Two swimming costumes and a bikini hung limp over the bath-curtain rail. They were still damp, and sand was clumped in the gussets where Flora hadn’t bothered to rinse them out. She opened the airing cupboard crammed with old sheets, towels, blankets, and stained and flattened pillows—coloured layers of cloth like the tinted sand in the tiny bottles sold by Hadleigh’s tourist shops. Somewhere in the mass of fabric would be more swimming costumes and trunks like the ones she had found for Richard—left behind by long-gone summer visitors and stuffed amongst the linen. Only the top third of each shelf was ever used—washed, ironed, folded, and returned by Nan. Flora wormed her arms into the dense bottom layers, her fingers searching for smooth, slippery material. When she was immersed up to the elbows she grabbed a piece of cloth from the rear of the cupboard and pulled it forwards. A corner of a towel appeared. She hauled it out and recognised the faded sandstone colour, the bald patches where the nap had worn away, and the hole on one edge where the towel had been jammed over the peg on the back of the bathroom door. Flora held it up to her face, closed her eyes and inhaled; it smelled grey, the odour of fabric that has lain too long without being washed. Still, the image of her mother came, forever turning away in the pink dress, the scent of coconut from the gorse, the colour of golden honey, a book in her hand.
Flora went into the kitchen, where Richard was washing up the breakfast plates. Nan, standing beside him, was scooping a pot of sour cream into a glass mixing bowl. A large salmon was flopped in an oven dish, and salad ingredients and a bag of new potatoes were scattered on the counters.
“Do you remember this?” Flora said, holding out the towel.
Nan looked around. “What do you mean, remember it?” She blinked. “Flora, please put some clothes on. It’s not right.” She dolloped another pot of sour cream on top of the first and added a handful of chopped parsley.
“Richard’s seen it all before, haven’t you, Richard?” Flora said.
He smirked over Nan’s shoulder.
“It was Mum’s towel,” Flora said to Nan.
Nan stared down at the bowl in the crook of her arm as if she couldn’t bear to see her sister’s body. “I don’t recall any of us having our own towels, although that would be preferable. It’s always a free-for-all in this house, as far as I can see.”
“No, I mean the day she disappeared.”
“Put some clothes on, please.”
Flora wrapped the towel around her, tucking it in under her armpits. “Well?” she said, and sat at the table.
Nan picked up a spoon and stirred the parsley into the white cream. “It might be; I don’t remember.”
Richard filled the kettle, lifted cups from the cupboard. “Tea or coffee?” he said.
“If she took this towel to the beach that last time”—Flora tucked it more tightly around her chest—“how did it get to be in the airing cupboard?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Nan snapped. “Where else would it be?”
“How did it get here, and what happened to the other things Mum had on the beach?”
“The same way that the ridiculous dress that you insist on wearing got back,” Nan said. “I put the things away, in the airing cupboard, in the wardrobe, on the bookshelves, wherever they were meant to go—which is a lot more than other people do.” She picked up half a lemon and crushed it in her fist so the juice flowed out from between her solid fingers into the bowl of sour cream.
“But how did they get home?”
“I don’t know. Martin must have brought everything over the next day—Mum’s clothes, the towel. Somebody picked it all up from the nudist beach and stuffed it in a bag. One of the search party, I suppose.”
“And her book?” Flora said. “What happened to that?” She wasn’t sure why it was so important to know how her mother’s things had got home, where they were now. An answer to a question she couldn’t quite work out.
“Like I said, I put things away in their proper places.”
“Didn’t the police want to see them?” Richard said.
Flora had almost forgotten he was in the room. “The fucking police were only interested in whether Daddy had murdered her and buried her body under the floorboards.” Flora stamped a foot. “But as soon as their dense little heads had worked out that he hadn’t, they weren’t interested in anything,” she said. “No suspicious circumstances. They were crap.”
“Flora,” Nan said, “that’s not fair. Mum was an adult.” To Richard she said, “She went for a swim; she left her clothes on the beach. The coast guard searched, of course, but . . .” Nan trailed off.
“What about her passport?” Richard said. He opened a cupboard and found the teapot, brown and round with several zigzags running through it where it had been glued together. He held it up to the window, as if unsure it would hold water.