The Influence (29 page)

At home Derek and her parents were eager to tell her how well Rowan had behaved all day. She was glad they didn’t suspect and saddened by their determination to convince her. “I know you’re there,” she reassured Rowan silently as the eyes of the child of the house stared at her, blank with triumph.

That night she dreamed she lost Rowan. She was in Liverpool for the sales, struggling through the crowd that filled the street of shops from wall to wall and eddied sluggishly around the traders’ stalls and open suitcases. She was thinking that at least Rowan needn’t struggle to keep up with her when she realised that Rowan was no longer there. She glanced about wildly as if she could see Rowan, she craned her body to see over the masses of faces indifferent as masks, she cried Rowan’s name as she thought she heard her voice beyond the wordless murmur of the crowd, she tried to force her way through the crowd that was packed too tightly now to let her pass. Soon someone would offer to help her search for her lost child, and when she admitted that they couldn’t see her they would burst out laughing, the whole streetful of people, laughing so loud and so cruelly that they would drive Rowan away for ever. Alison woke trembling, icy with sweat, knowing that the dream was hardly even an exaggeration of the truth.

Her parents left before dawn to avoid some of the traffic. “I hope we’ll see you all soon, Derek. And just you look after our Alison, she’s all we’ve got now,” Edith said with a misty dragon breath.

“Keep in touch,” Keith told him and stopped in the act of shaking his hand, for Rowan had appeared in the silvery hall.

“Go back to bed,” Alison cried, in a rage at the sight of Rowan’s body not even being allowed to sleep. “Say goodbye to your grandmother and grandfather and then go back until it’s time to get up.”

Alison hugged her parents and made herself let go, and watched the car’s red lights shrink, turn the corner, vanish. The child was just behind her on the pavement, gazing at the stars that the approaching dawn had begun to extinguish. Her breaths stained the air grey, and filled Alison with sudden loathing: they weren’t Rowan’s breaths. “Get inside when you’re told,” she almost screamed.

“Try and get a bit more beauty sleep, babe, not that you need it,” Derek said and pushed the child gently into the house, though Alison was sure she stiffened as he touched her. “Don’t be too hard on her, Ali,” he murmured as they heard her footsteps overhead. “She’s been through a lot, remember. I know you have too, but let’s just try and be glad we got her back, all right?”

“I will be,” Alison said, aching with the impossibility of telling him more of the truth. She took his hand as they went back to bed for an hour. She wanted to make love to him, to bring them closer, but she couldn’t when she sensed that Rowan had taken refuge in their room. They lay in each other’s arms as the dawn draped the sky with gold. Rowan was part of her calm, which felt like a wall that shut out the intruder in the next room. It couldn’t last, but perhaps it was a promise, and she kept it secret and safe when the alarm warned her it was time to go to work.

She was brushing her teeth when the phone rang downstairs. She hurried down, but it had been the school, for Derek. “Vandals have been at the electrics. Rowan won’t want to come with me, so she’ll have to stay at Jo’s.”

“All right,” Alison said, hushing her thoughts furiously, making her face into an agreeable mask. “Will you take her over? I’d better be heading for work.”

She scraped the silvery ferns off the windows of her car and prayed that it would start. While she pumped the pedal and listened to the spluttering of the engine she had time to watch Derek hurry the child across to Jo’s. At last the car lurched juddering towards the main road. She drove for half an hour at random through the thawing streets, past parked cars with blinded windows and children skating on the pavements, and then she turned back toward the house.

As she came to the crest of the overpass beside the bay, sunlight pierced the car from back to front. In the dazzle beside her she glimpsed Rowan’s face. Rowan looked anxious, close to fear. “We’ll be all right,” Alison murmured fiercely as the glimpse was extinguished. She parked the car outside the house and called the hospital to say she was too ill to come to work, which she had never done before in her life, and then she strode across to Jo’s to fetch the child.

Chapter Thirty-Four

The vandalism wasn’t as bad as Derek had feared, at least as far as his work was concerned. Rewiring the school had been his most demanding job so far, especially in disentangling the labyrinth of wires the original builders had buried in the plaster. The school governors wouldn’t let him wait until the holidays, presumably because they wanted to reassure parents that the school was being made safe after the accident that had gained him the job. It had taken him almost a month of nights and weekends. The job had made his reputation locally and brought him all the work he could handle, but now he realised he’d seen far less of Alison and Rowan than he should have when they’d needed him.

The deputy headmistress came across the schoolyard as Derek climbed out of the car. A glazier was repairing a window by the infants’ entrance. “Thank you for coming so promptly,” the deputy, a thin woman in a purple track suit, said to Derek. “I hope this hasn’t sabotaged any plans you had for today.”

“No, you’re okay.” He followed her into the school. Children’s paintings had been torn off classroom walls: someone had set fire to a pile of them in an open desk. “Stupid bastards,” he muttered.

“Thank heaven for children like yours. Not that most are bad. There’s always been a minority like this.”

“Rowan’s doing all right then, is she?”

The deputy smirked as if she took him to be joking. “Considerably better than that, Mr Faraday. Hasn’t Miss Frith let you know how impressively she’s done these past few months? Our only fear is that she may grow bored.”

“You heard what she went through? I suppose her teacher’s making allowances for that.”

“Miss Frith didn’t need to. In all my years in the profession I’ve never seen a child so mature. You’ve nothing to worry about there, if I may say so.” She stepped aside as they reached the assembly hall. “I believe this is what you’ll need to look at.”

All the lights were smashed, and someone had pulled down a wire and a chunk of plaster. The pointless stupidity dismayed him. Rowan would never do anything like this, he thought as he discovered that the vandals had stuffed the wall sockets with plasticine and tipped a bucket of water over the fuse box. Perhaps when Alison heard about all this it might help her accept the way Rowan was developing. He brought the old hairdryer from the car and used it to dry the box before he replaced the fuses, then he unscrewed the fronts of the wall sockets so as to poke out the plasticine. He’d replaced the wire and was packing his tools before he went to mix some plaster when he heard a woman’s footsteps hurrying down the corridor behind him. “Nearly finished,” he called. “Could have been worse.”

The footsteps halted, and the silence made him glance back, the snapped wire dangling from his hand. The woman in the corridor was Jo. Apprehension brought him to his feet so clumsily he kicked the box of tools away. “Where’s Rowan?”

“Alison took her.”

That jerked his nerves tighter, and he found it hard to speak. “I thought she was at work. Where’ve they gone?”

“Back to your house.”

Derek grabbed the toolbox and made for the corridor so quickly that Jo flinched. “She’s Rowan’s mother. I couldn’t stop her,” she said defensively, and as if she wanted to deny her reason for coming to him “I thought you should know, that’s all.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

As Alison reached Jo’s gate the children in the house fell silent. Wind hissed through the sharp grass on the dunes under the grey sky and made her shiver, but most of what she felt was a determination so fierce that she grew a little afraid of herself. She could no longer sense Rowan beside her. Perhaps fear of the child in Jo’s house had driven her into hiding. The thought made Alison feel cold and hard as metal. She strode up the short path and rang the doorbell.

Jo was wearing a housecoat and slippers. She opened the door halfway and stopped it with her foot. “Now you see how us ladies of leisure dress when we aren’t receiving guests,” she said like one of the historical romances she enjoyed reading. “Aren’t you at work?”

“I was mistaken. I’ll take her home now.”

Jo didn’t step back. “Nothing’s the matter, is there?” Alison said sweetly. “Can’t I come in? I won’t be shocked by anything I see, I promise, even if you haven’t tidied up after the monsters.”

“Come in for a chat and a cup of something if you like,” Jo said, her face reddening. “But really, you can leave her, I don’t mind. They’re playing.”

“It sounded to me as if they were arguing.” As Alison marched along the hall into the main room she had time for one deep breath that stiffened her chest and her throat. “Say goodbye, miss. You and I are overdue for a talk.”

The child was sitting at the table, Paul and Mary at her feet. She raised her head unhurriedly and stared at Alison. “I’m playing hangman with them.”

“You would be, wouldn’t you?” Alison saw that she wasn’t even taking the trouble to ensure that her look of innocence was convincing. “I’m sure they can manage without you now,” she said, forcing her teeth not to clench.

“She keeps saying we can’t spell,” Mary complained.

“You can’t,” the child said, “and so you were hanged.”

Alison went to the table that was scattered with sketches of gallows, stick figures dangling from them above uncompleted words, and made herself grasp the child’s shoulder, which stiffened at her touch. It felt exactly like Rowan’s, and yet she shuddered at the feel of it as though it were full of worms. “No more arguments,” she said.

“What’s she done?” Jo queried.

Almost as soon as she began nursing, Alison had vowed that she would never be drawn into that collusion between adults that makes children into property and victims—but she wasn’t using it against a child, she thought, appalled. “Don’t ask,” she said in a tone that told Jo they both knew what children were like.

Jo was staring at her hand on the child’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t you at least like a cup of tea to give things a chance to calm down?”

“I couldn’t be calmer, Jo, and we’ve embarrassed you quite enough. Now we’re going home this instant, miss.”

Might the child pretend to be frightened of her and tempt Jo to intervene? But the child shrugged off her grasp and stood up. Without another glance at Alison, she stalked down the hall and out of the house. “Thanks for keeping an eye on her,” Alison said, and ran after her.

She was staring back from Queenie’s gate. Her faintly mocking look enraged Alison, all the more so when she realised Jo was watching her run across the road. She unlocked the house and would have shoved the child inside, except that the child strutted in, head held high. Alison followed her into the hall and leaned against the door to shut it. “I’m surprised at you,” she said at once, “trying to use people you’ve so little time for.”

The child turned, leaves shifting on both sides of her. “Why, mummy, I thought that was how you felt after what she said about me.”

“How clever you think you are.” Alison could see from the child’s eyes that she hadn’t needed to say those words out loud. “Who do you think I was talking about?” she said through lips that felt cramped. “It must be hard for you to have to depend on us even as much as you do.”

“Because I heard you say you didn’t want me, do you mean? I hoped you might want me now. I thought at least you’d be glad I came back.”

She was taunting Alison because she knew Alison couldn’t risk injuring her—injuring Rowan’s body. Or perhaps she wanted to provoke Alison, because if Alison marked her that would be evidence that she wasn’t fit to look after the child, a reason to send Alison away and leave the child with those who believed in her. Alison could only just control herself, and she would be no use while she felt like this. “Don’t you dare speak like that to me. Go to your room and don’t you say another word.”

The child glared sullenly at her. In the dimness her eyes looked like a sky before a storm. She was about to stop pretending, Alison thought, apprehension flashing through her like an electric charge and springing her mind alert for the least chance. But the child smiled faintly, derisively, and did as she was told.

Alison listened to her footsteps going up. They sounded measured and confident, the footsteps of the owner of the house. Alison imagined her curling up on Rowan’s bed, safe in her lair that was the entire house, satisfied to be alive. The thought jerked her upstairs like a knife driven deep into her.

The child had reached the next floor. Her shoulders hunched as Alison ran up behind her, as if she expected Alison to hit her or shove her, but Alison told herself that the child knew perfectly well what was coming. She dodged past her and blocked the doorway of Rowan’s room. “Don’t try to come in here. This isn’t your room.”

“Why, mummy, who else could it belong to?”

“To my child, and you aren’t my child.”

But it was Rowan’s face that was gazing at her, so sadly that Alison wondered if she was wrong after all, if she was going mad. How could she have said what she’d just said when Rowan had already run away once because she felt unwanted? How could she believe in a Rowan she wasn’t even able to touch instead of the evidence of her own eyes that Rowan was standing in front of her, her small face stiff as a mask, perhaps because if it moved it would burst into tears? Her whole body ached to step forward and hug the child, to feel that she was still Rowan after all and needing her, even after what Alison had just said. She could feel the step she was about to take, the step that would rush her forward to the child.