I consider telling him about Audrey’s bedroom, how Sybil keeps it ready for her return, how she lives only for that day, how nothing is history, nothing has gone. Only time passes, stealing years from Audrey. “We are,” I say instead. I do feel incredibly lucky to be here with him.
“You’ve got a very pretty smile, Margot. You should smile more. Not be so serious. Come on, I’m not doing a very good job of saving you. At this rate you’ll have to save me. Let’s get back.” Filling his lungs with air, he lifts his beautiful arm and sluices it into the river.
I follow in his wake, admiring his powerful stroke, studying the cinnamon freckles across his shoulder blades, thinking about him and Audrey, trying to see a pattern in the chaos of those freckles, as I saw Audrey’s face that time in the constellation of stars in the sky. But they stay just as freckles, a random sprinkling of long-lost summers and river swims, distant solar heat.
“Well, bravo, buttock.” There is incandescent fury in Pam’s smile. “If Harry was not yours before this afternoon’s swim, Flora, he is now. And so, I daresay, are Tom, the bullocks in the field, the pilot of the hot air balloon, and anyone else within appreciative range of your strip show. Ma would be proud.”
“I swear I’ll paint your mouth shut,” hisses Flora.
They glare at each other. Then Flora bends her face closer to my foot, which is resting in her lap, and I feel the cold press of the varnish brush against my nail. She’s painted Pam’s toes, too—she stands wiggling, drying them on Flora’s bedroom rug—but it isn’t enough. Pam is still smarting.
When Harry and I returned from our swim—“You two took your time,” observed Flora, puzzled rather than annoyed since she’d never see plain old me as a rival for a boy’s affections—the rest of them were basking on the sunny riverbank, lips bloodied by cherries. Something was off, the discord in the air between Flora and Pam thorny, almost a physical thing. The atmosphere wasn’t improved by Harry’s obvious air of preoccupation, the way he dared to chew a blade of grass and stare intently into the gliding river rather than put all his energy into charming Flora. She looked at me quizzically; I shrugged. Interpreting Harry’s reflective distance as a slight—Flora has little experience of slights, after all—she moved away to lie down next to Tom, who was spread out tantalizingly on the grass, eyes shut, head resting on his interlaced hands, naked but for his shorts, turning the color of toast in the sun. When Flora landed beside him, a huge smile spread across his face: so attuned to her presence, her coordinates on the bank, he seemed to know it was Flora without opening his eyes. As they laughed and talked in low voices, I noticed how Flora became more natural in Tom’s presence, while Tom was magnified in hers, losing his reserve. Pam noticed it, too, contemplated the two of them with the merciless eye of an angry swan—it was enough for Flora to have Harry, not Tom, too. I understood that. I wanted Harry myself, more than I’ve ever wanted anybody.
The unraveling continued into the afternoon. Back at the house, Moll brought us ice pops from the icebox, normally a moment of collective pleasure, but we took them silently and slumped on striped deck chairs in the shade of the beech tree as if on separate islands, dreaming, sucking, Pam sulking. At one point, reliving Harry’s hand on my arm, I sighed, far too longingly and loudly. But neither of my older sisters noticed or commented upon it, and I wondered if we had lost the ability to read one another—the guilty conscience in a nostril rub, the words sucked back by a sharp inhalation of breath, the dreams behind a dawdling footstep—or if we were all too wrapped up in our own worlds now to care.
“Dot, move a bit to the left. You’re in my light.” Flora dabs at my foot again, and my thoughts stream away. “Your baby toenail is so fiddly. It’s the size of a split pea.”
“Flora?” Dot pushes her glasses back up her nose. It’s the first time she’s spoken for ages, particularly quiet since we got back from the river. I don’t think she likes the way our sisterly allegiances keep changing, realigning in minute ways since we met the Gores, like the cloud of tiny midges that towered and flattened above the river’s surface.
“Hmm?” Flora says distractedly, holding up my foot, surveying her handiwork. “Perfect, if I say so myself. But careful, Margot, or it’ll smudge.”
“What was wrong with Harry earlier? Why did he go silent?” Dot’s mind is still raking over the morning.
I feel Flora’s start in the varnish brush. “Maybe you can tell us, Margot.”
I blush. The chemical smell of the varnish catches in the back of my throat. Pam and Flora exchange a look that has a silent nod inside it. Pam grabs a large, pretty glass paperweight off Flora’s desk and slaps it from one palm to the other.
“You grilled him about Audrey, didn’t you?” Pam says, lifting her chin so that I can see the triangle shape of her Wilde jaw.
“Well, yes. Sort of.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Margot.” Flora rejects my foot from the cradle of her lap.
“Do you have to ruin everything?” Pam looks even more furious, blaming me for the imagined slight that had led to Flora’s monopolization of Tom. “Audrey’s no more likely to come back than the dodo. I don’t even care who did it anymore. Perry, Moll, the decapitated German pilot, the kitchen cat. Audrey’s dead! We’re alive! Can we just be grateful for that?”
“She’s right,” says Flora more softly.
“Someone has to ask questions,” I throw back at them sharply, guilt about my desire for Harry making me hot and defensive.
“Margot, the questions have been asked,” Pam says wearily. “And there are no answers.”
“That’s simply not true.” Indignant, my heart racing, I walk to the open window. But the air is still hot as a brick. I think of sitting at Audrey’s dressing table earlier, the tug and weave of Sybil’s fingers: I felt more understood then, certainly more appreciated.
“Do you have to infect everyone with your maudlin imagination?” Pam mutters beneath her breath.
I shake my head in disbelief that she could be so uninterested in Audrey’s fate. “You have a splinter of ice in your heart, Pam.”
“And you, my strange little sister . . .” She holds the paperweight up to the light and turns it slowly so that the cobalt swirl in its center seems to move, like a girl twisting, dancing in a blue dress. “You have a ghost in yours.”
9
Not dead, dormant: Jessie stares at the bulb between her soil-hardened fingertips. A gusty November wind, smelling distinctly of the orchard’s rotting windfalls, pushes against her back. And she wonders. She wonders about the other thing lying dormant at Applecote, waiting for the right conditions to come alive.