I regret to inform you that after your failure to return the stolen boots, the matter has been passed into the hands of the police.
Margery’s stomach fell, as if she were in an elevator and someone had cut its suspension. She hid the letter under the bed and pulled out her suitcase.
For years, Margery did not know what had happened to her father. After he walked through the French windows, she’d heard the gunshot and seen a spray of blood against the glass, and it had terrified her so much that she’d remained exactly where she was. Then came other sounds—a hundred birds, her mother’s scream—and the rectory had seemed to fill with new voices. She didn’t know anymore what was safe and what wasn’t. All she could see was the red on the window, all she wanted was her father, until eventually someone thought to look for her and found her wedged beneath the bookcase. This person—she had never seen him before but, then again, he was lying at a sideways angle in order to coax her out—said her father had met with an accident and she would need to be a very good little girl, and not cause trouble or hide under any more furniture.
Over the next few weeks, everything disappeared from the rectory. Not just Cook and the housemaid, but even the contents. Margery watched as things that had made up her life to date—the table she had run into when she was four, the wardrobe where she had once hidden a whole afternoon, her brothers’ cricket bats, her father’s books—were loaded into carts and driven away. Then she and her mother left, too, her mother in dark crêpe, Margery wearing an old pair of trousers and a scratchy boater. One suitcase was all they had.
They took the train to her aunts’ in London. Her mother sat wedged in the corner of the carriage, sinking toward sleep, while Margery counted every station and spoke the names out loud. Her mother was a big woman, but there was nothing soft about her. Nothing gave when you tried to hug her. If anything, it became more solid.
“I will never be happy again,” she said, as if grief was something you put on, like a hat.
And Margery—who hadn’t a clue what she was talking about—leaned joyfully out of the window and announced she could see the River Thames.
* * *
—
Aunt Hazel and Aunt Lorna were her father’s twin sisters, and they were very religious. They wore black, even on a good day, and prayed before and after every meal, sometimes in the middle. They didn’t make conversation as such but gave edifying pronouncements, like “We rejoice in our suffering, knowing that suffering produces endurance,” and “We are never sent more than we can bear.” The kind of thing other women stitched on samplers. They did all that spinsters of a certain class were allowed to do—dusting, of which they did an awful lot, counting the laundry but not actually washing it, and polishing silver until it shone like the sun. Everything else they left to the live-in maid, Barbara, a terrifying woman who wore her hair in a topknot and took all instruction as a personal affront. The aunts owned a mansion flat in Kensington with a hundred steps. As for the garden, there wasn’t one: it was just a communal square.
After the suitcase had been brought in, Aunt Hazel poked up the fire and Aunt Lorna pulled the curtains, while her mother landed in a chair by the window, like a toy that had lost its stuffing. The parlor was filled with vast furniture that made no concession to the smallness of the room, so everyone was a bit cramped. Her aunts observed in horrified tones that Margery was big for a girl, and also dressed like a boy. Her mother yawned and explained the problem was that she kept growing. “May I play, please?” said Margery. Her aunts said she could play in the square so long as she didn’t shout or bend the flowers. But when she asked, “Is my father coming soon?” all three women closed their eyes. For a moment Margery thought a prayer was coming on.
Then:
“Tea?” said Aunt Hazel.
“Ring for Barbara,” said Aunt Lorna.
“I’m so tired,” yawned her mother.
And that was how it went for the next few months. Margery roamed the square and tried her best not to shout or to bend flowers, but when she asked for news of her father or when she would go home—even if she asked about her brothers—her aunts rang the bell, her mother closed her eyes, as if overcome with a fairy-tale kind of tiredness that might last centuries, while Barbara crashed into the parlor, furious, bearing an overpacked tea tray. No one meant to hurt her. In fact, they meant the opposite—they meant to spare her from shame—but it was like passing through a bewitched land, a place without signposts or boundaries where everyone was asleep but her. Panic set in. She wet the bed. She cried over nothing. For a while, she spent her days checking that the men in bandages and wheelchairs outside were not her father. Finally, her brain made a decision: it was better not to keep things that clearly were not meant to be kept, and a hole opened. Everything from her life before the aunts disappeared. The war came to an end, and her brothers and father belonged to a part of her life that seemed incredibly far away, like looking at something distantly across a lake, so that even though she missed them, she didn’t feel it. It didn’t hurt. And, after all, there was nothing strange about an all-female household: a generation of men had been wiped out.
Life carried on. Her aunts replaced her brothers’ hand-me-downs with plain frocks, and so long as Margery didn’t run or make a noise, they failed to notice her. A school was found to which she seldom went, and when she did, she kept herself apart. Meanwhile, her mother continued to sit in one place and grow heavier, not just in her body but in her eyes and voice, and still no one said anything about her father. Margery forgot his book of incredible creatures.
Then, coming into the parlor one afternoon, she found four women balanced on the furniture. Even the maid, Barbara, was up there, and so was her mother—it was the most agile thing Margery had seen her do in years.
“Just get rid of it!” shrieked Barbara, sounding not like a maid. All four women pointed at the window.
Attached to the curtain like a little black brooch, Margery found a beetle. “Hello,” she said. Feeling she had its confidence, she eased it into her hand and opened the window. She felt giant with the responsibility. She certainly wasn’t afraid.
But when she tried to set the beetle free, it wouldn’t move. Had she killed it? She gave the smallest shake of her arm—she even prayed—and, to her delight, its back suddenly lifted and split into two hard wings. Beneath them a second miraculous pair fanned out, as delicate as sweet wrappers, and began to pulse. I know this, she thought. I know about this. The beetle paused for a moment, as if to check everything was in good working order, then lifted upward, heading straight for the wall before swinging out its tiny legs and righting itself in the nick of time. It made such a busy noise and, for the first time, she felt she understood something about the perilous mechanics of flight. A beetle might be small, and on the chunky side, but its will to travel was spectacular. She began to laugh.