The storm blew in before dawn, ice pellets attacking the caravan so that Audrey in her dreamy fog thought it was finally the war at her door. The sway of her home made her feel as though she were at sea, and she blamed her nausea on the wind and not on the tooth extraction she’d had three days ago. Too ill to eat, too tired to make tea, all she could do was stay in bed and listen to the world outside. She feared for the birds in this onslaught, hearing tree branches snap under the weight of ice.
From her window she saw ice forming in the eddy of the river, the water coursing through the floes like a snake following its prey. The wind through the conifers like a machine gathering strength.
She wished Frank would come to her. She would not say as much to him, but she needed him and this need frightened her. If he would just bring her tea, sit with her a while.
Surely, he would worry, she thought. It had been two days since he’d checked on her.
She imagined the war arriving in the cover of night, taking out her world beyond the caravan. It was capable of doing that she knew, the insidious, heartless nature of it, capable of that and more.
She remembered hearing planes overhead, the relentless drone that came from some point beyond the trees working its way up to a roar as they came overhead. There may have been the sound of a gun, too. Had that been last night? Yesterday? Or was this a memory from long ago? The medication had made her drowsy, her thinking woolly. Her days and nights confused, a coasting in and out of consciousness.
Perhaps she had lived here too long.
In this enfeebled state she felt panic rise within her, so she pulled back the blankets, and sat up in the bed, only to collapse on one elbow from dizziness. Deep breath. Eyes closed. The world stopped moving, so she gingerly placed one foot then the other on the floor, checked for water in the kettle, and turned on the hob.
A branch clattered on the front landing. She needed to get up, get out. She could be crushed under the weight of a fallen tree. She pulled the nightgown over her head and caught sight of herself in the mirror, her skin the colour of cement, the exposure a shock as if she had never seen her own flesh. The musky scent of her body, like that of springtime soil. Ice rain tapped at her window, and a gust sent the caravan back to sea.
She couldn’t leave, she knew, not now with the weather holding her captive.
She made her tea and got back in bed to drift off again. When she awoke two hours later, she had no idea where she was.
Eyes held shut, the silence so pure that she felt she’d been transported to an inner sanctum, separate from all she knew. Then the cry of a wood pigeon and, with it, relief that she was indeed home and not relegated to an institution. She reached for the book she’d been reading and opened it up, but the words floated across the page, incomprehensible. In the presence of everything that held her to her bed, the weather, her fear, the pain of her tooth, she was left with a solitude that took her back to herself, restored in her all the reasons to be in the caravan, to be alone. She patted the blankets around her body and propped up a pillow. She peered through the curtains to see blazing sunshine.
The party. Was it just five days ago? The Carringtons’ anniversary, and Frank insisting they must go. She protested because she was privy to a history Frank would never know, of young Carrington, the idiot son of decent parents, a brash and entitled man whom Audrey knew only through the servant Elspeth.
She spotted him immediately, his swagger giving him away. He filled the room as though everyone was aware he needed more space than most. She could hardly bear to watch him talk to one guest then the next as if he had something pressing to share. She questioned her own moral compass in that moment. Was she a voyeur, was she accepting that, after all, what was done was done? She’d been curious, watching him, and keeping watch on him throughout the evening, knowing she was invisible to him. She behaved beautifully, had her full kit of charm on so that even Frank was under the impression she was enjoying herself. She sipped her sherry and felt her face burn with pain from the infected tooth, and when he finally came to her, introduced himself, she leaned into him so that he alone would hear her words.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
He flashed back, half smiling, confusion washing over him, his mouth parted as if he might speak, but clearly unable to as his mind whizzed through a past that held too many stories of negligence, though hardly any amounting to loss in his mind. He would never know what she knew of the young woman he impregnated in the library that night, rape not a word he thought applied to him. He would never understand the desperation Elspeth felt when she came to Audrey, wild with worry, shame, horrified at a future that could see her on the streets. He would never understand the level of terror Elspeth felt when the hemorrhaging began, when life spilled out of her as a final punishment to the invasion she’d all but blamed herself for. I’m sorry for your loss.
This was her triumph, satisfying beyond the waving of placards, yet she was filled with a despair soon overwhelmed by pain as her tooth worsened, and Frank, rescuing her from the party, insisted they see a doctor immediately.