I think of Flora, hesitate, but thinking doesn’t work.
The fire pulses, a beating red heart. I hand him back his jacket and reach into the grass for my discarded dress and pull it back on, safe in its soft folds again. “Where is everyone?” I ask, meaning Flora.
“Not sure it matters.” He lights a cigarette from a glowing ember. His shorts are stuck to his body, outlining everything.
I try not to stare. But I catch him smiling. After that, I daren’t move my gaze from the fire. I love its hiss and spit, the way it makes me feel connected as I never have before to the stones, the valley, the earth itself, connected to something bigger and greater and older than any of us.
“You’re the intellectual in the litter, Flora tells me. What do you think these stones mean?” Harry asks after a while, his words slurring slightly. His elbow brushes against my arm as he lifts his cigarette to his lips. He suddenly feels both familiar and unknowable, like an old friend with secrets.
“Moll, my aunt’s housekeeper, she says these stones honor ancient dead. That they have special powers. But she’s a bit superstitious, likes to talk about omens and things,” I say quickly, in case he mistakes Moll’s views for mine.
“Ah.” His laugh is warm, gravelly. “Yes, she would. The people around here might look like churchgoing people, but don’t be fooled, Margot.” He leans right up to me, so close I feel I might get drunk on his breath. “Pagan souls. It’s like the last few thousand years never happened. We’re only missing the saber-toothed tiger and the mammoth.”
I reach out my hands toward the fire. “What do you think the stones mean, then?”
“Me? I only know that from now on, whenever I see them I’ll think of you, Margot, sitting there in the firelight. In that dress.”
My cheeks burn with pleasure. I can’t stop smiling.
“It’s just like hers, isn’t it?” he says abruptly, an edge to his voice.
My smile vanishes.
“Your cousin Audrey’s. The blue dress. The color of her eyes.”
I’m saved from having to answer by Pam charging out of the darkness, teeth chattering, searching for her clothes, yelping, “Cold, cold, cold.”
Flora and Tom follow a moment later, breathless, laughing, then, seeing the rest of us, quietening, like children quickly adjusting their behavior to adult company. I notice how they stand close together, hands brushing. How they make each other look more beautiful, more alive. Perhaps realizing this herself, Flora quickly moves away, bends over to plant a kiss on Harry’s mouth.
“Pam thought it a grand idea to get out of the river on the opposite bank,” explains Tom to Harry, a little sheepishly. “Bit of a detour.”
Harry shrugs. I wonder if he’s hiding his hurt pride. Rivalry wrestles the air between them. Suddenly, they both seem dangerously drunk.
Pam yanks her dress over her head, asking, as she emerges, “Where’s Dot?”
“Dot?” It quickly dawns that while I’ve been here, enjoying what is not mine, Dot’s been alone in the dark. “Oh dear.”
“One of us should go and check she’s got back to the house okay.” Flora eyeballs me. “Don’t you think, Margot?”
“Yes, you go, Margot,” instructs Pam.
“Oh. Oh, right, okay.”
On the way back to the house, tipsier than I thought, indignant that I’ve been shooed off by my older sisters, surplus to the party, I linger by the bathing pool gate, resting my arms along the flaky wood. Reasoning that Dotty will be asleep in her bed now anyway, and not feeling in any great hurry for the evening to end, I enter and sit down on the pool’s edge, hitching my dress above my knees, bare feet paddling the water. After the coldness of the river it is warm as blood. I like it.
Memories ripple across the water’s surface, layered like leaves: me and Audrey diving, Pam racing Flora to the edge, Dotty, on a deck chair, watching us over the book in her hands, Perry in his horrifying knitted trunks. All the summers we’ve spent here, the furthest we’ve ever been from real life yet the closest to our real selves.
“Margot.”
I peer into the inky shadows, unsure if the voice comes out of them or my head, eyes slowly adjusting to Harry’s face in the moonlight, the bone-white flash of his smile. He leans back against the gatepost, louche, disheveled, his shirt buttons undone. “Wasn’t very gentlemanlike of me to let you walk back alone this late.” His voice is slurred, soft. He makes the night feel closer, less full of air.
“I’m not scared of the dark.” I turn back to the water, sonically mapping him from the creak of the gate, the shifting of a foot on stone. Somewhere above me, a fierce rush of wings in the trees, a swift, silent hunt to the death. I look up but see nothing. It is already over.
Harry squats beside me, swaying slightly, muttering something about a storm brewing and how he misses the rain on his skin. Splashing his feet clumsily into the pool he leans back, crossing his arms behind his head. I sneak a glance at his prostrate body, his tummy where his shirt bunches up, the intriguing dip and hair beneath the pin-glint of his belt buckle.
“I’d sit here with Audrey sometimes.”
“Me too.” I like that he mentions her so naturally.
He regards me with amused, heavy-lidded eyes. “She’d talk about running away to London when she was older, going to live with a particularly beautiful, scandalous aunt . . .”
“My mother, I’m afraid.”
He laughs, splashes his feet.
“You were fourteen? When she . . .” I trail off.
“A young fourteen. A late starter. Tom was about two foot taller than me. Practically had a beard.”
I understand then why Harry might have found some equality in the companionship of a lively younger girl.
“Did she ever talk about me?” he asks, his voice carrying the neediness of a formative boyhood crush.
“A little,” I fib kindly. Audrey tended to make a bigger impression on other people than they made on her.
He broods on this a while. He kicks his feet, sprinkling the hem of my dress with water. I wonder how late it is—or how early. The night is slipping through our fingers like sand, and I don’t want it to end.
“Flora . . .” He hurls my sister’s name into the sticky summer air, changing everything. “Your sister is very beautiful.”
I close my eyes for a moment, feeling so, so stupid for not realizing that Harry’s only come here to talk about Flora, not to be with me or talk about Audrey, that we’ve been having two parallel conversations, not connecting at all.
“Paris is going to love her,” he adds.
The pressure drops. For the first time in weeks, I can actually smell rain, a swirling cold front boring through the valley toward us. “You know Paris well?” I ask weakly, looking for the right gap in the conversation to get up and leave.
“My parents have a house in the south, so I make damn sure Paris is on the way.” He shrugs and lolls back, careless of his worldly glamour.
“Easy to see Flora again, then.” My voice sounds squeaky and odd.