The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Read online

  Everyone said we looked very similar: the unspoken bit was that Audrey was prettier, her features more finely wrought, better arranged. She was also blonder. Cleverer. Richer. In fact, Audrey was more of everything – a sweet-sharp cordial undiluted by siblings – and by resembling her, but being almost two years younger, falling short of her, I made her superiority obvious, which she liked.

  Pam used to say Audrey bossed me about – pots and kettles – and that I shouldn’t stand for it. But I was happy to submit in order to taste the rare sweetness of being favourite: Audrey made me feel chosen, special. For two weeks every summer, that was all that mattered. She treated Pam warily – sensible. She adored Flora but at an awed distance. She grandly declared Dot too young to be truly interesting: ‘A little insignificant on her own, without the rest of you, like a full stop at the end of a sentence.’ I disloyally agreed with her even though I didn’t see Dot like that at all. Audrey always made words sound good enough to eat.

  I would secretly debate which of my sisters I’d sacrifice so I could have Audrey as a sister instead. The victim changed weekly, depending on how much attention Flora was attracting that day, or whether Pam had slipped a note under my bedroom door saying, ‘Dear Margot, you stole my pen, I hate you, your loving sister, Pam.’ Audrey and I were never tested, like sisters are, never with each other long enough to grow disenchanted. There was nothing to weigh us down – no dead father, no running out of coal on a winter evening – so the time we spent together at Applecote was honeymoon light. And, of course, it was always summer, summers in which we were suspended like the strawberries in the glorious jellies that appeared from the bountiful kitchen.

  Every childish whim was met at Applecote. It wasn’t just the jellies. There was an endless supply of colourful balloons purely for Audrey’s amusement, enormous cupboards stuffed with more toys, board games and children’s books than I’d ever seen. Audrey’s home life seemed to me a never-ending birthday party, albeit without any other guests until we arrived. The moment Audrey and I were reunited, a year older than the last time we’d met, we would lock into the same private world of hide and seek, shadow puppets, handstands against the rough brick of the orchard wall. We’d talk fancifully about how one day, if the wind was strong, when we had enough balloons and hadn’t eaten too much tea, we might fly. It didn’t matter where we went as long as we flew – or crash-landed – together.

  But that last summer Audrey wasn’t interested in the balloons, declaring them too childish, along with jelly and Malory Towers. Something was changing in my cousin. I had no idea what until the morning Audrey pulled me into the apple store – making Dot stand outside – and unbuttoned her blouse to show me how her breasts had budded, impressive at twelve. She made me feel them, tiny cushiony mounds, hard and hot beneath the nipple. Every couple of days we’d return to the cool dark of the store so we could check how they were growing, like greenhouse tomatoes. She reassured me that by next year I would have breasts too. Secretly I wasn’t sure I wanted them.

  How terrible now to remember that I enjoyed saying goodbye that summer, as I did every summer, the heightened drama of it, knowing Audrey would miss me. I was also relieved to get away from the confusion of my cousin’s new breasts, back to the combative simplicity of life with my sisters. Audrey begged to come back to London with us, as she always did – Audrey worshipped Ma as fiercely as her parents disapproved of her – but Sybil would never let her stay in Chelsea, worried that the disorder of our lives might be catching, that we’d fill her head with improper thoughts and nits.

  But it turns out she’d have been safer in London. Five days after we left Applecote, Audrey had gone. ‘Simply vanished, the poor darling,’ Ma told us, in a shaken voice. For years I wilfully accepted Ma’s evasive, elliptical account of events because I didn’t want any of it to be true. The lack of detail meant I could salt the story with hope and adventure, mix true memories with false ones, and make the story of Audrey’s disappearance no different from, no more substantial than, the ghostly yarns Audrey and I used to whisper to each other in the meadow at dusk. Not seeing my aunt and uncle these last five years has allowed me to do this, I realize, not visiting the Cotswolds, rarely hearing Audrey mentioned. But now we’re back at Applecote? Not knowing what happened to Audrey means that even going down to dinner this evening feels like being sent into dangerous terrain without a map. For the first time since she went missing, I realize I desperately need to know the truth.

  The dining room is the colour of the inside of a Bramley apple, a very pale dense green, in its centre a long, narrow rectangular mahogany table, polished to a mirror finish, with many legs in awkward places. Sybil sits very straight at one end, rigid as a board, eyes sharp and darting, Perry at the other. We are under-dressed in our summer frocks: Perry’s sporting a spotty bow-tie and dinner shirt, Sybil an unfashionable long gown – funereal, high-necked, its skirt meanly cut – that gives out the unmistakable pong of mothballs. I notice a livid web of red veins on her un-made-up cheeks – Ma wouldn’t tolerate them for a moment. She’d smother them in Pan Stik.

  No gazpacho: pork, potatoes, peas, dumplings, a huge boat of gravy. Moppet, forbidden any titbits, lies mournfully under the table. Sybil picks at her food, seeming not to enjoy a single mouthful, her face reflected in the polished silver of her dessert spoon, warped in a way that seems to unlock something of her inner torment. Perry, though, eats like a man with a hole inside him that he can never fill, his lips slicked with grease, waiting impatiently for Moll as she bustles back and forth from the kitchen, hers a solid, fluttery presence, like a nervous wood pigeon.

  The air spins with unspoken things, the conversation stilted. Perry says little, his gaze seeming often to travel, disconcertingly, to our mouths. Sybil asks us politely about our studies, our home weekends in London, then coughs into her napkin when Pam tells her about Flora’s friend’s fancy birthday do at the Dorchester, the calypso band’s drums that felt like they were inside you, had taken the place of your heart. Perry puts down his fork for the first time then, listening carefully to Pam, as if soaking up every last detail of a world he’d completely forgotten existed. When she has finally finished – Flora kicks her shins hard under the table – Sybil says tightly that we won’t find anything like that here, the country being a quiet place, not liking foreign music or rowdy parties. ‘More’s the pity,’ Perry mumbles, and Sybil’s mouth forms a hard thin line, like a zip. Pudding arrives, just in time, steaming bowls of apple crumble and custard.

  Sybil eats one mouthful, savouring the taste of her own orchard fruit, but leaves the rest untouched, as if it might be too much pleasure to eat it. Her gaze is continually pulled towards the window, searching for something, seeing something that we cannot. Even as she talks, her attention seems elsewhere, hovering an inch or two above the conversation, like the tiny black flies over the fruit bowl: in this way she’s the opposite of Ma, who has the ability to make you feel, if only for a few seconds, like the only person in the universe who matters.

  It is only later as we shuffle upstairs, exhausted by the forcing of polite conversation, longing to be just the four of us again, so we don’t have to speak at all, that I realize it must be Audrey for whom Sybil is distractedly searching, Audrey she spots, blurring in the corners of the room, smudged in the trees, just as the picture on our television set in London tunes for a brief moment, before a passing motor-car makes it fuzz.

  Pleased with this observation, I expound my theory to my yawning sisters as we huddle together on the landing, reluctant to peel off into our own bedrooms. ‘It’s almost like two layers of time – Audrey here, Audrey gone – have not separated from one another but have elided, don’t you think?’

  ‘No, Margot,’ sighs Pam. ‘It’s like a ghoulish country-house weekend, without any other guests, a place where it’s not taken for granted that we will survive until morning.’

  I can’t sleep. Pam’s words seem less fanciful in the dark: I keep thinking I can hea
r feet padding outside my door, wheezy breathing. I jump out of my skin when Dot bangs on our adjoining wall at about eleven. I find her tearful, sheets pulled up to her chin. She tells me how she parted her curtains to see the sky and it looked far too big, while the earth felt terrifyingly small, hurtling through nothingness in cold space. I hold her in my arms, stroking her silky hair until she falls asleep, then return to my bed alone.

  Midnight now, halfway between night and day, as Applecote itself feels caught between the past and the present, life and death, a house gummed shut, waiting for news that never comes. I flip the pillow to its cool side, releasing a lavender-water scent that makes me miss London’s impolite smells: bus exhaust, Lucky Strikes in Ma’s crisp bottle-blonde curls. The sounds, too, drunken revellers on the street, the rush of scalding water into my mother’s thoughtless midnight baths, then the slap slap slap of the flannel against her imaginary double chin. Here, just a velvet hush shredded by the hoots of owls and foxes that sound like screaming children. Thoughts of Audrey fall through the swirling dark above my bed. I see her head turned to face me on the pillow, trying to tell me what happened that day, but the words keep faltering, stuck in her throat. That’s when I get up.

  ‘Margot!’ Flora hisses.

  Audrey’s doorknob feels warm in my hand: I might have been standing there holding it for a while.

  ‘What are you doing? We’re not allowed in there.’ Moonlight splashes off her nightie, the pearl of her face.

  ‘I – I was just curious,’ I stutter, relieved to have been interrupted. What was I thinking?

  She walks towards me, whispers, ‘Curiosity killed the cat, Margot.’

  ‘I wouldn’t actually have gone in.’ Although I’m not sure. I forgot myself for a moment there, sucked towards the room on a hidden dangerous current. ‘What are you doing out here anyway?’

  Flora widens her eyes. ‘I heard something.’

  My breath catches. ‘Oh?’

  ‘I got it into my head it was Uncle Perry. Prowling the landing.’

  Perry. Of course. It feels good to put a name to that sense of indefinite threat outside my bedroom door.

  ‘But it was you,’ Flora says, sounding almost disappointed.

  ‘No, no. I heard something earlier too.’ I stoke the fear again, and we peer down the dark staircase, half expecting to spot Perry hiding, pressed against the wall.

  Flora folds her arms over her chest with a shudder. ‘Uncle has a bit of a look about him, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I’d say.’ I feel a small, unexpected thrill, an impatience for some kind of drama.

  Flora opens her bedroom door, then hesitates. ‘I can’t get used to the quiet,’ she confides. ‘I even miss Pam’s awful snoring.’

  ‘Shall I come into your room for a bit?’ I don’t much like the privacy I’d thought I craved either.

  Flora snaps on her bedside lamp and botanical wallpaper surrounds us, like a forest. I lie, belly down, on the bed.

  Flora flops beside me, warm and sisterly. ‘You must try not to think about Audrey too much, Margot.’

  ‘How can I not?’

  ‘Well, don’t pick at it, that’s all.’ She pauses, and déjà vu runs through the moment, like silver metallic thread: a close summer evening, back in London, and I’m trying to talk about Pa’s accident and Flora is saying, as she is now, ‘If we think about it too much, it’ll weigh us down, it’ll make life impossible.’ As if we’re four birds that must keep flying upwards or we’ll drop out of the sky.

  ‘Being at Applecote without Audrey feels like borrowing something without asking.’ I lower my head to the mattress. ‘It’s her life. It’s her house.’

  ‘She’d happily lend her life to you of all people.’

  Something inside me lights. I’d never thought of it like that before. I prop myself up on my elbows, resting my face in my hands, a sense of possibility fizzing. I imagine myself crawling into Audrey’s life, under it, like a blanket.

  ‘Although it’s not the same, is it? It used to be so free and easy here.’ Flora kicks up her legs, her feet brushing against mine mid-air. ‘Do you remember how Aunt Sybil would take us moonlight swimming in the river?’

  The image of Sybil, her black-red wet curls flat on her head, her starlit bare shoulders emerging from the river water, swims towards us. ‘She doesn’t look like she would now.’

  ‘No, she really doesn’t.’ Flora studies the ends of her hair under the circle of lamplight, checking for split ends. She looks up and laughs. ‘Jump the well wall! My God. Remember that?’

  ‘Now that didn’t involve Aunt Sybil.’ I laugh, enjoying having my big sister to myself for once. ‘She didn’t know about that one. Audrey swore me to secrecy.’

  The key, Audrey said, was to imagine the narrow well as a shallow pond. Fear made you falter, nothing else. You can do anything if you’re not scared. (She took the same approach to scaling the towering beeches in the Wilderness.) It was the one thing I refused to do, the well. And I wouldn’t let Dot go anywhere near it at any time. It wasn’t just the blackness. Audrey said it was the entry point to the underworld, a labyrinth of tunnels that burrowed right down to the molten core of the earth. That was why if you threw a stone into it, you couldn’t hear the splash. It just kept falling, like a stone in space.

  ‘And stars. All those stars,’ Flora says wistfully.

  We tug open her window. The night gusts in. We pull out the necklines of our nighties, like nets, to catch it, press the cool dark air against our skin, then settle, our chins on the sill. ‘Look.’ Flora points, like we used to years ago from this same window. ‘The Bear … Can you see it?’

  I nod, although I can see only Audrey’s heart-shaped face, stars for eyes, picked out like sequins.

  ‘She must be dead, Margot,’ Flora mutters softly, tuning into my thoughts. ‘She drowned. Everyone thinks so.’

  Audrey’s eyes sparkle before a dark cloud masks them again. ‘No body.’

  Flora shakes her head, curls stippling my arm. ‘They say the river can sweep you all the way down to the London docks some days. All those horrible reed beds too.’

  ‘She could have run away,’ I suggest, not really believing it.

  ‘What would be the point of that?’

  ‘Well, quite.’

  Flora eyes me warily. ‘You got more details from Ma this morning, didn’t you? I heard you haranguing her. And I can tell by the expression on your face.’

  I smile, superior with knowledge, and think of Ma earlier, wilted against the malachite-green parlour wall, surrounded by her trunks, the back of her hand pressed to her forehead in utter exasperation at my questions. She admitted defeat in the end and told me the little she knew, the gaps between facts.

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘Boat people,’ I say cryptically.

  ‘Boat people?’ Flora wrinkles her nose.

  ‘One theory. They stole her. Sooty-skinned river gypsies who wanted a pretty blonde girl to bring up as their own.’ I like this version, Audrey rocking on a narrow riverboat, one of those long barges, gold and green, like something from the circus, full of skinny cats and grubby, happy children, running along the vessel’s narrow flat roof with bare feet. Audrey is smiling and barefoot, too, her plaits silted with river mud, wild and free as an otter.

  ‘I think there might be rather worse things gypsies do to pretty blonde girls, Margot,’ Flora mutters darkly.

  ‘Oh. Yes, of course,’ I say quickly, trying to cover my own naivety. I feel a funny sort of heat imagining what might happen to a blonde girl like Audrey, like me, in the hands of a piratical gypsy man. I squeeze my legs together and change the subject. ‘There were reports of a man in the area too.’ I pause, enjoying Flora’s impatience, the breeze playing around my neck. ‘A key suspect. Close to the bridge. In a hat.’

  ‘Ooh.’ A bat curls towards the window, away again. Then more and more of them, like question marks.

  ‘The police never found him.’

&n
bsp; ‘Bah. Did they find anything?’

  I shake my head. ‘Hopeless, Ma says. Swung a torch on a rope into the well. Checked the spades in the shed for blood. Oh, yes, and searched the village houses belonging to the funny types … you know, the men who had never married, the village idiot – at least, the child-murdering sort. But it was too little, too late. A bit of a scandal afterwards. One police officer lost his job.’ I put on my grand, high Ma voice, imitating her, fluttering my lashes. ‘Darling, if you’re going to vanish and prefer to be found, I’d advise you to vanish in London under the beady eye of Scotland Yard.’

  Flora’s laugh tails off into sadness. We sit in silence for a moment, our thoughts separating. Then Flora says, ‘But what about the obvious?’ and the conversation plunges somewhere darker, gathering speed.

  ‘Moll was the last person to see her, that’s true,’ I acknowledge. ‘Sybil and Perry were out that evening but Sybil gave Audrey permission to fish before they left, Ma said, so that wasn’t Moll’s fault, or idea, Audrey being by the river alone. And Moll was the one who searched and searched for her, walking miles and miles through fields with a stick, who never deserted Sybil and Perry afterwards, not like the rest of the staff. Anyway, don’t you remember how Moll adored Audrey?’

  Flora drops her voice to a barely audible whisper. ‘I don’t mean Moll.’

  ‘Oh.’ Something unspoken seesaws between us. The hairs on my arms spike.

  ‘The police, however dozy, must surely have considered it, Margot, even if he did have an alibi.’

  I feel my heart quicken. I think of his bullish neck. His huge shoulders. The peculiar way Ma mentioned my uncle’s name, her lips closing around a cigarette, stopping more details getting out. ‘You know, Flora, thinking about it, I did get the sense Ma wasn’t telling me everything.’

  To my surprise, Flora suddenly reaches up and pulls the window shut. ‘Let’s stop this. Audrey is long gone.’

  ‘You don’t want to talk about it?’ I ask, baffled. All these years of not talking about Audrey have built up in my brain and are now pressing hard against it.