She smiles slowly and turns her head on the pillow toward Will, whose arms are tightly wrapped around her waist, as they always are, as if to stop her vanishing in the night. His rugged good looks slackened in sleep, the strain of yesterday’s move is crosshatched in tiny lines across his face like a woodcut. Jessie tenderly pushes a lock of dark hair off his forehead, revealing a streak of silver. Will’s is the kind of face—noble, life-weathered—that could easily have come from an ancestor portrait, such as those that must have once hung on these walls, she decides. He belongs here. They all do.
Jessie likes the idea, that there’s an unbroken thread, a pulse of energy, running through the lives of the historic owners, the Wilde family, and their own. It feels like they’re picking up something loved but broken, putting it back together again. She loves Will deeply for being brave enough to take on this old house, this new unknowable life. He’s been under a lot of pressure to bow out: Will’s old loyal friends, not wanting to lose him, tried to persuade him to stay; Bella swore she’d never forgive him if they moved, that there was something bad at Applecote, like a gas you couldn’t taste or smell, that would poison them all in their sleep.
Jessie’s nerve was shaken at times. She didn’t like the way two local builders went silent on the phone when she mentioned the name of the house, refusing to explain why they didn’t want to work on it. But she made light of this to Will. There have been many times in their relationship when one of them has had to reassure the other. Sometimes it is him—yes, Romy really will sleep through the night soon, of course Bella will grow to love her little sister—sometimes her. This is how they roll.
But the possibility that the move might be stirring up Will’s old grief has been niggling. A few days ago, she’d woken in the early hours, discovered his side of the bed empty, and got up, wondering where he was. She’d only got as far as the landing and stopped: music was drifting from beneath the closed living room door, up the stairs like smoke, songs that had nothing to do with her, old hits from the time of his first marriage, the nineties Britpop Bella had once told Jessie that her mother loved. She crept back to bed, the lyrics to the Blur song “Country House” whistling ironically in her head. She told herself it was just Will’s way of saying a final good-bye to the house, his life with Mandy. Closure.
But the timing of her mother’s words the next morning hadn’t helped: had Jessie seriously considered what moving to the countryside could do to her marriage? The undertow there, Jessie knew, was that Jessie’s father had fled sleepy Somerset in the eighties for an adventurous new life with another woman—christened “the Hussy from Hampshire” by Jessie’s mother—when Jessie was three, only to die in the Hussy’s arms in a moped accident on the Costa Brava six months later. So she can’t blame her mother for pocketing the belief that a marriage might be broken into at any time, or simply explode, like a faulty gas boiler. Aware that she’s not had a father’s opinion to counterweight her mother’s, she’s always made a conscious effort to discard her mother’s anxieties. But it can be difficult at times. Like trying to separate a sound from its echo.
Maybe for these reasons, she had secretly feared the deal might fall apart right until yesterday morning when the moving trucks turned up. She had watched, stomach knotted, as their London lives were dismantled, bound with tape, memories rolled up like rugs. It struck her both how replaceable things were—throws, food mixers, unread books—and how easy they were to forget once removed from view. And a tiny voice in her head guiltily hoped that Mandy would be, too, just a little.
Will wore his darkest sunglasses during the move yesterday, joked blackly about how he never thought he’d get sentimental about logistics. But Jessie didn’t cry: she was, she realized, completely ready to go, and had been for a while. Since she’d had Romy, the big booming city she’d loved had shrunk to the same circle of tightly packed Victorian streets: the park she would circuit with Romy, wondering if she could face taking the tube to the Tate Modern or if she’d get the stroller wheels stuck on the escalator again; Greta’s, the coffee shop whose sweet staff never complained about her nursing a coffee for hours to give Will and Bella space alone at home; the lovely Lebanese grocer where she’d blindly buy exotic ingredients for supper, hoping to make a meal that Bella might not compare unfavorably to one prepared by her late foodie mother or by a beleaguered au pair.
Jessie suddenly recalls the day Camille—the last au pair in a long, frequently sobbing line—left their household. It was the first day of Jessie’s maternity leave: she was determined to embrace her new role and show Will she could manage both girls without any hired help. (How hard could it be?) As they waved Camille off, Bella hissed in Jessie’s ear that she’d merely taken Camille’s place: “You’ll probably stick around a little bit longer. But I wouldn’t count on it.” And Jessie had replied, in the steadiest voice she could manage, that Bella could absolutely count on it, actually. Bella would always be able to count on her. As Jessie lies on the mattress now, staring up at the flaking plaster on the ceiling, she hopes that one day Bella will see Applecote as a physical manifestation of that promise.
Yesterday she and Will ran around madly, trying to make the unlived-in house homey for the girls, Will struggling to put together Romy’s toddler bed, Jessie scattering their cushions and rugs around the grubby old drawing room so that one place at least felt familiar. Then, after the girls finally fell asleep—Romy in the room adjacent to theirs, Bella in the peculiar little room under the eaves on the top floor, any ghouls or poisonous gasses preferable to close proximity to her family—she and Will opened a bottle of warm champagne and walked around, hand in hand, marveling, giggling like trespassing children in those big drafty rooms lit by bare bulbs, a house they still didn’t dare quite believe was theirs.
Jessie did puzzle at the charred remains of a log fire in the living-room grate—it looked so inky-black, not silvered with dust like everything else, and she was sure it hadn’t been there when they’d looked around in January, or their last visit in March. Will joked that someone had clearly broken in to toast marshmallows, and she’d laughed and dismissed it, not wanting to dampen things. They swayed together on the veranda under a fairy light net of stars and decided that Applecote was tilted more closely to the elements than anywhere they’d ever been, that all the upheaval was worth it. By midnight, Will had conked out like an overwhelmed child at Christmas, unable to process anything more. But Jessie had lain awake, enchanted by the countryside hush, the creak of wood, a tick of a pipe, a faint scurrying, the sense that the house was stirring around her in the darkness, waking again from a dormant state, observing its new inhabitants.
Jessie’s first restless night at Applecote had jolted her own recent past vividly to the surface. Pitching on the edge of sleep, she could see her life flickering in the room’s shadows like old film rushes, how it had been so radically rerouted, fast-tracked from one place to another.