Dreaming of the Bones

us. Do you not want to?”
    So she had drunk the whisky for the Dutch courage to seduce him, and all the while he’d been bumbling round like an idiot, trying not to presume too much. ”Of course I want to. But I didn’t think... and I’m old enough—”
    ”Don’t you dare tell me you’re old enough to be my father. That’s absurd, unless you were a very precocious adolescent, and anyway, what would it matter?”
    ”But it’s been—” He found his tongue hung on the words since Jean died. He swallowed and substituted, ”such a long time,” but Vic was laughing now and he couldn’t go on.
    ”It’s just like riding a bloody bike, Nathan, for heaven’s sake,” she managed to sputter. ”You won’t have forgotten how.”
    Her laughter died as suddenly as it had begun. He reached out and touched her cheek, and when she turned her face into his hand he felt her trembling.
    ”No,” he said, tracing the curve of her jaw with his fingers, then the comer of her mouth. ”I think it will all come back to me very, very quickly.”

5

    Is it the hour? We leave this resting place
    Made fair by one another for a while.
    Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;
    The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.
    Ah! The long road! and you so far away!
    Oh, I’ll remember! but... each crawling day
    Will pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile
    Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.

    RUPERT BROOKE,
    from ”The Wayfarers”

    Morgan Ashby pulled his battered Volvo into the drive of the house on Grange Road . There was just enough light left for him to see that the hedges needed trimming, yet the lamps in the houses next door and opposite had come on, defense against the evening. No light shone through the stained glass transom above the door of number 53.
    The door of the Volvo creaked as he swung it open, and he felt an answering ache in his knees as he stood. Rheumatism? The afflictions of age so soon in what he staunchly maintained was the prime of his life? Perhaps, he thought, but he knew the truth. It was dread.
    The bequest of this house had been Lydia’s last malicious joke, perpetrated from beyond the grave, and he had cooperated, God rot both their souls. Taking the key from his pocket, he fumbled at the front door’s lock in the dusk of the porch. He should have sold the house. He’d known then that he should sell it as soon as the ink on the probate papers dried. Francesca had pleaded with him to sell it, to sever the last link, and yet some perversity in him had made him hold on. Had he thought some positive thing would come of the nagging discomfort, some pearl of good character form under his hide? He snorted derisively in the darkness and the tumblers clicked over.
    In the end, he’d leased it to a married couple, a doctor and his wife, and their tribe of screaming children. They had stayed for five years, troubling him little but for the occasional request for a plumber or repairs to the roof, and had just last week decamped on the improvement in their financial fortunes.
    He felt for the switch inside the door, then blinked as light flooded the entry. Leaves had crept over the sill and littered the black-and-white tile floor, their twisted brown shapes looking for a moment like small dead birds.
    The rose-patterned wallpaper that lined the entry and climbed up the stairs looked even more dilapidated than he remembered. The seams curled, and in a few plates near the ceiling it had come away entirely— Lydia would probably have said the drooping swags looked like stained petticoats, he thought with a grimace. At thigh level the children had scrawled across it with crayons.
    It would mean keeping the tenants’ bloody deposit back, he supposed, but he was not sure he could be bothered. Moving towards the back of the house, Morgan steeled himself to assess the rest of the damage. First the sitting room, cold and empty, the carpet threadbare and spotted, the cushion on the window seat ripped with the stuffing spilling out. Lydia had liked to read here on fine mornings when the sun flooded through the bay window, warming the room. He remembered her choosing this wallpaper, with its intricate pattern in rose and green and dull gold. It had been years before the resurgence in popularity of William Morris, but Lydia had been determined to find something with the feel of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
    They’d had a furious row over it, because even her innocent decorating enthusiasms had