The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Read online

  Romy starts to whimper.

  ‘Let’s – let’s just stop, Bella. Please. Not here. Let’s go back to the house. We’ll talk it through.’

  ‘There’s nothing else to say. I’ve said the truth. It’s out there now. Do what you like with it.’ Bella turns, walks off, bent forward in the rain, like something wild, elemental, completely out of Jessie’s control.

  ‘Bella …’ Jessie calls weakly, blinking back tears. But her voice is sucked away by the wind. She knows she should run after her, persuade her to come back to the house, warm up by the fire, but she can’t erase the image of Romy in the spectacles, sitting on the stone, like a sacrificial offering. So she lets Bella vanish into the rain.

  Almost two hours now. Where is she? Jessie listens with mounting alarm to the sound of branches breaking, great limbs crashing to the ground outside, static things airborne, benign things gone rogue, a world spun upside down. She prays for Bella’s quick return.

  The clock ticks faster on the kitchen wall, stacking up the missing minutes, minutes when anything could be happening. Jessie imagines Bella crushed beneath a lightning-felled tree, her trainers poking out, the neon-yellow soles.

  Out of the kitchen window, the cone of Will’s torchlight nudges through the shrubs and shadows. Jessie desperately wishes she could run back into the afternoon, refuse to let Bella take Romy anywhere, listen to her gut.

  Will throws open the back door. His hair is flat on his head. His eyes bloodshot. Like a man emerging from a rough sea. ‘She’s most likely to be at a school friend’s house, don’t you reckon?’ he says breathlessly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replies.

  He swipes his car keys from a pottery bowl on the kitchen worktop. ‘There’s not a particular house she hangs out at after school?’

  Jessie swallows. Her throat is sore from shouting earlier. ‘I – I’m not sure. I don’t think so.’

  Will stares at her searchingly, longer than is comfortable. ‘But I thought you said that …’ He looks confused, then something seems to dawn on him. Or maybe he reads the guilt in her face, the way she’s staring down at her hands, cursing her eagerness to tell Will only what she thought he wanted to hear about Bella’s friendships. ‘She normally comes home after school, if there’s no school club,’ she says quietly.

  ‘Right.’ Will is frowning.

  She can tell he feels duped, lulled into believing things about their weekday life that are not exactly untrue, just tangentially true, a version of a life that hasn’t quite happened yet. ‘I’m sorry if I misled you. I – I didn’t want you to worry about Bella while you’re in London, that’s all.’

  A moment passes. ‘Right,’ he says again, only more tersely, and she feels it like a physical thing, the way distrust slips between them. She stands up quickly, the chair rocking back. ‘There’s a class list somewhere.’

  ‘I’m going to check the pub. Call me, if you hear anything.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Desolate, Jessie stares out of the window as Will’s car roars away. So it wasn’t Romy, she thinks, covering her nose and mouth with her hands. It wasn’t Romy who was going to vanish – Romy is happily asleep upstairs, bottom balled in the air, like a baby. It was Bella herself, of course, Bella re-enacting the past. She must tell Will this. That it’s about the girl, the vanishing girl, the story planted like a pip in Bella’s head, a true story, not a Squirrels myth. Full disclosure now. She is picking up her mobile to call him when the doorbell rings. The police, she thinks. Oh, God.

  But it is the most wonderful sight: sodden, mud-sprayed, black-eyed, like a girl who lives in the woods. Jessie reaches out to hug her. Bella steps back, leaving Jessie swiping at air.

  Out of the shadows, emerging from a dripping umbrella, a tall woman in a mackintosh. ‘I’m afraid I kidnapped her.’

  The voice. So soft. So well-spoken. So familiar. Jessie is unable to believe her eyes. ‘It’s you!’

  The woman smiles uncertainly, trying to place her. ‘I …’

  ‘Sorry, I come to your café,’ Jessie explains, trying to collect herself. ‘With my little girl? I come and eat cake with my little girl.’

  ‘Of course. Sorry.’ The look of recognition is swiftly followed by astonishment. ‘And it was you … You bought Applecote Manor? My goodness. I had no idea.’

  Jessie looks from Bella to the woman in confusion. ‘But, Bella, how …’

  Bella moves awkwardly from one foot to the other, her trainers making a squelching sound. ‘I was actually completely fine,’ she mumbles.

  ‘It’s just that she didn’t look particularly fine, that’s all. I was driving back from a friend’s, and there she was, this determined young thing, marching along the lane in the storm. She refused to get into a car with a stranger, sensible girl. But I begged her to make an exception this once. That lane is no place for a young girl at night. I insisted she get in. Absolutely my fault, not hers.’ She smiles, firm but kind. ‘You mustn’t be cross with her.’

  Cross? Jessie can only imagine what Bella’s said. ‘I’m just pleased to have her home. Thank you, thank you so much. I’m immensely grateful.’

  The café woman touches Bella lightly on the arm, says softly, in an easy maternal way, like Jessie isn’t there, ‘You sure you’re quite okay now?’

  Bella nods, mutters thanks, and pushes past Jessie into the house. A well-timed flick of her wet hair stings Jessie’s cheek as Jessie texts Will to tell him the wanderer has returned.

  ‘Pop along to the café sometime,’ the lady calls after her. But Bella’s gone. Somewhere a door slams.

  Jessie sticks out a hand. ‘Jessie.’

  The woman hesitates, unsure about revealing her name. ‘Margot. Margot Waters.’

  Margot. The woman looks like a Margot. ‘Would you like to come in? Warm up with a cup of tea?’

  Jessie sees her hesitation, the familiar twitch: Margot knows about Applecote, Jessie realizes. Her spirits sink.

  ‘I’d better get back. But thank you for the kind offer.’ Margot peers curiously over Jessie’s shoulder into the hall. ‘You’ve made it very beautiful,’ she says, in a tone of quiet appreciation.

  ‘Oh, it’s just a lick of paint, really,’ says Jessie, wondering what Margot’s comparing it to, how well she knows the house. ‘It was always beautiful.’

  ‘It was,’ Margot says, lighting up.

  Jessie has the odd sensation of being in the way, standing between the house and Margot, as you might two ex-lovers in a crowded room.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t come in?’ she asks again.

  ‘No. No, I won’t,’ she says, more firmly. ‘I must go.’ With one hand, Margot pulls up a leopard-print scarf from her hood, settling it over her mink-grey hair.

  Jessie starts. Seeing the scarf, she thinks of the woman she saw that day in August, as she hung from the orchard wall, that woman with the two black Labradors, walking away from the house. No, too much of a coincidence. There must be dozens of women in the Cotswolds with leopard-print scarves.

  ‘I hope you’re happy here, Jessie. Bella too. She’s a very spirited girl.’ Margot lowers her voice into something more conspiratorial. ‘A good thing in the end, I promise.’

  Jessie’s throat locks. She fights the urge to throw herself at the older woman and tell her everything about the agonies of trying to mother Bella, stepping into a dead wife’s shoes, but she has a funny hunch that somehow Margot has guessed it all anyway.

  ‘Well, good night,’ Margot says, more briskly now, withdrawing.

  ‘Thank you again.’

  Margot steps out of the shelter of the portico and stops, turns around once more. ‘The drain at the back, it’s blocked. It always blocks this time of year.’

  ‘Sorry?’ says Jessie, bemused.

  ‘If you don’t clear it, you’ll get damp in the top-floor bathroom.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. Thank you,’ Jessie says, with a small puzzled laugh that soon stops. ‘But how do you know …’ Her voice trails off
.

  Margot is already walking down the path to her car in the rain. Jessie stares after her, puzzled. As she drives away Jessie sees them, just for a brief second, in the puddle of light thrown by the lamp at the end of the drive: the two noses pressed against the car’s rear window, a gleam of black fur, the two dogs’ eyes glowing like lamps, then gone.

  10

  Not even Moppet can understand it. The treat of raw pigs’ knuckles mid-morning. The petting from Sybil. The slow collapse of Applecote’s house rules, like something rigid buckling in the soaring late-summer heat.

  The only thing that seems to dampen Sybil’s mood – pause her flow around the house, opening curtains – is a reminder that we are two and a half weeks off returning to school, Flora departing for Paris. And the only thing that truly stops Sybil in her tracks, so that her foot stills above the staircase tread, her hand leaps to her throat, is a mention of my mother, particularly Dot questioning if there are any letters for her from Ma. (The rest of us have given up asking.)

  I’m now sure Sybil’s managed to convince herself that Ma no longer exists – after all, she’s convinced herself that Audrey will knock at the door any day – and that she, Sybil, is our new mother, we her adopted daughters. And because a mention of Ma seems to rattle her so, and threaten the mood that’s led to the delicious relaxation of rules – and thereby our access to Harry and Tom – we mention Ma less and less, even to each other.

  Or maybe it’s just that Ma’s hurt us by not writing, more than any of us care to admit. But I don’t know for sure since we sisters no longer talk about our feelings honestly. We used to push them, like a kneaded lump of dough, into each other’s hands to hold and squeeze so that we could experience them together. Now we take polemical positions. We have secret desires. We lob spiky feelings at one another, like hairbrushes. And Dot takes herself off on long solitary walks with Moppet.

  Sybil, in her own subtle way, fuels this friction. Her quiet relish of Ma’s reckless parenting makes me uncomfortable. When Pam mused in Sybil’s hearing that Ma’s probably run off with an Arab prince and is floating around a medina somewhere, nibbling dates, having forgotten her daughters completely, I’m sure I saw a satisfied smile flicker over Sybil’s lips. Later that day, she appeared at dinner wearing an unthinkable slash of lipstick, Ma’s distinctive crimson. I wanted to wash it off her face, say, ‘You are not Ma, my wonderful, maddening, electrical storm of a mother.’ But she looked so pretty, shyly pleased with herself. And she waved us off for a sunset swim in the river. So I didn’t.

  I keep thinking it can’t last, Sybil’s mood, this transformation. That it must be induced by a pill, like the ones Ma used to take after Pa died. Or the Dubonnet. That she’ll clip downstairs in dark grey flannel the next morning, forbidding life-endangering swims. But then she appears freshly at the breakfast table in that yellow dress, the colour of lemons, and delivers me a private look, long as a letter, that binds me to her, making me feel that my dissembling is allowing her to gather a little of her old self again.

  It baffles Perry. He blinks at Sybil as if he has noticed a fundamental change in his wife but has no idea what it is, or why. He double-takes when she ankles across the lawn, a floral skirt swishing around calves so slim and pale from being hidden under heavy dresses for years they are like a shop mannequin’s, walking with the accelerating rhythm of someone keen for another day to unfold, rather than the slow step of someone determining to endure it.

  Confusingly, Perry suddenly looks less guilty. No longer walking with his hand on his lower back, he is more upright, his belly less swollen with gas and secrets. I wonder if his wife’s mood is passing into him, some kind of marital osmosis. This morning at lunch, he even suggested tentatively, as if he didn’t quite trust this gay interloper masquerading as his wife, that she join him in the pool: Sybil threw back her head and laughed, not unkindly. She said she hadn’t swum in it for years and was far too old to do so now and, anyway, the greenfly on the roses need dealing with. Still, he actually asked and she actually laughed, both unimaginable when we first arrived.

  We joke that Sybil is having an affair with the gardener, Billy. Why else the smiles, the laxity, the red lipstick? But one afternoon Pam whips around, hard blue gaze prodding at me like a finger in the chest: ‘What do you think, Margot? You’re Sybil’s pet. How do you read the mood of your mistress?’ And I felt Audrey’s world seal tighter over me then, its birdcage door swing shut.

  I cannot confide to my sisters how Sybil’s eyes follow me about the house. My anticipation of her tread on the stairs, her knuckles bunched, just outside my door, the moment before she knocks. How I know she will enter my room, closing the door behind her, circling me with smiles, drinking me in, asking the whereabouts of my sisters, until she suggests that we ‘sit in Audrey’s room together awhile’.

  I’m not sure how to say no, and part of me wants to please her, and part of me enjoys it, and part of me wants to supplant Ma, punish her for not being here, for not writing, and letting this happen at all. It’s not that I haven’t tried to tell Sybil that it’s a case of mistaken identity, that she mustn’t muddle me with Audrey, but the stuttering words didn’t come out very forcefully, and she shot me such a puzzled, disappointed look. She’s just enjoying my company, she said. I knew she was lying. She probably knew it too. But I was so relieved at this simple explanation, the whole thing so awkward and odd and beyond navigable, that I grabbed it. But the longer I let it go on, the more culpable I feel, the more daunting the thought of addressing any of it or confiding in my sisters: the tighter the knot.

  I imagine the likely scenario if I do say anything to them: the silencing of their conversations as I walk into a room, already something I’ve tasted in the last week or so: Pam’s delighted disgust; Flora’s wounded betrayal; Dot’s sense of abandonment; and more than any of this, my sisters knowing that I’ve wilfully hidden a part of myself from them all these weeks in Audrey’s room, a place no one but Sybil dare follow. It will cement my reputation as Strange Margot for ever, even though that version of me, the one who walks in Audrey’s shoes, is transitory, an experiment, alive only in the confines of Audrey’s room. She isn’t allowed to escape, or leave her footprints behind.

  I can smell Harry on Flora straight away.

  Carelessly late for lunch, she sits at the dining table with swollen red lips, a flush on her chest, grass whiskering the back of her dress. She radiates soft light, like a candle. She smiles in a way I’ve never seen her smile, soft, distant. Perry raises his glass: ‘My God, I was thinking it was never going to happen.’

  And I feel so unbelievably stupid, so foolishly deluded, that I have to bite down hard on my silver fork to stop my eyes filling with tears. After the boat trip, the kingfisher, the hand on my arm, I stupidly allowed myself to imagine it might be me whom Harry liked a little. But, of course, it’s not me. It’s never me.

  Pam is cock-a-hoop: it’s only a matter of time before Tom will be hers, now that the annoying distraction of Flora has been removed. But Tom is more sullen and reserved than ever in the days following that first kiss, and stares after Flora with such tortured yearning that it’s hard not to feel sorry for him. Pam, refusing to be beaten, flirts harder. Pam will make him love her, I know that. She will not be left behind with the hopeless cases of me and Dot: ‘I absolutely refuse to get to the end of the summer with my innocence intact.’

  It seems unlikely Flora will either. The romance between her and Harry develops rapidly, frenziedly, after that kiss, climbing like a fever. We are all sucked up in it: the long, private river swims, Dot made to be the lookout on the bank; the rendezvous in the shed that mist up the small window, Pam patrolling outside, then sniffing inside the shed afterwards, once Harry’s slunk away, diagnosing the atmosphere as ‘salty, sweet, a bit animal’; Flora, sneaking out after dark under cover of a clumsy alibi – ‘taking some air’; ‘just stretching my legs’ – not questioned by Sybil, if the excuse comes from me. Because of this, to
my chagrin, I become the logistical facilitator of those heady evening meetings, and am so successful at it that Flora starts to move about Applecote with a slow, languid siren’s grace, trailing her hands over the long grass, as if each tip sends shivers of pleasure down her arm. I watch her and ache. I want to feel what she is feeling. I think of us both, me locked away with Sybil, Flora with Harry, our lives dividing.

  One afternoon Harry invites Flora to Cornton Hall: Pam is actually struck mute for three and a half hours by the swinging left hook of her own jealousy. Flora finally returns, dishevelled, glowing, breathlessly describing the stuffed grizzly bear, the carved crest above the fireplace, the suits of armour hanging off the wall, the sweeping gardens, like a London park. ‘ “And at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” ’ mocks Pam.

  The worst thing of all is that I still dream of Harry, more intensely than ever, and wake in a twist of sheets, the dreams so vivid it is hard to imagine he is not dreaming them too. I know it’s wrong. I’ve tried to strip Harry of glamour, imagine him with greasy hair ambling down a grimy London street, past old bombsites and dirty pecking pigeons. But it is as if Harry can exist only in the Cotswold hills, among rivers and meadows, in this stifling summer, shirtless, sun-freckled, his substance all desire and dreams. In the city he’d dissolve into the drizzle.

  A dip in my mattress. A hand stroking the hair from my forehead, carrying the faint scent of Pond’s cold cream. Brain blurred by sleep, I’m sure that Ma is beside me, that I’m back under Chelsea’s porridge-grey skies, sharing a bedroom with Dot, my elder sisters chattering amiably next door, Betty scrubbing the doorstep, Tube trains rumbling, and happiness flows through me, like the morning’s first mouthful of piping hot tea. ‘Ma?’

  ‘I’m here,’ a voice whispers.

  My eyes spring open.

  Sybil’s face is inches from mine, emerging from a puff of cream blouse, a lace doily of a collar. ‘Good morning, my darling girl. It’s quite all right. You’re in the right bed, exactly the right bed.’