“Pam, listen.” The room trembles on the edge of a row again. “I have four girls to keep in stockings and hats and food on my own. Four. I’ve already sold my best bits of jewelry.” I feel a fresh flush of shame recalling Ma’s and my last furtive trip to the small dark room at the back of the jewelers in Burlington Arcade, the pained passing over of Grandma’s brooches, each one a small glittering scandal, a defeat. “The theater work is drying up. Artist model earnings? Hopeless. I am running out of options.”
“I won’t let you,” says Flora suddenly, eyes glistening. “I won’t let you go.”
Ma touches Flora’s smooth cheek lightly with the back of her hand. “Flora, my lovely Flora, you are seventeen, leaving Squirrels Ladies College this year. I want you in Paris by the autumn.”
The rest of us flinch, hating the reminder that Flora will be bundled off to a finishing school in Paris, where she’ll learn to speak fluent French, type, talk about art, things that will help her find a good husband and can then be promptly forgotten, lost in a puff of flour and baby talc.
“You’ll be wanting some sort of coming-out party, too. It all costs, costs, costs.” She shakes her head despairingly.
“The Season finished for good last year, Ma. And I really never expected to go to Paris,” Flora says unconvincingly. (She’s already bought a beret.) “I don’t need Paris.”
Ma lights a cigarette, sighs the smoke out. “The Queen may have stopped the curtseying, now that anyone with a bit of money can buy their way in. But the debs are still dancing, as you well know, Flora. Their mothers will make damn sure of it. How else will they make a match for their little darlings?” Her eyes glint. Ma relishes her outsider status—she wasn’t a deb herself—yet is determined that we fully exploit our Wilde heritage to secure good marriages ourselves. “And every girl needs Paris.”
“Every girl” means Flora. I’m not sure Ma seriously considers the rest of us worth the investment.
“When? When will you go, Ma?” Pam’s cheeks are stained a vivid, anxious red.
“Beginning of July, thereabouts.”
“So we’d live at school always? Even during the summer holidays?” asks Dot, voice high with panic.
“No, Dot. Don’t worry.” Ma’s face starts to shut. And it is immediately obvious that there’s something important she’s not telling us.
“Where, then?” Pam and I demand in unison.
Ma’s gaze slides away. “The simplest thing would be for you all . . .” She stalls. Her voice rises. “. . . to live at Applecote Manor with Aunt Sybil and Uncle Peregrine.”
None of us speak. In the shocked hush, I see Pa’s family house, the honeyed Cotswold stone, the shallow valley spilling beyond, all spinning, whirling, a vortex of dragonflies, birds, grasses, cartwheels, picnics, long-lost summers. But the sky is black.
“You’d have a wonderful address. Not even a house number.” Ma appeals eagerly to Flora. “Think of the letterheads.”
“I’m not ashamed of where we live or who we are,” declares Pam, raising her chin. Flora reaches for her hand and holds it in a stagey moment of Girl Guide–ish solidarity.
“I’m not suggesting for a moment that you girls should be ashamed. I certainly am not. But I am nonetheless a pragmatist, and rather bloody short of cash.” She brings the cigarette to her mouth quickly. “It will be good for you to have a male figure in your lives. And Sybil, I’m sure, will spoil you rotten.”
I see my aunt then, as I last saw her five years ago, all bouncing red curls and bone-china features, laughing, bending down to pat a cloud-gray whippet puppy; Uncle Perry, walking toward her, a huge, handsome swagger of a man, hunting rifle over his shoulder. Then the puppy yaps. There’s a patter of small footsteps. A swing of a braid. A flick of yellow ribbon. Something pulls at the edges, a darkness that no one dares name.
“Such an idyllic place to live.” Ma continues talking herself into it. “I may not be a country girl, but you’ve all got apples and hay in your blood. Old Father Thames springs not too far from there, doesn’t he?” I think of the rush of glassy green that passes close to Applecote. “Well, you do, too.”
To my dismay, I can see my older sisters turning, a light in their eyes that wasn’t there a moment ago, won over by Ma’s absurd pastoral oratory.
“You remember the bathing pool, Pam?” Ma continues, conjuring up the Italianate pool buried deep at the bottom of Applecote’s garden. “And there’s an orchard, Dot. Perfect for climbing.”
I’m upside down, swinging, skirt tenting my head, the mossy branch velvety in the clamp of my palm. A girl’s voice is counting down to ten. And something else is counting down, too, but we can’t hear it.
“The weather’s incomparably better, of course. More daylight, farther west. Pretty sunsets and things, you know.”
The sky on fire. An ice pop melting, dripping stickiness down the inside of my arm.
“A proper English summer, girls,” Ma breathes out in a curl of cigarette smoke.
Applecote Manor was summer: Ma dropped us by the front gates in August, returned two weeks later. Then, five years ago, summer stopped: none of us have seen Sybil or Perry since. We only overhear snatches, Ma telling friends that Sybil hasn’t left the house in years, shunning all company, that huntsman Perry is now crippled by a pain in his back that no doctor can diagnose or treat, and rarely moves from his armchair.
“The area so pretty, never pummeled by bombs, not like dirty old London,” Ma continues, ignoring all this. She presses a finger to her lips. “Sorry, I forget, a German pilot did crash into Applecote’s meadow, didn’t he?”
“Aunt Sybil found his head, perched on top of one of the Applecote Stones like a dress shop dummy,” Pam recounts with relish. “She said he was actually very handsome.”
Dot pushes herself closer to me. Her eyes are owlish.
Ma squeezes Dot’s hand. “The pilot’s head is long gone now, don’t you worry, Dotty.”
But I can see that it isn’t the pilot who’s varnishing Dot’s eyes with fear. That it’s something worse. And since Flora and Pam are weighing up the advantages of Ma’s proposal with a silent exchange of animated, quizzical looks, it’s left to me to blurt, “ButwhataboutCousinAudrey?”
3
At 6:02 on the first morning of her new life, Jessie is woken by a riot of drunken birdsong. She squints sleepily through her lashes and sees a dead spider as big as a fist, a bloom of damp on unfamiliar floral wallpaper. She wonders where she is. Why she is camping on a mattress in a huge, bare room that smells of old fabric. Then she remembers.
It is the second week of August. Eight months and two days since they first saw Applecote Manor. And, unbelievably, it is theirs.