The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde

by Eve Chase

  Margot pauses only for a moment, as if crossing Applecote’s threshold requires a mental rallying of some kind. ‘Thank you.’

  Jessie pushes her hair off her face with the back of her wrist, overwhelmed by the sight of Margot in her messy pink kitchen. ‘Here, let me take your coat. Do sit down.’

  Margot double-takes at Romy’s child’s chair – Jessie has the unsettling sense she recognizes it – then sits rather elegantly on a sheepskin-covered chair, just missing a Cheerio, in a pair of slim indigo trousers and a pale powder blue cashmere sweater, set off by a turquoise necklace. She sits very still, too still, someone trying hard to keep control, clasping her hands slowly, purposefully in front of her on the wooden table. Pale hands, long fingers. Jessie notices her wedding ring for the first time, a band of gold.

  ‘Billy,’ Margot says, intercepting Jessie’s gaze. She smiles, one of those genuine, quick smiles that can’t be forced. ‘My husband, Billy. He talked you into buying a lemon tree, I believe?’

  ‘Oh, oh, right. Yes, he did. I love my lemon tree.’ Jessie puts the pair together for the first time, the weather-gnarled countryman with the glint in his eye, stylish Margot, who sounds like she could be one of the Queen’s more bohemian cousins. Unlikely, but she can see how it might work.

  ‘He’ll sell you an entire citrus orchard if you’re not careful,’ Margot adds wryly.

  Jessie laughs. And then the laugh stops and she hears her own voice cutting through the kitchen air like a knife. ‘Margot, how did you know about the blocked drain, the damp patch in the top-floor bathroom?’

  The clasp of Margot’s hands tightens. ‘I kicked myself for saying that afterwards.’ She shakes her head at herself. ‘What a goose.’

  ‘So you know Applecote Manor well?’ Jessie asks, when no further explanation is offered.

  Margot nods resignedly. ‘Like my own heart.’

  Jessie stares at her baffled, wondering if the woman might be slightly unhinged, or merely eccentric. ‘I think I’ve seen you peering at the house a few times,’ she says hesitantly, wondering how far she should push this. ‘You walked away once when I called you. In the summer. You were behind the orchard wall with your dogs?’

  Margot dips her head and looks up guiltily, a slightly coy, childish gesture that in any other circumstance would make Jessie smile. ‘I’ve always imagined myself rather good at subterfuge, Jessie, but I always, always prove myself utterly useless. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh. Well … Would you like a cup of tea?’ Tea seems a way of making things vaguely normal. Somewhere in the house, Jessie can hear the clatter of a falling tower of alphabet bricks.

  ‘I would like a cup of tea very much. It’s been quite a day.’

  Jessie stands at the range, watching the kettle, ready to grab it before it starts howling. She takes a sideways view of Margot, the unremarkable, quiet features, the firm jaw, the discreet diamonds blinking in her ears. She’s always admired women like Margot, all the more interesting for not being great beauties, women who have had to make their mark on a room in other ways. The question is, though, what other ways? And what room?

  Still wondering, Jessie fills her brown teapot, wishing their mugs weren’t chipped. ‘How do you …’

  ‘No milk, no sugar, parsimonious, please.’

  Jessie can’t help but warm to Margot again. She sits down beside her. No perfume, she notices. No smell at all, like someone who doesn’t want to leave her trace behind. She glances down at Margot’s feet on the tiles, simple black flat boots, like riding boots, the prints from the melted snow, largish.

  When she looks up, Margot is watching her. ‘Another question?’ she asks. ‘Feel free.’

  ‘Okay, and I do realize this might sound very silly, but were they your footprints in the shed? I found footprints in there when we moved in last summer. And someone seemed to have been in the pool changing room. I always wondered …’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s maddening, isn’t it, always wondering?’ Margot bends down and roots around in her large handbag. Jessie glimpses the spines of two battered books. A hairbrush. A dog lead. ‘Here. I should have given it back to you months ago.’

  The key is dull with age, hanging from an enamel dog keyring. ‘Ours?’ Jessie gasps.

  Margot sits up straighter, which, moments ago, wouldn’t have seemed possible. She turns the turquoise beads at her neck with her fingers. ‘I owe you an explanation, Jessie.’

  ‘Yes, you do!’ Jessie exclaims hotly. ‘Please.’

  ‘It was my aunt, Mrs Sybil Wilde, who sold you the house.’

  ‘Your aunt?’ Jessie is reeling. So Margot was Audrey’s cousin.

  Margot nods, almost impatiently, waiting for Jessie to catch up. ‘I helped her move, not that she wanted to go. My aunt is very old, and very stubborn. She managed – just – living here, with daily help. But then she had a fall. So it was all a bit of a rush in the end. I’m afraid we left rather a mess. I do apologize for that. But we had nowhere to put anything. My cottage is stuffed to the rafters as it is. My sisters’ houses too. And the agent said, “Leave everything. Any new owner will gut the place before they move in, trash everything, or give it to charity.” So I left …’ something catches ‘… I left things as they were, Jessie, like a ship about to sink beneath the waves.’

  ‘And we kept them.’

  ‘I can see.’ Margot glances at the child’s chair again, then the walls, stuck with the girls’ flapping pictures, the tester paint pots on the kitchen dresser, the clutter of Romy’s craft paraphernalia. ‘You’ve brought everything to life again,’ she adds, and Jessie can’t tell from her tone whether this is a good thing or not.

  ‘Sorry. But why didn’t you say all this when you dropped Bella off that night?’

  Margot glances down at the key on the table and sighs. ‘The honest answer, Jessie, is that it threw me, seeing a new family here. Those lovely girls of yours. I didn’t want the conversation.’ She looks up and smiles kindly. ‘I didn’t want to fill your young heads with old ghosts, I suppose.’

  Jessie inhales, everything beginning to make sense at last. ‘Hang on. You had a key. So someone might have seen you at a window after Mrs Wilde had moved out?’

  ‘Quite possible.’

  ‘You lit a fire in the old drawing-room grate?’

  ‘Oh, it was so dreadfully cold. I felt sorry for the house. I kept coming here to check on it and it felt so abandoned, unwelcoming and empty. Exactly what my aunt had sought hard to avoid all those years. So I brought in flowers, lit a fire sometimes. I wanted to keep its homely spirit ticking over.’ Her voice drifts, and Jessie senses her mind going somewhere she can’t follow. She frowns, brightens again. ‘You know those brilliant memories, memories of being young, that get stronger as the years pass?’

  Jessie nods, feeling herself slipping under Margot’s spell.

  ‘They’re the things that settle in the very soul of a girl. The idea of a memory being something that is over, in the past only, is quite wrong, just another grown-up delusion, isn’t it?’ Jessie thinks of how Bella would understand Margot’s words completely, and what a wonderful confidante Margot would make for her. She leans forward, rapt. ‘A memory is a living thing. It breathes beside you, Jessie, it sits on your shoulder, replays itself over and over. And then –’

  A thunder of feet interrupts Margot: Bella, Romy on her hip, waggling a wooden puppet spoon with yellow wool hair, a dishevelled Will, in socks, a pair of old jeans and a baggy blue jumper, recently attacked by moths. Jessie fears they must all look like a load of hillbillies. ‘Has something happened, Jessie?’ Bella asks urgently. ‘Do we know who it is?’

  Jessie stands up, widens her eyes. ‘Bella, this is Margot. Margot who picked you up in the lane that night, remember?’

  Bella blushes, taken by surprise. ‘Oh, sorry. I thought you were a detective or something. Hi.’

  Margot smiles. ‘I’ve heard all about your bravery, Bella. The very best of big sisters, I’d say.’
/>   Bella blushes more deeply, can’t quite hide her pleasure.

  ‘And this is my husband Will,’ Jessie says shyly, proudly, feeling rather like a girl introducing her boyfriend to her mother for the first time.

  ‘I believe I owe you a big thank-you for returning Bella safely that night,’ Will says warmly.

  ‘Hello!’ Romy interrupts, with a waggle of her spoon puppet.

  ‘Well, hello there, Miss Spoon.’ Margot twinkles. ‘What beautiful blonde hair you have.’

  Bella shoves Romy into Jessie’s arms and sits on a kitchen chair, settling in for the conversation, gaze pinned hungrily on Margot. ‘It’s Audrey, isn’t it?’

  ‘Whoa, Bella –’ begins Will.

  ‘Ah. Okay. You do know.’ Margot turns to Jessie. ‘Audrey’s name is spreading on the tom-tom drums through the valley. But I wasn’t at all sure if anyone would have told you about her. It takes at least three generations before you’re deemed a local.’

  Will grins. ‘Ah.’

  ‘I thought you should prepare yourselves. And that I had a responsibility to tell you about Audrey, given my relationship with the house,’ she adds apologetically.

  Will kicks Jessie’s foot under the table – a discreet, what-the-? – then stands up, rubbing his hands together. ‘Okay, girls, Bella, Romy, let’s see what’s on telly, shall we? Let’s leave Jessie and Margot to it.’

  Bundled in Will’s arms, Romy taps the wooden spoon against her father’s stubbled cheek. Will nods at Bella to move.

  ‘Obviously I’m not going anywhere, Dad,’ Bella says, keeping her gaze on Margot.

  Jessie squeezes Will’s hand. ‘It’s all right. Let Bella stay.’

  ‘Tell us everything,’ Bella begs, emptying a packet of sponge fingers on to a yellow plate and sliding it distractedly to the middle of the table.

  ‘Oh. May I? How did you guess I had a soft spot for a sponge finger, Bella? Goodness, I haven’t had one of these in years.’ Margot takes a bite and closes her eyes, seemingly transported by the old-fashioned biscuit that Jessie had bought in the village shop only because they’d run out of everything else.

  Jessie and Bella wait. It feels like Margot has a ball of string in her hand and is about to tug it, unwind the whole story.

  Margot swallows, puts the biscuit down. ‘I should have guessed,’ she says, her vivid blue eyes darkening. ‘But my mother told me the police swung a lamp on a rope down the well after Audrey went missing. I accepted it, even though that hapless lot probably wouldn’t have found my cousin if she were lying in the middle of the lawn. Or maybe she was just miles down. I don’t know.’

  Jessie shudders. Again she sees it.

  ‘After my uncle Perry died, back in the seventies,’ Margot continues, her voice a little unsteady, ‘I worried about Aunt Sybil pottering about here on her own, so I got that lid fitted over the well. I never thought …’ Margot shakes her head, visibly pained. ‘I can’t bear to think.’

  ‘It’s okay, Margot,’ Jessie says, touching her arm lightly. Memories seem to be surfacing in the lines of Margot’s face, and a certain vulnerability. ‘We don’t want to upset you with our questions, do we, Bella?’

  ‘No,’ says Bella, unconvincingly, drumming an impatient tattoo on her lap with her fingers. Again, they wait.

  ‘There was a game Audrey always tried to get me to play in the garden, you see.’ Margot winces. ‘Jump the well wall.’

  ‘Christ,’ mutters Jessie, spluttering into her tea.

  ‘Audrey was fearless. No one else was daring enough to do it, not even me. She was always looking for someone to play that game.’ Margot’s fingers roll the turquoise rope of beads at her neck.

  Jessie finds herself mirroring her, reaching for her own gold pendant.

  ‘You see, Jessie,’ Margot says, and Jessie nods even though she doesn’t see at all, ‘in hindsight, that game was the jigsaw piece, the bit in the corner you can never find, that makes sense of all the rest but at the time, that summer of ’fifty-nine, I just heard the word “water” and I joined all the right dots to make entirely the wrong picture.’ Jessie notices a tremble on the surface of the tea as Margot lifts her cup. ‘And he didn’t contradict me. He let me believe that.’

  ‘What was the wrong picture? Who is “he”?’ asks Bella, eagerly, leaning so far forward she’s almost sitting in Margot’s lap.

  ‘I won’t say his name, if you don’t mind, Bella. He … he was the only person who knew the truth. Let’s leave it at that.’ Margot seems to consider this a moment, her forehead furrowing. ‘He just didn’t tell the truth,’ she adds, with a hiss of unmistakable fury, clearly unable to leave it at all. ‘I was sure he had, many years ago, but he damn well hadn’t. He told me they played a game. I assumed he meant a fishing game or something. But –’

  ‘Jump the well wall!’ blurts Bella.

  ‘Well, yes, very good,’ says Margot. ‘You’re right, Bella. I think it must have been, that stupid game of Audrey’s. And, of course, it would have revealed her whereabouts, if he had let that little detail out, wouldn’t it?’

  Bella nods. ‘So he pushed Audrey in?’

  Margot flinches. The question swells in the kitchen. Jessie is suddenly not at all certain they should be listening to this. Surely a police matter. If any of it is true.

  ‘No, I don’t think he did, not purposely,’ Margot says, after a while, her voice more reflective and distant, as if she’s in conversation with herself. ‘He told me he tried to kiss Audrey. So he must have grabbed at her or something and …’ she draws a breath ‘… and she fell. That much is certain.’

  ‘He didn’t save her?’ Bella rises from her chair indignantly. Jessie touches her arm, a gentle warning to tread carefully. Bella lowers herself again.

  ‘No, he didn’t. Not everyone is as brave as you, Bella,’ Margot says, with a small smile.

  Bella sits a little straighter.

  ‘Although the truth is he couldn’t have reached down into that well and pulled her out, I realize. It was already over for poor Audrey. Just not for him.’

  ‘But why didn’t he reveal where she was?’ Jessie asks, puzzled.

  ‘Guilt. Denial. Immaturity. Fear of his father. I’m guessing, Jessie. And I might be being far too kind. But I do know that time has a way of compacting youth’s dark secrets, making them harder and more solid,’ Margot says, with a steely precision that makes Jessie wonder what youthful secrets Margot might be keeping. ‘And he’d convinced himself that admitting knowledge of Audrey’s fate would make him look guilty of murder. And maybe it would have.’

  ‘He sounds like a total arse.’ Bella lurches back in her chair.

  Margot laughs, nods. But her eyes are wet. She tries to sniff back the tears. ‘Forgive me. It’s just a bit of a shock. To believe Audrey had died in the river all these years and … and …’

  Bella rips off a piece of kitchen roll and hands it to Margot.

  ‘Thank you.’ Margot wipes her eyes. ‘It’s not the dead that suffer. It’s the living, you see.’ She shakes her head. ‘All those lives’ trajectories changed. Weighed down.’

  Bella nods, as if Margot’s making perfect sense. But Jessie feels lost in Margot’s story, the nameless ‘he’, the secrets, lies and shifting truths of the 1950s. All she can truly understand is the primal horror of a deep well, a mother’s grief. Her throat locks. A child is never a collection of historic bones: a child is always human, loved, missed, their loss incomprehensible. It is just too sad.

  ‘I still can’t believe no one saw them that day,’ says Margot, after a while, her voice strong again, almost angry. ‘Someone must have. This bloody valley, Jessie, it doesn’t change. Everyone protects their own. They always have done and they always will.’

  ‘You reckon there were witnesses?’ Bella gulps.

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, I do. A fisherman. And some man in a hat by the bridge who never came forward. My aunt always hoped he would one day. But he didn’t, of course.’

  Jessi
e grabs Margot’s arm, making Margot jump. ‘I know who it might have been!’

  Margot and Bella both look at Jessie as if she’s gone mad.

  ‘Jessie!’ Bella laughs awkwardly, embarrassed on her behalf.

  ‘Joe!’ exclaims Jessie, thinking of the photo he pulled out of his wallet the first day.

  ‘Joe?’ repeats Margot, blankly.

  ‘Joe Peat. He’s doing a bit of work for us. And he showed me a photo of his dad, Sid or something, and he wore a hat, always wore a hat. He used to do work at Cornton Hall in the fifties.’

  Jessie can almost see Margot’s mind rummaging through the past, like Romy’s fingers in Bella’s things. ‘Loyal to Cornton,’ she murmurs, under her breath. ‘Yes, he would be.’

  ‘You know what? I’m sure Joe said something about him dying of a heart attack, which would explain why he never came forward. Shall I call Joe? Get him over?’

  ‘No. I’m not sure I can take in anything else today, Jessie.’ Margot picks up her handbag from the floor, stands up. ‘And I’ve invaded your kitchen long enough.’

  ‘Oh, don’t go. Not yet. You haven’t told us what Audrey was like,’ Bella says, crestfallen. ‘I really want to know what she was like. I’ve wondered all this time.’

  ‘You have?’ Margot seems genuinely touched by this. She slowly sits back down. ‘Well, Bella, Audrey …’ she searches for the right word ‘… Audrey was a gas. You’d have loved her.’

  Bella nods encouragingly.

  Margot smiles, her face changing in front of their eyes, brightening, animating as she starts to talk, conjuring up Audrey as if she had seen her only yesterday, pulling her out of the distant past and into the kitchen, long-lost summers out of the winter air, the clever, bossy girl with the swinging plait and the bright blue eyes and the fancy dresses, who looked like Margot, only much prettier, who hated being an only child, yearned for sisters, spent her time inventing games, adventures, running across the meadow with fistfuls of balloons in the wind, determined to lift off and fly. Margot is inhaling, about to launch into another stream of anecdotes when Will walks in, and she stops and colours.