Flora covers her face with her hands. “I just had no idea all that time . . . all that stuff we did . . . It makes my skin crawl.”
I touch the backs of my knees, thinking how Harry found the most hated, horrible part of my body and kissed it. I wait for it to make my skin crawl, too. But it doesn’t.
“Did he force himself on you, Margot?” Flora stifles a sob, eyeing the scratch beneath my collarbone.
I shake my head, knowing that I must tell Flora what really happened, how I kissed Harry, lost myself in his arms. But there is something more pressing, something they need to know, a decision to be made. And I’m ordering the difficult words on my tongue when Pam sighs out, “Oh, Margot,” and pulls me to her chest so that I can feel her heart’s gallop. Then Dot and Flora join us and we are all entangled together on the bed, a scrum of nighties, frenzied heartbeats, and hair. And it feels so good, so safe, the place I’ve missed so much, and I realize in that moment how far I’ve drifted from them all, lost in Audrey’s world, desires, secrets within secrets. I never want to leave the sisterly fold again.
“Nothing can hold us back now, can it?” murmurs Flora, articulating something that I am feeling, too, struggling to accept, that the realization we could actually kill a man if we had to—and share responsibility for that killing—brings with it a new sense of possibility, an awareness of a ruthless female power we didn’t know we had. Surely if we could do that, we can do anything: change shape, pull down our destinies from the skies? We are not English girls waiting to be married anymore. Not alone like poor Audrey, either. Sisters. Survivors. Like cats. Nine lives. Maybe we always were, we just didn’t know it.
“Nothing,” Pam sighs.
“Thank God it’s all over,” says Flora.
“Not quite,” I say.
The world starts to announce itself loudly through the open window—the rattle of a cart down the lane, a farm dog barking, the squeak of Billy’s bicycle brakes—shattering the sense that we are somehow suspended over events, can remain untouchable for much longer. Time is running out. Fighting sleep, we try to resolve the irresolvable in rambling, unfinished sentences. My sisters make me describe his eye in detail again, how Harry remembers seeing Dot the moment before she cracked the paperweight on his head and thinks we tried to drown him; our moral obligation to expose him against the need to protect ourselves.
We talk in muddled circles, slowly moving toward a center, like an old tractor in a field. Pam lies down on her belly, ripping at her nails with her teeth. Dot lays her head in my lap, fighting sleep. Flora sits up on the pillows, biting a hank of her hair.
“Okay, listen,” Pam says after a while, rubbing her eyes so hard they squeak. “The fact is if we do tell Aunt Sybil and Uncle Perry, we are dealing them torturous knowledge that can’t be proved, since Audrey’s body was swept away years ago and Harry will deny it.”
“Just when they are recovering their old selves, and Aunt Sybil so much happier,” Flora murmurs quietly, her eyelids heavy, almost shut. “She will simply die of grief.”
“Uncle Perry will hunt Harry down with his shotgun,” adds Pam. “And if he doesn’t, we’re all stuffed because Harry will be out for our blood.”
“But it is the truth,” I say.
“No. It’s what Harry told you, drunk,” corrects Pam, glancing at Dot in my lap. “Oh, look, our warrior’s asleep.”
I gently lift Dot’s head onto a pillow, cover her with a sheet. She stretches out one leg, dangling the foot off the edge of the bed, just like she always did in our bedroom in London.
“But the pact will never end,” I whisper. “We will be connected to him forever. And we don’t know what effect it—”
“Margot,” says Pam wearily. “How can any of us predict our futures years from now? I can’t even predict how today’s going to turn out.”
“My brain aches. I just can’t think anymore.” Flora collapses on the pillow next to Dot, closing her eyes. “I’m so, so tired.”
Pam lowers her head to her arms, her voice slurring. “I think we will know for certain what to do, Margot, when we see Aunt Sybil. Then it will all become clear . . .” Her words trail off into a snore.
I have no recollection of dozing off myself, but when I awake, Pam’s elbow is in my nostril, my sisters still asleep. I hear the deep rumble of Perry’s voice downstairs. Everything is almost normal, for two or three seconds. Then I remember.
I stumble to the window and peer out at the garden. It’s unsettling, the way it all looks so peaceful, like a river must after a person has sunk. Bright sunshine now. A morning in full swing. Billy is crouched down in one of the flower beds. And on the other side of the garden wall, the nose of Perry’s black Daimler in the drive, gleaming like a bullet.
Returning to my room to dress, I glance at Audrey’s door, noticing that for the first time this summer I don’t feel its pull. I have no desire to sit on her sleigh bed and pretend it’s mine. I only want to wear my Chelsea-black trousers, the ones I haven’t worn since the day we arrived. They’re at the very back of my drawer. I have to suck in my tummy to do up the last button, my figure filled out by Moll’s cooking. The trousers feel hot and clingy after weeks of loose dresses, but good. I’m a London girl. Myself again.
“Morning, young lady.” Perry winks at me; he’s bent over, touching his toes in the drawing room. It occurs to me that I really could turn my uncle’s world upside down with just a few words about last night. “Look, I can almost do it.”
“Like an acrobat, Uncle.”
“Never say never, Margot.” He straightens with a low groan and rubs his back. “You look ghastly. Just as well we let you all sleep in. I take it last night was a success, then?”
I nod and try to keep my face free of inflection. “I hope you had a nice time, too.”
He pulls on his earlobe and grins. “Yes, it was, fun in fact. And a fine play, a very fine play.” There is a moment of embarrassment, as if I’ve stumbled into his bedroom without asking and found him in his underwear.
“I was looking for Aunt Sybil.”
“Oh, the garden somewhere.” He scratches the back of his neck. “You know your aunt.”
“Yes,” I say, because I do.
Outside, the air is like water, the hazy bake of dust and seeds gone, washed away by last night’s rain. I weave through the lushness, still not knowing for sure what we should do, if the moral duty to tell Sybil the truth overrides everything else. It will become clear when I see her, I tell myself, just as Pam says. But I still can’t see Sybil.