by Eve Chase
And that’s when I feel it, the springy wicker headboard pressing into my shoulder, the luxurious give of the goosedown pillows. As I lie there in a daze, blinking up at Sybil, the previous night slides back to me, how I spasmed awake in the early hours, my head full of Harry, my body not my own, my thighs twitching, like a horse’s flank. I snapped on the bedside lamp with clumsy fingers. There was a moth, a huge moth, its wings woven gold, the colour of Harry’s eyes. Fearing such traitorous longing, the ache that pulsed somewhere near my abdomen, a bit of my body for which I have no name, that I don’t understand, I stumbled down the corridor, trying to escape the confusion of sensation, searching for the childhood peace of Audrey’s room.
How could I have been so utterly stupid as to actually fall asleep in her bed?
‘You and I are both such early birds, aren’t we? Flying while the world sleeps,’ Sybil whispers. Her eyes are oddly bright, lambent with love. A shaft of dawn light pours through the long ochre curtains, rinsing Sybil’s hair russet, so it looks a little as it did when she was younger, and time seems to have reversed, rolling backwards slowly, so that I am somehow stuck in it, that the bad thing that happened hasn’t happened yet, that it is all to come, not to Audrey but to me.
Sybil brushes a lock of hair off my face. ‘I’ll run you a bath and then you can slip into your favourite blue dress, the one that brings out your eyes, hmm?’
I pull the sheet up to my chest protectively. It has gone too far. It’s wrong, all of it. ‘No, I –’
‘But I’ll bring you up some toast first,’ Sybil says quickly, stealing my protest away. ‘Raspberry jam. You love Moll’s raspberry jam. That was always your favourite.’
‘I must get back to my room.’ I swing one foot out of the bed. ‘My sisters will come looking,’ I add, although I know they won’t. We go down to breakfast separately now, no longer in a pack like before.
‘Your cousins are all conked out. It’s Moll you can hear, up with the larks.’ She smiles.
Nothing about Sybil’s expression suggests she realizes she’s just called my sisters my cousins, or sees anything wrong with this. I open my mouth to correct her, but she continues to talk, a low, maternal murmur, the sound of a stream bubbling over small rocks. ‘Let me plump the pillow. There. Leg back in. That’s it. I’ll open the window. Fresh air. Can you smell the roses? They’re at their best just after dawn.’
I can smell them, their queasy sweetness.
She hesitates, reading my unease, unsure whether to leave me. ‘You will stay here, won’t you?’
I nod obediently: there is something in the intensity of Sybil right now, the determination of her delusion, that makes me wonder what she might be capable of if I refuse to play along. She walks to the door, glancing over her shoulder twice to check I haven’t moved. The door shuts with a click. I wait a couple of minutes, maybe five, to be sure she’s gone, then scramble up, just as the bedroom door opens again.
My heart leaps out of my chest: it’s Moll, shuffling in, washing basket on the hunk of her hip. She doesn’t see me straight away, and I stand very still, like a girl who believes in invisible cloaks.
She claps a hand to her mouth. A sharp intake of breath.
‘I – I must have sleepwalked or something,’ I blurt.
I can see Moll’s mind racing, her puzzled gaze puddling around my bare feet, rising slowly up the crumpled cotton of my nightie, my tightly crossed arms, my blazing cheeks. To my surprise, she simply puts down by the bed the laundry basket – stacked with clean folded linen – and walks stoutly to the open window, her rectangular frame rocking from one foot to the other. She peers out at the scud of clouds, her back to me, the belt of her overall tightening, loosening as she breathes. ‘Mrs Wilde found you, did she?’
‘Yes,’ I admit sheepishly, wondering if she’s just bumped into my aunt on her way to make toast in the kitchen. I try to smooth my nightie, desperately wishing I were properly clothed, remembering Ma saying you can get away with anything if you’re dressed well.
‘She means no harm in it, Margot.’ Moll turns to me, her round face pinched.
‘I – I’m not sure what you mean.’ I glance at the door, worried that Sybil might return at any moment and I’ll be trapped here, pinned to the bed with fuss and toast.
Moll smiles kindly. ‘I found your hairs in the hairbrush, duck.’
‘Oh.’ I close my eyes for a moment. So much for a brain like a board game. Even Moll’s outmanoeuvred me.
‘Not as milky as Flora, but blonder than Pam and little darkling Dot. Similar to Audrey’s hair. But curlier, and shorter.’ She picks a pillow off the bed, and skins it of its slip, eyeing me a little more sharply. ‘And someone has been rifling through her frocks.’
‘I … I’ve been an idiot, Moll.’
Moll snaps back the sheet from the bed. ‘I’m saying nothing.’
‘Aunt Sybil …’ I begin, and stop, not sure how much Moll has worked out.
‘I guessed, Margot.’ The sheet slacks in her hands. ‘I’ve seen the way she looks at you. But your aunt has faith, you see, blind faith, that’s all. Like I believe in the Good Lord, she believes in Audrey. And, well, sometimes she gets too wrapped up in it, that’s all. She loses herself.’
I stare down at my toenails, the red varnish suddenly incongruous, and feel a roll of guilt. For haven’t I encouraged Sybil? Isn’t that what we both do in this room, lose ourselves, hold reality at bay?
‘You’re a kind girl, Margot,’ Moll says, more softly, second-guessing my thoughts, rumpling the sheet back, exposing the blue quilting of the mattress. ‘I can see that, the way you look after little Dot.’
My guilt intensifies. I’ve not been looking after Dot these last few weeks. I’ve left her to grow up on her own this summer. And, being Dot, she hasn’t complained, just taken refuge in Moppet, books, the companionship of her own imagination.
‘Your aunt’s seen some dark times, Margot, darker than you’ll ever know.’ Moll flutters over a fresh sheet and lifts a mattress corner. ‘But I haven’t seen her so relaxed, not for many years. Whatever’s gone on in here, in this room, it’s none of my business. All I know is that you and your sisters have breathed life into this house again.’ She cocks her head, eyes me sadly. ‘I can’t bear the thought of you all flying away at the end of the summer, like swallows.’
I smile back at her. ‘I’m glad you’re at Applecote too, Moll. You didn’t leave like the cook. Or the old gardeners.’
She shrugs, smooths the sheet with her palm. ‘My sweetheart, Arnold, was shot down like that poor fella in the meadow. Missing in action. They never found him either. I know a little of the Wildes’ heartbreak, that’s all.’
‘So is it you who leaves posies in the crater!’
She colours. ‘I know it’s daft. But someone loved that pilot, Margot. If it were my Arnold …’ She stops, her eyes pouching with tears.
To give Moll a moment, and despairing at my own fantastical theories, I peer out of the window, my hands on the wavering glass, and watch all the lost loved people, wheeling tracks in the sky, disguised as birds. And I think of the pilot, our German James Dean, how he had a Moll back at home, who was tiny-waisted once, who will always miss him, who will never be the person she would have been if he’d lived. Just like I will never be Margot A-go-go again, without Pa. Sybil will never be Sybil again without Audrey. And I wonder if we’re only our true selves as children, before life starts to go wrong.
‘Spoiled rotten she was. Little madam, I called her – but I’d have done anything for Audrey,’ Moll says abruptly, her thoughts seeming to follow mine. ‘And she knew it, bless her.’
It strikes me that the answers could all be behind the black door of Moll’s missing tooth. ‘What happened to Audrey, Moll?’
‘All I know …’ Moll hesitates, sieving her words like flour, patting them out in puffs ‘… is that Mrs Wilde will never leave this big old house. Not while Audrey could come knocking on the door any day. And if
they ever find her little broken body, it will shatter her mother’s heart. Mrs Wilde lives for hope, Margot, you see. And up here,’ Moll taps her temple, ‘Audrey’s as alive as you or me.’
‘But it’s been five years. Most people think …’ I try to say ‘that she’s dead’ but can’t.
‘Your uncle did it?’ Moll swipes at a pillow. ‘Well, of course they did. After he was arrested by those buffoons.’
‘Arrested?’
‘You didn’t know?’ Moll clutches the pillow to her chest, red-faced. ‘But everyone knew.’
I picture Ma the day we left, pressing the back of her hand to her forehead, the small silence after she mentioned my uncle’s name. ‘My mother never told us.’
‘Well, she probably thought it best,’ Moll says quickly, trying to backtrack. ‘Now what have I done? Me and my big mouth. It’s all your questions, Margot,’ she adds, more irritably. ‘You ask too many. You were the same as a child, like a bumblebee in the room.’
‘So what happened?’
‘It’s not my place,’ she says tightly.
‘Oh, Moll. No one ever tells the whole story about anything. Our family history is built on layer upon layer of omissions,’ I say, suddenly tearful. ‘It’s like the river, near the mouth of the Thames, you know, where they say you can stab at the ground and the underground water comes spurting out. Our family’s like that, just with secrets.’
‘All families are like that, duck.’ Moll gives me a sympathetic smile. ‘Now, she’s got a good heart, your mother. I always thought so. It’s not been easy. She does her best for you girls.’
‘Moll, please. I won’t be able to be in the same room as my uncle if you don’t.’
Moll sits down heavily on the side of the bed. ‘The police arrested your uncle because they had to arrest someone. That’s my opinion, Margot. Couldn’t find the poor mite in the river. Couldn’t find that funny man in the hat. The grand families around here, the Gores and the like, especially those Gores at Cornton, wanted the matter swept away as soon as possible, exerted pressure at the top, like they always do. And the police had to be seen to be doing something.’ She shakes her head, her eyes glassy with tears. ‘Awful for Mrs Wilde. She stuck by her husband, though. She knew he’d had nothing to do with it.’
‘Didn’t he?’ I ask, preparing for the worst, thinking of Perry’s fat fingers.
‘No, of course not, Margot!’ Moll looks shocked that I should think such a thing. ‘They couldn’t pin anything on him, nothing but tittle-tattle and rumour, the mutterings of an old mystic in the next valley, and he was released. Although, in many eyes, he’ll always be guilty, but that’s the valley for you.’ She stands up with a sigh, glances at the door. ‘And that’s Mrs Wilde’s footstep on the landing below, if I’m not mistaken.’
Without thinking, I lean towards her, kiss her warm, papery cheek. ‘Thank you, Moll.’
Moll presses her fingertips to her cheek with a look of amazement, as if she’s not been kissed by anyone in years. Then she flicks me away, flustered and smiling. ‘Be off with you.’
Summer is almost over. Suddenly some apples in the orchard are ripe. An evening arrives with a sharp nip, requiring the novelty of a cardigan. Flora shows off a love bite on her left breast, just above the nipple. ‘A marriage proposal is only a matter of time,’ Pam decides, after inspecting it closely. ‘But he’d better get his skates on.’
In just over a week – ‘That day,’ as Sybil now refers to it, eyes closing as she speaks – we must pack our cases and return to Squirrels without Flora for the first time, and Flora is off to be polished, like a precious stone, in Paris.
There suddenly seems a lot to lose – Flora, Harry, Tom, the possibility of ever finding out what happened to Audrey, even Billy’s bashful hellos, Sybil brushing my hair, little things I’ve grown used to and will miss.
But, most of all, it is the loss of our sisterhood, the tribe of Wildlings we were at the start of the summer, that hits hardest. The four of us are no longer solid, but dispersing, scattering in different directions. I try to close the gap between me and my sisters, especially Pam and Flora, but it’s like chasing dandelion seed across the meadow. Just marking time until summer’s end.
Dot idles off on long walks with Moppet and Perry’s binoculars, enchanted by swallows and swifts tracking across the hot blue sky. Flora is preoccupied with Harry – so much so that when I told her about Perry’s one-time arrest she merely shrugged, rather than shrieked, ‘Nooo!’ But she is less love-dazed now, more serious, absorbed, unreachable: the love deeper, more real, I suppose. Pam is frustrated by Tom, who still shows no sign of succumbing to his romantic destiny. And I am useful to my older sisters only in that I can sweet-talk Sybil into allowing them more freedom. They don’t see the price of it. I fear they’d shun me completely if they could.
Leaving Dot reading, Pam and Flora to squabble upstairs – ostensibly about the division of un-lost hairclips, really about Pam’s fear that Tom is in love with Flora, who does nothing to discourage him – I sit at the edge of the Wilderness, my chin resting on my knees, feeling more distant from my sisters than ever, stoking my own misery in the evening sun.
A shadow cools my back, spreads across the ground like a cloud. I brace myself, expecting it to be Sybil again, come to suggest a meeting later, but when I look up it’s into the tunnels of two nostrils.
Perry’s wearing his dreadful knitted bathing trunks and a crumpled white dinner shirt, open to the waist, a silk handkerchief knotted on his head. ‘May I?’ Without waiting for an answer, he lands next to me with a puff of sweat and air. In that moment, I know why Ma didn’t tell us about his arrest – how easy it is to make monsters out of large, heavy-breathing men, who sit too close and smell of game and salt – but then the understanding slides away, not quite clarifying.
‘Siblings are a nuisance, aren’t they?’ Perry says.
I shrug, wondering what his agenda might be, not wanting to encourage him.
‘I hated Clarence for years, Margot. He made me terribly cross.’
Clarence. Pa’s name rings out like a bell. It’s a shock to hear it. Perry rarely mentions Pa. Not knowing what to say, I pick a blade of grass and chew it.
‘He was handsome, your father,’ Perry continues gruffly. ‘Too clever by half. He married a woman so damn pretty that she made men’s hair stand on end, not caring what our parents thought, what it would do to the family name. And then he had the gall to have four daughters whereas Sybil and I only ever managed one, and we damn well …’ He kicks out one leg, like a mallet. ‘Oh, and the medals. How my brother liked to rub my nose in his bloody war medals, his heroic thumb. He shot Germans. I shot pheasant. Then, after achieving all that,’ he laughs hollowly, ‘he still bloody well got himself killed in the most stupid way possible and broke my mother’s heart.’ His tsk vibrates on his lips. ‘I always thought my little brother would outlive me by a country mile, move into Applecote Manor before I was even cold.’
I’m not sure what to say. Or who my uncle is any more, only that he is not the prowling beast with the lascivious eyes right now, but a huge, lonely man.
‘You know, after it happened,’ he says more gently, ‘the awful business on the rail tracks, I started to miss having someone to get cross about, just every once in a while.’ He leans back on his elbows, tilting his head to the sky. ‘And now I miss him every day. And I look across this garden, and I see us both so clearly – really, I can see us now, two little boys in breeches, fishing rods over our shoulders, one destined for the battlefield, one for the hunt and the house – and I think …’ He stops, swallows hard and his voice goes funny. ‘What I wouldn’t give to have just one more simple summer’s day, Margot, like that, me and my maddening swot of a little brother, everything ahead of us, no responsibilities, nothing to lose, everything still to play for, only thinking about trout.’ He stumbles up, squeezing my shoulder under the great ham of his hand. I wait until he’s safely gone, then I start to cry.
<
br /> A week to go. We try to think of a gift for our uncle and aunt as a thank-you for their hospitality. For me it’s more complicated than this: a goodbye, a very sorry for thinking you a murderer, I’ll miss you, and good riddance, all at once. But it’s difficult since we have no money and can’t agree on anything. The day trip is Dot’s idea, shot with unexpected Dottish brilliance. Isn’t Sybil locked into this house by her own fear? Perry by the anxieties of his wife? What if we could guide Sybil through it, lead her into the outside world again before we go? Wouldn’t that be the most perfect parting gift?
‘It’ll never happen,’ Flora says.
Pam, looking for opposition, says, ‘Margot can do it.’
Flora bets me the glass paperweight on her desk that I can’t coax our aunt out of the house into the local town.
I tell Dot I’ll win it for her.
‘I’ll be right with you, Aunt, right by your side. Just like Audrey was,’ I tell Sybil shamelessly, as she brushes out my hair that evening. She shakes her head incredulously, as if I’ve suggested she jump from the village church tower flapping tea-towels as wings. But when I mention it again the next day she hesitates, and the brush stills in my hair, as if she’s suddenly remembered something terribly important. I know the bet is mine.
‘I suppose it’s now or never, and I do need a new hat,’ Sybil repeats anxiously that Wednesday morning. She looks well, her cheeks less hollow, her thread-veins disguised with Pan Stik. She eats toast plastered with butter, two eggs, almost as if she’s enjoying them. Perry watches approvingly, only gobbling a mean bowl of salted porridge himself. And it strikes me that the two of them are really one system, redistributing their appetites, that the marriage that once looked dead may actually be alive at the roots.
In the hall, Sybil succumbs to nerves, clasping and unclasping her best crocodile handbag. We link our arms in hers, steer her down the front path, chatting, pretending everything is normal, that it isn’t her first trip into town in years, that her hands aren’t shaking.