by Eve Chase
Daphne is a tiny rowing boat, blue and scuffed, sinkable-looking. Fits six easily, Harry says, if you squash up. The water is only an inch or two away from the top of the boat, splashing over the sides, making us laugh and shriek every time someone moves. The river drifts lazily ahead, twisting gently, wide as a country lane, willow trees kissing the cloudy green surface.
Harry is sitting next to me, wearing shorts, his thigh banging against mine. There are hairs on his legs like copper wires. The side of me that touches him is unbearably alive.
The boys start to row. I can feel the heat on Harry’s leg, the effort it takes to pull the long wooden oars rippling from his arms through his body. Occasionally he gives me a sidelong, slightly puzzled smile. The smile he beams at Flora is more open and less complicated. Like he wants to lick her.
When the boys stop rowing, we drift downstream, faster as the current picks up, ducking beneath overhanging branches, through the columns of midges, trying to keep our feet out of the water that has pooled in the boat’s base, while trailing our fingers in the river, like actresses in films. Blue-black house martins dive low over the water, tails forked. Memories of Audrey dart, sprite-like, peeking between bulrushes: Audrey with pigtails at seven years old, trailing her skipping rope like a tail; Audrey at twelve, the summer afternoon it started to bucket down without warning and our blouses got drenched and went transparent and we ran back to the house, laughing, mouths wide open, tongues out to catch the raindrops.
When I revisit that day in my mind now, it’s hard not to wonder if someone else was watching us, noticing Audrey’s blooming prettiness, our flaunting of girlish carefree joy. Did our happiness make someone else feel the bitter lack of it and want to trap it for themselves? A lonely fisherman maybe, piercing wriggling maggots to his hook. The man in the hat, lurking under the damp shadow of the bridge.
‘Land ahoy!’ shouts Harry, grabbing a dangling willow branch, like a lock of a girl’s hair, and sliding the boat beneath the tree, those troubling thoughts away.
We throw down a picnic rug on the grassy bank, leaving Harry and Flora to bail out the boat. Lying on my belly, chin on my hands, I watch Flora bending from her tiny waist, giggling behind a curtain of blonde hair as she scoops with a bucket, Harry brushing against her, closer than he needs to be. Tom also watches them, with a look of frustrated longing. And Pam watches Tom.
When Flora and Harry finally join us, flushed, glowing, Harry picking something out of Flora’s hair, it’s obvious to everyone they’re closer, those few minutes spent alone enough time to form some kind of alliance, and that the rest of us are cut out of it, spectators. Over a marbled ham, cold chicken legs, Pam tries to grab Tom’s attention but it doesn’t work particularly well, so she ups the ante, hitching her dress into the sides of her underwear, showing off her taut brown thighs, and striding back to the boat, hands swinging, saying that she’s going to row us all back. The boys whoop. ‘Me and Margot!’ Pam shouts over her shoulder. I shake my head.
‘Margot, Margot,’ Harry chants, slapping a hand on his thigh.
It’s the first time a boy has ever chanted my name.
Within seconds my palms are stinging. The backs of my knees grate against the bench. But there is something more at stake than proving we’re better rowers than the boys, although I’m not sure exactly what. On the last stretch, I feel unstoppable. Stepping out at the meadow again, our legs shaky, dresses wet with sweat, Pam and I grin at each other triumphantly, then glance around, half expecting applause, or at least an admiring male look. But Tom is glaring at Harry, who is whispering something into Flora’s ear, making her laugh, and lingering, as if sniffing her – she is not stinking of sweat. And I remember that I am just Margot Wilde, plain Margot with itchy skin, invisible once more.
The curtains in Dot’s bedroom are drawn, the scorching afternoon a white scissor cut where they meet. I sit next to her on the bed where she is balled up, facing the wall, looking smaller and darker than ever. ‘Still woozy from the boat?’ I whisper, stroking her shoulder.
Her toes twitch but she says nothing.
I crouch down. ‘Oh, Dot, you’re crying. What’s the matter? Is it because we haven’t heard from Ma?’
The mail boats are erratic, Sybil says. Better to push her from our minds altogether, she says. We are Applecote girls now.
Dot smiles weakly. ‘I don’t mind not having Ma when I’ve got you, Margot.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘I’m too babyish. I try not to be. But I hold the rest of you back, I know I do.’
‘Back from what?’ I smile, her sweetness touching.
She presses her dark red lips together.
‘Do you mean with boys and things?’ I ask tentatively.
She nods, shoots me a small smile of gratitude that she has been understood.
‘Oh, Dot, I’m as out in the cold as you are, honestly. I’m hardly beating them off with a stick, am I?’ I pick a hair off her cheek, where it clings to the tears and sweat. ‘Two into three won’t go either.’
Dot rearranges herself, rests her head on her hand. ‘Harry was looking at you, Margot. In the boat. When you were rowing.’
‘He only has eyes for Flora.’ Something leaps inside me all the same.
Dot sighs. ‘No one ever looks at me, Margot.’
‘They will,’ I say, my heart starting to pound. Harry was looking at me? Me? ‘You’re still a child, Dot. But you’re going to be a beautiful woman, I can tell.’
She shakes her head. ‘I wear spectacles. It’s a complete disaster.’
‘Lots of girls wear spectacles. And I have skin on the backs of my knees that looks like dried Spam.’
Dot smiles. ‘You can hide knees.’
‘Not in a bathing-suit. Not even in a summer skirt very easily, not without half-decent stockings.’
‘But I don’t look like the rest of you.’ Her face grows serious. She speaks in a whisper. ‘Why am I so dark, Margot? Why aren’t I blonde, like the other Wilde girls? Why don’t I have blue eyes? Ma has blue eyes. Pa had blue eyes.’
‘Oh, Dot, you could be black as ink and you’d still be a Wilde girl. You’re not a changeling. Don’t be a goose. Budge up.’ I clamber into bed beside her, refusing to wonder about Dot’s exotic colouring since it doesn’t matter and never has. She feels surprisingly wiry and strong, no longer the pale asthmatic city girl she was just over a week ago. It strikes me that Ma is going to miss a significant summer of us growing up. It shouldn’t matter – perfectly normal to be away at school for a term, after all, come home taller – but somehow it does here. We might grow up slightly wonky at Applecote Manor, like roses trained the wrong way along a wall. ‘It’s been such a long, hot day, have a nap, Dot. Everything will feel better afterwards, I promise. It always does.’
‘I love you, Margot.’ She yawns, eyes starting to close.
Stepping on to the landing, I’m met by an astonishing sight: Moll huffing through Audrey’s door with a laundry basket, as if the room were of no more significance than the scullery. I smother a gasp, step back into Dot’s doorway and wait for something to happen, the world to end, some sort of static crackle. But Moll doesn’t smoke or flash. And she leaves the door ajar.
I watch, transfixed, as she starts to peel the linen off Audrey’s bed, tucking in new sheets, smoothing them with her palm. She folds a pink blanket, a blanket I remember well: we made lifelong promises huddled under it that we were never able to keep. As she bends down, I see the porthole window, its spill of purple light, like blackcurrant cordial, on the floor. Moll finished, I edge backwards into Dot’s room again, until I hear the soft click of a door closing, Moll’s footsteps descending the stairs.
No one is around. Dot is asleep. Pam and Flora are playing Monopoly with Sybil and Perry in the drawing room: I can hear Perry bellowing, ‘Ha! To jail, Pam!’
Audrey taps me on the shoulder: well, what are you waiting for? My mind arrives before the rest of me.
The door
knob turns shockingly easily in my hand. I hesitate, as I’ve hesitated many times before, my heart pounding. The fear remains that if I enter this room a part of me will never leave. Come on, Margot. I feel her fingers pressed over my eyes. Find me. Count to ten. One, two, three …
As I step in, something in me releases, like a sigh: I feel safe, a little girl again. Nothing has changed. Audrey appears to have popped out to fetch an apple: she’ll be returning shortly, extracting a pip from her teeth with her tongue. The room smells not of lost things but of lavender water. Fresh sheets. There is a small posy of meadow flowers on her old school desk – the water clear, the flowers fresh, pink and white – and her pencils, all sharp, their tin case open, are ready for my cousin’s busy fingers. On her dresser, her ivory-handled hairbrush, some yellow ribbons in a porcelain shell dish. Long-forgotten memories rush to the surface, not just the games, stories, dressing-up, but how Audrey made me feel my own person, not just one of four sisters. More than anything, I remember the sweet pleasure of feeling chosen, a favourite: the exact opposite to standing on the bank of the river, body aching, the backs of my knees itching, watching Harry woo Flora.
I kick off my shoes, take out my hairgrips, and throw myself back on the cloud of Audrey’s bed, tracing the familiar bumps of the wicker headboard lightly with my fingers. Tears curl hotly into my ears, not just for Audrey but the way life hurtles forward so, leaving the past standing alone, shrinking, like a forgotten child on a deserted railway platform. I’m not sure how long I stay there, why I doze off, but when I open my eyes, the sky in the round window is gingery, and I feel different, emptied yet peaceful: I’ve made a space inside me for Audrey to live. I get up slowly, sleepily: reflected in the mirror of the dresser, my face, her face, the edge between us wavy, dissolving, like an outline in the midday heat. And when I go downstairs to join my sisters, I leave behind not just my forgotten hairgrips but a little bit of myself too, just as I knew I would.
I’ve discovered I quite like having secrets from my sisters. There’s a thrill in holding something tight to one’s heart, cupped in closed hands, like a baby bird. Also, I know that Pam and Flora would be furious if I told them I’d visited Audrey’s room, or slept with her domino under my pillow. They have Tom and Harry to lose now, the summer’s precarious freedom. We can’t afford to upset Sybil.
I know this too. But I’m unable to resist surrendering to the suck of Audrey’s room, sometimes only to poke my head around the door, other times lingering too long, risking being caught. Familiar again to the point of feeling like mine, it’s become a refuge from all sorts of things: Ma not writing; Harry peeling off Flora’s dress with his eyes; the thrilling fear that if Perry did do something awful to Audrey, he might do the same to us; the discovery of another strange posy in the meadow’s crater, a dark red flower and a budding twig, twine-tied, like some sort of pagan offering; and the brick-bake of inescapable heat.
Today there is a breeze but it’s warm and wet, like a lick. Dot shelters under a huge, gnarled beech tree in the Wilderness with Moppet, preferring her company to ours. The rest of us gravitate to the pool, seeking relief, only to find Perry already there. We get in, watching him warily, the pink roll of his arms stretched along the stone sides, his stomach a barrel beneath the water, rising and falling. And he watches us.
After a while, he heaves himself out and falls asleep in a poolside chair, his legs outstretched, the bulge in his knitted trunks jumping and twitching as he dreams, making us all dissolve into smothered snorts of laughter. It dies down. The heat intensifies. I leave my elder sisters idly gossiping about the Gores behind the shield of their novels, so absorbed in the subject they barely acknowledge my departure.
I stop at the pool gate, feeling a small pang for the long, dreary days before the Gores spangled into our summer when all we had was each other. No chance I’d have been able to sneak away to Audrey’s room then, I realize. Pam would have hauled me back by my swimsuit strap. Flora would have looked into my eyes and seen Audrey’s room reflected, as in one of those round, gilt-framed convex mirrors in the hall.
Audrey’s wardrobe door is ajar. It is impossible to resist.
Audrey was always the best dressed. My clothes, originating from Woolworths or Marks & Spencer, came third hand, the hems faded and creased from being turned up and down. Audrey had new dresses, made by a seamstress in Bath, or bought from the gleaming counters of Harrods. She would make me try them on, even though they were too big, and turn slowly, aching for her dresses, her splendid life: I think Audrey could only really appreciate her fine clothes by seeing them on someone else.
Something of that childish acquisitive excitement returns. My hands are already inside, clicking through the padded floral hangers – broderie anglaise, seersucker, crêpe-de-Chine, lawn cotton, pearl buttons, horn buttons, toggles, zips, hooks and eyes – working from left to right, amazed to see little-girl dresses give way to older-girl dresses, then much older girls’, enough dresses to clothe Audrey every season since she’s been gone. At the very far right of the rail, pressed against the cedar wood, a dress that brings back the past like a burn: blue – the shade of the cornflowers in the meadow, the huge summer sky – with a white Peter Pan collar and scarlet heart-shaped buttons, puffed with a tissue-thin petticoat. And yet. How can I possibly remember a dress of this size, with darts at the bust?
I slide it off its hanger and hold it against my body, imagining we might dance together around the room, and it will tell me its secrets.
‘Margot.’ Sybil is a thin dark line in the doorway.
My stomach drops. ‘I was …’
‘I can see what you’re doing.’
I don’t know where to put myself, or the dress, swishing indecently against my legs. I inhale to speak, say nothing, wonder why Sybil isn’t shouting yet.
‘Audrey will need new clothes when she comes home.’ Sybil speaks in an unsteady voice, as if it is she who feels she must explain herself. ‘Clothes that fit.’
I bow my head, deeply uncomfortable. ‘Of course.’
‘That was her favourite dress. The one she wore that … that day.’
‘Yes.’ I wish I wasn’t still holding it.
‘So I had it made up again, just the same.’
‘How lovely,’ I murmur quietly, as if there is nothing odd about this.
Sybil watches me carefully, gauging my reaction, wondering if she can trust me. ‘Don’t mention it to your uncle, will you? It would only upset him. He won’t come in here.’
‘I won’t,’ I assure her.
‘Or your sisters.’
I hesitate. It feels like disloyalty to promise such a thing.
‘Margot, you really mustn’t tell your sisters. They won’t understand.’
‘Okay,’ I say, because they wouldn’t.
Sybil exhales, relieved that I’m going along with her. ‘It’s not the first time you’ve been in here, is it, Margot?’ she asks, her voice soft, softer than I’ve heard it all summer.
I shake my head. There’s suddenly nothing between us, only an understanding that hasn’t made its character known yet.
‘Why don’t you put the dress on?’ she whispers, her voice trembling.
I stare back at her blankly, hoping I’ve misheard.
‘I know you want to, Margot. We don’t have to pretend with one another. Not any more. Not in here.’
I shake my head.
‘I saw you take the domino, Margot. I saw the look on your face. I know you couldn’t help yourself then either.’
My cheeks blast with heat. ‘It was just … just a silly impulsive thing. I – I’ll return it.’
She nods at the dress again. ‘Slip it on.’
‘I’d – I’d rather not,’ I say, almost faint with embarrassment. I’ve never felt more exposed, more seen in my life. ‘It’s Audrey’s.’
Sybil’s grey eyes start to swim with tears. ‘It would make me so happy, Margot. I can’t tell you how happy it would make me. Just for a
moment. Just a twirl.’
Mortified, unable to refuse, I self-consciously unbutton my shirtdress with fumbling fingers until I’m standing just in my underwear. The porthole window casts a shard of purple on my white pants, where the elastic hits my belly button. I hesitate, imagining my sisters’ appalled faces if they could see me now.
Sybil nods at me encouragingly.
I nervously step, foot pointed, into the folds of the dress.
‘Oh. It fits! Just that top button.’ I try not to flinch from Sybil’s cold fingers, tugging the bodice shut. It won’t go. My back is too broad. ‘So almost perfect.’
Sybil’s face is very close to mine, inches away, smiling a long-forgotten smile that transforms her into the Sybil I remember as a child. ‘Oh, it really picks out the blue of your eyes, Margot. Just like hers.’ She starts arranging wisps of hair around my face. ‘No, not quite right. A plait would look better. Audrey loved a plait.’
She’s making me collude in a game of her devising, just as Audrey used to. I start undoing the dress, fiddling with the buttons. ‘My sisters are waiting for me.’ I pull my own dress back on too quickly, ripping a seam with my foot.
‘No hurry,’ says Sybil. ‘Here. Let me.’ And she’s standing too close again. ‘Oh, you have a little sunburn here, Margot.’ She touches my right shoulder delicately. ‘And a heat rash, I think. I’ll get Moll to bring up some calamine. How are your knees?’ And before I can answer, she’s picking up the hem of the dress at the back and is bending down, inspecting them. ‘Oh, my darling. Oh, you poor thing.’
‘It looks worse than it is, really.’ And while it feels wrong on a level I can’t quite grasp, a little part of me is seduced by the attentive maternal concern, the slow trail of a cool finger over the raw heat of the itch.
‘You have been terribly neglected by your mother, I can see that. But you won’t be neglected any longer, not under my care, my dear.’ She drops the hem of the dress and smooths it lightly with a quick brush of her hand, a gesture that seems to give me permission to leave.
