The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Read online

  The rest of us flinch, hating the reminder that Flora will be bundled off to a finishing school in Paris, where she’ll learn to speak fluent French, type, talk about art, things that will help her find a good husband and can then be promptly forgotten, lost in a puff of flour and baby talc.

  ‘You’ll be wanting some sort of coming-out party too. It all costs, costs, costs.’ She shakes her head despairingly.

  ‘The Season finished for good last year, Ma. And I really never expected to go to Paris,’ Flora says unconvincingly. (She’s already bought a beret.) ‘I don’t need Paris.’

  Ma lights a cigarette, sighs the smoke out. ‘The Queen may have stopped the curtsying, now that anyone with a bit of money can buy their way in. But the debs are still dancing, as you well know, Flora. Their mothers will make damn sure of it. How else will they make a match for their little darlings?’ Her eyes glint. Ma relishes her outsider status – she wasn’t a deb herself – yet is determined that we fully exploit our Wilde heritage to secure good marriages. ‘And every girl needs Paris.’

  ‘Every girl’ means Flora. I’m not sure Ma seriously considers the rest of us worth the investment.

  ‘When? When will you go, Ma?’ Pam’s cheeks are stained a vivid, anxious red.

  ‘Beginning of July, or thereabouts.’

  ‘So we’d live at school always? Even during the summer holidays?’ asks Dot, voice high with panic.

  ‘No, Dot. Don’t worry.’ Ma’s face starts to shut. And it is immediately obvious that there’s something important she’s not telling us.

  ‘Where, then?’ Pam and I demand in unison.

  Ma’s gaze slides away. ‘The simplest thing would be for you all …’ She stalls. Her voice rises. ‘… to live at Applecote Manor with Aunt Sybil and Uncle Peregrine.’

  None of us speaks. In the shocked hush, I can see Pa’s family house, the honeyed stone, the shallow valley spilling beyond, all spinning, whirling, a vortex of dragonflies, birds, grasses, cartwheels, picnics, long-lost summers. But the sky is black.

  ‘You’d have a wonderful address. Not even a house number,’ Ma appeals eagerly to Flora. ‘Think of letter headings.’

  ‘I’m not ashamed of where we live or who we are,’ declares Pam, raising her chin. Flora reaches for her hand and holds it in a stagey moment of Girl Guide-ish solidarity.

  ‘I’m not suggesting for a moment that you girls should be ashamed. I certainly am not. But I am nonetheless a pragmatist, and rather bloody short of cash.’ She brings the cigarette to her mouth quickly, again and again. ‘It will be good for you to have a male figure in your lives. And Sybil, I’m sure, will spoil you rotten.’

  I see my aunt then, as I last saw her five years ago, all bouncing red curls and bone-china features, laughing, bending down to pat a cloud-grey whippet puppy, Uncle Perry, walking towards her, a huge, handsome swagger of a man, hunting rifle over his shoulder. Then the puppy yaps. There’s a patter of small footsteps. A swing of a plait. A flick of yellow ribbon. Something pulls at the edges, a darkness that no one dare name.

  ‘Such an idyllic place to live.’ Ma continues talking herself into it. ‘I may not be a country girl, but you’ve all got apples and hay in your blood. Old Father Thames springs not too far from there, doesn’t he?’ I think of the rush of glassy green that passes close to Applecote. ‘Well, you do too.’

  To my dismay, I can see my older sisters turning, a light in their eyes that wasn’t there a moment ago, won over by Ma’s absurd pastoral oratory.

  ‘You remember the bathing-pool, Pam?’ Ma continues, conjuring up the Italianate pool buried deep at the bottom of Applecote’s garden. ‘And there’s an orchard, Dot. Perfect for climbing.’

  I’m upside down, swinging, skirt tenting my head, the mossy branch velvety in the clamp of my palm. A girl’s voice is counting down to ten. And something else is counting down too, but we can’t hear it.

  ‘The weather’s incomparably better, of course. More daylight, further west. Pretty sunsets and things, you know.’

  The sky on fire. A lolly melting, dripping a line of stickiness down the inside of my arm.

  ‘A proper English summer, girls,’ Ma breathes out in a curl of cigarette smoke.

  Applecote Manor was summer: Ma dropped us by the front gates in August, returned two weeks later. Then, five years ago, summer stopped: none of us has seen Sybil or Perry since. We only overhear snatches, Ma telling friends that Sybil hasn’t left the house in years, shunning all company, that huntsman Perry is now crippled by a pain in his back that no doctor can diagnose or treat, and rarely moves from his armchair.

  ‘The area is so pretty, never pummelled by bombs, not like dirty old London,’ Ma continues, ignoring all this. She presses a finger to her lips. ‘Sorry, I forget, a German pilot did crash into Applecote’s meadow, didn’t he?’

  ‘Aunt Sybil found his head perched on top of one of the Applecote Stones, like a dress-shop dummy,’ Pam recounts with relish. ‘She said he was actually very handsome.’

  Dot pushes herself closer to me. Her eyes are owlish.

  Ma squeezes Dot’s hand. ‘The pilot’s head is long gone now, don’t you worry, Dotty.’

  But I can see that it isn’t the pilot who’s varnishing Dot’s eyes with fear. That it’s something worse. And since Flora and Pam are weighing up the advantages of Ma’s proposal with a silent exchange of animated, quizzical looks, it’s left to me to blurt, ‘ButwhataboutCousinAudrey?’

  3

  At 6:02 on the first morning of her new life, Jessie is woken by a riot of drunken birdsong. She squints sleepily through her lashes and sees a dead spider as big as a fist, a bloom of damp on unfamiliar floral wallpaper. She wonders where she is. Why she is camping on a mattress in a huge, bare room that smells of soft old fabric. Then she remembers.

  It is the second week of August. Eight months and two days since they first saw Applecote Manor. And, unbelievably, it is theirs. She smiles slowly, and turns her head on the pillow towards Will, whose arms are tightly wrapped around her waist, as they always are, as if to stop her vanishing in the night. His rugged good looks slackened in sleep, the strain of yesterday’s move is crosshatched in tiny lines across his face, like a woodcut. Jessie tenderly pushes a lock of dark hair off his forehead, revealing a streak of silver. Will’s is the kind of face – noble, life-weathered – that could easily have come from an ancestor portrait, such as those that must once have hung on these walls, she decides. He belongs here. They all do.

  Jessie likes the idea that there’s an unbroken thread, a pulse of energy, running through the lives of the historic owners, the Wilde family, and their own. It feels like they’re picking up something precious but broken, putting it back together again. She loves Will deeply for being brave enough to take on this old house, this new, unknowable life. He’s been under a lot of pressure to bow out: Will’s old loyal friends, not wanting to lose him, tried to persuade him to stay; Bella swore she’d never forgive him if they moved, that there was something ‘bad’ at Applecote, like a gas you couldn’t taste or smell that would poison them all in their sleep.

  Jessie’s nerve was shaken at times. She didn’t like the way two local builders went silent on the phone when she mentioned the name of the house, refusing to explain why they didn’t want to work on it. But she made light of it to Will: there had been many times in their relationship when one of them had had to reassure the other. Sometimes it is him – yes, Romy really will sleep through the night soon, of course Bella will grow to love her little sister – sometimes her. This is how they roll.

  But the possibility that the move might be stirring up Will’s old grief has been niggling. A few days ago, she’d woken in the early hours, discovered his side of the bed empty and got up, wondering where he was. She’d only got as far as the landing and stopped: music was drifting from beneath the closed living-room door, up the stairs, like smoke, songs that had nothing to do with her, old hits from the time of his first marriage, the ninetie
s Brit-pop Bella had once told Jessie that her mother loved. Jessie crept back to bed, the lyrics to the Blur song, ‘Country House’, whistling ironically in her head. She told herself it was just Will’s way of saying a final goodbye to the house, his life with Mandy. Closure.

  But the timing of her mother’s words the next morning hadn’t helped: had Jessie seriously considered what moving to the countryside could do to her marriage? The undertow there, Jessie knew, was that Jessie’s father had fled sleepy Somerset in the eighties for an adventurous new life with another woman – christened ‘The Hussy from Hampshire’ by Jessie’s mother – when Jessie was three, only to die in the Hussy’s arms in a moped accident on the Costa Brava six months later. So Jessie can’t blame her mother for pocketing the belief that a marriage might be broken into at any time, or simply explode, like a faulty gas boiler. Aware that she’s not had a father’s opinion to counterweight her mother’s, Jessie’s always made an effort consciously to discard her mother’s anxieties. But it can be difficult at times. Like trying to separate a sound from its echo.

  Maybe for these reasons she had secretly feared the deal might fall apart right until yesterday morning when the removal lorries turned up. She had watched, stomach knotted, as their London lives were dismantled, bound with tape, memories rolled up like rugs. It struck her both how replaceable things were – throws, food mixers, unread books – and how easy they were to forget once removed from view. And a tiny voice in her head guiltily hoped that Mandy would be too, just a little.

  Will wore his darkest sunglasses during the move yesterday, joked blackly about how he never thought he’d get sentimental about logistics. But Jessie didn’t cry: she was, she realized, completely ready to go, and had been for a while. Since she’d had Romy, the big booming city she’d loved had shrunk to the same circle of tightly packed Victorian streets: the park she would circuit with Romy, wondering if she could face taking the Tube to the Tate Modern or if she’d get the pram wheels stuck on the escalator again; Greta’s, the coffee shop whose sweet staff never complained about her nursing a coffee for hours to give Will and Bella space alone at home; the lovely Lebanese grocer where she’d blindly buy exotic ingredients for supper, hoping to make a meal that Bella might not compare unfavourably to her late foodie mother’s or, worse, one of the beleaguered au pairs’.

  Jessie suddenly recalls the day Camille – the last au pair in a long, frequently sobbing line – left their household. It was the first day of Jessie’s maternity leave: she was determined to embrace her new role and show Will she could manage both girls without any hired help. (How hard could it be?) As they waved Camille off, Bella hissed in Jessie’s ear that she’d merely taken Camille’s place: ‘You’ll probably stick around a little bit longer. But I wouldn’t count on it.’ And Jessie had replied, in the steadiest voice she could manage, that Bella could absolutely count on it, actually. Bella would always be able to count on her. As Jessie lies on the mattress now, staring up at the flaking plaster on the ceiling, she hopes that one day Bella will see Applecote as a physical manifestation of that promise.

  Yesterday she and Will ran around madly, trying to make the unlived-in house homely for the girls, Will struggling to put together Romy’s cotbed, Jessie scattering their cushions and rugs around the grubby old drawing room so that one place at least felt familiar. Then, after the girls finally fell asleep – Romy in a room adjacent to theirs, Bella in the peculiar little room under the eaves on the top floor, any ghouls or poisonous gases preferable to close proximity to her family – she and Will opened a bottle of warm champagne and walked around, hand in hand, marvelling, giggling like trespassing children in those big draughty rooms lit by bare bulbs, a house they still couldn’t quite believe was theirs.

  Jessie did puzzle at the charred remains of a log fire in the drawing-room grate – it looked so inky-black, not silvered with dust like everything else, and she was sure it hadn’t been there when they’d looked around in January, or their last visit in March. Will joked that someone had clearly broken in to toast marshmallows, and she’d laughed and dismissed it, not wanting to dampen things. They swayed together on the veranda under a fairylight net of stars, and decided that Applecote was tilted more closely to the elements than anywhere they’d ever been, that all the upheaval was worth it. By midnight, Will had conked out, like an overwhelmed child at Christmas, unable to process any more. But Jessie had lain awake, enchanted by the countryside hush, the creak of wood, a tick of a pipe, a faint scurrying, the sense that the house was stirring around her in the darkness, waking again from a dormant state, observing its new inhabitants.

  Jessie’s first restless night at Applecote had jolted her own recent past vividly to the surface. Pitching on the edge of sleep, she could see her life flickering in the room’s shadows, like old film rushes, how it had been so radically rerouted, fast-tracked from one place to another …

  The bijou East London flat she shared with her girlfriend Lou, pre-Will. Flamingo wallpaper. An orange sixties egg chair bought from a shop on Brick Lane. A tumble-dryer scorching ‘hand wash only’ knickers. Jessie is in her early thirties: the decade of wedding invitations has begun, the first pregnancies, and dating has started to feel a bit like a game of musical chairs, no one wanting to be the person left standing. Mostly, she thinks, this is nonsense: if it happens, it happens. She’d rather be on her own than with the wrong person. Still, she can’t help but wonder why it hasn’t happened to her yet.

  She’s applying red lipstick, leaning into a gilt oval mirror in a flatteringly lit room. Her face is wide, girlish, her complexion still undimmed by motherhood’s broken nights, completely unlined since her pale skin has never been able to take the sun. The bedroom reflected in the mirror is tiny, crammed with an old shop rail – smart fifties-style dresses for work, cowboy boots, heels, far too many ankle boots, an ongoing costly quest for the elusive perfect pair – a bookshelf sagging with magazines and second-hand books from her favourite stall beneath Waterloo Bridge, photos she’s never had time to organize in an album even though she has no responsibility for anyone but herself.

  Through the thin, adjacent bedroom wall she can hear Lou and her boyfriend, Matt, giggling, a prelude to the noisy sex that will soon follow, the sex that she isn’t having, and hasn’t had in nearly six months. In her hurry to leave before it gets awkward, she forgets her Oyster card. She likes her Oyster card. Her flat-share. Her busy city life. It still gives her a kick because, like all non-native Londoners, Jessie carries around the knowledge of where she started: a cottage in Somerset, the familiar sequence of noises and smells that is her mother, dressed in her nurse’s uniform, making an intense breakfast for the two of them, the day Jessie leaves for design college in London; Jessie, clutching a holdall of her least uncool clothes; her mother’s eyes wet and needy, making Jessie feel guilty and more desperate to get away. Her judgemental younger self has no idea that she will have a daughter too one day, and that the thought of her little girl ever leaving home will make her feel like weeping. Or that motherhood will make her crave the sort of landscape she is fleeing, the damp soil, the simple worm-turned grassiness of the country childhood her mother worked so incredibly hard to provide.

  Jessie’s polished single self is arriving at work, the design ‘studio’ – a large, beige office – humming with the quiet industry of over-qualified multinational twentysomethings, the beep of software updates, the hiss of the coffee-maker, like a huge industrial machine. Corporate packaging. She’s good at it – she has a reputation for being creative, a little maverick, working on projects late into the night. Sipping a soy latte, she sits in her lime-green ergonomic chair, moving lines about a screen, rotating three-dimensional shapes, considering the typography on a toothpaste tube, but a deeper bit of her brain, the unpredictable irrational bit where desire, dreams and stories live, is wondering if that man will be in the park at lunchtime again.

  Same bench in St James’s Park, close to Horse Guards Parade, where you can
smell peaty horse dung and hear the growl of the diplomatic cars around Downing Street. Older, maybe in his late thirties – she’s always liked this, something to do with growing up without a dad around, Lou says – he is not particularly tall but has wide, strong shoulders, like a swimmer, and a mop of dark hair, a crumpled air of Parisian dishevelment. He is easy to imagine sitting up in bed, naked, smoking, a black-and-white photograph. She is intrigued by the way he stretches out his legs, laces his fingers behind his head and glares up at the sky as if challenging it to a fight. Sometimes, as she walks past, their eyes hook – his an unusual speckled brown – and she feels it as a physical tug.

  Afterwards, she wonders if she’s imagined that connection in order to compete on some silly erotic level with Lou. She cannot imagine this man existing outside St James’s Park. But one warm June evening he materializes miraculously on a Bloomsbury roof-terrace at a party thrown by one of Lou’s boyfriend’s friends. Lit by a halogen beam flickering from a wall of bamboo, he cuts a brooding figure, raking his hand through his hair, smoking fiercely. Like he doesn’t want to be there. She watches him until he notices her, and his expression changes: surprise, something else. He stubs out his cigarette and cuts his way through the crowds. ‘You’re the girl from the park,’ he says, his voice soft, low, already private. She nods, suddenly shy. ‘Will,’ he says, shaking her hand, smiling right inside her.

  They kneel on the bench overlooking the roof-terrace wall, the city spreading beneath them, a landscape of light. Behind their backs, the party is now at a great distance. Will doesn’t laugh much, but there is a woody warmth in his voice that draws her in, a gentle sense of humour, and unlike most men, he asks her lots of questions and listens carefully to her answers. He tells Jessie he’s in ‘the deeply unglamorous business of logistics’, but can’t be trusted to transport his own sunglasses to a party without sitting on them, and pulls out a broken pair from his shirt pocket. She laughs, and wonders why she’s never found logistics fascinating before – you order things one day, they arrive the next! – and she can tell by the way his eyes shine that he’s enjoying her, this conversation, her unlikely enthusiasm. Jessie feels she could talk about these things all night, that there’s a world beneath this world she’s never fully appreciated before, that they all take for granted, like electricity or WiFi or air – but their talk moves on, to the show at the National, their loathing of the gym, their love of Woody Allen, Minstrels, the smell of bonfire smoke, mown paths through long grass, her half-baked dreams of being a freelance illustrator one day, having her own little art studio at home, Will’s dream of selling the company, living a less frenetic life …