Touched (10 page)

The other window was where the empty old water tank was, she remembered. She looked again, and for a moment, she thought she saw the faintest passing hint of illumination like a candle that was running out. She stared, but saw nothing more.

She went back and tried to put Bob down to sleep on the sofa, but he reared up in moments, bright-eyed and excited at the change in routine. She steeled herself and took him up the stairs to his room instead, which was so rain-darkened, she thought for a moment she had left the curtains closed. And there was her boy. He smelled of stream water. But Bob was just in front of her, and the shape, or shadow movement, had been beside her. ‘Oh—' she said, and tucked Bob in, patting his bottom rhythmically, as she had seen other mothers do, to send him to sleep, to drum away the thought with normality. She couldn't look behind her.

‘Hear!' said Bob suddenly.

‘Here?'

‘Dem words. Peoples.'

‘Oh God,' muttered Rowena. ‘People?' she said, stroking him.

He nodded, grinning.

‘Bobby, do you see someone?'

Bob shook his head, his eyes following the rain shadows on the ceiling.

‘Or do you just hear him?'

‘Hear dems.'

‘But have you
seen
him?' said Rowena.

Bob looked puzzled. ‘I plays with Freddie,' he said eventually, smiling.

Rowena swallowed. She was silent.

‘Yes,' she said then, her voice a croak. ‘What does he look like?'

‘Boy.'

‘So you've seen him?'

Bob screwed up his forehead. To her horror, his blue eyes – an echo of Jennifer's, but less azure, less extraordinary – filled with tears. ‘I dunno,' he said, looking at his fat little lace-ups that she had forgotten to remove. He glanced up at her with the expression of fear that appeared on his face when he thought he was about to get into trouble.

‘Oh Bobby,' she said stroking him. ‘Don't worry. Just tell me – what do you see?'

Bob frowned again. He shook his head.

Rowena paused. ‘Never mind, darling,' she said, and she kissed him. ‘Go to sleep now.'

Downstairs, there was a shine on the quarry tiles on the other side of the arch, where there was no outside wall.

‘It's impossible,' murmured Rowena, sinking down on her knees. The tile was damp. She pressed into it, hard. The one beside it was cold, with the faintest sheen.

But there isn't even rain on this side, she thought. The corner of the room faced an internal wall and then a corridor. She kneeled on her own, shivering in her pale blue summer dress that flared out and returned most of her waist to her, and clouds burst their contents on to her windows, and damp and mould lined her nose, and her mind was rotting with her house.

‘Greg,' she said, hearing an engine starting up outside the house behind the sound of the rain, and she ran outside into the downpour, urgency compelling her against her better judgement, but he was driving away from the side of the lane. ‘Gregory,' she screamed, rain assailing her mouth, scalp, neck. She began to run, waving, but the car drove off into the arch of trees that led out of the village towards the power station, the aerodrome, the private schools.

She bent over, rain scoring her back, and began to cry. She didn't stop herself. She stood by the Big House for a few seconds, in full potential view of Lana Dangerfield, and the rain met her tears. As she opened her gate, an engine was audible from behind and the MG drew up beside her.

‘I saw you just as you were about to disappear from view,' he said, leaping out. ‘You silly girl, you're soaked through.'

She allowed him to hurry her through the gate, and he held her in the kitchen, rain puddling beneath her, steam rising from her as she soaked his chest. The idea of the boy in the house now seemed absurd. She looked up at him finally.

He lifted her hand, and kissed it.

‘Mrs Crale,' he said.

‘Don't call me that,' she said rapidly.

‘My darling Rowena.'

She let her breath out.

‘Are my eyes like pandas'?'

‘Yes.'

‘And my hair has all fallen down.'

‘Yes.'

‘And look at me. Oh God, I am wet through. I am barely seemly.' She covered herself with her hands.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘And I have never seen you so gorgeous.'

‘God. Greg,' she said.

‘Why the dickens have you been avoiding me?'

She felt herself blush. ‘You know—'

‘Yes, I know why,' he said, taking out a cigarette and lighting another for her.

‘Lana might see us!' she said, looking up and starting.

‘Only if she walks to the bottom of the garden through torrential rain with an ability to see through semi-darkness into an unlit kitchen,' he said, and she laughed, then hiccupped.

‘Excuse me.'

‘Come out with me tomorrow,' he said.

‘Where? Where could I possibly go out with you?'

‘To a candlelit restaurant far away from here, in – in Hampstead, in Bond Street – where I can gaze at you and hold your hand and tell you that I never saw anyone like you in Crowsley Beck.'

‘I'm not sure that's much competition,' she said, her mouth twitching.

‘In all of South Herts!'

She smiled, gave a moue of objection.

‘You're the most bewitching creature I ever did see,' he said, his voice breaking up as he said it. ‘We need to spend more time together. I will think.'

His words carried her through the afternoon and evening as she nodded and smiled absently at Bob, and then the twins came back from fetching the baby, trailing vast puddles as they wheeled her in. Caroline gurgled, and was fatter and more contented since she had started going to Mrs Pollard's.

‘Where is Eva?' said Rowena. How many times did she say that?
Where is Eva
?

The twins shook their heads, spraying rain.

‘Hot bath,' murmured Rowena, taking a wet Caroline out of her pram and stripping her down.

Evangeline had gone. Could she say those words? She couldn't. ‘
Evangeline
,' she called, knowing it was useless. She stood on a stool in Eva and Caroline's room, lifted the window and let the rain tumble on her head in arrows that pelted her. She looked uselessly through the torrents on the green.

She habitually barely saw her own strange daughter, but there were glimpses, sightings, the odd meal taken, nights in her own bed before an early departure. But even the twins were not now reporting seeing her at the Pollards'. She glanced at the clock. She was waiting for the yardarm, she realised.

‘Douglas,' she said when he returned from work. ‘I don't know where Eva is.'

He made an impatient plosive sound and shrugged, handing her his jacket. ‘Who ever does?'

‘Yes, but – Yes, but—'

He suddenly leaned over and kissed her, as though remembering you were supposed to kiss your wife when you returned from work; or, she thought, he had caught sight of the anxiety she must be betraying, and he felt a moment of sympathy. He occasionally did.

‘She'll come back,' he said. ‘She always does.'

‘Yes,' she said uncertainly. ‘You're right.'

She appraised her husband. He looked the same as he always had, immune to all the changes that were at large in London, Liverpool, Washington, outer space. He was of medium height, a fact that clearly aggrieved him, as there was an air of strutting self-importance to his gait; he held himself as high as possible, his chin tilted in a slight thrust. His mid-brown hair was still sensibly cut, not so different from when he had been at school. The faintest pot belly was forming, visible only in his white shirts. He was a decent husband, thought Rowena. She loved him.

With Caroline at Mrs Pollard's for a few hours, she had managed to prepare a shrimp mousse. Lana Dangerfield served a starter and a proper dessert every evening, apparently, though Lana Dangerfield had a nanny and a cleaner. Rowena had thought Douglas would be pleased with her effort, but he barely noticed, then cursorily thanked her when she asked him. She raced up between courses to put baby Caroline to bed, and while the chops browned she looked swiftly in Eva's trunk in case there was some unlikely indication of her whereabouts, but all she saw was a scrumpled layer of the terrible clothes, wrinkled and grubby, and she shuddered with distaste, and hated herself for a transient sense of something close to relief that she was not having to bear the social shame of Eva, the stares and puzzled faces. Once the new term started and Eva was secure in Ragdell Place, life would be easier. But in the meantime, where was she?

She ran back through the pool of darkness by Bob's room, and blame emanated from it at her: blame, blame, guilt.

It was picturing that old woman's face turned to the wall in despair that made her want to cry, to curl up and hide; or, on different days, to protest, justify, explain.

But
, she thought, she was old; she was ill.

So shouldn't they have looked after her in her own home? Of course they should have. But in the daze of nappies and gripe water that followed Caroline's birth, the idea of caring for a half-demented mother-in-law almost defeated her. Douglas, she noticed, did not appear to shoulder his share of guilt for the painful decline of his own mother, occasionally barking out an ill-considered statement of regret, while Eva was always there to punish her.

‘Please, Douglas, can we get rid of that staircase?' she said as she sped back down to the sizzling meat.

He laughed at her. ‘You can't just chop out a staircase,' he said. ‘My daffy little love.'

‘It doesn't feel right.'

‘There's no problem with the staircase. Just this goddamn unexplainable leak.' He gestured at the ceiling. ‘Use the other stairs if you've taken against these ones.'

They went to bed. Now that Mrs Pollard was feeding Caroline by bottle – and she would secretly use any excuse to get her off the breast – perhaps her former body would return to her.

‘Darling,' she said tentatively to Douglas, trying hard to do her duty, but he had drunk several glasses of whisky after supper, and she turned her head so she couldn't see the determined look in his eye as he gave her a series of amorous embraces that led to nothing.

‘LOOK FOR EVA,'
she said the next day to her older girls. ‘Please. Tell her to come home if you see her. Doesn't she help with Caroline and the other babies?'

‘Yes, Mummy,' said Jennifer.

But there was no sign of her that evening, so the next day, Rowena went to Mrs Pollard's herself. Smoke emerged from the window of a large shed, its wood damp-greened, and thuggish-looking cats mewed.

‘Rosie!' cried Rosemary.

‘Ginger!' cried Jennifer.

‘Come here, my dear,' said Mrs Pollard, crooning with baby Caroline in her arms and stroking Jennifer's head as she passed.

‘Has Eva – Evangeline – been here?'

Mrs Pollard looked at her blankly with her saucer-of-milk eyes, her face so plumply smooth, she looked as though she must be faintly retarded.

‘She's a helpful girl,' she said.

‘Thank you. Yes. Has she been here?'

‘Of course.'

‘When? When did you last see her?'

‘She just left.'

Rowena paused, relieved but puzzled.

‘But it's only half past nine,' she said.

Mrs Pollard met her gaze. ‘Why yes, Mrs Crale. Evangeline is an early riser.'

‘She stayed the night here?'

There was the faintest pause.

‘I don't really know, my dear. She may well have. She knows that any room she wants is hers. There's many a bed here.'

‘I see,' said Rowena. ‘Can you send her home? Next time.'

‘As you wish. Of course.'

Rowena paused again. Mrs Pollard was smiling at her placidly, and she suddenly felt reassured and faintly ridiculous for worrying. It was the summer. Eva ran somewhat wild in the school holidays, and the countryside would afford her infinitely more opportunity, but the terms tethered her to more of a routine.

‘Eva likes it here, Mummy,' said Rosemary.

‘I'm sure she does.'

‘She says Freddie is here, dear,' said Mrs Pollard.

Rowena paused for longer. She coloured faintly. ‘Well . . . always? Is he always meant to be here?'

‘No. Just some nights. At other times, apparently he goes home without her! There now, my dear, Freddie is one child you do
not
have to worry about!' She winked, slightly, from under her bristling fringe.

‘Shall we take Caroline round?' said Rowena, and began to wheel her towards the side of the house.

‘Oh, come in through the front door, not the long way round,' said Mrs Pollard in her comforting sponge of a voice and led the way through the hall, which featured several telephones from different eras, some with their wires cut; tools, boxes, hooks, old carriage clocks and sacks piled up among out-of-date catalogues and envelopes. ‘Excuse the state of it, please, Mrs Crale,' said Mrs Pollard. ‘It's all Arthur's flotsam and jetsam. I only usually show visitors my garden, my parlour and my dining room. This way.'

They entered the dining room, where Mr Pollard's bunches of plastic roses sat in vases on doilies all about the sideboards and his Welsh landscapes decorated the chimney breast.

‘Very nice,' said Rowena. The sounds of infants drifted through the open window.

She glanced at the other end of the room and gave a gasp. There on the wall was an oil painting of her daughter. Jennifer Crale gazed into the room with eyes so large and intensely blue, she looked almost inhuman: improbably beautiful. Her plaits were caught up in hangman's nooses, their perfect loops like two sides of a bow. She gazed into the room, a dimple on her cheek, the glisten of imminent laughter animating her mouth, and all of life was there ahead of her in her crystalline eyes and in the smile that danced over her expression. Rowena recognised her pink gingham dress with the rick-rack collar, her yellow cardigan, faithfully reproduced. The painting was skilled but wilful, crude and odd, so vast-orbed its subject recalled a Harlequin Waif or an alien doll.