Afterward, seeking reassurance, she’ll phone Will just to hear his voice. Although Jessie can’t picture the house, room, or chair in which he sits—she hates this—she can hear the police sirens in the background, the murmur of the city, and she will smell the traffic, the surging scented gusts from shop fronts, and she will picture dear Lou on a tube beneath the city’s concrete crust, applying her deep-black MAC mascara, and she will miss it all with a pang that is almost painful, and bring the conversation to a sharp close, in case she gives herself away or starts to sound like a sitcom stereotype of the needy, emotionally unstable wife at home.
Alone in the house, followed by Mandy’s Mona Lisa gaze, these uncorrected thoughts gather plausibility until Friday, D-day, the day Will returns. Friday is always busy. It is the day Jessie primps the house, fueled by a manic energy that turns her into a woman she doesn’t really recognize: flowers arranged, bread baked, roaring fires lit. No longer the start of a lazy slide toward Sunday, as they used to be, Applecote weekends must now justify themselves. She feels under pressure for it all to be worth it, the exhausting commute, the upheaval, the cold and mud. She’ll scrub the soil from beneath her fingernails and—the image of perfectly presented Mandy never far from her mind—rummage around for something faintly chic to wear.
“I wouldn’t bother, Jess. I’m sure he’d much rather just get laid,” Lou counsels on the phone. Jessie loyally doesn’t tell Lou that that side of things is stalling. How sometimes, when she and Will embrace, they don’t seem to fit together as they used to, as if they are physically changing shape in the days they are apart.
Anyway, it’s about the girls now, not her, she tells herself. They miss him terribly, the absent hero. (Bella, in particular, takes it out on Jessie, since she is around to receive it.) Romy launches herself at Will in a frenzy of possessive delight the moment he walks through the door. After hugs, tickles, a nonsensical discussion about Boy, the unfortunate roly-poly Romy keeps as a pet in a jam jar, Will dutifully retreats upstairs to spend time alone with Bella in her bedroom. Jessie encourages it, as she always has. It’s only sometimes, after particularly long chats, when Will comes downstairs looking preoccupied, a little troubled, like he did last night, that Jessie feels the hollow pang of exclusion and starts to wonder exactly what Bella is telling him about the week alone with her stepmother.
But she says nothing. She carries on cooking. She smiles, maybe a little dementedly at times. She reminds herself that her policy is to share nothing that could stress Will. She might lay it on a bit too thick: how Bella’s making such nice friends (Jessie pounces on any mention of a fellow classmate being “kind of all right” as evidence of a blossoming friendship) and Romy loves the playgroup (she wrestles tractors out of the boys’ hands, then demands to go home). She makes light of Bella’s sleepwalking, not mentioning how she found Bella by Romy’s cot again a couple of nights ago, staring down at the snuffling lump of her little sister with cold, blank, unseeing eyes. She doesn’t talk about her own irrational wake-in-the-night fear that Romy will disappear, like the girl who lived here all those years ago; that old houses, set in such ancient landscapes, create atavistic reflexes, recirculate the past, and that bad things will always happen at Applecote, just as Bella once promised.
“Dad!” Bella shouts into her thoughts. Jessie looks up, surprised to find herself still standing in the flower bed, an allium bulb in her hand, the planting hole empty. This keeps happening, this fleeting loss of herself. Like she might have dissolved into the very substance of the house and garden while Will was away.
The light has changed, bronze now.
“Have you seen him, Jessie?” Bella is standing by the orangery, long hair blowing about her face, arms tightly crossed, wearing her Saturday uniform of skinny jeans, sneakers, and a sloppy hoodie.
“Sorry, miles away. Yes, yes, he’s taken Romy to the village pond to feed the ducks.” Jessie likes how this sentence sounds, normal, domestic, like they’re a regular country family enjoying their weekend. “He won’t be long.”
To Jessie’s surprise, Bella starts to walk in her direction across the veranda, its stone still black from the morning’s downpour. “What are you doing?” she asks curiously.
“Planting flowers for spring.” Jessie straightens, presses a hand on her aching lower back. “We may not have a new roof by then. But we will have flowers. Far more important, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Is that a shallot?”
“An allium bulb. Close though. Same family.”
Bella sticks her hands in her jeans’ pockets, raises her shoulders into a shrug. “Doesn’t look like it’ll do anything,” she says flatly.
“Why don’t you plant it and see? It’s a bit late in the season. But the man at the nursery said it should be fine if we get them in this weekend. It’s a cool little nursery; I wish you’d come with me one day.”
Bella rolls her eyes. “Nurseries are never cool, Jessie. You’ve been in the country too long.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Jessie laughs. She picks the paper bag of bulbs from the ground and hands it to Bella. “There’s another trowel in that bag.”
Bella hesitates, then, resignedly deciding she has nothing better to do, she takes the bulbs and the trowel, bends down, and flicks at the soil.
Jessie tries not to look too pleased. Nothing scares Bella off faster. “About ten centimeters deep . . . that’s it. That’s great. Shove the bulb in. No, other way. Pointy bit facing up. Then just fill it in. Well done.”
It’s an incongruous sight, Bella squatting down, carefully digging tiny holes, dropping in bulb after bulb, entirely absorbed, nudging them into place with her fingers. After a while, she stops and frowns up thoughtfully at Jessie. “Mum never gardened.”
“No, I guess she didn’t,” says Jessie after a pause. It hits her that there is now a heartbreakingly long list of things that Bella will never do with Mandy. She’d like to be able to acknowledge her understanding of this somehow to Bella but deems it too risky.
Bella starts digging once more, stabbing the trowel deep into the earth until it collides with something. “Oh. Look.”
She wipes a muddy pair of glasses on her jeans. The lenses are long gone, one arm, too, the frame tortoiseshell where she rubs the mud away. She forces the remaining arm open, holds the spectacles up, and peers though them. They have a cat’s-eye slant, giving her a definite 1950s air. The sun dips. Jessie feels a little breathless, as if the house is confronting her with its darkest secret, the one she’s kept from Will.
She knows what’s coming.
“The vanishing girl, the one you hate me talking about. They could be hers, couldn’t they?”
“I don’t . . .” Jessie’s words trail off at the terrible timing: Will is pushing through the side gate, Romy on his shoulders, Flump, her knitted elephant, bobbing on his head.
“Ladies.” He bends down to shimmy Romy off his shoulders, grinning, pleased at this rare scene of familial harmony. “Looking like a natural, Bella.”