The dining room is the color of the inside of a Bramley apple, a very pale dense green, in its center a long, narrow, rectangular mahogany table, polished to a mirror finish, with many legs in awkward places. Sybil sits very straight at one end, rigid as a board, eyes sharp and darting, Perry at the other. We are underdressed in our summer frocks: Perry’s sporting a spotty bow tie and dinner shirt, Sybil an unfashionable long gown—funereal, high-necked, its skirt meanly cut—that gives out the unmistakable smell of mothballs. I notice a livid web of red veins on her un-made-up cheeks and think how Ma wouldn’t tolerate them for a moment. She’d smother them in Pan-Stik.
No gazpacho: pork, potatoes, peas, dumplings, a huge boat of gravy. Moppet, forbidden any tidbits, lies mournfully under the table. Sybil picks at her food, like she’s not enjoying a single mouthful, her face reflected in the polished silver of her dessert spoon, warped in a way that seems to unlock something of her inner torment. Perry, though, eats like a man with a hole inside of him that he can never fill, his lips slicked with grease, waiting impatiently for Moll as she bustles back and forth from the kitchen, hers a solid, fluttery presence, like a nervous wood pigeon.
The air spins with unspoken things, the conversation stilted. Perry says little, his gaze often seeming to travel, disconcertingly, to our mouths. Sybil asks us politely about our studies, our home weekends in London, then coughs into her napkin when Pam tells her about Flora’s friend’s fancy birthday do at the Dorchester, the calypso band’s drums that felt like they were inside you, had taken the place of your heart. Perry puts down his fork for the first time then, listening carefully to Pam, as if soaking up every last detail of a world he’d completely forgotten existed. When she’s finally finished—Flora shins her hard under the table—Sybil says tightly that we won’t find anything like that here, the country being a quiet place, not liking foreign music or rowdy parties. More’s the pity, Perry mumbles, and Sybil’s mouth forms a hard thin line like a zipper. Dessert arrives, just in time, steaming bowls of apple crumble and custard.
Sybil eats one mouthful, savoring the taste of her own orchard fruit, but leaves the rest untouched, as if it might be too much pleasure to eat. Her gaze is continually pulled toward the window, searching for something, seeing something that we cannot. Even as she talks, her attention is elsewhere, hovering an inch or two above the conversation, like the tiny flies over the fruit bowl: in this way she’s the opposite of Ma, who has the ability to make you feel, if only for a few seconds, like the only person in the universe who matters.
It is only later, as we shuffle upstairs exhausted by the forcing of polite conversation, longing to be just the four of us again so we don’t have to speak at all, that I realize that it must be Audrey for whom Sybil is distractedly searching, Audrey she spots, blurring in the corners of the room, smudged in the trees, just as the picture on our television set in London tunes for a brief moment before a passing motorcar makes it fuzz.
Pleased with this observation, I expound my theory to my yawning sisters as we huddle together on the landing, reluctant to peel off into our own bedrooms. “It’s almost like two layers of time—Audrey here, Audrey gone—have not separated from one another but have elided, don’t you think?”
“No, Margot,” sighs Pam. “It’s like a ghoulish country house weekend, without any other guests, a place where it’s not a given that we will survive until morning.”
I can’t sleep. Pam’s words seem less fanciful in the dark: I keep thinking I can hear feet padding outside my door, wheezy breathing. I jump out of my skin when Dot bangs on our adjoining wall at about eleven. I find her tearful, sheets pulled up to her chin. She tells me how she parted her curtains to see the sky and it looked far too big, while the earth felt terrifyingly small, hurtling through nothingness in cold space. I hold her in my arms, stroking her silky hair until she falls asleep, then return to my bed alone.
Midnight now, halfway between night and day, as Applecote itself feels caught between the past and the present, life and death, a house gummed shut, waiting for news that never comes. I flip the pillow to its cool side, releasing a lavender water scent that makes me miss London’s impolite smells: bus exhaust, Lucky Strikes in Ma’s crisp bottle-blond curls. The sounds, too: drunken revelers on the street, the rush of scalding water into my mother’s thoughtless midnight baths, then the slap slap slap of the washcloth against her imaginary double chin. Here, just a velvet hush shredded by the hoots of owls and foxes that sound like screaming children. Thoughts of Audrey fall through the swirling dark above my bed. I see her head turned to face me on the pillow, trying to tell me what happened that day, but the words keep faltering, stuck in her throat. That’s when I get up.
“Margot!” Flora hisses.
Audrey’s doorknob feels very warm in my hand, like I might have been standing here holding it for a while.
“What are you doing? We’re not allowed in there.” Moonlight splashes off her nightie, the pearl of her face.
“I . . . I was just curious,” I stutter, relieved to have been interrupted. What was I thinking?
She walks toward me, whispers, “Curiosity killed the cat, Margot.”
“I wouldn’t have actually gone in.” Although I’m not sure. I forgot myself for a moment there, sucked toward the room on a hidden dangerous current. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”
Flora widens her eyes. “I heard something.”
My breath catches. “Oh?”
“I got it into my head it was Uncle Perry. Prowling the landing.”
Perry. Of course. It feels good to put a name to that sense of indefinite threat outside my bedroom door.
“But it was you,” Flora says, sounding almost disappointed.
“No, no. I heard something earlier, too.” I stoke the fear again, and we peer down the dark staircase, half expecting to spot Perry hiding, pressed against the wall.
Flora folds her arms over her chest with a shudder. “Uncle has a bit of a look about him, doesn’t he?”
“I’d say.” I feel a small, unexpected thrill, an impatience for some kind of drama.
Flora opens her bedroom door, then hesitates. “I can’t get used to the quiet,” she confides. “I even miss Pam’s awful snoring.”
“Shall I come into your room for a bit?” I don’t much like the privacy I thought I craved, either.
Flora snaps on her bedside lamp and botanical wallpaper surrounds us like a forest. I lie, belly-down, on the bed.
Flora flops beside me, warm and sisterly. “You must try not to think about Audrey too much, Margot.”