“For Romy.” He pulls a white toy rabbit from one of the coat’s cavernous pockets. “I heard she was back safe last night.”
“That’s very kind. She’ll love it, thank you, Joe.” Jessie takes it, amazed that while they barely know anybody in the valley, her family’s news has traveled. She will make more effort, she decides. She will invite people to tea. She will stop cutting herself off, telling herself she’s an outsider. Then she waits for him to leave.
He stamps his feet in the cold. He isn’t going anywhere. “How is the poor mite?”
“Better. We’ve been incredibly lucky.”
He glances over his shoulder, as if worried about someone overhearing him. “Would you mind if I came in, Jessie?” he whispers, his breath foggy in the cold air.
“Can it wait until tomorrow morning?” She gestures smilingly at her dressing gown, trying to draw his attention politely to the fact that they’re not yet up, that it’s nine o’clock on a freezing Sunday morning.
“Not really. I didn’t want to disturb you, not when you’ve been through the mill like you have, but . . . but the wife said I should.” Joe starts tripping over his words. “What with the police having to get involved and the like. Jessie, I’m out of my depth here.”
“The police? Whoa. Joe, slow down, I don’t understand.” Jessie frowns, uneasy now. “You’d better come in. Hang on, I’ll grab Will.” She runs upstairs, returns with a sleepy Will.
“So, what’s the problem, Joe?” Will asks, stifling a yawn, closing the kitchen door so the girls can’t hear.
“I . . . I found something in the garden.” Joe takes off his cap, revealing a domed forehead skimmed with sweat. He glances at Jessie. “You might want to sit down first.”
14
We run over the dewy grass, hand in hand, Dot stumbling, the garden seeming to stretch, lengthen, giving us time to adjust from the dead to the living, the law of the wild to the rule of law. Dot and I lunge for the safety of the scullery door, and I glance over my shoulder, expecting Pam and Flora to be right behind us. They are not. I can see only Flora, some way back, under the trees, gesturing for us to go inside, they’ll follow. Somewhere, a jackdaw calls.
The house seems too small. Like we’ve outgrown it overnight. The clock on the wall says ten past four. In the kitchen, Moll, our hopeless guardian, is fast asleep on a chair beside the range, her mouth slightly open, air whistling through the open door of her missing tooth. There are four large pans of cooling jam on the stove, empty jars waiting on the wooden table. Moppet runs up to Dot, her tail beating. Dot holds the dog’s delicate head between her hands, and the two look at each other, exchanging something that bypasses my understanding. Then she buries her face in Moppet’s flat gray fur, eyes closed, like a girl reunited with the wolves that brought her up. Moppet starts licking Harry’s blood off her fingers, excited by the smell, and I have to push the dog away.
Shutting Moppet in the kitchen, we start up the stairs, adrenaline finally giving way to exhaustion. I feel an ache with each photograph of Audrey we pass, my dead drowned cousin, my lodestar. I pause in front of the one that Flora, the day we first arrived, mistook as a shot of me. But I can no longer see myself in her bleached-out features. I cannot see me at all.
We hover on the top-floor landing, neither of us wanting to peel off into the solitariness of our own little bedrooms, scared of the images that might fly at us like bats. Dot starts to shiver. We hug. We smell bad.
“We need to wash. You have the first bath, Dot.” I rub her goose-bumped sapling arms, marveling at their deceptive brute strength. “I’ll search for your spectacles later.”
I sit on the edge of her steamy bath, worried that exhaustion and shock might make Dot sink silently beneath the suds. We don’t say much, focusing instead on the reassurance of passing the washcloth, me soaping her back in small circles, the familiar damp mark on the wall shaped like Ireland. If we can wash behind her ears, then a corpse cannot roll in the bathing pool. If her nails are clean, she is innocent.
Dark thoughts still scratch against the backs of my eyes: How old must you be to hang? How dozy really are country policemen? But I tell Dot that everything’s going to be fine—everyone will presume Harry was drunk and drowned, sort of the truth—and we will always protect her and she must get some sleep. She dries herself silently, numbly, then pads naked into her room, leaving small footprints on the floor.
I take on the duty of dealing with our soiled dresses. After stamping an exit from mine, noticing the missing button, the smears of mud, grass, and blood, I ball it with Dot’s inside a pillowcase and stuff it at the bottom of my half-packed suitcase: it is destined for one of the school’s vast canteen trash bins in a couple of days’ time and will quickly be buried under potato sacking, porridge, and rice pudding, then carted away. I won’t miss the dress: I came too close to ending up like Audrey last night. I don’t want to be her ever again. For once the pure inescapable fact of myself, my naked body with all its inelegant pudges and mauve mottles, is a huge relief.
Lowering myself into Dot’s bathwater, I twist on the hot tap with my toes, letting the heat gush in until my legs scald red. I scrub my skin raw but I don’t feel clean. I’m not sure how long I lie there, dazed, thinking of Audrey’s last moments, my head full of rushing river and reeds. After a while, I hear Flora’s and Pam’s hushed voices. Only Flora briefly pops her head around the bathroom door: her eyes oddly bright. I tell her what I did with the stained dresses and that she should give hers to Pam to dispose of in the same way. Flora’s mouth parts to say something, but no words come out and she pulls the door gently closed again. It occurs to me then that Flora, numbed by the violence, her own role in it, is too shocked to speak.
Emerging, steaming, wrapped in a towel on the landing, I hear no sounds coming from my sisters’ rooms. I decide to leave them alone: we must get our stories straight, but I also want them to sleep, an hour at least, so that they’re less likely to make damning mistakes later. I will keep myself awake, slumped on my bedroom chair in my dressing gown, like a person on watch around a fire. Occasionally I drift off, but my body always spasms awake again. I think of Harry kissing me behind my knees, the traitorous pleasure of it, how that hot soft mouth is now submerged, stiff and cold. I walk to the window for air. Outside, the moon still hangs in the morning sky, faint as a watermark. The garden is engorged, a vivid green after last night’s rain, sugar-dipped with dew. I have time, just.