The evening sun is huge, gold as a grapefruit, making the silhouetted figures glow at the edges, rays burst out of their heads. We catch the young men’s voices, bubbles on the breeze blowing up the hill, popping when the wind changes direction. We don’t dare speak, risk ruining the moment, already perfect, that we’ve somehow willed into being through the sheer force of our collective longing.
They saunter slowly, carelessly, until the anticipation is almost unbearable, their steps synchronizing with the patter of our hearts, the quickening of our breath. We can tell that they’re not locals: their trousers are cut close, not baggy country-boy breeches. Smart hair, floppy on top, short at the sides. When the breeze blows, it flattens summer shirts against sinewy bodies, not the beefy bulk of farmhands.
“I’m not sure about this,” says Dot suddenly, decapitating a daisy with her thumbnail. “Shouldn’t we go back for dinner?”
“Shh, Dot.” Pam arranges her dress around her legs so that only her best calf is revealed, her eyes trained on her targets with predatory focus.
As the men’s attractiveness becomes more obvious, I feel a wave of self-consciousness about the lack of my own, eased only by the knowledge that I’ll be overlooked in favor of Flora anyway. “Should we stand up?” I whisper.
“Have you grown a beard?” Pam murmurs.
Flora glances at me, laughs. “Oh, Margot, you’ve got your nervous grimace on. You look like a murderess. Be natural.”
“Nonchalant,” hisses Pam.
“Smile,” mutters Flora through the rictus of her own.
I smile so hard my jaw aches. There is a trail of crushed grass behind them, like the tail of a comet. We could be the last two surviving groups of people on the earth, each imagining ourselves to be alone until now. A strange hush falls as they approach, just the whoosh of the grasses moving in the breeze, the fibrous crunch of their footsteps. We discreetly nudge one another—Pam’s fingers flicking against my knee, Flora’s toes on Dot’s arm—in a mark of sisterly solidarity before holding our siren poses once more.
“Ladies.” He speaks with no trace of a country accent. Since he is far too handsome to look at directly—dark, a big Roman nose, like he might have tumbled out of a Renaissance painting—I watch tanned, elegant fingers stub out the cigarette against a stone, snap its spine in half. Sparks shower down, setting light to the tussock of dried grass beneath it.
It is the other young man, the shorter, sandy-haired one with a round freckled face like a harvest moon, who stamps it out. “We won’t set the summer ablaze just yet.”
How old? Nineteen? Twenty? I don’t know enough men to guess accurately. All I know is that the shorter, sandy one is staring right at me with leonine yellowy-hazel eyes, and the point where our glances meet seems to solidify in midair for a moment, like something I could reach out and touch.
“Sorry, I forget my manners. I’m Harry. Harry Gore.”
The name is vaguely familiar. But I can’t place it.
He grins, drops his wicker picnic basket on the ground, where it clanks. Brown glass bottle tops nose out of it. “And this is my cousin, Tom. Fire starter.”
Tom taps out another cigarette from the packet, clicks his lighter under his thumb, a chunky metal one, like Pa’s from the army.
“Pam.” My sister leaps up, does an extravagant deb’s curtsey, one leg behind the other, dropping low, making everyone laugh, breaking the tension. But Harry’s and Tom’s eyes are already sliding to Flora. And I’m reminded of the unfairness of being female, that even if Pam and I were the kindest, most fascinating girls in the entire world, these men would still be staring at our exquisite older sister.
“And you are?” Harry asks gently, his eyes tracking upward from Flora’s bare feet—she must have kicked off her shoes without me or Pam noticing; if we had, we’d have done the same—to the creamy-blond curl coiled loosely around her finger like a question only she can answer.
“Flora,” she says slowly, honey off a spoon. She flicks her violet eyes at Tom, looks down again, then back at him. He stares at her with a look of awed wonder.
“Flora,” Harry repeats slowly, beneath his breath, his gaze moving so reluctantly away from her to me that I feel bad for depriving him.
“I’m Margot,” I preempt apologetically, before he feels he has to ask. I notice the oppositions of his face, the way his careless boyish grin seems at odds with the serious knit of his eyebrows. Something crackles around us, like the flame in the grass.
He cocks his head, trying to place me. “Have we met before?”
“I don’t think so.” I don’t know how I should sound. How to sit. What I should do with my hands. To shift his attention from my burning cheeks, I say quickly, “And this is our little sister, Dot.”
“Ah, Dot.” Harry squats beside her. A silver-lidded pen pokes out of his back trouser pocket, like a pet. “You know, I think that might be the longest daisy chain I’ve ever seen.”
Dot smiles shyly. I like him for noticing Dot’s daisy chain. For the pen in his pocket. For being less obviously handsome than his cousin, the way his features are arranged slightly wrong on his face, making them right.
“Applecote Manor,” says Pam, artlessly shoving our new social credentials into the conversation. “We’re staying there with our aunt and uncle. The Wildes? With an e. Do you know them?”
At the name Wilde, a million tiny strings seem to be yanked beneath the surface of Tom’s and Harry’s skin at the same time.
“Yes, we do,” says Harry, grabbing the cigarette packet and lighter out of Tom’s hand, then sticking a cigarette in his mouth, an excuse not to say anything else.
“Our mother is abroad,” explains Flora, sensing the kink in the air, subtly trying to distance us from Applecote again. “So we were shipped out here from Chelsea.”
“Like evacuees,” quips Pam.
Harry blows out a puff of smoke, his eyes catching Tom’s again. And a fragment of an old summer reassembles: me, Audrey in the meadow, early morning, two older boys across a foggy river, waving at Audrey through the mist, Audrey waving back. “Did you know our cousin, Audrey?” I ask, the words flying out into the gap in the conversation before I can stop them. “Audrey Wilde?”
Pam widens her eyes at me, telling me to shut up.
But it is too late. Harry’s face has changed again, as all faces change whenever I bring up Audrey: that spasm of recognition followed by something blank and awkward. “We did know Audrey, a little. When we were young.”
Tom’s Adam’s apple dips and rises. He offers Flora a sincere, apologetic smile. “Dreadful business. I’m so sorry.”
Harry’s freckled lips are slightly parted, like he might have more to say on the matter.
But Pam jabs a finger into my ribs so I don’t ask any more questions, and Audrey is swept away, as she always is, by the clearing of throats, the slide of eyes, and exists only as an omission again.
“Where are you two staying?” asks Pam brightly, brushing grass off her dress.
“Cornton, my parents’ place.” Harry nods at the rooftops in the distance, as if Cornton Hall were a small thatched cottage rather than the most extravagant house for miles, rising on the hill at the edge of the village like a patriarch at the table. “Do you know it?”