The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Page 20

He sips his pint, shrugs maddeningly. ‘It’s no big deal.’

  ‘Hello! It’s amazing.’

  ‘It’s a very, very cheeky offer.’ He frowns into his pint glass. ‘We can’t accept it. Jackson won’t accept it.’

  ‘Jackson? Jackson’s gone surfing, Will.’ She leans forward, her heart starting to patter. She can see a new life, the life they were meant to live here. It’s within their grasp again. ‘We don’t need to be rich, we really don’t. We just want you back. The girls and me, we want to see you. That’s all that matters.’

  He takes her left hand, worrying her wedding band with his thumb. ‘It’s not that simple. We get one shot at it. And we’ve given it everything, Jessie, for so long. For us to sell it so short now …’

  ‘Right,’ Jessie says flatly, unable to hide her disappointment.

  ‘One day, I promise,’ Will says softly. ‘Don’t give up on me.’

  ‘As if,’ she says. But the atmosphere has sobered. They are silent for a moment. ‘Maybe we should phone Bella, just to check she’s all right.’

  He nods, probably to appease her, and presses the phone to his ear. Jessie can hear it ring, then go to voicemail.

  She leans forward, the dress digging into her waist. The fire is too hot. The journey home too long. ‘Will …’

  ‘Bella probably can’t hear her phone, that’s all,’ Will says quickly. He drains his coffee, stands up. ‘Shall we shoot?’

  Jessie already has her fake fur jacket around her shoulders.

  ‘Girls, we’re home!’ Will calls cheerfully, as they open the door, stepping into the hall. No one answers. But they can hear the television. On the sofa, nestled next to a half-eaten packet of crisps, Bella’s phone, Will’s number flashing up as a missed call. But they phoned over half an hour ago – the car made such slow progress through the snow – and Bella checks her phone every thirty seconds.

  ‘Something’s wrong, Will,’ says Jessie.

  ‘They’re probably up in her bedroom, messing about with music and clothes.’ He squeezes her hand. ‘I’ll go upstairs, you check down here.’

  Jessie spots the snowy footprints through the kitchen window: Bella’s long and narrow, Romy’s chunky and small. A small snowman with a crooked twig mouth. But the relief is short-lived. Outside in the freezing air, there is no sign of them, the footprints circling, looping back on themselves, then seeming to multiply, as if there were four girls, not two.

  ‘Jessie! Hey, Jessie.’

  She stops, turns around to see the incongruous figure of Joe lumbering towards her. He is red-faced, agitated. ‘Can I talk to yer?’

  ‘Have you seen the girls?’ Jessie demands breathlessly.

  He nods. ‘About an hour ago, making a snowman. Happy as anything.’ His accent has thickened. She can barely understand it. ‘Can I have a quick word about –’

  ‘So you haven’t seen the girls since then?’ Fear curdles in her stomach. Her breath is loud in her ears.

  He shakes his head. ‘Sorry. They all right? Wait, Jessie …’

  Leaving Joe calling behind her, she starts running, making strange stifled sounds in her throat, through the skeletal trees, tracking the little footprints, shouting out the girls’ names, futilely telling herself not to panic, she’ll find them soon, all she has to do is follow their footprints. But then the girls’ footprints separate: Bella’s, further apart now, as if running too, soon become untraceable on the snowless ground beneath the trees. Romy’s stop at the dark block of yew hedge that separates the garden from the pool, opposite a small gap in the hedge’s lowest branches, where they are joined by the starfish prints of two tiny hands.

  12

  Every moment, something changes. The evening is elastic, pulled into new shapes by a stolen look, a flirtatious laugh, a leg emerging from a scalloped dress hem. There is a faint smell of bodies, the way bodies smell when they’re close to one another in the late summer heat, sweat-damp cotton.

  Harry is leaning back against one of the stones, his guitar like a girl in his lap. He is singing a love song in French for Flora, laughing and cursing as he misses a note, forgets a word. And I can’t help but adore him for his imperfect French, his musical clumsiness, and feel jealous of Flora, who is basking in the attention, blonde and barefoot in a white party dress that belongs in Belgravia, one simple rose pinned in her hair, prettier than I’ve ever seen her.

  Occasionally Harry glances at me too, his eyes alive and intense: I can’t help but hope he doesn’t just see Flora’s plainer younger sister, but somebody different, desirable, even. The funny thing is I am different tonight, wearing this blue dress, not only because it covers the backs of my knees so well: Audrey is sewn into it, and some of her energy and irrepressible confidence has become mine. Or maybe it’s just the wine the boys have brought, and only Dot refuses to touch, sticking to the lemonade. I’m not used to it. But the taste is pleasant enough after a few sips. Unlike the boys’ Scotch whisky, which I have to discreetly spit into the grass.

  The sun sinks lower. Above it, the inky patch where sky becomes space. Pam squeezes next to Tom as he lights a small fire, belly down in the grass, cigarette in his mouth, his bare feet beating time to Harry’s guitar. The wood he’s collected is so dry it flares up instantly. The flames dance light over everyone’s faces, and the sun becomes a pool of blood at the bottom of the valley, making us all more lovely, and more aware of our loveliness, drunk on it as well as the wine. At one point I find myself touching the buttons on my dress thoughtlessly, as if I want to get beneath them, before I realize what I’m doing.

  I don’t know how it happens, who suggests the swim first. I think it’s Harry, but it may have been Tom, or it may have been suggested by no one, just something we do instinctively. Suddenly they’re stripping off: Harry, yanking his shirt above his head; Tom’s tummy a smooth cave as he breathes in. And we all scream and laugh, clap our hands over our mouths, pretending to be shocked. Dot whispers fiercely into my ear, ‘Aunt Sybil will kill us.’

  ‘Aunt Sybil isn’t here.’ I laugh, still amazed that I was able to persuade my aunt to go away for the night – it took much cajoling, and a shameless parading of this dress, my hair plaited – and that only Moll is back at the house. It’s hard not to feel giddily uncaged.

  Pam is the first to strip – she’ll do anything to drag Tom’s eyes away from the spectacle of Flora – and eagerly rips off her dress to reveal an oyster satin slip. The boys clap and howl. ‘Take ’em off, girls,’ they shout. Flora and I look at each other and laugh, tempted, while Dot just sits there and shakes her head, like a shocked little old lady.

  Flora shoots me a mischievous secret smile that says: I will soon depart for Paris, the life Ma wants for me. The summer is almost over. Let us live for this one night. Her slip is plain white cotton, unlike Pam’s, yet this simplicity only seems to make her more exquisite. Harry grabs at her, pulls her against his belly with a deep growl of pleasure. She throws back her arms against the sky and whoops, and it echoes back against the hills, that whoop, a spinning loose from Ma, Pa, Audrey, all of the people who have died or left, all the forces that pull us down, tether us to the ground. And my fingers find a scarlet button on my dress.

  Dot tugs on my arm. ‘You don’t need to join in, Margot.’

  ‘I do, Dotty. I actually do. Sorry.’ I suddenly don’t care about my knees or that I won’t look as pretty as Flora, as statuesque as Pam. The stretch of smocking, the skirt over my head, the froth of petticoat, then the realization that I’m not even wearing a slip, just pants and a bra, and it being too late to hide and Harry is shouting, ‘Bravo, Margot! Come on, come on.’ And the grass-crushing rushing sound of a crowd of feet running through the dry meadow towards the bank, geese scattering, white as ghosts, the grass stubby against my soles, the smell of river water the second before the first shock of coldness, the violent joy of it all, the sharp cry.

  The water is depthless. Legs brush mine. Hands flit across my waist then vanish, cool, smooth and f
ast as the sides of fish, and I have no idea if the contact is from my sisters or the boys, and it doesn’t seem to matter, for we are a writhing mass of happiness, swimming up and down on the moon-lit water. I don’t know how long we swim for, only that when I get out on the skid of the bank everyone seems to have dissolved into the darkness, the vertical reedy shadows. Someone places a jacket over my shoulders. I turn and he is there, as I somehow knew he would be, as if our exchange of glances earlier was pulling us together, the way hands inch along a rope during a playful tug of war.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ Harry says. I’m not shivering, not even that cold, but I lean against him anyway. ‘Sit by the fire?’

  I think of Flora, hesitate, but thinking doesn’t work.

  The fire pulses, a beating red heart. I hand him back his jacket, reach into the grass for my discarded dress and pull it on, safe in its folds again. ‘Where is everyone?’ I ask, meaning Flora.

  ‘Not sure it matters.’ He lights a cigarette from a glowing ember. His shorts are stuck to his body, outlining everything.

  I try not to stare. But I catch him smiling. After that, I daren’t move my gaze from the fire. I love the sound of it, its hiss and spit, the way it makes me feel connected as I never have before to the stones, the valley, the earth itself, connected to something bigger and greater and older than any of us.

  ‘You’re the intellectual in the litter, Flora tells me. What do you think these stones mean?’ Harry asks after a while, his words slurring slightly. His elbow brushes against my arm as he lifts his cigarette to his lips. He suddenly feels both familiar and unknowable, like an old friend with secrets.

  ‘Moll, my aunt’s housekeeper, she says the Applecote stones honour ancient dead. That they have special powers. But she’s a bit superstitious, likes to talk about omens and things,’ I say quickly, in case he mistakes Moll’s views for mine.

  ‘Ah.’ His laugh is warm, gravelly. ‘Yes, she would. The people round here might look like church-going people but don’t be fooled, Margot.’ He leans right up to me, so close I feel I might get drunk on his breath. ‘Pagan souls. It’s like the last few thousand years never happened. We’re only missing the sabre-toothed tiger and the mammoth.’

  I reach out my hands towards the fire. ‘What do you think the stones mean, then?’

  ‘Me? I only know that from now on whenever I see them I’ll think of you, Margot, sitting there in the firelight. In that dress.’

  My cheeks burn with pleasure. I can’t stop smiling.

  ‘It’s just like hers, isn’t it?’ he says abruptly, an edge to his voice.

  My smile vanishes.

  ‘Your cousin Audrey’s. The blue dress. The colour of her eyes.’

  I’m saved from having to answer by Pam charging out of the darkness, teeth chattering, searching for her clothes, yelping, ‘Cold, cold, cold.’

  Flora and Tom follow a moment later, breathless, laughing, then, seeing the rest of us, quietening, like children quickly adjusting their behaviour to adult company. I notice how they stand close together, hands brushing. How they make each other look more beautiful, more alive. Perhaps realizing this herself, Flora quickly moves away, bends over to plant a kiss on Harry’s mouth.

  ‘Pam thought it a grand idea to get out of the river on the opposite bank,’ explains Tom to Harry, a little sheepishly. ‘Bit of a detour.’

  Harry shrugs. I wonder if he’s hiding his hurt pride. Rivalry wrestles the air between them. Suddenly they both seem dangerously drunk.

  Pam yanks her dress over her head, asking, as she emerges, ‘Where’s Dot?’

  ‘Dot?’ It quickly dawns that while I’ve been here, enjoying what is not mine, Dot’s been alone in the dark. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘One of us should go and check she’s got back to the house okay.’ Flora eyeballs me. ‘Don’t you think, Margot?’

  ‘Yes, you go, Margot,’ instructs Pam.

  ‘Oh. Oh, right, okay.’ On the way back to the house, tipsier than I thought, indignant that I’ve been shooed off by my elder sisters, surplus to the party, I linger by the bathing-pool gate, resting my arms along the flaky wood. Reasoning that Dot will be asleep in her bed now anyway, and not feeling in any great hurry for the evening to end, I enter and sit down on the pool’s edge, hitching my dress above my knees, bare feet paddling the water. After the coldness of the river it is warm as blood. I like it.

  Memories ripple across the water’s surface, layered like leaves: me and Audrey diving, Pam racing Flora to the edge, Dot, on a deckchair, watching us over the book in her hands, Perry in his horrifying knitted trunks. All the summers we’ve spent here, the furthest we’ve ever been from real life yet the closest to our real selves.

  ‘Margot.’

  I peer into the inky shadows, unsure if the voice comes out of them or my head, eyes slowly adjusting to Harry’s face in the moonlight, the bone-white flash of his smile. He leans back against the gatepost, louche, dishevelled, his shirt buttons undone. ‘Wasn’t very gentleman-like of me to let you walk back alone this late.’ His voice is slurred, soft. He makes the night feel closer, less full of air.

  ‘I’m not scared of the dark.’ I turn back to the water, sonically mapping him from the creak of the gate, the shifting of a foot on stone. Somewhere above me, a fierce rush of wings in the trees, a swift, silent hunt to the death. I look up but see nothing. It is already over.

  Harry squats beside me, swaying slightly, muttering something about a storm brewing and how he misses the rain on his skin. Splashing his feet clumsily into the pool he leans back, crossing his arms behind his head. I sneak a glance at his prostrate body, his tummy where his shirt bunches up, the intriguing dip and hair beneath the pin-glint of his belt buckle.

  ‘I’d sit here with Audrey sometimes.’

  ‘Me too.’ I like that he mentions her so naturally.

  He regards me with amused, heavy-lidded eyes. ‘She’d talk about running away to London when she was older, going to live with a particularly beautiful, scandalous aunt …’

  ‘My mother, I’m afraid.’

  He laughs, sploshes his feet.

  ‘You were fourteen? When she …’ I trail off.

  ‘A young fourteen. A late starter. Tom was about two foot taller than me. Practically had a beard.’

  I understand then why Harry might have found some equality in the companionship of a lively younger girl.

  ‘Did she ever talk about me?’ he asks, his voice carrying the neediness of a formative boyhood crush.

  ‘A little,’ I fib kindly. Audrey tended to make a bigger impression on other people than they made on her.

  He broods on this awhile. He kicks his feet, sprinkling the hem of my dress with water. I wonder how late it is – or how early. The night is slipping through our fingers like sand, and I don’t want it to end.

  ‘Flora …’ He hurls my sister’s name into the summer air, changing everything. ‘Your sister is very beautiful.’

  I close my eyes for a moment, feeling so, so stupid for not realizing that Harry’s only come here to talk about Flora, not to be with me or talk about Audrey, that we’ve been having two parallel conversations, not connecting at all.

  ‘Paris is going to love her,’ he adds.

  The pressure drops. For the first time in weeks, I can actually smell rain, a swirling cold front boring through the valley towards us. ‘You know Paris well?’ I ask weakly, looking for the right gap in the conversation to get up and leave.

  ‘My parents have a house in the south, so I make damn sure Paris is on the way.’ He lolls back, careless of his worldly glamour.

  ‘Easy to see Flora again, then.’ My voice sounds squeaky and odd.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, after a reflective pause. ‘Yes, it will be easy to see Flora again, Margot.’

  And I don’t know whom I envy more: Harry for being able to see Flora in Paris, my sister for being able to see him. The silence tautens. The wind blows a skim of pale rose petals across the water. ‘Well
, I’d better go.’ I scramble up, inelegant now, the magic I felt earlier in my dress gone. ‘I need to check on Dot.’

  His hand shoots out, coils around my ankle, making me start. ‘Will I see you before you leave?’

  ‘I – I don’t think so,’ I stutter, baffled by his hand, the urgency of his question. ‘We go back to school on Sunday night.’

  His fingers tighten. ‘I have to see you again, Margot.’

  I wonder if I’ve misheard him. Nothing makes sense.

  ‘I can’t stop thinking of you.’

  A dangerous, excitable heat starts to spread through me. For the first time in my life, I get a taste of the power that Flora must take for granted, and it feels like a weapon, one of Perry’s hunting guns, heavy, unwieldy in my hands. I don’t trust myself with it. ‘I – I should go back.’

  ‘Sit. Sit with me a little longer, Margot. You have to.’ His fingers release my leg, one by one, and I think back to the beginning of the summer, the way he put my fingers around the cool metal cup of beer that evening, the way it all started. ‘Please?’ he says more softly, remembering his manners.

  I sit down gingerly beside him again, careful not to be too close, an unprepared understudy shoved into the lead role, torn between a giddy joy and a sense of foreboding. The rules have all been broken. ‘Don’t you love my sister?’ I ask cautiously, concerned for Flora.

  ‘I suppose.’ His voice is distant, as if Flora lives in a different part of his mind altogether, has nothing to do with any of this. ‘But I dream of you as I dream of her, Margot.’

  He dreams of Flora. He dreams of me. He dreams of hundreds of girls. He will not remember this in the morning. He is drunk. He is a rogue. Maddeningly, this does not make me like him less.

  ‘And now you are in here.’ He taps his temple, as if he blames me for climbing inside it. The mood pitches: I wonder what I’ve done wrong. He slams one fist into his palm, the slap resounding across the water. ‘Damn. What was in that whisky?’

  ‘I’m a little tipsy too, Harry,’ I bluster, embarrassed on his behalf. ‘Really, it’s okay. We can forget …’ I watch his hand rising in slow motion through the night air. When it touches my cheek, the curve of his warm palm fits perfectly, and I cannot help but lean into it, just for a moment, just to see what it feels like, closing my eyes, smelling the cigarettes on his fingers and feeling bits of me slip loose.