“You don’t want to talk about it?” I ask, baffled. All these years of not talking about Audrey have built up in my brain and are now pressing hard against it.
She shakes her head. “Don’t start dissecting everything like always.”
“But we must.”
“Oh, Margot. I do love you. But I’m tired. It’s late. And we’re talking nonsense into our heads that’s going to make this summer even more unbearable. We’ve just got to get through the next few weeks, that’s all.” She tugs the top sheet over her knees and lies back on the pillow. “It’s only until the beginning of September; then you’ll be at Squirrels again and everything will go back to normal.” Flora extends one graceful arm toward the lamp. “Good night.”
“Good night,” I say, closing her door, struck by an odd, overwhelming sense that nothing will ever be normal again, that this summer is going to change everything.
Whatever is about to happen, I’m ready.
In a bathing suit there is no escape from the plain fact of myself. My skin is mottled, mauve, a heat rash pinpricking the pudge of my breasts. The unsightly, unkissable backs of my legs itch where they meet the wooden deck-chair frame. It’s impossible not to stare enviously at Flora lying beside me, those long limbs languidly spread as if for a lover, her firm soft skin, radiating gauzy light, the gentle tip of her conical breasts as she reclines back. I wonder if Audrey’s body would be like Flora’s now, womanly, desirable, a little treacherous. Trying to take my mind somewhere else, I open my novel, but it’s impossible to read—sweat drips from my eyebrows—so I cover my face with the book instead, wishing someone would invent a way of reading a story by inhaling it.
“This is intolerable.” Pam’s voice. To my left. We’ve instinctively arranged our deck chairs beside the pool in a protective semicircle, like wagons. “What day is it?”
I try to work it out. Time is shapeless here, the hours indistinct, sliding into one another in the heat. “Wednesday?”
“It feels like Sunday. It’s going to be a summer of deadly dull Sundays.” Pam groans. “And we’ve not even been here half a week.”
I remove the book. Scorching sunlight. A dragonfly, long and blue as a pencil.
“We could be swimming in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, Margot. With friends. And young men. Remember them? Rarer in the Cotswolds than pheasants on the Mall.”
I smile. For distraction we have only Billy Waters, Applecote’s new young gardener, tall, blond, tanned walnut-brown: he has a particular way of carrying a spade and a shy smile that transforms his face. Or the ghost of the pilot who crashed into the meadow, the spit, we’ve decided, of James Dean. We no longer care that he is German, or headless, or dead. He is someone to long for as we twist in our sheets through the hot sticky nights.
Pam sighs theatrically. “Oh, dear beloved London.”
“London’s hotter than Africa right now,” says Dot, perching on the edge of her deck chair, throwing crumbs of smuggled bread onto the terrace for the blue tits, the thick nylon of her school bathing suit bagging around her thin child’s figure. “I read it in Uncle Perry’s paper at breakfast. It’s an official heat wave. And it shows no sign of stopping.”
“No wonder Ma wanted to emigrate.” Pam bends over, runs a hand along her calf, checking it for stubble. “She always did have a finely tuned sense of self-preservation. Swim?”
I stagger into the icy water with my arms above my head, gasping, stepping deeper, seeking the shock of sensation. The floating rose petals stick to my skin like tiny pink tongues. Pam and Flora dive in confidently, quickly becoming a spinning ball of limbs and hair, trying to outdo each other, hands grappling ankles, trailing bubbles, bobbing up, laughing, cursing. Dot sits on the side of the pool, dreamily swishing her feet, the coldness of total immersion too much for her, her skin just not thick enough. And I think how we all swim like how we are.
Afterward we flop around on the poolside, eating apples, taking bites out of one another, until Pam says, “Shh!” and puts her finger to her lips. “Someone’s coming.”
We fluster, arrange ourselves, hopeful it might be Billy the gardener with his kind, coy, river-green eyes.
But it doesn’t sound like soft-footed Billy. There’s a crashing animal sound, the birds chattering electric warnings. The pool gate flings open and the animal is Perry, panting, fanning his hat in front of his face. “Ah, Wildlings.”
There is a moment of stunned disbelief. Perry and Sybil never swim in the pool. Sybil said so. We are meant to be safe here. Dot sends me a look of distress as our uncle puffs over to the changing hut, clearly intent on joining us. As soon as its door swings shut, we move fast, muffling our horrified giggles, tugging our dresses over bathing suits, catching pool-tangled hair in buttonholes. Dot hisses, “Hurry up, hurry up, oh, Margot, he’s . . .” She stops short, her lips parting.
Our uncle strides out into the sunlight, legs splayed, hands on his hips, the handsome muscularity of his former shape just visible beneath the rolls of flesh, his knitted blue swimming trunks bulging. The sight of those terrible trunks, my sketchy knowledge of what is beneath them, jumpy as a pumping garden hose, separated from us by just one layer of fabric, makes me feel peculiar. And I am suddenly aware of the round circles on the busts of our dresses, caused by the wet bathing suits beneath; how the easy innocence of those old childhood summers has been replaced by something that worries the edges. So I try to look away, but, confusingly, my eyes are drawn to his trunks again, as if my body and my mind are splitting apart, developing different opinions.
“It’s splendid to see you girls here, the pool used again.”
We smile politely, glance at one another, trying to agree silently on a rescue plan.
I stare at his hands, squeezing into the flesh of his hips. They are strong, red, fat-fingered, big as spades. They look capable of anything. The air thickens. And I suddenly remember another summer, Perry throwing Audrey into the pool, Audrey squealing, a glittering splash, the jealousy I felt watching, that she had a large, loud father who could pick her up and swing her about and I didn’t. And I can’t arrange my thoughts properly, or reconcile the two different Uncle Perrys. There is still that gap between them, a long drop of darkness, where the truth about Audrey’s fate might lie.
“Well, we will leave you to enjoy your peace, Uncle,” says Pam, pushing her swim bag over her shoulder. Water drips crudely from beneath her dress onto the stone paving.
“Peace?” His hollow laugh bounces across the water. “You think I can ever find damned peace, Pam?”
Not even Pam knows what to say.
“Swim with me,” he says, raising his chin in the manner of a man challenging another to a duel.