Flora’s face falls instantly. “But . . . but you can wear your beautiful dress. You’ll be the belle of the ball. And it’s the last weekend of summer. This is it, Margot.”
I sit on the edge of the bed, gathering the dress between my knees. The distracting smell of bacon is seeping under my bedroom door. “I can’t,” I murmur, unable to explain why.
“But I need you there.”
“You don’t need anyone, Flora. You’re fine. Everything comes easily to you. It always has.”
She looks hurt. “Is that what you really think?”
A silence stretches. An ivy leaf brushes against the window. And I think of what Perry said about giving anything for one more summer’s day with his brother, and something in me softens.
Flora lowers herself beside me, pressing her silky leg against mine. “I also need your advice about Harry.”
“Harry?” My voice comes out high, strangled. “You’d be better off asking Moppet. I don’t know anything about love.”
“Well, you think deeply, deeper than me and Pam, which isn’t saying much, I know.” She watches me curiously. I hope my face isn’t giving too much away. “Harry respects you.”
I close my eyes for a moment, reeling inside. I don’t want to be respected—the village vicar is respected!—I want to be grabbed and kissed and eaten alive like Flora. But still I ask, “Advice about what?” I can’t help myself.
Flora nibbles her bottom lip. She shuffles on the bed. “I . . . I just wish Perry hadn’t told me that Harry was such a catch, that’s all,” she stutters. “So that I could trust the authenticity of my own feelings.”
“Authenticity?” I repeat, amazed.
“I know it’s a big word for your stupid sister to use.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I say, even though we both know it sort of was.
“I don’t want to live the life that Ma wishes she’d lived, that’s all, Margot,” she says, with surprising intensity. “The rich husband, the great house . . .”
I’ve never heard Flora talk like this before. “Really? What do you want, then?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m thinking. Maybe it’s the heat.” Flora pushes sleep-crimped curls off her face. “I can’t remember what cold feels like anymore, can you? Or rain? It feels like it’s been summer forever. My brain’s stopped working. And it’s been invaded with these. . . . these damn questions.”
“God forbid.”
She laughs. We are quiet for a moment, considering each other, the distance between us. “Tom asked me what I wanted to do with my life.”
“Tom?”
“He’s not what he seems, you know, Margot, so standoffish, monosyllabic. He’s really not, not once he gets going. You just have to sort of crack him first, like an egg. Then he’s rather wonderful.”
It strikes me that Flora never talks about Harry like this. I’ve never seen her smile so open, so unprotected.
“No one’s ever asked me that question before anyway,” she says, blanching a little, as if the same thought has just struck her. “Nor has it ever occurred to me to ask myself.”
“So what was your answer?” The wave of affection I suddenly feel for Flora is confusing, since it makes my aching for Harry more disloyal. “To Tom’s question.”
She covers her mouth with her hands, laughs. “America! It just popped out. I said, ‘Go to America!’ and I couldn’t think why exactly. Just somewhere I could be exactly whom I liked, even though I’ve got no idea who that might be.” She shakes her head, bewildered by this unlikely, inexplicable shuffle of self. “Completely daft, obviously.”
I try to picture Flora’s hand lifting from a ship’s shiny rail, waving good-bye to the wedding ring, the lacy pram hood, Cornton Hall. But I can’t. Flora’s fate has always seemed so set, a story working toward one inevitable ending.
“Promise me you’ll come.”
“To America?”
“The party at the stones, stupid.” She grabs my hands, tugs me from the bed, and runs her gaze admiringly over my dress once more. “Just look at you. I tell you what, Margot, if you come to the party in that frock, anything might happen.”
11
Jessie wakes to the ghostly beauty of February’s first hard frost. She gets up carefully, not wanting to wake Romy, who is asleep, sprawled horizontally across her bed. Jessie knows it’s probably bad practice—Romy should sleep in her own bed—but she’s loved having the soft, snuffling lump of her daughter to hug these last few months when Will’s not here. Romy sleeps in when she’s in their bed, too. Also, Jessie knows she’s safe.
Jessie still can’t forget the creepy sight of Romy on the stones, wearing those glasses, the niggling suspicion that Bella was somehow trying to turn her little sister into the Audrey girl. Or the nights she’s found Bella sleepwalking in Romy’s room. She avoids leaving the girls alone together now and has gotten into a habit of taking Romy into the log shed while she chops wood, the bathroom as she washes, rather than leave her under Bella’s care. Jessie knows she’s overreacting, probably. She also knows that Bella senses the distrust. And she feels really bad about it. But it’s there.
Jessie pulls back the curtains, eyes widening at the sudden pitch into the frozen trough of winter: the garden is furred with ice, sculptural and magnificent, a Narnia landscape. She wishes that Will were there to see it and that the weather didn’t just throw its dreariest drizzle at him every weekend when he returns. The calendar she carries in her heart flips. Only three more sleeps until he’s back. She texts him a photo: Jack Frost! She’s been doing this a lot. Maybe too much, since Will doesn’t always respond. Bella prefers Skype, privately in her room. But as she points out, “It’s not the same.” And it isn’t.
They all miss Will terribly when he’s away. But Jessie has started to miss him when he’s at home, too, a bit of the man she loves somehow left behind in his London office, or worse, at his attractive host’s warm, comfortable London house. Or maybe it’s her. During the long weekday nights Will’s absent, it’s too easy to dwell on the intimate first marriage described in those letters and feel irrationally betrayed by it. When he returns to Applecote on a Friday, she feels something inside of her pulling away from him. The sensation takes a day or two to fade. But by then it’s time for Will to return to London, so the cycle begins again.