“So the tribe returns.” Perry reaches for his drink, studies us down the shaft of his glass, eyes licking over Flora, as all men’s do. Sybil stands stiffly, biting the inside of her cheek.
“We’re so pleased to be back at Applecote. It is very kind of you to take us in.” No one can lie as well as Flora. Could get away with murder, Ma always says. “We are very grateful, Uncle.”
“No need for baroque exaggeration,” Perry says with a bluntness that makes even Flora color. “You’re Wildes, after all. Couldn’t leave you to get gobbled alive on the streets of London while Bunny goes hopping around the clubs of Cairo, could we?”
“Morocco,” I point out, sounding a little too pedantic. He lifts an eyebrow, as if noticing me for the first time, his left eye squinting.
Sweat slides down the inside of my trousers.
Moppet starts to sniff us nervously, cowering, only accepting a stroke from Dot, whom all animals seem to instinctively trust.
“Ma’s got a job, Uncle. At the consul,” says Pam sharply, the most protective of our mother and her own role as mother’s fiercest critic. Perry’s eye rolls off me and onto Pam. “She needs to earn some money,” she adds.
At the unmentionable word, I suck in my breath. The silence tilts, sending everything sliding downward. Then it starts, like far off thunder at first, his laughter growing louder and rougher, splitting open the room. Sybil turns to stare at her husband in astonishment, as if he has inexplicably started speaking in a different tongue. “You never did let manners get in the way of your opinion, did you, Pam? I remember now. Excellent, excellent.” Perry shakes his head, his belly quivering, his laugh is still moving about inside it. “Good God. Applecote Manor isn’t going to know what’s hit it. I hope you’re ready for these Wildlings, Sybil. I hope you realize what Bunny’s charmed you into here.”
“I’ll get Moll to show the girls to their bedrooms so they can dress for dinner,” Sybil says, her voice vinegary. It’s hard to imagine Sybil being charmed by anyone, least of all my mother. It strikes me that she must have her own reasons for letting us stay at Applecote, although I can’t think what. “Moll?”
As if she’d been listening outside the door, Moll steps into the room, smoothing her overall with busy plump hands. Stout, rectangular, with an enormous bosom, Moll has the same crinkled round face, a bit like an old apple. I wait for her to smile.
“You remember my four nieces?” says Sybil tightly. “Clarence’s girls from London,” she adds, like an apology in advance.
Moll smiles: and there it is, the neat black gap of a missing tooth I used to think of as a tiny door. For some reason, I’m very glad it’s still there. “Welcome back, girls.” That voice. That accent. Thick with soft country mud, blackberries picked off a hedge. Other things, too. Old songs never written down, only ever sung in this valley. Omens, superstitions, country lore that can’t be explained, only understood. “If you’d like to follow me,” she says, a little bit uncertainly, not used to guests.
We clatter up the staircase behind Moll’s blocky rump, scuffing the waxed banisters with our bags, Pam slitting her throat with her finger. Halfway up the stairs, Flora grabs my arm. “Oh! Look, a photo of you, Margot.”
I peer closer. A photograph, taken in sharp sunlight, bleaching out the features of a girl with braids, a cheeky smile. It does sort of look like me, I suppose. Caught in a particularly flattering light.
“That’s Audrey,” Moll corrects in a whisper, her fingers touching the wooden crucifix at her neck.
“Eek, sorry,” says Flora, pulling a face. Pam snorts.
We climb the stairs a little quicker then, peering down long landings at closed doors, windows draped in heavy sepulchral curtains. There are more and more photographs of Audrey, like an accelerating panicked heartbeat, and the house gets darker and stuffier the higher up we go, so that by the time we are on the top floor, Audrey’s floor, Applecote seems to be sealed tight like one of Moll’s jam jars, lest fresh air get in, allow what has been so carefully preserved to blacken and rot.
The top step creaks, just as I remember. The landing is as narrow. The bathroom door is open, revealing the familiar claw-foot bath, the long dangling chain of the lavatory flush, and the damp stain on the wall, in the shape of Ireland, from the drainpipe that always blocks outside. I remember how Audrey would proudly show off the names of East End evacuees—PL Trotter, May, and Teddy—scrawled under the washbasin, and how she added her own, a neat, carefully perfected autograph, ready for when she grew up and became famous. Like she knew.
“I hope it’s not too hot for you up here,” Moll says, not quite meeting our eyes. She pulls a white handkerchief from her overall pocket, wipes sweat from her bristly upper lip. We’re all playing the game of pretending everything is normal, that a girl of twelve didn’t vanish from Applecote’s grounds five years ago. “You’re all back in the same guest rooms.”
“Lovely,” says Flora, clearly relieved that no one’s going to be shunted into Audrey’s old bedroom.
It’s hard not to stare at it. At the far end of the landing, the pale door seems to pulse in the gloom, drawing attention to itself like the newest stone in a graveyard. I become aware of Moll frowning at me, as if something in my expression unsettles her. “I must tell you that Audrey’s room is strictly out of bounds,” she says in a furtive voice.
Pam shudders. “Like we’d ever want to go in there.”
Waiting for my sisters to collect me for our first dinner, I trace the route of Audrey’s last known journey from my bedroom window: under an early evening August sun, she’d have run through the garden with her crayfishing line, obscured as soon as she got into the Wilderness, passed the bathing pool, slipped through the gate, and cut across the meadow to the deserted riverbank, where Moll would later find her paper bag of dried bacon rinds, a lone crayfish scuttling at the end of the line like a clue.
I press my hands against the glass, angry that Audrey is not there still. The only small comfort is knowing how much she would have enjoyed the mystery, the vanishing bit. Becoming such a sensation.