12

Rose knocked softly on my door before dawn and told me to get dressed quickly. Venus hung like a white lamp over the mouth of the combe as we hurried up the lane to the house, whose door stood open. All the doors were open — I could see straight through to the lawn, silver with dew. Juliet was waiting in the dim hall with another woman in a brimmed hat: it was Agnes. The doctor was slowly making his way down the stairs — I was half expecting some sort of ceremonial robe, but he wore simple brown cords and the Aran jumper, and now reached for his usual waxed coat. Smiles and nods were exchanged but nobody spoke.

Corvin appeared in the dining room in his wild-haired pantisocratic guise, carrying a tray of little steaming glasses — coffee with a dash of something stronger, one mouthful — and then we filed down the garden steps and across the lawn.

Venus had lost her radiance by the time our slow procession reached the top of the temple stair — she was now just a dull white speck of paint, smudged by my own faulty optics, on the greenish continuum between the blue twilight above and the deep amber glow seeping up from the eastern horizon.

We shuffled into the dark temple; the door was closed with a soft click and everyone took their seats around the circle of the sanctum. Boy-girl-boy on one side, I noticed, girl-boy-girl on the other, just like a dinner party. A faint orange light rested on the centre of the brass calendar on the western curve, in the gap between the doctor and Juliet.

‘Friends,’ said the doctor at last, breaking the morning’s silence. As he smiled and nodded to each of us in turn, a rayed point of light opened like a tiny golden flower on the polished silver boss that marked the equinox — opened wider, brighter, and brighter still, until the whole chamber was bathed in a warm light. All of us were turned towards it except the doctor and Juliet, whose faces were illuminated from one side only: but both were smiling.

‘In nomine nostra,’ he began, ‘consideremus.’

By the time we finished breakfast the garden was bathed in equinoctial sunshine that burned off the dew and breathed its seductive magic on a thousand buds and shoots. Chaffinches skipped about on the terrace, showing off their spring plumage and roguishly snatching breadcrumbs from under each other’s noses. There was a faint warmth in the air, so that for the first time one might open a door or a window and feel no compulsion to close it. Indeed, was it not warmer outside than in? Meaulnes emerged from the kitchen garden with his shirt sleeves rolled up and collar open, and a quiet gardener’s joy in his big white face. He helped us to carry a table and chairs out onto the terrace, before busying himself with assembling a mysterious contraption in the middle of the lawn.

‘Who’s coming for a dip?’ demanded Corvin, gazing up at the sky from where he lay on the grass, with arms and legs spread in a pantisocratic star.

‘I’ll come,’ said Rose.

‘Sis?’

‘Not likely,’ said Juliet absently, frowning at a page of Early Music Today. ‘Take Mr Browne.’ All eyes turned to me.

‘Alright,’ I said. ‘Where do we go?’

Rose fetched three faded towels from upstairs and tossed one each to Corvin and me, and we trooped out towards the meadow. The bathing pool was a rounded inlet of the stream where the water was deep and clear and a few weed fronds waved in refracted sunlight. I was nervously pondering questions of propriety when Corvin kicked off his shoes, pulled his shirt over his head to reveal a compact, muscular torso, dropped his trousers and underpants together and dived headlong into the pool. He emerged at the far side with a cry of delight.

‘You’re next, Mr Browne,’ said Rose, firmly. I followed Corvin’s example as quickly as I could while she looked on with a vague sardonic smile — the knotted combination of my trousers and pants got stuck on one ankle for a long, desperate moment, and then I was free and plunged in after him.

‘Good for you, old chap,’ he said, calmly treading water as my lungs shuddered with rapid involuntary gasps for air. ‘How’s that for clearing out the cobwebs?’ I was still getting my bearings when I heard another neat splash, and turned to see Rose’s head emerge from her own dive, her eyes shining with the shock of cold. For a few seconds we trod water in a triangle, three gasping, vivid, youthful, slick-haired heads from which three blurry white ghosts of nakedness hung suspended, kicking the void. Rose’s proud eyes were fixed on Corvin; his, amused and curious, on me, and mine flitted from one to the other as I wrestled alternately with the challenges of determined disinterest and unwanted inferiority. One of the combe’s several triangles, I later thought.

‘Look!’ said Corvin suddenly, cupping his hands together and lifting them above the surface. ‘I’ve caught a fish.’ As Rose glanced down he squeezed a powerful spray of water into her face. She surged forward and pushed him under, and then I felt his iron grasp on my ankle, pulling me down. Now we were all wrestling, hands pushing and grasping on cold, slippery, vague bodies, feet kicking, mouths gasping. I recall an arm flung up, Grecian contours falling from a slim cord of muscle to a white, faintly stubbled armpit to a glimpsed breast; the instep of a kicking foot skimming down my thigh; white fingers raked through dark hair and a burst of laughter with eyes closed tight against the spray. Then the moment was over and we were back in our triangle of heads, breathing hard.

‘I’ve had it,’ gasped Rose, and turned to the bank.

‘Two minutes is about the limit if you’re not used to it,’ said Corvin to me.

‘I know,’ I said, my teeth starting to chatter. ‘All systems pr-preparing to sh-shut down.’ I glimpsed the long backs of Rose’s legs shining in the sun as she towelled herself furiously, and then I staggered up the slippery bank myself. My skin flushed and burned as blood seethed back out from the protected core. A blackbird’s song, one of the season’s first, erupted from a nearby chestnut tree, and soft grass tickled my toes. Corvin was the last to get dressed.

‘Alive!’ he cried triumphantly towards the wooded hillside, holding his towel above his head like a trophy so that the muscles of his back slid and swelled. ‘Alive and alight!’