Touched (5 page)

‘What
was
it?' she asked.

He shook his head and shrugged, not looking at her.

Eva appeared. The wall was down, dead, and it looked like a pelt. Men were standing around, sweating, exhausted after the kill. Pollard was trembling with exertion; there was dust and hair all over the floor, shattered brick, an uneasy quietness in the house. None of them, Eva could see, was quite comfortable. The canary was silent. She lifted up the cloth. It had died.

She began to shake as a fresh surge of anger hit her.

‘Mummy!' she shouted, in a strangled staccato, so different from her usual low rumble.

‘Hello, my chickabiddy,' said Pollard, out of Rowena's earshot.

‘How
dare you, dare you
, this is,
this
is—' said Eva to her mother, but she couldn't finish. They had killed the canary; they had killed the wall. They had stolen the house, and now it was dying in front of them.

‘Darling, not now,' said Rowena, laying her hand on Eva's shoulder, as Gregory had done to her, and noticing that she was tottering slightly on her heels.

Evangeline was crying against the remaining small section of wall, her face pressed to the ripped wallpaper; it had belonged to her grandmother with her dear, frail kindness, and they had not wanted her.

‘You stole the house,' she hissed.

‘What?' said Rowena.

‘You wanted to purloin
her house
.'

Rowena frowned.

‘You should
not
have destroyed her home and STOLEN IT,' shouted Eva.

Rowena put her hands over her ears.

‘You must have known what it could have done to her. Mother. What was she supposed
to
do?'

Rowena jolted as though slapped, and Eva shouted once more right in her face, then went upstairs, and cried on her bed.

Rowena trembled, angry with Eva, trying to be angrier, to fill the space where guilt was trying to get at her. She looked through the laurel at Gregory's lawn; but of course he had returned to the power station. She turned, thinking she had seen Bob pass the door, but there was no sound and the figure had, after all, seemed a little taller. She called out Bob's name, but he wasn't there. She was momentarily puzzled. She was still shaking from Eva's outburst, but Gregory's words laid a warm trail through her. Her breast leaked milk, and she stabbed at it impatiently with a tissue.

‘
You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen
,' she remembered.

No, Jennifer is the most beautiful, she thought as the twins returned. She had the sweetest demeanour. Rowena had so many children, she could acknowledge the beautiful, and the not beautiful, she thought. Her husband would have preferred more sons, she knew with a twinge of misgiving, but at least, after a big gap following the shock of Evangeline – strange wistful face with its wide-apart eyes and uneven gaze forming in toddlerhood; temper tantrums from birth – she had given him their boy.

Being a third girl must be difficult, she thought now, with a sudden stab of sympathy for poor Eva, Douglas's wish for a sturdy red-cheeked son to call his own all too apparent. His insistence that the third girl be named after his mother was patently an obstinate act of self-compensation that Rowena argued against with no success. And the two Evangelines had loved each other from the start. From the time she could speak, Eva would beg to visit her grandmother in Crowsley Beck, the journey from north London a short one, and old Evangeline Crale had nurtured, cosseted, adored her granddaughter as no one else had, dismissing her strangeness, giving her her own clothes, dolls, gewgaws, possessions that made the twins screw up their noses or sneeze.

Douglas had no patience with Eva's behaviour; Rowena herself was torn between impatience and sorrow. Increasingly, Eva was absent, and that, in truth, suited them all.

RAGDELL PLACE WAS
along one of those fast straight roads, past a nurses' training college, on the way to Radlett. Evangeline wanted to laugh when, a few days later, she went for her introductory morning at the school for backward children, for Mongols and idiots. She looked askance at the expensive colour photos on the corridor walls. A few cripples seemed to be thrown into the mix, callipers beside blank stares. She smiled to herself, and resolved to perform, to keep them all happy. Ragdell Place featured many strange chairs and locks, and she could ascertain already how to get out of the buildings and the grounds.

‘I cannot get my child out of these – these clothes,' Rowena said, sweeping her hand towards Evangeline, but unable to look at her. Eva had dressed herself in her finest, her grandmother's church best, with her most intricately embroidered petticoats. She had brought a hoop with her, but Rowena had made her rest it against the gates, and she tugged off Eva's bonnet as they approached the school. Freddie, too, was in full attendance, Eva addressing him in the back of the car in elaborate prolonged monologues until Rowena had shouted at her to stop. She was irritated beyond measure by her daughter's ubiquitous imaginary friend. Eva decided to give them exactly what they wanted or expected, for she had become expert at that, and she was taciturn, she muttered to Freddie, who had run up a tree, and occasionally she gurned.

The child truly looks like a feral cat in a gown, thought Rowena, slightly frightened. She tried to show affection to compensate for the thought, but Evangeline turned to her with her row of sharp little teeth and dishwater hair and fell into a cloud of melancholy on the way home, and she simply did not know what to do with her.

‘Help me, God,' she muttered. Eva needed punishing, she thought, but she somehow evaded discipline, and Rowena only occasionally had the heart to mete it out. She had spanked her that very morning in an attempt to make her wear normal clothes, after many previous failed attempts, and it had felt like abusing a wraith. Douglas had less tolerance for her behaviour, but no more success.

As Rowena swung into the village in her turquoise Anglia, Evangeline stared at the children Peter and Jane in their oversized estate car, being driven the other way by their mother Mrs Dangerfield. The Dangerfield dog, a collie, was in the luggage space. Pollard had told her that it ran around the fields all day by the power station and came home dazed. The children stared back at Evangeline, but she stared harder at the boring boy and girl who had a field of a garden to run through, two tortoises, two gardeners, and a mother who did nothing. She out-stared them, showed them her teeth a little, and laughed.

The village's resident actress, source of local excitement and disapproval, was, on this sunny day, wearing a peaked cap with a swirly lime-coloured skirt that fell above the knees. She had parked her brand new Hillman Imp, a baby blue that set off her skirt, and she was talking to the twins.

‘I say,' she said to Rowena through the car window. ‘When the film people come scouting, they're sure to spot your Jennifer. Remember I told you first. Toodle pip.'

Rosemary stood on the green; Evangeline got out of the car; Jennifer looked uninterested, her eyes expressionless yet fathomless, a reed-fringed crystal pond as deep as it was empty of all but blueness. Seeing them in a line, Rowena wondered, as everyone else wondered, how such different girls could be sisters. There was a certain well-fed glow to both twins, a roundness of cheek, but Jennifer's danced into a dimple while darker Rosemary's remained stolid. Eva with her drenched tabby appearance was simply an unrelated creature, it seemed, here on the English green, by the elm trees, the pantiles.

A small Scottish man who lived at the end of the lane behind the pub was loitering on the edge of the green, watching.

‘What a get-up, lassie,' he muttered to Evangeline.

‘I'm sorry?' said Evangeline. She turned away from him and stuck her nose in the air.

‘Like your grandmammy.'

‘Yes,
hers
.'

‘Heart were broken. Reet tragic.'

‘I know.
I
know,' said Eva stiffly, her back still turned to him.

‘Sometimes I think she hasna left at all!'

‘What do you mean?' said Eva sharply, but Rowena was watching him, and he scuttled swiftly away.

 

At the house, now named simply The Farings to the consternation of the man at number 1, Pollard and his men were making good the plaster that bordered the large opening in the wall, forming a gentle arch. Apart from the stains on the ceiling, which would be removed when it was replastered, it now looked as though nothing untoward had happened. The old wall was gone, just its borders remaining, like a stiff tanned skin.

‘Come over,' Pollard said in a friendly whisper to Eva. ‘Saturday.'

Eva nodded slowly.

He seemed to be waiting for something.

‘I shall bring my sister,' she said. She offered it like a gift, she knew; something that was in her power. Her heart jerked into a run of unsteady beats.

‘All of 'em,' said Pollard surprisingly. ‘The missus would like to see the baby.'

‘
Yes
, Pollard,' said Eva, smiling, and went outside. The face was in the window, as she had hoped it might be.

Rowena inspected the house. The light fell in quite a different way through the larger L-shaped double room, glaring on quarry tiles and bouncing pleasingly about the centre, but failing to illuminate corners that were soaked with darkness. Despite the bright day and the rounded-off plaster, there was still a tension to the house, as though the air itself were sprung. She walked upstairs, and the unease only deepened. On the edge of the top step were a couple of dried petals, a faded version of the virulent yellow of the roses that grew just in front of the old number 3. She hated those roses and wondered how they had got there. The narrow staircase of what had been the old Mrs Crale's house was lit by a skylight, but the sun fell only in silvery slivers on uneven walls, and a pang that Rowena barely recognised as guilt flittered past her near little Bobby's room, which was where Mrs Crale had slept. It was there that all the shadows of these crooked cottages condensed, congealed even, and Rowena sped past, harried by a sadness or a worry she couldn't remember.

Their plan to move Mrs Crale had not been so very bad, she thought, trying to comfort herself. She had been a danger to herself. But Scotland was so far away. It was the distance, as much as anything, that had so filled her with hopelessness and had had such painful consequences.
And they had wanted her house
. It was what Evangeline perpetually threw at them. In moments of honesty, she couldn't disagree. How much had this influenced their decision to send her to her goddaughter? It had been a mistake. She held her head in her hands and stood there in the passage.

‘Mummmmmmyyyyyy,' called Bob from his bed, so she had to go into his room. She sped through the pool of ill ease, and kissed Bobby's warm little cheek.

‘I 'ear dem again!' he said.

‘Hear what, my darling?' she said, stroking his hair.

‘Foots. Cats.'

‘What was it you heard?' she murmured.

‘Um, dunno! Robots! Cats!'

‘Oh, darling,' said Rowena, smiling. ‘And what were the cats doing?' she said in a colluding tease.

‘Kit sounds. I like 'em.'

‘What sound does a cat make?'

‘Miaow.'

She kissed him again, then remembered the cat's urine smell. ‘Is that what you hear?'

‘Quack quack! Bow wow. Moo moo,' he said, and she smiled in relief.

‘My silly Bobby. My Bobbit! Come down for your orange juice now.'

Downstairs, Pollard was smoothing a section of plaster. Clutching Bob's hand, Rowena gazed around the room, her mind trying out her pallet of colours, although if Douglas said they could afford it, she would use a basket-weave wallpaper. Their house would soon be smarter, lighter, cleaner, and they could begin to live as a civilised family. Bob walked away, and she was aware of him behind her as she discussed decorations with Pollard, but she turned and he wasn't there. He was playing in the corner with Pollard's bucket.

‘
HAVE YOU SEEN
that astonishing-looking child next door?' said Lana Dangerfield to her husband.

‘That nineteenth-century ghost girl, you mean? I rather admire her spirit. She has the villagers in jitters.'

‘No no. I think she looks a fright. The poor mother should be firmer. I meant, the fair-haired one. The beauty.'

‘I find her creepy. She looks like one of those dolls in a horror film.'

‘Oh, Greg, you always
must
be perverse.'

He winked. ‘You think so?'

Smiling to himself, he went off to the shrubbery at the end of the garden, and there was Rowena Crale.

‘Good afternoon,' he said.

She jumped.

‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you. How were those silly wives the other evening?'

‘Who? Oh. Yes. They were welcoming. Lana is – how nice to have her as a neighbour.'

She pulled in her stomach as she spoke, despairing over her baby flab. She had been told by the Wives' Association about the slimmers' club that met in the church hall, but in the meantime, she had seen an advertisement she was hiding in her underwear drawer for a remarkable girdle that sent electric impulses to the fat cells. The idea terrified her even as it offered hope.

‘Get away from all that,' said Gregory. ‘I'll show you round the power station. We can drive over there.'

‘Can we?' said Rowena, tilting her face to the ground to hide her colour. To her consternation, she felt light-headed, out there in the sun.

‘We'll nip over there in the MG. She runs like a tiger, you know, all purr and power. You should see the airfield as well. Monday? I can show you the very core – the reactor. One day our whole country will run on a few of them.'

‘Yes,' said Rowena. ‘I will ask Douglas,' she said, because she was flustered.