Touched (9 page)

‘Am I to
stay
?' said Evangeline thickly.

‘Course you can,' he said. ‘You can wipe me brushes.'

‘While she sits there to be pictured and painted, I am to be a slave girl?' said Eva, trembling, so hot she imagined herself bursting into flame.

Jennifer gazed impassively ahead. A small smile played on her lips, as though she were far away. Mrs Pollard watched her, then with her fingertip she applied a little touch of Vaseline she had mixed with lipstick. Jennifer sat there submissively as she did it.

‘I hate you,' said Eva to Jennifer in a long, low growl. Jennifer turned her head just slightly. ‘I hate you more than you can possibly imagine.'

‘If Pollard doesn't sort out this damp by tomorrow, I'm firing him,' said Douglas darkly.

‘He did the wall upstairs with no trouble, but yes . . .' said Rowena, letting her hair, which she was wearing loose today, fall over her face as she broke up mince in a pan.

‘I'm not sure he's got the ceiling straight, either.'

Rowena said nothing, but she had wondered if she had perceived a faint bulge in the area above the arch between the main rooms. She also worried about where Eva, who hadn't returned with the others, was. She hadn't seen her in the morning either. Setting the potatoes to boil, she muttered something about the washing, and walked out of number 2 into the darkening strip of garden, avoiding the gate on to the green, for she was hiding from Gregory Dangerfield. She was utterly shocked at herself: so shocked, she could not think about their kiss without trembling and panicking. He was her next-door neighbour. He was confident, laissez-faire, outrageous even. What if he told someone? Who might have been passing in a car through Elstree at night, a beam of headlights circling her face caught pressed against Greg's? She had never
dreamed
she would do such a thing. Douglas's fist – he who had not laid a hand on her – lifted in her mind, and behind him was the face of old Mrs Crale in shock.

Other images leapt at her: the scandal, her running away, gathering her children and running, running from shame and damnation, across the green, Caroline in her arms, Bob dragging on her hand, the twins in front, but where was Evangeline? She had slipped out of the picture. Another one seemed to be there. He flickered into her mind, and she swept him away, impatiently, just as she always dismissed the silly idea of Freddie. Where
was
Evangeline? And how would she make money? A sparse display of qualifications shuffled into place: that Distinction in her School Certificate. Secretarial college. The seventeen friend-packed months as ground staff for BEA, before Douglas Crale arrived and swept her from her desk. Marriage at twenty. She could type, and she could take shorthand. She had had elocution lessons disguised as speech and drama classes in her teens, and she was – she could admit it now, in desperation – considered nice-looking. But five children. Could you feed five children on that, as a shamed woman, an ‘A' branded on your forehead? She knew the answer.

She heard a voice and jumped. What if
Lana
Dangerfield caught her in the shadows? Threw a kitchen knife at her? She shrank among the bushes near the house.

She pressed herself against the warm bricks of the cottage wall, barely breathing. Two or three men chatted about the film, inconsequentially, words lost among clear sentences, ragged laughter floating over from the pub, an engine starting. She knew by their delivery that they were part of the crew, and they seemed to be packing up a vehicle outside her gate. She listened for a while, heard snatches of conversation, and then she started to inch her way back towards the kitchen, where the potatoes would be cooked.

‘Big family,' said one of them, and Rowena stopped and began to listen again. ‘. . . had to drag one of them off.'

‘. . . messing up the scene . . . don't look alike . . . Lally . . .'

There was more laughter, more noises as equipment was slung into a vehicle.

‘Creepy creepy . . .' Laughter. Rowena froze. Anger made her rigid. Leave her alone, she thought, and Evangeline's poor scrawny face came to her. She had looked hungry even as a baby, and yet she would not feed.

‘. . . bloody weird . . . it's those eyes. Like a doll . . .'

‘. . . zombie doll!'

‘. . . creepy eyes. She could have been in that John Wyndham film they made up here.'

Leave my daughter alone, thought Rowena, and she heard more laughter. She turned suddenly and strode to the gate.

‘
Shut up
about Eva,' she shouted, just as the van door was being slammed.

‘Eva?' said the one in the driver's seat through his open window as he reversed. He looked puzzled. The man beside him said something, and he accelerated forward. ‘Bye,' he called, and drove off fast.

‘
My daughter
,' she shrieked.

‘Rowena!' called Gregory, running down his lawn towards the laurel, and she started and ran back inside the house. As she scraped burnt potatoes from the bottom of the pan without the light on, she saw him in the ilex shadows, searching for her, and she wanted to weep with longing to be held by him, just as she wanted to cry with shame.

‘Where is
Eva
?' said Rowena as she cleared up the dishes, straightened her back and sighed.

‘She was at Mrs Pollard's this afternoon,' said Jennifer, and Rowena nodded. Baby Caroline had come back happy and sleepy. Perhaps Eva had stayed there?

When the children were in bed, Rowena tried to read in the new room, the side the lodgers had lived in, where there was no stain. She lay back in the new wicker chair Douglas had let her buy, and admired the orange plastic lampshade on the pendant light. But as she gazed at its amazing tangerine glow, a spot entered the periphery of her vision like a fly. Her scalp tightened. She stayed very still before she made herself look, putting off that moment, preserving happiness. On the arch, that stiff defeated remnant of the wall, there was a small stain on that side of the room too. It began on the ceiling, and made the paper bulge into a small crumbling brown intrusion. There was no escape. The water seeping through the tiles glittered darkly in the other section, just visible from where she sat, and eventually Rowena put down her book and left the room. When will this
end
?
s
he thought with a suppressed sob, and went to check on the children.

Someone was up there, murmuring. An adult voice, a sigh like an exhalation. ‘Bob!' she cried, bursting into his room, but he was asleep, and lifted his head only when she ran over to him.

‘Hush, hush,' she said to him, and ran into Eva's room, where there was no one but the baby. She had not expected Eva to be there. The window, she thought for the first time. Here was the window in the roof. It was too high for Eva to have looked out of it, but she must have climbed on a chair or a stool, or dragged her chest over and watched the filming. She felt relieved. Uncertainty about that face nagged at her, but of course it was Eva, dressed as a Victorian. It had been so fleeting, she might even have imagined it in the first place.

There were no more sounds. Walking through the new doorway Pollard had created into the other cottage, she nearly tripped on a step that he had had to build there in the corridor. Rosemary and Jennifer were in their bedrooms, Rosemary reading and Jennifer listening to the little wireless she had received for her birthday.

‘I wonder,' said Douglas, returning at nearly midnight from an outing with some work colleagues, reeking of alcohol. ‘Perhaps we were too hard on Mother. This was her home and—'

‘Don't say that, don't say that,' said Rowena frantically, instant tears springing to her eyes, but he merely grunted in response, lying on her chest with his mouth open, already falling asleep, dribbling like a baby.

She could smell her mother-in-law's perfume again. She got up and threw the window wider open, gulping air and looking through the moonlit night for Gregory Dangerfield in his large house, willing, willing him to look out at his own garden from a bedroom. In her mind, she climbed down the creeper and flitted barefoot across his lawn towards him, but though she tried to banish her, Mrs Crale chased her, feeble and stumbling.

IN THE MORNING,
the stain was feathering over the basket-weave, its bright sunshine-coloured patterning bulbous with spreading tufts and runnels of damp that ran from the ceiling to the underside of the arch.

‘I can't bear this,' Rowena murmured, turning away from it. I don't know what to do, she thought.

Douglas hugged her, cursed under his breath, summoned Pollard and fired him. Pollard nodded and received the news with his usual self-possession. It was as though he held something back; as though he knew something, or was amused.

‘There is no cause for that wall and ceiling damp I can establish,' he said. ‘Every pipe and coupling, stopcock, all the washers and tanks is checked. The tiles, gutters, the lids. You've got no rads yet on this side. Isn't a referred leak – all the rads on the other side flushed and bled. As for the floor, my thinking is you're on an underground spring and when you took up the old flooring on this side and dug deeper, the earth got too thin. Membrane broke. Plenty o' hidden rivers round here. Trickling, juggling into London and abouts. The Fleet, the Darent, the Colne, the Quaggy—'

‘Thank you, Pollard,' said Douglas cursorily, put a day's wages into his hand as a gesture of goodwill since his wife was useful, and went out to drive to the station for work.

‘I hope that Mrs Pollard caring for Caroline in the mornings will make up a bit of the loss,' said Rowena, who felt sorry for Pollard, though he seemed to have accepted the news with alacrity and was humming as he cleared his tools with his usual incongruous physical grace.

Soon after he left, two builders from a London firm arrived. ‘Just watch them root out that leak,' Douglas told Rowena on the phone. ‘It can't be much of a challenge. It's not as though we're living at bloody Knebworth.'

‘They do have delightful designs for the breakfast nook,' she said uncertainly.

‘These provincials like Pollard can't compare,' said Douglas. ‘Though they're half the price.'

She was now able to acknowledge to herself that the ceiling was sagging. The little sections left of the original wall were bleeding and oozing. She ached over the loss of her expensive wallpaper. A new stain seemed to spread in front of her eyes and she still thought she could smell the dead canary among the mould and dirty water. Her guilt and her unease felt overwhelming. She looked back. This wrongness had started when they knocked down the dividing wall. No, it was before that. It was when they had very tentatively raised the idea of moving to Crowsley Beck, misgivings stalling their discussions, justifications sustaining them. Mrs Crale loomed so much larger here, in her very house, than Rowena had ever known she would.

The new builders were dressed in branded overalls, came equipped with various tools that were clearly more sophisticated than any owned by Arthur Pollard, set damp meters about the house, removed the old thermoplastic tiles, and projected an air of hushed capability.

‘Where
is
the damp coming from?' said Rowena to Douglas that evening, her wallpaper by now flopping in sections, grey and gritty with mould. She wanted it scraped off, scraped and peeled and scrubbed and burnt.

He paused. ‘Damned if I know,' he said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Afraid these fellows can't work out the bloody problem yet either, competent though they are. Don't worry, they'll get there.'

The rain blew through the summer as the weeks passed, hurtling down the gutters, gulleys, drains. The green was drenched, the elms bowed. The windows wept. And still it came sheeting down, spilling in. The refurbishments in the number 2 section of the house remained pin bright, cosy, yet exhilaratingly à la mode. But once you stood in the number 3 side, the cottage-hunched shadows clustered and the black reticulated puddle on the floor was growing. Rowena watched, transfixed, the little bubbles and burps of liquid that rose as the rain continued its assault.

A hand touched hers, and there was the smell of grubby warm hair. ‘Freddie,' she said instinctively. ‘Bob,' she added, because she had to, but Bob was in the next room. She looked down at her own hands. One had touched the other.

Rowena drove baby Caroline to Mrs Pollard's since no one wanted to walk her through the mud of the Brinden lane. The carrycot jumped and slid on the back seat as she accelerated over skidding puddles and loosened stones. Bob chattered beside her. When she got back, the twins were out with their friends and she was alone with little Bob, but there seemed to her to be another child there, in the other room. Had she arranged for a friend's son to come over, she wondered? Had she
forgotten
about someone's young child and left him in the house? She panicked for a fragment of a second. Of course she hadn't, she thought, her heart racing. So why was there that feeling again, of another child in the house? A boy. And where was Eva? She had been absent for too long this time.

Rowena watched the rain, clutching Bob till he protested, and the perfume smell, the
Je Reviens
, came creeping, retreating, progressing, down the stairs. I am afraid of this house, she thought finally. She felt tearful. A house such as this, a lovely house in a perfect village wonderfully close to London had been her fantasy during a decade and more in a box in the suburbs. As a provincial herself – as Douglas would have sniffily called her with her humble-to-middling Hampshire origins – she felt untethered if she was too far from the capital. Crowsley Beck was perfect. Perfect.

But there is something up there, she thought, and even the staircase seemed to seep with an impenetrable sense of shadow that gathered with more determination on the landing and in Bob's room. Mrs Crale's room, she thought, then stopped herself. She slipped out to look again for the window that she had seen on the film, certain that Gregory would be at the power station. She stood on the green and gazed upwards, but she was puzzled, because there were two windows in the roof, whereas the bedroom only had one. Hadn't Gregory said this in the beginning? She cast her mind back, a warmth, a wistfulness for him returning to her because she hadn't seen him, though she had heard him humming at the end of his garden, whistling, singing snatches of opera even, romantic arias she recognised and knew were for her. She relived their kiss after the screening. Her knees buckled a little.