The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Read online

  Pam and Flora never thought this day – a fleetingly amusing idea back in May – would actually happen, that there would be an end to London’s dances, gossip and suitors; that Ma, derailed by events of her own making (probably never expecting Sybil to agree to her outlandish idea in the first place), would sail for Africa tomorrow.

  ‘Margot,’ Dot whispers. Her spectacles are smudged with greasy fingerprints from the cheese sandwiches we ate on the train. ‘It is very quiet.’

  ‘As a grave,’ says Pam, swinging her heavy suitcase easily in her hand.

  ‘Maybe they’ve forgotten we’re coming,’ Dot suggests hopefully.

  ‘No, no. They’ll be in the garden on a day like today, that’s all,’ I say. Above the trees, a flock of birds, dozens of black Ms, like Audrey and I used to draw them. My stomach lurches again.

  ‘The gardens are heaven, Dot,’ Flora says, trying to reassure our nervous little sister.

  Pam snorts. ‘Yes, and when we wake up in the countryside tomorrow morning we may well feel like we’ve died.’

  ‘Don’t make everything worse than it is already, Pam. She’s teasing, Dot, don’t worry. Come on, we can’t stand here for ever.’ Flora starts to walk towards the house, her pale blue skirt brushing the lavender, stealing its scent in its folds. The rest of us follow in Flora’s shadow, as we always do, the sun beating down on our snowy legs.

  As we get closer to Applecote, London further away, like it might not exist at all, I’m hit by the odd sensation that I’m walking back in time, cat’s cradling the last five years between my fingers, like elastic, that I might even be able to alter the past somehow, pull Audrey away before anything terrible happens. That if I try hard enough, I can un-vanish her.

  It is Aunt Sybil. It’s not Aunt Sybil. A woman fiercely squirts a tumble of roses beside the garden gate, her fingers on the trigger of a spray. A shock of straight hair, white as table salt, where the vibrant auburn curls used to be. Far thinner, all bone and shadows, her head large on the vine of her neck, she’s not wearing a jaunty yellow dress, the colour of Spanish lemons, the dress I always picture her in, but something heavy, navy and shapeless, as if she’s a season out of step, inhabiting her very own winter. Twenty years appear to have marked her face, not five. My mother’s age, Sybil now looks like she was never young.

  Turning slowly, she seems equally shocked by our appearance. ‘Bunny’s girls? My goodness.’ Her gaze slides cautiously from one of us to the next. Her eyes are small, watery, colourless as puddles. ‘How grown-up you all are,’ she says, three lines pressing between her eyes, like the impression of a fruit fork, as if she finds it unbearable that we have grown up and Audrey hasn’t. ‘So grown-up,’ she repeats numbly.

  We smile awkwardly, not knowing how to bridge the gap between now and the last time we saw her, our childhood and our womanliness, the scabby knees we once had, the bras and girdles we now wear, the fact we are here, while Audrey is not. Sybil makes no attempt to close the distance. She doesn’t open her arms to us, like she used to, or kiss our cheeks, but recoils slightly, as if touching us, getting too close, might burn her.

  ‘You are a very beautiful young woman, Flora.’ Sybil’s thin lips hitch into a smile with obvious effort. Flora modestly bows her head, pretending the compliment is novel, not something people continually remark upon. Sybil turns to Pam, her gaze sweeping over Pam’s feet – two sizes bigger than Ma’s – to her broad sportswoman’s shoulders. ‘Gracious. I did read somewhere that girls are getting taller since rationing stopped.’ She covers a more natural smile with the nail-bitten tips of her fingers. ‘You are very statuesque, my dear. What is Bunny feeding you?’

  Pam bristles. She will not forgive Sybil’s comment easily. ‘You don’t want to know, Aunt.’

  Sybil cocks her head to one side. ‘Oh … is that … little Dorothy?’ Dot is shuffling behind Pam, scraping her sandal on the gravel, trying to camouflage herself in a puff of dust. ‘Dorothy, last time I saw you, you were …’ She lowers her hand to hip height. There is a hiccup, a holding of breath, at the mention of ‘last time’. A small nervous laugh cracks in her throat like glass. ‘… a little sapling of a girl. How old are you now?’

  Dot doesn’t want to say it. The age Audrey was. Everything here swings back to Audrey, the house’s magnetic north. ‘Twelve,’ she manages.

  Something starts beneath Sybil’s skin, a comparison between Audrey and Dot maybe. But thankfully they look so unlike, and are such opposites, Sybil is able to recover quickly. ‘You are swarthy for a Wilde, Dorothy, like a little Italian.’ The silence stretches into the shape of a question, as it always does when people mention Dot’s exotic colouring. ‘Now, you probably don’t remember Applecote very well, do you?’ she says, in the remedial voice grown-ups stupidly use for Dot. ‘The pool? The orchard? The stones in the meadow?’

  ‘I just remember the puppy,’ Dot mumbles, curling one foot behind the other, forgetting all Ma’s instructions to speak loudly and cheerfully, that we’re delighted to be here. ‘And the jam.’

  I suddenly remember how the housekeeper, Moll, would give us jars of Applecote jam – gooseberry, wild strawberry, plum – to take back to Ma at the end of the holidays. It was always something she did in private, when Sybil and Perry weren’t around, so it carried a delicious contraband whiff.

  ‘Well, there’s a lot for a little girl to remember, I suppose. It’s a big house.’ Sybil glances up at her home through sandy lashes, her gaze landing at the porthole window on the top floor. Audrey’s window. Audrey’s room. It winks back, as if about to let us in on a secret. Sybil sighs, adds, ‘Too big really …’ The pause swells painfully. Suddenly we all know what is coming. ‘… now.’

  Pam lets out one of her inappropriate bark laughs, like the ones that escape during assemblies when the head relays news of a despised old teacher ‘passing’. I stare down at my feet.

  Sybil’s Oxford lace-ups swivel towards me on the gravel. I look up slowly and our eyes meet directly for the first time. There’s a violent spasm in hers, a rapid dilation of the pupils. ‘Hello, Margot,’ she breathes.

  ‘Aunt Sybil.’

  She frowns at my legs, the black trousers. ‘How’s your skin, the back of your knees?’ she asks, as if this might explain them.

  Embarrassed, I mumble something about it being up and down. I hate it for being the most memorable thing about me.

  ‘Well, girls …’ She hesitates, her eyes still roaming over my face, as if something about my unremarkable features traps her there. ‘Let’s get out of this unbearable heat, shall we? I don’t remember a summer like it. London must be like Hades.’

  Inside the cool stone-flagged entrance hall, it is still and tense, like the silence following a terrible row. I smell wax polish, vinegar, a domestic order we’re unused to. The oak staircase, wide as a London bus, sweeps into the hall with the same dark red stair runner, unworn by young feet these last five years. The furniture has not, as part of me always fancied, disappeared with Audrey, sucked out of the windows to be strewn across the Cotswolds in scraps of horsehair, floral linen and silk. I scan the hall for signs of our uncle, as one might for a bull in a field, but can’t see anything except a pair of gigantic battered leather boots.

  ‘Margot?’ Flora elbows me, then says, through a forced smile, ‘The present?’

  ‘Oh. Oh, yes. Sorry.’ I dig into my satchel and pull out the cake that Ma’s help, Betty, made a few days ago. It slumps wetly from one side of the tin to the other. ‘It’s from Ma, Aunt. She hopes you like it.’

  Sybil prises off the lid, holding it slightly away from her body. ‘Goodness.’ She blows out sharply, like a puff from a bicycle pump. ‘How kind.’

  ‘A fruit cake,’ Dot clarifies, lest it resembles something else after the long train journey.

  ‘Oh. I never knew your mother was a baker.’ And there are the old tensions again, snapping in the air, like skipping ropes: we all know that what Sybil really means is, ‘Your mother is not inte
rested in homemaking and never has been,’ so we all chime in unison, ‘Oh, she is!’ with such loyal passion that the lie is obvious.

  Sybil frowns down at the cake. And it occurs to me that it must hurt that Ma, a woman who wears her motherhood so lightly, has a reckless surplus of daughters whereas Sybil, who took motherhood so seriously, lost her only one.

  ‘Wildlings!’ booms a voice from behind a closed door. Even Sybil startles, like a hare.

  He has his back to us: mountainous shoulders, a thick neck swelling from the constraint of his shirt collar, the potato-sack sag in the armchair’s base. Moppet, the cloud-grey whippet puppy, no longer a puppy, nervously scrabbles up from her master’s velvet-slippered feet. ‘My back has the devil in its discs today.’ Stout red fingers piano the air. ‘Come here, girls.’

  We slowly walk to face him, our eyes rudely widening. While the last five years have left Sybil thinner and paler, sucked of blood, my uncle has ballooned, his once-handsome face bloated: I’m sure if you pricked it clear juices would run out. Even his head has expanded, its planes – the square flat forehead, the jaw thrusting out, like a padded boxer’s glove – seeming more crudely carved. A gamey smell rises off him in the heat. ‘Wildlings,’ he repeats, with a nod of gruff satisfaction.

  It’s odd hearing it. No one has called us that for five years. After the wildling apple trees, the ones grown from rogue bird-scattered seeds, not carefully planted like those in the orchard, Perry’s affectionate nickname for us was always pipped with criticism of my parents. Perry and Pa famously never got on, even as boys. (‘Brothers always want to murder each other,’ Ma would shrug. ‘It’s sisters you need to look out for. They’re the ones who can break your heart.’)

  ‘So the tribe returns.’ Perry reaches for his drink, studies us down the shaft of his glass, eyes licking over Flora, as all men’s do. Sybil stands stiffly, biting the inside of her cheek.

  ‘We’re so pleased to be back at Applecote. It’s very kind of you to take us in.’ No one can lie as well as Flora. She could get away with murder, Ma always says. ‘We’re very grateful, Uncle.’

  ‘No need for baroque exaggeration,’ Perry says, with a bluntness that makes even Flora colour. ‘You’re Wildes, after all. Couldn’t leave you to get gobbled alive on the streets of London while Bunny goes hopping around the clubs of Cairo, could we?’

  ‘Morocco,’ I point out, sounding a little too pedantic. He lifts an eyebrow, noticing me properly for the first time, his left eye squinting.

  Sweat slides down the inside of my trousers.

  Moppet starts to sniff us nervously, cowering, only accepting a stroke from Dot, whom all animals seem instinctively to trust.

  ‘Ma’s got a job, Uncle. At the consulate,’ says Pam, sharply, the most protective of our mother, and her own role as Ma’s fiercest critic. Perry’s gaze rolls off me and on to Pam. ‘She needs to earn some money,’ she adds.

  At the unmentionable word, I suck in my breath. The silence tilts, sending everything sliding downwards. Then it starts, like far-off thunder at first, his laughter growing louder and rougher, splitting open the air in the room. Sybil turns to stare at her husband in astonishment, as if he has inexplicably started speaking in a different tongue. ‘You never did let manners get in the way of your opinion, did you, Pam? I remember now. Excellent, excellent.’ Perry shakes his head, his belly quivering, his laugh still moving about inside it. ‘Good God. Applecote Manor isn’t going to know what’s hit it. I hope you’re ready for these Wildlings, Sybil. I hope you realize what Bunny’s charmed you into here.’

  ‘I’ll get Moll to show the girls to their bedrooms so they can dress for dinner,’ Sybil says, her voice vinegary. It’s hard to imagine her being charmed by anyone, least of all my mother. It strikes me that she must have her own reasons for letting us stay at Applecote, although I can’t think what. ‘Moll?’

  As if she’d been listening outside the door, Moll steps into the room, smoothing her overall with plump busy hands. Stout, rectangular, with an enormous bosom, Moll has the same crinkled round face, a bit like an old apple. I wait for her to smile.

  ‘You remember my four nieces?’ says Sybil, tightly. ‘Clarence’s girls from London,’ she adds, like an apology in advance.

  Moll smiles: and there it is, the neat black gap of a missing tooth I used to think of as a tiny door. For some reason I’m very glad it’s still there. ‘Welcome back, girls.’ That voice. That accent. Thick with soft country mud, blackberries picked off a hedge. Other things too. Old songs never written down, only ever sung in this valley. Omens, superstitions, country lore that can’t be explained, only understood. ‘If you’d like to follow me,’ she says, a little bit uncertainly, not used to guests.

  We clatter up the staircase behind Moll, scuffing the waxed banisters with our bags, Pam slitting her throat with her finger. Halfway up, Flora grabs my arm. ‘Oh! Look, a photo of you, Margot.’

  I peer closer. A photograph, taken in sharp sunlight, bleaching out the features of a girl with plaits, a cheeky smile. It does sort of look like me, I suppose, caught in a particularly flattering light.

  ‘That’s Audrey,’ Moll corrects in a whisper, her fingers touching the crucifix at her neck.

  ‘Eek, sorry,’ says Flora, pulling a face. Pam snorts.

  We climb the stairs a little quicker then, peering down long landings, with closed doors, windows draped in heavy sepulchral curtains. There are more and more photographs of Audrey, like an accelerating panicked heartbeat, and the house gets darker and stuffier the higher up we go, so that by the time we are on the top floor, Audrey’s floor, Applecote seems to be sealed tight, like one of Moll’s jam-jars, lest fresh air get in, allow what has been so carefully preserved to blacken and rot.

  The top step creaks, just as I remember. The landing is as narrow. The bathroom door is open, revealing the familiar claw-footed bath, the long, dangling chain of the lavatory flush and the damp stain on the wall, in the shape of Ireland, from the drainpipe that always blocks outside. I remember how Audrey would proudly show off the names of East End evacuees – P. L. Trotter, May and Teddy – scrawled under the washbasin, and how she added her own, a neat, carefully perfected autograph, ready for when she grew up and became famous. Like she knew.

  ‘I hope it’s not too hot for you up here,’ Moll says, not quite meeting our eyes. She pulls a handkerchief from her overall pocket, wipes sweat from her bristly upper lip. We’re all playing the game of pretending everything is normal, that a girl of twelve didn’t vanish from Applecote’s grounds five years ago. ‘You’re all back in the same guestrooms.’

  ‘Lovely,’ says Flora, clearly relieved that no one’s going to be shunted into Audrey’s old bedroom.

  It’s hard not to stare at it. At the far end of the landing, the pale door seems to pulse in the gloom, drawing attention to itself like the newest stone in a graveyard. I become aware of Moll frowning at me, as if something in my expression unsettles her. ‘I must tell you that Audrey’s room is strictly out of bounds,’ she says, in a furtive voice.

  Pam shudders. ‘Like we’d ever want to go in there.’

  Waiting for my sisters to collect me for our first dinner, I trace the route of Audrey’s last known journey from my bedroom window: under an early evening August sun, she’d have run through the garden with her crayfishing line, obscured as soon as she got into the Wilderness, passed the bathing-pool, slipped through the gate and cut across the meadow to the deserted riverbank, where Moll would later find her paper bag of dried bacon rinds, a lone crayfish scuttling at the end of the line, like a clue.

  I press my hands against the glass, angry that Audrey is not there still. The only small comfort is knowing how much she would have enjoyed the mystery, the vanishing bit. Becoming such a sensation. I did too, shamefully, although I think Audrey would have understood. Her disappearance lent me a rare celebrity in the Squirrels playground, the popular pretty girls who always ignored me, huddling around, pressing their bodies
against mine, hanging on my every word. I remember the strange new power I felt as they started to sob, one after the other, each louder than the next, grabbing one another, competing for who could feel things more, the explosive emoting spreading like flu, taking out whole classrooms, erupting during the Lord’s Prayer, as if it was they who had disappeared, or their sister, not a girl in the newspapers whom they had never known. Not my beloved cousin from Applecote Manor.

  Or maybe it was just that we all wanted to be Audrey a little bit, Audrey with her forget-me-not eyes and milk-blonde plaits, her picture in the papers. We wanted to be noticed. We wanted to be missed. But not to die. Dying was not glamorous. Dying meant TB, complications from measles, drowning in a rough sea at Margate. But vanishing, like Audrey, that was a delicious mystery, a secret holiday. It meant anything was possible, like finding out you were adopted. Also, for me, it meant I didn’t have to grieve for Audrey, like I did Pa. I didn’t have to think about worms wriggling through eye sockets. And it meant she would come back. Only she hasn’t.

  These last five years, Audrey’s always felt alive but silent, like a pen pal who has discovered boys. Audrey-ish things often flare in my mind: the red heart-shaped buttons on the cornflower-blue dress – which I’d fiercely admired – that she was ‘last seen wearing’; her princessy sleigh bed, the way its woven headboard pressed a constellation of tiny stars on to the skin of our bare girls’ shoulders. I envied so much of what she had: a father (alive), a room of her own under the eaves with a porthole window and a boggle of sky, a red mole that sat on her knee like a ladybird, the way she never had to share her bathwater.

  Yet I always knew I had the thing Audrey most wanted in the world: sisters. She hated the intensity and solitude of being an only child – she’d ripped apart my aunt’s womb by escaping it bottom-first – and grew up craving company, a sister’s unconditional shrug of love. ‘You’ve got a brain like a board game, Margot,’ she’d say sometimes. ‘And you’re really good at drawing toes. If only we could marry each other.’