I stand very still in the grass, mind spinning, trying to work it out: Harry’s survival saves Dot, all of us, from having committed the ultimate crime; Audrey, by drowning, surely damns him—but it is his word against mine, a story against facts. Will Sybil believe me? Anyone? And isn’t Harry’s injury far more persuasive than my report of a drunk man’s words?
“Both summer nights . . . scrubbed out. Never happened at all.” I hear a tremor of desperation in Harry’s voice then, his fear of the terrible secret that has boiled within him these last five years. “Margot?”
“I . . . I need to talk to my sisters first.” I turn, start to run.
Harry shouts something unintelligible behind me. And when I glance over my shoulder he has sunk to his knees again, covered his face with his hands.
I find my sisters in Flora’s room, awake, ashen-faced, wearing nighties and an air of anxious complicity. Dot and Flora are squeezed together on the bed, nervously curling and uncurling their toes on the rug, Dot hugging a pillow to her stomach. Pam stands by the half-open window, as if she has been tracking my journey through the garden. She has an intense set to her jaw: I can read her like a telegram again. “How is he?” she asks, confirming my suspicions.
“So it was you.” I catch the shock of my reflection in a wall mirror, my eyes darting wild flashes in shadowed sockets. “He’s . . .” I can’t bring myself to say okay. Neither can I bear to reveal the gruesome extent of his injury to Dot. “. . . in the meadow.”
“Oh, walking then? Good.” Pam blows out with relief.
“Can you please explain why he’s not lying dead at the bottom of the bathing pool?” The words come out too forcefully. Dot startles. I try to sound calmer. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
“We . . . we weren’t sure how you’d take it,” Pam stutters apologetically, realizing she should have. “You seemed almost on the verge of . . .” She pauses, stealing a surreptitious glance at Flora. “We thought it better to tell you after you’d rested, that’s all.”
“Tell me what?”
“Just after you and Dot ran off, Harry started grappling about, Margot,” Flora says, shuddering at the memory. “We couldn’t believe it.”
My mind returns to those twitching fingers. My refusal to believe what my eyes saw.
“I couldn’t just stand there.” Pam’s voice is unusually quiet. She sits on the bed. “It was . . . unethical. We had a choice.”
I can’t help thinking bitterly how Harry had a choice, too, to save Audrey, or at least tell her broken parents what had happened, save them years of dreading and hoping. He chose himself, his family’s reputation. Until he met me, a pale imitation of Audrey, not his chance at atonement, but his nemesis.
“Pam was quite something, Margot,” says Flora, twitchily trying to smile. “Gave him the kiss of life and everything.”
Pam pulls a face. “He coughed up whiskey.”
I collapse on the bed beside her, my body leaden. “Harry doesn’t remember anyone pulling him out of the pool, just waking wet on the stone paving.”
“Well, we left him there, breathing okay, lying on his side,” Pam explains. “We thought it best to spirit away after that, rather than make ourselves known. Given . . . well, what had happened earlier.” She starts to look worried. “What? Why are you frowning like that, Margot? What did he say?”
“He’s convinced we tried to drown him, not save him. He thinks us murderesses.”
“Gratitude for you,” says Pam, trying to clear the air. But the silence that follows is heavy.
I rub my raw eyes with the heels of my hands: colors bloom and splatter on the inside of my eyelids like paint. I wonder if this is what Harry sees in his right eye, if he sees anything at all.
“Well, Harry can’t stay in the meadow,” Flora says after a while, her concern about her lover still oddly subdued. I wonder again if her reaction to the night is stalled by shock.
“I doubt he’s there now.” I lean back against the reassuring bulk of Pam. “He said he was going to walk home. Yes, I know. I did offer to get a doctor. He didn’t want it.” Spoken aloud, the conversation with Harry seems so preposterous, so unreal, I suddenly wonder if I’ve dreamed the whole thing.
“I’ll find Tom. I’ll get Tom to search for him, just to be sure. Tom must have got back to Cornton hours ago, wondering where Harry is.” Flora grabs her dressing gown off the back of the bedroom chair.
“Flora, you can’t,” instructs Pam sharply, like it’s not the first time she’s had to say it. “What if someone sees you? We’ve got to look like nothing out of the ordinary happened last night. We have no idea what Harry’s going to do now. He could call the police, anything.”
I rally myself to tell them about his eye, the proposed pact. “And the thing is—”
“But I have to see Tom,” Flora interrupts tearfully.
“Flora . . .” Pam warns. She turns to me, says matter-of-factly, “To put you in the picture, Margot, Tom and Flora combusted into high feeling when Harry wandered off looking for you last night.”
“What?” I turn to Flora, aghast. But her face makes sense of it: a funny light in her eyes, that almost-smile. And it’s perfectly obvious.
“I couldn’t fight it anymore,” Flora says simply.
“And before you try to say anything sympathetic, Margot, I’d gone off Tom by midnight anyway,” Pam points out tersely. “And there are much bigger things to think about right now. Can we please think about them?”
Dot lets out a sob. I turn to her, so quiet beside me, the still point of this storm, and put my arms around her. Up close, I notice the ghost of her lost spectacles in tan lines, the ghost of the fragile little girl she was yesterday and is no longer. “You okay?”
She nods unconvincingly.
“What were you doing in the garden last night?” I ask.
Dot rolls the lacy edge of Flora’s pillow between her fingers. It’s a moment or two before she can speak. “I felt lonely in the house on my own,” she says eventually, distressed by recalling it. “Moll was already asleep in the kitchen chair. And the rain looked so enticing after the heat. I could see two people running under a tree. I thought it was Flora and Harry. But when I got there . . . it was you, Margot.” She lowers her gaze. “You and Harry.”
So it was Dot following us, not my conscience. I shift uncomfortably on the bed, unable to look at Flora.
“I thought he was going to kill you, Margot. I thought . . .” Dot’s voice cracks. I take her trembling hand. Tears start to roll down her cheeks. “And I saw the paperweight on the deck chair with my book, you know, where I’d forgotten it earlier, the deck chairs on the lawn. And . . .” She can’t go on, her shoulders heaving silently.
“It’s all right,” I say.
“You are a warrior, Dot. Never forget it.” Pam is unable to keep the respect out of her voice: our little sister has proved herself at last. I feel something in Dot’s hand release then, as if her sisters’ opinion is the only thing that really matters.
“Was he, Margot?” asks Flora urgently. “Was Harry trying to kill you?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” I admit.
A bleach of sunlight moves ominously across the rug, warming the tips of our bare toes, a reminder that the day is coming.