“Well, he won’t, Jessie. And he won’t ever love you like he loved my mother. He never has. Everyone knows he married you because of Romy. And everyone knows this move will end in total disaster.” She looks away, raises her chin.
Jessie blinks furiously, damned if she’ll let Bella see her tears. It’s not the first time Bella’s said these things, but it doesn’t hurt any less. “I only care about what’s right for us, for you. Where we might be happy.”
“I’m happy where I am!”
“Are you?” Jessie asks quietly. The question rearranges the air. “Really? Because from where I’m standing, it doesn’t look like that.”
Bella’s mouth opens to say something, but no words come out. She spins around to the square window, roughly yanking back the old curtains. Leaning forward against the sill, her legs coltishly crossed, she looks as young and vulnerable as she did menacing a moment before, and Jessie feels terribly sorry for her.
She waits for the worst of the mood swing to pass—a gritty sandstorm that will obliterate everything for a few moments, choke, then start to clear—before tentatively joining Bella at the window, careful not to touch her hot, angry edges. Sadly, theirs is not a tactile relationship: Bella has made it quite clear that any sort of physical contact with Jessie is so not okay.
Jessie’s heart lifts at the view from the window: the wild expanse of garden, the exact opposite of their outlook in London, which is tiny, Astroturfed (by Mandy), overlooked by neighbors who see Jessie as a young cuckoo stealing another woman’s nest. Their earlier hurried route through Applecote’s garden is clearer from here, too. Jessie maps it: the orangery’s glass roof, the woody area known as the Wilderness, the small walled orchard, the black rectangle of derelict swimming pool, a bit visually unnerving, like a void. At the end of the garden, although she can’t quite see it from here, she pictures the pretty iron gate where earlier they’d stood staring out at a glorious expanse of meadow with its ancient circle of knee-high stones, like tiny savage people. (“Pretty cool, eh?” the earnest agent had panted, sniffing a deal. “Hardly fucking Stonehenge,” Bella had replied dryly.) At the edge of that meadow, scooped out of it, the distant glitter of the river. Oh, and a bird of prey. A kite, Jessie guesses, with that forked tail. She and Bella track it together as it swoops, dives, momentarily united in the act of seeing, the space between them closing a little.
“Is something else bothering you, Bella?” Jessie asks gently. “I mean, apart from everything, obviously.”
Bella presses her nail-bitten fingers to the cold glass. “Bad stuff has gone down in this house.” Her voice is thin, sapped by her earlier outburst. “I came into this room and I could feel it.”
Jessie studies Bella’s face, the thoughts rippling beneath the milky translucent skin. She knows it’s only Bella’s hypersensitive teenage mind externalizing its own indefinite fears. “Can you describe it?” she nudges gently, hoping this might be a way of talking about the emotions Bella bottles up.
Bella frowns. “A sort of trapped feeling. Like the past is stuck, that’s all. Or someone. I don’t know, it’s weird.”
Jessie feels a sharp pang of sadness: Bella’s talking about her own grief, circling it. And Jessie knows better than to try to address it directly. “The house has been empty a long time, and neglected. But as soon as a new family moves—”
“Even if we move in, this house won’t ever belong to us,” Bella interrupts, her voice hard again. Outside, the kite plunges. A flock of birds rise, black, tiny, like a handful of nails thrown against the soft blue sky. “Just like I won’t ever belong to you, Jessie.”
2
CHELSEA, LONDON
May 1959
Ma’s certainly taking her time to die. She’s been draped on the chaise longue beside the window for two days now, barely moving other than to reach for a cigarette and a sticky glass of gin and orange, her heavy-lidded gaze trained on the street below, where wind whips the blossom off the trees in a mocking swirl of confetti. Having declared her heart “shriveled to a deviled kidney, barely capable of beating,” she’s determined to “fade away gently, surrounded by my four darling daughters.”
This poses a problem. It’s Monday. Our home weekend is over and we are meant to be at school. Not only will we get punished for being late, but my classmates, who view my mother as an exotic circus act and stick their faces to the school windows whenever it’s rumored she’s not forgotten to pick us up, will think us even more rackety. We get enough of this anyway: “Ah, yes, Bunny’s daughters,” people say, flushing at Ma’s name, equally excited and disapproving. I want to tell them we’re not so different. That the wonky world of my sisters and mother contains all the passions and squabbles of a hundred normal families just like them, only that without Pa it’s been reduced to something more intense and salty, like a sort of gravy.
Ma presses a limp hand to her forehead. Her beautiful face is a study in poetic suffering. I’m not sure dying people look like that. Or wear crimson lipstick. Pam says we should just leave her with a hot glass of honey and lemon and jump on a train. But Ma’s purse doesn’t contain enough money for our rail tickets—we’ve checked—and while none of us believe Ma’s theatrics, there’s still a niggling worry that she’ll die anyway, since Ma can do most things when she puts her mind to it.
I glance at the carriage clock eating minutes above the fireplace. My French lesson has just started. Madame Villiot will be calling out my name on the register, powdered chalk on the tips of her fingers, her tiny ruby earrings trembling above her white lace collar. It’s hard not to be a little in love with Madame—everyone is—since there are no boys to fall in love with at Squirrels Ladies College, only the head girl with the Botticelli hair. I look back to Ma, feeling my forehead pinch up. “Are you sure we can’t send for the doctor?”
“Don’t be hysterical, Margot.”
I stare glumly down at Fang, the moth-eaten tiger rug on the floor, wondering what to do next. Pam tramps into the room—“Built like a Boche tank,” Ma always says—making the glasses on the drinks trolley clink, and yanks open the window. Blossoms flutter in, settle like white butterflies on the dark wood floor. Ma winces, pained, and covers her eyes with her hands.