“What have you brought?” Flora asked.
“Wait and see.” Nan was as excited as a child. She carried the box down through the grass and put it on the table. She undid the catches on the side and lifted the lid. “It’s a windup record player,” she said, pleased with herself, delighted with the look on Flora’s face. “I managed to get you an album I think you’ll like. You have to turn your back.”
“Really?”
“Yes, turn around.”
Flora turned and she heard Nan take something out of the bag, heard her pressing buttons, winding the machine up, and the crackle as she placed a needle on the vinyl. The familiar opening chords of “Rubylove” played out over the tangled plants of the garden. Flora spun, laughing, and Nan clicked her fingers up near her head. “Greek, not Spanish,” Flora said, smiling.
“Who cares,” Nan said, and began to dance, giving her hips a little wiggle. She twirled where the grass had been flattened, Flora swaying with her. They found it impossible not to smile, dancing around the table with the sun shining on the sea below them, and singing along, making up the foreign words with anything that came to them, holding hands and laughing together until the track finished and Nan flung herself, panting, onto the ground. Flora lay beside her sister, staring up at the blue sky, the grass prickling her legs.
“I should have told them,” Flora said.
“Who?” Nan said, still breathless.
“Jonathan and Louise.”
“Told them what?” Nan moved onto her side, propping her head up with her hand.
“What you were always telling me.” Flora put her hands over her eyes. “That they shouldn’t leave Daddy on his own.” Her blood pulsed in her ears, the whirr of an approaching helicopter. “I’m sorry,” she managed.
“Oh, Flora. None of it’s your fault.” Nan tucked some of her sister’s hair behind her ear.
“You’re wrong.” Flora closed her eyes, tried to stop herself from crying. “It’s all my fault.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw Mum the day she disappeared.” Nan was silent, listening. “I didn’t go to school. I hid in the gorse and I watched her leave the house.” Once more, Flora saw Ingrid in her pink chiffon dress, turning into sunlight. “And I didn’t stop her.”
“But how could you have known? None of us knew she wouldn’t come back. And besides, you were a child—it wasn’t your job to stop her.”
Flora put a bent arm over her eyes, her chest heaving, and Nan pulled her in. They lay there, the two sisters, arms around each other with the sun shining on them until the album finished.
In the afternoon, when Nan had left, Flora pulled out one of the drawers from under the writing-room bed and took it, together with a cup of tea, to the table outside. The drawer was full of pieces of paper: snippets of typed stories, paragraphs describing landscape and birdsong, pages of sex. They had been scribbled over by her father, lines crossed out and annotations made in the margins: shit and move here and fucking rubbish. They made her smile, and she found it difficult to understand that these words could exist when her father did not.
The next morning Flora walked to the village shop. She selected a loaf of sliced bread and stood in front of the upright chiller with the door ajar, the pain of the cold air welcome. The second Mrs. Bankes, a younger, slimmer version of the previous one, coughed, and Flora took out a packet of bacon. She picked up half a dozen eggs, and when she opened the box to check none of them were cracked, something about their shape, their fragile brownness, made her grip the edge of the shelf for support. Tears plopped onto the box and spread into the cardboard. When she paid for the food, the second Mrs. Bankes gave her too much change. Flora knew it was on purpose, and she dropped the extra fifty pence into the collection box outside the shop.
As she balanced the frying pan on the writing room’s stove and tried to flip an egg, Flora heard the unmistakable rumble of the Morris Minor. She leaned on the bottom half of the stable door, eating bacon with her fingers, waiting for Richard.
“Hello,” she said.
He kissed her on the lips. “How have you been?”
“Breakfast? I could fry you an egg.”
“Just a coffee. You should eat at the table, you know, sitting down,” Richard said.
She fetched another cup, poured him some coffee, and they went to the table. The drawer was still there, the pages weighted with a rock.
“Nan brought me a record player,” Flora said, but Richard was busy sifting through the papers.
“What are these?”
“Some bits Daddy wrote. Scraps, really.”
He peered at the writing. “Do you think there’s anything publishable?”
She could tell he was excited. “Richard.”
He looked up. “Sorry. It was you I came to see. I brought a picnic. I thought we could go for a walk to the sea. Or you could even go for a swim. What do you say?”
She felt the sting in the bridge of her nose and turned her head away.