Just when we’ve almost given up on ever hearing from the Gores again, they trot on sweating velvet-black horses past the orchard wall and throw over an invitation like a bunch of flowers. Sybil forbids it. Perry overrules her: “Go and charm Harry silly, Flora.”
Daphne is a tiny rowing boat, blue and scuffed, sinkable-looking. Fits six easily, Harry says, if you squash up. The water is only an inch or two away from the top of the boat, splashing over the sides, making us laugh and shriek every time someone moves. The river drifts lazily ahead, twisting gently, wide as a country lane, willow trees kissing the cloudy green surface.
Harry is sitting next to me, wearing shorts, his thigh banging against mine. There are hairs on his legs like copper wires. The side of me that touches him is unbearably alive.
The boys start to row. I can feel the heat on Harry’s leg, the effort it takes to pull the long wooden oars rippling up from his arms through his body. Occasionally he gives me a sidelong, slightly puzzled smile. The smile he beams at Flora is more open and less complicated, like he wants to lick her.
When the boys stop rowing, we drift downstream, faster as the current picks up, ducking beneath overhanging branches, through the columns of midges, trying to keep our feet out of the water that has pooled in the boat’s base while trailing our fingers in the river, like actresses in films. Blue-black house martins dive low over the water, tails forked. Memories of Audrey dart, sprite-like, peeking between bulrushes: Audrey with pigtails at seven years old, trailing her jump rope like a tail; Audrey at twelve, the summer afternoon it started to bucket down without warning and our blouses got drenched and went transparent and we ran back to the house, laughing, mouths wide open, tongues out to catch the raindrops.
When I revisit that day in my mind now, it’s hard not to wonder if someone else was watching us, noticing Audrey’s blooming prettiness, our flaunting of carefree joy. Did our happiness make someone else feel the bitter lack of it? Want to trap it for themselves? A lonely fisherman, maybe, piercing wriggling maggots to his hook. The man in the hat, lurking under the shadow of the bridge.
“Land ahoy!” shouts Harry, grabbing a dangling willow branch like a lock of a girl’s hair and sliding the boat beneath the tree, chasing those troubling thoughts away.
We throw down a picnic rug on the grassy bank, leaving Harry and Flora to bail out the boat. Lying on my belly, chin on my hands, I watch Flora bending from her tiny waist, laughing behind a curtain of blond hair as she scoops with a bucket, Harry brushing against her, closer than he needs to be. Tom also watches them, with a look of frustrated longing. And Pam watches Tom.
When Flora and Harry finally join us, flushed, glowing, Harry picking something out of Flora’s hair, it’s obvious to everyone they’re closer, those few minutes spent alone enough time to form some kind of alliance, and that the rest of us are cut out of it, spectators. Over a marbled ham, cold chicken legs, Pam tries to grab Tom’s attention, but it doesn’t work particularly well, so she ups the ante, hitching her dress into the sides of her underwear, showing off her taut brown thighs, and striding back to the boat, hands swinging, saying that she’s going to row us all back. The boys whoop. Me and Margot, Pam shouts over her shoulder. I shake my head.
“Margot, Margot,” Harry chants, slapping a hand on his thigh.
It’s the first time a boy has ever chanted my name.
My palms sting. The backs of my knees grate against the bench. But it feels like there is something more at stake than proving we’re better rowers than the boys, although I’m not sure exactly what. On the last stretch, I feel unstoppable. Stepping out at the meadow again, our legs shaky, dresses wet with sweat, Pam and I grin at each other triumphantly, then glance around, half expecting applause, or at least an admiring look. But Tom is glaring at Harry, who is whispering something into Flora’s ear, making her smile, and lingering, as if sniffing her—she is not stinking of sweat. And I remember that I am just Margot Wilde, plain Margot with itchy skin, invisible once more.
The curtains in Dot’s bedroom are drawn, the scorching afternoon a white scissor cut where they meet. I sit next to her on the bed where she is balled up, facing the wall, looking smaller and darker than ever. “Still woozy from the boat?” I stroke her shoulder.
Her toes twitch, but she says nothing.
I crouch down. “Oh, Dot, you’re crying. What’s the matter? Is it because we haven’t heard from Ma?”
The mail boats are erratic, Sybil says. Better to push her from our minds altogether, she says. We are Applecote girls now.
Dot smiles weakly. “I don’t mind not having Ma when I’ve got you, Margot.”
“What is it, then?”
“I’m too babyish. I try not to be. But I hold the rest of you back, I know I do.”
“Back from what?” I smile, her sweetness touching.
She presses her lips together.
“Do you mean with boys and things?” I ask tentatively.
She nods, shoots me a small smile of gratitude that she has been understood.
“Oh, Dot, I’m as out in the cold as you are, honestly. I’m hardly beating them off with a stick, am I?” I pick a hair off her cheek, where it clings to the tears. “Two into three won’t go, either.”
Dot rearranges herself, rests her head on her hand. “Harry was looking at you, Margot. In the boat. When you were rowing.”
“He only has eyes for Flora.” Something leaps inside me all the same.
“No one ever looks at me, Margot.”
“They will,” I say, my heart starting to pound. Harry was looking at me? Me? “You are still a child, Dot. But you’re going to be a beautiful woman, I can tell.”
She shakes her head. “I wear spectacles. It’s a complete disaster.”
“Lots of girls wear spectacles. And I have skin on the backs of my knees that looks like dried Spam.”
Dot smiles. “You can hide knees.”
“Not in a bathing suit. Not even in a summer skirt very easily, not without stockings.”