“But I don’t look like the rest of you.” Her face grows serious. She speaks in a whisper. “Why am I so dark, Margot? Why aren’t I blond like the other Wilde girls? Why don’t I have blue eyes? Ma has blue eyes. Pa had blue eyes.”
“Oh, Dot, you could be black as ink and you’d still be a Wilde girl. You’re not a changeling. Don’t be a goose. Budge up.” I clamber into bed beside her, refusing to wonder about Dot’s coloring since it doesn’t matter and never has. She feels surprisingly wiry and strong, no longer the pale, asthmatic city girl she was just over a week ago. It strikes me that Ma is going to miss a significant summer of us growing up. It shouldn’t matter—perfectly normal to be away at school for a term, after all, come home taller—but somehow it does here, as if we might grow up slightly wonky at Applecote Manor, like roses trained the wrong way along a wall. “It’s been such a long hot day; have a nap, Dot. Everything will feel better afterward, I promise. It always does.”
“I love you, Margot.” She yawns, eyes starting to close.
Stepping onto the landing, I’m met by an astonishing sight: Moll huffing through Audrey’s door with a laundry basket, as if the room were of no more significance than the scullery. I smother a gasp, step back into Dot’s doorway, and wait for something to happen, the world to end, some sort of static crackle. But Moll doesn’t smoke or flash. And she leaves the door ajar.
I watch, transfixed, as she starts to peel the linen off Audrey’s bed, tucking in new sheets, smoothing them with her palm. She folds a pink blanket, a blanket I remember well: we made lifelong promises huddled under it that we were never able to keep. As she bends down, I see the porthole window, its spill of purple light like black currant cordial on the floor. Moll finished, I edge backward into Dot’s room again until I hear the click of a door closing, Moll’s footsteps descending the stairs.
No one is around. Dot is asleep. Pam and Flora are playing Monopoly with Sybil and Perry in the drawing room: I can hear Perry bellowing, “Ha! To jail, Pam!”
Audrey taps me on the shoulder: Well, what are you waiting for? My mind arrives before the rest of me.
The doorknob turns shockingly easily in my hand. I hesitate, as I’ve hesitated many times before, my heart pounding. The fear remains that if I enter this room, a part of me will never leave. Come on, Margot. I feel her fingers pressed over my eyes. Find me. Count to ten. One, two, three . . .
As I step in, something in me releases like a sigh: I feel safe, a little girl again. Nothing has changed. Audrey appears to have popped out to pick an apple; she’ll be returning shortly, extracting a pip from her teeth with her tongue. The room smells not of lost things but of lavender water. Fresh sheets. There is a small posy of meadow flowers on her old school desk—the water clear, the flowers fresh, pink and white—and her pencils, all sharp, their tin case open, are ready for my cousin’s busy fingers. On her dresser, her ivory-handled hairbrush, some yellow ribbons in a porcelain shell dish. Long-forgotten memories rush to the surface, not just the games, stories, dress-up, but how Audrey made me feel my own person, not just one of four sisters. More than anything, I remember the sweet pleasure of feeling chosen, a favorite: the exact opposite of standing on the bank of the river, body aching, the backs of my knees itching, watching Harry woo Flora.
I kick off my shoes, take out my brown hairgrips, and throw myself onto the cloud of Audrey’s bed, tracing the familiar bumps of the wicker headboard lightly with my fingers. Tears curl hotly into my ears, not just for Audrey, but the way life hurtles forward so, leaving the past standing alone, shrinking, like a forgotten child on a deserted railway platform. I’m not sure how long I stay there, why I doze off, but when I open my eyes, the sky in the round window is gingery, and I feel different, emptied yet peaceful, like I’ve made a space inside of me for Audrey to live. I get up slowly, sleepily: reflected in the mirror of the dresser, my face, her face, the edge between us wavy, dissolving, like an outline in the midday heat. And when I go downstairs to join my sisters, I leave behind not just my forgotten hairgrips, but a little bit of myself, too, just as I knew I would.
I’ve discovered I quite like having secrets from my sisters. There’s a thrill in holding something tight to one’s heart, cupped in closed hands like a baby bird. Also I know that Pam and Flora would be furious if I told them I’d visited Audrey’s room, or slept with her domino under my pillow. They have Tom and Harry to lose now, the summer’s precarious freedom. We can’t afford to upset Sybil.
I know this, too. But I am unable to resist surrendering to the suck of Audrey’s room, sometimes only to poke my head around the door, other times lingering too long, risking being caught. Familiar again to the point of feeling like mine, it’s become a refuge from all sorts of things: Ma not writing; Harry peeling off Flora’s dress with his eyes; the thrilling fear that if Perry did do something awful to Audrey, he might do the same to us; the discovery of another strange posy in the meadow’s crater, a dark red flower and a budding twig, twine-tied, like some sort of pagan offering; and the brick-bake of inescapable, itchy heat.
Today there is a breeze, but it is warm and wet, like a lick. Dot shelters under a huge, gnarled beech tree in the Wilderness with Moppet, preferring her company to ours. The rest of us gravitate to the pool, seeking relief, only to find Perry already there. We get in, watching him warily, the pink roll of his arms stretched along the stone sides, his stomach a barrel beneath the water, rising and falling. And he watches us.
After a while, he heaves himself out and falls asleep in a poolside chair, his legs outstretched, the bulge in his knitted shorts jumping and twitching as he dreams, making us all dissolve into smothered snorts of laughter. It dies down. The heat intensifies. I leave my elder sisters idly gossiping about the Gores behind the shield of their novels, so absorbed in the subject they barely acknowledge my departure.
I stop at the pool gate, feeling a small pang for the long, dreary days before the Gores spangled into our summer, the way all we had was one another. No chance I’d have been able to sneak away to Audrey’s room then, I realize. Pam would have hauled me back by my bathing suit strap. Flora would have looked into my eyes and seen Audrey’s room reflected, as in one of those round, gilt-framed convex mirrors in the hall.
Audrey’s wardrobe door is ajar. It is impossible to resist.