The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Read online

  ‘You know, you remind me of someone, Margot.’ He stares at me intensely, making me blush.

  ‘People say I look like my cousin. Like Audrey,’ I say, breathless again.

  He removes his arm and frowns. ‘Ah, yes. I’ve been wondering what it is about you.’ His easy charm held in tension with something else now, something darker, deeper, like the pond skater’s feet on the filmy surface of the water.

  ‘You were friends, my aunt says.’ I tread water a little faster, scattering the tiny fish. I can still feel his warm hand on my arm, the spread of his fingers.

  Harry twists on to his back, very still, as if there were a hidden plank under the water, a conjuror’s trick. ‘We’d knock about, the first couple of weeks of the summer, before my family went to France. I was the poor substitute – she was excitedly waiting for her marvellous cousins to arrive.’ He turns to me and grins in a way that makes something inside me tighten. ‘Now I get to see what all the fuss was about.’

  I smile and swivel on to my back too, gaze up at the sky. It’s easier to talk when I’m not looking at him. And when he moves his hands I feel them as ripples up the side of my body. ‘Can I ask you something, Harry?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Are my aunt and uncle not liked around here?’

  ‘Liked?’ he repeats, with a small laugh, apparently puzzled that anyone should give two hoots if they’re liked or not. Or maybe he’s just surprised that I’ve asked such a direct question. I always forget people never expect it, that it’s politer not to say what you mean.

  ‘It’s just … well, they don’t have much to do with anyone now. It’s odd.’ I turn my head to face him, my ear filling with water. ‘Sybil is scared of leaving the house. She can’t bring herself to do it.’

  ‘Nothing’s stopping her, Margot,’ Harry says softly. ‘You have to force yourself to do the things you’re most scared of. You have to face your darkest fears, don’t you?’

  I try not to look too impressed. But his words ring true, and wise. I make a note to relay their message to Sybil, coax her out of the house one day.

  ‘Only then can you survive yourself,’ he adds, with sudden poetical intensity.

  I climb into these words in wonder. Harry doesn’t talk like other men. I’m hit by the injustice that Flora will not appreciate him for this, yet I would love him for it.

  ‘Anyway, it’s like the Stone Age here.’ Harry flips on to his front puppyishly, and something about this gesture lightens things again. ‘They believe in Little Folk. Spirits in the stones. And, you know, bad luck is contagious. Missing children too. No smoke without fire, all that.’

  The water feels colder now. ‘So did … did people assume …’

  ‘That your uncle and aunt had something to do with it?’ he says abruptly, surprising me by finishing the question. I start to sink inelegantly and have to kick myself back to the surface. ‘Bloody stupid, of course they didn’t,’ he adds.

  Something feels different, like we’re in a new level of conversation. I check that the hot-air balloon is still in the sky. That everything is as it was. The taste of river drips down the back of my throat, a cow-dung grassiness. This could have been the last thing Audrey tasted, not apple pie or a pork chop or honey cake but the river. ‘What did your parents think? They are … educated people.’

  ‘My parents?’ He laughs hollowly. ‘Educated? Using the term loosely. My parents prefer not to think, Margot. They simply decide on a course and stick to it, like ocean liners.’

  I’m not sure if I’m allowed to laugh too, and decide it is safer to say nothing and keep my face solemn.

  ‘All the reporters were crawling everywhere. They hated their names mentioned in the papers. So they left, and didn’t want to be around here much, not after that. Then they just got used to sticking in France all summer, I suppose. The sun. The wine. They’re simple creatures of habit, my parents.’

  ‘Why did you want to come back?’ The moment the words are out of my mouth I feel it might be one question too many. He double-takes, like people do when they realize someone is leading them somewhere they don’t want to go.

  ‘Because they’ll sell Cornton soon, and when I was a boy this was my special place, synonymous with summer.’ I nod, understanding this completely. He grins. ‘Really, Margot, all that matters is that I have the keys to Cornton. There are four beautiful sisters at Applecote Manor. It’s divinely hot. Elvis Presley is on the wireless. There’s not much wrong with the world, is there? We’re so lucky, aren’t we, to live here, now – I mean, at this point in history?’

  I consider telling him about Audrey’s bedroom, how Sybil keeps it ready for her return, how she lives only for that day, how nothing is history, nothing has gone. Only time passes, stealing years from Audrey. ‘We are,’ I say instead. I do feel incredibly lucky to be here with him.

  ‘You’ve got a very pretty smile, Margot. You should smile more. Not be so serious. Come on, I’m not doing a very good job of saving you. At this rate you’ll have to save me. Let’s get back.’ Filling his lungs with air, he lifts his muscle-bunched arm and sluices it into the river.

  I follow in his wake, admiring his powerful stroke, studying the cinnamon freckles across his shoulder-blades, thinking about him and Audrey, trying to see a pattern in the chaos of those freckles, as I saw Audrey’s face that time in the constellation of stars in the sky. But they stay just as freckles, a random sprinkling of long-lost summers and river swims, distant solar heat.

  ‘Well, bravo, buttock.’ There is incandescent fury in Pam’s smile. ‘If Harry was not yours before this afternoon’s swim, Flora, he is now. And so, I dare say, are Tom, the bullocks in the field, the pilot of the hot-air balloon and anyone else within appreciative range of your strip show. Ma would be proud.’

  ‘I swear I’ll paint your mouth shut,’ hisses Flora.

  They glare at each other. Then Flora bends her face closer to my foot, which is resting in her lap, and I feel the cold press of the varnish brush against my nail. She’s painted Pam’s toes too – she stands wiggling, drying them on Flora’s bedroom rug – but it isn’t enough. Pam is still smarting.

  When Harry and I returned from our swim – ‘You two took your time,’ observed Flora, puzzled rather than annoyed since she’d never see plain old me as a rival for a boy’s affections – the rest of them were basking on the sunny river bank, lips bloodied by cherries. Something was off, the discord in the air between Flora and Pam thorny, almost a physical thing. The atmosphere wasn’t improved by Harry’s obvious air of preoccupation, the way he dared to chew a blade of grass and stare intently into the gliding river, rather than put all his energy into charming Flora. She looked at me quizzically; I shrugged. Interpreting Harry’s reflective distance as a slight – Flora has little experience of slights, after all – she moved away to lie down next to Tom, who was spread out tantalizingly on the grass, eyes shut, head resting on his interlaced hands, naked but for his shorts, turning the colour of toast in the sun. When Flora landed beside him, a huge smile spread across his face: so attuned to her presence, her co-ordinates on the bank, he seemed to know it was Flora without opening his eyes. As they laughed and talked in low voices, I noticed how Flora became more natural in Tom’s presence, while Tom was magnified in hers, losing his reserve. Pam noticed it too, contemplated the two of them with the merciless eye of an angry swan – it was enough for Flora to have Harry, not Tom too. I understood that. I wanted Harry myself, more than I’ve ever wanted anybody.

  The unravelling continued into the afternoon. Back at the house, Moll brought us lollies from the icebox in the fridge, normally a moment of collective pleasure, but we took them silently and slumped on striped deckchairs in the shade of the beech tree, as if on separate islands, dreaming, sucking, Pam sulking. At one point, reliving Harry’s hand on my arm, I sighed, far too longingly and loudly. But neither of my elder sisters noticed or commented upon it, and I wondered if we had lost the ability to read one another �
�� the guilty conscience in a nostril rub, the words sucked back by a sharp inhalation of breath, the dreams behind a dawdling footstep – or if we were all too wrapped up in our own worlds now to care.

  ‘Dot, move a bit to the left. You’re in my light.’ Flora dabs at my foot again, and my thoughts stream away. ‘Your baby toenail is so fiddly. It’s the size of a split pea.’

  ‘Flora?’ Dot pushes her glasses back up her nose. It’s the first time she’s spoken for ages, particularly quiet since we got back from the river. I don’t think she likes the way our sisterly allegiances keep changing, realigning in minute ways ever since we met the Gores, like the cloud of tiny midges that towered and flattened above the river’s surface.

  ‘Hmm?’ Flora says distractedly, holding up my foot, surveying her handiwork. ‘Perfect, if I say so myself. But careful, Margot, or it’ll smudge.’

  ‘What was wrong with Harry earlier? Why did he go silent?’ Dot’s mind is still raking over the morning.

  I feel Flora’s start in the varnish brush. ‘Maybe you can tell us, Margot.’

  I blush. The chemical smell of the varnish catches in the back of my throat. Pam and Flora exchange a look that has a silent nod in it. Pam grabs a large, pretty glass paperweight off Flora’s desk and slaps it from one palm to the other.

  ‘You grilled him about Audrey, didn’t you?’ Pam says, lifting her chin so that I can see the triangle shape of her Wilde jaw.

  ‘Well, yes. Sort of.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Margot.’ Flora rejects my foot from the cradle of her lap.

  ‘Do you have to ruin everything?’ Pam looks even more furious, blaming me for the imagined slight that had led to Flora’s monopolization of Tom. ‘Audrey’s no more likely to come back than the dodo. I don’t even care who did it any more. Perry, Moll, the decapitated German pilot, the kitchen cat. Audrey’s dead! We’re alive! Can we just be grateful for that?’

  ‘She’s right,’ says Flora, more softly.

  ‘Someone has to ask questions,’ I throw back at them sharply, guilt about my desire for Harry making me hot and defensive.

  ‘Margot, the questions have been asked,’ Pam says wearily. ‘And there are no answers.’

  ‘That’s simply not true.’ Indignant, my heart racing, I walk to the open window. I think of sitting at Audrey’s dressing-table earlier, the tug and weave of Sybil’s fingers: I felt more understood then, certainly more appreciated.

  ‘Do you have to infect everyone with your maudlin imagination?’ Pam mutters, beneath her breath.

  I shake my head in disbelief that she could be so uninterested in Audrey’s fate. ‘You have a splinter of ice in your heart, Pam.’

  ‘And you, my strange little sister …’ She holds the paperweight up to the light and turns it slowly so that the cobalt swirl in its centre seems to move, like a girl twisting, dancing in a blue dress. ‘… you have a ghost in yours.’

  9

  Not dead, dormant: Jessie stares at the bulb between her soil-hardened fingertips. A gusty November wind, smelling distinctly of the orchard’s rotting windfalls, pushes against her back. And she wonders. She wonders about the other thing lying dormant at Applecote, waiting for the right conditions to come alive.

  The problem is she knows now. She wishes she didn’t. She wishes she’d let Audrey be.

  But these last two and a half months, since Bella started school and Will his disorienting split Applecote–London life, Bella’s not stopped muttering about the ‘vanishing girl’. She particularly likes talking about it when Will is away during the week, and it’s just the three of them alone in the house, surrounded by a darkness so absolute it is like tangible living matter. It started to spook Jessie a bit so a couple of weeks ago she decided to prove the whole thing was nonsense, once and for all.

  She was heartened by a quick search online that came up with nothing. But then, just to be sure, she’d gone on to chat with Sheila, the nice lady behind the till in the village shop – Sheila had been proudly saying she’d been born in the village, only visited London once, which was enough. Jessie casually asked if she knew anything about a young girl who had gone missing from Applecote in the fifties. She fully expected Sheila to laugh, ask her what on earth she was talking about.

  ‘Never forgot the day my mammy told me,’ Sheila muttered instead, stuffing noodles more vigorously into Jessie’s hessian shopper. ‘We weren’t allowed out to play for months that summer.’ She shook her head. ‘That poor Mrs Wilde.’

  ‘But not the Mrs Wilde who lived at Applecote before us?’ Jessie clarified, with a delayed smile.

  She had to sit down on the bench by the village pond afterwards, bury her face in Romy’s cloud of biscuity curls. That night she dreamed of the woman with the dogs again, and called, ‘Audrey!’ and the woman turned around, revealing no face inside the headscarf, just a smudge. She’s dreamed it every night since.

  Jessie hasn’t told Bella what Sheila said, of course. Bella needs no more encouragement. Rather than growing bored with the story, she seems more obsessed than ever, layering the bare ‘facts’ with her own details and suppositions, like one of those dark internet memes Jessie’s read about. Jessie hopes ‘the Audrey story’ is Bella’s way of getting herself noticed, trying to fit in, egged on by the other Squirrels girls. But Bella won’t leave the story at school.

  Bella’s portrait of ‘Audrey’ – a rather good collage of a girl with a toothpaste smile, a background of rolling newspaper print – is now stuck on their kitchen wall, next to Romy’s innocent finger paintings. And on Bella’s dressing-table, that eerie memento mori keeps growing: the heart-shaped button, the paperweight from the desk in the old drawing room, those disintegrating newspapers from 1959, joined this week by a stubby pencil with the faintest A on its hexagonal side that Bella found wedged under the skirting board. Jessie secretly wishes she could throw the whole lot in the fire. (In hindsight, she also wishes she’d never given Romy those alphabet bricks from the attic, or fixed up the child’s chair.) Will sees no harm in Bella’s interest – ‘a teen thing, like collecting badges’ – but, then, Jessie hasn’t told Will what Sheila said yet either.

  She tried. But the words caught, and she washed them away with a large gulp of red wine. Jessie’s overwhelming instinct is to protect Will from further darkness, not to add to his growing troubles. As it is, there are Skype meetings in the small hours with Jackson in Brisbane that leave Will permanently exhausted. Two business deals have been toasted in the last month, then disastrously fallen through at the last minute, Will’s hopes dashed, his professional pride dented. The company’s staff are unsettled, a couple jumping ship. Last week there was an embarrassing, expensive cock-up, a cargo turning up in the wrong port.

  Will takes it all too personally, as if this no-deal limbo is a failure of him as a businessman and, Jessie senses, a husband. However much she assures him it’s not his fault – it’s the nervous markets, the lack of accessible capital, just crap luck – Will seems increasingly distant, weighted down by critical introspection. (Jessie is struggling not to take this personally and see her inability to lift his sombre mood as a reflection on the shortcomings of their relationship. She’s sure Mandy would have known how to reach him.) Given all this, she simply cannot bring herself to tell Will about Applecote’s grim past and risk him seeing Applecote not as a rural haven but as a house of horrors. She’s terrified he may want to leave. So she lets Will dismiss Bella’s story as a schoolgirl’s tall tale, and desperately hopes it will all gently fade away, like one season turning into another.

  And yet. The house’s history certainly explains things. The resistance of local builders – thank God for Joe Peat, who has agreed to work at Applecote, albeit in a vague ‘few weeks’. The minute flickers in villagers’ faces when Jessie mentions where she lives. The way a couple of the mothers at the local church playgroup in the village hall exchanged the sort of uneasy complicit look that wonders if they should mention anything. Jessie felt she had �
�Outsider’ crayoned on her forehead. She’s just grateful that she hasn’t mentioned anything to the woman at the plant-nursery café: she still has one sanctuary with good cake, like Greta’s in London, where Applecote’s history won’t follow her. She needs it.

  During the week now, whole days can pass when she doesn’t see another adult. Her thoughts loosen and slip away then, especially if she has to go into Bella’s bedroom, where those love letters still flutter in the eaved shadows like silver moths, and Mandy’s beautiful, accomplished gaze mocks her from the walls. What did we do in our past lives to be so blessed? Those words still taunt her. As does the image of them holding hands in their sleep, especially given that she and Will spend most of the week in separate beds, more than seventy miles apart. All the niggles and natural fears Jessie’s ever had about Will – the speed of their relationship, the fact he’d loved someone else so deeply, that Bella still doesn’t accept her, probably never will – take on a life of their own in the strange lilac light of that room.

  Afterwards, seeking reassurance, she’ll phone Will, just to hear his voice. Although Jessie can’t picture the house, room or chair in which he sits – she hates this – she can hear the police sirens in the background, the murmur of the city, and she will smell the traffic, the surging scented gusts from shop fronts, and she will picture dear Lou on a Tube beneath the city’s concrete crust, applying her deep-black MAC mascara, and she will miss it all with a pang that is almost painful, and bring the conversation to a sharp close, in case she gives herself away, or starts to sound like a sitcom stereotype of the needy, emotionally unstable wife at home.

  Alone in the house, followed by Mandy’s Mona Lisa gaze, these uncorrected thoughts gather plausibility until Friday, D Day, the day Will returns. Friday is always busy. It is the day Jessie primps the house, fuelled by a manic energy that turns her into a woman she doesn’t really recognize: flowers arranged, bread baked, roaring fires lit. No longer the start of a lazy slide towards Sunday, as they used to be, Applecote weekends must now justify themselves. She feels under pressure for it all to feel worth it, the exhausting commute, the upheaval, the cold and mud. She’ll scrub the garden soil from beneath her fingernails, and – the image of perfectly presented Mandy never far from her mind – rummage around for something faintly chic to wear.