This is not how it was meant to be. Only the carefully curated images she posts on Facebook resemble the life she’d thought they’d be leading by now: the house swagged with ivy, flickering with Christmas candlelight; a family walk into a winter wood; a bubbling apple crumble, steaming shamelessly in a pastel-blue earthenware dish. Jessie spends a lot of time tweaking her own time line, admiring this fictitious version of their life, envying it.
The photogenic ice melts later that day, the crisp beauty turning into a freezing wet mush that clings to her heavy brown boots in fleshy clots, works its way beneath her fingernails, creeps into the house. There is no escape from the mud that week, nor the heavy tallow-gray sky that presses down on the valley. The girls’ hands are scarlet and itchy with cold, their lips blue. All their outdoor clothes are wrong, designed for temperate city parks, not winter countryside. She orders heavy unflattering coats, ear-muffling hats, insulated gloves from a catalog based in the Highlands. She hopes for snow. Snow will make everyone happy, she thinks. But the white sky falls as charmless sleet, then rain. The earth is sodden. It keeps raining. There is nowhere for the water to go.
Wednesday, the day Will’s to return early and work from home, having promised the girls he’d make up for his absence: flooding. A mercury mirror of dirty water, spreading west, gushing over piles of sandbags, drowning homes and fields, turning woods into underwater forests, pushing Victorian femurs and finger bones to the surface of one sodden village graveyard not far away. Applecote’s land becomes glutinous—there is a pool of viscous boggy mud, like a dirty old mouth, close to the old well that sucks the welly boot off Romy’s foot, making her squeal. Bella calls Applecote “the Ark,” and it’s funny, really quite funny, for a second or two, but then Jessie hears the shrill edge to her own laughter and the sound dies quickly. Will’s name is flashing urgently on her phone. Another crisis at work. A client threatening to sue. An important meeting tomorrow now, too, something promising. He’s not going to make it back tonight. When she tells the girls, Romy bursts into tears. Bella’s face simply empties. She runs upstairs and slams her bedroom door in the way only Bella can slam it, like an act of war.
Even the weather tantrums that night, the wind howling, muscular gusts punching at the house like fists. Jessie, hit by a sense of foreboding, locks the doors, and a tiny voice in her head wonders if perhaps she’s not locking out the threat, but locking something in. Firelight shadows flicker against the old drawing room wall—like someone making puppets with their fingers—and she can hear things outside, sounds she can’t quite identify, sticks breaking maybe, the gravel crunch of a footstep. Heart pounding—it can’t be Will; who is it?—she turns off the hall lights and scans the drive through the window, half expecting to see Margot fading into the shadows again, walking away from the house with her dogs. But there is no one.
Margot. Jessie hasn’t been back to the nursery café since the day Margot had turned up with Bella. She misses it, more than she expected to, just having a friendly, bohemian local place to go. But she can’t forget the two black Labs in the back of Margot’s car, Margot’s leopard-print head scarf, and, more puzzlingly, Margot’s detailed knowledge of the house: Jessie investigated the drainpipe the next day and discovered Margot was absolutely right—it was blocked, and there was also a bloom of damp on the top floor bathroom wall that she hadn’t noticed before. But how did Margot know about it? She could hardly see it from outside.
Jessie’s mind keeps wandering back to the Squirrels girls’ theory about Audrey returning, stalking her old home. And although it’s the most absurd thing she’s ever heard—women don’t vanish as children, reappear with a secret set of keys to the family home fifty-odd years later—it’s gotten under her skin, the ridiculous idea that Margot is actually Audrey.
A dog might help, Lou suggests distractedly on the phone, hopping around her London apartment, looking for the lost platform heel that goes with her navy sequin dress. Everyone in the country has dogs, don’t they? It’s practically the law that you must be covered in mutt hair and smell like a kennel. It’ll keep you company, Jessie, stop you getting spooked. And it’ll look good on Facebook, Lou adds wryly, Lou who can see through everything. Jessie laughs, relieved to be understood. Lou finds her shoe with a delighted squeal, and her taxi is outside. “Gotta go!”
Jessie sighs, wishing she could follow Lou into that taxi, a buzzy gallery opening, her old life, just for one evening. Instead, she clears a space on the messy kitchen table, opens her laptop, and surfs videos of puppies so cute that Bella must surely forgive her for existing if she buys one. She runs upstairs and knocks on Bella’s door gently, asking if she’s okay, if she wants to talk, and, hey, what does she think about a puppy? But Bella rebuffs her with “I want to be alone,” and suddenly the idea that a puppy might heal the rift in the family, like so many other ideas, seems wildly optimistic. Jessie walks back down into the dark empty house, thinking of Lou in the brilliant city night, laughing, sparkling.
The next morning, the February light browns and thickens as Jessie reaches the top floor, making her gray flannel pajamas look ink-black. It is colder, too. She shivers, pausing on the creaking top step, tightening the wriggle of Romy’s hand in hers, and wonders if the walls of this upper floor landing have actually narrowed further or if it’s her imagination. She can’t be sure. Applecote is not like other houses, she’s learning. Not a stable fixed thing, it seems to swell and shrink in response to the weather outside and the emotional climate of its inhabitants.
“Right, washing,” Jessie says aloud to herself. (Narrating her own movements through the house is a worrying new habit, one of her mother’s that, as a teen, she’d rolled her eyes at.) She hurriedly piles Bella’s clean washing onto the sleigh bed—she doesn’t dare open any drawers now—and glances warily at the Mandy Boxes, still wedged between the bed and the wall, while Romy makes a beeline for the dressing table.
“Rom,” Jessie warns, shaking her head. “Leave Bella’s things.”
“Romy likes them.”
“You want to see Tractor Joe?” Distraction is proving more effective than discipline with Romy right now. “Here.”
Standing by the larger window, Romy on her hip, they watch the vehicle—battered, bandaged with gaffer tape—grind into view, Joe Peat resting his forearms on the wheel. Romy waves, the bracelet Jessie made from colored paper clips swinging on her tiny wrist.