Dreaming Of The Bones

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?