“It would be just lovely to swim together another time,” says Flora, rushing to Pam’s aid. We all agree insincerely. “But we’re rather worn out, I’m afraid.”
“Oh.” His forehead rolls into a frown, his bluster gone, replaced by something a little lost, confused. And we move so fast out of that pool gate, stumbling, running, chased by the monster in our heads. When we reach the meadow, we collapse into a gasping fit of stifled, horrified laughter.
I peer through the triangle of my bent elbow. Waving wands of yellow grass. Hot blue sky. A lichen-starred chunk of gray stone. Dot’s bare toes, wiggling, trying to cool. “When will it be safe to return to the pool, do you think?”
“An hour,” mumbles Flora, who is sitting on the stout ancient stone next to me, her dress tented over her head for shade. “Two, to be safe.”
“I’m going to expire of thirst,” moans Pam.
“You know, you sound just like Ma,” Flora says waspishly from inside her dress.
“Very funny. Lest we forget, while we roast in this godforsaken meadow, hiding from the lascivious troll of Applecote—”
“Pam!” Flora says, pretending to be shocked, encouraging her. Dot giggles nervously.
“—Ma is sipping gin slings in the shade of some Moroccan palace,” Pam continues blithely. She has a sunburned streak across her nose like war paint. “By the way, Billy isn’t around, Flora. Your display of underwear is quite wasted.” She shoots an irritated glance at Flora’s slim, shapely legs.
“There’s always the dead pilot,” Flora jokes, emerging from her dress, smoothing it over her thighs.
“Well, he did leave you flowers,” Pam retorts.
It was Dot’s eagle eye that spotted the wilting posy in the gouged dip in the meadow, where the plane crashed all those years ago, a small unlikely bunch, tied with twine. We still can’t work out who might have left it or why.
“I think that might be this summer’s epitaph, don’t you?” continues Pam. “‘There’s always the dead pilot.’ A summer so empty of handsome young men, we had to dig up a dead one.”
Flora laughs and tickles Pam’s sunburned arm with a blade of feathery grass.
After a while the sun sinks lower, bringing relief, a new, sleepier heat. We give in to the meadow, sinking back against the stones. Dot starts a daisy chain, her little fingers working fast, pinching, threading, each link locked to the next. My brain tries to move as fast as Dot’s fingers, but I can’t get Audrey’s story to link. I lean back on the warm stone, my eyelids heavy, my mind spacey, and I think of how my body is touching something Audrey touched, and someone else before that, back and back, to the dirty digit of an ancient, as I, too, will one day be an ancient to another girl, not yet born, lolling, just as hot and tired, eyes slowly closing until all is wild birdsong and scorched grass and hot pink clouds . . .
“Margot, there is a God.” Pam yanks my big toe.
“Ow. What?” I rub my eyes. Everything feels different immediately. Pam’s face is rose-tinged, magically lit. The dusk sky is aflame, volcanic and otherworldly, like something might actually be about to happen. “Where?”
“Look, Margot. Over there. Yes, yes, just up from the river.” Flora points to the edge of the meadow at the two tall figures in the distance. They are male. Definitely male. And there is a youthfulness to their energy, the way they are kicking through the long grasses toward us, exuding a louche confidence, a sense of entitlement, as if the meadow, the golden evening, each one of us sisters, were theirs for the taking.
5
After a late lunch, Jessie and Will loll back on the orangery steps, making the most of the afternoon sunshine, legs outstretched, their bare feet on the mossy stones, investigated by tiny black ants. The television chatters from inside the house, a cooking show, one of the rare programs Bella and Romy both enjoy, meaning that Jessie and Will are alone for once.
It’s the last day of August, mild, damp, already autumny. Birds are nesting in the ivy that beards the house. Insects everywhere: dragonflies, moths, midges, earwigs, bees, more butterflies than Jessie’s ever seen. For a brief moment, a cabbage white poses on Will’s shirtless tanned shoulder, then spins away as he lifts his bottle of beer. Jessie watches it vanish into the undergrowth, picks a wild strawberry from the bowl cradled between her knees in the folds of her poppy-red dress, and turns to Will with a smile. “Open.”
Will swallows it down with a wince. “Christ. That is seriously sharp.”
“How a strawberry’s meant to taste.”
He laughs. “I knew you were going to say that.”
Jessie pops one into her own mouth. She likes its bittersweet seediness. She likes that it grew in the cracks of the veranda paving, too. Somewhere in the house they can hear Will’s cell ringing again.
“Oh, ignore it.” She rests her head back on his shoulder. “It’s Sunday. It’s almost sunny. And we’re still officially on holiday.”
“Using the term loosely.”
Jessie’s lips brush the underside of his jaw. “The best thing about this particular holiday is that we are already home,” she murmurs. “It doesn’t end.”
Will looks up at the sky. “And we’re never in danger of sunburn.”
Seconds later the rain starts to fall hard. They leap up, squealing. Jessie won’t let Will shut the orangery’s glass doors, tussling with him, laughing. She doesn’t want to close off the outside, not yet: the sound of rain dripping off branches, the smell of apples and river. He gives up, as she knew he would, stands behind her, one arm wrapped around her waist, and picks out the burrs hooked in her hair.
The wettest summer for twenty years, it’s not been quite the heat-hazed August idyll Jessie and Will imagined. Will really has had to start chopping wood and cut open his thumb with an ax last week. (Six stitches. “The mark of a real woodsman,” he said, impressed.) The central heating is proving temperamental, so to warm the place up—Applecote seems to have centuries of winters trapped in its walls—Jessie’s been stoking smoky fires that don’t draw properly, coughing smoke into the house. Country walks have been elemental rather than bucolic: “Insane hikes into the squall,” Bella groans, even though Jessie suspects she secretly quite enjoys them.