Touched (13 page)

She smiled at him, and at herself behind her magazine, and she felt refreshingly elegant there in that place of glaring secretaries in dated spectacles and engineers in masks and white suits. She wandered to the door, hoping Greg was watching her. Bob was playing in the fields with Bob, throwing a stick mere inches and stumbling, grinning.

‘Lady Crale, allow me to show you round my power station,' said Gregory Dangerfield, his breath a sudden heat on her temple, and they wandered round rooms of steel to the sounds of humming and pumping, past the generator and turbine areas, straight past signs that said
Danger
.

He kissed her suddenly. My daughter's whereabouts are uncertain, she thought. My husband is not desirable to me. My house is putrefying around me. She needed, very urgently, to block it out. He was kissing her neck, kissing her collarbone. He put his hand under the strap of her dress, and she gazed at him, limp with desire, knees barely able to prop her up, but there were footsteps nearby and they fell apart.

‘Come here,' he said, and pulled her into an office, but there were too many workers around, and too much glass.

‘I want to make love to you. Very badly,' he murmured.

They went past the control room to a small concrete area behind, and they kissed against a wall, near dark puddles that reminded her, though she fought the image, of the tiles in her house. She saw the carved glory of his mouth and he told her she was the most beautiful creature, a breathing mannequin, a woman of dreams, that he was falling for her, and then a receptionist tapped past on high heels and they slipped behind a frozen tank, and waited.

‘We need to find somewhere,' said Greg. ‘I will find somewhere.'

Rosemary, Jennifer and baby Caroline were at Brinden. ‘Rosemary dear,' said Mrs Pollard. ‘Fetch me my sunshade, will you? Mr Pollard is off working in Watford today.'

Rosemary nodded and set off on her peg legs to fetch a parasol from the hall. She was wearing a pale yellow shorts-and-bib playsuit that did not flatter her.

The babies dozed, fast asleep in the heat.

‘Jennifer, you need your orange juice, dear,' said Mrs Pollard, picking up the cap she was crocheting for her, and putting it down. ‘Not in this heat,' she murmured. ‘And one more brush of your hair. I bought you – Jennifer, when I was at my sister's house in Bushey, I bought you a Sindy doll book to cut out and dress. I only bought Rosemary some sweet cigarettes. Do you think they will be enough?' she said anxiously. ‘I have bought poor Evangeline nothing, of course.'

‘Thank you, Mrs Pollard,' said Jennifer politely. Her hair danced and dazzled in the glare.

Rosemary returned and sucked on her sweet cigarettes, two at a time. She stuck one behind her ear. Jennifer giggled.

‘Jennifer, my dear, now you can sit here and talk nicely to me whilst I try to set those curls in this dreadful heat,' said Mrs Pollard. ‘Mr Pollard will sketch you as a country maiden, holding some of his flowers, when he gets back later.' She turned to the drying fields. ‘I see no sign of a girl in a pale frock and petticoats today,' she mused.

‘No, Mrs Pollard,' said Jennifer.

‘Look! He's not in Watford,' said Rosemary as Pollard appeared with his clipboard and paper. ‘He's not,' she said, pointing at the shelter. ‘He's there.'

‘So he is,' said Mrs Pollard placidly.

‘I want to go home now,' said Jennifer.

‘Not yet, dear,' said Mrs Pollard.

Jennifer was silent for a few minutes.

‘But Mummy asked us to hang up the washing so it dries before evening,' she said uncertainly.

‘Time for your orange juice, dear,' said Mrs Pollard in her custard cream voice.

‘We have to look more urgently for Eva,' said Rowena as soon as Douglas came home that night.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Police round here are as ineffectual as the builders. Not that this new lot have cured these blasted problems either.'

In the night, there was old Mrs Crale, both half-demented child and crone, with her bedpan and her doll's-house room. She came trailing that eternal foul guilt. In the daytime, Rowena could periodically muffle the guilt, sidestep it, or even accept its validity, head bowed; but at night it was a monster that fed on her. It was Mrs Crale's face, the expression on it when she and Douglas had told her that she wasn't coping and that they had been in contact with her goddaughter, that was preserved in her mind and which always toppled her, the absolute panic in her poor faded eyes. The protest, agitation, weak attempts to prove her independence. Rowena turned away to face her pillow, Douglas snuffling beside her. Gregory Dangerfield came to her, and now in the depths of the night, her desire froze into pure panic. She turned abruptly to the ceiling, and Mrs Crale returned. There was no escape.

Rowena tensed her legs, threw her sheet back, utterly restless, and then she thought she heard a noise. It was from the other side of the house. She listened. Her bedroom was in the back section, the former number 2, facing Gregory's lawn, mercifully far from that landing and staircase in the old number 3, and everything in her resisted walking through those passages in the dark, but she needed to check on Bob and Caroline. The bulb outside her bedroom had blown. She crept along, the wallpaper with its racing-boat design leading her to the doorway, the step and staggered landing before the former number 3, and there she paused. She listened, her heart thumping. There was nothing, she reassured herself. She could hear her own breathing. Then there was a shuffling sound, like a light footfall, a rodent.

Could
Eva
have returned, and discovered that stuffed cupboard? They were so close, those two: had old Mrs Crale revealed to her this fusty doll's room on some visit in the past, before they had moved in? Did Eva now hide there as well as wherever else it was she stayed? Yet with its dust and stale closed air, it clearly hadn't been entered for some time.

‘Eva,' she said, unsteadily, and knocked lightly. ‘Eva,' she murmured, hoping against sense. She pressed her ear to the wood, straining to hear more. There was a general rustling, a flurry of floorboards shifting, pipes contracting, her own heartbeat hammering over the top. But wasn't this always the way? If you listened for long enough at night in an old house on the edge of a village, weren't there settlings and expansions, weather movements, animal sounds? Yet there were voices, quiet voices, she was certain of it: a hushed, murmuring layering of sounds. Were they coming from the pub outside? She ran into Caroline and Eva's bedroom, creeping past the cot, and listened from under the window. The sounds from outside – a car door, a couple of drunken calls – were quite distinct.

She went back on to the landing. There were pattering footsteps, the inching of a door. Her heart daggered into her throat. She couldn't move. Someone tapped her leg and she yelped.

‘Mummy!'

She jumped. ‘Bobby! Oh God, Bob.' She picked him up with a rough movement. He wriggled. ‘Bob,' she said, her heart banging against him. ‘My Bobbit. Why are you awake?'

‘They're here,' he said.

She swallowed. She tried to catch her breath. ‘Who? Where are “they”?'

He clambered back down, smiled, shrugged, pointed at the wall, then further down the passage, back at his room, and span round, grinning, pointing in all directions.

‘Yes, darling, and what do you hear?'

‘Dem peoples. Cats. Lady crying!'

‘Crying? How?'

He shrugged again. ‘Freddie here? But Eva not lookin' after now? Poor Freddie.'

‘Bob, darling,' said Rowena, pulling his head to her and stroking it rhythmically. ‘Tell me more. Have you
seen
any of these people, cats, Freddie?'

He hesitated. ‘No,' he said, looking up at her, eyes big dark pools in the night. ‘Yes,' he said.

‘OK, darling,' said Rowena, with a forced calm. ‘Tell me what they look like.'

He shook his head.

‘No? Nothing?'

‘Freddie is Freddie!' He giggled.

‘What about the other ones?'

‘No,' he said, his expression suddenly stiff.

‘Please, Bob. What do the others look like?'

He shook his head, tugging at her hand.

‘Please tell me.'

He shook his head. A tear wobbled from his eye, fear tangible on his face.

‘Bob—'

He began to cry, snuffling tears as he buried his face in her legs.

‘Shh, hush,' she said, holding him to her. ‘Don't wake the baby.'

She put him back to bed, and stroked him till he was sleeping, then tiptoed out.

She steeled herself. Almost calling aloud in her fear, she pressed at the panel of tongue-and-groove, running her fingers down the edge of the beading. As Gregory had said, it was flush against the planks; there was nothing visible. She put her hands exactly where she thought she remembered him pressing, but she could feel no movement under her fingers, as though the wood met solid wall. She pressed further down, but nothing gave. She was largely relieved. The night was silent, and finally she crept back into the other side of the house and into her bed.

THE NEXT MORNING,
the stains on the ceiling above the arch formed a crazy network, a scrabble of angles that resembled beaks, feet, trampled feathers. A section of plaster was working loose, a brown-edged rough-toothed shard of it. There was that smell of urine again, thought Rowena, that sourness they had unearthed when they attacked the wall: cat's piss, something rank and wet like damp straw. The
Je Reviens
was the tiniest note behind it. She remembered Mrs Crale wetting herself, and shuddered. She
had
needed care, she thought, trying to comfort herself. But it had not been a pure decision. She now cursed the day she had thought of moving here: it had been her idea, not Douglas's, though he had edged towards it with a series of doubts that had turned into justifications. She cursed the day. What was hers was not hers.

The phone rang. It was PC Baldihew calling in somewhat weary tones from Radlett. The police were clearly losing interest in their search as there were reports of sightings of this wild girl who was, to their eyes, little but a troubled runaway.

‘We
have
to find her,' said Rowena. ‘This isn't her . . . normal pattern of disappearances. Is it? Douglas?'

‘No,' grunted Douglas.

A shadow of a child passed the doorway in the next room. Rowena looked up. ‘Have we got—?'

She was silent.

‘Have we got what?' said Douglas absently as he looked through the London telephone directory.

‘Was there someone in there?'

‘No.'

‘I – where's Bob?'

‘In the khazi last time I looked. I need to go . . . Can you get my newer shirts ironed today? And weren't we meant to invite the Dangerfields for dinner? Have them round with the Bradshaws?'

‘Yes,' said Rowena quietly.

She looked down at her pinny after he had left to meet the cricket team for a Saturday lunch in the pub. She was crumpled, not yet model-trim, and she was to spend her day in a round of domestic tasks that after all these years as a housewife still felt somewhat beyond her capabilities. Her mother hadn't taught her adequately, as Douglas had hinted over the years. She wondered what had happened to that grammar school girl who, the teachers had all agreed, should go to university. The girl who had taken a secretarial course instead because her parents had thought it more useful, and then met Douglas Crale. What had happened to the girl who read reams of Wordsworth, Racine, Chaucer? Who knew the order of the kings and queens of England and could recite the periodic table of the elements? She missed that earnest prize-winner in a blue blouse who had not yet discovered that certain men found her attractive, that there was fun to be had in clubs and coffee bars. And five children?
Five?
She could never, ever have imagined as she sat there with her Latin primer that her body would bear her so many children.

‘I've seen Eva,' said Jennifer.

‘What?
Where?
'

Jennifer hesitated for the tiniest fraction of a second. ‘Mrs Pollard's.'

‘Have you seen her, Rosemary?' said Rowena rapidly.

Rosemary turned to her mother slowly, then shook her head.

Rowena looked at Jennifer. ‘You haven't seen her, have you?' she snapped, instinct informing her.

Jennifer widened her eyes until they were oversized blue jewels. They are utterly utterly blank, thought Rowena with a quiver of distaste. I don't trust her. She is hiding something.

‘Douglas,' said Rowena in desperation after her husband had made a noisy return home already tipsy and she had poured him a drink. ‘There's something I should – show you. In case, in case, Eva—' She held him protectively. ‘Please don't be upset—'

She left him upstairs and wandered out to the garden to avoid the sounds of him thundering about and cursing. His anger had always turned her rigid.

‘A sighting!' said Gregory through the laurel.

Rowena jumped.

‘I am in luck,' he said.

She cast her gaze quickly about her.

‘You've been waiting,' she said boldly.

‘Right first time. Come to a hotel with me?'

Electricity swarmed up her body. She looked at her feet. ‘You know I can't do that,' she said.

‘Where? Where then, heavenly creature? You know I want to
be
with you so badly.'

‘Hush,' said Rowena in a low voice, but all she wanted to do was slash her way through the hedge and place herself in his arms.

‘Stay home from church? Tomorrow?'

She dropped her gaze again. She paused. ‘I'll try.' She coloured. She turned her head. ‘Douglas,' she hissed, ran her hand through her hair and returned, aware of Gregory's gaze on her back. Her steps were unsteady.

Evangeline hovered over her as she did every time such desire caught her, and Mrs Crale appeared ghost-like behind her, prodding her with guilt and now outrage. Then the lust took over again. It was urgent. It blocked out the rest, for moments, like some divine drug tumbling through her body, and left a later residue of even more bitter guilt.