‘What afabulouschat,’ she says, squeezing Adelaide’s hand in farewell before walking slowly back down the uneven steps to the street, handbag flapping at her side.
‘Toodle-oo,’ Adelaide calls, then resists the urge to slam the door shut.
That will be, she decides, the last interview she ever gives in her life. She rewards herself for surviving it by putting on her favourite recording of ‘Clair de Lune’ and making a pot of tea. It’s the only remedy for assault-by-journalist.
CHAPTER FIVE
Margot loved this white lace dress when she was a teenager. It has loose sleeves, almost see-through, a skirt that falls below her knees, and an underlay of cotton for the bodice and skirt. She wore it to a dance at a time when lots of girls wore jersey and polyester and other fabrics that clung to the body.
Despite having what her mother called a neat figure, Margot never went in for anything revealing. She may have reached her late teens in the 1970s, when hemlines rose and women started to show more flesh, but that wasn’t for her. She didn’t want to remain a child so much as just not grow up. To her, those two states of being were different.
Clothes that drew attention to a neat figure were for girls who did want to grow up. Who wanted to be married. That had never appealed to Margot: to have to accommodate a man. She had enough to deal with in her interior life. Her head was full of stories and memories; her imagination so vivid that it crowded out almost everything else. And it’s not as if she needed to marry so she wasn’t poor, the way some girls did. She had money. For a while.
She looks at herself in the long mirror in her bedroom. The dress still fits her even though she hasn’t tried it on for years.It still hangs in the same wardrobe she’s always had. Even after her parents died, she didn’t move into their bedroom. It’s her aunt Lavinia’s room now.
There are other bedrooms in this house. Margot could move into the one that has trees outside the window, or the one that has more light. She doesn’t want to, though. They’re not familiar. This room is safe, and she needs a place to feel settled and steady when her imagination takes flight.
Lavinia needs to see this dress – Margot doesn’t think she’s ever shown it to her. She makes her way down the creaking stairs to the sitting room.
‘Hello, darling,’ Lavinia says as Margot enters. She is standing by the sideboard, looking at the collection of photographs there. She does that from time to time.
Margot tries never to look at them because she doesn’t think people can be captured in photos. How can something that is still represent a human in motion? She hates to think that anyone could believe a photo of her would be anything like the real her.
Lavinia gives her a quizzical look. ‘What are you wearing?’
‘I’ve had this dress since I was seventeen!’ Margot picks up the sides of the skirt and half-curtseys. ‘Do you like it?’
Lavinia’s face is unreadable. Then she smiles kindly. ‘I might have when you were seventeen,’ she says. ‘But, darling, it’s past its prime, don’t you think?’
Margot looks down at the dress and fails to see what she means. ‘No,’ she says, and is met with raised eyebrows.
‘Are you planning to wear it out?’ Lavinia says.
‘I might.’ It’s been hidden away for decades so it deserves a little spin – to the shops, perhaps.
‘It’s not quite the shade it’s meant to be.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Darling … it’s yellowed badly.’
Margot glances down at the dress again. It looks the same to her now as it does in her memory of it. This happens to hersometimes, that she imagines things to be different than they are, but she really thinks Lavinia is wrong in this instance. So she decides to change the subject.
‘Who are you looking at?’
‘Your dear brothers.’ Lavinia points to the photograph of two young men in army uniform.
Margot blanches and wishes she hadn’t asked the question. She can’t talk about them. Even if they are the reason she exists.
‘They were lovely boys,’ Lavinia goes on, sadness in her voice the way it always is when she mentions them.
Margot can’t participate in this conversation, though, because she never met them. Toby and Oliver were eighteen and nineteen when they went to war, and a year older when they died together in 1943. Margot’s father’s first wife, their mother, died not long afterward – from the shock, Lavinia always said. Then he met Margot’s mother, Perry – given name Petunia, which she never liked – and Margot was born in 1955. Their only child, but her father’s third.
Her parents gave her everything a girl could need. Their home was comfortable and Margot always had the prettiest dresses, as well as piano and ballet lessons, a dog and a doll’s house. Sadness pervaded the household, however, without Margot even realising it. Her father would smile but rarely laughed. Margot felt like she could never quite reach him – it was as if he was always somewhere else even when in her presence. She knew he loved her – he demonstrated that in his care of her – yet his eyes were distant. Her mother tried to make up for it by ensuring Margot had a lovely life, but it always felt as if the household was living in two parallel dimensions at once.
As a child Margot was creative with a daydreamy streak, but not one so extravagant that it stopped her excelling at her schoolwork. She topped her classes in mathematics and English. A good all-rounder, her teachers would say. In her daydreams, she made up worlds in her head where there was laughter andsunshine always. It was these worlds that kept her from collapsing entirely when she was in her late teens and both of her parents died. Later, she would wonder if it was grief that killed them: her mother dying of a cancer that ate away at her stomach, the strain of tending to her father’s sadness too great; and her father dying of a heart attack.
Once Margot was in the big house on Avenue Road on her own, with all those empty bedrooms, Lavinia, her father’s sister, came to live with her. Lavinia had never married, and the childhood polio that had left her with a pronounced limp meant she was destined to need some care as she aged. Margot not only wanted to offer Lavinia a place to live where someone could keep an eye on her, but she wanted the company.