The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde Read online

  ‘Oh, yes, I forgot about that. Perfect rainy-afternoon activity. It’ll make that bedroom finally feel like yours, Bella, it really will. Wait for us.’ By the time Jessie’s grappled Romy out of her swimsuit, the meadow is empty, only the stones huddled like a group of small old men in long grey coats. She doesn’t like it much, not with Will in London, the responsibility of the girls suddenly all hers.

  The isolation that Jessie’s relished these last two weeks feels almost threatening now. All August, it’s seemed almost unearthly quiet – ‘With a sort of two-centuries-behind lag,’ as Bella cannily describes it – and Jessie’s loved that too, the way the roads have been empty, apart from the occasional coach full of bemused tourists, usually pulled up in front of Cornton Hall, the grand house on the outskirts of the village, even though it’s shrouded in scaffolding and green netting that billows in the wind, like sails. Sometimes it feels that everyone’s left but them.

  ‘Dog,’ Romy announces, with a grin.

  Jessie looks up from the swim bag, and is immediately struck by a sense that something is not quite right. There are two black dogs charging along the riverbank, as if called by their owner, a shadowy figure hidden beneath a huge umbrella, walking smartly away. Is it that woman again? Was she secretly watching her swim? The thought makes Jessie feel strange. She stuffs the towels into the bag quickly, wanting to get home.

  She is glad when the meadow gate clicks shut behind them. Gladder still when Romy shouts, ‘Bell-Bell!’ and points excitedly through the trees to where Bella leans back against a huge beech, inspecting something in her hand. ‘Oh, Rom, wait!’ Jessie calls, exasperated, chasing after her tiny daughter, who gets faster by the day.

  Both girls are in thrall to the detritus Applecote’s soil spits up: old teacups, shards of plates, rusted gardening forks, shilling coins, tiny broken things that Bella is piecing together to create a sort of character sketch of the house: ‘Since there’s nothing else to do,’ she explains, in case Jessie thinks she may be enjoying herself.

  In the house, Bella’s discovered names scrawled beneath the basin in her little bathroom, only a few letters decipherable, a large A with a swirly, exuberant curl to it. Last week, newspapers fell out of a cavity in the kitchen cupboards, yellow and crumbly as filo pastry, dated from the late fifties. The headline – ‘It’s a Scorcher!’ – was about a heatwave in 1959, ‘Which shows the house has a sense of irony at least,’ remarked Bella, carrying the papery quarry up to her room. And then there’s the children’s things Will found in the attic – a handy child’s high chair, a toy pram, some old wooden bricks, pastel alphabet letters on their faded papered sides.

  Jessie can see the previous owner, Mrs Wilde, in her mind now: a sturdy, cheerful countrywoman surrounded by mischievous pretty young daughters, rocking a cradle with her foot by the fire. She imagines her pounding dough in the kitchen, snapping out starched sheets on the beds upstairs. But, then, she’s always had a terrible habit of imagining life stories, of elderly ladies in particular. (One of her ‘things’, Will affectionately calls it.) In London, she sees old ladies waiting at bus stops, and transforms them into Blitz survivors, code breakers, once glamorous mink-coated women rendered invisible by stained beige padded jackets. For this reason she will always stand up and offer her seat to them on the Tube or bus, make a point of smiling and chatting about the weather. As Will points out, when her own mother does an old-personish thing, asks what an app is or loses her reading specs in her handbag, Jessie gets irritated. But mothers are different. Everyone gets irritated by their mother. Apart from Bella, whose mother will be for ever perfect.

  Later that afternoon, once the hammering has finally stopped, Jessie knocks on Bella’s bedroom door, holding a stack of the just-delivered Squirrels’ school uniform under one arm. No answer. It strikes Jessie, not for the first time, that Bella’s bedroom door has a funny sort of force field to it, and that even the landing has an odd atmosphere, a sense of compression as you walk down it.

  ‘Button,’ Romy mutters, pressing her eye to the keyhole, as if she might spot the button Bella found in the Wilderness earlier, a funny little thing, faded pink plastic that might have been red once, heart-shaped.

  She knocks again. Nothing. Deciding that Bella probably has her headphones on, Jessie gingerly pushes open the door with her knee. ‘So did you manage to get your pictures …’ She gasps.

  Bella is nowhere to be seen. But Mandy, Mandy is everywhere. Dozens of photos that Jessie’s never seen before: Mandy pregnant, blooming, Will kissing her belly; Mandy and Will swinging a tiny cute Bella over a jumble of autumn leaves; Mandy lying on a beach, wearing one of her signature kaftans, laughing, Bella’s head in her mother’s lap. A gallery of private moments from which Jessie will for ever be excluded.

  Jessie’s always known such moments must have existed – although she and Will rarely discuss them – but actually seeing them, documented on the walls of Applecote, the day after Will’s departure, shakes her to the core. She feels as if she’s been chased down by them and, for a moment, she cannot breathe.

  Romy explores the fascinating, forbidden zone of her big sister’s bedroom, while Jessie moves in a sort of trance. The photos pop from the dark walls – Bella insisted on sludge grey, exactly the same shade as their London house – that she and Bella painted together last week to make it more homely. Was Bella always planning this? Did she know that afternoon as they painted side by side, listening to the radio? Was she waiting for Will to be out of the house? Jessie can’t help feeling betrayed.

  But the worst thing of all – and Bella must have known this – is how bloody amazing Mandy and Will look together. Mandy’s face is chiselled, androgynous – the exact opposite of Jessie’s girl-next-door prettiness – with a piercingly intelligent gaze beneath an inky Hepburn crop, one of those serious hairstyles adopted only by women confident of their cheekbones. Unlike Jessie’s chaotic clash of eras and colours, Mandy’s style is faultless, a restrained palette of beige, navy and black, a slash of red. She exudes self-possession, a woman who has bigger things to think about than what ankle boots to wear in the morning, a human-rights lawyer, after all. Jessie gawps at her, painfully aware of her own crumpled jersey dress, the smell of the river on her skin, the grubby old feather Romy’s stuck in her pinned-up mess of red hair.

  It’s just Bella’s way of not leaving her mother behind, nothing else, she tells herself. It’s not about me. She must shut the door, go downstairs and face Bella calmly, like there is nothing wrong. But she doesn’t. Something powerful holds Jessie in that room of her own dark imagining, transfixed by the woman she was hoping to escape.

  It looks like Mandy herself might have just got undressed in here – a stylish black felt fedora sits on a bedside chair, the silk dressing-gown swishes from the back of the door, and an indigo kaftan is slung casually across the sleigh bed, the same one, Jessie realizes with an inward jolt, that Mandy wears in the beach photograph.

  It’s like being immersed in Mandy. It’s like diving into her. And maybe that’s why Jessie does it. Because the room has a current, a pull to it, something that makes her put down the school uniforms and pick up that kaftan, rub its beautiful crewel embroidery between her fingers, and then, knowing she shouldn’t, that she’s crossing a line, she holds it up, letting it rustle down over her legs, puddle on the floor. She presses the cool cotton against her breast, the accelerating pump of her heart.

  ‘Pretty, Mummy.’

  Jessie starts. Romy is sitting on the bed, holding the heart-shaped button between her fingers, looking a little puzzled by this strange new version of her mother.

  Horrified at herself – what if Bella walks in? What would Will think? – Jessie throws the kaftan back on to the bed. Flustered, she wrestles the button out of Romy’s closed fist and hurries them both away from that strange little room under the eaves where, for a moment, she had felt she might lose herself completely.

  6

  The evening sun is huge, gold as
a grapefruit, making the silhouetted figures glow at the edges, rays burst out of their heads. We catch the young men’s voices, bubbles on the breeze blowing up the hill, popping when the wind changes direction. We don’t dare speak, risk ruining the moment, already perfect, that we’ve somehow willed into being through the sheer force of our collective longing.

  They saunter slowly, carelessly, until the anticipation is almost unbearable, their steps synchronizing with the patter of our hearts, the quickening of our breath. We can tell they’re not locals: their trousers are cut close, not baggy country-boy breeches. Smart hair, floppy on top, short at the sides. When the breeze blows it flattens summer shirts against sinewy bodies, not the beefy bulk of farmhands.

  ‘I’m not sure about this,’ says Dot, suddenly, decapitating a daisy with her thumbnail. ‘Shouldn’t we go back for dinner?’

  ‘Ssh, Dot.’ Pam arranges her dress around her legs, so that only her best calf is revealed, her navy-blue eyes trained on her targets with predatory focus.

  As the men’s attractiveness becomes more obvious, I feel a wave of self-consciousness about the lack of my own, eased only by the knowledge that I’ll be overlooked in favour of Flora anyway. ‘Should we stand up?’ I whisper.

  ‘Have you grown a beard?’ Pam murmurs.

  Flora glances at me, laughs. ‘Oh, Margot, you’ve got your nervous grimace on. You look like a murderess. Be natural.’

  ‘Nonchalant,’ hisses Pam.

  ‘Smile,’ mutters Flora, through the rictus of her own.

  I smile so hard my jaw aches. There is a trail of crushed grass behind them, like the tail of a comet. We could be the last two surviving groups of people on the earth, each imagining ourselves to be alone until now. A strange hush falls as they approach, just the whoosh of the grasses moving in the breeze, the fibrous crunch of their footsteps. We discreetly nudge each other – Pam’s fingers flicking against my knee, Flora’s toes on Dot’s arm – in a mark of sisterly solidarity, before holding our siren poses once more.

  ‘Ladies.’ He speaks with no trace of a country accent. Since he is far too handsome to look at directly – dark, Roman-featured, he might have tumbled out of a Renaissance painting – I watch tanned, elegant fingers stub out the cigarette against a stone, snapping its spine in half. Sparks shower down, setting light to the tussock of dried grass beneath it. It is the other young man, the shorter, sandy-haired one, with a round freckled face, like a harvest moon, who stamps it out. ‘We won’t set the summer ablaze just yet.’

  How old? Nineteen? Twenty? I don’t know enough men to guess accurately. All I know is that the shorter, sandy one is staring right at me with leonine yellowy-hazel eyes, and the point where our glances meet seems to solidify in mid-air, like something I could reach out and touch.

  ‘Sorry, I forget my manners. I’m Harry. Harry Gore.’

  The name is vaguely familiar. But I can’t place it.

  He grins, drops his wicker picnic basket on the ground where it clanks. Brown-glass bottle tops nose out of it. ‘And this is my cousin, Tom. Fire starter.’

  Tom taps out another cigarette from the packet, clicks his metal lighter under his thumb, a chunky silver lighter, like Pa’s from the army.

  ‘Pam.’ My sister leaps up, does an extravagant deb’s curtsy, one leg behind the other, dropping low, making everyone laugh, breaking the tension. But Harry and Tom’s eyes are already sliding to Flora. And I’m reminded of the unfairness of being female, that even if Pam and I were the kindest, most fascinating girls in the entire world, these men would still be staring at our exquisite older sister.

  ‘And you are?’ Harry asks gently, his eyes tracking upwards from Flora’s bare feet – she must have kicked off her shoes without me or Pam noticing; if we had, we’d have done the same – to the creamy-blonde curl coiled loosely around her finger, like a question only she can answer.

  ‘Flora,’ she says slowly, honey off a spoon. She flicks her violet eyes at Tom, looks down again, then back at him. He stares at her with a look of awed wonder.

  ‘Flora,’ Harry repeats slowly, beneath his breath, his gaze moving so reluctantly away from her to me that I feel bad for depriving him.

  ‘I’m Margot,’ I pre-empt apologetically, before he feels he has to ask. I notice the oppositions of his face, the way his careless, boyish grin seems at odds with the serious knit of his eyebrows. Something crackles around us, like the flame in the grass.

  He cocks his head, trying to place me. ‘Have we met before?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ I don’t know how I should sound. How to sit. What I should do with my hands. To shift his attention from my burning cheeks, I say quickly, ‘And this is our little sister, Dot.’

  ‘Ah, Dot.’ Harry squats beside her. A silver-lidded pen pokes out of his back trouser pocket, like a pet. ‘You know, I think that might be the longest daisy chain I’ve ever seen.’

  Dot smiles shyly. I like him for noticing Dot’s daisy chain. For the pen in his pocket. For being less obviously handsome than his cousin, the way his features are arranged slightly wrongly on his face, making them right.

  ‘Applecote Manor,’ says Pam, artlessly shoving our new social credentials into the conversation. ‘We’re staying there with our aunt and uncle. The Wildes? With an e. Do you know them?’

  At the name Wilde, a million tiny strings seem to be yanked beneath the surface of Tom and Harry’s skin at the same time. ‘Yes, we do,’ says Harry, grabbing the cigarette packet and lighter out of Tom’s hand, then sticking a cigarette into his mouth, an excuse not to say anything else.

  ‘Our mother is abroad,’ explains Flora, sensing the kink in the air, subtly trying to distance us from Applecote again. ‘So we were shipped out here from Chelsea.’

  ‘Like evacuees,’ quips Pam.

  Harry blows out a puff of smoke, his eyes catching Tom’s again. And a fragment of an old summer reassembles: Audrey and I in the meadow, early morning, two older boys across a foggy river, waving at Audrey through the mist, Audrey waving back. ‘Did you know our cousin, Audrey?’ I ask, the words flying out into the gap in the conversation before I can stop them. ‘Audrey Wilde?’

  Pam widens her eyes at me, telling me to shut up.

  But it’s too late. Harry’s face has changed again, as all faces change whenever I bring up Audrey: that spasm of recognition followed by something blank and awkward. ‘We did know Audrey, a little. When we were young.’

  Tom’s Adam’s apple dips and rises. He offers Flora a sincere, apologetic smile. ‘Dreadful business. I’m so sorry.’

  Harry’s freckled lips are slightly parted, as though he might have more to say on the matter.

  But Pam jabs a finger into my ribs so I don’t ask any more questions and Audrey is swept away, as she always is, by the clearing of throats, the slide of eyes, and exists only as an omission again.

  ‘Where are you two staying?’ asks Pam, brightly, brushing grass off her dress.

  ‘Cornton, my parents’ place.’ Harry nods at the rooftops in the distance, as if Cornton Hall were a small thatched cottage rather than the most extravagant house for miles, rising on the hill at the edge of the village, like a patriarch at the table. ‘Do you know it?’

  A secret smile flashes between Pam and Flora.

  ‘But we’re not there much.’ He tilts his face back and blows smoke rings, one, two, three, like nooses of rope. ‘My parents prefer their London house these days.’

  ‘Or that scruffy little dive in the Côte d’Azur,’ teases Tom, making me suspect he doesn’t come from such wealth himself.

  ‘The Côte d’Azur.’ Pam sighs longingly, all nonchalance forgotten. ‘Lucky you.’

  Harry nods, as if he doesn’t quite believe it. ‘They’ve handed us the keys for one last summer here anyway.’ The word ‘last’ hangs in the still air, making everything feel urgent, soon to be lost. ‘My last hurrah before I go up to Oxford, Tom here to National Service,’ he explains, with an easier smile. ‘Doing rather
well on the domestic front, aren’t we, Tom, darling?’ Tom laughs. ‘A perfect married couple. We’ve only flooded one bathroom and smashed two vases so far.’

  ‘We? You.’ Tom’s sharpness suggests this is an argument they’ve had before.

  Tom and Harry stare at each other, each refusing to look away, jockeying for position, an old rivalry that the rest of us can only guess at, until Harry bends down and holds up a beer bottle with a stack of battered metal tumblers that makes me wonder if they knew we were here. ‘Shall I be mother?’

  We sneak thrilled glances at each other, trying to read the other’s reaction. We might sip half a glass of champagne at a party, but beer in a meadow with strange young men? Unthinkable.

  ‘The local brew. Tastes better than it smells, I promise.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you …’ begins Flora, taking the moral lead.

  ‘Yes, please.’ Pam sticks out a hand and tosses her hair. Dot’s eyes widen behind her glasses.

  Flora, annoyed that Pam has made her look prim, says, ‘Since when did you drink beer, Pam?’

  Pam shrugs. ‘I’m dying of thirst.’

  Flora hesitates, laughs. ‘Oh, you know what? I’ll have one too.’

  ‘Flora,’ I mutter in astonishment, wondering where this will all lead, if we’ve been out too long in the sun. Or whether it’s just the stones themselves, the way their shadows are lengthening, lapping at the grass, making the red sky spin. But Harry is already pouring beer into the tumblers, the liquid foaming over the sides, like thick cream. He hands them to Pam and Flora, who sniff it curiously, as if it were some strange elixir.

  ‘You might be a little young for beer,’ Harry says to Dot sweetly. ‘So I bequeath to you my water flask.’ He turns to me, yellow eyes glinting. ‘But you …’