I can’t stop my own gulping, dismantling sobs. Audrey’s never going to come skipping in from the orchard now, a catkin in her hair. She’ll never write me another letter, using words I have to look up. She’ll never run away to London to live with Ma. But beneath the sadness, white-hot anger. “Perry was arrested.”
“I know, I know. It was awful. I couldn’t live with it, not that as well. But I turned up at the station to confess and Perry was walking out, just released, and . . . and it felt like someone was giving me another chance. So I turned around and I bumped into Pa. And there was this moment, this diabolical moment with Pa, when he shoved me into the alley by the baker’s and asked what I’d done in the stables that afternoon, and I stuttered something about saddles, I can’t remember what, and the next day he moved us all back to London, shut up Cornton. And people continued to talk about boat gypsies and the man in the hat and . . . I lived my life, the life I was meant to live. I found I could, Margot. That it was actually possible.”
“Oh.” Harry in his golden life, Audrey swept along the muddy channel of the river. My stomach heaves.
“She’s always there, in my head. I can’t sleep. I can never sleep,” he sobs, no longer the beautiful boy who kissed my knees, spun me by the hands in the rain. “That’s why I came back. To prove I could. To prove I could do anything. That it was over.”
“And to lie some more?” I don’t mean to shout. But the words barrel out as raging red things.
He grabs me by the shoulders, making me gasp, speaking urgently. “And I met you, and it was like Audrey all over again, the way you filled my head, Audrey how she would be.”
I try to wriggle free of his hands. “Let go.”
He shakes me harder. “What have you done? What have you made me say?”
“The truth!” I shout again. “For once in your life you’ve told the truth, Harry.” Something in his eyes makes me feel the vulnerability of my position, an animal in a trap.
“A girl who cheats on her sister, who can’t keep her drawers up?” he snarls. “Who will believe you, the daughter of a rackety model and a mad old soldier? Yes, yes, I know all about them both; Chelsea’s a small place, Margot. Who will believe you over a peer’s son?”
I bite his hand, twist from him, but he pushes me right back down with terrifying ease. “You made me tell you, Margot. A big mistake.”
Fear bolts through my body. I cry out, struggling to see over his shoulder, but there is no one, just the hammering rain, a bulb flash of lightning. His fingertips press on my collarbone, then into the softness of my neck, and I think of Ma and my sisters and how I don’t want to leave them. But my head is filling with sky, where Audrey is waiting, her arms stretching toward me like beams of torchlight, and Harry’s mouth is grazing mine. I don’t know whether he’ll kill me or kiss me, or do both at once, and my body detaches, comes away, floats off so it cannot be hurt. Only my brain still chatters. Find the word that will make him stop. But no sound comes out of my mouth. I see Harry glance to his left, a look of surprise, then I hear a crack. I wait for the pain, knowing it’s the end, that darkness will scrub everything out, like it did for Audrey, for Pa. But it’s Harry’s head that slams against mine, and above the slump of his shoulder I see the lenses of spectacles glinting like stars.
I’m not sure how long Dot and I stand there, watching over Harry in numb disbelief, waiting for him to come back to life, only that Dot is still holding the paperweight in her left hand, transfigured—taller, stronger, fully realized, thrown out of girlhood at last. And the rain has stopped and the sky is pink dawn–edged and the birds are singing wildly and the candy-striped deck chairs we sat on yesterday afternoon are a few feet away and we can hear Pam and Flora talking in heated voices, laughing through the trees, incongruous sights and sounds of a life already out of our reach. No Tom, thank goodness. They don’t see us beneath the tree at first, about to walk straight past. I call out, mixing their fates with ours, the sound that comes from my throat a funny sort of bark, more fox than human.
Flora and Pam giggle and peer down at Harry, thinking him blind drunk. Then Pam sees the bloodied paperweight in Dot’s hand, nudges Flora, and their mouths part. I am overcome by a yearning to be curled up on Fang, our moth-eaten tiger skin rug, sucking the hard sugar crystals off the top of sweet sponge fingers.
“Oh no.” Pam kneels down next to Harry, presses her ear to his chest, then looks up at Flora, shaking her head. Flora whimpers. I try to explain in gabbles—what he told me, what he did, what Dot did, what I’ve been doing with Sybil in Audrey’s room, how it all led to this—then I hear myself repeating over and over, like a needle stuck on a gramophone, “He watched Audrey drown, he watched Audrey drown.”
Pam takes my hand. “Shush,” she says firmly, kindly, frowning at the bodice of my dress where a button has ripped off, exposing a bulge of breast, a red scratch. “It’s going to be all right, Margot.”
But it’s not, clearly. Flora is swaying like she’s about to collapse. Harry is dead. And it is all my fault for inhabiting Audrey, pushing things too far as always, treating it all as a game, and the result is that Dotty is in awful trouble, dear Dot who won’t even whack a wasp, my baby sister, whom I was meant to protect, protecting me, guilty of the worst crime. What will happen to her?
“Quick. Give it to me.” To our astonishment, Flora snatches the paperweight out of Dot’s hand and lobs it with all her strength into the undergrowth. It leaves a smear of blood on Flora’s fingers that she wipes on her dress briskly, as if it were juice from a sticky red plum, transferring the guilt, violating the very idea of who she is, who we were brought up to be, who we will grow into, well-behaved wives, doting mothers, changing everything. “The river,” she says, white-faced, glancing at Harry. “Can we get him that far?”
Pam shakes her head, speaks through the grate of her fingers. “We can’t risk being seen. Not if Tom is walking back to Cornton Hall.”
“The pool?” Dot suggests quietly, and, without her saying anything else, we all know exactly what she means, what must be done, our thoughts rallying, collective again, just as they used to be. The decision has made itself.