10

Flora

Flora inches open the downstairs toilet door. The entrance hall is clear. Slipping off her noisy wedge heels, she creeps past the living room – where her father and Angie are laughing and talking in hushed voices – to find her sisters. After an agonizing half an hour or so, in which they were forced to repeatedly toast the lovebirds and pick their jaws off the floor, the three of them fled, like startled stampeding cattle after a lightning strike. Only she’d peeled off to relieve her bladder. And try to process what she’d just seen.

The Campari-red plume of hair. The triumphant smile on that slack, sensual mouth. The starburst of lines around those blown-out mad-green eyes. The surreal cruelty of Angie, now in the pneumatic badlands of her mid-forties, wearing Cuban-heeled ankle boots – silver! – and a leopard-print fake fur, sashaying into Rock Point, looking like she’d spent the intervening years at a sordid party. She even moves in her own pocket of warm, sweet, musky air, that smell when you strip clean bed linen after sex.

Flora’s phone rings. She fumbles to silence it: a missed call from Scott. The screen is blurred. She wipes it on her dress. Still blurred. Okay, she’s sloshed. And if she speaks to Scott, he’ll know. Etting dinnr. Will cal back. Miss u!!! she texts, buying herself time.

Swaying in the kitchen doorway, heels in hand, a dress seam split, she feels like the hostess of a dinner party gone catastrophically wrong. But does she detect a new siege unity too? Kat and Lauren are huddled over the table, next to an open bottle of red, and lit by a guttering candle; while physically dissimilar – Kat’s got the Finch wide cheekbones and Grandpa’s nose, Lauren’s a birdlike version of Dixie – Flora sees echoes in their tight jaw lines, their expressive hands, and this pleases her. For all their distance in recent years, there’s still a lot to lose.

Angie knows too much. And she’ll kill any chance of her, Kat and Lauren finally putting the sorry summer behind them. The past will be inescapable now. It’ll be like having a dead body in the corner of the room, buzzing with bluebottles, and trying to eat lunch.

Also, Angie fled that August day. How can Dad forget that? Are they all meant to claim amnesia? The moment – ‘Where’s Angie?’ – is seared on Flora’s brain. Similarly the sight of Dixie screeching into the drive in a battered VW van, driven by a friend with pink dreadlocks. The way Dixie had asked in her soft, kind, yoga voice that made Flora want to confess immediately, ‘Tell me what happened.’ They didn’t. Not everything. They’d been too scared.

‘There you are, Flora.’ Kat spins around. ‘Engaged to Angie? I mean, fuck, right?’

‘Right.’ Flora wants to climb on her hands and knees up the stairs, curl beside Raff and tumble into one of her dreamless drunken sleeps, and for the next day to begin as it was meant to, according to her itinerary. Instead, she slumps onto a kitchen chair and spreads her palms on the faded William Morris print tablecloth. With the candles, the wind yawning outside, it feels séance-y. A strobe of moonlight spills across the table, powdery and potato-pale. The blinds that had once hung at the windows have gone, she notices, plucking a sugar cube from the small pot on the table and pushing it against the roof of her mouth with her tongue.

‘Cadmium!’ Kat barks, with such force it blows out the candle.

‘Cadmium?’ Flora repeats blankly. She’s always a step behind her sisters. Growing up, she’d read so slowly she didn’t bother. She couldn’t spell. Or do maths. Only Kat can do maths: numbers make Flora’s brain melt. Ironically, she discovered books after the eclipse summer, searching for escape, anything to take her away from herself. Her thoughts paddle drunkenly, with a sharp physical tug of yearning, to her book group.

‘Dad used to joke about it, don’t you remember?’ Kat continues. ‘Lauren, you know about this stuff …’

Lauren nods, presses her fingertips against her eyes. ‘Cadmium can disrupt neural processes but –’

‘Oh, God!’ Finally, Flora gets it. She coughs on the sugar cube. ‘Maybe that explains why he’s throwing Granny’s things away too.’

‘No, Angie will be behind that, bet your bottom dollar. Out with the old …’ Kat slams back in her chair. ‘Did you catch that he bumped into Angie the night of your mum’s funeral, Lauren? In the arts club. Think about it. He’d have returned to London emotional, vulnerable, ripe for the picking. And rich. Angie would have moved in like a heat-seeking missile.’

Flora sloshes red wine into some dusty goblets. She doesn’t normally drink red – it plays havoc with her gut biome – but this counts as an emergency. Despite never meeting, Dixie and Angie are now connected, invisibly sutured together, the death of one woman bringing back another in a horrible way.

No one had expected her father to be quite so devastated at Dixie’s woodland funeral in October. He’d sobbed, shoulders heaving, as he scattered a handful of earth into that ghastly hole. It’d been painful to watch, not least because she’d known he’d never cry like that if Annabelle, her mother, had died. Even as girls she and Kat had sensed – and deeply resented – that it was young, feisty Dixie their father loved most. Lauren’s mum, not theirs. But then Dixie was the only one to reject him, wasn’t she? Dixie left him, taking baby Lauren. Annabelle and Blythe – whom he’d deserted for Dixie … what goes around – always loathed Dixie for being wanted by Charlie when they were not.

‘Do you remember how Angie couldn’t swim?’ Kat says, after a beat. ‘She’d just stand in the surf, terrified if the water went over her knees. Maybe we can tempt her back in.’

‘Kat,’ Flora admonishes, even though, for a fraction of a second, the idea glitters in her mind too. Kat always nudges her to darker places.

Kat raises her hands. ‘Joking.’

Lauren shoots Kat a slightly wary look, then strikes a match with tremulous fingers, relighting the candle, filling the room with that sulphur cigarettey smell.

Flora could kill a cigarette. She hasn’t smoked since meeting Scott, who believes smokers should be refused NHS cancer treatment. She was thinner when she smoked. ‘We have to fix this.’ She leans forward, invigorated by the red wine and the sheer scale of the family crisis. ‘How about I call Mum and you call Blythe, and we stage some sort of intervention?’

‘The cavalry?’ Kat shakes her head. ‘I think not.’

‘And what if Angie makes Dad happy?’ Lauren suggests quietly, her eyes black and soft, the candle flame dancing inside them.

‘But he wasn’t unhappy, Lauren!’ Flora groans. ‘Isn’t the absence of unhappiness enough? At his age.’

‘You’re both missing the point.’ Kat breaks off a drip of candle wax, rolls it between thumb and finger. ‘This is a white-male midlife crisis, very late onset, super-charged by a terror of his mortality and artistic and cultural irrelevance.’ She flicks the wax ball away. ‘Being generous, I’d say he’s trying to capture those unreconstructed anything-goes golden days of his own roaring talent, the Girls and Birdcage summer, the pinnacle of his fame.’

‘Seeking what’s lost,’ murmurs Lauren, heavily, as if this makes sense to her too.

‘But it’s no excuse!’ Flora’s a firm believer in making your bed and lying in it, however uncomfortable the mattress.

‘It’s not. He should have warned us, rather than dragging us to Rock Point during an extreme-weather event. It’s a stitch-up.’ Kat pinches the bridge of her nose with her fingers. ‘A cluster fuck. He’s going to marry Monster.’

‘Gosh. I’d forgotten we’d called her that.’ When Flora thinks what they were like, it makes her grateful she has a son. ‘Monster,’ she says, relishing it once more.

‘I guess it takes one to know one.’

Flora turns and, to her mortification, there’s Daddy standing at the kitchen door, his expression thunderous. She dreads to think how long he’s been standing there, what else he might have heard.

‘Well, you lot regress pretty damn quickly.’ He stomps over, slaps a scrunched piece of notepaper on the table, making the wine slosh greasily up the sides of Flora’s goblet. ‘Who knocked this out?’

Before Flora or Lauren can react, Kat swipes it. Her eyes move from left to right, then widen. Her left leg starts to bounce. ‘Shit,’ she mutters, under her breath.

‘What?’ Flora has a bad feeling. That leg.

‘Feel free to share, boss.’ Their father’s expression is cold now, with the detached artist’s gaze Flora’s always hated.

Then, down the corridor, the clip-clip-clip of ankle boots – like the ticking crocodile in Peter Pan – and Angie appears, planting a hand on his shoulder. ‘What’s up, babe?’

Kat’s trainer taps out a tattoo. Flora anxiously twists her rope of pearls.

‘Don’t be shy, Kat.’ Charlie’s low voice swells with fury. ‘Read it out. No secrets between me and Ange.’

Kat inhales to speak. But Flora’s necklace snaps, explosively, and the pearls hail down, spinning, rolling into the room’s dusty, darkest corners, out of reach.