Bunny Wilde is not a fan of fresh air. Her natural habitat is a smoky post–six p.m. world, the sodium shadows of West End theaters, Chelsea soirees, and Mayfair clubs, lit by guttering candlelight, chandeliers, and the gazes of adoring men. Ma loathes the countryside and embraces daylight only in an artist’s studio, naked, modeling for Jack Harlow, the painter she’s madly in love with, a handsome, dark, crow-like man who smells of paint and Pernod. He’s betrayed her again—taking only my mother by surprise—and is courting a new muse: “Some Berkeley Dress Show model,” Ma whispered on Friday, too terrible a thing to name out loud, like Russian nuclear weapons or a bladder infection.
Unfairly, the torpedo of blame that should be directed at Jack’s house—crashing through the tall glass dome of his artist’s studio, a glorious explosion of oil paint—has been directed at us. Last night Ma slurred, in and out of sleep, that Jack would have married her years ago if she hadn’t had so many daughters, as if the small fact of her progeny was something that could be reshaped, like her eyebrows. It made me grateful that it isn’t just me—“My dear strange Margot,” she says, like I have dropped into the parlor from the moon—being an obstacle to her happiness, that there are four of us sisters, so the blame can be divided and dished out into smaller portions.
Flora, Pam, and I were a shoe size apart growing up, an inch of dress hem: seventeen, sixteen, and fifteen now. “Quite impossible not to get pregnant with your father around,” Ma says, mischievously making light of something so terrifying, explained at school with diagrams of mating livestock, investigated by girls in taxis with boys after dances. (I had my left breast caressed at Christmas. It was less exciting than hoped.) Just when Ma thought she was done, her figure safe, along came Dot, three years after me. Dot doesn’t look much like the rest of us, dark where we’re fair, tiny where we’re tall. Dot doesn’t look twelve, either. Her spectacles are too big for her face. A late starter as I was, her chest is all ribs, like a boy’s. She can read well enough—she loves to read, her cocoa-brown eyes widening, living every page—but she can’t do arithmetic at all. We think this is because of what happened. How Dot started.
Ma was pregnant with Dot when the engine of Pa’s car cut out on the level crossing, seconds before the 14:07 from Edinburgh screamed down the tracks. The policeman took his hat off at the door, I remember that, the icy blast of winter as the door opened, the unseasonal film of sweat on his square forehead. And Ma not believing him, shaking her head, holding the hard balloon of her tummy, shouting no, no, no, not her Clarence, not when he had survived the war, a thumb blown clean off and, after that, the thing that had made him cower under their bed some nights, hands cupped over his ears. Ma went into labor later that day, six weeks too early, and out slid Dot, blue as the Piccadilly line.
After that, Ma was in bed for months, very still, her mind living somewhere else. When Dot cried, I would soothe her. Like other friends had kittens, I had a baby sister, the first thing I remember ferociously loving, wanting to protect. When Dot is sick now—she has lungs that whistle in winter and needs to be steamed over the bath like a creased dress—it’s me she calls out for, rarely Ma.
For me, embarrassingly, in my sleep, it’s Pa. I was his favorite, Ma says. He called me Margot A-Go-Go because I was so cheerful and busy, always asking questions that made him laugh: “Where does the sky end and space begin?” “If God is everywhere, is He in the bristles of my hairbrush?”
I like that Pa called me Margot A-Go-Go: confirmation of a different version of me, the little carefree girl I was, like the photo of me riding on his shoulders, Pa laughing, running across Kensington Gardens in the rain. Also, a great improvement on “strange Margot,” despite Ma and my sisters insisting it was just an affectionate nickname.
Pa’s loss still feels epic yet utterly obscure. My memories are random. I remember his face, the strong Wilde jaw jutting out above his medals, the jaw you see repeated in all the portraits hanging from the walls of Applecote Manor, Pa’s old family house. But not his voice: it’s got muddled with voices on the wireless, voices in my head. Ma says, “We’d all be destroyed if we could remember everything, Margot.” This is her way of picking over the past as if it were a box of chocolates, I think, ignoring the nasty coffee creams.
Sometimes I think that part of me is forgotten, lost. And I don’t know if I’ll ever find it, whether it’s something you lose and can’t replace, like an adult tooth, or if it can regrow. But, more than this, I’d like to know if my skin will ever be like my sisters’, smooth as soap. The red itchy patches at the backs of my knees appeared the day of Pa’s funeral and never healed. When the sores are oozing and classmates stare in the school showers, I wonder why, out of all of them, I’m the one cursed with it, if my skin is a punishment for a terrible thing that I haven’t done yet. And what that might be.
My skin is the only thing my sisters won’t tease me about, secretly relieved that I got it and not them. It brings out rashes of kindness. Dot lets me sleep in the cooler bed by our bedroom window. Flora rubs ointment into the bits I can’t reach. Pam briskly reminds me that at least I am clever—“which goes some way to compensate for your missing chunks of common sense”—and that everyone has something they don’t like about themselves, apart from Flora, she adds wryly, since Flora is flawless.
That always makes me laugh. I need my sisters more than I do Ma sometimes.
It’s not that Ma isn’t a good mother. Just that she’s different from other mothers, the ones who didn’t lose their husbands in odd, terrible accidents, who don’t live in tall, narrow, tilt-to-the-left houses on the wrong side of Chelsea, with sooty stucco exteriors and the interiors painted the blazing colors of an African parrot in defiance of English weather and good taste, the rooms all strewn with marabou scarves, curlers, and books.
Nothing works here. The fridge is balmy. We can see the picture on the television—Ma bought it with much fanfare to watch the coronation—only if we hang up the old blackout curtains. The Hoover sulks accusingly in a wooden box beneath the stairs, awaiting a handyman to offer his services for free in exchange for a smile from my mother. Over the years, such a smile has won over all sorts of handymen.
Ma hates paying for anything if she can help it. Not for Ma dropping her shillings into a shop’s cash carrier, waiting for it to ping along the wire to the cashier. Ma’s purchases are all on credit. She has complicated bills all over London. She also has the longest legs west of Sloane Square. This helps.