As I pull up outside, my pulse thickens. The scaffolding that has caged Cornton for months has gone, revealing stone buffed to the color of clotted cream, decades of ivy skinned away. CCTV cameras. Two expensive cars in the drive. It is a different house, a different age, most of the old county families like the Gores long gone. But Cornton’s windows still wink at me in the watery sunshine, and I fancy I can feel a little of the presence of the beautiful young man with the leonine eyes who swam along the river with me one stifling summer afternoon many years ago. I think of the kingfisher, that bomb of blue, the hot air balloon dangling over our heads like a planet. I see the life Harry was destined to inherit, quite how far he fell. Time compresses. My eyes fill with tears.
Houses are never just houses; I’m quite sure of this now. We leave particles behind, dust and dreams, fingerprints on buried wallpapers, our tread in the wear of the stairs. And we take bits of the houses with us. In my case, a love of the smell of wax polish on sun-warmed oak, late summer sunlight filtering through stained glass. We grow up. We stay the same. We move away, but we live forever where we were most alive.
For Harry, I think, that was Cornton Hall. For me it was Applecote Manor, during that delirious heat wave of ’59. Moll, Perry, and Moppet are all just bones now, but while Sybil remained stubbornly hanging on at Applecote something of those heady summer days was preserved, like the fruit of old harvests in one of Moll’s jams. After Applecote finally sold and the Tuckers moved in, I saw that the house deserved a new family, a new chance at happiness. And I started to pray that the past would stay buried. This seemed entirely possible. So much time had passed, the world of the fifties a nostalgic memory, a Sunday night TV show. But it turns out that the past—and, bizarrely, Dot’s spectacles, Bella tells me—was never far beneath the surface of the soil here, rising and falling with the water table itself. And, like the stones, the crater in the meadow, the past somehow holds its form. Only its meaning changes.
We didn’t dare tell Ma when she reclaimed us that morning, lured back to London by Jack. Only Tom knew: Flora refused to keep it from the man she still calls her soulmate. He tried to reassure us that Harry would find it very difficult to prove we had anything to do with his eye—let alone a charge of attempted murder—since there were no witnesses but we four nicely spoken girls. Rationally, this made sense. But reason has little to do with fear: the power Harry wielded over us, me in particular, hard to comprehend now, an incantation forged in the mythic heat.
Harry was dangerous, damaged. I was petrified that he’d wreak revenge on Dot if I broke our pact of silence. I dreamed of him most nights, jolting up in bed in a grease of sweat. And he moved, deliberately, I think, in overlapping London circles afterward, staying close, unable to cut loose, either—easy enough since Flora absconded from finishing school in Paris, declaring herself “already perfectly finished,” and wed Tom on a snowy morning in early ’61 while he was on leave. Harry even came to Flora’s wedding, sitting sullenly with his aloof rich parents in the Chelsea Register Office, as handsome as ever from one side before turning to shoot us down with that frozen bloodshot eye.
It wasn’t just his eye. It was the bloat of his face, the news that he’d dropped out of Oxford, spent his time pushing cards across the baize tables of Mayfair clubs and sleazy Cannes casinos, his nostrils crusted with cocaine, a different woman on his arm every night. It was the loss of early promise, his freckled boyish beauty. Worse, far worse, I discovered that, despite all he’d done, I still secretly longed for him. I couldn’t forget the tenderness with which he’d kissed the backs of my raw knees, those sticky summer nights in my sixteenth year when I’d lain in my bed, twisted in sheets and desire, the woman in me awakening.
I’d seek out experiences with other men that echoed my first sexually meaningful encounter. They rarely ended well. While my sisters built upon the confidence—that violent widening of our own expectations—that that terrible summer’s night bestowed upon us, and moved on—Pam to medical school, Dot to study English at Cambridge, Flora and Tom to California with flowers in their hair and armfuls of babies—I, like Harry, struggled to find a direction, or a steady partner, scraping by on a series of jobs in auction houses, bars, and galleries, unable to settle, living and fighting with Ma in Chelsea or sharing dreary rooms in Earls Court with other drifting sixties single girls like me: I was always circling around the summer of ’59 in my mind, round and round, like a falcon over the meadow, trying to make sense of it.
Then, the day Harry died in ’66, that bird fell out of the sky. A winding coastal road outside Cannes. A sharp bend. Harry, drunk, driving too fast. A twist of hot metal.
Something in me, taut for so long, stretched to capacity, just snapped.
Pam discovered me shaking in the dark of my boarding house room. Ma refused to let her call a doctor, terrified of the electric shocks they’d jolted through Pa’s skull all those years before. She wanted me home even though, scandalously, Jack was living there then, his infidelities brought to heel. So I was installed in my old bedroom like a madwoman in the attic, far above the now fashionable Chelsea streets that teemed with optimistic youth, glorious girls in miniskirts up to their hips.
I did not recognize myself. But Ma never once told me to pull myself together. She simply sat with my sadness, stroking my hair as I laid my head in her lap. My sisters rarely left my side. But I felt like a burden, a leftover from another bleak postwar decade, nothing to do with the fulfillment they were experiencing, the excitement bubbling up on London’s streets. I wanted to disappear. But my sisters wouldn’t let me. And then Dot wrote to Sybil.
My aunt braved the swinging metropolis alone—the last time she’d done it, rationing had just ended. I knew exactly how hard that journey must have been for her, and I never forgot it. My most vivid memory of that time is of stumbling downstairs to find her—wearing her outdated church best, clutching her crocodile handbag—rigid on Ma’s chaise longue, openmouthed at the sight of Jack, who was striding around the house bare-chested with a paintbrush between his teeth. It was on that first visit that I decided to tell Sybil the truth, my pact with Harry now finally over. My sisters agreed and waited outside the door, ready to stick her together again.
Of course, Sybil didn’t believe a word of it: everyone knew Harry had grown from a sweet boy into a rogue and a druggy liar, she said. Audrey was going to come home one day and that was the end of it. And she didn’t want me upsetting her husband, or myself, with this gossip, or for me ever to mention it again. She visited London a couple of times after that, accompanied by Perry, who, to Ma’s great annoyance, got on like a house on fire with Jack—they’d get roaring drunk and sing Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” But Sybil never mentioned what I’d told her about Harry. And neither did I.