“They’re probably up in her bedroom, messing about with music and clothes.” He squeezes her hand. “I’ll go upstairs, you check down here.”
She spots the snowy footprints through the kitchen window: Bella’s long and narrow, Romy’s chunky and small. A snowman with a crooked twig mouth. But the relief is short-lived. Outside in the freezing air, there is no sign of them, the footprints circling, looping back on themselves, then seeming to multiply, as if there were four girls, not two.
“Jessie! Hey, Jessie.”
She stops, turns around to see the incongruous figure of Joe lumbering toward her. He is red-faced, agitated. “Can I talk to yer?”
“Have you seen the girls?” Jessie demands breathlessly.
He nods. “About an hour ago, making a snowman. Happy as anything.” His accent has thickened. She can barely understand it. “Can I have a quick word about—”
“So you haven’t seen the girls since then?” Fear tightens in her stomach. Her breath is loud in her ears.
He shakes his head. “Sorry. They all right? Wait, Jessie . . .”
Leaving Joe calling behind her, she starts running, making strange stifled sounds in her throat, through the skeletal trees, tracking the little footprints, shouting out the girls’ names, futilely telling herself not to panic, she’ll find them soon, all she has to do is follow their footprints. But then the girls’ footprints separate: Bella’s, farther apart now, as if running, too, soon become untraceable on the snowless ground beneath the trees; Romy’s stop at the dark block of yew hedge that separates the garden from the pool, opposite a small gap in the hedge’s lowest branches, where they are joined by the starfish prints of two tiny hands.
12
Friday night, the last weekend of August
Every moment, something changes. The evening is elastic, pulled into new shapes by a stolen look, a flirtatious laugh, a leg emerging from a scalloped dress hem. There is a faint smell of bodies, the way bodies smell when they’re close to one another in the late summer heat, sweat-damp cotton.
Harry is leaning back against one of the stones, his guitar like a girl in his lap. He is singing a love song in French for Flora, laughing and cursing as he misses a note, forgets a word. And I can’t help but adore him for his imperfect French, his musical clumsiness, and feel jealous of Flora, who is basking in the attention, blond and barefoot in a white party dress that belongs to in Belgravia, one simple rose pinned in her hair, prettier than I’ve ever seen her.
Occasionally Harry glances at me, too, his eyes alive and intense. I can’t help but hope he doesn’t just see Flora’s plainer younger sister, but somebody different, desirable even. The funny thing is I am different tonight, wearing this blue dress, not only because it covers the backs of my knees so well: Audrey is sewn into it, and some of her energy and irrepressible confidence has become mine. Or maybe it’s just the wine the boys have brought and only Dot refuses to touch, sticking to the lemonade. I’m not used to it. But the taste is pleasant enough after a few sips. Unlike the boys’ Scotch whiskey, which I have to discreetly spit into the grass.
The sun sinks lower. Above it, the inky patch where sky becomes space. Pam squeezes next to Tom as he lights a small fire, belly-down in the grass, cigarette in his mouth, his bare feet beating time to Harry’s guitar. The wood he’s collected is so dry it flares up instantly. The flames dance light over everyone’s faces, and the sun becomes a pool of blood at the bottom of the valley, making us all more lovely, and more aware of our loveliness, drunk on it as well as the wine. At one point I find myself touching the buttons on my dress, thoughtlessly, as if I want to get beneath them, before I realize what I’m doing.
I don’t know how it happens, who suggests the swim first. I think it is Harry, but it may have been Tom, or it may have been suggested by no one, just something we do instinctively. Suddenly they are stripping off: Harry, yanking his shirt above his head; Tom’s tummy a smooth cave as he breathes in. And we all scream and laugh, clap our hands over our mouths, pretending to be shocked. Dot whispers fiercely into my ear, “Aunt Sybil will kill us.”
“Aunt Sybil isn’t here.” I laugh, still amazed that I was able to persuade my aunt to go away for the night—it took much cajoling and a shameless parading of this dress, my hair braided—and that only Moll is back at the house. It’s hard not to feel giddily uncaged.
Pam is the first to strip—she’ll do anything to drag Tom’s eyes away from the spectacle of Flora—and eagerly rips off her dress to reveal an oyster satin slip. The boys clap and howl. “Take ’em off, girls,” they shout. Flora and I look at each other and laugh, tempted, while Dot just sits there and shakes her head like a shocked little old lady.
Flora shoots me a mischievous secret smile that says, I will soon depart for Paris, the life Ma wants for me; the summer is almost over; let us live for this one night. Her slip is plain white cotton, unlike Pam’s, yet this simplicity seems to make her only more exquisite. Harry grabs at her, pulls her against his belly with a deep growl of pleasure. She throws back her arms against the sky and whoops, and it echoes back against the hills, that whoop, a spinning loose from Ma, Pa, Audrey, all of the people who have died or left, all the forces that pull us down, tether us to the ground. And my fingers find a scarlet button on my dress.
Dot tugs on my arm. “You don’t need to join in, Margot.”
“I do, Dotty. I actually do. Sorry.” I suddenly don’t care about my knees or that I won’t look as pretty as Flora, as statuesque as Pam. The stretch of smocking, the skirt over my head, the froth of petticoat, then the realization that I am not even wearing a slip, just pants and a bra, and it is too late to hide and Harry is shouting, “Bravo, Margot! Come on, come on.” And the grass-crushing rushing sound of a crowd of feet running through the dry meadow toward the bank, geese scattering, white as ghosts, the grass stubby against my soles, the smell of river water the second before the first shock of coldness, the violent joy of it all, the sharp cry out.
The water is depthless. Legs brush mine. Hands flit across my waist then vanish, cool, smooth, and fast as the sides of fish, and I have no idea if the contact is from my sisters or the boys, and it doesn’t seem to matter, for we are a writhing mass of happiness, swimming up and down on the moonlit water. I don’t know how long we swim for, only that when I get out on the skid of the bank everyone seems to have dissolved into the darkness, the vertical reedy shadows. Someone places a jacket over my shoulders. I turn and he is there, as I somehow knew he would be, as if our exchange of glances earlier was pulling us together, the way hands inch along a rope during a playful tug-of-war.
“You’re shivering,” Harry says. I’m not shivering, not even that cold, but I lean against him anyway. “Sit by the fire?”