The problem is she knows now. She wishes she didn’t. She wishes she’d let Audrey be.
But these last two and a half months, since Bella started school and Will his disorienting split Applecote/London life, Bella’s not stopped muttering about the “vanishing girl.” She particularly likes talking about it when Will is away during the week and it’s just the three of them alone in the house, surrounded by a darkness so absolute it is like tangible living matter. It started to spook Jessie a bit, so a couple of weeks ago she decided to prove the whole thing was nonsense, once and for all.
She was heartened by a quick search online that came up with nothing. But then, just to be sure, she’d gone on to chat with Sheila, the nice lady behind the till in the village shop—Sheila had been proudly saying she’d been born in the village, only visited London once, which was enough. Jessie casually asked if she knew anything about a young girl who had gone missing from Applecote in the fifties. She fully expected Sheila to laugh, ask her what on earth she was talking about.
“Never forgot the day my mammy told me,” Sheila muttered instead, stuffing noodles more vigorously into Jessie’s basket. “We weren’t allowed out to play for months that summer.” She shook her head. “That poor Mrs. Wilde.”
“But not the Mrs. Wilde who lived at Applecote before us?” Jessie clarified with a delayed smile.
She had to sit down on the bench by the village pond afterward, bury her face in Romy’s cloud of biscuity curls. That night she dreamed of the woman with the dogs again, and called out, “Audrey!” and the woman turned around, revealing no face inside the head scarf, just a smudge. She’s dreamed it every night since.
Jessie hasn’t told Bella what Sheila said, of course. Bella needs no more encouragement. Rather than growing bored with the story, she seems more obsessed than ever, layering the bare “facts” with her own details and suppositions, like one of those dark Internet memes Jessie’s read about. Jessie hopes the Audrey story is Bella’s way of getting herself noticed, trying to fit in, egged on by the other Squirrels girls. But Bella won’t leave the story at school.
Bella’s portrait of Audrey—a rather good collage of a girl with a toothpaste smile, a background of rolling newspaper print—is now stuck on their kitchen wall, next to Romy’s innocent finger paintings. And on Bella’s dressing table, that eerie memento mori keeps growing: the heart-shaped button, the paperweight from the desk in the old drawing room, those disintegrating newspapers from ’59, joined this week by a stubby pencil with the faintest A on its hexagonal side that Bella found wedged under the baseboard. Jessie secretly wishes she could throw the whole lot in the fire. (In hindsight, she also wishes she’d never given Romy those alphabet bricks from the attic, or fixed up the child’s high chair.) Will sees no harm in Bella’s interest—“a teen thing, like collecting badges,” but, then, Jessie hasn’t told Will what Sheila said yet, either.
She tried. But the words caught, and she washed them away with a large gulp of red wine. Jessie’s overwhelming instinct is to protect Will from further darkness, not to add to his growing troubles. As it is, there are Skype meetings in the small hours with Jackson in Brisbane that leave Will permanently exhausted. Two business deals have been toasted in the last month, then disastrously fallen through at the last minute, Will’s hopes dashed, his professional pride dented. The company’s staff is unsettled, a couple jumping ship. Last week there was an embarrassing, expensive cock-up, a cargo turning up in the wrong port.
Will takes it all too personally, as if this no-deal limbo is a failure of his as a businessman and, Jessie senses, a husband. However much she assures him it’s not his fault—it’s the nervous markets, the lack of accessible capital, just crap luck—Will seems increasingly distant and introspective. (Jessie is struggling not to take this personally and see her inability to lift his somber mood as a reflection on the shortcomings of their relationship. She’s sure Mandy would have known how to reach him.) Given all this, she simply cannot bring herself to tell Will about Applecote’s grim past and risk him seeing Applecote not as a rural haven but as a house of horrors. She’s terrified he may want to leave. So she lets Will dismiss Bella’s story as a schoolgirl’s tall tale and desperately hopes it will all gently fade away, like one season turning into another.
And yet. The house’s history certainly explains things. The resistance of local builders—thank God for Joe Peat, who has agreed to work at Applecote, albeit in a vague “few weeks.” The minute flickers in villagers’ faces when Jessie mentions where she lives. The way a couple of the mothers at the local church playgroup in the village hall exchanged the sort of uneasy complicit look that wonders if the other should mention anything. Jessie felt a little like she had outsider crayoned on her forehead. She’s just grateful that she hasn’t mentioned anything to the woman at the plant nursery café: she still has one little sanctuary with good cake, like Greta’s in London, where Applecote’s history won’t follow her. She needs it.
During the week now, whole days can pass when she doesn’t see another adult. Her thoughts loosen and slip away then, especially if she has to go into Bella’s bedroom, where those love letters still flutter in the eaved shadows like silver moths and Mandy’s beautiful, accomplished gaze mocks her from the walls. What did we do in our past lives to be so blessed? Those words still taunt her. As does the image of them holding hands in their sleep, especially given that she and Will spend most of the week in separate beds, over seventy miles apart. All the niggles and natural fears Jessie’s ever had about Will—the speed of their relationship, the fact he’d loved someone else so deeply, that Bella still doesn’t accept her, probably never will—take on a life of their own in the strange lilac light of that room.