The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Page 19

  Very dashing, Jessie agreed, peering at the picture, the ornate sweep of the wrought-iron gates of Cornton Hall in the background uncannily the same.

  That was his pa all over, Joe continued proudly, always wanting to better himself. Never got the chance. Heart attack. Poor bugger. Jessie had looked up. ‘Aye,’ Joe said, ‘right at the end of that cursed summer,’ as if answering a question she hadn’t voiced.

  At this unexpected, lurching nod to Audrey, the past breaching the present once again, Jessie’s heart sank. But Joe lasted the morning. And the week. Thank goodness, Jessie thinks, as the tractor vanishes into a huddle of trees, taking her thoughts with it, and Romy opens her hands and cheerfully declares, ‘Gone.’

  Jessie is stabbing rosemary into a leg of lamb later that afternoon when Joe finds it. As part of his investigation into the tree root beneath the orangery floor, he dismantles the boxed-in window-seat that edges the room – and there it is, a brown paper parcel wrapped in garden twine. ‘Old houses always throw up a few surprises,’ he says, wiping a thread of sweat off his upper lip with his arm. Jessie thinks she’s probably had enough surprises at Applecote, thanks all the same.

  The front door slams and Bella is beside them, eyes shining, fingers restless at the sides of her school blazer, desperate to snatch the parcel out of Joe’s hand. ‘Oh, my God. What’s that?’

  ‘Love letters probably,’ jokes Joe.

  Jessie stiffens. She’s had quite enough of other people’s love letters too.

  As Romy stacks the alphabet bricks on the kitchen floor, Bella starts to peel off the brown paper on the table. Joe is right: letters, water-stained, disintegrating, handwritten. Jessie watches, sucks in her breath – she knows exactly what Bella will be hoping for – and is grateful to see the water-blurred ink is almost unreadable.

  ‘Oh, no, wait!’ Bella points to a smudged postmark. ‘Nineteen fifty-nine,’ she says, looking up at Jessie excitedly. ‘That’s the year of those old newspapers, isn’t it?’

  ‘The heatwave, you’re right. How funny.’

  ‘I was totally meant to find this,’ Bella mutters, sitting down, considering the letters and then slowly, carefully, sliding letter fragments together using the tip of her index finger. ‘I reckon I can work them out.’

  Jessie gets a glimpse of a different Bella then, the one the art teacher at Squirrels enthused about in her last report, creative, inquisitive, absorbed.

  ‘Some are sent from … from Morocco. Others … Oh, look, Jessie, the later ones, from London.’

  ‘A traveller, then,’ says Jessie, returning to the lamb. She drizzles olive oil over the skin, tucks garlic cloves around its base.

  ‘Oh. Oh, no. They’re not addressed to Audrey,’ Bella says flatly, disappointed. ‘Someone called Pam. And … It’s hard to make out the other names. Dot? Is Dot actually a name?’

  ‘Short for Dorothy.’ Jessie thinks how the names already sound historic, surely due a revival. No one calls girls Pam or Dot any more. Maybe, if they had another, a sibling for Romy – She stops herself sharply. They’re way off that right now, way off any kind of stability.

  She sighs, glances at the clock. Will should have made the train. She imagines him settling in, the warmth of his body under his suit, the way he holds his book away from him, in denial at needing reading glasses.

  ‘Listen to this. “Please, please write back soon, your loving …” ’ Bella reads out, squints, trying to work out the words. ‘Ma. It’s Ma, isn’t it?’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ shouts Romy, with unfortunate timing. She pokes the tower of bricks and they crash to the floor.

  ‘It is,’ says Jessie, quietly, standing behind Bella, wiping her hands on her apron. And, for a moment, she can almost hear a mother’s voice, carried across time by the wind.

  ‘A mother,’ Bella whispers, her voice trailing such longing that Jessie is overcome by the urge to gather her in her arms. But as she lifts her hand, it stills in space, unable to reach further, and she’s struck by the deluded futility of such an idea. Bella can’t bear Jessie touching her. She wants her mother, not a poor replacement. So Jessie turns back to the lamb. The ferric smell of fresh wet meat.

  Will stumbles in as their supper finishes, drained, pale-faced, the freezing night clinging to him, like a heavy damp coat. Romy wraps her body around his legs, brushes her little fingers lovingly over his evening stubble. But Bella hangs back, punishing him for his unreliability. And when Will goes to hug her, apologize for being a day late, she coolly steps away. Jessie sees hurt ripple over Will’s face and squeezes his hand, trying to tell him it’ll be all right. He turns to kiss her and, for the first time ever, their mouths miss, and his kiss lands awkwardly on her cheek. She puts her hand to the spot where it lands and laughs. He looks at her, bemused, wondering why she’s laughing.

  In that moment, Jessie feels acutely all the hours they’ve been apart these last five months, the way separation creates experiences that are no longer shared, parts of each other’s lives in which they no longer live. And she wonders how they will ever get themselves back.

  That evening Will spends a long time counselling Bella in her bedroom. Afterwards, he eats some leftovers of the lamb, lost in thought at the table, looking straight through the spray of evergreen branches and berries in the vase, the freshly baked bread in its basket, the claret that Jessie drove for an hour to buy. The temperature plummets. They can see their breath in the hall. That night, under a pile of blankets, Romy wriggling beside them, Will tosses and turns, the adrenalin of city life still crackling through his veins. When Jessie rests her head against his chest, even as he sleeps, she can hear his anxiety, his rising blood pressure, like the gush of a swollen river. He talks in his sleep, and she’s sure he’s muttering Mandy’s name, hungering for the past, the comforts of the marriage that was stolen from him, which the love letters show were irreplaceable. She presses her body against him. He rolls away in his sleep.

  Lying awake, she listens to the hiss of the wind in the trees, and picks over her marriage, her mind opening doors to rooms she knows she shouldn’t enter. Does Will still fancy her? Why hasn’t he found a buyer for the company yet? Is it just an excuse to stay in London? At what point do they declare this divided life unworkable? Then Friday morning breaks, Romy wanders back to her bedroom, and Will’s longed-for body finally turns towards her. He rests his chin on his hand, hollowed-out eyes serious and searching, and asks, ‘Are you happy here, sweetheart?’

  ‘Happy?’ Jessie yawns, surprised. Her happiness has never seemed particularly important, resting, as it does, so much on other people’s right now, Bella’s in particular. ‘I’m happy to have you home.’

  ‘It isn’t a weakness to admit you’re not, you know, that you – we, I mean – that we’ve made a mistake.’ He takes her hand, opens it and circles the inside of her palm lightly with his index finger, like she does to Romy, round and round the garden. ‘Maybe Applecote is too remote, too much house and land …’

  She realizes where this is going. What she should say, to make it easy for him. After all, they could sell up and move back, even if not to central London – prices have rocketed, leaving them behind – then closer to it, some more affordable suburb. ‘I’ve never experienced sadness without wanting to escape it before. I don’t need to be happy here, Will.’

  Will frowns, puzzled. He doesn’t understand. He would have once. He would have known exactly what she meant. ‘Are you? Happy, I mean,’ she asks, and immediately realizes it’s a mistake.

  His gaze slips away, leaving her feeling instantly, intensely bereft. ‘I was a Londoner a long time, longer than maybe I realized.’

  He means he was married to Mandy for a long time, of course. Stupid of her to expect him to lie, stupid of her to ask. So she says, too sharply, hiding her hurt, ‘I lived in London too, Will. I didn’t lose a wife. But I did lose other things, things that mattered, my career, my friends … my freedom. It’s not the same, I know. And I don’t want it back but it
meant something to me, and I gave it all up too.’

  Will leans back heavily on the pillow, stares up at the ceiling, not at her. They listen to Bella clattering down the stairs in her hard-soled school shoes. ‘I never wanted you to give up anything, Jessie,’ he says, in a way that fills her eyes with tears. ‘That was the last thing I wanted.’

  ‘It came out wrong, I’m sorry,’ Jessie says, although she knows it’s too late, that the words are circling. And there’s a terrible silence that suddenly feels like an ending.

  Jessie blows into the lattice of kindling in the grate until flames leap and dance. She’s got satisfyingly good at making fires. But in the mirror above the fireplace she sees herself more critically: the streak of soot across her cheekbone, the wild reddish hair frizzed by the woodsmoke. The slinky black dress she’s put on for Friday evening jars with the rawness of her face, the animal brightness of her eyes. Hearing Will’s tread on the stairs, returning from Bella’s room, she frantically smooths her hair with the flat of her palm.

  Will slumps to the sheepskin rug on the floor beside her, leans back against an armchair, his left foot tapping anxiously. She catches his eye and they smile at each other, the hesitant unsure smile of lovers who have been apart too long and fear the other might have met someone else in their absence. In that moment Jessie can see a defensive layer forming around Will. He had it when they first met too. She’d never expected it to come back.

  They talk. But gaps open in the flow of conversation, like tiny splits in a seam. Jessie can’t remember that ever happening before. There’s always been too much to say. So she tries to repair it with chatter about Romy’s hide-and-seek antics – their little scamp so fast, so inventive – the latest on the flooding, the rising water table, the intriguing letters Joe Peat discovered hidden in the orangery window-seat.

  Then Jessie begins to feel something, a tension, like the moments before an electrical storm. ‘What’s wrong, Jessie?’ he asks abruptly.

  ‘Wrong?’ There are so many things wrong, so many hidden feelings, stuffed into her pocket, like unexploded fireworks. ‘What do you mean?’

  His eyes roam her face, trying to work her out. ‘I don’t know. You don’t seem yourself. You haven’t for months. I’m worried about you.’

  ‘I’m worried about you!’ she says, with a short, surprised laugh, throwing it back at him.

  ‘That’s not really an answer.’

  ‘And how would you know how I am anyway? You’ve hardly been here.’

  He frowns more deeply. He suddenly looks very, very tired, a man with the world on his shoulders.

  ‘Bella’s said something, hasn’t she?’

  Will’s mouth opens, shuts, caught between loyalties. ‘She says you won’t let her be alone with Romy.’ He waits for Jessie to reassure him and deny it.

  But Jessie’s cheeks heat. She won’t lie to him any more. ‘I … I’m really sorry she feels that.’

  ‘It’s true?’ His eyes harden. She feels he’s looking at her dispassionately for the first time.

  Jessie wraps her arms tightly around her knees. ‘Since that day. Romy, on the stones. I know it sounds silly, but I can’t forget it, Will,’ she explains quietly.

  It’s the disappointment in his face that breaks her heart, the cool way he says, ‘You need to have a bit more faith in my daughter.’

  ‘Faith? All I’ve ever had is faith!’ She recoils at the injustice of it. They are spiralling back in time then, two people knocked off their feet by a gale, and Jessie is standing nervously in the hall of Will’s London house, Will introducing his stern, unsmiling daughter, Jessie thinking, You are part of the man I love. I will love you too. Then months later at the hospital, Jessie too sore to move, ecstatic, offering Bella the most precious thing in her entire world, the baby’s skin still womb-pink, waxy, saying, ‘Do you want to hold your new little sister? You can hold her, Bella. She’s yours too.’

  Bella shaking her head, mumbling, ‘She’s not.’

  Jessie storms into the garden, ignoring Will calling her back, the family idyll she simply can’t create shattering behind her, Mandy triumphant. The cold is like a slap around the face. Coatless, Jessie keeps walking. Unidentifiable things splatter under her boots. She’s unsure where she’s going until she gets there, the padlocked gate of the pool, the slab of oily black beyond, the absence of light. As she did that first morning at Applecote, she feels its pull, the refuge of that enclosed still place, where the past feels parcelled tight. Climbing over the gate, her boots land on the slippery paving with a smack. Above, a frantic rush of wings in the dark. Then, nothing.

  She bloody well gives up. She’s done. She lets the cold coil around her. Tears slip down her cheeks. She listens to the dispassionate silence, the movements of tiny creatures, the scrape of crossed branches in the wind, the adjustment of beechnuts under the slight weight of a hidden paw. And she suddenly knows she’s not alone on this freezing winter night, that there is something else out there by the pool in the darkness, just as there was that August day. She waits for it. She wills it forward. And it comes, not at all other, soft, female, rushing through her like a band of warmth: the spirit of all the women who have ever lived at Applecote, daughters, mothers, sisters, voices long dead, strong Applecote women who never gave up. A moment later, it is gone, cold again. But Jessie is no longer crying. And the first snowflakes start to fall, sprinkled over her upturned face, like frozen white freckles.

  ‘Will,’ Jessie whispers, in wonder, the next morning. She stands beside the bedroom window, her breath misting the frost-laced glass.

  ‘Hey?’ Will mumbles sleepily, turning his head on the pillow. Jessie sees the memory of the argument the night before move behind Will’s half-opened eyes, like a cloud. They went to bed barely talking.

  ‘It snowed properly in the night. You’ve got to see.’

  ‘Snow?’ Romy’s eyes spring open and she crawls out of the nook of Will’s armpit. Jessie doesn’t remember Romy coming into their bed in the night. ‘Snow!’

  Will stands behind Jessie. He wraps his arms around her: the physical relief of his touch is overpowering. She remembers how much she loves Will like this, dozy, unshowered, the edges between their bodies still blurry from tangling in sleep. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers. He holds her a little tighter. She presses her body into his. They stand there for a while, bruised and tender, Romy burrowing between them. ‘I want to take you out to lunch,’ he breathes into Jessie’s ear.

  ‘Lunch?’ It’s the last thing she imagined he’d say. ‘I’d love that,’ she whispers back, feeling something inside lighten.

  ‘Just you and me. Can you even remember the last time we went out alone together? I can’t.’

  ‘Like on a date?’ She laughs, the idea faintly ridiculous.

  ‘Why is that funny?’ he asks, looking slightly hurt.

  ‘It’s not funny. It’s lovely, Will.’ She plays with Romy’s hair where it’s matted into flat lamb’s tail curls at the back. She wonders what she will wear. ‘I’ll find a babysitter.’

  Will doesn’t miss a beat. ‘We have one in the house, don’t we?’

  Jessie’s hand freezes on Romy’s head. She feels her marriage teeter once more. Last night’s tensions resurface. She knows Will is simply asking for her trust. Implicit in his question, however gently posed, is that without trust, this cannot work.

  ‘Jessie?’ Will asks softly, when she doesn’t answer.

  Jessie forces herself not to check her mobile until they’ve ordered pudding. It’s not like Bella would call her anyway, she tells herself. She wiggles inside the silky cocoon of the fitted parrot-print dress she finally settled upon, a dress she hasn’t worn since leaving London, and now feels both insubstantial and restrictive, as if it might belong to someone else. Outside the pub’s dimpled windows, snow whirls down in flurries. Jessie wonders where the girls are, what they’re doing, if Bella is being kind. Then her mind skitters to the narrow, darkening lanes that lie between this tha
tched country pub and the house containing their girls. She imagines the car getting stuck, the wheels spinning on black ice. Their mobiles running out of power.

  ‘They’ll be snuggled in front of the telly,’ Will says, reading the skit of her thoughts. He reaches one hand down to the roaring log fire, spreads his fingers to the scorch of seasoned wood and burning pine cones. ‘And Joe’s working this afternoon, isn’t he? They’re not completely alone down there.’

  ‘I guess.’ Joe’s presence doesn’t do much to reassure.

  ‘And I’ve just texted Bella. So you can enjoy your chocolate tart. Please will you enjoy your chocolate tart?’

  ‘Yes.’ She laughs.

  They share it, like they used to, spoons clinking. Jessie smiles and nods as Will tells her about his long week in London, a lorry drivers’ strike in France. But it’s surprisingly hard to disentangle her thoughts from Applecote, a little bit of her still inside its stone walls: she wonders if Bella’s answered Will’s text yet, if it wouldn’t look too stressy to ask.

  ‘Jessie, did you hear what I said?’ Will’s eyes are alive with firelight. His hands spread on the table, leaning back in his chair, he’s grinning at her boyishly, anticipating a reaction.

  She winces. ‘Sorry. Tell me, tell me again.’

  ‘We’ve had an offer for the whole company, not just a stake. They want the whole ugly beast. Can you believe it?’

  Jessie’s mouth opens. ‘Finally! Why didn’t you say earlier?’