Deborah Crombie - Dreaming of the bones

Gemma took a fortifying sip of coffee and plunged in. “We’re police officers, but we have no official standing on this case, only a special interest.” Watching Francesca’s eyes widen, she added, “Look, Mrs. Ashby, I couldn’t misrepresent myself, and I can’t force you to talk to me. But I’m convinced that Vic died because of something she found out about Lydia Brooke. I want to know about Lydia-anything you or Morgan can tell me. Why wouldn’t Morgan talk to Vic or Duncan about her? It’s been five years since she died.”

Setting her mug on the table, Francesca stood up and went to the loom. She touched its frame for a moment, then turned to Gemma, arms folded across her chest. “You think time makes a difference?” She shook her head. “You don’t understand, do you? Have you ever seen two people turn love into an excuse for mutual destruction? Their obsession poisoned them both. Even now he can’t let her go. She eats away at him in the dark, like a cancer.”

Appalled by the bleakness in Francesca Ashby’s voice, Gemma said, “How can you live with a man who felt-feels-that way about someone else?”

Francesca stared at her for a moment, lips parted as if she were about to tell Gemma to mind her own bloody business. Then the corners of her mouth turned up in what might have been a smile. “It’s not that simple. It never is, is it?” She came back to the sofa and sat down facing Gemma. “And, of course, I imagined things would be different. One does in the beginning. He’d left her for me, after all, hadn’t he? I thought that meant he loved me more.” Shaking her head, she said, “What I didn’t understand was that I was simply the rock available in the tempest, and he was a man clinging desperately for survival. He saw the way things were going-he knew if he didn’t leave, something terrible would happen.”

“What do you mean?” asked Gemma. “What sort of terrible thing? Was he afraid she’d kill herself?”

“I don’t know.” Francesca turned her palms up. “All I can tell you is that he was frightened for them both, and for that he became the villain in everyone’s eyes. They said his selfish desertion of her caused her breakdown and her attempt at suicide.”

“Vic might not have told it that way,” said Gemma. “If she’d had a chance to hear his side of it.”

“I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen,” Francesca said, twisting her hands in her lap. “I was even tempted to go to her myself, after she came here, but I couldn’t bear for him to think I’d betrayed him.”

“What would you have said?” Gemma asked gently.

“That Lydia was unstable from the beginning. She had violent mood swings, she was unpredictable-she put him off for more than a year, did you know that? She’d hardly spoken to him for all that time, then within a couple of months she was all over him, wanting desperately to marry him.”

“You knew her then?”

“Not then,” Francesca said, and looked away.

“But you knew Morgan, and he told you about her?” pressed Gemma.

“Not then.” Francesca still didn’t meet Gemma’s eyes. “Not until much later. I came to work in his studio as an assistant, helping with the props and the children, scheduling the sittings, that sort of thing. Fine arts photography was Morgan’s dream, but the baby portraits paid the bills in those days.

“He was so unhappy, and he would talk to me about it because there was no one else. We became friends.” She shrugged. “I suppose it sounds trite.”

“You were sympathetic and he was misunderstood?” Gemma said. “Just because it’s an old story doesn’t make it any less true.” She’d even tried to cast Kincaid as the sinned-against husband, years after he and Vic had gone their respective ways. Remembering her own reaction when she’d finally met Vic, she asked, “And what did you think when you met Lydia?”

“It’s hard to separate those first impressions from what I’d heard before and what I knew after,” said Francesca, frowning. “I’d worked there several months before she came into the studio, and by that time I’d made her into some screaming, hysterical Medusa.”

“And was she?” asked Gemma.

“Of course not. She was small and dark, with a husky voice and an exotic sort of prettiness, but other than that she seemed perfectly ordinary. And she was kind to me.”

“She didn’t seem unbalanced?”

“Just unhappy,” said Francesca with a sigh. “The more difficult things became with Morgan, the more time she spent with her old University friends, and that only made things worse. Morgan blamed them for everything, including her emotional problems. He said they encouraged her fantasy about being related to Rupert Brooke-”

“Related to him?” Gemma said in surprise. “I knew she was a little obsessive about him, but-”

“By some coincidence her parents had the same names as Rupert’s parents, Mary and William. Lydia’s father was an orphan, and he himself was killed in the war, just days before Lydia was born. So she grew up knowing very little about her father’s people, and she concocted this great fantasy that her father had been Brooke’s illegitimate child, and she his granddaughter.” Francesca made a face. “It all seems a bit pathetic, looking back on it, and I wish now that I’d had more compassion.”

“Could there possibly have been any truth to it?” Gemma asked. She was aware, after even the briefest of introductions to Brooke, what allure the idea might have had to a lonely and literary teenager.

“I don’t suppose it’s likely,” said Francesca. “Brooke’s life is fairly well documented, although it’s true that little of the material would have been available to Lydia at that time. If she’d known about his relationship with Noel Olivier, I imagine little Noel would have done quite well for the part of fantasy grandmother.”

“It is odd,” said Gemma, thinking of the photos of Noel Olivier she’d seen in the book Hazel had given her last night, and of the snapshots of Lydia that had been among Vic’s papers. “You could find a resemblance between them, if you were looking for it.”

“Then it’s just as well Lydia didn’t know to look. She’d carried things too far as it was. She saw herself as the chosen successor to carry on Rupert’s Neo-Pagan revival-you know, all the dancing naked in the woods at midnight stuff-the cult of perpetual youth.” Francesca smiled. “Of course, if he’d lived he’d have outgrown all that, seen it for the nonsense it was, but he hadn’t the chance.”

“But Lydia outgrew it eventually?”

“I don’t know.” Francesca reached for her mug, the coffee surely now grown cold, and sank back against the cushions. “Perhaps she considered forty-seven the beginning of middle age. One’s idea of it does tend to recede as one gets older.”

Gemma remembered the strength of Vic’s certainty that Lydia had not committed suicide. “Vic-Dr. McClellan-thought it possible that Lydia may have come to happiness later in life, or at least contentment of a sort.”

“Happy when she wasn’t mad, like Virginia Woolf?” Francesca said. “I’d like to think so. I never wished her ill.”

“You said she was kind to you, in the beginning. What about later, when she knew about you and Morgan?”

“He kept it from her as long as he could. For her sake, not his. But Cambridge is a small place, and a few months after they’d separated we ran into her in the market one day.” Francesca rubbed her palms against the knees of her jeans. “She was civil, but you could tell she couldn’t bear it. That was one of the worst days of my life.”

“Worse than the day you heard she’d slit her wrists?” said Gemma, remembering what Kincaid had told her about Lydia’s first suicide attempt.