One morning, Bella walks downstairs with the two empty Mandy Boxes, asking if she should put them out with the recycling. The bouquets at the gate start to fade. The news agenda moves on without any mention of the mysterious he whom Margot had made sound so culpable. Jessie decides there’s something unknowable about Margot and her story, a fluidity in which solid facts dissolve, and it’s best to leave it to the police. She collects the soft toys for charity (only three quietly adopted by Romy), sends on the notes and messages to Margot. She keeps expecting, hoping, to find Margot on the doorstep. But she doesn’t appear. And Jessie doesn’t want to disturb her or intrude by turning up at the café, assuming she has her hands full with the police and dealing with Audrey’s poor mother.
Life takes over again. The floods recede. The daylight gets longer. Will leaves for London with a quiet positivity, nothing that Jessie can quite put her finger on, but just as if he’s resolved a matter that’s been privately troubling him. She puts this down to Bella continuing to prove to her father that she is not a girl to be flattened by life’s blows, and in this, and many other ways, Jessie now suspects she is probably like her mother, a woman Jessie finds herself no longer wanting to push away quite so hard. Her old jealousy seems increasingly absurd—she is alive, Mandy is not; she is Will’s wife, a mother to his child, too—and the curiosity she’s suppressed for so long floats more freely to the surface. Jessie starts to ask Bella questions. What movies did Mandy love? What books did she read to Bella when Bella was Romy’s age? Did Mandy send Bella to a playgroup? At first Jessie’s questions are met with a puzzled shrug or a breath of monosyllables, but Bella reveals a little more each time. And it is through Bella that Jessie slowly gets to know Mandy—and the daughter who still misses her so much—and, inch by inch, allows Mandy space to live freely live alongside them. One day Jessie catches herself having a conversation with Mandy in her head, like two neighbors gossiping from either side of a garden fence. Mandy tells her to love fiercely what is precious, what is not yet lost. Oh yes, and Bella would adore a dog.
If not now, when, Jessie says afterward to Will. Bella deserves it, after all the upheaval of the last few weeks. She calls the local golden retriever breeder that evening. They are lucky. There is one bitch left in a litter, smaller than its siblings, blond with bearlike paws, ready to go. Bella names her Marilyn and smothers her with love. Marilyn pees all over the house, eats their shoes, digs up the carefully planted bulbs in the garden. One terrible afternoon, she chews off Flump the elephant’s trunk. Romy sobs. Bella carefully sews it back on with gray cotton, nicked especially from the school craft cupboard. Jessie forgives Marilyn everything.
Joe Peat works hard, sweating more profusely under his cap as the temperatures slowly rise. By late March, the well and the pool have both been made safe, their structures removed. The statues of the stone goddesses that once guarded the pool’s corners now emerge like wood nymphs from behind clumps of daffodils. One Saturday afternoon, Lou arrives unannounced, newly single, eyes mascara-streaked, saying she needs to lick her wounds. Bella says Marilyn is good at licking wounds, and Jessie ropes Lou into helping seed the new topsoil that covers the ghost of the pool’s rectangular expanse with wildflowers and grasses. Lou pulls Jessie to one side, whispers, “Why is Bella smiling so much? What the hell happened?” And Jessie says, “Bella happened.”
An unexpectedly warm early spring knocks out winter. Her mother comes to stay, warns Jessie that disasters always come in threes and not to let her guard down for a minute, then wonders if she could take some cuttings from the garden and stay on another few days. Jessie enrolls Romy in a playgroup in the village hall two mornings a week. It is during these hours, the furry heap of Marilyn at her feet, that Jessie sits in her studio. Studying her reflection in a mirror, she sketches a self-portrait, the woman she is now, wiser, older, scruffier, and, yes, happier. Bella, on returning from school, agrees it’s terrible but says it’s a start at least, and sticks it on the kitchen wall next to Romy’s finger paintings and the portrait of Audrey.
One afternoon Bella pulls Jessie aside on the front step and warns her in a furious whisper “not to act like it’s the first time I’ve brought anyone back or ask stupid questions.” Liv, also a daygirl, is a tall gabby blonde with three brothers whose parents have just completely ruined her life by moving from Camden to Cornton Hall, the spookily big house on the outskirts of the world’s dullest village. Over the following days, she and Bella spend hours in Bella’s bedroom, listening to music, screeching with laughter (abruptly silent the moment Jessie enters), and hanging out at the stones, leaving behind a badly hidden trail of cigarette butts in the grass.
Will surprises them all by arriving home on a Wednesday, not a Friday. He is grinning like a loon. Jessie fears he’s been drinking on the train. He starts raking his hand through his hair, speaking too fast, and tells her he’s accepted an offer on the entire company, not just Jackson’s stake, that he’s been negotiating a half-decent price these last couple of weeks. No, they won’t be flash rich, more’s the pity, but comfortable enough to take stock, for both of them to set up something here—and have more babies. If not now, when, he teases. And Jessie kisses him, tastes the mints he sucked on the train on his tongue. Wait, he says, pulling away. I got you this. He slips something small and hard into her hand, folds her fingers over it. She looks down, opens her palm. A gold pendant figure, an exact match to the one on her necklace, the one Will bought after Romy’s birth. I can’t, she whispers, covering her mouth with her hand. Bella will hang me by it. Bella chose it, Will says. Standing behind her, he lifts Jessie’s hair and threads the pendant onto the chain at her neck. At first it feels odd, two figures swinging in the dip of her clavicle. Then it feels right. She has two daughters, not one. When she touches it, her skin has already warmed the gold.
16
I get up very early, leaving my beloved Billy buried in sleep—no one sleeps as deeply as a plantsman. After feeding our dogs and emptying the car of our young grandsons’ carelessly discarded, festering football boots, I drive away, relishing the silence, inhaling the dawn-damp spring air. The cottage, our nest in the woods, shrinks in the mirror. Ahead, the open empty lane. The hedgerows are foliated with tiny tits, sparkling with dew. Queen Anne’s lace is starting to foam now. Sap rising. At the crossroads, I take the road into the valley, the one I normally avoid, to Cornton Hall.
Where will I find Harry Gore, if not there?