—”
“The poems,” Gemma said, smacking her palm against her forehead. “Nathan only read the poems for the first time this afternoon, just as we did. And if we figured out what happened to Lydia and Vic, how much easier will it have been for him?”
Then in some garden hushed from wind… How had it gone? Warm in a sunset’s afterglow… After that had come something about lovers, but Nathan couldn’t quite bring it back. Rupert had been big on gardens and sunsets and moonlight, he remembered, and Lydia had loved the dreamlike quality of those poems.
He might be dreaming now, he thought as he watched the deep green shadows moving under the stillness of the trees. The air had a shimmering translucence to it, almost as if it were underwater, and it smelled of springs long past.
But he felt the cold steel weight of his father’s old shotgun across his knees, and he knew himself to be awake, sitting in the dusk at the bottom of his garden. When it was full dark he would go.
His feet would remember the path … the leaf-thick path … the way they had gone more than thirty years ago… He had tried for so long to forget what happened that night, buried it in his love for Jean and for his daughters, his work, his gardens. And yet he had come back here, to this house by the river, and his reckoning.
How had he not seen what monster they’d created with their silence? First Lydia, then Vic … Dear God, his blindness had condemned her as surely as if his own hand had slipped the poison into her drink.
Nathan rose and stood by the gate a moment, one hand on the latch, the other clasped loosely round the worn grip of the gun. The poets wait…for her coming… Lydia had not allowed herself to forget; she’d kept it sharp and clear, then distilled it into words. The poem had been intended for him, for Adam, for Darcy. When he’d read it that afternoon, after Kincaid and his sergeant left, he’d known that as surely as if Lydia had spoken to him. Was that why she’d rung him the day she died? Had she waited until the girls were grown and gone, and Jean dead, so that he would be free of his need to protect them?
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 —”
