The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Read online

  When we get off the bus, Sybil stumbles only once, when a blonde girl leaps out in front of us, rolling a hoop with a stick. And if she notices the heated whispers of the locals, the gawping and staring, she says nothing, keeps her head high, braver than I thought.

  After tea and cake – ‘The best Victoria sponge I’ve ever tasted,’ Sybil marvels quietly, even though it wasn’t nearly as good as Moll’s – we visit the milliner, insisting she buy the most exuberant hat in the shop, the one with colourful silk flowers crammed about its rim, like a May carnival float. Sybil protests. But she’s transfixed by her own reflection, seeming to glimpse another woman in that joyous hat, someone she could be again.

  I think it’s a girl at first, hanging from the back of my bedroom door. And I don’t like the idea that Sybil’s visited my room and hooked it there as I slept. But I still can’t quite resist it. To my surprise, the top button does up this time. I realize Sybil has had it altered.

  Oh, it is beautiful. I’d forgotten how lovely, light, yet full-bodied it is, the way the cool petticoat rustles against my legs.

  ‘Margot?’ Flora stands in the doorway, a pillow mark down the side of her cheek, her violet eyes wide. I still, but the dress keeps moving, already with a life of its own. ‘Where on earth did you get that?’

  ‘Sybil gave it to me,’ I explain awkwardly.

  ‘Gosh. Well, lucky you.’ She narrows her eyes, assessing it, head cocked on one side. ‘Have I seen it before?’

  My heart stops. If Flora recognizes this dress as a copy of Audrey’s, I’ll be forced to explain everything. Flora frowns. I brace. The morning pivots.

  ‘Oh, it must have been in a fashion magazine or something. Anyway, Pam will cut it from your back with her nail scissors. It makes you look like a film star, Margot.’ She laughs. ‘I can’t quite believe it’s you.’

  I exhale a long breath that I didn’t know I was holding, and the bodice loosens.

  ‘Oh, before I forget, that fine paperweight, won fair and square.’ Flora puts it on the chest of drawers. ‘Even if it’s not really mine to give away.’

  ‘Or mine to give to Dot.’

  ‘It’s the principle that counts. I’ll buy you something nice in Paris, I promise. Here.’ Flora adjusts the dress’s Peter Pan collar with the same light hot fingers that have run up and down Harry’s freckled back, twisted into his sandy hair. It’s the first time I can remember Flora touching me in ages. It feels nice.

  ‘We’re going to have a party tomorrow,’ she says companionably. ‘At the stones. Just the six of us. A goodbye to the summer and all that.’ She raises an eyebrow. ‘A wild party, if Harry has his way.’

  ‘I imagine Sybil might have an opinion on that.’

  Flora grins, puffs the dress’s folds with her fingers. ‘Sybil will be out for the night.’

  I start swishing the dress around my legs again, looking down, admiring it. ‘She only just managed the milliner, Flora.’

  ‘I have a plan.’ Flora looks just like Ma lit by one of her mad ideas, and I suddenly miss Ma physically, like a twist inside. ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Flora says, with a glint of mischief. ‘It’s on in town, Harry told me. Sybil will love it. Perry won’t object to anything that encourages Harry. There’s a hotel round the corner, quite fancy, doormen and everything.’ She leans into my ear. ‘Perry might get his first screw in years.’

  The word ‘screw’ is a shock, so fast, so wanton, not like Flora at all, making me wonder how far Flora and Harry really have gone: a couple of days ago, Flora confided to Pam, who promptly told me, that they did ‘everything but it in the garden shed’. (‘Wild exaggeration, obviously,’ said Pam, dismissively. ‘How could they? There’s not even a bed in there.’)

  ‘You’re the only one who can persuade Sybil, Margot.’ Flora starts to flirt, fluttering her long lashes. I get a sudden unsisterly urge to pick them out one by one, like legs from a spider. ‘Please try, Margot. I need to go off to Paris with a bang.’

  I’m not sure if this is Flora’s code for doing the ‘everything but it’ again, or for a marriage proposal. Maybe both. I don’t want to know anyway. The thought of her and Harry smooching at the stones at sunset is torment enough.

  ‘What’s the matter? You’ve got your Strange Margot face on.’

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ I snap. Sharp fragments of the summer fly at me: the blank domino, the kingfisher, Sybil’s fingers in my hair, Harry’s hand on my arm. ‘I don’t want people to call me strange any more, okay?’

  She leaps back from me, hands raised. ‘Crikey, okay.’

  ‘And I’m not coming to the party.’

  Flora’s face falls instantly. ‘But – but you can wear your beautiful dress. You’ll be the belle of the ball. And it’s the last weekend of summer. This is it, Margot.’

  I sit on the edge of the bed, gathering the dress between my knees. The distracting smell of bacon is seeping under my bedroom door. ‘I can’t,’ I murmur, unable to explain why.

  ‘But I need you there.’

  ‘You don’t need anyone, Flora. You’re fine. Everything comes easy to you. It always has.’

  She looks hurt. ‘Is that what you really think?’

  A silence stretches. An ivy leaf brushes against the window. And I think of what Perry said about giving anything for one more summer’s day with his brother, and something in me softens.

  Flora lowers herself beside me, pressing her leg against mine. ‘I also need your advice about Harry.’

  ‘Harry?’ My voice comes out high, strangled. ‘You’d be better off asking Moppet. I don’t know anything about love.’

  ‘Well, you think deeply, deeper than me and Pam, which isn’t saying much, I know.’ She watches me curiously. I hope my face isn’t giving too much away. ‘Harry respects you.’

  I close my eyes for a moment, reeling inside. I don’t want to be respected – the village vicar is respected! I want to be grabbed and kissed and eaten alive, like Flora. But still I ask, ‘Advice about what?’ I can’t help myself.

  Flora nibbles her bottom lip. She shuffles on the bed. ‘I – I just wish Perry hadn’t told me that Harry was such a catch, that’s all,’ she stutters. ‘So that I could trust the authenticity of my own feelings.’

  ‘Authenticity?’ I repeat, amazed.

  ‘I know it’s a big word for your stupid sister to use.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ I say, even though we both know it sort of was.

  ‘I don’t want to live the life that Ma wishes she’d lived, that’s all, Margot,’ she says, with surprising intensity. ‘The rich husband, the great house …’

  I’ve never heard Flora talk like this before. ‘Really? What do you want, then?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m thinking. Maybe it’s the heat.’ Flora pushes sleep-crimped curls off her face. ‘I can’t remember what cold feels like any more, can you? Or rain. It feels like it’s been summer for ever. My brain’s stopped working. And it’s been invaded with these – these damn questions.’

  ‘God forbid.’

  She laughs. We’re quiet for a moment, considering each other, the distance between us. ‘Tom asked me what I wanted to do with my life.’

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘He’s not what he seems, you know, Margot, so standoffish, monosyllabic. He’s really not, not once he gets going. You just have to sort of crack him first, like an egg. Then he’s rather wonderful.’

  It strikes me that Flora never talks about Harry like this. I’ve never seen her smile so open, so unprotected.

  ‘No one’s ever asked me that question before anyway,’ she says, blanching a little, as if the thought has just struck her. ‘Nor has it ever occurred to me to ask myself.’

  ‘So what was your answer?’ The wave of affection I suddenly feel for Flora is confusing since it makes my aching for Harry more disloyal. ‘To Tom’s question.’

  She covers her mouth with her hands, laughs. ‘America! It just popped out
. I said, “Go to America,” and I couldn’t think why exactly. Just somewhere I could be exactly whom I liked, even though I’ve got no idea who that might be.’ She shakes her head, bewildered by this unlikely, inexplicable shuffle of self. ‘Completely daft, obviously.’

  I try to picture Flora’s hand lifting from a ship’s shiny rail, waving goodbye to the wedding ring, the lacy pram hood, Cornton Hall. But I can’t. Flora’s fate has always seemed so set, a story working towards one inevitable ending.

  ‘Promise me you’ll come.’

  ‘To America?’

  ‘The party at the stones, stupid.’ She grabs my hands, tugs me from the bed and runs her eyes admiringly over my dress once more. ‘Just look at you. I tell you what, Margot, if you come to the party in that frock, anything might happen.’

  11

  Jessie wakes to the ghostly beauty of February’s first hard frost. She gets up carefully, not wanting to wake Romy, who is asleep, sprawled horizontally across her bed. Jessie knows it’s probably bad practice – Romy should sleep in her own bed – but she’s loved having the soft, snuffling lump of her daughter to hug these last few months when Will’s not here. Romy sleeps in when she’s in their bed too. Also, Jessie knows she’s safe.

  Jessie still can’t forget the creepy sight of Romy on the stones, wearing those glasses, the niggling suspicion that Bella was somehow trying to turn her little sister into the Audrey girl. Or the nights she’s found Bella sleepwalking in Romy’s room. She avoids leaving the girls alone together now, and has got into a habit of taking Romy into the log shed while she chops wood, the bathroom as she washes, rather than leave her under Bella’s care. Jessie knows she’s overreacting, probably. She also knows that Bella senses the distrust. And she feels really bad about it. But it’s there.

  Jessie pulls back the curtains, eyes widening at the sudden pitch into the frozen trough of winter: the garden is furred with ice, sculptural and magnificent, a Narnia landscape. She wishes Will was there to see it, and that the weather didn’t just throw its dreariest drizzle at him every weekend when he returns home. The calendar she carries in her heart flips. Only three more sleeps until he’s back. She texts him a photo: ‘Jack Frost!’ She’s been doing this a lot. Maybe too much, since Will doesn’t always respond. Bella prefers Skype, privately in her room. But as she points out, ‘It’s not the same.’ And it isn’t.

  They all miss Will terribly when he’s away. But Jessie has started to miss him when he’s at home too, a bit of the man she loves somehow left behind in his London office or, worse, at his attractive host’s warm, comfortable London house. Or maybe it’s her. During the long weekday nights Will’s absent, it’s too easy to dwell on the intimate first marriage described in those letters, and feel irrationally betrayed by it. When Will returns to Applecote on a Friday, she feels something inside her pulling away from him. The sensation takes a day or two to fade. But by then it’s time for Will to return to London, so the cycle begins again.

  This is not how it was meant to be. Only the carefully curated images Jessie posts on Facebook resemble the life she’d thought they’d be leading by now: the house swagged with ivy, flickering with Christmas candlelight; a family walk in a winter wood; a bubbling apple crumble, steaming shamelessly in a pastel-blue earthenware dish. Jessie spends a lot of time tweaking her own timeline, admiring this fictitious version of their life, envying it.

  The photogenic ice melts later that day, the crisp beauty turning into a freezing wet mush that clings to Jessie’s heavy brown boots in fleshy clots, works its way beneath her fingernails and creeps into the house. There is no escape from the mud that week, or the heavy, tallow-grey sky that presses down on the valley. The girls’ hands are scarlet and itchy with cold, their lips blue. All their outdoor clobber is wrong, designed for temperate city parks, not winter countryside. Jessie orders heavy unflattering coats, ear-muffling hats, insulated gloves from a catalogue based in the Highlands. She hopes for snow. Snow will make everyone happy, she thinks. But the white sky falls as charmless sleet, then rain. The earth is sodden. It keeps raining. There is nowhere for the water to go.

  Wednesday, the day Will’s to return early and work from home, having promised the girls he’d make up for his absence: flooding. A mercury mirror of dirty grey water, spreading west, gushing over piles of sandbags, drowning homes and fields, turning woods into underwater forests, pushing Victorian femurs and finger bones to the surface of one village graveyard not far away. Applecote’s land becomes glutinous – there is a pool of viscous boggy mud, like a dirty old mouth, close to the well, that sucks the welly boot off Romy’s foot, making her squeal. Bella calls Applecote ‘The Ark’, and it’s funny, really quite funny, for a second or two, but then Jessie hears the shrill edge to her own laughter, and the sound dies quickly. Will’s name is flashing urgently on her mobile. Another crisis at work. A client threatening to sue. An important meeting tomorrow now too, something promising. He’s not going to make it back tonight. When Jessie tells the girls, Romy bursts into tears. Bella’s face simply empties. She runs upstairs and slams her bedroom door in the way only Bella can slam it, like an act of war.

  Even the weather has tantrums that night, the wind howling, muscular gusts punching at the house, like fists. Jessie, hit by a sense of foreboding, locks the doors, and a tiny voice in her head wonders if perhaps she’s not locking out the threat but locking something in. Firelight shadows flicker against the old drawing room’s wavering walls – like someone making puppets with their fingers – and she can hear things outside, sounds she can’t quite identify, sticks breaking maybe, the gravel crunch of a footstep. Heart pounding – it can’t be Will so who is it? – Jessie turns off the hall lights and scans the drive through the window, half expecting to see Margot fading into the shadows again, walking away from the house with her dogs. But there is no one.

  Margot. Jessie hasn’t been back to the café since the day Margot had turned up with Bella. She misses it, more than she expected to, just having a friendly bohemian local place to go. But she can’t forget the two black Labradors in the back of Margot’s car, Margot’s leopard-print headscarf and, more puzzlingly, Margot’s detailed knowledge of the house: Jessie investigated the drainpipe the next day and discovered Margot was absolutely right – it was blocked, and there was also a bloom of damp on the top-floor bathroom wall that she hadn’t noticed before. But how did Margot know about it? She could hardly see it from outside.

  Jessie’s mind keeps wandering back to the Squirrels girls’ theory about Audrey returning, stalking her old home. And although it’s the most absurd thing she’s ever heard – women don’t vanish as children and reappear with a secret set of keys to the family home fifty odd years later – it’s got under her skin: the ridiculous idea that Margot is actually Audrey.

  A dog might help, Lou suggests distractedly on the phone, hopping around her London apartment, looking for the lost platform heel that goes with her navy sequin dress. ‘Everyone in the country has dogs, don’t they? It’s practically the law that you must be covered in mutt hair and smell like a kennel. It’ll keep you company, Jessie, stop you getting spooked. And it’ll look good on Facebook,’ Lou adds wryly, Lou who can see through everything. Jessie laughs, relieved to be understood. Lou finds her shoe with a delighted squeal, and her taxi is outside. ‘Gotta go!’

  Jessie sighs, wishing she could follow Lou into that taxi, a buzzy gallery opening, her old life, just for one evening. Instead, she clears a space on the messy kitchen table, opens her laptop and surfs videos of puppies so cute that Bella must surely forgive her for existing if she bought one. She runs upstairs and knocks on Bella’s door gently, asking if she’s okay, if she wants to talk and, hey, what does she think about a puppy? But Bella rebuffs her, ‘I want to be alone,’ and suddenly the idea that a puppy might heal the rift in the family, like so many other ideas, seems wildly optimistic. She walks back down into the dark, empty house, thinking of Lou in the brilliant city night, laughing, spar
kling.

  The next morning, the February light browns and thickens as Jessie reaches the top floor, making her grey flannel pyjamas look ink-black. It’s colder too. She shivers, pausing on the creaking top step, tightening the wriggle of Romy’s hand in hers, and wonders if the walls of this upper landing have actually narrowed further, or if it’s her imagination. She can’t be sure. Applecote is not like other houses, she’s learning. Not a stable, fixed thing, it seems to swell and shrink in response to the weather outside, and the emotional climate of its inhabitants.

  ‘Right, washing,’ Jessie says aloud to herself. (Narrating her own movements through the house is a worrying new habit, one of her mother’s that, as a teen, she’d rolled her eyes at.) She hurriedly piles Bella’s clean washing on to the sleigh bed – she doesn’t dare open any drawers now – and glances warily at the Mandy Boxes, still wedged between the bed and the wall, while Romy makes a beeline for the dressing-table on soft, silent feet.

  ‘Romy,’ Jessie warns, shaking her head, ‘leave Bella’s things.’

  ‘Romy likes them.’

  ‘You want to see Tractor Joe?’ Distraction is proving more effective than discipline with Romy right now. ‘Here.’

  Standing by the larger window, Romy on her hip, they watch the vehicle – battered, bandaged with gaffer tape – grind into view, Joe Peat resting his forearms on the wheel. Romy waves, the bracelet Jessie made from coloured paperclips swinging on her tiny wrist.

  Joe arrived last Monday, a few weeks late, swaying his huge bulk up the front path, like a human hay bale, a tweed cap pulled low on his head. Jessie’s absurdly grateful for him. He has already removed the knotted heart of brambles and rubble from the bottom of the garden, achieving in hours what would have taken her months. He’s built raised vegetable beds in the kitchen garden. Later today, he’s going to have a look at the pool, so they can make a final call on it, the old well, other bits and pieces.

  When he arrived, Jessie asked him if he knew the house at all, searching for that telltale flicker of recognition, the sign he might not last the morning. But he simply nodded, ‘Aye, I know the house,’ and said his dad, Sid, and his uncle, Brian, used to do some work at Cornton Hall, just down the road, back in the day. Fine old house down the river, did she know it? She did. Encouraged by Jessie’s interest, happy to chat, Joe dug into the grubby back pocket of his trousers, pulled out a wallet and, from it, a grainy black-and-white photo of a shy-looking man in country clothes and a smart hat. ‘Dapper fella, my old man.’