Touched (8 page)

The MG appeared through the arc of horse chestnuts leading into the village and crunched to a halt on the lane.

‘Got you a viewing of the rushes,' said Gregory, letting his dog leap out.

‘I'm sorry?'

‘Come and see the rushes tomorrow. The dailies. What they filmed today.'

‘Already tomorrow?' said Rowena, bemused.

‘Oh, they put it in the bath overnight and the important bods view a rough cut. Lally knows the producer – rather well, if you ask me – and I persuaded her to get us sneaked in to the viewing theatre as a favour, to have a squint at today's footage.'

‘But . . . Douglas?' Rowena murmured, looking at her toes.

Gregory hesitated. ‘He can come along too, I'm sure. It'll be only a few seconds, you understand. Who'll be left with the brats?'

‘We have no sitter yet.'

‘I'll send ours over. Mother of the star, of course you must come along. A rare opportunity.'

‘She has four words,' said Rowena, noticing that she argued with Gregory or contradicted him by rote, when she wanted to do quite the opposite.

‘I'll pick you up at eight. Or you and old Douglas. Then we'll bowl over to Elstree.'

‘I – Greg—'

‘Come on, it'll be fun. It'll be a Friday night, so Lally says they might get up a bit of a party.'

‘The Pollards want you to visit again,' said Eva to Jennifer in a low monotone. ‘You are
want
ed at Brinden.'

‘Oh,' said Jennifer. ‘All right.'

She gave a slight smile, and it was that smile that made Eva want to scream close to her face.

The smoke was so thick in the screening room, Rowena blinked. She coughed, intimidated by these people who were alien to her, a world apart: a planet of louche ease, hardness, success. ‘Join them,' said Gregory, and she took one of his Stuyvesants. She was trying to get the taste back for smoking, because her London friends had unanimously declared it kept them trim. She felt her stomach again surreptitiously as she sat, and held it in for Gregory, and wondered whether Douglas would stray before she could force herself to make love with him again, because after all, who wanted to be tied to a frigid dairy cow? She tensed her stomach even harder, and pulled in her cheeks.

‘Relax,' whispered Gregory. ‘You are beautiful,' he said, as though reading her mind. He beckoned the director, who ignored him. ‘Prannet,' Gregory muttered, then hailed him loudly and called out his name. He came over.

Gregory held out his hand. ‘Friends of Miss Lyn,' he said lazily. ‘Mother of the kid actress is here too. Where's a bloke to get a drink? Ah, thank you.'

He poured Rowena and himself a large cup of the red wine someone had brought in. He was the perfect gentleman, thought Rowena. He looked after her. He strolled over to the table where the director stood, grabbed a bottle and refilled her cup, and yet, sitting beside her he didn't touch her and he said nothing further of a flattering nature. He chatted to her and to others around them, discussing the film, his attention equally shared: she did not have to resist him, which perversely made her want him to flirt with her. Lally Lyn arrived in a houndstooth skirt that was so short, Rowena gasped to herself. ‘Miss Lyn has forgotten to attend her wardrobe fitting,' Gregory announced, and Lally paused, wide-eyed, then laughed loudly.

There were many delays, much cursing, tension and cynical joking. I am quite, quite gone, thought Rowena, fuzzily, and she wanted to lean against Gregory, but he was talking to the editor. He returned to his seat, grinned at her, and she sat back in delectable anticipation as the film rolled. It was a black-and-white picture, a small British production, and the green seemed barrel shaped and quaint, fringed by over-dark elms. There stood Jennifer, hands held in front of her as she listened and nodded at Lally Lyn's animated importuning. Rowena tried to deny it to herself, but Jennifer looked puzzlingly ordinary. The camera tightened in on her as she said her one line. In truth, she was a disappointment. The lighting, or the celluloid process itself, somehow failed to capture the breathtaking aspect of her physiognomy. In fact, she looked almost strange, a little disturbing, the eyes that were so glitteringly kingfisher in real life like an empty glare. Rosemary and Bob were just recognisable in the background with other village children.

‘Jolly good,' whispered Gregory without conviction.

The camera panned to the cottages alongside the green and Rowena felt the satisfying swoop of familiarity as real life played back to her, and then she thought she saw something. She stared, and blinked. There was a face in a roof window of her house. It had gone. She must have imagined it, she thought; must have put together shadows to make features.

The minutes of film juddered to a halt.

‘You'll now see endless takes of the same scene,' whispered Gregory, and Rowena nodded and concentrated. She couldn't blink. She didn't even breathe. And there, as the camera panned swiftly over the cottages beside the green, there was a face in a skylight of The Farings. In its fleetingness she could not be entirely certain – such a tiny detail that no one else would have seen it – but it seemed to her, in a fragment of a second, that the film had caught a face in the shadows of the window, a head in ruffles of lace, in a lace cap, the eyes staring out over the horizon. The crying wrinkled face came back to her, the haunted eyes of homelessness, but of course it was Eva, dressed in her grandmother's clothes. She looks so like her, Rowena thought miserably, and she leaned against Gregory.

‘What's this?' said Gregory, glancing down at her with an amused expression, then he put his arm around her.

‘I – I feel a little faint,' she said.

‘Just watch the last takes and we can leave,' he murmured.

The same scene ran again, Jennifer delivering her line with no more conviction. Rowena stared at the screen. This time, the face wasn't there. She frowned. She watched the next take, and all that followed, and the face was no longer in the window.

‘Can you take me out, Gregory?' she said.

‘Mrs Crale does not feel well,' he announced, standing. ‘It's an oven in here. Splendid job, chaps. Can't wait to see snoozing Crowsley Beck on the silver screen.'

‘I feel sick,' said Rowena, leaning against Gregory in the cooling air.

He held her arm. He hesitated, then pulled her against him so she could feel the warmth of his skin beneath his shirt. She quivered. The wine rolled inside her. She wanted life, hot dark urgent life, not guilt, this endless growing guilt.

‘You can,' she said.

‘I can?' he said playfully, but his voice snagged.

‘Yes.'

‘Are you sure?' he said earnestly, lifting her chin and looking her in the eye.

She pressed against him, gazing back. He was all dark brows and shaded sockets, his contrasts black and pale silver in the night, like film.

She nodded. ‘Yes,' she said.

The damp was oozing up through the tiles again, a pool now catching the moonlight and infusing the room with the breath of brackish water. Rowena hurried past it. Was it a mistake coming here? The thought came at her obliquely, as though it were not her own. She wouldn't countenance it, she thought stoutly. They simply had to be patient. She remembered the dead canary, Mrs Crale's, and almost thought she could smell it as a dank decaying undernote. Its cage was in the side porch, waiting for the Radlett rag-and-bone man. Douglas must have disposed of its body. The damp stain above her – I must face it, face it all down, she thought hectically – was growing and now it started to look faintly avian to her, like the poor shot birds on Mrs Crale's ugly wallpaper, and oh, she had done wrong. She vomited, between the sink and the kitchen floor, and then stood there panting. ‘My God,' she said out loud. Her forehead cold; she cleared up, gagging again, and washed herself.

She forced herself up the staircase to check on Bob and Caroline. Was that where Eva hid, then, somewhere in the loft, up here? She glanced at the hatch in the landing ceiling, dimly illuminated. It was barely a loft, Douglas had said: the bedrooms themselves were built into a portion of the roof, so there was only a shallow tent-shaped storage space up there. Was poor Eva crouched in the loft? Rowena didn't want to know. She didn't want to see her strange daughter in her strange Victorian clothes talking to her awful invented friend. She did not. She checked on her little ones, ran down the stairs and back up the other staircase into her own room, and there was Douglas spreadeagled and asleep. ‘Sorry,' she murmured. ‘Sorry. I'm sorry.'

THE NEXT DAY,
Pollard knocked through the wall on the upper floor in under two hours, the bricks, lath and plaster succumbing limply to his blows in a settling spray of dust and dirt, as though already defeated.

Jennifer offered to take baby Caroline to Mrs Pollard's. Rowena watched her as she darted all the way round the back to the far staircase to fetch Caroline's sun bonnet from her room. Rosemary stayed at home to draw, Rowena cleared up, and the boy was behind her again. Boy, she wondered? Why had she thought there was a boy? Bob was running around by himself, noticeably energetic in the garden, but she had felt something like a glimmer or a lash on the side of her eye: a knowledge that someone was there. It was as though the air was disturbed. She drew herself up and dismissed it quite strictly, and Jennifer dashed back into the room with Caroline's little mint-coloured sun bonnet and set off with the perambulator.

Eva had shown Jennifer a new track she had found across the fields behind the stream that they could use when the weather was hot and the mud had all dried, though baby Caroline bounced up and down on groaning springs, asleep or crying. It was faster than going by the lanes round the back of the village.

Eva was already there when Jennifer arrived.

‘Why
are you here?' she hissed to Jennifer.

‘To see Mrs Pollard,' said Jennifer calmly.

Eva glanced at her. There was little else to say. ‘Why?
Why
?' she said eventually. ‘Do you like Mr
Pollard
?'

‘I like them both,' said Jennifer. ‘Mrs Pollard's hairdressing salon is starting today in the garden. I am to be her first model girl.'

‘Is that what's in that frilly-silly bag you carry? All your hair
ribbons
and brushes?'

‘Yes,' said Jennifer, and smiled.

Eva glared at her.

Mrs Pollard's hairdressing salon involved the placing of chairs under a shelter that Mr Pollard had constructed using a canvas stretched across two walls of breeze block. The girls worked hard together heating Mrs Pollard's wiry bob into a temporary smoothness with hair irons that drew a singed smell, then held her fringe back with a velvet headband. It began to spring loose, so they soaked it in hairspray and added rows of kirby grips, concealed by the band. Mrs Pollard sat very stiff all the while, in a sort of trance, her cream voice stilled.

When they had finished, she stirred herself, examined Jennifer's palms and rubbed in some Astral. ‘The hairspray will dry them out,' she said. She whisked a wet flannel over Jennifer's face, then patted her cheeks and the tip of her nose with some sun lotion, passing a scoop to Eva without looking at her.

‘Stand up nice and straight, my pet,' she said, repositioning Jennifer's shoulders, and went off to fetch some semolina.

‘Is it always to be the food Jennifer
likes
?' growled Eva, barely audibly, as Mrs Pollard returned.

Mrs Pollard cast her a glance.

‘That baby food Jennifer eats,' said Eva after an awkwardly long pause. Her eyes were glittering. ‘Shall she have
some
rusks, then?'

‘Now, now, dear,' said Mrs Pollard impassively. Idly, she picked up Jennifer's spoon and held it to her mouth.

A look of disquiet came over Jennifer's face, and she paused, stiffly, then took a mouthful.

‘Good girl,' said Mrs Pollard.

Mrs Pollard selected a number of clips, grips and a can of Elnett and teased and lacquered Jennifer's hair into a tall beehive and attached a little bow at its front. She stood back to admire her work. She stared at Jennifer for some time.

‘The prettiest girl in the kingdom, who—'

‘She
looks
like a woman!' Eva interrupted, with undisguised indignation. ‘She looks so tall!
Grown
up almost. Like a lady.'

‘Now you're ready for Arthur,' said Mrs Pollard.

‘What do you mean?' said Eva.

‘For the new painting. Arthur wants to do some photographs first with his Instamatic camera he bought himself earlier in the year. He had a contract to build three shops! And after that, he treated himself. Now, dear, can you walk carefully to the shed? Don't let the heat spoil your do.'

‘But – but—' said Eva. ‘He is working at our home.'

‘He was going to come back. Did you want your hair done too?' said Mrs Pollard casually, looking back.

‘Pollard is here?' said Eva. ‘He is here?' She squinted.

‘Don't screw up your face like that, my dear. It's bad for beauty. Arthur's at work in his shed. Arranging the sheets for behind the chair. He had to prepare a canvas too.'

Mrs Pollard shielded Jennifer with a parasol as she led her round the house, through the cauliflower beds, to the tangled patch of briar and nettle where Pollard's painting shed stood. Cats followed them.

‘Make sure you don't get stung,' she said.

‘Where
as
I can?' said Eva, jumping on the nettles and stinging herself. She hissed like one of the cats.

‘Now, dear,' said Mrs Pollard calmly to her. ‘You must put some of my cream on those. Jennifer, keep your chin tilted. We are nearly there. You can have your little nap afterwards.'

‘Beautiful,' said Mr Pollard phlegmatically, glancing up at Jennifer. He nodded at Eva, winked at her. ‘Sit yourself there on the chair, Jenn'fer.'