The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Read online

  A distant rumble. Another. The sound of a storm splitting the sky.

  ‘Look what you’ve done, you sorceress.’ He throws an arm around my shoulders, heaves me closer.

  I laugh as rain starts to fall, small drops at first, as unimaginable, until a few seconds ago, as his arm about my shoulders. Lightning flashes over the trees, turning the garden silver and black. If this is all that will ever happen, it is enough. Just this. The thunder, the rain, the weight of Harry’s arm against my neck.

  ‘Come on.’ He grabs my hand, leads me into the garden, bristling, snapping, dripping, alive in the wind and rain, nothing like the gentle English garden we’ve grown used to this summer. We start walking away from the river, the meadow, the irreconcilability of Flora. But it’s hard to see where we’re going, walking at a slant into a tilted universe, the garden changing character with every step. Paths don’t fork where I remember. Hulks of topiary rise unexpectedly, megaliths on the lawn. I try to tune my ears to the sound of my sisters’ footsteps, ready to pull my hand from Harry’s. And I’m sure I can hear something, a twig snapping, a shuffle in the shadows. But the sounds stop when we do, and I wonder if they’re nothing so much as the sounds of my own conscience.

  We run beneath a huge tree, enchanted, a private tent full of forgotten sounds: water funnelling along leaves, dripping through branches. Harry is behind me, his arms tightening around my waist. I suck in my breath sharply, don’t pull away as I should, the warmth of his body spreading through the wet cloth of my dress. I’ll stand here for a while, I tell myself, then I’ll go. Nothing else will happen.

  ‘May I have this dance?’ Without waiting for my answer, he starts to turn me slowly, then faster, until I’m spinning round and round, my dress kicking up, the rain flying off, the world too, faster and faster until we skid and fall on to the blanket of leaves and beechnuts beneath the tree. As we lie there, laughing, I think of how Flora and I would play that game when we were little, spinning each other like tops. And how I’ve gone from that sister to this, and I feel a wash of shame, try to get up. But he rolls on top of me, presses a knee between mine.

  There is a thrill at his surprising drilling weight, a need for it, the way it takes away my responsibility. ‘I must get back …’ I start to say but the distance between our mouths closes. I taste river on his tongue, whisky, wine and honey. His hand is running up my legs, along the backs of my thighs, towards my knees. I tense, wriggle, trying to get his hand away, to save him from recoiling.

  Harry is stronger than me, more insistent. He lifts my skirt, holds my legs at the ankles, and, as if he’s noticed the patches, knows exactly where they are, he starts to kiss behind my knees. I cannot breathe, paralysed with horror, waiting for his inevitable disgust. But it doesn’t come. He continues to kiss, his mouth soft and wet and forgiving, kissing away all the years of scratching and discomfort, the names in the playground, the shame of school showers. I open my eyes, cry out, the sky spins. It is the most physically profound thing ever to happen to me.

  I lift my head, peer down my body to look at him, the sight of us together, his eyes half closed, unreachable, glazed with lust. He grabs my hand and places it on the stiffness in his trousers. I fumble at his belt, reach for the sex beneath it, shocked by how gristly, springy and alive it is. Freed, it slaps against my legs, trying to find a way in. His mouth is everywhere, biting my lips, my breasts, and the rain is escaping through the trees, and then I hear it, his whispered voice, rasping, ‘Audrey.’

  I push him back, panting, ‘Did you just call me Audrey?’

  ‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’ he mumbles, kissing my neck.

  ‘No!’

  ‘But you wore this dress. You’ve got her eyes, her gestures. And you’re not a girl now, you’re all womanly and you want me.’ He pulls at my dress. Something rips, and I feel a release as a button flies off. Lightning flashes: something has disrupted his face, something ugly rising to the surface. ‘You deny it?’ He grins.

  My answer is a knee in his groin. Still not quite believing what is happening, I try to twist out of his reach but he holds me tight, pinning me down by my wrists. Above me now, his face inches from mine, he is blinking, rain dripping into his eyes, the moment of connection cut, like a wire.

  ‘I am Margot,’ I scream, hysteria rising, all the afternoons I spent in her room, pretending it was mine, trying on her clothes, Sybil plaiting my hair, they all fly away, reveal themselves as stupid fantasy, girlish make-believe. It wasn’t me he wanted. It wasn’t me. It was my cousin but grown-up, some stalled childhood fantasy. ‘I am Margot Wilde!’

  We lie there in shocked, damaged silence, the rain finding its way through the canopy now, falling, pock, pock, pock. Every outline seems changed, nothing what it was.

  Very slowly, he lowers his face until the tip of his nose touches mine. It feels more intimate than his kiss, that he is trying to make me understand something. ‘Sorry,’ he murmurs. ‘I don’t know what happened. I – I got confused, for a moment. I’m truly sorry, Margot.’

  I blink back tears. Questions creep over my skin. I think about the way he recognized the dress – did he remember it from the newspaper? But not even my sisters have remembered it from the newspaper. And I think of us in the river, Harry saying, ‘You have to face your darkest fears, don’t you? Only then can you survive yourself.’ And it strikes me that Applecote is that fear, the meadow, the river, the true reason he’s returned to Cornton Hall. Oh, God.

  ‘Harry, what happened to her? Please tell me.’ I force the words out, heart starting to slam.

  I’m sure he’s going to hit me, the way he clenches, rears up. Instead, he pulls himself away, buttons up his trousers. ‘I don’t damn well know.’

  ‘You’re not covering for anyone?’ I sit up too, tug down my dress, try to pull my body and mind into some kind of order, sensing this might be my chance.

  ‘Very good, Margot,’ he says sarcastically. ‘Are you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Was it Perry? Sybil? Moll? Oh, sorry, you’ve guessed,’ he slurs. ‘It was Tom.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ I clap my hands to my mouth, thinking of Flora and Pam, with him now, oblivious, in danger.

  ‘Of course, it wasn’t bloody Tom.’ He laughs hollowly. ‘I wish it were.’

  ‘You wish …’ I know the comment reveals something. But it’s all too much, my thoughts mashed, my body aching, and I desperately want to find my sisters, be safe among them again. But then I hear it, Audrey’s voice in my head, clear as a bell, ‘You have a brain like a board game, Margot, don’t give up …’ and I pull it from deep inside me, that spark, one last attempt at slotting the jigsaw together, a risky, desperate tactic. ‘I know you didn’t mean to, Harry.’

  A silence, a rip in the night. Harry’s shoulders seem to drop with something that looks like relief, and it is this tiny gesture that gives me the courage to continue. ‘You were only a boy. A child yourself,’ I whisper. Out of the corner of my eye, movements in the shadows, but I don’t want to turn my head, in case I break the spell. It feels like Audrey is talking through me. ‘You held it inside all this time,’ I say, my heart pounding in my ears. ‘That must be so hard. But you did it, Harry.’

  Harry is silent, his breathing heavy, fast. And I get this tangible sense of something swelling inside him, pushing at the edges, vying for release.

  ‘Everyone has secrets.’ I lift my hand to touch his face. His skin feels clammy, febrile. ‘Everyone has done something they regret.’

  His voice is weak, climbing high as a boy’s. ‘I … I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘You met Audrey fishing?’ I say carefully, as if I were talking Dot back from a nightmare, trying to keep the tremor from my voice.

  ‘I wasn’t meant to be there. I’d argued with Pa again.’ Something in his features twists. ‘I was never good enough.’

  ‘Nobody was good enough,’ I murmur, as Audrey nods eagerly at my shoulder.

  ‘Stupid, stupid boy, get
that book out of your hands and do something bloody useful for once. Muck out the horses!’ Harry booms, making me flinch. ‘I went to the river instead, just to defy him. And I saw Audrey … I …’ He stops. Even in the gloom I can see that his eyes are bright with fear, back on the riverbank that August afternoon. ‘We were playing a game.’ He stops again.

  ‘A game?’

  ‘A stupid game. I – I tried to kiss her.’

  My breath catches.

  ‘She slipped.’ He starts to shiver uncontrollably. ‘Her dress. Her hair. Her hands. She was sinking. She was reaching for me. Two hands. Fingertips.’

  ‘You didn’t pull her out?’ I recoil, feeling the splash of cold water as I speak, the bubbles up my nostrils, my mouth full of grassy river.

  ‘I thought she was pretending – she was always pretending things, hiding so I could never find her, teasing, playing with me like a cat does with a mouse but then …’ His voice knots. ‘I realized and I – I froze. I just froze.’ The beechnuts closest to me move as he shudders again, his fear nudging from one little shell to another.

  ‘You stayed there? With her?’ I say quietly. Audrey is shrinking away from me, like a figure pulled back on a rope, smaller and smaller, reaching out for my hand.

  ‘I ran into the stables, and I lay down with the horses. I just curled up next to the horses.’ He closes his hands over his face.

  ‘Why did you not get help?’ My voice comes out as a croak.

  ‘She was gone, just gone.’ And his voice is colder, more certain. ‘I told myself I would tell, I would, I really would, in a day or two, the day after that. When they found her, I would explain.’ His eyes fill with tears. ‘But they didn’t find her. They never bloody found her. And I lied and lied. To the police, my parents, everyone. And the lie grew and grew until I believed it and it walked around with me. And it’s only now, talking to you …’ His voice breaks. He looks wretched, tears pouring down his face in the rain.

  I can’t stop my own, gulping dismantling sobs. Audrey’s never going to come skipping in from the orchard now, a catkin in her hair. She’ll never write me another letter, using words I have to look up. She’ll never run away to London to live with Ma. But beneath the sadness, white-hot anger. ‘Uncle Perry was arrested.’

  ‘I know, I know. It was awful. I couldn’t live with it, not that as well. But I turned up at the station to confess, and Perry was walking out, just released, and … and it felt like someone was giving me another chance. So I turned around and I bumped into Pa. And there was this moment, this diabolical moment with Pa, when he shoved me into the alley by the baker’s and asked what I’d done in the stables that afternoon, and I stuttered something about saddles, I can’t remember what, and the next day he moved us all back to London, shut up Cornton. And people continued to talk about boat gypsies and the man in the hat and … I lived my life, the life I was meant to live. I found I could, Margot. That it was actually possible.’

  ‘Oh.’ Harry in his golden life, Audrey swept along the muddy channel of the river.

  ‘She’s always there, in my head. I can’t sleep. I can never sleep,’ he sobs, no longer the beautiful boy who kissed my knees, spun me by the hands in the rain. ‘That’s why I came back. To prove I could. To prove I could do anything. That it was over.’

  ‘And to lie some more?’ I don’t mean to shout but the words barrel out as raging red things.

  He grabs me by the shoulders, making me gasp, speaking urgently. ‘And I met you, and it was like Audrey all over again, the way you filled my head, Audrey, how she would be.’

  I try to wriggle free of his hands. ‘Let go.’

  He shakes me harder. ‘What have you done? What have you made me say?’

  ‘The truth!’ I shout. ‘For once in your life you’ve told the truth, Harry.’ Something in his eyes makes me feel the vulnerability of my position, an animal in a trap.

  ‘A girl who cheats on her sister, who can’t keep her drawers up?’ he snarls. ‘Who’ll believe you, the daughter of a rackety model and a mad old soldier, yes, yes, I know all about them both. Chelsea’s a small place, Margot. Who will believe you over a peer’s son?’

  I bite his hand, twist from him, but he pushes me right back down with terrifying ease. ‘You made me tell you, Margot. A big mistake.’

  Fear bolts through my body. I cry out, struggling to see over his shoulder, but there is no one, just the hammering rain, a bulb flash of lightning. His fingertips press on my collarbone, the softness of my neck, and I think of Ma and my sisters and how I don’t want to leave them. But my head is filling with sky, where Audrey is waiting, her arms stretching towards me, like beams of torchlight, and Harry’s mouth is grazing mine. I don’t know whether he’ll kill me or kiss me, or do both at once, and my body detaches, comes away, floats off so it cannot be hurt. Only my brain still chatters. Find the word that will make him stop. But no sound comes out of my mouth. I see Harry glance to his left, a look of surprise, then hear a crack. I wait for the pain, knowing it’s the end, that darkness will scrub everything out, like it did for Audrey, for Pa. But it’s Harry’s head that slams against mine, and above the slump of his shoulder, I see the lenses of spectacles glinting like stars.

  I’m not sure how long Dot and I stand there, watching over Harry in numb disbelief, waiting for him to come back to life, only that Dot is still holding the paperweight in her left hand, transfigured – taller, stronger, fully realized, thrown out of girlhood at last. And the rain has stopped and the sky is pink, dawn-edged, and the birds are singing wildly and the candy-striped deckchairs we sat on yesterday afternoon are a few feet away and we can hear Pam and Flora talking in heated voices, laughing through the trees, incongruous sights and sounds of a life already out of our reach. No Tom, thank goodness. They don’t see us beneath the tree at first, about to walk straight past. I call out, mixing their fates with ours, the sound that comes from my throat a funny sort of bark, more fox than human.

  Flora and Pam giggle and peer down at Harry, thinking him blind drunk. Then Pam sees the bloodied paperweight in Dot’s hand, and nudges Flora, and their mouths part. I am overcome by a yearning to be curled up on Fang, our moth-eaten tiger-skin rug, sucking the hard sugar crystals off the top of sweet sponge fingers.

  ‘Oh, no.’ Pam kneels down next to Harry, presses her ear to his chest, then looks up at Flora, shaking her head. Flora whimpers. I try to explain in gabbles – what he told me, what he did, what Dot did, what I’ve been doing with Sybil in Audrey’s room, how it all led to this – then hear myself repeating over and over, like a needle stuck on a gramophone, ‘He watched Audrey drown, he watched Audrey drown.’

  Pam takes my hand. ‘Shush,’ she says firmly, kindly, frowning at the bodice of my dress where a button has ripped off, exposing a bulge of breast, a red scratch. ‘It’s going to be all right, Margot.’

  But it’s not, clearly. Flora is swaying like she’s about to collapse. Harry is dead. And it is all my fault for inhabiting Audrey, pushing things too far as always, treating it all as a game, and the result is that Dotty is in awful trouble, dear Dot who won’t even whack a wasp, my baby sister, whom I was meant to protect, protecting me, guilty of the worst crime. What will happen to her?

  ‘Quick. Give it to me.’ To our astonishment, Flora snatches the paperweight out of Dot’s hand and lobs it with all her strength into the undergrowth. It leaves a smear of blood on Flora’s fingers that she wipes on her dress, briskly, as if it were juice from a sticky red plum, transferring the guilt, violating the very idea of who she is, who we were brought up to be, who we will grow into, well-behaved wives, doting mothers, changing everything. ‘The river,’ she says, white-faced, glancing at Harry. ‘Can we get him that far?’

  Pam shakes her head, speaks through the grille of her fingers. ‘We can’t risk being seen. Not if Tom is walking back to Cornton Hall.’

  ‘The pool?’ Dot suggests quietly and, without her saying anything else, we all know exactly what she means, wh
at must be done, our thoughts rallying, collective again, just as they used to be. The decision has made itself.

  We drag him out from under the tree, across the lawn. Harry is heavy, almost immovable, determined to stay there and damn us, a meaty lump on the lawn. Worse, he leaves a trail in the wet grass, his belt buckle catching, so we wordlessly agree to heave him up, his shirtsleeve ripping, making a terrible sound. A girl on each limb, we stagger through the trees, our faces stiff with shock. Dot loses her spectacles. There is no time to find them. I envy her inability to see the details – the way blood has started to curl around Harry’s ear, bead on its lobe like a gruesome jewel – that I know will be imprinted on my mind for ever.

  We let him sag to the paving beside the pool’s edge. Can we really do it? Who will do it? Which of us has the stomach? But the sun is rising higher. There’s no time to think. A stone goddess waits, her hand protruding just so, ready to crack a drunken falling head, something that might explain his injury. The water is strewn with rose petals, plucked off by the rain, that will tuck over his body like a thick pink blanket. We wait, hanging on to our old selves a little longer. Then Flora nods, and the nod travels between us, like a parcel of light, a binding acknowledgement of a sisterhood that is bigger than Harry, lust, love or marriage, a loyalty that rides above all others.

  In the end, it doesn’t matter who does it – Flora first, a firm hand in the small of his back, then Pam, a second later, harder, with her foot – since we all watch him sink beneath the surface, the back of his shirt bulging with air, like a lung holding on to its last breath. We lean forward, peering through a gap in the petals, to see him roll hideously, a necklace of bubbles stringing from his mouth. Time cat-cradles back, stretched between our fingers, Harry sinking as Audrey did, the blue shirt, the blue dress, the margins all blurred. There’s a heart-stopping moment when I think I see Harry’s hand move, grapple for the edge. But then it slips under the roof of petals. The pool stills. And I start to run, tripping, stumbling into the garden, fleeing from who we are, the terrible creatures we’ve become.