Jessie is not sure. There is one tiny moment as they stand in the hall, a nick in the air, when their eyes catch, and Jessie feels that they understand each other absolutely, before she breaks it, firing off a round of questions about school meals and teachers—too many, too fast. The next day, after Bella’s gone to school, Jessie checks the drawer again and sees the letters are no longer there.
Jessie calls Lou to confide what she’s done to another adult, test the water before she tells Will. But Lou has London gossip to unload first—a friend coming out, a power-crazed boss at work, a tube station shut by a dancing flash mob—which is like a dispatch from another planet. When Lou asks how she is, Jessie hesitates and decides she doesn’t want to share the humiliation of the letters. She’s not so sure she can tell Will either. She can’t unread them. And any conversation will lead back to her prying in Bella’s drawers, a damning trail of distrust, like dirty footprints across a clean floor.
The week stretches on, empty of Will, his laugh, his smell, his sleepy morning kiss, and full of unsettling thoughts and noises and autumn spiders. Jessie and Bella capture them together—rare moments of harmony, Bella shouting, “Left, right, oh my God, it’s a beast, go, go!” Jessie on all fours with one of the jam jars she’d found at the back of a cupboard.
Jessie packs her days with physical exertion: less room for self-analysis, less time to think about Will and Mandy holding hands in their sleep. She takes Romy for drives, through valleys, villages, folktale woods. On one of these trips, she stumbles into a café. Ten miles away—this counts as local, she’s learning—it feels like an oasis of culture. Attached to a plant nursery, it hosts jazz nights, poetry readings, things she thought she’d left behind in another life. Housed in a pretty old greenhouse, decorated with the work of local artists, it’s run in a cloud of steam and wry humor by a tall, well-spoken woman in her youthful seventies with a dancer’s deportment and a penchant for huge beaded necklaces—fists of lapis lazuli and turquoise—that bring out the brilliant painter’s blue of her eyes. She has a way of glancing kindly in Jessie’s direction, as if she senses something of the tumult of Jessie’s thoughts. And the very nice man in the nursery, who has Robert Redford’s grizzled good looks and patiently answers each one of her naive gardening questions. He sells Jessie a dwarf lemon tree with three tiny lemons the color of sunshine that she puts in an earthenware pot in the orangery. She photographs Romy standing next to it with a trowel—a pose that only took twenty minutes to stage—and texts it to Will, proof of their happy new life, then posts it on Facebook. Their life is liked forty times. And she feels a little better about it.
A curling postcard flyer, stuck to the village shop’s window: JOE PEAT. BUILDING WORK. ODD JOBS. HOUSE ’N’ GARDEN. NO JOB TOO SMALL. Jessie leaves a voice mail for him. The surname, Peat, is reassuring. She also scribbles down the details of local toddler groups. And although she doesn’t go to any, not yet, she feels she’s accomplished something at least.
Friday, the day Will returns: Jessie realizes she’s been holding her breath all week. The world lightens. The sun comes out, filtering through saffron leaves. The air smells of wood smoke drifting along the river from the village.
Jessie arranges a mental good news list of happy family anecdotes to recount to Will on his return—blackberry foraging with the girls, the trip to the stones at sunset with a flask of cocoa. There’s another list of things she won’t worry him with—Joe Peat not calling back, the evening Bella took Romy bat-spotting in the Wilderness and lost her for ten minutes. After settling Romy with the alphabet bricks from the attic, Jessie pulls out her most trusted recipe book, stained with golden syrup and olive oil and the sweat of teaching herself how to cook for a family after years of living happily on salad bags and microwave falafel. She will cook everything better, she tells herself. She will cook a meal as good as anything Mandy might have made, adds a small insecure voice in her head.
Will’s running late. Really late. Jessie hangs on until the point the chicken is smoking. It is shriveled, the potatoes burned to a crisp. She puts out crumpled linen napkins anyway, sticks beeswax candles into old wine bottles and turns out the kitchen’s bright fluorescent lights. The candlelight flickers against the bulging walls and beams, making the fireplace look dark and deep as a cave, throwing the whole room back into a different era. Romy clings to her leg. She pours herself a large glass of red wine.
“Not another power cut?” Bella shines her iPhone flashlight into Jessie’s face.
Jessie puts up her hand against the dazzle. “We’re celebrating your first week at Squirrels. Too bright.”
“Er, why?” Bella frowns, clicking the phone off.
“Because it’s a big thing and you’ve done brilliantly.”
Bella looks genuinely surprised. The frown turns into a small smile.
Jessie lifts Romy into the old high chair, which wobbles slightly. She’ll have to tighten those screws again. “Your dad’s late, I’m afraid. He’s really sorry.”
“Wasn’t the idea that we moved to the arse end of nowhere and he was at home more?” Bella takes a green bean from the steamer and bites into it, wincing at its heat.
“Yes, it was. And he will be.” Jessie’s voice comes out a little too tight. “Let’s eat while the meal’s still faintly digestible.”
Sawing the tough chicken breast into pieces for Romy, Jessie looks up, making an effort to smile. “You could invite a girl from school over this weekend.”
“I don’t have any friends,” Bella says matter-of-factly.
“But it’s only been a week. You will.”
Bella shrugs, as if she doesn’t much care anyway. “I’m not like them. I never will be.” She scoops her hair into a loose bun, securing it with a hairgrip, her neck long, balletic. “And they wouldn’t want to set foot inside this house anyway,” she adds.
Jessie’s immediate response is to take a sip of wine. It burns down her throat, and she feels its effects almost instantly. She’s noticed this before at Applecote, the way her body seems purer and more sensitive to alcohol, everything more finely tuned. “Why do you say that?”
It occurs to Jessie that Bella looks rather pleased with herself, sucking on a secret. “Something happened here. The girls at school told me. It’s legend at Squirrels.” Bella times her words carefully, studying Jessie’s reaction. “They reckon the agent should have told us before we bought it.”
Romy cocks her head to one side, alert to the change of tone, her eyes rolling from Jessie to Bella and back again, sensing something worrying nibbling at the edges of the conversation.
“And?”
“A girl used to live here ages ago, a cousin of some girls who went to my school. Her name was Audrey. Audrey Wilde.” Bella’s voice drops low, thrilled, and the candlelight flickers up her face, her eyes brilliantly shining as if she were huddled over a table at a séance. “There’s a photo with them in it—her cousins, I mean, also Wildes, four of them; one of them is totally supermodel-beautiful—hanging in Squirrels’ Great Hall.”