The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde

by Eve Chase

  I pause in the doorway. ‘I’m truly sorry, Aunt Sybil.’

  ‘Oh, I always knew you would come in here, Margot, that out of all of the sisters, it would be you. Don’t look so surprised.’ Her gaze has unexpected warmth. ‘You are just like Audrey. She’d have taken that domino. She would have come in here too, of course.’

  It is only then that it strikes me: Sybil left the wardrobe door open deliberately. And it was she who found my hairgrips, not Moll. And she had seen my weakness that morning as I poked around the storeroom. Maybe she knew it was only a matter of time.

  Sybil cocks her head to one side, her fingers rolling the seed pearls at her throat. ‘You see, I was planning to keep this door very much locked.’ Her eyes roam my face. ‘But, for some reason, I thought of you, Margot, and I didn’t want to lock the room after all. Isn’t that odd?’

  7

  An early September morning, the day summer crumbles into autumn. Thick fog presses up at the windows. Romy sits enthroned in the wooden child’s chair from the attic that Jessie has restored, nibbling one of the orchard’s first almost-ripe apples. The clock ticks on the newly painted calamine-pink kitchen wall. The silence is shouty. Romy nudges the apple off the table to the tiled floor, where it lands with an impressive thump, its red skin splitting, revealing white wet flesh. ‘Uh-oh.’

  Jessie glances distractedly at the apple, which is rolling into the little tepee she’s made for Romy out of sticks and an old sheet in the corner of the kitchen, then at the clock again, then Will, who is by the range, being careful not to lean upon its greasy flank, blue-lipped from his icy shower, since the plumber didn’t turn up. Dressed for his second week wooing investors in his slim-cut navy suit, clean white shirt and Italian leather brogues, he seems almost comically at odds with his surroundings now, and in danger of being soiled by them at any moment: the butcher’s block scattered with Romy’s craft glue and pasta shapes; the fuzzy grey sheepskins that Jessie’s laid over the spindle-backed kitchen chairs to make them more comfortable. And Jessie herself, who has been up for hours already – Romy now wakes with the cockerels at dawn, maddeningly in sync with her environment – and is wearing baggy denim dungarees, splattered with the pink kitchen paint, the knees shiny from bending down, yanking up brambles. ‘What is Bella doing up there? Shall I go up?’ she asks, even though she’d rather not. She’ll never get used to that gallery of Mandy.

  ‘Give her one more minute.’ Will frowns.

  ‘Apple, Daddy.’ Romy points imperiously at the floor.

  ‘You must think I’m dafter than you, ma’am.’ But Will picks it up, hands it back to her, putty in Romy’s hands, as he is in Bella’s. Guilty too. Soon, he will say goodbye.

  Romy, oblivious to Daddy’s imminent departure, grins, swings the bare tough tiny feet that seem permanently grubby from weeks of scuffing along the house’s oak floorboards, the centuries of dust and God knows what wedged in their cracks. She knocks the apple off the table again. ‘Uh-oh.’

  Jessie presses the gingerbread man pendant on her necklace between her fingers, feeling stress rise through her body, like prickly heat, her anxious gaze sticking to the clock. Bella has to be at the school bus stop by eight. Although Will woke her with a cup of tea an hour ago, and was instructed to go away, she’s not yet emerged. Since Bella got her GCSE exam results a few days ago, she’s been sleeping late, increasingly withdrawn, brooding in that bedroom, like a fierce young owl. The grades were a blow, not an unexpected one, and not because they were particularly bad, only because Bella knew she could have done so much better, that she’d not fulfilled the promise of her early school years, the glowing reports that stopped abruptly with her mother’s death. Jessie fears that she’ll simply give up, or refuse to go to Squirrels, and that one of the main reasons they’ve moved from London could fall apart. What on earth would they do then? How could they justify being here?

  The question tightens like a belt across her chest. Reality has hit hard this morning. Will is in his suit, armed for corporate combat. The air is wet and cidery, the river starting to swell. Yesterday Jessie saw swallows, tiny beautiful birds, wheeling south for winter. For some reason, the sight made her eyes fill with tears.

  Hearing the slow clap of footsteps on the stairs, Jessie and Will rush into the hall, their fingers touching, not daring to entwine. And there is Bella, unexpectedly shy, hand gripping the wooden banister, halfway down. Except it is not a Bella they recognize. In a pleated grey skirt, wool blazer and striped burgundy tie, her face scrubbed clean of make-up, hair tied back, she looks like a schoolgirl from long ago, nothing like the precocious alley-cat teen in tiny denim shorts and black tights who used to stalk around London, eyes cast down, in silent sullen communion with her mobile phone. Will beams. He grabs Jessie’s hand and holds it tightly behind his back against the wool of his suit. Jessie smiles. ‘You look wonderful,’ she tells Bella truthfully.

  ‘I feel like a right twat.’

  After a hurried breakfast, Bella insists on walking to the bus stop by herself, no embarrassing family send-off. At the front door, Will stands back admiringly, holding Bella’s hands and swinging her arms, as if she were a little girl in a new party dress. ‘I’m sorry I have to be in London all week again. It’s just until I secure the finance, okay? Good. That’s my girl. You don’t have to pretend to miss me.’

  Jessie glances away, feeling like an intruder. When she looks back Bella is walking down the gravel path into the fog, her skirt brushing against the spent silver lavender heads, and the sight makes her heart lurch. ‘Bella!’ she calls. Bella turns round and there is an awkward pregnant moment, a moment when a mother would naturally run and hug her daughter goodbye. The thought of Bella’s recoil stops Jessie even attempting it. ‘Good luck,’ she says instead.

  Bella nods. The moment has gone.

  ‘Bye-bye, Bell-Bell.’ Romy waves excitedly. Bella keeps walking. She doesn’t wave back.

  Will’s turn to leave. He pulls Jessie gently towards him by the straps of her dungarees until their foreheads meet, the tips of their noses. Over the tailoring of his shoulder Jessie can see dense black clouds framed in the paned glass, their shadows like huge airships moving slowly over the hills towards them. She’s hit by a sense of foreboding.

  And yet she knows this is the sensible thing to do. The days he struggled up to London last week proved that a daily commute isn’t feasible, not with these back-to-back meetings, cancelled trains, early starts. And it would be stupid to turn down the offer of a nice spare room in a friend’s house during the week – churlish even to observe that his host, a divorced attractive GP called Kate, was one of Mandy’s best friends. Besides, it’s just a temporary measure. He’ll secure the finance quickly.

  ‘You sure you’ll be okay here on your own?’ he asks gently.

  Jessie’s thoughts turn to the woman with the dogs, the one Bella said was in the lane again yesterday evening, staring up at the house. ‘Check out the dungarees, the hoary leather boots.’ She smiles. ‘Would you really mess with a woman who looks like this?’

  ‘You do look like you might cut your evening cigar with the wood axe.’

  Jessie thinks of the photos of stylish, elegant Mandy in Bella’s room, and her smile fades. Does Will ever compare his two wives? Is it even possible not to, given that the pictures are so in his face? Jessie remembers her mother’s warnings about moving to the country, what it can do to a marriage.

  Will’s face grows serious again. ‘Now Bella’s back at school, you’ll be able to meet other mothers in the area, all that stuff,’ he says, in the hesitant manner of a man who senses he might be fluffing it.

  ‘Civilize myself?’ she says quickly.

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘It’s all right. I know what you mean.’ Jessie brushes a roll of dust off his shoulder, one of those grey caterpillars that float down from the beams. She’s not sure how she’ll be spending her hours here alone. But she doubts that coffee mornings are about to be
come a priority. There’s too much to do on the house. ‘And I’ll be very busy. Don’t worry about me.’

  His gaze roams over her face, seeking more reassurance. ‘Call me if there’s any problem with Bella, won’t you?’

  ‘Bella will be fine,’ she insists, aware, as he is, that it’s the first time she and the girls have been alone for more than a night here without him. Also, Bella, anxious about starting a new school, has pitched into one of her darker moods again, her emotions pinballing, looking for places to land. She sleepwalked again a couple of nights ago: Will found her wandering along the top-floor landing like a ghost. ‘Me and the girls will have a blast without you. Really.’ She kisses him, her nose lingering close to his cheek, trying to store his scent. ‘Now go. Or you’ll miss your train and we’ll go bankrupt trying to buy out Jackson and have to live like thirteenth-century rural peasants for ever.’

  ‘Don’t think I don’t know that’s what you really want, Jessie,’ he calls over his shoulder.

  She watches him drive away, until his car is lost to the fog.

  Jessie’s surprised at how much she misses Bella. Applecote feels too quiet without the stomping and door slamming and sideways dry humour. This is it for now, she realizes, just me and Romy in this huge, silent house on our own. In Bella’s room, Jessie puts the laundry basket on the rug and walks over to the little round window, peers through its crossed pane: it gives a bird’s eye view, or a teenager’s, the way it detaches and elevates, shrinks everything else to insignificance. The fog has finally lifted. The stones in the meadow are like dorsal fins in a distant sea. She feels a real yearning to be out there in the long, wet grass, not in this intense airless room with the memory of herself pressing Mandy’s kaftan against her body, greedy for a dead woman’s allure. ‘Come on, Rom,’ she says distractedly, then glances back over her shoulder. ‘Oh, you fruitloop. What are you doing?’

  Romy has Bella’s sports bra on her head, furtively rooting through the laundry basket. Jessie laughs, grabs the bra. ‘Bella will kill you. No, you can’t wear that either. Oh, my goodness, you munchkin. Scoot.’ She removes the basket from Romy’s reach, and puts it in the middle of Bella’s bed, eyeing the two boxes wedged between the bed and the wall, wondering what might be left inside them.

  Romy wanders over to the dressing-table, the curios Bella’s arranged into an artistic still life: the heart-shaped button, the old newspapers from ’59, a very pretty chipped teacup decorated with little gold flowers, and a new discovery from the Wilderness, a rather unnerving long white bone that is too big to be a rabbit’s.

  ‘Don’t mess it up this time, sweetheart.’

  Having been fiercely chastised by Bella for rummaging through her things in recent days – ‘You’re disrespecting my privacy, don’t you understand?’ Bella hissed, and Romy nodded solemnly, not understanding at all – Romy inspects it all at a distance, her little fingers twitching over her adored big sister’s objects, not quite daring to touch them. Jessie smiles, then picks up a stack of Bella’s underwear, turns, opens the top drawer of Bella’s chest of drawers. And there they are. Letters.

  Jessie immediately knows she mustn’t look at them, which is part of their appeal. But they aren’t tucked right at the back, not like something private would be, but at the side of the drawer, propped up against socks, almost as if they’ve been put there on purpose for her to find this morning.

  Jessie glances at Romy, still absorbed by the objects on the dressing-table, and curiously pushes the stack to see the handwriting. Will’s. Letters home to his daughter? Oh, and someone else’s, a strong, immaculate hand. In that instant, she knows the letters are from the boxes. She starts closing the drawer quickly, then hesitates, the woman who picked up the kaftan that day slipping into her once more, like an oily black shadow, sliding her hand into the gap.

  Sent over the years from various locations Jessie knows Will visited for work, Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris, in the days before he scaled back his travel to be around for Bella, the letters are stung with longing and soft with marital tenderness – ‘What did we do in our past lives to be so blessed?’ he writes – and an erotic intimacy that makes Jessie blush, dispelling any hope that Will’s marriage to Mandy might have cooled into something affectionate, habitual. Eyes blazing, she skim-reads the letters written by Mandy: funny, opinionated, so obviously more articulate than anything she could ever write, they hop from global political issues to the sweetly domestic, Bella splitting a lip on a swing, the scandalous appearance of a mistress at a neighbour’s barbecue, how she misses them holding hands as they sleep. Nicknames, jokes, shared conundrums, the letters reveal the intricate private world that Jessie and Will never talk about. And then there is the physical fact of them, not texts or emails, but letters, old-fashioned and romantic. Blinking back tears, Jessie feels the words settle inside her, like tiny fragments of swallowed glass. And it is only the sight of Romy, finally succumbing to temptation and deftly picking up the heart-shaped button, that makes Jessie snap back in to the room, realize what she’s doing, and hurriedly stuff the letters back into the drawer, trying to leave them exactly where she found them, but unsure where that was.

  Jessie is flaying off old wallpaper in the room that will be her studio when she hears the front door slam. Romy, who is drawing wiggles in the dust on the floor with the handle of a paintbrush, stops, looks up. ‘Bell-Bell home.’

  Jessie nods, her arm still above her head, dust sugaring her hair. She took letters from her stepdaughter’s underwear drawer and read them. She is that person. If Bella put them there deliberately to test her, will she know just from looking at her that she’s done it?

  Jessie isn’t sure. There is one tiny moment as they stand in the hall, a nick in the air, when their eyes catch, and Jessie feels they understand each other absolutely, before she breaks it, firing off a round of questions about school meals and teachers – too many, too fast. The next day, after Bella’s gone to school, Jessie checks the drawer again and sees the letters are no longer there.

  Jessie calls Lou to confide what she’s done to another adult, test the water before she tells Will. But Lou has London gossip to unload first – a friend coming out, a power-crazed boss at work, a Tube station shut by a dancing flash mob – which is like a dispatch from another planet. When Lou asks how she is, Jessie hesitates and decides she doesn’t want to share the humiliation of the letters. She’s not so sure she can tell Will either. She can’t unread them. And any conversation will lead back to her prying in Bella’s drawers, a damning trail of distrust, like dirty footprints across a clean floor.

  The week stretches on, empty of Will, his laugh, his smell, his sleepy morning kiss, and full of unsettling thoughts and noises and autumn spiders. Jessie and Bella capture them together – rare moments of harmony, Bella shouting, ‘Left, right, oh, my God, it’s a beast, go, go!’ Jessie on all fours with one of the jam-jars she’d found at the back of a cupboard.

  Jessie packs her days with physical exertion: less room for self-analysis; less time to think about Will and Mandy holding hands in their sleep. She takes Romy for drives, through valleys, villages, folk-tale woods. On one of these trips, she stumbles into a café. Ten miles away – this counts as local, she’s learning – it feels like an oasis of culture. Attached to a plant nursery, it hosts jazz nights, poetry readings, things she thought she’d left behind in another life. Housed in a pretty old glasshouse, decorated with the work of local artists, it’s run in a cloud of steam and wry humour by a tall, well-spoken woman in her youthful seventies with a dancer’s deportment and a penchant for huge beaded necklaces – fists of lapis lazuli and turquoise – that bring out the brilliant painter’s blue of her eyes. She has a way of glancing kindly in Jessie’s direction as if she senses something of the tumult of Jessie’s thoughts. And the very nice man in the nursery, who has Robert Redford’s grizzled good looks, patiently answers her naive gardening questions. He sells her a dwarf lemon tree with three tiny lemons the colour of s
unshine that she puts in an earthenware pot in the orangery. She photographs Romy standing next to it with a trowel – a pose that took only twenty minutes to stage – and texts it to Will, proof of their happy new life, then posts it on Facebook. Their life is liked forty times. And she feels a little better about it.

  A curling postcard advert, stuck to the village shop’s window: ‘Joe Peat. Building work. Odd jobs. House ’n’ garden. No job too small …’ Jessie leaves a voicemail for him. The surname, Peat, is reassuring. She also scribbles down the details of local toddler groups. And although she doesn’t go to any, not yet, she feels she’s accomplished something at least.

  Friday, the day Will returns: Jessie realizes she’s been holding her breath all week. The world lightens. The sun comes out, filtering through saffron leaves. The air smells of woodsmoke drifting along the river from the village. Jessie arranges a mental good-news list of happy family anecdotes to recount to Will on his return – blackberry foraging with the girls, the trip to the ancient stones at sunset with a flask of cocoa. There’s another list of things she won’t worry him with – Joe Peat not calling back, the evening Bella took Romy bat-spotting in the Wilderness and lost her for ten minutes. After settling Romy with the alphabet bricks from the attic, Jessie pulls out her most trusted recipe book, stained with golden syrup and olive oil and the sweat of teaching herself how to cook for a family after years of living happily on salad bags and microwave falafel. She will cook everything better, she tells herself. She will cook a meal as good as anything Mandy might have made, adds a small insecure voice in her head.

  Will’s running late. Really late. Jessie hangs on until the chicken is smoking. It is shrivelled, the potatoes burned to a crisp. She puts out crumpled linen napkins anyway, sticks beeswax candles into old wine bottles and turns out the kitchen’s bright striplight. The candlelight flickers against the bulging walls and beams, making the fireplace look dark and deep as a cave, throwing the whole room back into a different era. Romy clings to her leg. She pours herself a large glass of red wine.