Not even Moppet can understand it. The treat of raw pigs’ knuckles mid-morning. The petting from Sybil. The slow collapse of Applecote’s house rules, like something rigid buckling in the soaring late summer heat.
The only thing that seems to dampen Sybil’s mood—pause her flow around the house, opening curtains—is a reminder that we are two and a half weeks off returning to school, Flora departing for Paris. And the only thing that truly stops Sybil in her tracks, so that her foot stills above the staircase tread, her hand leaps to her throat, is a mention of my mother, particularly Dot questioning if there are any letters for her from Ma. (The rest of us have given up asking.)
I’m now sure Sybil’s managed to convince herself that Ma no longer exists—after all, she’s convinced herself that Audrey will knock at the door any day—and that she, Sybil, is our new mother, we her adopted daughters. And because a mention of Ma seems to rattle her so and threaten the mood that’s led to the delicious relaxation of rules—and thereby our access to Harry and Tom—we mention Ma less and less, even to one another.
Or maybe it’s just that Ma’s hurt us by not writing, more than any of us care to admit. But I don’t know for sure since we sisters no longer talk about our feelings honestly. We used to push them, like a kneaded lump of dough, into one another’s hands to hold and squeeze so that we could experience them together. Now we take polemical positions. We have secret desires. We lob spiky feelings at one another like hairbrushes. And Dot takes herself off on long solitary walks with Moppet.
Sybil, in her own subtle way, encourages this friction. Her quiet relish of Ma’s reckless parenting makes me uncomfortable. When Pam mused in Sybil’s hearing that Ma’s probably run off with an Arab prince and is floating around a medina somewhere, nibbling dates, having forgotten her daughters completely, I’m sure I saw a satisfied smile flicker over Sybil’s lips. Later that day, she appeared at dinner wearing an unthinkable slash of lipstick, Ma’s distinctive crimson. I wanted to wash it off her face, say, You are not Ma, my wonderful, maddening, electrical storm of a mother. But she looked so pretty, shyly pleased with herself. And she waved us off for a sunset swim in the river. So I didn’t.
I keep thinking it can’t last, Sybil’s mood, this transformation. That it must be induced by a pill, like the ones Ma used to take after Pa died. Or the Dubonnet. That she’ll clip downstairs in dark gray flannel the next morning, forbidding life-endangering swims. But then she appears freshly at the breakfast table in that yellow dress, the color of lemons, and delivers me a private look, long as a letter, that binds me to her, making me feel that my dissembling is allowing her to gather a little of her old self again.
It baffles Perry. He blinks at Sybil as if he has noticed a fundamental change in his wife but has no idea what it is, or why. He double-takes when she ankles across the lawn, a floral skirt swishing around calves so slim and pale from being hidden under heavy dresses for years they are like a shop mannequin’s, walking with the accelerating rhythm of someone keen for another day to unfold, rather than the slow step of someone determining to endure it.
Confusingly, Perry suddenly looks less guilty. No longer walking with his hand on his lower back, he is more upright, his huge belly less swollen with gas and secrets. I wonder if his wife’s mood is passing into him, some kind of marital osmosis. This morning at lunch, he even suggested tentatively, as if he didn’t quite trust this gay interloper masquerading as his wife, that she join him in the pool: Sybil threw back her head and laughed, not unkindly, and said she hadn’t swum in it for years and was far too old to do so now and the aphids on the roses need dealing with. Still, he actually asked and she actually laughed, both unimaginable when we first arrived.
We joke that Sybil is having an affair with the gardener Billy. Why else the smiles, the laxity, the red lipstick? But one afternoon, Pam whips around, hard blue gaze prodding at me like a finger in the chest: “What do you think, Margot? You’re Sybil’s pet. How do you read the mood of your mistress?” And I felt Audrey’s world seal tighter over me then, its birdcage door swing shut.
I cannot confide to my sisters how Sybil’s eyes follow me about the house. My anticipation of her tread on the stairs, her knuckles bunched, just outside my door, the moment before she knocks. How I know she will enter my room, closing the door behind her, circling me with smiles, drinking me in, asking about the whereabouts of my sisters, until she suggests that we “sit in Audrey’s room together awhile.”
I’m not sure how to say no, and part of me wants to please her, and part of me enjoys it, and part of me wants to supplant Ma, punish her for not being here, for not writing, and for letting this happen at all.
It’s not that I haven’t tried to tell Sybil that it’s a case of mistaken identity, that she mustn’t muddle me with Audrey, but the stuttering words didn’t come out very forcefully, and she shot me such a puzzled, disappointed look. She’s just enjoying my company, she said. I knew she was lying. She probably knew it, too. But I was so relieved at this simple explanation, the whole thing so awkward and odd and beyond navigable, that I grabbed it. But the longer I let it go on, the more culpable I feel, the more daunting the thought of addressing any of it or confiding in my sisters: the tighter the knot.
I imagine the likely scenario if I do: the silencing of their conversations as I walk into a room, already something I’ve tasted in the last week or so; Pam’s delighted disgust; Flora’s wounded betrayal; Dot’s sense of abandonment; and more than any of this, my sisters knowing that I’ve willfully hidden a part of myself from them all these weeks in Audrey’s room, a place no one but Sybil dares follow. It will cement my reputation as Strange Margot forever, even though that version of me, the one who walks in Audrey’s shoes, is transitory, an experiment, alive only in the confines of Audrey’s room. She isn’t allowed to escape or leave her footprints behind.
I can smell Harry on Flora straightaway.
Carelessly late for lunch, she sits at the dining table with swollen red lips, a flush on her chest, grass whiskering the back of her dress. She radiates soft light, like a candle. She smiles in a way I’ve never seen her smile, soft, distant. Perry raises his glass: “My God, I was thinking it was never going to happen.”