by Eve Chase
Will looks in bemusement at the women around the table, knitted together like old friends. ‘I won’t ask if I’m interrupting anything.’
‘No, no. You’re absolutely not.’ Margot stands up, pulling herself back together. Jessie feels Audrey’s spirit scroll away from them. ‘I fear I’ve quite outstayed my welcome. I was only going to be five minutes.’
‘No, no. I have something for you!’ says Bella, excitedly. ‘I’ve finally worked it out. You have sisters?’
‘Three.’ Margot raises one eyebrow. ‘Imagine.’
‘A Dot?’
Margot nods, puzzled.
‘Don’t move, don’t go anywhere,’ Bella shouts, rushing off. They listen to the quickening clatter of feet up the stairs, down again.
‘Here you are. Joe found them in the window-seat in the orangery.’ She hands Margot the stack of letters. ‘From Ma,’ Bella adds, when Margot says nothing, her face paling, her lips parting in astonishment as she peels back pages, scans the water-blurred words. She checks the date on an envelope. She turns to Bella. ‘Thank you, thank you so much. You have no idea how much we longed for these letters. Oh, my goodness.’ She shakes her head, struggling to take it in. ‘We never believed Ma when she said she’d sent them. Under the window-seat? All this time? My aunt has some serious explaining to do.’
‘I hope we’ve not got anyone into trouble,’ says Jessie, exchanging a concerned look with Will.
‘Trouble? My God, Aunt Sybil’s never been anything but trouble,’ says Margot, with a mixture of exasperation and fondness. ‘Once again today, I stand corrected.’ She looks down at the letters again, obviously stunned, then back at Jessie. ‘I’ll see the police now.’
‘The police?’ Will repeats, taken aback.
‘I’d like a quick word, if you don’t mind. I want to tell them what I know.’
‘Well … sure.’ Will smiles resignedly. ‘I’ll show you the way.’
‘No need. I know exactly where I am going,’ Margot says quickly, winking at Jessie.
Twenty minutes later Margot slips out of the garden by the side gate. Jessie hears the put-put-put of a car and runs to the hall window. She watches the car’s headlights illuminate fragments – a gatepost, a snowy hedgerow, the iced sinew of the lane – then slide back into the darkness, just like Margot herself.
Two days later, the police call Will to confirm that the remains are those of the missing girl, Audrey Wilde; relatives have been informed; there will be a press conference in the morning. Jessie and Will say nothing to Bella and curl up by the fire, holding each other tightly, discussing in muted voices how they should break the news to the girls in the morning. They don’t know what it might trigger in Bella. Jessie sleeps badly – a nightmare about a dark tunnel, a head torch like a car headlight bouncing off wet, slippery stone walls, no way out – and wakes early. Wanting to ensure they get to Bella before schoolgirls start texting for gossip, or Romy wakes up, she makes her a cup of tea, shakes Will awake, and they rush nervously upstairs.
Bella is already awake, resplendent in Mandy’s grey silk dressing-gown, sitting up in the sleigh bed, the bed Jessie’s very glad no one mentioned to Margot, just in case it was Audrey’s. Despite the early hour, Bella looks rested, radiant even, her hair coiled, twisted over one shoulder. Seeing their solemn faces, she rolls her eyes. ‘I’m not about to have a breakdown or anything.’
Will sits gingerly on the side of the bed. Jessie hands Bella the tea and perches, a little further away, eyes soberly lowered. ‘Very sad news, I’m afraid, Bella,’ Will says gently. A shaft of winter sunlight crackles through the round porthole window, smudging lilac across the wall. ‘The police have confirmed that the remains are Audrey’s.’
Bella blows out, relieved. ‘Thank God. She’d want to be found.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it, I guess,’ says Will, cautiously, exchanging a puzzled glance with Jessie.
‘Audrey can have a funeral now. Her mother can finally say goodbye,’ Jessie says, then immediately kicks herself for reviving the subject of mothers and goodbyes. She waits for Bella to pounce on her clumsy comment, as she normally would.
But Bella only nods and mutters, ‘Yeah.’
Although the exchange is minimal, opaque to anyone who didn’t know them, maybe even to Will, it feels significant to Jessie. She relaxes a little, lets her weight rest on the mattress, not just on the tips of her toes.
‘It is okay to feel upset about this, Bella,’ Will says softly.
‘Dad,’ Bella groans.
‘We realize Applecote Manor is … tainted now, not the fresh start we’d hoped,’ Jessie says. ‘And we want you to have much more say in where we go next.’
Bella bolts upright. ‘Next? What do you mean next?’
‘We’ll put Applecote on the market.’ Jessie waits for Bella to smile, or at least look triumphant. That is what Bella always wanted after all. ‘Remember what you said the first time we saw this room? “Even if we move in, this house won’t ever belong to us,” I think it was. Well, you were right, Bella. You were right about many things. To borrow Margot’s words, I stand corrected.’
‘We,’ says Will, smiling at Jessie. ‘We stand corrected.’
‘What are you two banging on about?’ Bella looks appalled by both of them, then starts to laugh, as if they can’t be taken seriously. ‘You want to move house because of a body from the dawn of time in the garden? Oh, my God. What are you trying to protect me from? Death? Hello? Bolting horses and stable doors.’ She shakes her head at their immaturity, then smiles at them both with a look of weary affection. ‘I’m not moving anywhere. You can if you like.’
A shrine grows steadily beside Applecote Manor’s gate: flowers from elderly villagers and old school friends of Audrey; teddy bears from young village children who can’t comprehend death but understand the terror of being alone and lost; an exuberant floral wreath from Joe Peat and his family. Among the cellophane and ribbons, cutouts of the photograph that’s been splashed across the papers, grainy black-and-white, the tragedy somehow sealed in her innocent prettiness. Jessie studies Audrey’s face, tracks traces of Margot in those lively bright eyes, the curl at the corners of her smile.
But it’s hard not to see everything through the prism of Audrey now. Even Bella’s bedroom feels different, airier, rinsed clean somehow, and the top-floor landing less narrow and dim, as if the house is not caving in but opening up.
Obviously, this change in atmosphere – perception, of course – comes from Bella’s lifting spirits, rather than any release of Audrey’s. But Jessie senses the two things are deeply connected: as a seismic tremor deep in the earth can nudge something on the surface, the discovery of Audrey has shifted things for Bella. She has no idea how Bella – connecting disparate things as the young do naturally, like artists – has turned another girl’s terrible fate into a catalyst for her own change. But she has. Bella is still Bella, of course, complex, contradictory, stubborn. But the high wall that surrounds her is cracking, small gaps Jessie can peer through and see, for the first time, Bella as she really is, the girl she was, moving behind it, like a streak of brilliant light.
The explanation, Will believes, is more straightforward. Bella saved Romy’s life, a heroic act that made her realize not only did she love her little sister but that she has a vital role to play in this family, her family. Something, resisted for so long, clicked.
One morning, Bella walks downstairs with the two empty Mandy Boxes, asking if she should put them out with the recycling. The bouquets at the gate start to fade. The news agenda moves on without any mention of the mysterious ‘he’ whom Margot had made sound so culpable. Jessie decides there’s something unknowable about Margot and her story, a fluidity in which solid facts dissolve, and it’s best to leave it to the police. She collects up the soft toys for charity (only three quietly ‘adopted’ by Romy), sends on the notes and messages to Margot at the nursery. She keeps expecting, hoping, to find Margot on the doorste
p. But Margot doesn’t appear. And Jessie doesn’t want to disturb her, or intrude by turning up at the cafe, assuming she has her hands full with the police and dealing with Audrey’s poor mother.
Life takes over again. The floods recede. The daylight gets longer. Will leaves for London with a quiet positivity, nothing that Jessie can quite put her finger on but just as if he’s resolved a matter that’s been privately troubling him. She puts this down to Bella continuing to prove to her father that she is not a girl to be flattened by life’s blows, and in this and many other ways, Jessie now suspects she is probably like her mother, a woman Jessie finds herself no longer wanting to push away quite so hard. Her old jealousy seems increasingly absurd – she is alive, Mandy is not, she is Will’s wife, a mother to his child too – and the curiosity she’s suppressed for so long floats more freely to the surface. Jessie starts to ask Bella questions. What films did Mandy love? What books did she read to Bella when Bella was Romy’s age? Did Mandy send Bella to playgroup? At first Jessie’s questions are met with a puzzled shrug or a breath of monosyllables, but Bella reveals a little more each time. And it is through Bella that Jessie slowly gets to know Mandy – and the daughter who still misses her so much – and, inch by inch, allows Mandy space to live freely alongside them. One day Jessie catches herself having a conversation with Mandy in her head, like two neighbours gossiping either side of a garden fence. Mandy tells her to love fiercely what is precious, what is not yet lost. Oh, yes, and Bella would adore a dog.
‘If not now, when?’ Jessie says afterwards to Will. ‘Bella deserves it, after all the upheaval of the last few weeks.’ She calls the local Golden Retriever breeder that evening. They are lucky. There is one bitch left in a litter, smaller than its siblings, blonde with bear-like paws, ready to go. Bella names her Marilyn, and smothers her with love. Marilyn pees all over the house, eats their shoes, digs up the carefully planted bulbs in the garden. One terrible afternoon, she chews off Flump the elephant’s trunk. Romy sobs. Bella carefully sews it back on with grey cotton, nicked especially from the school craft cupboard. Jessie forgives Marilyn everything.
Joe Peat works hard, sweating more profusely under his cap as the temperatures slowly rise. By late March, the well and the pool have both been made safe, their structures removed. The statues of the stone goddesses that once guarded the pool’s corners now emerge, like wood nymphs, from behind clumps of daffodils. One Saturday afternoon, Lou arrives unannounced, newly single, eyes mascara-streaked, saying she needs to lick her wounds. Bella says, ‘Marilyn is good at licking wounds,’ and Jessie ropes Lou into helping seed the new topsoil that covers the ghost of the pool’s rectangular expanse with wildflowers and grasses.
Lou pulls Jessie to one side, whispers, ‘Why is Bella smiling so much? What the hell happened?’
And Jessie says, ‘Bella happened.’
An unexpectedly warm early spring knocks out winter. Her mother comes to stay, warns Jessie that disasters always come in threes, and not to let her guard down for a minute, then wonders if she could take some cuttings from the garden, and stay on another few days. Jessie enrols Romy in a playgroup in the village hall two mornings a week. It is during these hours, the furry heap of Marilyn at her feet, that she sits in her studio. Studying her reflection in a mirror, she sketches a self-portrait, the woman she is now, wiser, older, scruffier and, yes, happier. Bella, on returning from school, agrees it’s terrible but says it’s a start at least, and sticks it on the kitchen wall next to Romy’s finger paintings and the portrait of Audrey.
One afternoon Bella pulls Jessie aside on the front step and warns her in a furious whisper ‘not to act like it’s the first time I’ve brought anyone back or ask stupid questions’. Liv, also a daygirl, is a tall gobby blonde with three brothers whose parents have just completely ruined her life by moving from Camden to Cornton Hall, the spookily big house on the outskirts of the world’s dullest village. Over the following days, she and Bella spend hours in Bella’s bedroom, listening to music, screeching with laughter (abruptly silent the moment Jessie enters) and hanging out at the stones, leaving a badly hidden trail of cigarette butts in the grass.
Will surprises them all by arriving home on a Wednesday, not a Friday. He is grinning like a loon. Jessie fears he’s been drinking on the train. He starts raking his hand through his hair, speaking too fast, and tells her he’s accepted an offer on the entire company, not just Jackson’s stake, that he’s been negotiating a half-decent price these last couple of weeks. No, they won’t be flash rich, more’s the pity, but comfortable enough to take stock, for both of them to set up something here and have more babies. ‘If not now, when?’ he teases. And Jessie kisses him, tastes the mints he sucked on the train on his tongue. ‘Wait,’ he says, pulling away. ‘I got you this.’ He slips something small and hard into her hand, folds her fingers over it.
She looks down, opens her palm. A gold pendant figure, an exact match to the one on her necklace, the one Will bought after Romy’s birth. ‘I can’t,’ she whispers, covering her mouth with her hand. ‘Bella will hang me by it.’
‘Bella chose it,’ Will says. Standing behind her, he lifts Jessie’s hair and threads the pendant on to the chain at her neck. At first it feels odd, two figures swinging in the dip of her clavicle. Then it feels right. She has two daughters, not one. When she touches it, her skin has already warmed the gold.
16
I get up very early, leaving my beloved Billy buried in sleep – no one sleeps as deeply as a plantsman. After feeding our dogs, emptying the car of our young grandsons’ carelessly discarded, festering football boots, I drive away, relishing the silence, inhaling the dawn-damp spring air. The cottage, our nest in the woods, shrinks in the mirror. Ahead, the open, empty lane. The hedgerows are foliated with tiny tits, sparkling with dew. Cow parsley is starting to foam now. Sap rising. At the crossroads, I take the road into the valley, the one I normally avoid, to Cornton Hall.
Where will I find Harry Gore, if not there?
As I pull up outside, my pulse thickens. The scaffolding that has caged Cornton for months has gone, revealing stone buffed to the colour of clotted cream, decades of ivy skinned away. CCTV cameras. Two expensive cars in the drive. It is a different house, a different age, most of the old county families like the Gores long gone. But Cornton’s windows still wink at me in the watery sunshine, and I fancy I can feel a little of the presence of the beautiful young man with the leonine eyes who swam along the river with me one stifling summer afternoon many years ago. I think of the kingfisher, that bomb of blue, the hot-air balloon dangling over our heads, like a planet. I see the life Harry was destined to inherit, quite how far he fell. Time compresses. My eyes fill with tears.
Houses are never just houses, I’m quite sure of this now. We leave particles behind, dust and dreams, fingerprints on buried wallpapers, our tread in the wear of the stairs. And we take bits of the houses with us. In my case, a love of the smell of wax polish on sun-warmed oak, late-summer sunlight filtering through stained glass. We grow up. We stay the same. We move away but we live for ever where we were most alive.
For Harry, I think, that was Cornton Hall. For me it was Applecote Manor, during that delirious heatwave of 1959. Moll, Perry and Moppet are all just bones now, but while Sybil remained stubbornly hanging on at Applecote, something of those heady summer days was preserved, like the fruit of old harvests in one of Moll’s jams. After Applecote finally sold and the Tuckers moved in, I saw that the house deserved a new family, a new chance at happiness. And I started to pray that the past would stay buried. This seemed entirely possible. So much time had passed, the world of the fifties a nostalgic memory, a Sunday-night TV show. But it turns out that the past – and, bizarrely, Dot’s spectacles, Bella tells me – was never far beneath the surface of the soil here, rising and falling with the water table itself. And, like the stones, the crater in the meadow, the past somehow holds its form. Only its meaning changes.
We didn’t dare tell Ma
when she reclaimed us that morning, lured back to London by Jack. Only Tom knew: Flora refused to keep it from the man she still calls her soulmate. He tried to reassure us that Harry would find it very difficult to prove we had anything to do with his eye – let alone a charge of attempted murder – since there were no witnesses but we four nicely spoken girls. Rationally, this made sense. But reason has little to do with fear: the power Harry wielded over us, me in particular, hard to comprehend now, an incantation forged in the mythic heat.
Harry was dangerous, damaged. I was petrified that he’d wreak revenge on Dot if I broke our pact of silence. I dreamed of him most nights, jolting up in bed in a grease of sweat. And he moved, deliberately, I think, in overlapping London circles afterwards, staying close, unable to cut loose either – easy enough since Flora absconded from finishing school in Paris, declaring herself ‘already perfectly finished’, and wed Tom on a snowy morning in early 1961 while he was on leave. Harry even came to Flora’s wedding, sitting sullenly with his aloof rich parents in Chelsea Register Office, as handsome as ever from one side, before turning to shoot us down with that frozen bloodshot eye.
It wasn’t just his eye. It was the bloat of his face, the news that he’d dropped out of Oxford, spent his time pushing cards across the baize tables of Mayfair clubs and sleazy Cannes casinos, his nostrils crusted with cocaine, a different woman on his arm every night. It was the loss of early promise, his freckled boyish beauty. Worse, far worse, I discovered that, despite all he’d done, I still secretly longed for him. I couldn’t forget the tenderness with which he’d kissed the backs of my raw knees, those sticky summer nights in my sixteenth year when I’d lain in my bed, twisted in sheets and desire, the woman in me awakening.
I’d seek out experiences with other men that echoed my first sexually meaningful encounter. They rarely ended well. While my sisters built upon the confidence, that violent widening of our own expectations, that that terrible summer’s night bestowed upon us, and moved on – Pam to medical school, Dot to study English at Cambridge, Flora and Tom to California with flowers in their hair and armfuls of babies – I, like Harry, struggled to find a direction, or a steady partner, scraping by on a series of jobs in auction houses, bars and galleries, unable to settle, living and fighting with Ma in Chelsea, or sharing dreary rooms in Earls Court with other drifting sixties single girls like me: I was always circling around the summer of 1959 in my mind, round and round, like a falcon over the meadow, trying to make sense of it.