Dreaming of the Bones

reeked to him of her involvement with her pretentious literary friends, and he had despised them.
    He moved on, down the hall, bypassing the door to Lydia’s study. Whatever havoc the little monsters had wreaked in there would have to go unremarked, because he could not bring himself to enter the room where Lydia had died.
    The kitchen was best, he thought as he opened the door at the end of the hall. First the little reception area with the space for the telephone, and the bookshelves for the cookery books. Then round the comer into the kitchen proper, and beyond that the dining area with its vaulted ceiling and windows overlooking the garden. This they had planned and built together, using part of his small inheritance, and it had been clean and untainted. His reflection stared back at him from the black mirror of the uncurtained garden window—a tall, thin shape, shoulders hunched, dark curling hair, a white blur of a face. He framed the shot in his mind, blinked.
    They had shared thinking in images, he and Lydia . He had understood her need to write poetry, for he had gone about photography with the same dedication. It was the other things he hadn’t understood: her need for drama and atmosphere, her desire to exist within a group, her obsession with the past.
    He looked upwards, towards the first-floor bedroom. For a long while, they had patched over their arguments with lovemaking so fierce it left them sobbing and exhausted. Destructive, yes, but he had never since known anything so intense, or so addictive. In his blackest moments, he wished he had killed her then, and himself, put them both out of their misery.
    The sound of a door closing came from the front of the house. Morgan stopped his prowling about the empty room to listen. Some neighbor come to investigate lights in a vacant house, perhaps? God forbid he should have to be sociable, especially here, and now.
    ”Morgan, darling?”
    Oh, Lord, it was Francesca. The last thing he’d meant to do was upset her. How in hell had she found him?
    ”In here,” he called out, and hurried to meet her in the more neutral territory of the hall. She stood beside the cold radiator at the bottom of the stairs, huddled in the old brown coat she kept for taking out the dogs.
    He grasped her shoulders and looked down into her anxious face. ”Fran, what are you doing here?”
    ”I came into town with Monica to get some knitting wool. I ran out of the indigo. And then when we drove by I saw the car.”
    ”The wool shop is nowhere near Grange Road ,” he said gently. ”Nor do you go to town in that old rag of a coat.” He put a finger under her chin and tilted her face up so that she had to look into his eyes. ”How did you know?”
    ”I knew you’d have to come. And I knew you wouldn’t tell me.”
    ”Only because I didn’t want to worry you.”
    Francesca reached up and pushed a stray lock of hair from his brow. ”When will you ever get it through your thick head that the not knowing, the not talking about it only makes it worse? You’ve been moping about the house for days, working yourself up to this. I could feel it.”
    ”You’d think I’d have learned, by this time, that I can’t keep anything from you,” he said, forcing himself to smile. ”But the house had to be attended to, and I didn’t see why you should be upset by it.”
    ”Then let it go this time, Morgan. Let her go. You’ve been picking at this scab for more than twenty years and it will never heal unless you stop. Call an estate agent tomorrow and you need never set foot in this place again. We have a good life together. Let us get on with it. Please.”
    Morgan gathered his wife into his arms, her cheek pressed against his chest. He stroked the top of her head, then the thick plait of brown hair, now finely threaded with gray. Francesca had rescued him from the disaster of his first marriage, and he had loved her because she was everything Lydia was not. She had less pretension about her than anyone he had ever met. and though intelligent, she lacked any intellectual conceit. Steadfast, she had supported him in his battle with depression, buffered others from his moods and his temper, and she’d borne with grace and courage their failure to conceive the children she had wanted so badly.
    They had made a good life. Francesca’s reputation as a textile artist had grown over the years, as had his as a photographer, and together they’d turned their renovated farmhouse