Touched (11 page)

‘My . . . that's Jennifer,' she said eventually, torn between pride and a kind of possessive anger.

‘It certainly is. Dear Jennifer. Arthur painted her nicely. I hope you'll agree.'

‘Yes, yes,' said Rowena, frowning slightly. She was suddenly worried, but tried to reassure herself.

‘And I can see where her glorious beauty comes from, my dear,' said Mrs Pollard, glancing at Rowena with a smile from beneath her fringe.

‘She doesn't look like me,' said Rowena bluntly.

‘No, but the material's all there,' she said. ‘It's strange that she doesn't look directly like you. But you're a fine-looking lady, Mrs Crale. And it's a pleasure to make the acquaintance of the Crale family. Come on now, little Caroline.'

Evangeline was not at home when Rowena returned. But the boy was. It was always when she entered the house or another room that she had a faint awareness that someone else was there, somewhere, just in the periphery of her vision or forgotten in a different room. He watched and retreated, followed and waited. It made her count her children in her head, with a plunge of worry for Eva. Bob barely had friends yet, merely alliances fabricated by her and the other mothers in the Wives' Association, a round of teas and cookery afternoons when local women put their vaguely contemporary children together to squabble, then hug goodbye. Was she looking after one of those children? Had she forgotten who was in her charge? She saw the shadow, almost a dandelion seed, floating past the corner of her eye. More often, it was simply an awareness, a nagging of something she had forgotten. Was it really
Freddie
she was imagining? Was her own mind playing tricks, contaminated by Evangeline's? What was Freddie supposed to look like? She would ask Bob again.

She dreaded the moments she put Bob down for his nap after his lunch. She used the staircase in number 2, walking him all the way along the narrow corridors and round the corner to his bedroom at the far end of number 3, but still the sourness was there on the landing, an underlying mouth-coating of mould, urine, protest, as there had been in the wall that had died. No, it hadn't died, she told herself. They had knocked it down. But it had, hadn't it? It had had life to it, in some inexplicable way. It had cried out. Its stiff edges were the crusts of a carcass, and it was still seeping the life blood that it had once had. Today, the perfume lay in fitful drifts over the shadows.

I want to get out of this house, Rowena thought with heart-sinking realisation.

A brief summer downpour hit the village again and someone appeared on the green, a sole figure out in the rain, and Rowena gazed, barely focusing. It was a girl, making her way from behind the war memorial across the grass. She was so thin that she looked barely human, but rather a half-drowned creature, hair plastered, long frock soaked grey beneath a clinging shawl, the day so leached of colour, she appeared as a Victorian waif in a black-and-white photograph. She was holding the hand of a young child. No, she wasn't; she had merely swung her arm near the little bridge that traversed the stream, where children threw sticks. But was it Evangeline? She seemed thinner, noticeably slighter, and grubbier. It was a girl in a long dress and apron: it could only be Evangeline. Rowena felt relief tangled with anger at her disobedience.

Douglas had provided more housekeeping money for increased hours at Mrs Pollard's while the builders were working on the house, to enable Rowena to supervise every aspect of its decoration, and so Evangeline's absence was not as noticeable as it would have been in less busy weeks. The decorating helped Rowena to keep away from Gregory, for she was resolved again, ricocheting between horror that they had kissed and simple fear. The twins reported seeing Evangeline, yet they, especially Jennifer, were vague, and the sightings, by their account, had been brief.

Later in the week, she saw Eva twice through the downstairs window of number 3, but she was yet thinner, and once she turned with an even scrawnier face to look at the house from the green, and Rowena was shocked.

Ignoring the possibility of discovery by Gregory or Lana Dangerfield, she raced out on to the green. ‘Eva, Eva, come back home,' she called, but it was dusk, and the shadows were long, the elm shade knotty, and Eva had flickered away. There was a boy there. On the other side of the green. But he too left, down where the stream was.

‘Eva, come home and eat,' Rowena called. ‘Darling,' she shouted, sounding like a madwoman. ‘
Evangeline
,' she said.

After a fortnight's work, the builders had made a breakfast nook, complete with delightful red tiles, a wood-effect surface, and a matching red floor. Mrs Crale's old kitchen with its smoking range was turned into a playroom, her pantry into a downstairs lavatory, and the kitchen in the original number 2 had been entirely remodelled. But still the damp oozed, bubbled, crusted. Rowena heard footsteps; she was sure she did, but it was her own poor imagination. Now she was left in the house with Bob, the others playing, a pump chugging, a polythene membrane added, clay air bricks inserted, and the lovely wallpaper entirely ruined.

‘Eva has
gone
, do you understand that?' said Rowena to Douglas later that night. ‘She doesn't come home.'

He shrugged reflexively. Then for the first time, he looked worried.

‘I'll ring the police station in the morning,' he said.

‘
MY DAUGHTER HAS
gone,' Rowena said to the doctor, because Douglas had advised her she should make an appointment. She wasn't sleeping, and she was jumping at shadows. Dr Crewe gave her some Librium that would help her, and added a prescription to precipitate the loss of baby flab.

‘Your daughter is a runaway?' he said to her.

She paused. ‘I – I hardly know how to answer,' she said, plucking at her skirt. She pressed on her fingernail so hard it broke.

The policeman from Radlett came and asked questions to which Rowena and Douglas could only provide answers that sounded, even to Rowena's ears, culpably vague. But to explain the nature of Evangeline was difficult. Was she a backward child, he wanted to know? Was she handicapped? A candidate for electroshock treatment? Evangeline did not fit easily into any category, and yet she was considered mentally subnormal by those who saw her slipping, murmuring, sidling through the village in her ghost frocks. The villagers had plenty to say to the police about Miss Evangeline Crale. The station at Radlett brought in another officer from Watford. They rifled through Evangeline's trunk, contacted her old school in London, and interviewed all the neighbours. They spent the most time at Brinden, where the Pollards were apparently happy to answer questions and give them the run of the place, and they came back full of tales of Mrs Pollard's rock cakes and Mr Pollard's sloe gin.

‘Have you seen her this week at
all
?' Rowena asked the twins, and dreaded the answer.

‘No, Mummy,' said Rosemary.

Jennifer shook her head. ‘No,' she said. There was something shuttered about her eyes.

The hay meadows were dozing, and the Dangerfields went to Cornwall, which meant that Rowena could wander freely. She resolved to keep Bob out in the sunshine and baby Caroline in the fresh air when she was not with Mrs Pollard. The village was a little emptier. She had hoped for a bucket-and-spade holiday perhaps in Essex or Suffolk, but Eva's absence rendered this an impossibility, while the expenses of the house prohibited it. ‘Eva, Eva,' Rowena called, whenever no villager was near her. The police asked more questions and returned an officer to Brinden, but the frequency of Eva's past absences made them confident of an imminent return.

‘There are wild children we occasionally come across, Mrs Crale,' said PC Baldihew from Radlett. ‘They stray. They tend to return when the weather gets colder.'

‘It's early August,' said Rowena, glancing at the glaring sky, the drying grass on the green. ‘Are you saying she may return in
September
?'

‘We would hope for an earlier return,' he said. ‘And we will allocate it our full attention. But I am of the opinion that come the new school term and a chill in the air, your girl will come scurrying back like a rat.'

‘Don't call my daughter a rat,' said Rowena. The green swayed a little. She felt woozy on the new pills, but she slept like the dead.

‘We will be making further inquiries.'

‘
Eva
,' Rowena called across the stream, as soon as the policeman had climbed on to his bicycle.

There was no echo, just a stillness, a trickle.

‘She with Freddie,' said Bob.

Rowena stiffened.

‘Is she?'

‘Yus!' Bob nodded, grinned, and hopped about the flagpole socket in a circle.

‘How do you know, darling?'

‘I hear 'em.'

‘Where?'

‘There.'

‘Where, Bobby?'

Bob pointed a fat finger towards their house, to the top windows.

‘Upstairs?'

‘Yus yus. Freddie down.
Down
stairs. Evie's friend. I sees 'im, hear 'im.'

‘Me too,' murmured Rowena, and was frightened of herself, and shed a tear she wiped away with the back of her hand; then she took Bob paddling in the almost-dry stream, and they fed the ducks on the pond, and she bought him an ice cream at the post office shop.

‘Sure your girl will come back,' said the owner comfortingly. ‘Always did see her out dawn and dusk.'

There was a bending of the air, a coldness from the staircase, but no child there when she got back. Oh God, thought Rowena, catching sight of herself in a mirror and seeing how pale she was, how stringy and dulled the brightness of her auburn-brown hair.

Every day, the damp found a different course, bubbled in new patterns like fungus, emitted new smells, taunted her with fresh oozings, and the stairs and the landing were careless in their resentment, their aches and shadows and contractions of air. She kept herself outside, walking Bob about the village, wheeling Caroline after Mrs Pollard's, laying her on the grass. She sobbed every day, at odd times, for Evangeline, and walked further, out and about in the village, searching for her.

She asked Mrs Pollard if she could look round Brinden in case Eva was hiding there.

‘Of course, my dear,' said Mrs Pollard, laying her hand sympathetically on her arm, and allowed her to search all over the house and land, where she tripped and crouched, torn between revulsion and fascination, and became as filthy as Evangeline.

Beyond a run of tool rooms, right at the back of the house, Rowena saw a door that had escaped her notice, a door almost obscured by the lack of light in that warren of neglected storage rooms, and she had to struggle past a tricycle and an old mangle to gain access. She turned the key that was left in the lock and pushed the door open with some difficulty. Inside was a room that was different from the others, and appeared to be half-finished. Its small window gave on to a bank of earth in that sunken back area of the house, a muddy slope that plunged it into semi-darkness. Rowena switched on the bulb overhead and saw a room in transition, seemingly half-prepared for a girl of uncertain age: in her early teens, or possibly much younger. Its floor was still covered in unvarnished boards with loose nails, the window as yet uncurtained, but its walls were papered pink, with a princess bed in one corner and a draped and sparkling dressing table in another.

It was apparent that this was nothing to do with Evangeline, who would have scorned such convention and left her own shabby mark. The sickly glycerine pink of the walls seemed to throb in the gloom, and among the froth of the dressing table sat a little Gaiety transistor, a
Gear Guide
and a copy of
June
, while a picture of a rag doll adorned one wall. A giant yellow teddy bear sat on the bed's pillow beside a Barbie with friend Midge.

‘Who – what –
whose
is that room?' she asked Mrs Pollard.

‘Which of the many, dear?' said Mrs Pollard without looking at her.

‘The one at the back.'

Mrs Pollard's face was blank.

‘Past the pantry by the back door, beyond all the tool storage shelves, the lawnmower . . .'

‘Oh yes. For my niece,' she said in her smoothest cream voice.

‘Oh,' said Rowena. She hesitated. ‘What's her name?'

Mrs Pollard paused, barely perceptibly. ‘Barbara,' she said.

By Thursday, Rowena was suddenly calmer, muffled by the dregs of dark deep sleep. Eva would come back – of course she would – Douglas always told her that, brusquely, though she noticed he was increasingly snappy on the subject.

‘The child is not
right
,' he said to her in exasperation. ‘You can't apply normal rules to her, Ro. She's – she's – she will be living off nuts and berries, jaunting around in her petticoats and sleeping in a bloody mob cap. The trouble she'll be in when she's back. I need to beat some sense into her.'

‘No!' Rowena gasped. ‘No, no, Douglas. You see. This is what I'm afraid of. When she comes back, we must
welcome
her.'

‘You always were too soft on her, you know. The kid's touched, and that's that, I'm afraid.'

Rowena looked away from him and glanced out of the window. Gregory Dangerfield was back that night from Cornwall.

The following morning, Rowena waited for Gregory to go to work, ventured on to the green and checked on Bob who was playing on the war memorial, then, desperate for distraction, she buried herself in the story of the extraordinary train robbery that had just occurred in Buckinghamshire. She watched the suntanned Dangerfield children, Peter and Jane, march to the post office, and then focused on Bob's head, in case Lana emerged. There was no sign of Eva. The mobile library turned up and stayed almost empty, its book covers glaring with sun. There was a shimmer in the elm leaves. That was all. Eva had often said that Freddie hid up in the trees. But the day was bright, and such distortions couldn't get her, she thought.