Young, Gifted and Dead

by Lucy Carver

  ‘Anyway, don’t tell me.’ Lily groaned and pulled the duvet further over her head. ‘I don’t want to know. And, anyway, whose idea was it to send me home with Harry Embsay?’

  There are certain things so shocking that even I don’t retain them at the time. They explode in my head and scramble my brain and even when my thoughts knit back together in some kind of order, that one gruesome thing doesn’t reappear until much later. It was like that with Lily. But I have to remember it, even if I don’t want to. I owe it to Lily.

  Paige and I had come out of a maths lesson with Shirley Welford. We had the afternoon free so we went up to our room to change out of our uniforms into jeans and sweaters. It was Paige who’d looked out of the window and seen the emergency-service vehicles surrounding the lake – two police cars and one ambulance.

  ‘What are they doing there?’ She sounded irritated. ‘Look – they’ve put tape across the lawn. There’s a no-go area.’

  ‘So?’ I joined her at the window.

  ‘It’s blocking off the lake and the woods – just where I was planning to ride Mistral.’

  ‘Must be serious.’ Besides the vehicles I counted five police officers, two paramedics and three divers in black wetsuits.

  Looking back, I’m disappointed by how long it took for Paige and I to get our brains into gear.

  The divers slid into the lake and disappeared below the surface. A police officer saw D’Arblay walk across the lawn and warned him not to go beyond the blue-striped plastic tape. And still I didn’t do the simple two-plus-two arithmetic.

  ‘What are they looking for?’ I wondered.

  D’Arblay seemed to argue with the policeman. A diver resurfaced empty-handed. The grey light of a November afternoon turned everything monochrome.

  The diver took off his breathing apparatus and said something to the paramedics. A second diver reappeared and held up an object that seemed to be of interest. A shoe. A female police officer took it and placed it in a plastic bag as evidence.

  ‘Definitely serious,’ Paige agreed.

  It could have been any sodden, dripping shoe, and yet it looked familiar. Even from a distance I could make out rows of silver studs against the black leather. But no – I still wouldn’t let the idea into my head.

  The two divers slipped back into the water like seals. Minutes went by.

  ‘That shoe . . .’ Paige began.

  I shook my head.

  ‘It looked like Lily’s.’ It was Paige – she was the one to open Pandora’s box and let the nightmare truth fly out. ‘They think she’s in the lake.’

  Yes, they were looking for Lily, diving down into the murky depths, searching among the weeds and the mud. I held my breath, unable even to think.

  D’Arblay remonstrated with the cops. The two paramedics went right to the water’s edge. A diver came up with a heavy, limp, human-shaped form in his arms. He staggered out of the water and put his burden down. The body wore Lily’s leather jacket and its long black hair dripped muddy water. Both feet were bare.

  The truth was out and battering its way into my brain.

  Saint Sam (I’ll explain the nickname in a moment) strode across the lawn to join the bursar while the paramedics went into the ambulance and brought out a body bag.

  So now we’re back to the present, and still wondering what happened to Lily. Everyone is saying that she killed herself, but I don’t believe it. I spent a lot of time with her in classes, plus socially in the evenings. I shared a room with her, for God’s sake. Surely I would have picked up on it if she had been feeling suicidal. There must be more to it, something that I’m not seeing.

  As I remarked earlier, Adam Earle didn’t rush to St Jude’s when they found his sister’s body. Neither did her father, Robert, who, it turned out, was doing important business in Chicago. Her mother, Anna, eventually deputized her oldest son to show up at the scene and deal with possible press fallout. There were satellite vans, reporters and cameramen flashing and clicking at the gate when Adam drove by, straining for a picture to make the next day’s front page. High-profile media family falls prey to tabloid frenzy. Don’t we just love the irony?

  Adam talked with Saint Sam and Terence D’Arblay, plus a couple of Lily’s teachers, spending the most time with Bryony Phillips who was halfway through teaching King Lear to me, Zara, Harry and Lily, among others. ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth’ and all that. It was in Bryony’s classes that I learned how much Lily hated every member of her family and especially her filthy rich father (or ‘the tyrant’, as she called him). She was definitely a one hundred per cent thankless child.

  Then, at 4.30 in the afternoon of Adam’s second visit, Saint Sam called for me and Paige to join them in his study.

  ‘This is a difficult time,’ Dr Webb began, elbows on desk, manicured hands clasped. The bursar stood to attention behind him; Adam Earle sat in one of the studded leather armchairs by the long, leaded window with the ancient coat of arms.

  Adam looks nothing like Lily, by the way. His hair was already taking leave of his skull, but what was left of it was fair and wavy. He had none of her energy, none of her neediness – at least that was my first impression as he sat sober-suited and quiet in the red armchair.

  ‘Paige, you’ve been friends with Lily for some time now. Alyssa, I realize that your acquaintance was shorter, but when you room with someone you do get close very quickly.’

  We stood and waited. We were still in shock over Lily and neither of us had anything to say.

  ‘We’re here to listen whenever you need to share your concerns.’ Saint Sam’s nickname suited him, obviously. He talked quietly, he looked you in the eye, has the stuffy air of a bishop, the calm, considered frankness of a counsellor, and always with the best interests of St Jude’s closest to his heart.

  Behind him, sentry D’Arblay gave a slight nod of agreement. Nihil sed blah blah. Nothing but the best. We’ll give you two fellow students all the professional help you might need to deal with this trauma.

  ‘Lily’s brother, Adam, would like to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ Adam added. Like politeness has to be observed even when your kid sister has just been found dead.

  ‘Don’t worry – none of this will go beyond these four walls,’ Saint Sam assured us. ‘Whatever you tell us will remain completely confidential.’

  As if we cared. All that mattered to us right then was how Lily had ended up in the lake.

  Adam stood up from his chair, stared out of the arched, gothic windows across the lawn to the lake beyond. ‘Did Lily say anything to either of you?’ he asked without turning round.

  Late autumn leaves swirled in eddies across the grass; the sky was leaden.

  ‘In what way?’ Paige countered.

  I felt uneasy, with a building suspicion that the grey suits were hiding something.

  ‘Did she tell you why she packed her bag and went?’

  ‘Yes.’ I don’t need to tell you that I remembered the conversation word for word. That’s the thing with us eidetics (look it up or I’ll tell you later) – our recall sometimes covers all five senses, not just the visual. ‘She said it was a family crisis.’

  It was then that Adam Earle turned his full attention on me and Paige, and his gaze grew more focused. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Paige insisted.

  No, but she flung jeans and a sequinned top into her bag in reaction to an email from you, I thought. She was definitely going somewhere in a mad, bee-stung rush.

  ‘How did she . . . seem?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Hyper,’ Paige told him flatly. ‘Just like always.’

  Not quite always. I remembered the few days after Tom’s party when Lily could hardly get out of bed. And the time in Bryony’s English lesson when Lily had been the only one to get the King Lear bit about not heaving your heart into your mouth just to please your father. She’d written an A* essay about it and read the whole thing out to the class, how you
have to stay true to yourself and not do things just for greed or profit, how money and power will make you corrupt. I was impressed.

  But then, yeah, there was her fizzy creative energy with body and brain in overdrive, slapping paint around, slashing and ruining her own work after a last meeting with Adam and Saint Sam, her losing things, getting drunk and throwing herself at boys – all that stuff.

  ‘You know Lily was bipolar,’ big bro Adam saw fit to tell us now. ‘That’s the reason her behaviour was sometimes a little . . . bizarre.’

  Oh well that’s OK, then. Stick a label on her, give it a medical framework. I shook my head and bit my lip. So, Adam, don’t whatever you do let the grief get to you. Don’t break down and say that she was your kid sister and you miss her like hell.

  ‘Her illness could be a problem sometimes,’ he acknowledged. ‘Especially if she didn’t take her medication.’

  So here’s the solution – tuck her away out of sight in an obscenely expensive Cotswolds sixth-form college where she could be bipolar and exceptional in private. A sore thumb among other sore thumbs, just like me. Good thinking. I couldn’t help frowning as Adam talked on.

  ‘On the day she left – did she seem . . . preoccupied?’ he asked.

  I hated his habit of mulling over words until he came up with the one that fitted best.

  ‘Not so you’d notice,’ Paige said as she backed towards the door. I could see she wanted to be galloping Mistral over cross-country jumps, not dealing with questions she couldn’t answer.

  ‘And she didn’t say – anything? Anything personal?’

  ‘Jesus!’ Paige was halfway to the door. ‘Why is he asking us all this stuff?’ she asked D’Arblay.

  Saint Sam stood up and came out from behind his desk. ‘Adam thinks you have a right to know this,’ he confided gently. ‘It seems Lily was pregnant.’

  That stopped us dead in our tracks. Paige gasped. I stared while the principal drew a folded piece of paper from his inside jacket pocket.

  ‘She sent this email,’ he added. ‘Telling us exactly why she killed herself.’

  chapter three

  The first question you ask when you get news like this – well, me anyway – is, ‘So who’s the father?’

  It cut through the stunned silence and thudded into my chest like an arrow. Who got Lily pregnant?

  The second thing that occurred to me was, ‘Am I the only one who didn’t know about this?’ But no – a quick glance in Paige’s direction told me it was as new to her as it was to me.

  ‘This is a printout of an email from Lily – the police have another,’ Adam said, taking over from where Saint Sam left off. From the way red blotches had formed on his neck I could see he was struggling to stay calm and was actually doing a pretty good job. ‘She doesn’t give any details about the pregnancy, but the preliminary forensic report confirms her . . . condition.’

  ‘How pregnant was she?’ Paige wanted to know. Like me she was obviously working out the paternity issue.

  Think about it. As far as we knew, Lily hadn’t had a boyfriend since Jayden did the dirty and dumped her in the first week of term. Sure she’d been seriously slutty at Tom’s party, but she’d gone home alone (or at least with Harry as her bodyguard-cum-chaperone and that definitely didn’t count). We were now early December.

  ‘They think about thirteen weeks,’ Adam told us.

  It had to be Jayden, then.

  Unless Lily had been with someone else during the summer break. I imagined a different scenario – a holiday fling in Greece, Italy, the Bahamas – wherever the Earles hung out en famille. A sexy local guy with a tanned and ripped torso, too much wine, a starlit sky, a walk along the beach with Lily in one of her manic, daredevil phases . . .

  I was still working it out when Paige had her meltdown. She was halfway out of the room, remember, when Saint Sam dropped his pregnancy bombshell, and she stayed fixed to the spot. She kept shaking her head then she let out a small, soft groan. More head shaking until finally she hugged herself and bent double then started to sob.

  ‘Don’t!’ I begged. Meltdowns are infectious. I couldn’t bear the sound of Paige crying and I was scared I was about to go the same way. Anyway, there were hot tears in my eyes and I was shaking like a leaf, thinking of Lily almost halfway through a pregnancy and locked in a lonely, dark night of the soul.

  ‘Why didn’t she tell us?’ Paige said over and over as the bursar tried to help her.

  ‘She didn’t tell anybody at St Jude’s,’ Adam explained. ‘We don’t think she even saw a doctor.’

  ‘So that wasn’t the reason you came to visit four weeks after term started?’ I had to keep on asking questions, otherwise I’d have been with Paige in total collapse, and D’Arblay only had one pair of hands.

  Adam shook his head, obviously ill at ease, possibly lying.

  ‘She was upset,’ I told him. ‘She came back to the room and wrecked one of her paintings.’

  My razor-sharp memory replayed the scene and I give it to you again, with added details, in case the extra info turns out to be crucial:

  Lily took a knife and slashed through the reds and oranges. Stab, stab, stab, then slashed right across the diagonal, like she was killing a part of herself.

  ‘I hate all this,’ she’d cried.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I’d asked. ‘What do you hate?’

  ‘Everything.’

  (The trouble is when someone is as OTT as Lily was you tend not to take them seriously.)

  ‘What do you mean, everything?’ I’d moved in to stop her cutting the canvas, though it was too late – the painting was already ruined.

  She raised the knife and turned on me with a wild look. ‘What do you know, Alyssa?’ she yelled. ‘You’ve only just got here. What could you possibly know?’

  ‘Lily, cut it out,’ Paige said, sensible and determined. She came and grabbed Lily’s wrist. The knife dropped to the floor, the crazy look faded from Lily’s eyes and suddenly it was over. We never mentioned the slashing incident again.

  ‘Lily may not have told anyone at St Jude’s that she was pregnant, but she actually did discuss it with our mother,’ Adam went on. ‘We know that she used an over-the-counter pregnancy test.’

  And the family did nothing? I shook my head over and over. What’s with that?

  Adam cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, Lily’s email is a form of suicide note. It makes it clear that she was well aware how far on she was and how upset she was about it.’

  If you close your eyes to steady yourself, it sometimes makes you even more dizzy. I found this out during the conversation I was having with Adam Earle. When I opened my eyes again, the room swam. The lions and unicorns in the coats of arms in the leaded windows danced. It turned out my brain had gone to mush and I’d run out of questions too.

  ‘Worse than upset, actually.’ Adam obviously wanted to be more precise. ‘The pregnancy must have plunged Lily into unrelieved depression.’

  ‘No.’ Paige was back on her feet, breaking away from D’Arblay’s ministrations. She shoved the bursar aside and advanced towards Adam. ‘Alyssa and I were with Lily all this term and I personally didn’t see any massive difference. Up and down – just the same old, same old.’

  ‘Believe me.’ There was steel in Adam’s voice now. ‘I knew my sister better than you did. The mood swings, the silences, the deliberate staying away from family.’

  ‘No.’ Faintly I backed up Paige’s refusal to agree with the official version. Remember Lily’s contribution to the King Lear debate about ungrateful daughters? Spend a moment:

  Lily’s voice rang clear in my head. Her eyes flashed with rage; she was totally intense: ‘I have no idea why Cordelia would even want to stay loyal to that nasty old perv.’

  Our group of English literature baccalaureate students sat in a sunny classroom overlooking the lake, amazed that she felt so strongly. Jack Hooper, who is a sensitive soul, actually edged his chair away from where she sat.

/>   ‘I would have got the hell out,’ Lily insisted. ‘The old man’s a fool for trusting the other two daughters. He gets what he deserves.’

  ‘But that’s the point,’ Bryony explained. ‘The king is a fool and he has to literally go mad and get through to the other side before he sees the truth.’

  ‘I still say she should have ditched the tyrant straight off,’ Lily muttered.

  ‘Tyrant’ – that’s the way she talked about her own father, as you know. ‘The tyrant has bought another TV network, yawn, yawn’, ‘The tyrant is flying out to Chicago in his private jet. How green is that?’ ‘Jesus Christ, not again – the tyrant wants to see me!’

  Yeah – these were her last words as she hurtled out of our room with her hastily packed bag; ‘The tyrant wants to see me. I’m out of here!’

  ‘It was definitely Jayden’s baby.’ Afterwards Paige and I both fixated on this one point.

  We were back in our room, beds unmade. Paige’s horse tack hung from the back of her chair ready for cleaning. Adam’s car was still in the visitors’ car park under the glare of bright security lights.

  ‘Adam focused on the fact that Lily didn’t mention a name,’ I reminded her. ‘Why couldn’t it have been somebody she met on holiday?’

  Paige shook her head. ‘Lily wasn’t like that. She didn’t do one-night stands.’

  ‘No? Didn’t you see her coming on to Tom at his party?’

  ‘Only because she knew Jayden was watching her. She wanted to make him jealous.’

  ‘OK.’ It only took me a few seconds to realize that Paige was probably right.

  ‘Anyway, Lily didn’t go on holiday this year.’

  ‘She didn’t?’ No luxury yacht in Monaco, no penthouse suite in Nassau. Bang went one of my theories.

  ‘No. She was in the UK, drifting, doing her own thing, staying away from her dad.’

  ‘The tyrant.’

  ‘Yeah. She came to see me ride in the Burghley Horse Trials. That was late August. Harry Embsay and Guy Simons were there too.’