‘On the bank. Hanging—hanging over.’ He could not bear to re-live the horror of it, to re-visualise it. He had called to her but she hadn’t been in the glade; had thought he heard a rustling of leaves, seen nothing around him, forced himself to creep through the tunnel to the bank. ‘Her head was in the water, and one arm—one arm was trailing in the water and her hair all like—like seaweed….’
‘Did you lift her out?’ said Abel. Abel was the able one, they used to say, laughing; the alert one, the do-er. Christo—well, really, he was like a child in some ways, such a dreamer, so much at the mercy of emotions too delicate for a man. ‘She was dead. I couldn’t bear to—’
‘You’re certain she was dead?’
‘Oh, yes, yes,’ said Christo. ‘I touched her arm, the other arm. It was—sort of doubled up behind her. It was—cold.’ He shuddered. ‘Her face under the water was all… I couldn’t bear to touch her again, I couldn’t bear the—the oppression of that horrible cave behind me. So I came to tell you.’ But he stumbled to his feet. ‘Just to leave her there!—I shouldn’t just have left her there. I should have lifted her out.’ He looked at them, sick and guilty. ‘I ought to go back.’
‘We’ll go,’ said Abel. ‘Rohan and I can go.’
‘They’ll say he did it,’ said Melisande, suddenly. ‘They’ll say he made her pregnant and then he killed her. They’ll say it was Christo.’
They turned upon one another terrified eyes, the whitening of their faces turning the outward tan to an ugly grey. ‘Oh, God, Christo—they’ll say it was you.’
If Corinna had been ‘simple’, Christo also was simple; though only perhaps in the sense of an absolute simplicity—those who loved him would have said of an absolute goodness. Now, the thought that he might have injured, let alone slaughtered, any creature in the world, turned him almost faint with horror and disbelief. ‘Us so-called Hippies,’ said Rohan. ‘They’d believe anything of us. They knew she hung around Christo. Her parents had warned her not to.’
Abel said: ‘Rohan—do you think she did kill herself?’
‘An accident? Leaning over too far and then—? Oh, my God,’ said Rohan, ‘you don’t mean—?’
‘If she was pregnant,’ said Abel, ‘or only if she’d been seduced—because with a girl like that, that’s what it would have been—someone else was involved. She said that if her father knew, he would kill her. But what would he do to that other one?’
‘Christo,’ said Primula, imploring, ‘do you think it could have been an accident?’
He considered it, forcing himself to gather-in his flying wits, to concentrate upon recollection. ‘Leaning over the bank like that—you could get back if you wanted to. You could lift up your head if you wanted to.’
‘Could a person just force themselves to keep their head under water and drown, Abel, if by just lifting it up—?’
‘No,’ said Abel, sharply resolute.
‘Wait!’ said Primmy suddenly. She ran into the house. The movement, the translation into action, relaxed them, they found themselves standing rigidly holding rakes and hoes: threw the tools aside, rested, sitting or half kneeling, still in their ring, gazing into the sick white face with its fringe of ragged gold. ‘Either way, they’ll still think Christo seduced her. Her father—’
‘We can deal with fathers,’ said Abel. ‘If it’s murder—that’s the Law.’
‘There was someone else involved. They’d be bound to investigate—’
‘Where else would they do their investigating?’ said Abel simply. ‘When they’ve got us.’
Primmy came back. The front of her long cotton dress had dribbles of wetness down it and she held in her hand a sodden paper. She said: ‘She did kill herself.’
She had printed in straggling capitals, in a rough estimate of Megan’s probable spelling: I am to unhapy. I will droun myself. ‘I’ve made it all wet, as though she dropped it in the water or something; no one could say it was her writing or anyone’s writing. I haven’t said anything about being wicked or pregnant or anything. It needn’t have been that; and we don’t want to put the idea into people’s heads.’
‘Primmy—if she was murdered!’
‘Anything’s better,’ said Primula, ‘than Christo being put in prison.’
And the words had been spoken at last: they faced it at last. Christo raised his head. ‘In prison? Dear God, if they put me in prison—!’ A sort of darkness closed in upon him at the bare thought of it. The closeness and the suffocation. ‘I couldn’t. I couldn’t.’