by Eve Chase
Then, without warning, like a man urgently compelled to declare his true identity, he blurts out that his wife died in a cycle accident just over a year before. In the distance, a fluming firework, a splatter of red. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, forgetting herself, having drunk more than she meant to, reaching for his hand. Before she has a chance to feel foolish, his fingers close over hers as if they’ve been waiting for them. And in the pressure of his fingers she feels his need for contact. They sit in silence, an electric current circuiting their hands, their bodies. It is both the strangest and most intensely natural ten minutes of her life. When she looks up people are leaving, shooting them curious second glances. He doesn’t take her number. For some reason, she cries all the way home.
By the following evening Will has got her email. He suggests meeting in the park at lunchtime on Monday. It sounds sweet, chaste. And it feels like an invitation to a dirty weekend in Paris. ‘Very, very complicated,’ warns Lou, who’s asked around about Will and discovered a daughter, ‘who sleeps clutching her dead mother’s nightie’, and a handsome widower known not to be on the market for anything more than no-strings hot sex. ‘Damaged goods, Jess,’ she says. ‘He’ll break your heart.’
Jessie agrees. She meets him on Monday anyway. There are wiry dark hairs flattened under his watch. She can’t stop looking at them. Will’s smile always starts in his eyes, spreading slowly, remaining there even when his mouth has stopped smiling. He has a way of teasing her, a bit like a brother would, someone she’s known all her life. She likes it, even though she doesn’t feel remotely sisterly to him. He is endearingly intrigued by her creativity, as if she were an artist, not someone who designs soup packets. He makes her see that she’s got too used to herself, like a person in a stale marriage ceases to see their spouse for who they are: she’s forgotten she can intercept the trajectory of her life, completely redesign it. They meet up every day that week because it feels a mad squandering of happiness not to. They visit galleries, seeing familiar artworks entirely anew. They wander central London’s back-streets, the city never looking more beautiful. He does not try to kiss her.
One day, Jessie runs home from work and falls into Lou’s arms in despair. Disaster. Code red. She’s fallen in love with a man who doesn’t fancy her. ‘It’s fur-coat-and-no-knickers time,’ advises Lou, pouring Jessie a glass of white wine while opening a bag of Twiglets with her teeth.
So it is that three weeks after the party, one sunny July lunchtime, she meets him in her success dress – tiny waist, a breathless starlet décolletage, the red a brilliant, unforgettable clash with her gleaming copper hair – and teaches him swing dance steps in the park, the ones she’s learned at her Hackney evening class, not caring about the people staring, pressing him close to her, feeling his knotted body soften, something in him give. Afterwards they lie in the grass laughing, and he pins her to the ground by her wrists, lowers his face to hers and they kiss for the first time. She blows him away, he whispers, his eyes full of tears, his lips brushing her ear lobe, a gust of Heaven, a light in a deep, pitch-black mine. Later that day, after work, in her tiny bedroom, he will peel off that red dress (the dress that hasn’t fitted since she had Romy), and kiss her singleton’s drum-flat belly, her thighs, her neck, over and over until it is impossible to tell where she ends and he begins. The noise of the office, Lou and Matt fucking, the traffic roaring beneath her bedroom window, the pain of a sandal blister on her heel, it is eclipsed that summer by the sheer lust and happiness that turn her into one of those London women who smile and blush to themselves as they swing from a handrail in a hot crowded Tube carriage …
The memory started to fade: a peachy dawn light nosed its way into their Applecote bedroom, wiping Jessie’s old life from the shadows, as if to say, ‘Do you see how all those disparate moments were connected, plotted like a line to this old house in this remote Cotswold valley? You are here now. Sleep.’ And she did.
‘Oh, Jessie.’ Will opens one eye, takes in his strange surroundings. The corners of his mouth curl with a sleepy smile. ‘Where are we? What have you made us do?’
Laughing, she kisses him on the lips. She likes the animal taste of him in the morning. ‘Coffee? I’ll hunt down the pot.’ She grabs the nearest clothes from her suitcase – a yellow tea dress, smelling of the London house. ‘Brr. This place needs warming up.’
‘I’ll chop logs later.’ He grins. ‘You know, I think I might have been waiting all my life to say that.’ Propping himself on his elbows, Will watches his wife brushing the restless night’s tangles from her hair.
When she was pregnant, Will would brush it for her, their eyes locked in the mirror, her hair luxuriant with hormones, floating with static, as they seemed to float above ordinary life. There hasn’t been much time for that sort of thing since Romy was born or in the last manic few months since they decided to move. This summer, Jessie thinks, these last two weeks of summer, we will find the time and peace to be that couple again. The agony of decision-making is over. They are here. For better, for worse.
Walking into the kitchen, Romy a warm, dense weight on her hip, Jessie can taste the weather in the room. It is draughty, damp, stirred by the smells of the morning garden, even though the windows are all closed and the black range radiates a doggy heat. The oldest part of Applecote, it’s easy to imagine a dumpy cook making pies in here, a maid scrubbing mud-clagged potatoes, the beams greasy with lamp smoke. She loves the bath-sized butler’s sink, the butcher’s block, scarred with knife and scorch marks, the rows of cavernous wall cupboards still stuffed with dented copper pans.
Jessie loves it because it is the opposite of their modern stainless-steel London kitchen, Mandy’s kitchen, the site of those indelible awkward dinner parties of the early days: Romy screaming down the baby-monitor, Will’s friends, older than her, far more successful and serious, until they got drunk and the husbands would stare at her with an odd mixture of envy and suspicion, and make jokes about Will being thrown back into the nappy years, and the wives would start crying about Mandy, then apologizing, flapping their hands, and saying they’re sure Jessie’s lovely too, which made it worse. Yes, she’s happy to say goodbye to all that. A dishwasher would be nice, though.
Making a mental note to call the plumber, Jessie arranges Romy on a cushion on one of Applecote’s spindle-back chairs – Romy’s still too small to reach the farmhouse table properly, and her own high chair was broken in the move. Romy sits, not wriggling for once, gazing around the room in wonder, eating dry Cheerios from a plastic bowl.
It’s like the first day in a holiday house. Jessie digs the coffee pot from a cardboard box, sets it up on the unfamiliar range and hopes for the best. After a while, a satisfying drip falls from it and beads on the hot plate, rolling, fizzing, until it vanishes entirely with a sizzle, like their London life.
‘Bell-Bell,’ she hears Romy chunter.
Jessie turns around, smiling, then starts. Bella is wearing a dove-grey silk dressing-gown Jessie’s never seen before, her dark hair loose, swirling dramatically over her shoulders. ‘Wow, where did you …’
‘Mum’s,’ Bella says, defiant yet needy of approval.
The word sucks the air from the room. The dressing-gown ripples. It has fine black lace edging, Jessie notices, a discreet sensuality. And it looks expensive, very expensive. A gift. A Valentine’s present, maybe. Jessie is aware of the high risk in saying the wrong thing at this point.
‘It was in the boxes of Mum’s stuff – the boxes Dad brought down from the attic at home?’ Bella watches Jessie’s reaction carefully.
Jessie nods, her mouth dry. In the chaos of the last few hours, she’d forgotten about those two boxes, Mandy Boxes. She’d never been sure what they contained – photos maybe, some of Mandy’s more poignant things; it felt way too intrusive to ask – only that Will stored them away shortly after she’d moved into the London house, in a way that had seemed sweetly symbolic at the time. ‘Well, it’s … very glamorous,’ Jessie says
, recovering herself. ‘How did you sleep in your new bedroom?’
‘Like a bad trip,’ Bella retorts sharply, grabbing at the cereal box, leaving Jessie to worry if the reference is serious, based on an authentic druggy experience.
She sighs silently. Silly to expect Bella to embrace the move straight away. These last two weeks of August will be a period of transition. They must bear with it until Bella starts at Squirrels Ladies College, a stable new routine. Squirrels, as it’s known, is an independent – unlike Bella’s London school, or either Jessie’s or Will’s old comps – and ruinously expensive. But all the decent local state sixth forms were full and they’ve decided it’s better to forgo expensive building works and foreign holidays than take a risk with Bella’s education at such a tender point. It also has an unflappable headmistress who wasn’t spooked by Bella’s last school report.
‘But …’ Bella leans back against the warm range, picking at her bowl of cereal with her fingers. ‘I did get an excellent view of our stalker from the window.’
Now, where might she find their first nosy neighbour? Jessie remembers them clearly from her own childhood, those benign bustling village women who knew your business without ever being told. They’d always turn up on newcomers’ doorsteps, clutching Tupperware boxes stuffed with scones. She’d like to say hello. Anyway, it’s an excellent excuse to explore the garden.
She blows a stream of kisses to Will and Romy at the kitchen window, then walks away from the stone veranda, her heart quickening. The garden has changed almost beyond recognition since January. No winter windows between bare whiskery branches now, just soaring walls of green. A leafy puzzle of edges, beginnings and endings, it feels like the kind of impenetrable garden that might change shape as you walk through it, lead you out of one century into another.
Roses are everywhere, their stems running amok, like feral teenagers who have taken over in their parents’ absence (Jessie knows something about this). Amorphous lumps of yew and box squat in the overgrown lawns. Beyond them, the ground starts to undulate, swelling over the splayed toes of trees, following the inclines of forgotten paths, ponds and beds, tracing the garden’s original structure, like a lost ancient settlement. And the Wilderness is so verdant, tangled, it no longer resembles garden at all, the tiny historic well – sealed, thank goodness – just visible beneath a dense hive of brambles, like a chimney to a hobbit’s house.
Nothing is quite how Jessie remembers it. The apple store’s warped wooden door is ajar, revealing a deserted wasps’ nest hanging from the rafters, like an enormous hard cheese. The small dirty shed window has been polished in a circle by a hand from inside, the fingermarks still visible. Peering through it, she notices a scuff of muddy footprints on the shed’s wooden floor, and her mind trips back to the charred fire in the drawing-room grate again. Someone has been in there recently. She feels a tiny flicker of disquiet.
But the orchard welcomes her with a cheery clack of jackdaws, the buzz of waspy plums. And it is as she is reaching up, plucking a biblical red apple, that she catches movement on the other side of the sagging perimeter wall, and remembers the purpose of her mission. Jessie climbs on to a tree stump and peers over, just in time to see a woman walking away: a leopard-print headscarf tied, silver hair curling beneath it, two black Labradors. The same woman Bella described earlier. Jessie calls shyly, ‘Hello there!’
The dogs glance back, tug on their leads. But the woman quickens her pace and is soon obscured by hedgerows as the lane twists away.
Oh, thinks Jessie. Maybe she’s just hard of hearing. Maybe they do things differently in the country now. She stays there a moment, hanging on with her small strong hands, her yellow dress blowing around her legs. It’s beautiful, the floury clouds, the wild flowers, the birds, but feels surprisingly lonely.
Not wanting to return to the house on a flat note, Jessie delves deeper into the garden, dwarfed by the trees into something more doe-like, vulnerable, as she searches for the rectangle of liquid darkness she can see from her bedroom window. The pool gate shivers as it opens, kissing a peeling forget-me-not blue paint to her palm. Bordered by the looming yew on one side, rose-scrambled walls on the others, the area feels completely cut off from the rest of the garden, eerily seductive. The rainwater collected in the tank has a cinematic jet-bead glitter, the visible cold of an underground lake. And at each corner of the pool stands a goddess statue, fragile, beautiful, broken, like survivors of some terrible natural disaster.
The otherworldliness holds her there. Jessie sits down on the pool’s edge, her feet dangling, the reflection of her sandal soles flashing on the water, like pale fish. And the anxiety she’s felt so often these last few months bubbles up again, taking her by surprise. Maybe it’s the leaves rotting on the surface, the thought of how they’d close over her head if she fell in. The water’s vertigo pull. But Jessie can’t stop her mind spiralling back to what Bella did in London, and something of that day returns, that heart-stopping phone call from the school – Bella Tucker? Yes, it’s her stepmother speaking, her father’s away, yes, you can definitely talk to me … She has promised to forget about it, like Will, and take Bella at her word. Only she hasn’t, not quite.
Seeking escape from the chaff of such thoughts, Jessie looks up at the lime-yellow tree canopy, stirred by gusts undetectable at pool level. She half closes her eyes. She lets the garden wrap itself around her, sounds becoming brushstrokes: the neon chatter of birdsong; the blue of the wind; and something else, sepia, weightless child’s footsteps. Jessie starts and glances at the gate, expecting to see Romy and Will. ‘Romy?’ she calls hesitantly. ‘Will? Bella?’
Silence. There is no one, of course, nothing at all, just a magnesium lick across the pool that dazzles momentarily, leaving behind her own wavering reflection, and something else, something that makes Jessie lean forward, heart racing, and part the slurry of leaves with her fingers to check that the submerged smudge is not a body bobbing at the bottom of the pool, just a trick of the light.
4
Ma’s not wrong. Applecote Manor is just the same, the iron front gate, the house behind it creamy and solid, like a block of vanilla ice-cream. Clouds of lavender, drowsy bees. Uncle Perry’s black Daimler on the drive, powdered with pollen. The high garden walls – although they don’t seem quite as high as they once did – are garlanded with fat baby-pink roses, the size of Ma’s hats, so unlike the buddleia and ragwort that explode out of London’s old bombsites and thread into our terrace garden. Behind the wall, its stone scorched white as teeth in the July sun, the head of a topiary peacock that, as a small child, had made me think of the garden as an animal enclosure at London Zoo, although the animals were made of clipped box hedging, delicately sculpted by gardeners with shears.
The last five years seem to have been snipped away too. Even the sky is as I remember it, huge, blue, warm as a bath, the air transparent, not washing-up-water tinged as it is in London, alive with butterflies and birds, so many birds. So much is the same that it highlights the one crushing, unbelievable thing that is not: Audrey isn’t about to come belting out of the house, running down the path, excitedly calling my name.
‘Margot, are you okay?’ Flora asks, concerned, as the taxi that met us at the railway station rumbles into the distance. ‘You look sort of peaky. Don’t be sick on your sandals. You’ll never scrub the stench out of them.’
I bend over, head spinning, hands on my knees, not knowing how to explain that we’re all older, coming of age – I’m wearing black Capri trousers that make me feel like Françoise Sagan – and Audrey is for ever a girl in a blue dress the colour of meadow cornflowers.
‘Ah, the curse,’ Pam diagnoses briskly. ‘It lives up to its name in this heat. You just have to soldier through it, Margot.’
I straighten slowly, wondering how it is possible that my sisters are not feeling it too. Audrey’s disappearance has been pressed on to our lives faint as a fingerprint until today – the subject taboo, rarely discussed, too aw
ful to think about, irreconcilable with the gay tug of our everyday lives – but here it is physical, internal, like a snap of bone beneath the skin.
‘Better?’ asks Dot, sweetly.
I nod. Even though I fear this is just the start.
The sun daggers into our eyes. We lift our hands simultaneously, shielding from its beams. A small stalling action that puts another moment between this one – the familiar taste of London still gritty in our mouths, the tack of our mother’s departing kiss – and crunching up the gravel path to Applecote’s front door sheltering in the mossy shade of its portico. Dot thumbs her glasses up her nose. The silence twitches in the heat. My trousers stick to the back of my legs.
‘So, here we are, abandoned by our dear mother in the middle of God-awful nowhere, a place where young girls have an awkward habit of disappearing off the face of the earth on summer evenings,’ Pam observes. ‘Never to be seen again.’
Dot sidles closer to me, as if I might protect her from a similar fate, all the more petrifying for being unknown and because Audrey has never been found, alive or dead.
‘Don’t, Pam.’ Flora grimaces.
‘Someone has to say it,’ Pam sighs.
