My little alarm clock says five a.m. But no time seems to have passed since the previous evening, Harry’s beer, the gunshot jolt of the Gores’ names spoken aloud in the orangery, Sybil sobbing and Perry shouting, the past ripping through the fabric of the present, revealing it to be as thin and fragile as antique linen. Outside, a cock crows.
I ask myself, what would Audrey do right now if she were me, and I her, and our fates had been swapped, like straw boaters, as they so easily might have been in the jumble of the last days of summer?
I pull on my dressing gown. Avoiding the top stair that squeaks, I creep down into the cool heart of the house until I can no longer hear Perry’s geological snores. There’s a thrill that comes with being awake when everyone else is lost in sleep. I don’t feel rushed. Or watched. Time even passes differently, molding itself around me like a kid glove on warm skin.
In the library I note Perry’s menacing collection of guns and swords on the oxblood walls. But the drawing room reveals only a lock of blond child’s hair in a tiny pull-out bureau drawer and, worse, a little cloth bag of milk teeth.
Unnerved by the teeth, I slip away into the kitchen. I steal two scones from under a wire cloche—one for me, one for a delighted Moppet—and start to investigate the warren of small rooms around the kitchen scullery, impossible during the day since this is Moll’s and Sybil’s territory.
The rooms are so familiar the moment I see them: it is like rejoining an old game of childhood hide-and-seek. A brick-walled room: shelves stacked with preserves, pickles, chutneys, jammy jewels in glass jars. I remember how I loved the glut of this room, its hive-like organization, how Moll would give me and Audrey the job of tying on the cloth jar tops, binding them with string. Then there’s the larder, with its mousetraps, baskets of potatoes, cool caves for cheeses. The broom cupboard where Flora once hid and tripped in the dark, cutting her lip on the edge of a metal mop bucket, bursting out of the door, her mouth dripping with blood, making us all scream. The laundry room, warm, damp, like a freshly bathed baby, its white sheets hanging on wooden poles—there was an art to standing between them, breathing so lightly you didn’t make them tremble—the mangle I’d use to wring out my bathing suit, just for the satisfaction of churning that heavy handle. Its mechanics fascinated me; we always sent our laundry out to be washed in London. And, next to this, a storeroom that makes my breath catch.
The light is greened by the ivy-spangled window, the air stirred by the draft from a large crack forking along the lower pane. Crammed inside, relics of long-lost childhoods—Grandpa’s, Perry’s, Pa’s, Audrey’s—awaiting a new generation that can’t be born: a wooden child’s chair with long slanting insecty legs; a small china bowl, Peter Rabbit running along the rim. Audrey’s dolly pram, the mattress still chewed on one corner—the memorable legacy of my and Audrey’s overenthusiastic parenting of “Baby Moppet.” Jump ropes, tiddlywinks, alphabet bricks, and a small wooden box of dominos that is like finding something of mine that I misplaced long ago. I slide back its stiff lid, remembering the games we played on rainy afternoons, how I’d let Audrey win, not wanting to disturb the natural order of things. Her fingerprints must still be over each piece, mine too, something of her, us. Impulsively, I pick out a lucky blank, a talisman, and drop it into the pocket of my dressing gown. impressed by my own audacity.
I quickly leave the kitchen by the back door then and walk into a soft and blessedly cool morning. Sitting on the garden bench, I become aware of a sound: hard to identify, rhythmic, metallic, coming from the side of the house. I get up and cautiously peer around the corner.
“Good morning, Margot,” Sybil says, not even glancing in my direction, pruning shears slicing into the ivy creeping over a ground floor window, the one with the crack.
My stomach lurches. She must have seen me. I wait for her to whip around and shout that I must never ever snoop among Audrey’s things again and return the domino immediately. But there is only the slice of metal against metal, an amputated arm of ivy falling to the ground, a small puzzling smile playing at my aunt’s lips.
As our first week progresses, Sybil keeps popping up suddenly, silently, marking our movements, twice catching me standing outside Audrey’s door, fighting the urge to open it. Perry lumbers around after us, too, noisily, minotaur-like, one hand on his lower back, suggesting swims or games of bridge. “But really wanting to suck the flesh off our bones,” says Pam. Yet our aunt and uncle step around each other like awkwardly placed furniture or guests at a party with a long-running feud.
It’s odd to witness. All our lives we’ve been brought up to want what Sybil has: a marriage to a firstborn son, a big house, a loyal maid, the clawed silver sugar tongs, a gold carriage clock ticking down to the next wedding anniversary. And yet Sybil grinds pepper over her boiled egg in the morning as if she’d like to wring the neck of the chicken who laid it.
Although she always emerges in the morning fully dressed, her face scrubbed almost raw—it is impossible to imagine her idling in a dressing gown like Ma, purring over a lazy continental coffee and the gossip columns of last week’s newspaper—she hasn’t gone farther than the village church in five years. She’s imprisoned herself behind her own floral swagged curtains.
And it’s becoming clear that she wants to do the same to us. When Audrey was here, we’d play in the meadow for hours, scramble across fields in the dark, and swim in the river, crowned with duckweed. Yesterday, a proposal of a jaunt into the village, no more than half an hour’s walk away, sent Sybil’s fragile face into a twitching spasm of anxiety. She tried to persuade us to do something else. A dip in the pool? A game of croquet? A picnic in the orchard, perhaps? As our secret mission of bumping into the Gore cousins seemed to be under threat, Flora suggested Sybil come with us, knowing full well she wouldn’t. Sybil blinked and paled, torn in half by the question, and I could see there was something in her that desperately wanted to say yes. But she didn’t. Or she couldn’t.
She didn’t miss much. A baby pageant on the village green by the duck pond and dozens of staring locals, their mouths open, displaying stumpy brown teeth. I’m not sure if it was Flora’s skirt, the pale cotton transparent in the bright sun, or just the sight of four sisters so obviously from elsewhere that disturbed the village air as we moved down the narrow cobbled streets, past bowed glass shop fronts, leaving something uneasy, troubled in our wake. Lace curtains in cottage windows parted slightly, shivered shut again. Women whispered behind cupped hands, children gawped, ran away, and a couple of times I heard our aunt’s and uncle’s names snag the air. Not one person smiled at us. Returning to the house, puzzled and downhearted, I saw Sybil watching us from an upstairs window, hand on the curtain, face pale as a plate beneath the glass. And I wondered if she knew the reaction we’d receive in the village, if she’d even tried to protect us from it.