Seeking escape from the chaff of such thoughts, Jessie looks up at the limey-yellow tree canopy, stirred by gusts undetectable at pool level. She half closes her eyes. She lets the garden wrap itself around her, sounds becoming brushstrokes: the neon chatter of birdsong; the blue of the wind; and something else, sepia, weightless child’s footsteps. Jessie starts and glances at the gate, expecting to see Romy and Will. “Romy?” she calls hesitantly. “Will? Bella?”
Silence. There is no one, of course, nothing at all, just a magnesium lick across the pool that dazzles momentarily, leaving behind her own wavering reflection, and something else, something that makes Jessie lean forward, heart racing, and part the slurry of leaves with her fingers to check that the submerged smudge is not a body bobbing at the bottom of the pool, just a trick of the light.
4
Ma’s not wrong. Applecote Manor is just the same: the iron front gate, the house behind it creamy and solid, like a block of vanilla ice cream. Clouds of lavender, drowsy bees. Uncle Perry’s black Daimler on the drive, powdered with pollen. The high garden walls—although they don’t seem quite as high as they once did—are garlanded with fat baby-pink roses, the size of Ma’s hats, so unlike the buddleia and ragwort that explode out of London’s old bombsites and thread into our terrace garden. Behind the wall, its stone scorched white as teeth in the July sun, the head of a topiary peacock that, as a small child, made me think of the garden as an animal enclosure at London Zoo, although the animals were made of clipped box hedging, delicately sculpted by gardeners with shears.
The last five years seem to have been snipped away, too. Even the sky is as I remember it: huge, blue, warm as a bath, the air transparent, not washing-up-water-tinged as it is in London, alive with butterflies and birds, so many birds. So much is the same that it highlights the one crushing, unbelievable thing that is not: Audrey isn’t about to come belting out of the house, running down the path, excitedly calling my name.
“Margot, are you okay?” Flora asks, concerned, as the taxi that met us at the railway station rumbles into the distance. “You look sort of peaky. Don’t be sick on your sandals. You’ll never scrub the stench out of them.”
I bend over, head spinning, hands on my knees, not knowing how to explain that we’re all older, coming of age—I’m wearing black capri trousers that make me feel like Fran?oise Sagan—and Audrey is forever a girl in a blue dress the color of meadow cornflowers.
“Ah, the curse,” Pam diagnoses briskly. “It lives up to its name in this heat. You just have to soldier through it, Margot.”
I straighten slowly, wondering how it is possible that my sisters are not feeling it, too. Audrey’s disappearance has been pressed onto our lives faint as a fingerprint until today—the subject taboo, rarely discussed, too awful to think about, irreconcilable with the gay tug of our everyday lives—but here it is physical, internal, like a snap of bone beneath the skin.
“Better?” asks Dot sweetly.
I nod. Even though I fear this is just the start.
The sun drops, daggers into our eyes. We lift our hands simultaneously, shielding from its beams. A small stalling action that puts another moment between this one—the familiar taste of London still gritty in our mouths, the tack of our mother’s departing kiss—and crunching up the gravel path to Applecote’s front door sheltering in the mossy shade of its portico. Dot thumbs her glasses up her nose. The silence twitches in the heat. My trousers stick to my legs.
“So, here we are, abandoned by our dear mother in the middle of God-awful nowhere, a place where young girls have an awkward habit of disappearing off the face of the earth on summer evenings,” Pam observes. “Never to be seen again.”
Dot sidles closer to me, as if I might protect her from a similar fate, all the more petrifying for being unknown and because Audrey has never been found, alive or dead.
“Don’t, Pam.” Flora grimaces.
“Someone has to say it,” sighs Pam.
Pam and Flora never thought this day—a fleetingly amusing idea back in May—would actually happen, that there would be an end to London’s dances, gossip, and suitors; that Ma, derailed by events of her own making (probably never expecting Sybil to agree to her outlandish idea in the first place), would sail for Africa tomorrow.
“Margot,” Dot whispers. Her spectacles are smudged with greasy fingerprints from the cheese sandwiches we ate on the train. “It is very quiet.”
“As a grave,” says Pam, swinging her heavy suitcase easily in her hand.
“Maybe they’ve forgotten we’re coming?” Dot suggests hopefully.
“No, no. They’ll be in the garden on a day like today, that’s all,” I say. Above the trees, a flock of birds, dozens of black Ms, like Audrey and I used to draw them. My stomach lurches again.
“The gardens are heaven, Dot,” Flora says, trying to reassure our nervous little sister.
Pam snorts. “Yes, and when we wake up in the countryside tomorrow morning, we may well feel like we have died.”
“Don’t make everything worse than it is already, Pam. She’s teasing, Dot, don’t worry. Come on; we can’t stand here forever.” Flora starts to walk toward the house, her pale blue skirt brushing the lavender, stealing its scent in its folds. The rest of us follow in Flora’s shadow, as we always do, the sun beating down on our snowy legs.
As we get closer to Applecote, London farther away, like it might not exist at all, I’m hit by the odd sensation that I’m walking back in time, cat’s-cradling the last five years between my fingers like elastic, that I might even be able to alter the past somehow, pull Audrey away before anything terrible happens. That if I try hard enough, I can un-vanish her.
It is Aunt Sybil. It is not Aunt Sybil. A woman fiercely squirts a tumble of roses beside the garden side gate, her fingers gunned down on the trigger of a spray can. A shock of straight hair, white as table salt, where the vibrant auburn curls used to be. Far thinner, all bone and shadows, her head large on the vine of her neck; she’s not wearing a jaunty yellow dress, the color of Spanish lemons, the dress I always picture her in, but something heavy, navy, and shapeless, as if she’s a season out of step, inhabiting her very own winter. Twenty years appear to have marked her face, not five. My mother’s age, Sybil now looks like she’s never been young.
Turning around slowly, she seems equally shocked by our appearance. “Bunny’s girls? My goodness.” Her gaze slides cautiously from one of us to the next. Her eyes are small, watery, colorless as puddles. “How grown up you all are,” she says, three lines pressing between her eyes, like the impression of a fruit fork, as if she finds it unbearable that we have grown up and Audrey hasn’t. “So grown up,” she repeats.