Touched (3 page)

‘Jennifer,' she said.

He nodded. ‘You like her?'

‘She's my sister,' said Evangeline. ‘Of course
I
do.'

He nodded. ‘I ain't ever seen anyone . . .' His eyes crinkled, and focused on the distance.

‘Prettier,' she said, to help him out.

‘Yes, that.'

Eva shrugged. ‘I'm going now,' she said.

Pollard took no notice. ‘What school you lot going to go to come new term?'

‘It's called . . . It's called Rag-something Place.'

‘Who? You?' he said in a tone of surprise.

‘Yes.'

‘Ragdell Place. You aren't touched enough to go there. Ragamuffins go there. Ones that can't speak. Hooooo-ligans.' His face and eyes were bright with amusement. ‘And the other ones?'

‘Mummy wants, terribly
much
wants, Jennifer and Rosemary to go to St
Bede's
,' she said. ‘I don't know if they will, though. She thinks Jennifer might if she works hard enough
all
summer. Bob's going to the primary school.'

He nodded. ‘Bede's's only for the brains,' he said.

‘I know,' she said coldly.

‘You can come and see me and my wife at my place,' Pollard said. He stood up. He was taller than she would have expected, with a slightness despite his strength. His blue-grey eyes seemed to look into distance, like a sailor's, and were deep set, among small sun wrinkles.

‘OK,' said Eva, brightening.

‘Come tomorrow. After I've finished my morning work here. Wife'll give you a big fat custard tart.'

Eva grinned at him.

She went back to her grandmother's trunk.
Evangeline Crale
was written on it. She, among four girls, had been named after her grandmother, and her grandmother was her beloved. Her life blood. Her real mother. The kindest old woman in the world, and her parents had thought it fair to send her away so they could take over her cottage. So
they
could steal her only home, join it to the one next door they had already bought, laying their plans long ago. It was thieving. Terrible theft.

‘She is simply too old, darling,' Rowena had said when the plan was first revealed. ‘She needs care now. She needs to be looked after, don't you see?'

‘But not by a friend. She needs her
family
,' said Eva, almost screaming. ‘
Us.
'

‘There's not room. She will be—'

‘Not
room
in
her
own house?' shrieked Eva.

Rowena was quiet for a few seconds.

‘Granny needs looking after,' she said patiently.

‘Grandmamma,' snapped Evangeline.

‘Yes, yes, Granny, Grandmamma. Lois has offered her a home. Lois has no children, and she's experienced with older people. She's family, almost.'

‘Lois is her
goddaughter
,' said Eva, this time in a hiss. She had a level, husky voice, her emphases oddly placed. ‘She runs a boarding house. She won't
look
after her. It's in Scot
land
. It's too too far away. We'll never never see her again.' And she began crying, hysterically, her mouth and nose dripping over the top of the clothes her grandmother had given her.

Eva now plunged her face in the depths of the trunk in her search for her grandmother's youth, lifting just the corner of the bottom layers, which she would never take out, because then she would lose the smell of her beloved grandmother, squander it to the air, trample on her as her family had. The top layers were her clothes, her daily wear, but there were tightly folded items at the bottom she would never never sully.

POLLARD THE BUILDER
was peering round the bend on the narrow staircase that led into the sitting room of number 2. Bob was making chugging noises with his cheeks puffed out as he pushed his toy train around its tracks, and there was Jennifer bending over him building a bridge. Even in the sun-deprived room of that stunted cottage shaded by ilexes, the blue of her eyes was steel-bright against her lashes and her curved dark brows. A dimple hovered on one cheek when she smiled; the gap in her teeth seemed to channel the beam of her delight, her features almost discomfitingly perfectly arranged. That small straight bridge of a nose, lightly freckle-strewn. The calmness of the rosebud mouth when closed. The complete tranquillity of her being that broke into bubbles of delight.

‘What are you doing,
Mr
Pollard?' said Eva.

‘Watching 'em play,' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘But it's you I've invited to my house tomorrow.'

‘Yes, Pollard. Can I invite Freddie? He's my friend.'

Pollard nodded in assent.

‘You can't see him.
Apparently
he's imaginary.'

‘That's as may be. Come in my lunch break for that big fat pie the missus is going to make you, and I can toddle back over for half an hour as well. Brinden, the house is called. Out across fields behind the stream. Or you can go round Beeck Lane and through the spinney, top of the village.'

She nodded. ‘I know my way round already.'

Rowena stood in the kitchen when the dishes were cleared and sipped a sherry. A small figure flitted past the door and she looked up, expecting to see Bobby, but it was nothing, and she realised that the alcohol went to her head too quickly in the heat. Through the ilex, the rhododendron and laurel, she could catch a pale grey glimpse of the Big House, as she had heard it called.

Douglas's snuffles and sleepy starts sounded from the sitting room to a backdrop of canary chatter, and the baby had begun to cry from the path outside. Looking vaguely round for Evangeline, Rowena ignored the clamour, just for a quarter of an hour more, mentally blocking it out. She could barely believe that this house was hers, with all its low-ceilinged prettiness, its curving plaster, its nooks and cupboards and little passages. It was as though she would now be a proper woman, a grown-up wife and mistress of a lovely house at last, and not the play-acting imposter she sometimes felt herself to be. Numbers 2 and 3 The Farings were postcard cottages, age-softened and settled, with their deep-set windows and boxes of geraniums, their uneven floors and cool pantries, their small gardens tangles of mature flowers and shrubbery. The modern house in London had contained no soul, and little opportunity for her decorating dreams; The Farings, by contrast, possessed so much character, she found it hard to believe there weren't other people there. That was why she was faintly nervy, she realised, imagining movement in other rooms, because it simply didn't seem as though it was theirs yet.

She stood up straight and looked out at the garden. She was still sore from Caroline's birth; she bled all these weeks later, and she was using ingenuity to avoid Douglas, who was clearly becoming restless. She must, must lose the pregnancy weight by the end of the summer to be as trim as she had been previously despite all those babies. (‘Body of a maiden,' her mother-in-law had commented after Bob's birth. It was Caroline who had tipped her.) She crept into the sitting room to avoid the grizzling, and braced herself for what she might see.

Pollard had left, finally, but the wall still seemed hunched like some wounded animal that was catching its breath. On the side where the old Mrs Crale had lived, it was covered in wallpaper, and the stains over there showed more clearly than on the paint and plaster of this side, where yellow maps with furring brown borders spread over the corner between wall and ceiling. The craters that Pollard and his men had made showed live white patches of spores or mildew clinging to brick. Horsehair hung in patches over the wallpaper with its twining trellis and bird design, birds' heads and tails cut off, as though shot, where the builders had gone through to the brick. Others were caught mid-flight by hammer blows, their poor wings blasted, cuffs and ruffs of broken paper round their necks.

Rowena held her breath. The smell: was it cat? Rat? Worse? Animal urine seemed to merge with mould. The children had all complained. Douglas had sworn he would work Pollard harder. Rowena, in her hormonal state, her breasts still full of milk, gagged. She was feeding this one herself, as she never had the others, and she felt like a nauseated cow. Even cigarettes tasted off.

More disturbingly, as she breathed through her mouth, there was a drift of perfume over the mould, that same taste of women's scent settling on her tongue. It nagged at her. She almost knew what it was. The crying wrinkled features flashed at her. A whiff of rot or animal hit her in the back of the throat and she forgot about it, rushing to the kitchen for water.

She had such plans for this house, she thought, as she steadied herself at the sink. She had spent weeks and weeks in London, first pregnant, then cow-feeding the baby, looking at
Homemaker
and
Modern Woman
and books from the library containing designs she could never previously have afforded but just might be able to copy with the move out of London. It had felt like an obsession. Except for the wall between the cottages, number 2 was in a reasonable state to do up, but she wondered whether number 3 was rotting. It gave her a pang of worry that she dismissed by fetching elderflower cordial for the family.

Fronting the green, right in the centre of the small village, stood the most desirable cottages, number 3 The Farings at the end of a small row. Evangeline slipped from the cottage across the lane and on to the grass, and neighbours watched her. She had a small-chinned face that widened at the cheeks and brow like a blunt cat's, and eyes in which hazel muddied grey, their distance lending her a dreaming, abstracted look. Front doors were left open in the heat; men leaned against fences and smoked pipes; women rocked babies in gardens. Some of them stared openly at the sepia flickering of this strange girl in the glare; a few made disparaging comments; the wife of the milkman crossed herself.

‘Freddie, Freddie,' Eva murmured, looking down, as though to a small child.

‘She's talking to
herself.
How does her mother allow that child to look such a sight?' said Lana Dangerfield, descending from her husband Gregory's MGB, the magnificent little sports car that had been his present to himself when he had been made manager of the power station.

Gregory barked with laughter. ‘Good for her,' he said, and he glanced at the windows of number 3 The Farings, but there were only dark small panes, the house seeming silent and sunken. Rowena Crale was absent, but voices wound down the path from number 2.

Lana Dangerfield stiffened. ‘I don't find it amusing,' she said. ‘The girl looks half crazed.'

‘Perhaps she is.'

Lana paused. ‘Ah,' she said. ‘Possibly then they moved here for Ragdell Place.'

‘The hellhole for halfwits?'

Lana frowned, as she so often did at her husband. ‘The school for – troubled children,' she said.

‘Who knows?' said Gregory idly, and stood lighting a cigarette at his own gate. The Dangerfield children, Peter and Jane, had returned from a friend's house, and Lana neatened their hair in turn as they passed through the gate.

‘I'll just smoke this,' said Gregory, and he wandered across the lawn. He made his way down to the shade of the rhododendrons, the ilexes and variegated laurel at the bottom of the garden, and smoked in their shade. Number 1 The Farings, at the end of the path, housed only a taciturn old widower who hid himself either there or in his allotment, but number 2 was now fuller and noisier.

‘Shut up,' he muttered at the crying baby, and stood there a while, but her mother didn't appear.

Evangeline paddled in the stream again, winding her way down it towards the pond, where ducks nodded. ‘Come, Freddie,' she called. She glanced up at the house, checking it, and was satisfied. Afternoon softened, Rowena hushed the baby, and the actress who lived by the centre of the green walked past in her short pink floral dress, much commented on by Crowsley Beck residents. She nodded at Rowena, whose auburn chignon and profile of a model posing as an air hostess made her noticeably smart and attractive for a villager.

The twins sat down for their extra studies, the television and canary cage covered with cloths until the early evening, and Bob made the baby mud pies. ‘Near
your
room. Near
my
room,' he sang to her and gave her a rough kiss so she grizzled, then he repeated it.

Rowena glimpsed the damp wall again, and this time she let out a low moan, for it seemed to be weeping. It might never succumb, she thought, and then what would they do? She had a momentary vision of a dark tunnel of recalcitrance, unspecified trouble. There was something indefinably resistant about the builder who worked on it, too. He was set on his course; he was self-contained. The other smell was now more apparent, borne by the wafts of damp.
Je Reviens
, it was called. Of course. Rowena was pleased with herself for remembering, but something about it made her uncomfortable, and she couldn't think what it was.

‘GOOD MORNING,' SAID
the vicar, faint bemusement crossing his face as a scrawny girl in a lightly stained Victorian child's costume walked past the post office towards Beeck Lane. He summoned his genial smile. He had a range of smiles, beams and expressions of gravity at his disposal, suitable to the occasion and the day of the week. ‘Can I help you?' he said eventually.

‘No, thank you,' said Evangeline in her husky voice.

He paused. ‘And you are?'

‘Evangeline Crale.'

‘Crale . . .' said the vicar, pausing again. ‘There is a new family in the village named Crale. They came to the church. You're a relation?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I
am
.'

‘I hope you approve of their choice of new home,' he said, spreading a plump hand towards the green with the air of one who owned it. ‘Can I help direct you? Where are you going? The family live at the other end.'