The next time she did my hair, I didn’t want to see myself in the mirror—What on earth was I doing back here again? What would my sisters say? I closed my eyes, slowly started to feel the familiar warmth, deep in my abdomen, that I’d experience in Audrey’s company, and I recognized it instantly as an echo of the hazily remembered pleasure of being Pa’s favorite girl, Margot A-Go-Go, a connection I’d never made before. And this small understanding was a revelation, not about Audrey, as intended, but myself, or my selves, the Margots stacked one inside another like painted Russian dolls. And here I am, back at the dressing table again.
“Margot?” Pam bellows up the stairs.
I stand up in a fluster, like someone startled out of a deep sleep. Each time I am in Audrey’s room, it takes a little longer to feel like myself again afterward. “I’ve got to go,” I whisper.
Sybil nods, but her disappointment is obvious. A yellow ribbon dangles limply from her fingers.
“I’ve been calling for ages. Where have you been?” Pam is on the landing below, hands on her hips, staring up at me through the banisters, eyes narrowed. It strikes me that none of us look much like London girls now. That Ma wouldn’t recognize us. We’ve been at Applecote almost a month, and our hair is bleached the color of the wheat fields, our shoulders strong from swimming, our bellies soft from Moll’s endless apple desserts and homemade toffee brittle.
We’re different on the inside, too. There’s a sharpness in the way that Pam looks at me, a latent unspoken suspicion of one another. If Ma ever does get through on the telephone—Ma is busy, Sybil tells us, the line terrible—I wonder if she’d hear it in our voices. She went away comforted by the knowledge that we’d always look after one another, a tight group—“What is the collective noun for sisters? A shoal of sisters? A murder?” Ma mused, fanning herself with a martini-stained copy of Vogue—who could “read each other’s minds like telegrams.” No longer.
“I was just up here.” It is not quite a lie, but enough of one to give me a sharp guilty thrill whilst leaving me feeling cheapened.
“What on earth have you done to your hair?” Pam scoffs. “You look about twelve years old, Margot.”
Appalled at my carelessness, I yank at the tight bristle of my braid, roughly pulling it apart. “It felt too hot down.”
“Shall we just leave you behind, then?” she says eagerly, like someone who wants to do exactly this. “Since you’re not ready.”
“Ready for what?” As my panic subsides, I notice that Pam is wearing lipstick—one of Ma’s pilfered crimsons—and her hair is oiled to a honey gleam at the tips.
“Christ, Margot. You really are from a different planet, aren’t you? The Gores. They said they’d be swimming in the river after tea. Remember?”
I clamp my hand to my mouth. My fingers smell unsettlingly of Sybil: roses, starch, something soaped and scrubbed. “Yes, yes, of course. I want to come!”
Pam doesn’t pretend to look pleased about this. The less competition for Tom’s attention, the better. She already has the exquisite obstacle of Flora: despite declaring herself “three-quarters in love with Harry already,” she’s reluctant to cut the rope from which Tom also dangles, thereby selfishly, greedily stealing the hearts of both boys rather than sharing the spoils with Pam. “In that case you’d better be quick. Put on your costume under your dress. Grab a towel. And use the lav first. You can’t bob down in the grass with boys around.”
Submerged beneath the river’s surface, their skin is pale green, like the underside of a leaf, their bodies muscularly wrought, making me think of the statues in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Great Hall. I never thought of boys as beautiful until now, that you might want to study their figures as you do girls’. But they are beautiful, frolicking in the water, compellingly, carelessly alive. We stare at them, enchanted, from behind a veil of Queen Anne’s lace, holding back Moppet by the collar. Above the trees, a giant hot air balloon rises, tomato-red, its basket swinging.
“This is not a good idea,” Dot tells Moppet. “I’m going back to the house.”
“No, no. Stay here with us,” I say, squeezing her hand, wanting her to feel included. “Sybil won’t mind.” Since the hair brushing started, Sybil has relaxed a little, if not giving us permission exactly, then turning a blind eye to meetings with the Gores, as long as it’s daylight and we don’t venture far.
“She said the river was dangerous.”
“Sybil thinks a bath is dangerous, Dot.” Flora laughs, trying to exchange an amused glance with me. But I quickly look away, feeling oddly treacherous to both Sybil and Flora since I’m honest with neither, caught between both.
“Yoohoo!” Harry waves jubilantly from the water, shouting at us to join them. I can think only of the back of my knees, which I scratched raw in my sleep last night, breaking through the toothpasty calamine crust.
But Pam is already tugging her dress over her head, keen to reveal her strong athletic body to Tom. Flora follows, slipping from hers in one graceful liquid movement. The boys exchange wolfish looks. Then I do it, awkwardly, holding a towel in my teeth lengthwise to hide my legs. The first to dive in, I am desperate for the cover of water. Dot stays on the bank, stubbornly clothed, Moppet on her lap like a long, thin gray baby.
The water is cold, alive with tiny silver fish. I like the fish, the way they swim like thoughts between my fingers, but they make Flora squeal. Midges halo our heads, rise and fall in columns.
Tom wades close to the muddy bank, all tall snaky sinew, glancing shyly at Flora, who stands in the shallows, skimming smiles at him across the water. They can’t quite stop looking at each other. But when Harry emerges from the deeper channel with a whoop, shaking off stringy reeds—compact where Tom is lean, his energy condensed, pushed into a tighter space—Flora deliberately turns her back on Tom, away from temptation, and propels herself toward Harry with a jump and a laugh that makes her breasts shake.
I suddenly wish that my own breasts were as round and pert as Flora’s, or that I didn’t have any at all: that I either exceeded expectation, like Flora, or sidestepped it completely, like Dot. I hate always to be in the middle of everything. Only in Audrey’s room, I realize, do I feel at the center.
The Gores and my elder sisters start flicking water at one another, giggling and jumping from branches. Too self-conscious to join in, I turn and swim downstream. Relieved to be on my own, I enjoy the rush of water between my legs, sticking to the cold of the deepest channel since I don’t like the mud in the shallows, crawling with crayfish, the way it feels fleshy, like it might be full of bodies.