The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Read online

Will nods sheepishly. ‘I’ve known for a while. Bella kept talking about it, so I did a search at the library by the station one day when the train was massively delayed.’

  Jessie stares at him in astonishment. ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I didn’t want to taint Applecote for you, or freak you out. I just couldn’t bear to pop your balloon.’ He grabs her more playfully, breathes into her ear, ‘And what’s your excuse, Missus? Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I knew there was a reason I loved you …’

  Will kisses the rest of the words away, and, right there, on the sheepskin rug, in front of the flickering fire, he peels off her dress, her tights, takes her apart, puts her together again, and the passion that Jessie thought was gone returns, electric, alive, all-consuming.

  Jessie sleeps deeper than she has in months. At some point, Romy climbs into bed beside them, snuggling against her breast, like a baby. Jessie drifts back to sleep, dreaming she’s floating down a river on her back, an electric-blue kingfisher bombing into the water. She wakes to the second ring of the doorbell.

  ‘I’ll go.’ She throws on an old dressing gown. Not very glamorous but she smells of Will again.

  ‘Hi!’ She’s surprised to find the enormous mass of Joe on the doorstep.

  ‘For Romy.’ He pulls a white toy rabbit from one of his coat’s cavernous pockets. ‘I heard she was back safe last night.’

  ‘That’s very kind. She’ll love it, thank you, Joe.’ Jessie takes it, amazed that, while they barely know anybody in the valley, her family’s news has travelled. She will make more effort, she decides. She will invite people to tea. She will stop cutting herself off, telling herself she’s an outsider. Then she waits for him to leave.

  He stamps his feet in the cold. He isn’t going anywhere. ‘How is the poor mite?’

  ‘Better. We’ve been incredibly lucky.’

  He glances over his shoulder, as if worried about someone overhearing him. ‘Would you mind if I came in, Jessie?’ he whispers, his breath foggy in the cold air.

  ‘Can it wait until tomorrow morning?’ She gestures smilingly at her dressing-gown, trying to draw his attention politely to the fact that they’re not yet up, that it’s nine o’clock on a freezing Sunday morning.

  ‘Not really. I didn’t want to disturb you, not when you’ve been through the mill like you have, but – but the wife said I should.’ Joe starts tripping over his words. ‘What with the police having to get involved and the like. Jessie, I’m out of my depth here.’

  ‘The police? Whoa, Joe, slow down. I don’t understand.’ Jessie frowns, uneasy now. ‘You’d better come in. Hang on, I’ll grab Will.’ She runs upstairs, returns with a sleepy Will.

  ‘So, what’s the problem, Joe?’ Will asks, stifling a yawn, closing the kitchen door so the girls can’t hear.

  ‘I found something in the garden.’ Joe takes off his cap, revealing a domed forehead skimmed with sweat. He glances at Jessie. ‘You might want to sit down first.’

  14

  We run over the dewy grass, hand in hand, Dot stumbling, the garden seeming to stretch, lengthen, giving us time to adjust from the dead to the living, the law of the wild and the rule of law. I lunge for the safety of the scullery door, and glance over my shoulder, expecting Pam and Flora to be right behind us. They’re not. I can see only Flora, some way back, under the trees, gesturing for us to go inside, they’ll follow. Somewhere, a jackdaw calls.

  The house seems too small. Like we’ve outgrown it overnight. The clock on the wall says ten past four. In the kitchen Moll, our hopeless guardian, is fast asleep on a chair beside the range, her mouth slightly open, air whistling through the open door of her missing tooth. There are four large pans of cooling jam on the stove, empty jars waiting on the wooden table. Moppet runs up to Dot, her tail beating. Dot holds the dog’s delicate head between her hands, and the two look at each other, exchanging something that bypasses my understanding. Then she buries her face in Moppet’s flat grey fur, eyes closed, like a girl reunited with the wolves that brought her up. Moppet starts licking Harry’s blood off Dot’s fingers, excited by the smell, and I have to push her away.

  Shutting Moppet in the kitchen, we start up the stairs, adrenalin finally giving way to exhaustion. I feel an ache with each photograph of Audrey we pass, my dead drowned cousin, my lodestar. I pause in front of the one that Flora, the day we first arrived, mistook as a photo of me. But I can no longer see myself in her bleached-out features. I cannot see me at all.

  We hover on the top-floor landing, neither of us wanting to peel off into the solitariness of our own little bedrooms, scared of the images that might fly at us like bats. Dot starts to shiver. We hug. We smell bad.

  ‘We need to wash. You have the first bath, Dot.’ I rub her goose-bumped sapling arms, marvelling at their deceptive brute strength. ‘I’ll search for your spectacles later.’

  I sit on the edge of her steamy bath, worried that exhaustion and shock might make Dot sink silently beneath the suds. We don’t say much, focusing instead on the reassurance of passing the flannel, me washing her back in small soapy circles, the familiar damp mark on the wall shaped like Ireland. If we can wash behind her ears, a corpse cannot roll in the bathing-pool. If her nails are clean, she is innocent.

  Dark thoughts still scratch against the back of my eyes: how old must you be to hang? How dozy really are country policemen? But I tell Dot that everything’s going to be fine – everyone will presume Harry was drunk and drowned, sort of the truth – and we will always protect her and she must get some sleep. She dries herself silently, numbly, then pads naked into her room, leaving small footprints on the floor.

  I take on the duty of dealing with our soiled dresses. After stamping an exit from mine, noticing the missing button, the smears of mud, grass and blood, I ball it with Dot’s inside a pillow slip and stuff it at the bottom of my half-packed suitcase: it is destined for one of the school’s vast canteen trash bins in a couple of days’ time and will quickly be buried under potato sacking, porridge and rice pudding, then carted away. I won’t miss the dress: I came too close to ending up like Audrey last night. I don’t want to be her ever again. For once the pure inescapable fact of myself, my naked body with all its inelegant pudges and mauve mottles, is a huge relief.

  Lowering myself into Dot’s bathwater, I turn on the hot tap with my toes, letting the heat gush in until my legs scald red. I scrub my skin raw but I don’t feel clean. I’m not sure how long I lie there, dazed, thinking of poor Audrey’s last moments, my head full of rushing river and reeds. After a while, I hear Flora and Pam’s hushed voices. Only Flora briefly pops her head around the bathroom door: her eyes are oddly bright, the colour of Parma violets. I tell her what I did with the stained dresses and that she should give hers to Pam to dispose of in the same way. Flora’s mouth parts to say something, but no words come out and she pulls the door gently to again. It occurs to me then that Flora, numbed by the violence, her own role in it, is too shocked to speak.

  Emerging, wrapped in a towel on the landing, there are no sounds coming from my sisters’ rooms. I decide to leave them alone: we must get our story straight but I also want them to sleep, an hour at least, so that they’re less likely to make damning mistakes later. I will keep myself awake, slumped on my bedroom chair in my dressing-gown, like a person on watch around a fire. Occasionally I drift off but my body always spasms awake again. I think of Harry kissing me behind my knees, the traitorous pleasure of it, how that hot, soft mouth is now submerged, stiff and cold. I walk to the window for air. Outside, the moon still hangs in the morning sky, faint as a watermark. The garden is engorged, a vivid green after last night’s rain, sugar-dipped with dew. I have time, just.

  I slip out of the house through the front door – careful not to wake Moll, praying that Moppet won’t bark – and into the garden through the side gate, telling myself I’m searching for damning marks of blood, the drag of his body on the grass. But the truth is I want to see Harry
one last time. I want to check last night was real. I want to say sorry. I want to say goodbye.

  A sprinkle of blood droplets in the grass by the pool gate, balancing on the blades’ tips, like the remains of a fox’s nocturnal kill. Using the edge of my bare foot, I smear them away – what would have disgusted me yesterday, easy now. The pool area feels knowing and dark, a few hours behind the rest of the garden, something of last night for ever printed upon it. There’s a large puddle of water on the stone paving, reflecting the lightening sky, and the pool itself is thickly carpeted with petals and storm-torn leaves, water winking in the gaps, like fragments of a half-told story. Crouching beside the stone goddess on the corner where we pushed him in, I part the petals with my fingers, gently at first, then more vigorously, panicking, prodding at the pool with a stick, desperate for a glimpse of him. I search and search.

  Harry is not there.

  More blood, a path of it, like breadcrumbs through a wood, leading from the pool to the meadow gate – open, a body’s width. I almost don’t go through it, scared of what I might find.

  James Dean. Fallen from the sky.

  He is slumped in the crater of the meadow, his forehead resting on his arms, arms crossed over drawn-up knees, like a bloodied soldier on a battlefield.

  I rub my eyes, sure I’m hallucinating with tiredness, readier to believe it is the ghost of the dead pilot than him. But Harry remains, a crumpled, solitary figure in a ripped shirt, head lolling. Not dead in the pool. The blood in his hair looks dry and black. And his shirt steams in the early-morning sunshine: he has been out of the water for a while.

  Harry has somehow survived: Dot is no murderer. Yet I feel no relief, only rapidly escalating unease. Not daring to breathe, my instinct is to back away slowly and return to the safety of the house so I can tell my sisters about this Lazarus, back from the dead.

  But, sensing my presence, Harry stirs. He raises one arm, sheltering his eyes from the light in its nook. ‘Margot? Is that you?’ he calls out hoarsely.

  ‘Yes,’ I manage, trying to hide my shock. For his head injury seems to have circuited his skull and found another way out: his right eye is bloodshot with a milky glaze over a frozen iris, not moving in tandem with the other, damaged in a way I can’t bear to think about.

  Harry swipes at the air, reaching for my hand. I fight my recoil, knowing that I must appear as normal as possible now, and wade through the long grass towards him. His grip is weak and cold. I heave him up, recognizing that dense dead weight. Once he is shakily vertical, I pull my hand away quickly, the feel of him too strange. ‘Shall I go and find Tom? A doctor?’

  ‘No … no fuss.’ He is disoriented, swaying a little. ‘I … I’ll walk back to Cornton.’ He winces at something that hurts, adds gamely, ‘I’m fine.’

  I don’t dare tell Harry he’s not.

  I watch, breath held, as he cautiously touches that awful eye, as if checking it’s still there. ‘It’s just … I can’t see too well. And my head …’ His fingertips investigate the crusted blood in his hair. And I can almost see his mind grasping into the fog, trying to pull down the events of last night. ‘What happened, Margot?’

  My mouth opens and closes: I have no idea. Only that Pam must have missed his heartbeat when she checked him in the garden, easy enough, given the late hour and the wine. And that twitch of his hand in the pool? No, I didn’t imagine it. But how did Harry pull himself out of the water? Regain consciousness just in time? Someone must have helped him. But who?

  ‘Margot?’ he persists, breaking my thoughts. ‘Please …’

  I nod at the scorch on the grass, the ashy remains of last night’s fire. Wine bottles on their sides. An empty whisky bottle. Harry’s silent guitar. ‘You were very, very drunk.’

  A moment passes. When I meet his gaze again something in his left eye is sharper, hardened. The other remains like that of a fish on ice. He clamps his hand over his mouth, disbelieving, something dawning. ‘I told you, didn’t I?’

  Fear flutters in my ears, an insect’s beating wings, and I feel his fingers at my throat again.

  ‘We … we were under the tree. The rain,’ he mumbles, slowly moving all the bits together like the shreds of a torn-up letter. ‘Dot. Christ. I looked up and saw her, fist raised …’

  ‘No, no. Dot was in bed,’ I say quickly, betraying too much.

  He stares at me, silent for a moment. Then he says coldly, ‘You’re lying.’

  I feel the hairs all over my body prick, a surge of heat.

  ‘I woke by the side of the pool. Wet. Why? Why was I by the pool? Answer me,’ he growls, when I don’t answer.

  ‘I – I don’t know,’ I say weakly, truthfully. I cannot tell Harry that the last time I saw him he was sinking beneath the water’s surface, a dead man.

  He bends down and rests his hands on his knees, breathing heavily, as if about to be sick. But he doesn’t take his eyes off me, looking up through his matted hair. And I see his expression changing as the night starts to solidify. ‘Did you and Dot try to drown me? My God. You did,’ he says, as if something in my expression confirms it. ‘You damn well tried to drown me.’

  ‘No.’ I start slowly walking backwards, realizing I’ve stupidly made myself vulnerable again. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You wanted revenge for Audrey. You wanted …’ He straightens, covers his face with his hands. And for a moment I think he’s going to burst into tears. But when he looks up his face is blazing, dangerous. He starts walking towards me, staggering over tussocks of grass. ‘I remember, Margot,’ he calls, his voice stronger now. ‘I remember everything.’

  I pick up my pace, not daring to turn my back to him.

  ‘I know you,’ he pants the words out. ‘We’re the same, you and I. We understand each other completely.’ His laugh comes out as a cough. ‘You think I can’t play your games? You think you’ll pull the wool over my eyes? That I’ll let your little baby Dot get away with attempted murder? I hope she’s got a bloody good alibi, Margot. Because Pa’s got some very, very good lawyers.’

  ‘Don’t threaten Dot,’ I flame.

  ‘That’s rich. But don’t worry, it won’t just be her. I’ll take you all down, you and your murderous sisters. I bet Pam was there too. And Flora,’ he spits out Flora’s name acidly. ‘I’ll tear you all apart.’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ I insist, retreating faster now.

  Just when I think he might run and chase me, he slumps, hands on his knees again, his pallor faintly green. ‘Margot, wait … A pact,’ he croaks. ‘My silence for yours? And your sisters’, since you act as one,’ he adds, correctly guessing that I’ve already told them.

  I stand very still in the grass, mind spinning, trying to work it out: Harry’s survival saves Dot, all of us, from having committed the ultimate crime; Audrey, by drowning, surely damns him – but it’s his word against mine, a story against facts. Will Sybil believe me? Anyone? And isn’t Harry’s injury far more persuasive than my report of a drunk man’s words?

  ‘Both summer nights … scrubbed out. Never happened at all.’ I hear a tremor of desperation in Harry’s voice then, his fear of the terrible secret that has boiled within him these last five years. ‘Margot?’

  ‘I – I need to talk to my sisters first.’ I turn, start to run.

  Harry shouts something unintelligible behind me. And when I glance over my shoulder he has sunk to his knees again, covered his face with his hands.

  I find my sisters in Flora’s room, awake, ashen-faced, wearing nighties and an air of anxious complicity. Dot and Flora are squeezed up together on the bed, nervously curling and uncurling their toes on the rug, Dot hugging a pillow to her stomach. Pam stands by the half-open window, as if she has been tracking my journey through the garden. She has a strange, intense set to her jaw: I can read her like a telegram again. ‘How is he?’ she asks, confirming my suspicions.

  ‘So it was you.’ I catch the shock of my reflection in a wall mirror, my eyes darting wild flashes
in shadowed sockets. ‘He’s …’ I can’t bring myself to say ‘okay’. Neither can I bear to reveal the gruesome extent of his injury to Dot. ‘… in the meadow.’

  ‘Oh, walking, then? Good.’ Pam blows out with relief.

  ‘Can you please explain why he’s not lying dead at the bottom of the bathing-pool?’ The words come out too forcefully. Dot startles. I try to sound calmer. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘We – we weren’t sure how you’d take it,’ Pam stutters apologetically, realizing she should have. ‘You seemed almost on the verge of …’ She pauses, stealing a surreptitious glance at Flora. ‘We thought it better to tell you after you’d rested, that’s all.’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘Just after you and Dot ran off, Harry started grappling about, Margot,’ Flora says, shuddering at the memory. ‘We couldn’t believe it.’

  My mind returns to those twitching fingers. My refusal to believe what my eyes saw.

  ‘I couldn’t just stand there, Margot.’ Pam’s voice is unusually quiet. She sits down on the bed, drops her head into her hands. ‘It was … unethical. We had a choice.’

  I can’t help thinking bitterly how Harry had had a choice too, to save Audrey, or at least tell her broken parents what had happened, save them years of dreading and hoping. He chose himself, his family’s reputation. Until he met me, a pale imitation of Audrey, not his chance at atonement but his nemesis.

  ‘Pam was quite something, Margot,’ says Flora, trying to smile. ‘Gave him the kiss of life and everything.’

  Pam pulls a face. ‘He coughed up whisky.’

  I collapse on the bed beside her, my body leaden. ‘Harry doesn’t remember anyone pulling him out of the pool, just waking wet on the stone paving.’

  ‘Well, we left him there, breathing, lying on his side,’ Pam explains. ‘We thought it best to spirit away after that, rather than make ourselves known. Bearing in mind … well, what had happened earlier.’ She starts to look worried. ‘What? Why are you frowning like that, Margot? What did he say?’