The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Read online

  ‘I wouldn’t bother, Jess. I’m sure he’d much rather just get laid,’ Lou counsels on the phone. Jessie loyally doesn’t tell Lou that that side of things is stalling. How sometimes, when she and Will embrace, they don’t seem to fit together as they used to, as if they are physically changing shape in the days they are apart.

  Anyway, it’s about the girls now, not her, she tells herself. They miss him terribly, the absent hero. (Bella, in particular, takes it out on Jessie, since she is around to receive it.) Romy launches herself at Will in a frenzy of possessive delight the moment he walks through the door. After hugs, tickles, a nonsensical discussion about Boy, the unfortunate woodlouse Romy keeps as a pet in a jam-jar, Will dutifully retreats upstairs to spend time alone with Bella in her bedroom. Jessie encourages it, as she always has. It’s only sometimes, after particularly long chats, when Will comes downstairs looking preoccupied, a little troubled, like he did last night, that Jessie feels the hollow pang of exclusion, and starts to wonder exactly what Bella is telling him about the week alone with her stepmother.

  But she says nothing. She carries on cooking. She smiles, maybe a little dementedly at times. She reminds herself that her policy is to share nothing that could stress Will. She might lay it on a bit too thick: how Bella’s making such nice friends (Jessie pounces on any mention of a fellow classmate being ‘kind of all right’ as evidence of a blossoming friendship) and Romy loves the playgroup (she wrestles tractors out of the boys’ hands, then demands to go home). She makes light of Bella’s sleepwalking, not mentioning how she found Bella by Romy’s cotbed again a couple of nights ago, staring down at the snuffling lump of her little sister with cold, blank, unseeing eyes. She doesn’t talk about her own irrational wake-in-the-night fear that Romy will disappear, like the girl who lived here all those years ago, that old houses, set in such ancient landscapes, create atavistic reflexes, re-circulate the past, and that bad things will always happen at Applecote, just as Bella once promised.

  ‘Dad!’ Bella shouts into her thoughts. Jessie looks up, surprised to find herself still standing in the flowerbed, an allium bulb in her hand, the planting hole empty. This keeps happening, this fleeting loss of herself. Like she might have dissolved into the very substance of the house and garden while Will was away.

  The light has changed, bronze now.

  ‘Have you seen him, Jessie?’ Bella is standing by the orangery, long hair blowing about her face, arms tightly crossed, wearing her Saturday uniform of skinny jeans, sneakers and a sloppy hoodie.

  ‘Sorry, miles away. Yes, he’s taken Romy to the village pond to feed the ducks.’ Jessie likes how this sentence sounds, normal, domestic, like they’re a regular country family enjoying their weekend. ‘He won’t be long.’

  To Jessie’s surprise, Bella starts to walk in her direction across the veranda, its stone still black from the morning’s downpour. ‘What are you doing?’ she asks curiously.

  ‘Planting flowers for spring.’ Jessie straightens, presses a hand on her aching lower back. ‘We may not have a new roof by then. But we will have flowers. Far more important, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Is that a shallot?’

  ‘An allium bulb. Close, though. Same family.’

  Bella sticks her hands in her jeans’ pockets, raises her shoulders into a shrug. ‘Doesn’t look like it’ll do anything,’ she says flatly.

  ‘Why don’t you plant it and see? It’s a bit late in the season. But the man at the nursery said it should be fine if we get them in this weekend. It’s a cool little nursery – I wish you’d come with me one day.’

  Bella rolls her eyes. ‘Nurseries are never cool, Jessie. You’ve been in the country too long.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re probably right.’ Jessie laughs. She picks the paper bag of bulbs from the ground and hands it to Bella. ‘There’s another trowel in that bag.’

  Bella hesitates, but then, resignedly deciding she has nothing better to do, she takes the bulbs and the trowel, bends down and flicks at the soil.

  Jessie tries not to look too pleased. Nothing scares Bella off faster. ‘About ten centimetres deep … That’s it. That’s great. Shove the bulb in. No, other way. Pointy bit facing up. Then just fill it in. Well done.’

  It’s an incongruous sight, Bella squatting down, carefully digging tiny holes, dropping in bulb after bulb, entirely absorbed, nudging them into place with her fingers. After a while, she stops and frowns up thoughtfully through her streaming dark hair at Jessie. ‘Mum never gardened.’

  ‘No, I guess she didn’t,’ says Jessie, after a pause. It hits her that there is now a heartbreakingly long list of things that Bella will never do with Mandy. She’d like to be able to acknowledge her understanding of this somehow to Bella but deems it too risky.

  Bella starts digging once more, stabbing the trowel deep into the earth until it collides with something. ‘Oh. Look.’ She is wiping a muddy pair of glasses on her jeans. The lenses are long gone, one arm too, the frame tortoiseshell where Bella rubs the mud away. She forces the remaining arm open, holds the spectacles up and peers through them. They have a cat’s eye slant, giving her a definite 1950s air. The sun dips. Jessie feels a little breathless: the house is confronting her with its darkest secret, the one she’s kept from Will.

  She knows what’s coming.

  ‘The vanishing girl, the one you hate me talking about. They could be hers, couldn’t they?’

  ‘I don’t …’ Jessie’s words trail off at the terrible timing: Will is pushing through the side gate, Romy on his shoulders, Flump, her knitted elephant, bobbing on his head.

  ‘Ladies.’ He bends down to shimmy Romy off his shoulders, grinning, pleased at this rare scene of familial harmony. ‘Looking like a natural, Bella.’

  ‘Jessie made me do it,’ Bella says, fighting a small smile. Will slings his arm around Bella, hugs his daughter to him.

  Jessie notices that Will is wearing his life in layers today: a Puffa coat, muddied from carrying his mid-life toddler; the V-neck cashmere sweater her mother gave him last Christmas – she’d never spent so much on a jumper in her life; a faded Glastonbury T-shirt from 1998, a festival he’d gone to with Mandy, and the year Bella was conceived.

  ‘Ah, Jessie can be persuasive,’ says Will, wryly, to Bella.

  ‘You’re back quick. Weren’t the ducks hungry?’ Jessie doesn’t mean to sound short. She picks at Romy’s curls. They’re beginning to dreadlock at the back. She looks increasingly feral, like some sort of woodland sprite.

  A free spirit – ‘A little too free?’ Will wondered yesterday, after getting home – Romy is resentful of any constraints: buggies, playpens and warm clothes. She knows her own mind, her favoured routes through the garden, all the better barefoot, the best places to forage in the undergrowth, finding a brain-like walnut revealed in the skull of its broken shell, rabbit bones that she offers to Bella, trying to win her affection. She eyes the glasses in Bella’s hand curiously.

  ‘Sorry,’ Will says distractedly, looking up from his phone. His eyes take a moment to refocus, the pupils contracting, as if he’s moving from one place to another in his head. ‘An email from Jackson. Says he’s sniffed out another potential buyer, some friend of a friend in the City. Maybe this will finally be it, Jess. I need to make a call.’

  ‘On a Saturday?’ Jackson’s ‘potential buyers’ have led them a dance so far.

  ‘If there’s a small chance, we can’t sit on it.’ Stuffing his phone back in his coat pocket, he glances at Bella’s hand. Jessie’s heart sinks: she’d hoped they might go unnoticed. ‘What you got there, Bella?’

  ‘Audrey’s glasses.’ Bella lays them flat on her palm and holds them up for Will’s inspection.

  Will sends Jessie a quizzical look. She sends a small shrug back, one that says, leave it, it’s just Bella’s fanciful teenage imagination.

  ‘Ducks?’ Romy presses against Bella’s leg, smiling the kind of smile that would melt any heart, just not her sister’s. ‘Bell-Be
ll take Romy to the ducks?’

  ‘Bella’s busy, sweetpea.’ Jessie smiles, scooping her up. But Romy is resistant. She wants Bella.

  ‘No, it’s all right, I’ll take Romy,’ says Bella, unexpectedly.

  Jessie is so taken aback she can’t think of anything to say at first.

  ‘Will you?’ Will looks pleasantly surprised.

  ‘Sure. We’ll find some ducks on the river.’

  The river. Jessie’s heart starts to thump. Bella cannot take Romy down to the water alone. She thinks of the cold, threatening way Bella looks at Romy sometimes. Bella’s hot temper, her unpredictability. Jessie scrabbles about for legitimate reasons, the ones she can voice out loud. ‘Oh, no, she’s such a scamp. She keeps running off and hiding, Bella.’

  And this is true. A trying new phase, Romy’s attempts at hide and seek. Usually Jessie finds her pretty quickly. But she wouldn’t want Romy trying it on by the river, not with that swell of water edging up the bulrushes, its surface fingerprinted with swirling eddies, guilty-looking. A bloated dead sheep was bobbing downstream yesterday, like an over-stuffed pillowcase, its eyes pink holes, pecked out by birds. ‘The river is very high after all the rain. And look at those clouds. It’s going to bucket down.’

  ‘We’ll be fine.’ Bella speaks directly to Will now. And Jessie is aware of the self-enclosed lock of their gazes, the way they are silently negotiating without her.

  ‘Off we go!’ Romy tucks Flump tighter under her arm. ‘Romy and Bell-Bell and Flump.’

  ‘Will,’ Jessie appeals to him, trying to talk in a grown-up code that Bella won’t understand, ‘I’m really not sure it’s such a good idea.’

  ‘She means she doesn’t trust me,’ Bella interjects simply, understanding perfectly.

  Will frowns. Jessie feels the day lurch, the first afternoon of the weekend, which was going so well. ‘I …’

  ‘I told you, Dad,’ Bella adds.

  What has she told him? When? Jessie glances at Will quizzically. Is this what they were talking about last night in Bella’s bedroom? Those long phone calls earlier in the week? But Will doesn’t quite meet Jessie’s eye. And something in Jessie sinks: she cannot tune into Will as she did, she realizes. Is he thinking of what happened in London at the pool? Because she is. She can’t not.

  The lifeguard saw Bella holding the girl under the water, the girl struggling, flailing. After he pulled her out – Zizzi Miles, cliquey, popular, an old adversary of Bella’s – she gasped on the poolside like a dying fish. An ambulance was called. Zizzi emerged from the incident unscathed, Bella far less so. After Zizzi swore that Bella ‘had gone psycho’ and tried to drown her, and Zizzi’s incensed parents called the police, Bella was suspended, her place in the sixth form revoked. Offered the chance to defend herself, she barely bothered, only saying that she wished she’d pushed down harder, and that Zizzi’s drowning act was faked: ‘I don’t expect to be believed.’ And the headmistress didn’t believe her. But Will did. And Jessie tried to. It’s just that there’s always been this doubtful voice in Jessie’s head. No, Bella shouldn’t be in charge of the little sister she doesn’t like very much down by that river.

  ‘Bella will be super careful, won’t you?’ Jessie hears Will say. And before she can object, she sees Will pull a sandwich bag of breadcrumbs from his coat pocket. ‘Here. Duck feast. Hold Rom’s hand, Bella. Tightly.’

  ‘And Flump’s,’ instructs Romy, pushing the elephant’s knitted grey foot into Bella’s fingers.

  Will is talking in his fast London voice, while Jessie paces by the kitchen window, peering out of the glass at the darkening garden beyond. The yellow tinge has gone. The sky is heavy, metallic, like a lid. She waits for Will to finish his call, turns to him. ‘They’ve been gone a while.’

  ‘Twenty minutes.’ He’s looking at her in a funny way, holding her at a distance. ‘Bella can handle Romy.’

  ‘It’s not a London park, Will.’ Worry makes her sound too sharp. Besides, he doesn’t know the river, or the girls’ dynamic, not like she does. He’s never here. ‘No one’s around. If anything happened …’

  Will rakes back his hair and says wearily, ‘I thought we moved here so the girls could roam free.’

  His tone takes her by surprise. It almost seems that a criticism of the entire move is seeded in his question. Rain starts to tap at the window, the sound of little fingers. ‘Romy hasn’t got her waterproof.’

  ‘That’s never held her back before.’

  Jessie’s not sure if there’s an accusation in there somewhere too, or if she’s imagining it. Maybe he’s just tired and scratchy. ‘I can feel another storm coming.’

  He follows her into the cloakroom, watching as she rifles frantically through the coats on the hooks, her heart starting to jack, her mind flying off to bad places. ‘Jessie …’ he says more softly.

  ‘Not now, Will.’

  He leans his head against the doorframe. ‘I was just going to say how sweet you and Bella looked together in the garden just then, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, momentarily thrown. Normally she’d seize upon this, evidence of how everything’s working out just fine. ‘Well, I won’t be long.’

  The wind pushes her through the meadow, as if it wants her to get to the river faster. It’s hard to see in the rain: the stones are battered grey shapes, the trees at the meadow’s edge sodden slabs of orange.

  The river slurps at the bank, breaching in places, blades of grass sticking up surreally under a couple of inches of water. She runs alongside it, peering through the blackened bulrushes. They’re not here, she thinks, her stomach flipping. They’re bloody well not here. She starts calling their names, skidding on the cattle-hoofed mud. There’s no one around, just the eerie desolation of a river in the rain, a red kite circling above. She stands for a moment, hand covering her mouth, not knowing what to do.

  Shadows appear just beneath the surface of the water, like they did in the pool that first day. A corner of an old red shopping bag looks, for a moment, like Romy’s welly boot, and a choke of fear rushes up her throat. She calls their names again, louder now. Nothing. She’ll phone Will. She must phone Will. But her phone is not in her back pocket. Her phone is on the kitchen table, of course, where she left it. She stops, panting, hands on her knees, tries to think rationally. She must return. Maybe they’re back at the house now. Yes, that’s where they have to be.

  Turning back to the meadow, Jessie freezes.

  Ahead, her outline smudged by an undulating curtain of rain and wind, is a little girl, tiny, huddled on one of the stones, wearing glasses.

  Romy hasn’t seen Jessie yet, not until Jessie calls her name, runs up and grabs her tightly as if pulling her back from the edge of a cliff. ‘Oh, sweetheart.’

  ‘Flump gone,’ sobs Romy, tightening her arms around Jessie’s neck. ‘Bell-Bell gone.’

  ‘Gone? Where? Why are you wearing those horrible glasses? Oh, you poor little thing. Let’s put this on before you get any wetter.’

  She whips the glasses off Romy, stuffing them into her pocket, and tries in vain to push Romy’s wet arms into her anorak. Out of the corner of her eye, movement. And there is Bella, out of breath, as if she’s run back from somewhere far away, hair falling in black blades across her face.

  ‘Bella! Where were you?’

  Bella holds up Flump. The knitted elephant’s sodden ears flop pathetically. ‘I went to find this. Don’t look at me like that. She dropped it. I told her to stay there while I went looking. I’ve only been five minutes or so.’

  ‘Five minutes!’

  ‘Flump was hard to find in the grass,’ Bella retorts defensively. She shoots Romy a cold look. ‘I knew she’d keep whining if I didn’t come back with it.’

  ‘Your dad told you to hold Romy’s hand!’

  ‘By the river. He said hold her hand by the river.’

  ‘The river is just there. It’s there! A toddle away. Romy could have gone looking for you and fallen in.’ All th
e times Jessie’s swallowed her anger, her fear, her doubts, seem to rise up at once, and she keeps shouting, even though she should stop, she knows she should stop, and Bella is paling, her blazing eyes darting about like something trapped. Then she is stumbling away over the soggy tussocks of grass.

  ‘Wait!’ Jessie runs after her, Romy sobbing on her hip. She pulls the glasses out of her pocket. ‘And why did you make her wear these? Tell me.’

  A guilty-looking flush rises on Bella’s cheeks as she stutters, ‘She – she wanted to wear them, didn’t you, Romy?’

  ‘Don’t like.’ Romy pushes the glasses away and buries her head in Jessie’s shoulder. Jessie cradles her protectively.

  ‘She does. I was just being nice. Is that so hard to imagine?’ Bella grabs the glasses back.

  Jessie hugs Romy closer. Something doesn’t fit. For all Romy’s sense of adventure, she wouldn’t have wanted to be left alone in the rain like that. And she’d have protested about it. A small suspicious voice in Jessie’s head starts to wonder if Bella, consciously or not, deliberately put Romy in danger. ‘I don’t like the sound of this.’

  ‘No, you don’t like me.’

  ‘That’s simply not true. I … I …’ Jessie is suddenly shocked by it all, the force of her own reaction, how a Saturday afternoon could have begun so sweetly and slid into this. She presses her hand to her forehead. ‘Sorry. I’m sorry for shouting. We need to get you some help, Bella. I – I’ll get you what you need, I promise.’

  Bella fists the tears off her face. ‘I need Mum back, don’t you get it? And I need you gone. No more shrinks. No more talking. No more Romy this and Romy fucking that. Just me and Dad again.’