I did, too, shamefully, although I think Audrey would have understood. Her disappearance lent me a rare celebrity in the Squirrels playground, the popular pretty girls who always ignored me huddling around, pressing their bodies against mine, hanging on my every word. I remember the strange new power I felt as they started to sob, one after the other, each louder than the next, grabbing one another, competing for who could feel things more, the explosive emoting spreading like flu, taking out whole classrooms, erupting during the Lord’s Prayer, as if it was they who’d disappeared, or their sister, not a girl in the newspapers whom they’d never known. Not my beloved cousin from Applecote Manor.
Or maybe it was just that we all wanted to be Audrey a little bit, Audrey with her forget-me-not eyes and milk-blond braids, her picture in the papers. We wanted to be noticed. We wanted to be missed. But not to die. Dying was not glamorous. Dying meant TB, complications from measles, drowning in a rough sea at Margate. But vanishing, like Audrey, that was a delicious mystery, a secret holiday. It meant anything was possible, like finding out you were adopted. Also, for me, it meant I didn’t have to grieve for Audrey, like I did Pa. I didn’t have to think about worms wriggling through eye sockets. And it meant she would come back. Only she hasn’t.
These last five years, Audrey’s always felt alive but silent, like a pen pal who has discovered boys. Audrey-ish things often flare in my mind: the red heart-shaped buttons on the cornflower-blue dress—which I’d fiercely admired—that she was “last seen wearing”; her princessy sleigh bed, the way its woven headboard pressed a constellation of tiny stars onto the skin of our bare girls’ shoulders. I envied so much of what she had: a father (alive), a room of her own under the eaves with a porthole window and a boggle of sky, a red mole that sat on her knee like a ladybug, the way she never had to share her bathwater.
Yet I always knew I had the thing Audrey most wanted in the world: sisters. She hated the intensity and solitude of being an only child—she’d ripped apart my aunt’s womb by escaping it bottom-first—and grew up craving company, a sister’s unconditional shrug of love. “You’ve got a brain like a board game, Margot,” she’d say. “And you’re really good at drawing toes. If only we could marry each other.”
Everyone said we looked very similar: the unspoken bit was that Audrey was prettier, her similar features more finely wrought, better arranged. She was also blonder. Cleverer. Richer. In fact, Audrey was more of everything—a sweet, sharp cordial undiluted by siblings—and by resembling her, but being almost two years younger, falling short of her, I made her superiority obvious, which she liked.
Pam used to say Audrey bossed me about—pots and kettles—and that I shouldn’t stand for it. But I was happy to submit in order to taste the rare sweetness of being a favorite: Audrey made me feel chosen, special. For two weeks every summer, that was all that mattered. She treated Pam warily—sensible. She adored Flora, but at an awed distance. She grandly declared Dotty too young to be truly interesting: “A little insignificant on her own, without the rest of you, like a full stop at the end of a sentence.” I disloyally agreed with her, even though I didn’t see Dot like that at all. Audrey always made words sound good enough to eat.
I would secretly debate which of my sisters I’d sacrifice so I could have Audrey as a sister instead. The victim changed weekly, depending on how much attention Flora was attracting that day, or whether Pam had slipped a note under my bedroom door saying, Dear Margot, you stole my pen, I hate you, your loving sister, Pam. Audrey and I were never tested, like sisters are, never with each other long enough to grow disenchanted. There was nothing to weigh us down—no dead father, no running out of coal on a winter evening—so the time we spent together at Applecote was honeymoon-light. And, of course, it was always summer, summers in which we were suspended like the strawberries in the glorious jellies that appeared from the bountiful kitchen.
Every childish whim was met at Applecote. It wasn’t just the jellies. There was an endless supply of colorful balloons purely for Audrey’s amusement, enormous cupboards stuffed with more toys, board games, and children’s books than I’d ever seen. Audrey’s home life seemed to me a never-ending birthday party, albeit without any other guests—until we arrived. The moment Audrey and I were reunited, a year older than the last time we’d met, we would lock into the same private world of hide-and-seek, finger shadow puppets, handstands against the rough brick of the orchard wall. We’d talk fancifully about how one day, if the wind was strong and we had enough balloons and hadn’t eaten too much at tea, we might fly. It didn’t matter where we went, as long as we flew—or crash-landed—together.
But that last summer Audrey wasn’t interested in the balloons, declaring them too childish, along with jelly and Malory Towers. Something was changing in my cousin. I had no idea what until the morning Audrey pulled me into the apple store—making Dot stand outside—and unbuttoned her blouse to show me how her breasts had budded, impressive at twelve. She made me feel them, tiny cushiony mounds, hard and hot beneath the nipple. Every couple of days we’d return to the cool dark of the apple store so we could check how they were growing, like greenhouse tomatoes. She reassured me that by next year I would have breasts, too. Secretly I wasn’t sure I wanted them.
How terrible now to remember that I enjoyed saying good-bye that summer, as I did every summer, the heightened drama of it, knowing Audrey would miss me. I was also relieved to get away from the confusion of my cousin’s new breasts, back to the combative simplicity of life with my sisters. Audrey begged to come back to London with us, as she always did—Audrey worshipped Ma as fiercely as her parents disapproved of her—but Sybil would never let her stay in Chelsea, worried that the disorder of our lives might be catching, that we’d fill her head with improper thoughts and nits.
But it turns out she’d have been safer in London. Five days after we left Applecote, Audrey had gone.
“Simply vanished, the poor darling,” Ma told us in a shaken voice. For years I willfully accepted Ma’s evasive, elliptical account of events because I didn’t want any of it to be true. The lack of detail meant I could salt the story with hope and adventure, mix true memories with false ones, and make the story of Audrey’s disappearance no different, no more substantial than the ghostly yarns Audrey and I used to whisper to each other in the meadow at dusk. Not seeing my aunt and uncle these last five years has allowed me to do this, I realize, not visiting the Cotswolds, rarely hearing Audrey mentioned. But now that we’re back at Applecote? Not knowing what happened to Audrey means that even going down to dinner this evening feels like being sent into dangerous terrain without a map. For the first time since she went missing, I realize I desperately need to know the truth.