Luckily, the Wildes—Pa’s older brother, Perry, and his wife, Sybil, the ones from Applecote Manor—pay for Squirrels, our bracing boarding school in Oxfordshire, where we are meant to be right now. (They chose a grander, far warmer one in Dorset for their daughter, my cousin Audrey, but it wasn’t enough to save her.) The Wildes won’t give a shilling directly to Ma. It’s no secret they don’t approve—Pa’s parents wanted him to marry a nice steady county girl with a title, but they got an outspoken theater agent’s daughter from Bloomsbury instead, their very own Wallis Simpson to tempt their second son astray. Also, Ma doesn’t care much what people think about her, which makes her quite dangerous.
The summer Grandma Wilde died in a deck chair, happily sunbathing dead for an hour before anyone realized, she told me Ma was “bringing you up like cats.” I nodded in agreement and sipped my lemonade. It does feel like we have as many lives, forced to adjust our manners and allegiances according to the different worlds we inhabit, learning to say the right thing or not reveal too much as we move between Ma’s bohemian household, the stolid steadiness of Squirrels Ladies College, then our smart London friends’ polite parlors for tea, buoyed along by the once-grandish heritage of our surname. Flora and I have learned to slip different selves on and off like socks: I’ve not decided who I am yet anyway—I feel like a completely different person from one day to the next—and Flora simply molds herself to the company she is in, always meeting expectation. Dot’s strategy is a sweet silence: she observes her surroundings carefully before impinging upon them, pushing her true feelings into her pinafore pockets. Pam can only ever be Pam, always gesturing too hard, saying too much, too loudly, her contours unique and fixed.
Pam’s the one who let slip to the Wildes how our drawing room fills with the laughter of Ma’s musician friends, men with skin the color of burned sugar, their accents strange and rich, fingers flying over the frets of their banjos like birds. How Ma prefers the company of artists and actresses from Chelsea to the tightly smiling wives of Kensington, discussing their new (cold) refrigerators on sunny street corners. How she seems to survive on Lucky Strikes and our maid Betty’s bewildered attempts—at Ma’s insistence—at Elizabeth David’s cold tomato soup, gazpacho.
We resent the gazpacho intensely: it makes us different from other girls. Whenever we return from school, we pour the bloody mess down the sink and Flora cooks an old-fashioned English roast. We all love Flora for this. Even Ma forks in the soft flakes of beef, unable to help closing her eyes and purring with pleasure, as if the roast is something lost and found, a taste of an easier, more conventional life. She tells Flora she’s going to make a wonderful wife someday—soon, she hopes, to a firstborn son, not the impoverished second, like she did, the silly goose. The thought of Flora marrying always makes me stop chewing, my throat close up. I don’t know who we sisters will be without one another to differentiate us. Take one of us away and we’d all lose our balance, like removing a leg from a kitchen table.
But I also want Flora to be happy since happiness suits her—I can never quite trust it; I’d rather rely on thinking—and for Flora that means a husband, children, and “a comfortable house where I won’t freeze in winter, a housekeeper, a little bit of evolution, that’s all.”
Ma also spends a lot of time thinking about our husbands (even though she hasn’t got one herself), the as yet unknown cast of four men lurking, waiting in our futures like shadows in a long, narrow London alley. To this end, Ma makes all of us walk across the drawing room in front of Patty, her Royal Ballet dancer friend with the mad lettuce-green eyes, who is ready to whack us on the back of a leg with a tortoiseshell shoehorn if we slouch. My A grades are viewed as a distraction: “Unwise to be too clever, Margot.” Pam’s ambition to be a nurse (unlikely, given her brute impatience if anyone falls ill) is affectionately dismissed—“I’m sure there are easier ways of annoying your mother, if you put your mind to it, Pam”—and dwarfed by the issue of Pam’s athletic “sturdiness,” which refuses to be diminished by the rubber roll-on foundation garments that Ma makes her wear to parties.
“Your faces must be your fortune, girls.” Ma will shrug. “I won’t pretend otherwise.”
The problem is I don’t turn heads like Flora. Neither do I know how to command attention in a room like Pam through sheer, unembarrassable life force. I am not unpleasant-looking, just not particularly memorable. Given my low position in these rankings, I told Ma it’d be more sensible for me to aspire to a job, teaching for example, where my face doesn’t matter. “Oh, Margot, have I taught you nothing?” She looked baffled. “Look at me, forced into independence! You cannot possibly envy it. Far simpler to get married.” She says that being married to Pa was the happiest time of her life. I remember fragments of this, haphazardly sewn together, like the hexagons of different-colored cloth in my bedroom quilt: my parents embracing in the hall; Ma tenderly kissing the glossy red stump of Pa’s thumb. But, really, the truth is, none of us sisters has any idea what a marriage looks like day to day, or how it must feel to live with men. With such scant evidence to go on, we just have to believe in it, like the Old Testament. But I secretly don’t believe in that, either.
“Margot.” Flora tugs me into the corridor, out of my thoughts. She shuts the drawing-room door with a supple flick of her hip. “Ma’s not eaten or slept properly in two days now.”
“Ma could survive on gin and air for months, unfortunately. Excuse me.” Pam storms past with a piece of toast, in one of those moods when she continually searches us out to make a show of ignoring us.
“I do understand why she’s cross, Flora,” I say, after Pam’s slammed her bedroom door as loudly as possible.
“Let’s not be too harsh.” Flora is kind, too, the kindest. Pam points out it must be easy to be kind if you’ve got a face like Flora’s. Even as a young child Flora drew attention, with her violet-blue eyes and moue of a mouth. Now that she’s seventeen, she also has something else that makes men stutter stupidly. She frowns, and rather than the frown making her look grumpy, it gives her luminous face complexity and depth. “It’s hardly Ma’s fault.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.”
“But she and Jack always get back together, and then it happens again.” I become aware of movement at the top of the stairs and look up to see Dot crouched against the banister, hands wrapping around her spindly legs, looking like she might dissolve in the watery spring light like a sugar cube, leaving nothing behind but tortoiseshell spectacles. I wonder how long she’s been there.
Seeing that she’s been spotted, she smiles hopefully. “Margot, will you play me a game of chess?” Suggesting chess is a very Dot-ish way of drifting over a crisis. “I asked Pam. She said she’d rather watch her fingernails grow.”
“Toenails!” Pam bellows from behind the bedroom door.
“Not now. Sorry. We’re trying to work out what to do, Dot,” I say in the soft voice I reserve for my little sister.