Karen has always maintained Martha Rasby was on the lawn that day too. She must have been. Everyone was there, soaking up the heat and the last time we’d all be together. But as I got up to go, passing from the light into the dark, I have no memory of seeing her among the faces on the lawn, turned up to the sun like daisies.

Likewise, I do not remember seeing her at the ball at all, packed as it was, a whirl of silks like the ball at Twelve Oaks in Gone with the Wind. I suppose it was unseemly, the way we all jostled to be part of her story, a story that began sometime that night, or maybe months or even years before it, when she first arrived at college perhaps, with her smile and long netballer’s limbs and her Nordic blonde hair that was almost white. Maybe girls like Martha are doomed from the moment they’re born, or the day they grow breasts. She had even more glamour after it – tragic, doomed, beautiful. The press adored it. It had the quality of a locked-room mystery, even, though the college was quick to play that down. Although it was only our students at the ball, they insisted anyone could have climbed over a fence or wall or hedge. Anyone could have come across Martha alone in the Fellows’ Garden, in her white silk dress – and who else would have dared to wear white? I had ketchup stains on my own precious ballgown within an hour. It did not have to be a member of our college, the upstanding young men who in a few short weeks would be in offices and suits, would be bankers and lawyers and brokers, set for life. It did not have to ruin anyone else’s life, what happened to Martha. And how sad, to be so drunk that this kind of thing happened to you. To let it happen, like standing out in a lightning storm, as if no one else had control over what they did to you, not when you were so pretty you were like a walking wound.

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

Bill met us at the hospital, and I’d never been so relieved to see anyone in my life. It was hard to explain. When I caught sight of him in the waiting room, leaning forward in the seat in his leather jacket and jeans, his shaggy hair around his ears, I knew he would help me, as if I was eighteen again and going to him for advice with essays and tutors and things Mike had said to upset me.

He saw me. ‘Christ, what happened?’

I ran to him, breathing in his smell of soap and leather. I forgot Cassie was there, I think. I sort of fell into him, clutching his arms. ‘He stabbed him.’