The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Read online

  ‘Not another power cut?’ Bella shines her iPhone torch into Jessie’s face.

  Jessie puts up her hand against the dazzle. ‘We’re celebrating your first week at Squirrels. Too bright.’

  ‘Er, why?’ Bella frowns, clicking the phone off.

  ‘Because it’s a big thing and you’ve done brilliantly.’

  Bella looks genuinely surprised. The frown turns into a small smile.

  Jessie lifts Romy into the old child’s chair, which wobbles slightly. She’ll have to tighten those screws again. ‘Your dad’s late, I’m afraid. He’s really sorry.’

  ‘Wasn’t the idea that we moved to the arse end of nowhere and he was at home more?’ Bella takes a green bean from the steamer and bites into it, wincing at its heat.

  ‘Yes, it was. And he will be.’ Jessie’s voice comes out a little too tight. ‘Let’s eat while the meal’s still faintly digestible.’

  Sawing the tough chicken breast into pieces for Romy, Jessie looks up, making an effort to smile. ‘You could invite a girl from school over this weekend.’

  ‘I don’t have any friends,’ Bella replies matter-of-factly.

  ‘But it’s only been a week. You will.’

  Bella shrugs, making out she doesn’t much care anyway. ‘I’m not like them. I never will be.’ She scoops her hair into a loose bun, securing it with a grip, her neck long, balletic. ‘And they wouldn’t want to set foot inside this house anyway,’ she adds.

  Jessie’s immediate response is to take a sip of wine. It burns down her throat, and she feels its effects almost instantly. She’s noticed this before at Applecote, the way her body seems purer and more sensitive to alcohol, everything more finely tuned. ‘Why do you say that?’

  It occurs to Jessie that Bella looks rather pleased with herself, sucking on a secret. ‘Something happened here. The girls at school told me. It’s legend at Squirrels.’ Bella times her words carefully, studying Jessie’s reaction. ‘They reckon the agent should have told us before we bought it.’

  Romy cocks her head on one side, alert to the change of tone, her eyes rolling from Jessie to Bella and back again, sensing something worrying nibbling at the edges of the conversation.

  ‘And?’

  ‘A girl used to live here ages ago, a cousin of some girls who went to my school. Her name was Audrey. Audrey Wilde.’ Bella’s voice drops low, thrilled, and the candlelight flickers up her face, her eyes shining as if she were huddled over a table at a séance. ‘There’s a photo with them in it, her cousins, I mean, also Wildes, four of them – one of them is totally supermodel beautiful – hanging in Squirrels’ Great Hall.’

  Jessie takes a larger sip of wine. ‘Amazing.’

  Bella angles her spoon so that the candlelight flickers off its handle and ripples on the ceiling. ‘That’s not all.’ Bella’s face is more animated than Jessie’s seen in months. ‘Audrey disappeared. She disappeared from Applecote Manor.’

  Jessie coughs on her mouthful of wine. ‘What – like an alien abduction?’

  ‘She went down to the river one day,’ Bella says, irritated that Jessie’s making light of it. ‘Never seen again.’

  Something in Jessie seizes tight. She thinks of the river that snakes through the meadow, its smooth verdigris surface, the surprising kick of its current. ‘She drowned?’ Her voice drops to a hush. Romy glances at her mother for reassurance, rotating a cindered roast potato in her fingers.

  ‘A man was arrested.’

  A man. A bad man. Jessie doesn’t want to hear this. She doesn’t want a girl to have come to harm in this house. Applecote Manor is their safe place. It’s where they’re going to become a happy family, and Bella will heal. It is not allowed to have a malign, murky history. She stands up and starts stacking plates.

  ‘Audrey’s father was arrested.’

  Jessie turns. The air fills unpleasantly with the smell of greasy chicken. ‘How terrible. And they – they found her?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  There’s something about the ‘yet’. It means she could still be here, the girl, that they could pull up a floorboard – No, she’s being as silly as Bella. This is the kind of story schoolgirls fabricate to whip themselves into a hormonal frenzy. Still, she could have done without it, today of all days. She reaches for the pendant on her necklace and feels her heart pumping along the gold.

  Without being asked, Bella starts clearing plates. ‘The Squirrels girls say that some of them have seen her, this Audrey. Seriously. I’m not joking. That she’s old now, because she would be, but she comes back to roam around Applecote Manor. A girl in the upper sixth, Tania – she has shocking acne – she drove past this house on a driving lesson, not even six months ago, when the house was meant to be empty, and saw a face in the window, pressed up to the glass. A woman looking out! She nearly crashed the car.’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ says Romy.

  ‘Well, they’ve certainly got lush imaginations,’ says Jessie, in a clipped voice.

  Bella watches Jessie’s evident discomfort with interest, and Jessie wonders if the whole thing is a ruse to unsettle her. ‘You remember I felt a bad thing had happened here, the first day we saw the house?’ The candle flames, stirred by an imperceptible draught, elongate into long red tongues, throwing shadows against the walls. ‘Well, I was right, wasn’t I? I knew.’

  Jessie turns on the stiff brass tap, seeking the distraction of water sputtering into the sink. First the letters, now this story about the girl. Summer is over. Will has gone. And Bella is determined to fill the house with ghosts. ‘Okay, pudding.’

  ‘I reckon there are certain places, houses, where bad things just happen and keep happening,’ Bella says determinedly.

  There’s a blast of heat as Jessie opens the oven, burns her fingers on the earthenware dish.

  ‘I wonder what the next bad thing will be. When it will happen.’

  ‘Bella, I think I’m done with legends of disappearing girls. And since I roasted the chicken into oblivion and back, I suggest we all fill up on apple crumble,’ Jessie says, trying to bury the conversation beneath steaming dollops of pudding, feeling a sudden unexpected rush of dread, less about the girl disappearing than the niggling sense that something about the story speaks directly to Bella, and that Bella wants to recast it.

  8

  Sybil tugs the brush through my hair like my mother used to, alternately brisk and tender, pausing to pull apart the worst bathing-pool tangles with her fingers. I sit passively on the floral upholstered stool at Audrey’s dressing-table, enjoying the relinquishment of control, my mind idly wandering from Harry’s thighs to my discovery of another posy in the meadow crater, and my new theory that it is not a local’s pagan offering but something left by Perry, a mark of guilt or a dark secret. I play over my mother’s explanation of what happened to Audrey, not the words but the gaps between them, the sense I had afterwards of not being told everything, a wrinkle in the air after she mentioned Perry’s name. Or am I imagining it, that wrinkle?

  Sybil clinks the hairbrush down on the silver dish and my thoughts slip beneath the surface once more. I see my reflection sit straighter in the dressing-table mirror, the stiff pleats of Sybil’s blouse splaying slightly over the neat hard mound of her bust. I know what’s coming next. I particularly like this bit, the lift of thick, hot hair off my neck, the splitting into three sections, the gentle tugging as Sybil weaves back time with her fingers, the rhythm filling the room with a strange music all of its own.

  When the plait is done our eyes meet with a spark in the mirror. And I know that Sybil is not seeing me but Audrey and that this is wrong and queer. And yet.

  I thought it would just be the once. After finding me in this room last week, making me try on the dress, Sybil kept asking if she could plait my hair. Secretly, she said. We wouldn’t tell anyone. I could take the plait out afterwards. Her fingers were twitching at the sight of so much unruly hair, so in need of a brush, she said. After a while my refusal seemed mean – I was so gr
ateful not to be in enormous trouble at being caught in Audrey’s room. Also, there was this bit of me that couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to sit at Audrey’s dressing-table, Audrey’s mother’s fingers in my hair. I thought of Ma’s actor friends, who live their characters’ quirks off-stage, and decided the more I submerged myself in Audrey the better the chances of discovering her state of mind the day she disappeared.

  It was awful at first, the plaiting. I sat rigid, flinching every time Sybil’s fingers brushed my scalp, appalled at the sound of her loud, fast breathing, but after a while I forced myself to surrender and the encounter became almost bearable, then comforting, all that being cared for, fussed over, like a little girl. Afterwards, I went into my room, not understanding why I suddenly felt tearful, and found a gift of the wooden box of dominoes on my bed, the one from the storeroom, complete but for the one I’d taken. And I wiped my eyes and smiled.

  The next time she did my hair, I didn’t want to see myself in the mirror – what on earth was I doing back here again? What would my sisters say? – I closed my eyes, started slowly to feel the familiar warmth, deep in my abdomen, that I’d experience in Audrey’s company, and I recognized it instantly as an echo of the hazily remembered pleasure of being Pa’s favourite girl, Margot A-go-go, a connection I’d never made before. And this small understanding was a revelation, not about Audrey, as intended, but about myself, or my selves, the Margots stacked one inside another, like painted Russian dolls. And here I am, back at the dressing-table again.

  ‘Margot?’ Pam bellows up the stairs.

  I stand up in a fluster, like someone startled out of a deep sleep. Each time I’m in Audrey’s room, it takes a little longer to feel like me again afterwards. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I whisper.

  Sybil nods, but her disappointment is obvious. A yellow ribbon dangles limply from her fingers.

  ‘I’ve been calling for ages. Where have you been?’ Pam is on the landing below, hands on her hips, staring up at me through the banisters, eyes narrowed. It strikes me that none of us look much like London girls now. Ma wouldn’t recognize us. We’ve been at Applecote almost a month and our hair is bleached the colour of the wheatfields, our shoulders strong from swimming, our bellies soft from Moll’s endless apple puddings and homemade toffee brittle.

  We’re different on the inside too. There’s a sharpness in the way that Pam looks at me, a latent unspoken suspicion of one another. If Ma ever does get through on the telephone – Ma is busy, Sybil tells us, the line terrible – I wonder if she’d hear it in our voices. She went away comforted by the knowledge that we’d always look after each other, a tight group – ‘What is the collective noun for sisters? A shoal of sisters? A murder?’ Ma mused, fanning herself with a martini-stained copy of Vogue – who could ‘read each other’s minds like telegrams’. No longer.

  ‘I was just up here.’ It is not quite a lie, but enough of one to give me a sharp guilty thrill, while leaving me feeling cheapened.

  ‘What on earth have you done to your hair?’ Pam scoffs. ‘You look about twelve years old, Margot.’

  Appalled at my carelessness, I yank at the tight bristle of my plait, roughly pulling it apart. ‘My hair felt too hot down.’

  ‘Shall we just leave you behind then?’ she says eagerly, like someone who wants to do exactly this. ‘Since you’re not ready.’

  ‘Ready for what?’ As my panic subsides I notice that Pam is wearing lipstick – one of Ma’s pilfered crimsons.

  ‘Christ, Margot. You really are from a different planet, aren’t you? The Gores. They said they’d be swimming in the river after tea. Remember?’

  I clamp my hand to my mouth. My fingers smell unsettlingly of Sybil: roses, starch, something soaped and scrubbed. ‘Yes, yes, of course. I want to come!’

  Pam doesn’t pretend to look pleased about this. The less competition for Tom’s attention, the better. She already has the exquisite obstacle of Flora: despite declaring herself ‘three-quarters in love with Harry already’, she’s reluctant to cut the rope from which Tom also dangles, thereby selfishly, greedily stealing the hearts of both boys, rather than sharing the spoils with Pam. ‘In that case you’d better be quick. Put on your costume under your dress. Grab a towel. And use the lav first. You can’t bob down in the grass with boys around.’

  Submerged beneath the river’s surface, their skin is pale green, like the underside of a leaf, their bodies muscularly wrought, making me think of the statues in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I never thought of boys as beautiful until now, that you might want to study their figures as you do girls’. But they are beautiful, frolicking in the water, compellingly, carelessly alive. We stare at them, enchanted, behind a veil of cow parsley, holding back Moppet by the collar. Above the trees, a giant hot-air balloon rises, tomato-red, its basket swinging.

  ‘This is not a good idea,’ Dot tells Moppet. ‘I’m going back to the house.’

  ‘No, no. Stay here with us,’ I say, squeezing her hand, wanting her to feel included. ‘Sybil won’t mind.’ Since the hair-brushing started, Sybil has relaxed a little, if not giving us permission exactly, then turning a blind eye to meetings with the Gores, as long as it’s daylight and we don’t venture far.

  ‘She said the river was dangerous.’

  ‘Sybil thinks a bath is dangerous, Dot.’ Flora laughs, trying to exchange an amused glance with me. But I quickly look away, feeling oddly treacherous to both Sybil and Flora since I’m honest with neither, caught between both.

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’ Harry waves jubilantly from the water, shouting at us to join them. I can think only of the backs of my knees, which I scratched raw in my sleep last night, breaking through the toothpasty calamine crust.

  But Pam is already tugging her dress over her head, keen to reveal her strong, athletic body to Tom. Flora follows, slipping from hers in one graceful liquid movement. The boys exchange wolfish looks. Then I do it, awkwardly, holding a towel in my teeth lengthways to hide my legs. The first to dive in, I am desperate for the cover of water. Dot stays on the bank, stubbornly clothed, Moppet on her lap, like a long thin grey baby.

  The water is cold, alive with tiny silver fish. I like the fish, the way they swim like thoughts between my fingers, but they make Flora squeal. Midges halo our heads, rise and fall in columns.

  Tom wades close to the muddy bank, all tall, snaky sinew, glancing shyly at Flora, who stands in the shallows, skimming smiles at him across the water. They can’t quite stop looking at each other. But when Harry emerges from the deeper channel with a whoop, shaking off stringy reeds – compact where Tom is lean, his energy condensed, pushed into a tighter space – Flora deliberately turns her back on Tom, away from temptation, and propels herself towards Harry with a jump and a laugh that makes her breasts shake.

  I suddenly wish that my own breasts were as round and pert as Flora’s, or that I didn’t have any at all: that I either exceeded expectation, like Flora, or sidestepped it completely, like Dot. I hate always to be in the middle of everything. Only in Audrey’s room, I realize, do I feel at the centre.

  The Gores and my elder sisters start flicking water at each other, giggling and jumping from branches. Too self-conscious to join in, I turn and swim downstream. Relieved to be on my own, I enjoy the rush of water between my legs, sticking to the cold of the deepest channel since I don’t like the mud in the shallows, crawling with crayfish, the way it feels fleshy, like it might be full of bodies.

  ‘One, two, three!’ I hear Pam shout, arms above her head, ready to dive from a high tree. But the Gores are not looking at her. They are watching Flora wading up the bank: her bathing-suit has risen up, revealing one round buttock, the colour of top-of-the-milk cream. It suddenly feels like the whole afternoon will be about my sister’s bottom, held in thrall to it. That there is nothing else left to happen.

  I start swimming again, faster now. Only after a bend in the river, the others obscured, do I drift again and seek refuge in noticing things: the water
vole’s tunnel; the way a pond skater taps ludicrously over the surface, like a man on stilts. It occurs to me that the world of the river reveals itself fully only when you inhabit it, leave the safety of dry land, lower yourself to its level, and maybe this is true of the past too. I am right to spend time in Audrey’s room, letting a little of her siphon into me.

  ‘You don’t look like a girl who needs help.’

  Harry’s unexpected proximity makes me splutter. Where did he come from so silently? ‘I’m fine,’ I manage breathlessly.

  He smiles, circling me, treading water. ‘Pam said you were the type to swim off on your own and go too far without realizing, so I grabbed the opportunity to be a hero. The river looks peaceful but it does get quite knotty in places.’

  ‘I know the river.’

  His eyes dance. ‘Ah, you sound like a modern girl who might object to being saved.’

  ‘I’m perfectly capable of saving myself, thank you,’ I say primly, sounding like a peculiar new version of myself. I swim away quickly. To my surprise Harry follows – his stroke splashless, the muscles in his arms bunching as they lift – rather than returning to ogle Flora on the bank.

  Nothing about the river is tranquil now, and it has nothing to do with the current. Harry’s presence heightens everything, the heat of the sun, the pull of water against my skin. Another gentle bend and the river widens. Everything slows here, the current, my heartbeat. The hot-air balloon, directly above, seems barely to move, holding the afternoon perfectly still.

  He grabs my arm. ‘Look!’ In the time it’s taken him to say that word, it’s already happened: the bomb of blue piercing the water, out again. ‘Kingfisher, did you see it?’

  His hand is still on my arm. This moment – the balloon, the kingfisher, his hand – already feels like a small disloyalty, and something else, something thrilling I haven’t got a word for yet.