The Influence (14 page)

Rowan wrote
Lots of love from your Rowan
and then glared at Vicky. “Maybe you think you could do better.”

“I’ll write it out for you if you like.”

“I don’t like. I don’t want you to do my writing for me.” She added some lines of kisses and stood up. “I’ll just tell Jo we’re going.”

“You needn’t. She was only interfering. I never—” Vicky’s eyes were suddenly opaque. “Let’s be off.”

“What were you going to say?”

“Nothing to do with you. Don’t you want to see where your mother works?”

“We’re going to, aren’t we? What’s your hurry?”

Vicky flung up her hands, and the shadow of one swelled over Rowan. “How long do you expect me to wait?”

All at once the room seemed dark and oppressive and chill. If this was Vicky’s impatience, Rowan didn’t like it much, especially when her legs began to shiver. Then Vicky turned away, and Rowan stumbled out of the house, her head swimming. The sunlight lit up her mind as she rang Jo’s rattly bell. “We’re going to mummy,” she said.

Jo shrugged. “That’s up to her,” she said, and closed the door.

The door of the big house closed like an echo. Vicky’s white dress seemed to brighten as she crossed the road and made a face at Jo’s house. “Wouldn’t you like to be able to go wherever you choose?”

“Like you, you mean?”

“You read my mind,” Vicky said with a meaningful look.

Just now, riding the bus without a grown-up was enough of an adventure. The streets were full of people she would never meet, every house held secrets she would never see. A man unrolled a carpet along the pavement of a side street, another pasted an eye bigger than himself onto a billboard. A scrapyard was scattered with a giant’s fingernail clippings: mudguards. In Liverpool, in the street that led up to the hospital, early drunks seemed to be playing a game, touching all the bases of the lampposts. Vicky led the way into the muggy hospital. “Mummy will be upstairs, I think,” Rowan whispered.

Nobody seemed to notice them as they ran up the stony uncarpeted stairs, past a folded wheelchair like a slice of itself. By the time they saw the sign for the ward where her mother worked, Rowan was sweating. Vicky, who looked absolutely cool, pushed open the double doors and followed her in, and Rowan caught sight of her mother beyond a door just inside the ward. She inched the door open, enjoying the surprise she was about to give her mother.

She faltered. There was an old man in the bed, a tiny bald old man with crippled hands. He looked as if his skin had shrunk almost to the point of tearing. What was he doing here? He oughtn’t to be in a children’s ward. Then his large sad eyes met hers, and she realised he was a child.

She wanted to flee, to run out of the hospital before her mother saw her. She was still trying when her mother swung round and came grimly at her, taking her by the shoulders with a firmness that felt like the threat of bruises and marching her out of the room. “I’ll be back shortly,” she said to the withered boy as she closed the door, and urged Rowan into the corridor. “What on earth do you think you’re doing, child?”

“There isn’t any school today,” Rowan stammered, glancing about for Vicky. “The electrician had an accident. Daddy may get the job now.”

“That’s all very well, but do you realise how ill that boy is I was talking to? Don’t you know any better than to disturb him?”

Rowan felt her lips begin to tremble as her eyes filled with tears. “I wanted to see where you worked. I only wanted to give you a surprise.”

“Well, you succeeded.” Her mother patted her face, not too gently. “Now, young lady, don’t turn on the taps. I can’t waste time on that while there are children here who need looking after. Couldn’t you have stayed with Jo?”

Rowan felt as if she hardly existed as a person any more, as if she were just an inconvenience her mother had to deal with, especially when her mother sighed and said “What are we going to do with you? I’d have you read to the little ones, but sister won’t let children visit. All the hospitals were like that when Hermione had to go in, and it didn’t help me then either. Just wait here.”

Soon she reappeared, snapping shut her handbag. “Here’s your pocket money early. Go down to the shop and buy yourself something to read. You’ll have to stay in the staffroom until I finish work.”

Rowan took the coin, which felt cold as indifference, and trudged along the shrill corridor. As she started down the stairs Vicky fell in step alongside her. “You don’t look very joyful. Did she send you away?”

Rowan wouldn’t admit that, even to Vicky. “I’m sad for that boy. I don’t ever want to be like him.”

“You won’t be yet. It isn’t natural to be like him.”

That didn’t sound as reassuring as it ought to be. All it meant was that Rowan would take longer to wither, for her limbs to turn scrawny and fragile, her hands and feet to curl into useless claws, until she was nothing but a lolling doll to be treated like a baby and pushed about in a wheelchair. “I don’t ever want to grow old,” she said, shivering amid the mugginess.

A child’s cry echoed through a corridor, an overhead speaker paged a doctor, a telephone rang. When these sounds faded, Vicky was still gazing at her. “Maybe you won’t have to,” Vicky said.

Chapter Seventeen

On Thursday evening Derek and Eddie papered the hall of the house. Rowan admired Eddie’s deftness in clothing the walls with hardly a wasted inch, but shook her head when they asked if she wanted to help. Even in the sewing-room, where her mother was stripping the walls, she didn’t help much. She didn’t want to be alone, Derek realised. He was glad when she was in bed and, surprisingly quickly, asleep.

The hall was finished when he went downstairs. He and Alison had chosen a paper embossed with silvery leaves, so that the eye was caught by the fall of light on silver rather than by the irregularities in the wall beneath. He took her hand as Eddie brought in a large white Chinese lantern. “Now you can get rid of that old thing,” Eddie said, and clattered up the ladder to remove the stained-glass lampshade. When the lantern was hung, the light turned the hall a dozen different shades of silver. “Now at least you won’t be putting off anyone who comes to view the house as soon as they step through the door,” Eddie said.

“You must let us pay you for that at least,” Alison protested.

“No chance. Call it the present we never gave you when you moved in. If you want to show your appreciation you can let this poor overworked bugger come with me for a drink.”

Derek sensed that she wanted to talk about Rowan, but she let go of his hand. “He’s never needed my permission.”

“I’ll stay if you want me to, love.”

“Go on, you deserve a drink. Get away from the family and try and relax for a while.”

Did she mean that as a rebuke? Eddie must have thought so, for when they were in the smoky pub and being served by a woman whom Derek had seen meeting her children at the school but who seemed not to want to be recognised, Eddie said “Something up at home?”

“Nothing worth mentioning. How do you mean?”

“Just thought there was an atmosphere in there before.”

“It’ll be that we don’t know how to take what happened at the school. I mean, they’ve asked me if I want the job and I’d be a fool to myself if I said no, but I’d rather not have got it that way.”

“He couldn’t have been much of a spark. Better he did it to himself than put our kids at school in danger.”

“I reckon,” Derek agreed. They found themselves a corner table, and Eddie said “Any interest in your house?”

“If there is, nobody’s told me.”

“I saw a couple looking, but something must have scared them off. The size of it, most likely. You know what me and Jo were saying you should do? Get outline planning permission for a nursing home. See if your estate agent doesn’t think so.”

“I might at that,” Derek said, imagining the house full of people and light, every bedroom a home.

“If it was half the size I’d make you an offer myself. We could do with more space now the kids are getting bigger. We’re starting to get on one another’s nerves.”

“Oh, aye.”

“You should count yourself lucky having just Rowan. Mary’s after a room of her own because she doesn’t want Paul to see her undressing, would you believe? And she can’t share with her sister because Patty’s up there watching her portable telly after Mary’s in bed. So now we’ve got Jo calling Patty a selfish cow and keeping on at me about looking for a bigger house, but will she get up off her arse and look for one while I’m out all day working? Will she buggery. Too busy giving the neighbors tea and cakes so they’ll order stuff from her catalogues so she can get another free percolator or some other crap. And then she whines on about how she never sees me because I’m out working all hours. They don’t appreciate us, do they?”

“Maybe we don’t appreciate them.”

“What’s that? Whose side are you on? You’re with your own kind now, mate, no need to be scared to speak up. Get that down you and I’ll buy you another, and then maybe you’ll talk some sense.”

This was an aspect of pubs Derek didn’t care for, going out for a drink so as to bare one’s home life. Discussing it with Alison was hard enough sometimes. He told Eddie how he’d bounced the accountant and was having to sue Ken. Eddie kept nodding, but looked dissatisfied. “I wanted to tell you, that lampshade was sort of a peace offering from Jo,” he said eventually, shouting now that the pub was packed. “She’d have come over herself but she was sorting out the brats. She wanted you and Alison to know she’s sorry if she let Rowan hear too much.”

“When was this?”

“Didn’t Rowan tell you? Perhaps it doesn’t matter, then.” He went on reluctantly “Jo thought she might have heard her and the teacher saying Rowan wasn’t, you know, planned.”

“Who says she wasn’t?”

“Don’t shout at me, pal, I wasn’t there. I expect your wife must have.”

She wouldn’t, Derek thought, and then: she must have. While he was doing his best to keep their secrets, she wasn’t even bothering to keep them in the family. At closing time he and Eddie leaned into the dark wind from the sea as they walked home. “We’ll have a go at your ground floor on Sunday,” Eddie called across the road as Derek stepped into the house.

The smell of soaked wallpaper and bare plaster from the darkness of the sewing-room reminded him of Queenie’s rotten books. Alison was lying on the sofa in the living-room, a mug of cocoa by her dangling hand. Her sleepy smile began to fade as she saw his expression, before he said “I found out what the trouble is with Rowan at school.”

“It’s nothing too bad, is it? She’s still recovering from seeing Julius at the hospital.”

“It’s worse.”

“Oh dear, what now?”

“She heard Jo and her teacher saying we hadn’t wanted her. I thought we were keeping that to ourselves. If I’d thought you might tell anyone I’d have made you promise.”

“You might have asked me, you certainly wouldn’t have made me. I told Jo in confidence. She thought she might be pregnant when they weren’t planning it, and all I said was how glad we were to have Rowan even though it was by mistake.”

“How about how you nearly had to find a second job, Rowan cost so much to keep?”

“Jo may have said we must have had a hard time, and I suppose I’d have had to agree, but that’s all.”

“You didn’t maybe mention we once talked about having her adopted?”

“What do you think? And may I remind you that was your idea, which I wouldn’t even consider. I don’t think you did really. You’d had too much to drink if I remember rightly, and I think you have now.”

“Drink or no drink, I don’t go shooting off my gob about how we didn’t want Rowan.”

“Keep your voice down. Do you want her to hear? I’ll have a word with Jo first thing in the morning. I wish I’d never told her, believe me.”

“Just never tell anyone else.”

“Do you think I would? Poor little thing, she wouldn’t even admit it was Jo and Miss Frith she heard. I think she believed what we told her, don’t you?”

“I hope she did.”

“She must have, surely.” All the same, she shivered and drew her shoulders up. “Won’t you hold me at least? I know I was wrong. I don’t know why Miss Frith wants to see us, but I’ll want to see her to make certain this doesn’t go any further.”

Derek sat by her on the sofa and put one arm around her shoulders, and she rested the side of her face against his chest. “We mustn’t hurt each other,” she mumbled. “I’d never do anything to hurt either of you. You’re all I’ve got, you know.”

Except for the rest of your family, Derek thought, but that thought led to a tangle of doubts. He laid his cheek against Alison’s hair, and she moved his free hand to her breast. “We better hadn’t say anything else to Rowan,” he said. “Only if it looks as if she’s wondering how we really feel about her. Come on, let’s go up to bed.”

And Rowan, who had been wakened by a whisper in her ear or a touch on her face that she thought she must have dreamed, stole away from the foot of the stairs, back to her room. She didn’t know how she was managing to tiptoe when her body felt so stiff and meaningless, but perhaps her fear that her parents would realise she’d overheard them was making it work. She’d crept downstairs in search of company just as her father had come home, looking so fierce she’d hidden, and she had heard everything. Vicky was right: they had lied to her—lied about the most important thing in the world. She could trust no one but Vicky. She crawled into bed and lay there, too dismayed even to weep. “I don’t want to live,” she whispered, and for a moment she felt less alone. She felt as if someone had smiled at her out of the dark.