by Eve Chase
Then, the day Harry died in 1966, that bird fell out of the sky. A winding coastal road outside Cannes. A sharp bend. Harry, drunk, driving too fast. A twist of hot metal.
Something in me, taut for so long, stretched to capacity, just snapped.
Pam discovered me shaking in the dark of my bedsit. Ma refused to let her call a doctor, terrified of the electric shocks they’d jolted through Pa’s skull all those years before. She wanted me home even though, scandalously, Jack was living there then, his infidelities brought to heel. So I was installed in my old bedroom, like a mad woman in the attic, far above the now fashionable Chelsea streets that teemed with optimistic youth, glorious girls in mini-skirts up to their hips.
I did not recognize myself. But Ma never once told me to pull myself together. She simply sat with my sadness, stroking my hair as I laid my head in her lap. My sisters rarely left my side. But I felt like a burden, a leftover from another – bleak post-war – decade, nothing to do with the fulfilment they were experiencing, the excitement bubbling up on London’s streets. I wanted to disappear. But my sisters wouldn’t let me. And then Dot wrote to Sybil.
My aunt braved the swinging metropolis alone – the last time she’d done it rationing had just ended. I knew exactly how hard that journey must have been for her, and I never forgot it. My most vivid memory of that time is of stumbling downstairs to find her – wearing her outdated church ‘best’, clutching her crocodile handbag – rigid on Ma’s chaise-longue, open-mouthed at the sight of Jack, who was striding around the house bare-chested with a paintbrush between his teeth. It was on that first visit that I decided to tell Sybil the truth, my pact with Harry now finally over. My sisters agreed, and waited outside the door, ready to stick her together again.
Of course, Sybil didn’t believe a word of it: everyone knew Harry had grown from a sweet boy into a rogue and a druggy liar, she said. Audrey was going to come home one day and that was the end of it. And she didn’t want me upsetting her husband, or myself, with this gossip, or for me ever to mention it again. She visited London a couple of times after that, accompanied by Perry, who, to Ma’s great annoyance, got on like a house on fire with Jack – they’d get roaring drunk and sing Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’’. But Sybil never mentioned what I’d told her about Harry. And neither did I.
If Harry’s death shattered me, it was finally telling Sybil the truth – even though she refused to believe it, and I’d got it wrong – that put me together again. The moment the words were out, Harry’s pact broken, I no longer felt that my brain was bursting out of my skull. Slowly, I began to think about the hour after that one, the next day, the next week. The skin at the backs of my knees started to heal, the rashes never to return.
Yearning to feel grass between my toes, smell rain falling on a fresh clean river, I took up Sybil’s offer of a restorative stay at Applecote, a house I hadn’t bothered to visit for years, wrapped up in my own crashing affairs. As I drove apprehensively through its gates, wondering if I was making yet another mistake, there was Billy standing on tiptoe, tying the baby-pink roses to trellis. A man I’d returned to in my thoughts many times during those intervening years, something between us left unfinished. The front of his T-shirt had ridden up, revealing the hard ridges of his stomach, like sand on a beach as the tide goes out. And I knew.
Ma didn’t live for ever, as we all thought she would, although she outlived Jack by twenty years. We gathered around as her body failed, firing questions before it was too late. Was Pa’s accident really an accident? ‘Oh, yes, darling,’ she wheezed, and I realized that, like Sybil with Audrey, Ma would always stick doggedly to her own version of events and curate our family history. Why has Dot grown to look so uncannily like Jack? ‘I suppose it is just possible he was her father,’ Ma finally conceded. She squeezed Dot’s hand. ‘I’m tired, darling. Let’s talk when I’m better.’ But she didn’t get better. We laid her to rest in an emerald-green gown next to Pa. We miss her still. But as I pull away from Cornton Hall, leaving the last traces of Harry behind, the Margot who once loved him, and head out of the valley on the road home, I think how much easier this afternoon will be without her.
Ma always loathed goodbyes.
Billy meets me with a cup of tea. He guesses where I’ve been. We stand there, holding each other, his large, rough hands delicately cupping my face, and I think how my younger self would have been incredulous that you can be grey and wrinkled and still in love.
After a pasta lunch I’m far too nervous to eat, I scout around our spring garden for just the right posy – a greeny-white tulip, fern leaves – and bind it in kitchen twine. I pull on an elegant dress – if one is born plain one must compensate by dressing well (Ma imprinted that on me) – but flat shoes. I stack the cakes carefully in the boot.
As Billy drives away, I glance anxiously out of the window at the trees bending, their leaves rattling. We could have done without the gusting wind.
Paul, Sybil’s favourite nurse, meets us at the entrance of the care home – ‘The dispatch centre,’ Pam wickedly calls it – a modern, ugly building that we chose for its kind staff and well-tended gardens. He runs me quickly through Sybil’s state of health, which changes hourly, suspended precariously in the twilight zone of her great age: she’s well this afternoon, had a reasonable night and, yes, a little lunch. She’s been very quiet but seems to grasp what it all means. (Unlike the letters: ‘What letters, dear?’ I remain wholly unconvinced by her amnesia about those, even knowing the way her memory loops and weaves.) Paul pats my arm. ‘It’s the right thing, Margot,’ he reassures me.
God, I hope he’s right.
Sybil seems quite cheerful. She is already in her wheelchair, organized for an outing, a crocheted blanket tucked over her knees and, on top of the blanket, her trusty crocodile handbag, just in case. Her hair – what remains of it – has been specially set into wispy spun-sugar curls by one of the nurses. Seeing me and Billy, she lights up and presses her twisted hands on the arms of the wheelchair, forgetting that she can no longer lift her own feather weight. Since the news broke, the transparent parchment of her skin has shrunk even tighter over her skeleton, so her body looks mummified, every vein and bone visible. She is much closer to the end. The fight – the maternal force that kept her going all these years – has completely gone. She sleeps a lot now, asleep far more than awake, like the time between ticks lengthening as an old pocket watch runs down.
‘All ready, Sybil?’ Billy manoeuvres the wheelchair forward.
She clutches her handbag, bunching the bulbs of her knuckles. ‘I’ve been ready a long time, Billy dear.’
Billy tucks the sapling into the Applecote soil, a crab apple that sings out each spring with ballerina-pink blossom. I picture its roots sucking up the rich water that rises here in the Wilderness, where the old well once tunnelled deep into the earth; Audrey and I dangling from a branch, the clamp of skin and moss; Ma on a chaise-longue in Chelsea, blossom drifting across the drawing-room floor. So many things. All connected. Still connecting. Not quite finished.
My sisters and I daren’t look at one another. We cry at everything, these days. Laugh at the wrong moments too, a particular risk this afternoon since the five red helium balloons – one for Audrey and each of us, eager for the flight Audrey once dreamed of – are snapping madly on their strings in the high wind, Pam struggling to control them. While Romy, our sweet uninvited guest, escaped from the house, is standing by the wheelchair, peering at Sybil with grave fascination, as if my aunt were a museum exhibit she’s forbidden to touch.
‘What does this little girl think of the tree?’ Sybil asks, as the wind cracks the blanket on her lap.
Romy considers this surprising question from the relic, fiddles with the pocket of her blue pinafore. ‘Not big.’
‘Little is nice too,’ Sybil says. ‘Like you.’
‘Romy not little.’
‘No. I’d say you’re just right.’ Sybil smiles. She is rea
ching out to touch Romy’s cheek when Jessie runs up, flustered.
‘I’m so, so sorry. You gatecrasher, Romy! Come here.’ She scoops up her adorable little girl and carries her through the budding green trees back to the house. Sybil stares after them longingly, her smile fading. The wind blows harder. The balloon strings tangle in Pam’s excitable grey hair.
‘Bloody things,’ Pam mutters, clicking her tongue like Ma.
Flora laughs. ‘Just give them to me, Pam.’
‘No, no, I can manage.’ Pam sniffs. ‘I’m hardly going to lift off the ground.’ She grips the strings in her fist and yanks them hard, like the leads of her unruly terriers. ‘Let’s get on with it, shall we, Margot?’
‘Good idea. I can no longer feel my toes.’ Flora stepped off the plane an hour late, still dressed for California in white linen and gold sandals.
‘I did warn you, Flora.’ Pam glances down approvingly at her own navy wool coat and sensible boots. ‘You do have a short memory.’
‘Not that short,’ Flora replies softly. And we all nod, silent for a moment, knowing exactly what she means. It still feels like yesterday. It still lives inside us.
Billy pushes the wheelchair through the gate and across the meadow grass where it jams on tussocks, careers into dips. After a few blustery minutes, we pause on a plateau, not venturing as far as the stones in case Sybil’s wheelchair gets truly stuck, a permanent addition to their circle. The others wait solemnly as Dot and I walk over to the grassy crater and lay the posy of flowers for Moll. When we return Sybil’s eyes are shut.
‘Asleep,’ mouths Pam, unnecessarily.
‘Look. The buttercups are out, Sybil!’ I yell into her hearing aid.
Sybil’s milky eyes open slowly, taking in, probably for the last time, the blur of windswept meadow that Audrey so loved, that meeting of grass and a sky filled with swallows, returning for another summer.
My sisters and I edge closer together, just touching. Squinting into the sunshine, I can still see us exactly as we were, unknowingly lovely and lithe-limbed, shedding our summer dresses, our English modesty, whooping, running barefoot into the moon-cut river, that wild night, the rest of our lives, unaware of the moment’s preciousness, its glittering fragility. And I am overwhelmed by tenderness for us all. So too, I think, is Pam, who wriggles out of her warm coat and slides it over Flora’s shoulders.
‘Where’s the little girl gone, Margot?’ Sybil says suddenly.
We look down to see our aunt, peaceful a moment ago now agitated, glancing around as if she’s misplaced something terribly important. ‘My little girl was here, I’m quite sure of it.’
I exchange alarmed glances with my sisters. Don’t let Sybil muddle Audrey with the little blonde Tucker girl. Not today.
‘I want to see her again.’ Sybil’s eyes start to swim with tears.
‘Oh, Sybil, you will,’ Flora says kindly, smoothing the blanket over our aunt’s lolly-stick legs. But it is no good.
‘Where’s she gone, Margot?’ Sybil sobs through the claw of her hand. ‘Where’s my little girl gone?’
‘Help,’ I whisper to Billy, starting to panic.
Billy – the person Sybil trusts most in the world, who battled the dreaded black spot on her beloved roses – bends down and mutters something to Sybil, which we cannot catch. Sybil stills. Dot squeezes my hand. We hold our breath.
Billy runs back to the house and, a few minutes later, reappears at the meadow gate with the young family, their pup. I start to get an inkling of his idea. But Romy is reluctant, belting an arm around Bella’s leg. Her parents can’t seem to persuade her. I feel time ticking by, Sybil’s distress, the afternoon falling apart. It is Bella who saves it, taking Romy’s hand and leading her out to us. Pam bends down – knees cracking – and offers the balloons. Romy hesitates.
‘Go on,’ Bella smiles. And I see it pipe silently between them, that secret language of sisters. Not taking her eyes off Bella, Romy slowly lifts her right hand and closes it around the tangle of strings.
Sybil watches all this intently, the little girl centred in her shadow-edged circular field of vision as if through a monocle. I’m not sure whether she sees Audrey or Romy now. Only that it doesn’t matter any more.
At a nod from Bella, Romy starts to run, wind at her back, a streak of blue dress, surging red balloons. A girl, unvanished. Like she just might fly. In the centre of the stone circle, she spins – once, twice – then stars open her hand, laughing, setting us free.
Acknowledgements
I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who cheered on The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde – from the first seed of an idea to The End – especially my brilliant editor Maxine Hitchcock at Michael Joseph and my wonderful agent Lizzy Kremer at David Higham Associates. Also Harriet Moore, Alice Howe, Emma Jamison, Claire Bush, Gaby Young, Eve Hall and Hazel Orme – I feel very lucky to work with you all. A special thank you to Deirdre Bryan-Brown – a treasured friend of my late grandmother – who had me rapt with her tales of upper-class girls in the fifties, and demonstrated a very impressive deb’s curtsy in the pub; to my three children, for putting up with me writing all the time and reminding me simply that ‘the best books are the ones you can’t stop reading’. And Ben: I couldn’t have done it without you.
THE BEGINNING
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First published 2017
Copyright © Eve Chase, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket photos © Judy Davidson/Arcangel Images and © Alamy
ISBN: 978-1-405-91935-7