“You lit a fire in the old drawing-room grate?”
“Oh, it was so dreadfully cold. I felt so sorry for the house. I kept coming here to check on it, and it felt so abandoned, unwelcoming and empty. Exactly what my aunt had sought so hard to avoid all those years. So I brought in flowers, lit a fire sometimes. I wanted to keep its homey spirit ticking over.” Her voice drifts, and Jessie senses her mind going somewhere she can’t follow. She frowns, brightens again. “You know those brilliant memories, memories of being young, that get stronger as the years pass?”
Jessie nods, feeling herself slipping under Margot’s spell.
“They’re the things that settle in the very soul of a girl. The idea of a memory being something that is over, in the past only, is quite wrong, just another grown-up delusion, isn’t it?” Jessie thinks of how Bella would understand Margot’s words completely and what a wonderful confidante Margot would make for her. She leans forward, rapt.
“A memory is a living thing; it breathes beside you, Jessie, it sits on your shoulder, replays itself over and over. And then . . .”
A thunder of feet interrupts them: Bella, Romy on her hip, waggling a wooden puppet spoon with yellow wool hair, a disheveled Will, in socks, a pair of old jeans, and a baggy blue jumper recently attacked by moths. Jessie fears they must all look like a load of hillbillies. “Has something happened, Jessie?” Bella asks urgently. “Do we know who it is?”
Jessie stands up, widens her eyes. “Bella, this is Margot. Margot who picked you up in the lane that night, remember?”
Bella blushes, taken by surprise. “Oh, sorry. I thought you were a detective or something. Hi.”
Margot smiles. “I’ve heard all about your bravery, Bella. The very best of big sisters, I’d say.”
Bella blushes more deeply, can’t quite hide her pleasure.
“And this is my husband, Will,” Jessie says shyly, proudly, feeling rather like a girl introducing her boyfriend to her mother for the first time.
“I believe I owe you a big thank-you for returning Bella safely that night,” Will says warmly.
“Hello!” Romy interrupts with a waggle of her spoon puppet.
“Well, hello there, Miss Spoon,” Margot twinkles. “What beautiful blond hair you have.”
Bella shoves Romy into Jessie’s arms and sits on a kitchen chair, settling in for the conversation, gaze pinned hungrily on Margot. “It’s Audrey, isn’t it?”
“Whoa, Bella . . .” begins Will.
“Ah. Okay. You do know.” Margot turns to Jessie. “Audrey’s name is spreading on the tom-tom drums through the valley. But I wasn’t at all sure if anyone would have told you about her. It takes at least three generations before you’re deemed a local.”
Will grins. “Ah.”
“I thought you should prepare yourselves. And that I had a responsibility to tell you about Audrey, given my relationship with the house,” she adds apologetically.
Will kicks Jessie’s foot under the table—a discreet what the?—and then stands up, rubbing his hands together. “Okay, girls, Bella, Romy, let’s see what’s on the telly, shall we? Let’s leave Jessie and Margot to it.”
Bundled in Will’s arms, Romy taps the wooden spoon against her father’s stubbled cheek. Will nods at Bella to move.
“Obviously I’m not going anywhere, Dad,” Bella says, keeping her eyes on Margot.
Jessie squeezes Will’s hand. “It’s all right. Let Bella stay.”
“Tell us everything,” Bella says, emptying a packet of sponge fingers onto a yellow plate and sliding it distractedly to the middle of the table.
“Oh. May I? How did you guess I have a soft spot for sponge fingers, Bella? Goodness. I haven’t had one of these in years.” Margot takes a bite and closes her eyes, seemingly transported by the old-fashioned biscuit that Jessie had bought in the village shop only because they’d run out of everything else.
Jessie and Bella wait. It feels like Margot has a ball of string in her hand and is about to tug it, unwind the whole story.
Margot swallows, puts the biscuit down. “I should have guessed,” she says, her vivid blue eyes darkening. “But my mother told me the police swung a lamp on a rope down the well after Audrey went missing. I accepted it, even though that hapless lot probably wouldn’t have found my cousin if she were lying in the middle of the lawn. Or maybe she was just miles down. I don’t know.”
Jessie shudders. Again she sees it.
“After my uncle Perry died, back in the seventies,” Margot continues, her voice a little unsteady, “I worried about Aunt Sybil pottering about here on her own, so I got that lid fitted over the well. I never thought . . .” She shakes her head, visibly pained. “I can’t bear to think.”
“It’s okay, Margot,” Jessie says, touching her arm lightly. Memories seem to be surfacing in the lines of Margot’s face, and a certain vulnerability. “We don’t want to upset you with our questions, do we, Bella?”
“No,” says Bella, unconvincingly, drumming an impatient tattoo on her lap with her fingers. Again, they wait.
“There was a game Audrey always tried to get me to play in the garden, you see.” Margot winces. “Jump the well wall.”
“Christ,” mutters Jessie, spluttering into her tea.
“Audrey was fearless. No one else was daring enough to do it, not even me. She was always looking for someone to play that game.” Margot’s fingers roll the beads at her neck.
Jessie finds herself mirroring her, reaching for her own gold pendant.
“You see, Jessie,” Margot says, and Jessie nods even though she doesn’t see at all, “in hindsight, that game was the jigsaw piece, the bit in the corner you can never find that makes sense of all the rest, but at the time, that summer of fifty-nine, I just heard the word water and I joined all the right dots to make entirely the wrong picture.” Jessie notices a tremble on the surface of the tea as Margot lifts her cup. “And he didn’t contradict me. He let me believe that.”
“What was the wrong picture? Who is he?” asks Bella eagerly, leaning so far forward she’s almost sitting in Margot’s lap.
“I won’t say his name, if you don’t mind, Bella. He . . . he was the only person who knew the truth. Let’s leave it at that.” Margot seems to consider this a moment, her forehead furrowing. “He just didn’t tell the truth,” she adds with a hiss of unmistakable fury, clearly unable to leave it at all. “I was sure he had, many years ago, but he damn well hadn’t. He told me they played a game. I assumed he meant a fishing game or something. But . . .”
“Jump the well wall!” blurts Bella.
Margot’s eyes widen in surprise. “Well, yes, very good. You’re right, Bella. I think it must have been, that stupid game of Audrey’s. And, of course, it would have revealed her whereabouts, if he had let that little detail out, wouldn’t it?”
Bella nods. “So he pushed Audrey in?”