Deborah Crombie - Dreaming of the bones

Unlatching the gate, he began to pick his way across the pasture in the light of the rising moon… the old pulse quickens in the dappled light… There had been moonlight that night. And the girls wore white, floating dresses, they always wore white… No, that was another time, another memory. On this night, Daphne had not come; she’d been called away unexpectedly, and her absence had spared her.

The river path felt smooth and familiar beneath his feet. He needed the familiarity now, even welcomed the memories as tinder to his purpose. They’d bicycled from Cambridge, he and Lydia and Adam. Lydia wore a gypsy dress, and dangling earrings. She’d pinched a rose from the college garden and fastened it in her dark hair. She’d bought shirts for him and Adam at a jumble sale, white with flowing sleeves, and when they put them on she kissed them and called them her lords. It was Darcy who waited for Verity and brought her in his mother’s car. He’d fancied her, and they’d laughed about it .

To his right as he passed he saw the gleam of the Orchard’s gate, and behind it the gnarled silhouettes of the apple trees. White blossom falling, the air heavy with wasps… They sat in the low canvas chairs, eating tea and cake and discussing the merits of free verse… tawny-haired Rupert, stuffing cake in his mouth, laughing as the crumbs spilled… No, that was only an old photo, it was just the four of them, Nathan, Adam, Daphne, Lydia… It was May Week, and the blossom was long gone… They were punchy tired from swotting for exams, silly and sentimental with it, and as he looked round the table at each of their faces he thought how much he loved them, wished he could stop time… Lydia knew, she always knew, “Let’s celebrate,” she said. “We don’t have to grow old. We’ll swim naked in Byron’s Pool tonight.” Rupert hadn’t wanted to grow old, and Rupert had the last laugh…

He’d reached the Old Vicarage now… Rupert sat in a chair in the tangled garden, dressed in tennis whites, books spread before him on a table. They hovered over him like ghosts, did he sense them there? He’d known how fragile was the boundary between the living and the dead… Rupert stands on the bank and sheds his clothes, body golden, awkward hands and feet… Is the water sweet and cool, gentle and brown, above the pool?

Byron’s Pool… Still in the dawnlit waters cool his ghostly lordship swims… The night is warm and close, heavy with moisture, Nathan and Adam and Lydia wait for her in a bower among the pink-petaled mallow, they pass round a bottle of wine, a joint Lydia’s begged from a musician friend… sight, sound, and touch so sharp and intense, time stretches… Verity comes, so lovely and unfinished, the thick straight honey of her hair smells of roses… They undress her among the soft leaves, moonlight slides over her skin and she laughs at the lightness of their fingers as they caress her… Adam sings a snatch of “Till There Was You,” they collapse into hysterical giggles while Darcy watches in impatient arousal, his breath rasping in Nathan’s ear… “Come,” Darcy coaxes her, “I’ll be Rupert, you be Virginia, we’ll have a midnight swim,” and he eases her down into the dark water… .

Nathan takes the rose from Lydia’s hair while Adam unfastens her sandals… her body emerges from the dress like a butterfly from a chrysalis… Nathan brushes the petals of the rose over her skin… at that moment Lydia is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen, the delicate curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulder, the perfect fullness of her dark-nippled breasts… She laughs up at him as Adam kisses her toes…

A cry from the far side of the pool, faint as a night bird, a stirring of the water… Nathan lifts his head to listen, but Lydia pulls him down to meet her mouth as she begins to unbutton his shirt, he falls helplessly into the warm rushing darkness of her lips and her tongue… then with some scrap of awareness he feels Adam stand, hears him say, “Darcy?” and again, “Darcy?”

A muffled sound again, a splash, then Darcy’s voice, a high scream of panic, “I can’t find her! I can’t bloody find her!” Adam is into the water by the time Nathan stumbles to his feet and follows. The cool water fills his clothes, his strokes are heavy, the few yards an impossible distance .

Adam reaches Darcy first, disappears beneath the surface, rises gasping. “It’s like pitch!” He shakes Darcy by the shoulders. “Where did she go under? You bloody fool! Tell me!”

“There!” Darcy points. “Just there. I didn’t mean-”

Nathan dives, opening his eyes in the velvet blackness. Tendrils brush against him, then something more solid, a hand. He follows it, pulls her easily, unresisting into his arms. A push to the surface, “I’ve got her!” A kick-stroke, cradling her head above the water, then Lydia helps him pull her weight up the slippery bank. “She’s not breathing. Oh, Christ, she’s not breathing.”

Adam kneels beside him, holding his fingers to her throat. “No pulse, I can’t find a pulse-”

Darcy wails, “I only meant to stop her crying out! She didn’t want-I never meant to hurt her-”

“Shut up!” Lydia screams, and Nathan hears a slap. She tugs on Nathan’s arm. “Get help, we’ve got to get help.”

“No time.” He tries to remember a sixth form first aid course. Clear the airway. Compress. Breathe. Compress. Breathe. Her lips are cold, her skin flaccid beneath his fingers. No breath resists the invasion of his own. Breath blurs into compression, compression into breath Sweat pours from his body, drips onto her still breast, until he feels Adam pulling him away .

“It’s no use, Nathan. You can’t help her.” Adam holds him in his arms. Lydia is crying, little frightened, hiccupping sobs .

Darcy drops to his knees beside them. “It wasn’t my fault. I never meant to hurt her. She shouldn’t have-”

“Shut up! You bastard!” Lydia is on him in a fury of kicks and pummeling fists. “You stupid fuck. You drowned her, you bastard. We’ve got to ring the police, tell someone-”

Panting, Darcy managed to twist her arms behind her back. “You won’t. You won’t tell anyone. Because you’re responsible, too.”

Nathan pulled away from Adam’s restraint. “That’s crap, Darcy. You know we didn’t-”

“But no one else will, will they?” Darcy is cold and urgent now. “Tell them just what happened, why don’t you? You brought her here, undressed her, gave her wine and drugs, but you didn’t touch her after that, oh, no. And even if they believe you, you’ll be sent down, you know that, don’t you? Your parents will have to know, of course, and yours are ill, isn’t that right, Adam? It might even kill them, but I don’t suppose that matters as long as you’re doing the right thing.”

“Fuck you, you son of a bitch,” said Adam, but Nathan heard the uncertainty in his voice. He thought of his own parents’ pride in him, the first child in his family to go to university, and of Lydia’s mother… A look at Lydia’s stricken face told him the shaft had hit home .

“Whatever happens now won’t make any difference to her, you see that, don’t you?” said Darcy. “I’m sorry she’s dead”-his voice quavered and he cleared his throat-“but it was an accident, and I don’t see how ruining our careers and our parents’ lives will help her.”

“You’re crazy.” Nathan licked his lips. “We’d never get away with it.”

“No one would ever know. Not unless one of us tells.” Darcy looked at them each in turn. “And if one of us tells, we’ll all suffer for it.”