We smile awkwardly, not knowing how to bridge the gap between now and the last time we saw her, our childhood and our womanliness, the scabby knees we once had, the bras and girdles we now wear, the fact we are here while Audrey is not. Sybil makes no attempt to close the distance. She doesn’t open her arms to us like she used to, or kiss our cheeks, but recoils slightly, as if touching us, getting too close, might burn her.
“You are a very beautiful young woman, Flora.” Sybil’s thin lips hitch into a smile with obvious effort. Flora modestly bows her head, as if the compliment is novel, not something people continually remark upon. Sybil turns to Pam, her gaze sweeping over Pam’s feet—two sizes bigger than Ma’s—to her broad sportswoman’s shoulders. “Gracious. I did read somewhere that girls are getting taller since rationing stopped.” She covers a more natural smile with the nail-bitten tips of her fingers. “You are very statuesque, my dear. What is Bunny feeding you?”
Pam bristles. She will not forgive Sybil’s comment easily. “You don’t want to know, Aunt.”
Sybil cocks her head to one side. “Oh . . . is that . . . little Dorothy?” Dot is shuffling behind Pam, scraping her sandal on the gravel, trying to camouflage herself in a puff of dust. “Dorothy, last time I saw you, you were . . .” She lowers her hand to hip height. There is a hiccup, a holding of breath, at the mention of “last time.” A small nervous laugh cracks in her throat like glass. “. . . a little sapling of a girl. How old are you now?”
Dot doesn’t want to say it. The age Audrey was. Everything here swings back to Audrey, the house’s magnetic north. “Twelve,” she manages.
Something starts beneath Sybil’s skin, a comparison between Audrey and Dot maybe. But thankfully they look so unlike, and are such opposites, Sybil is able to recover quickly. “You are swarthy for a Wilde, Dorothy, like a little Italian.” The silence stretches into the shape of a question, as it always does when people mention Dot’s exotic coloring. “Now, you probably don’t remember Applecote very well, do you?” she says in the remedial voice grown-ups stupidly use for Dot. “The pool? The orchard? The stones in the meadow?”
“I just remember the gray puppy,” Dot mumbles, curling one foot behind the other, forgetting all Ma’s instructions to speak loudly and cheerfully, like we’re delighted to be here. “And the jam.”
I suddenly remember how the housekeeper, Moll, would give us jars of Applecote jam—gooseberry, wild strawberry, plum—to take back to Ma at the end of the holidays. It was always something she did in private, when Sybil and Perry weren’t around, carrying with it a delicious contraband whiff.
“Well, there’s a lot for a little girl to remember, I suppose. It’s a big old house.” Sybil glances up at her home through sandy lashes, her gaze landing at the porthole window on the top floor. Audrey’s window. Audrey’s room. It winks back, as if about to let us in on a secret. Sybil sighs, adds, “Too big really . . .” The pause swells painfully. Suddenly we all know what is coming. “. . . now.”
Pam lets out one of her inappropriate bark laughs, like the ones that escape during assemblies when Head relays news of a despised old teacher “passing.” I stare down at my feet.
Sybil’s Oxford lace-ups swivel toward me on the gravel. I look up slowly and our eyes meet directly for the first time. There’s a violent spasm in hers, a rapid dilation of the pupils. “Hello, Margot,” she breathes.
“Aunt Sybil.”
She frowns at my legs, the black trousers. “How’s your skin, the back of your knees?” she asks, as if this might explain them.
Embarrassed, I mumble something about it being up and down, and hate my skin for being the most memorable thing about me.
“Well, girls . . .” She hesitates, her eyes still roaming over my face, something about my unremarkable features trapping her there. “Let’s get out of this unbearable heat, shall we? I don’t remember a summer like it. London must be like Hades.”
Inside the cool stone-flagged entrance hall, it is still and tense, like the silence following a terrible row. I smell wax polish, vinegar, a domestic order we are unused to. The oak staircase, wide as a London bus, sweeps into the hall with the same dark red stair runner, unworn by young feet these last five years. The furniture has not, as part of me always fancied, disappeared along with Audrey, sucked out of the windows to be strewn across the Cotswolds in scraps of horsehair, floral linen, and silk. I scan the hall for signs of our uncle, as one might for a bull in a field, but can’t see anything except a pair of gigantic battered leather boots.
“Margot . . .” Flora elbows me, then says through a forced smile, “The present?”
“Oh. Oh yes. Sorry.” I dig into my satchel and pull out the cake that Ma’s help, Betty, made a few days ago. It slumps wetly from one side of the tin to the other. “It’s from Ma, Aunt. She hopes you like it.”
Sybil prizes off the lid, holding it slightly away from her body. “Goodness.” She blows out sharply, like a puff from a bicycle pump. “How kind.”
“A fruitcake,” Dot clarifies, lest it resemble something else after the long train journey.
“Oh. I never knew your mother was a baker.” And there are the old tensions again, snapping in the air like jump ropes: we all know what Sybil really means is, Your mother is not interested in homemaking and never has been, so we all chime in unison, “Oh she is!” with such loyal passion that the lie is obvious.
Sybil frowns down at the cake. And it occurs to me that it must hurt that Ma, a woman who wears her motherhood so lightly, has a reckless surplus of daughters, whereas Sybil, who took motherhood so seriously, lost her only one.
“Wildlings!” booms a voice from behind a closed door. Even Sybil startles like a hare.
He has his back to us: mountainous shoulders, a thick neck swelling from the constraint of his shirt collar, the potato-sack sag in the armchair’s base. Moppet, the cloud-gray whippet puppy, no longer a puppy, nervously scrabbles up from her master’s velvet-slippered feet. “My back has the devil in its disks today.” Stout red fingers piano the air. “Come here, girls.”
We slowly walk to face him, our eyes rudely widening.
Whilst the last five years have left Sybil thinner and paler, sucked of blood, my uncle has ballooned, his once-handsome face bloated, like you could prick it and clear juices would run out. Even his head has expanded; the planes of it—the square flat forehead, the jaw thrusting out like a padded boxer’s glove—seem more crudely carved. A gamey smell rises off him in the heat. “Wildlings,” he repeats with a nod of gruff satisfaction.
It’s odd hearing it. No one has called us that for five years. After the wildling apple trees, the ones grown from rogue bird-scattered seeds, not carefully planted like those in the orchard, Perry’s affectionate nickname for us was always pipped with criticism of my parents. Perry and Pa famously never got on, even as boys. (“Brothers always want to murder each other,” Ma would shrug. “It’s sisters you need to look out for. They’re the ones who can break your heart.”)