She is glad when the meadow gate clicks shut behind them. Gladder still when Romy shouts, “Bell Bell!” and points excitedly through the trees to where Bella leans back against a huge beech, inspecting something in her hand. “Oh, Rom, wait!” Jessie calls, exasperated, chasing after her tiny daughter, who gets faster by the day.
Both girls are in thrall to the detritus Applecote’s soil spits up: old teacups, shards of plates, rusted gardening forks, shilling coins, tiny broken things that Bella is piecing together to create a sort of character sketch of the house: “Since there’s nothing else to do,” she explains, in case Jessie thinks she may be enjoying herself.
In the house, Bella’s discovered names scrawled beneath the basin in her little bathroom, only a few letters decipherable, a large A with a swirly, exuberant curl to it. Last week, newspapers fell out of a cavity in the kitchen cupboards, yellow and crumbly as filo pastry, dated from the late fifties. The headline—IT’S A SCORCHER!—was about a heat wave in 1959. “Which shows the house has a sense of irony, at least,” remarked Bella, carrying the papery quarry up to her room. And then there are the children’s things Will found in the attic—a handy child’s high chair, a toy pram, some old wooden bricks with pastel alphabet letters on their faded papered sides.
Jessie can see the previous owner, Mrs. Wilde, in her mind now: a sturdy, cheerful countrywoman surrounded by mischievous pretty young daughters, rocking a cradle with her foot by the fire. She imagines her pounding dough in the kitchen with ruddy fists, snapping out starched sheets on the beds upstairs. But then she’s always had a terrible habit of imagining life stories, old ladies in particular. (One of her “things,” Will affectionately calls it.) In London, she sees old ladies waiting at bus stops and transforms them into Blitz survivors, code breakers, once glamorous mink-coated women rendered invisible by stained beige padded jackets. For this reason she will always stand up and offer her seat to the elderly on the tube or bus, make a point of smiling and chatting about the weather. As Will points out, when her own mother does an old-personish thing, asks what an app is or loses her reading specs in her handbag, Jessie gets irritated. But mothers are different. Everyone gets irritated by their mother. Apart from Bella, whose mother will be forever perfect.
Later that afternoon, once the hammering has finally stopped, Jessie knocks on Bella’s bedroom door, holding a stack of the just-delivered Squirrels school uniforms under one arm. No answer. It strikes Jessie, not for the first time, that Bella’s bedroom door has a funny sort of force field to it, and that even the landing has an odd atmosphere, a sense of compression as you walk down it.
“Button,” Romy mutters, pressing her eye to the keyhole, as if she might spot the button Bella found in the Wilderness earlier, a funny little thing, faded pink plastic that might have been red once, heart-shaped.
She knocks again. Nothing. Deciding that Bella probably has her headphones on, Jessie gingerly pushes open the door with her knee. “So did you manage to get your pictures . . .” She gasps.
Bella is nowhere to be seen. But Mandy, Mandy is everywhere. Dozens of photos that Jessie’s never seen before: Mandy, pregnant, blooming, Will kissing her belly; Mandy and Will swinging a tiny cute Bella over a jumble of autumn leaves; Mandy lying on a beach, wearing one of her signature caftans, laughing, Bella’s head in her mother’s lap. A gallery of private moments from which Jessie will forever be excluded.
Jessie’s always known such moments must have existed—although she and Will rarely discuss them—but actually seeing them documented on the walls of Applecote, the day after Will’s departure, shakes her to the core. She feels like she’s been chased down by them and, for a moment, she cannot breathe.
Romy explores the fascinating, forbidden zone of her big sister’s bedroom while Jessie moves in a sort of trance. The photos pop from the dark walls—Bella insisted on sludge gray, exactly the same shade as their old London house—that she and Bella painted together last week to make it more homey. Was Bella always planning this? Did she know that afternoon as they painted side by side, listening to the radio? Was she waiting for Will to be out of the house? Jessie can’t help feeling betrayed.
But the worst thing of all—and Bella must have known this—is how bloody amazing Mandy and Will look together. Mandy’s face is chiseled, androgynous—the exact opposite of Jessie’s girl-next-door prettiness—with a piercingly intelligent gaze beneath an inky Hepburn crop, one of those serious hairstyles adopted only by women confident of their cheekbones. Unlike Jessie’s chaotic clash of eras and colors, Mandy’s style is faultless, a restrained palette of beige, navy, and black, a slash of red. She exudes self-possession, a woman who has bigger things to think about than what ankle boots to wear in the morning, a human rights lawyer after all. Jessie gawps at her, painfully aware of her own crumpled jersey dress, the smell of river on her skin, the grubby old feather Romy’s stuck in her pinned-up mess of red hair.
It’s just Bella’s way of not leaving her mother behind, nothing else, she tells herself. It’s not about me. She must shut the door, go downstairs, and face Bella calmly, like there is nothing wrong. But she doesn’t. Something powerful holds Jessie in that room of her own dark imagining, transfixed by the woman she was hoping to escape.
It looks like Mandy herself might have just gotten undressed in here—a stylish black felt fedora sits on a bedside chair, the silk dressing gown swishes from the back of the door, and an indigo caftan is slung casually across the sleigh bed, the same one, Jessie realizes with an inward jolt, that Mandy wears in the beach photograph.
It’s like being immersed in Mandy. It’s like diving into her. And maybe that’s why Jessie does it. Because the room has a current, a pull to it, something that makes her put down the school uniforms and pick up that caftan, rub its beautiful crewel embroidery between her fingers, and then, knowing she shouldn’t, that she is crossing a line, she holds it up, letting it rustle down over her legs, puddle on the floor. She presses the cool cotton against her breast, the accelerating pump of her heart.
“Pretty, Mummy.”
Jessie startles. Romy is sitting on the bed, holding the heart-shaped button between her fingers, looking a little puzzled by this strange new version of her mother.
Horrified at herself—What if Bella walks in? What would Will think?—Jessie throws the caftan back onto the bed. Flustered, she wrestles the button out of Romy’s closed fist and hurries them both away from that strange little room under the eaves where, for a moment, she had felt she might lose herself completely.
6