“Mum’s,” Bella says, defiant yet needy of approval.
The word sucks the air from the room. The dressing gown ripples. It has fine black lace edging, Jessie notices, a discreet sensuality. And it looks expensive, very expensive. A gift. A Valentine’s present, maybe. She is aware of the high risk in saying the wrong thing at this point.
“It was in the boxes of Mum’s stuff, the boxes Dad brought down from the attic at home.” Bella watches Jessie’s reaction carefully.
Jessie nods, her mouth dry. In the chaos of the last few hours, she’d forgotten about those two boxes, Mandy Boxes. She’d never been sure what they contained—photos maybe, some of Mandy’s more poignant things; it felt way too intrusive to ask—only that Will stored them away shortly after she’d moved in to the London house, in a way that had seemed sweetly symbolic at the time. “Well, it’s . . . very glamorous,” Jessie says, recovering herself. “How did you sleep in your new bedroom?”
“Like a bad trip,” Bella retorts sharply, grabbing at the cereal box, leaving Jessie to worry if the reference is serious, based on authentic druggy experience.
She sighs silently. Silly to expect Bella to embrace the move straightaway. These last two weeks of August will be a period of transition. They must bear with it until Bella starts at Squirrels Ladies College, a stable new routine. Squirrels, as it’s known, is an independent—unlike Bella’s London school, or either Jessie’s or Will’s old high schools—and ruinously expensive. But all the decent local state sixth forms were full, and they’ve decided it’s better to forgo expensive home renovations and foreign holidays than take a risk with Bella’s education at such a tender point. It also has an unflappable headmistress who wasn’t spooked by Bella’s last school report.
“But . . .” Bella leans back against the range, picking at her bowl of cereal with her fingers. “I did get an excellent view of our stalker from the bedroom window.”
Now where might she find their first nosy neighbor? Jessie remembers them clearly from her own childhood, those benign bustling village women who knew your business without ever being told. They’d always turn up on newcomers’ doorsteps, clutching Tupperware boxes stuffed with scones. She’d like to say hello. Anyway, it’s an excellent excuse to explore the garden.
She blows a stream of kisses to Will and Romy at the kitchen window, then walks away from the veranda, her heart quickening.
The garden has changed almost beyond recognition since January. No bare whiskery branches now, just soaring walls of green. A leafy puzzle of edges, beginnings, and endings, it feels like the kind of impenetrable garden that might change shape as you walk through it, lead you out of one century into another.
Roses are everywhere, their stems running amok like feral teenagers who have taken over in their parents’ absence (Jessie knows something about this). Amorphous lumps of yew and box squat in the overgrown lawns. Beyond them, the ground starts to undulate, swelling over the splayed toes of trees, following the inclines of long-gone paths, ponds, and beds, tracing the garden’s original structure, like a lost, ancient settlement. And the Wilderness is so verdant, tangled, it no longer resembles garden at all, the tiny historic well—sealed, thank goodness—just visible beneath a dense hive of brambles, like a chimney to a hobbit’s house.
Nothing is quite how Jessie remembers it. The apple store’s warped wooden door is ajar, revealing a deserted wasp nest hanging from the rafters like an enormous hard cheese. The dirty shed window has been polished in a circle by a hand from inside, the fingermarks still visible. Peering through it, she notices a scuff of muddy footprints on the shed’s wooden floor, and her mind trips back to the charred fire in the drawing-room grate again. Someone has been in there recently. She feels a flicker of disquiet.
But the orchard welcomes her with a cheery clack of jackdaws, the buzz of waspy plums. And it is as she is reaching up, plucking a biblical red apple, that she catches movement on the other side of the sagging perimeter wall and remembers the purpose of her mission. Jessie climbs onto a tree stump and peers over, just in time to see a woman walking away: a leopard-print head scarf tied, silver hair curling beneath it; two black Labradors. The same woman Bella described earlier. Jessie calls out shyly, “Hello there!”
The dogs glance back, tug on their leads. But the woman quickens her pace and is soon obscured by hedgerows as the lane twists away.
Oh, thinks Jessie. Maybe she’s just hard of hearing. Maybe they do things differently in the country now. She stays there a moment, hanging on with her small strong hands, her yellow dress blowing around her legs. It is beautiful—the floury clouds, the wildflowers, the birds—but feels surprisingly lonely.
Not wanting to return to the house on a flat note, Jessie delves deeper into the garden, dwarfed by the trees into something more doe-like, vulnerable, as she searches for the rectangle of liquid darkness she can see from her bedroom window.
The pool gate shivers as it opens, kissing a peeling forget-me-not blue paint to her palm. Bordered by the looming yew on one side, rose-scrambled walls on the others, the area feels completely cut off from the rest of the garden, eerily seductive. The rainwater collected in the tank has a cinematic jet bead glitter, the visible cold of an underground lake. And at each corner of the pool stands a goddess statue, fragile, beautiful, broken, like survivors of some terrible natural disaster.
The otherworldiness holds her there. Jessie sits down at the pool’s edge, her feet dangling, the reflection of her sandal soles flashing on the water like fish. And the anxiety she’s felt so often these last few months bubbles up again, taking her by surprise. Maybe it’s the leaves rotting on the surface, the thought of how they’d close over her head if she fell in. The water’s vertigo pull. But Jessie can’t stop her mind spiraling back to what Bella did in London, and something of that day returns, that heart-stopping phone call from the school—Bella Tucker? Yes, it’s her stepmother speaking; her father’s away. Yes, you can definitely talk to me . . . She has promised to forget about it, like Will, and take Bella at her word. Only she hasn’t, not quite.