Touched (16 page)

‘We must bring them more, Mummy,' said Rosemary. ‘Especially Ginger. I have to look after him for Jennifer. Meribell went away quite quickly. I think she died. Poor Eva.'

The house was silent, shuttered and dark, marginally tidier in the cluttered areas, but cheerless in a fashion neither of them had seen before. Fly nets were placed over plates of dried meat and fruit, now browning. Seedlings left on a windowsill were drooping. Rowena picked her way through the semi-cellar rooms at the back of the house, over lawnmower parts, tools and rusting containers, oil staining her legs as she clambered through the warren of storage spaces she had previously navigated, but she could no longer find the door to the pink bedroom. It wasn't where she had remembered it; there was only a wall where she had thought the door would be, and the mangle was elsewhere, the tricycle nowhere to be seen, and she was uncertain about her orientation. She returned a different way to where she thought the pantry was, and came out through a door to the kitchen yard instead.

Rowena found Mrs Pollard's dining room, where the oil portrait of Jennifer jumped out at her in the gloom, and she began to cry again. ‘It is
wrong
,' she said. ‘Oh, Rosemary, don't look.' But Rosemary was crying too, sobbing red-faced as she rarely did. They cried together, clutching each other as the police began their search. The house and grounds were too big to inspect in one day, they said, and they would work until nightfall, then call in more officers the following day to comb the entire place if necessary.

‘I
do
not,' said Evangeline at The Farings, sitting on the sofa in her grandmother's dress and pinafore, kicking up one leg after the other and revealing the trim of her gored petticoat until she was frowned at.

The lady policeman was asking her lots of questions that she could answer very easily, although she was grilled extensively and the police officer thought it fit to chide her for the suffering imposed on her mother. Eva sat up straight and answered in her level chalky voice. She had been sleeping in the fields and gardens all around, she said; it was so hot, so airless inside. She missed her grandmother, and her parents should not have taken her house and knocked down her wall. She was very angry with them for that; so angry, she would rather avoid them. She had spent some time at the Pollards'. Had she seen Jennifer there? Yes, her sisters had played there in the past, and she had seen Jennifer there recently. How often did she see Jennifer? Not often. How would she describe Jennifer's character? It was hard to say: she was quiet, undemanding, but of a sunny disposition. ‘All any
one
ever notices about her is how
she
looks,' said Eva. ‘It is all about her.'

She was questioned for over three hours. She managed not to address Freddie, recalled all the answers she had prepared, and was twice asked to repeat details of her whereabouts, itemising nights spent at Brinden, in woods, sheds, hedges and the garden, demonstrating a consistency that finally satisfied the officer.

Rowena returned and talked to the police officer as Rosemary made cups of tea, awkwardly placing an arm around her crying mother, while Evangeline disappeared upstairs. There were new framed pictures on the walls of her grandmother's staircase, Eva noticed, a modern jagged black-and-white rug on the landing. She spat on it, and rubbed the spittle in with her foot.

Bob emerged from his room and wrapped his arms about her, laughing. ‘I seen Freddie more van you, Evie!'

Evangeline looked down at his round eyes gazing up at her. She tousled his hair and bit her lip.

‘Have you,
Bob
?'

‘Yus yus. When you away, Freddie here!'

‘You
looked
after Freddie?'

‘I like Freddie.'

‘Yes, Bob. I haven't seen Freddie for
an
age.'

‘I
sees him
,' said Bob.

‘I don't. Where?'

‘By Mummy's back. Kitchen. Here. I like Freddie!'

‘Yes,' said Eva. ‘What does he look
like
? How old is he?'

Bob shrugged.

‘Smaller than you?'

‘Bigger,' said Bob firmly, nodding.

‘Bigger or smaller
than
me?'

‘Bit – bit smaller.'

‘Who does he like most?'

‘Mummy,' said Bob instantly.

Child Actress Vanishes
, said the headline, accompanied by a still from
Blush
in which a widening effect of the lens flattened Jennifer's face, and, as in the film, lent her an almost ordinary appearance. In black-and-white, her hair's blondeness could have been mouse toned, and the eyes that had seemed to possess an almost worrying glare in the footage were unremarkable in the still.

Brinden was revisited, fields and woods as far as Epping searched; every rally driver who had gathered in the village at the time of Jennifer's disappearance was interviewed and profiled.

There was, thought Rowena, quite simply spite in The Farings. Could they really live in this village where the house turned against them and they lost children? Dreams, already shattered, were irretrievable: it was the nightmare now that she fought.

The walls on either side of the arch between the two houses were openly flaunting their canker, the ceiling opening slowly in brown-ringed sections of plaster. Sometimes rooms were bathed with
Je Reviens
; at other times, decay dominated. The wallpaper was furry with bulges of mould, as though mice ran under it. In a previous period, the decomposition would have made Rowena despair. Now it merely formed the backdrop to chaos as the past soaked in.

Eva's absences increased once again, but now she would appear just as her mother showed signs of agitation.

She crept down the stairs, her stockinged feet making no noise, but Rowena grabbed her as she entered the main room.

‘You must stay at home more!'

‘Do
not
worry about me,' said Eva. ‘I am safe. It's the summer.'

‘But where do you go?'

Eva gazed. ‘Same,' she said, her lips' stubborn set momentarily silencing Rowena. Rather than her usual dress, petticoats and pinafore, she was wearing an elaborate lace blouse with a long skirt that was too big for her.

Rowena gave an exasperated sigh. ‘You will look for Jennifer?'

Eva nodded.

‘Everywhere?'

‘Yes.'

‘
Everywhere
you go, Eva. Call and search.'

‘Yes,
I'll
look.'

‘Eva,' Rowena called just as Evangeline was leaving. She turned, clasping her skirt at the waist. ‘How did you
know
Jennifer had disappeared?'

‘I didn't,' said Eva.

‘But you did. When—'

‘When?'

‘When I found you. You knew. You comforted me and said not to worry.'

‘Oh, I—' said Eva, and she paused.

‘You know something,' Rowena said, her voice catching.

Eva dropped her gaze. When she looked up, her eyes glistened.

‘No, Mummy.'

‘You never call me “Mummy”. What is it you know? You must
tell
me.'

Eva paused for the smallest fragment of time.

‘I heard you calling for her from upstairs. I don't know where she is,' she said. ‘But I'm sure
she's
safe.'

Later in the day, Rowena lay on the floor gazing at the ceiling as Bob had his nap and Rosemary played with the post office children. The night had once more been devoid of sleep, Rowena only dozing just before the alarm went, then turning sick with tiredness to her pillow to cry. The ceiling sagged. Do your worst, she thought. If it fell on her, it would take away all pain and all fear. There was a tap from upstairs, a rush, a burp of sound, and a stain moved over the ceiling in front of her eyes to meet others, so slowly, so slowly she was barely certain, and she smelled again the cat's urine, along with the scent
.
She could, she noticed, only detect the perfume at certain times of the month.

She willed the stain further, her head fuzzy. Fall on me, she thought. She heard Greg's car door slam outside. She knew when he arrived home at lunchtime – he said he preferred his wife's cooking to the canteen sludge, and that anxious, good plain wife was always ready in a pinny – just as she knew the time he swung out again, his jacket over his shoulder, spinning his hat on to the seat beside him.

She lay there and felt herself a little, longing for him as tears rolled down the sides of her face. The walls seemed to creep in on her. Squash me, she thought. There was a knock on the door, and she turned her head but didn't get up. A cockerel cried outside, at the wrong time of day, and water shimmered in the corner.

‘Rowena?' called Gregory softly. He inched open the door. ‘Rowena.'

‘In here,' she said.

The sun pattered in tentative warmth over the tiles, and there he was, immensely tall above her.

‘“She loosed the chain, and down she lay,”' he said. ‘How exquisite you are, Lady Crale.'

She smiled up at him. ‘You are beautiful,' she said, barely moving her mouth.

He knelt beside her and stroked her feet, trailing his fingers up her calves so she shivered. He stroked her for a long time. She tried to pull him closer, but he resisted, lingering on her thighs, playing, tickling, holding back, occasionally dipping to kiss the crook of her elbow and her neck until she grasped him.

‘Patience, Lady Crale,' he said, murmuring right inside her ear. ‘I want to kiss the freckles on your haughty nose. Your hair is ember-coloured in the sun. Your figure is the finest I have ever seen. Patience.'

‘No,' she moaned.

‘No one here?' he said, feeling in his pocket.

She shook her head. All she wanted, she thought, was him inside her right now, hard and insistent, ridding her of loss, of guilt, of misery, of everything. He plunged into her and she cried out and she was alive; she was alive. She loved him.

‘We could make this a regular meeting,' he said afterwards. ‘Suddenly I have developed a taste for the power station's reconstituted shepherd's pie.'

‘Oh yes. Yes.'

‘Every day at ten past one. We will find places to be together. To do . . . whatever you need to do until your daughter comes back.'

‘Oh, Greg. I – I think I lo—'

‘Hush now,' he said, and she froze.

‘I love you, Lady Crale,' he called as he closed the front door, and she lay there in the sun.

She will come back, she whispered to herself.

She allowed the little boy to be in the other room, to make a shadow on the corner of her eye. Then, for the first time, she called him to her, and tried to embrace him, but he hovered next door and wouldn't come.

She lay there with just her mind to play with till Bob woke. She thought about John Profumo, about the Russian and the osteopath and their women, as she had from the start of the scandal. Every day she scoured the papers for more to distract her for a few minutes at a time. Even Mr Kennedy, it seemed, cheated on that lovely wife of his with actresses and strippers. They were more immoral than her, the whole lot of them.

Or were they? She might make love with a married man, but a worse guilt hooked her and inhabited her. She was haunted by an old lady she had wronged and by children she had lost. She felt a little hand in hers, and pulled Freddie to her.

THERE WAS STILL
no Jennifer, only police and journalists, nosy neighbours and more questions, and a house that made a mockery of its inhabitants.

Douglas Crale threw himself into his work, travelling to London early each morning, then ranting by telephone to the police and Rowena. Rowena moved in a daze, and all that kept her breathing and fighting was Gregory Dangerfield. Intimacy blanked out reality. He invented any number of meetings and research trips, and during those times, she began to leave Bob with the pensioner three doors down who had been friends with Mrs Crale. She seemed to look at Rowena askance but was kind to Bob and let him watch
Andy Pandy
with his snack.

 

‘You're back, Mr Pollard,' said Evangeline, who was making enough appearances at home to keep her parents calm. Jumping out at him from the bushes, she skipped beside him as he made his way from his old farm van along the path to his back door at Brinden.

‘Chickabiddy,' said Pollard with a smile, his blue eyes scanning the distance, his dancer gait graceful even as he carried a sack of cement.

‘Oh, I
am
your favourite!' said Eva. ‘I hope I am, I am, not
that
Jennifer with her dimple.' She laughed.

‘Have an apple. You are the one I knew from the start, silly missy, so remember it.'

‘
Be
fore the start, Pollard,' said Eva primly. ‘Oh, Pollard, you are the only one who understands! They all think I have mostly
been
wandering the lanes like a vagrant and gypsy. Even the lady policeman believed it all.'

‘You're a naughty one. Hush now, Eva. I needs to see the missus, then I will set you a new treasure hunt. There's lots you haven't found already, even with your nosy ways.'

‘What? What?'

‘Plenty. There's a tree platform hidden. There's washrooms, more tool sheds and lofts, more gates behind bramble patches. Here's a bet you haven't found all the yards. A Caramac for every new bit you find.'

‘Oh, I love it here so much, Mr Pollard. When I am with dear Grand
mamma
, I wonder to myself what is going on in lovely wild Brinden.'

They reached the shed, where they smoked a cigarette, poured plastic into petal moulds for the roses, and jiggled to ‘From Me to You'. Eva sat and watched him as he cooked them a fried breakfast, and planned what she would take back for her grandmother.

‘I must return to Grandmamma soon,' she said, and Pollard, prodding the tomatoes, nodded.