Touched (7 page)

The children were watching
The Saint
and chattering in the dining room, Douglas reading his newspaper. She felt the need, again, to count the children. She knelt down and pressed her fingers against several tiles, which had loosened themselves and gave slightly beneath her hand, little springs of water appearing in rectangles. She laid her head against the edge of the arch, but it was cold, even covered in wallpaper. At that moment, she smelled the perfume again. It was the old Evangeline Crale's. ‘Please,' she said. ‘Please.

‘I just need a walk,' she called to Douglas. ‘Just one turn round the green.'

She let herself out of the door and breathed in the freshly rinsed air. Several villagers were out walking in the late sunshine, and nodded to her. There was another new family who had moved in just before the Crales; they were friendly and had already asked the older girls round to play. Rowena chatted briefly to them, then the daughter lingered as her parents walked to the pond.

‘Mrs Crale,' she said, almost bobbing, politely. ‘Please, who is the face looking out of your window?'

Rowena paused. ‘What do you mean?' she said.

‘The lady.'

Rowena frowned.

‘She wears pale clothes.'

Rowena paused again. ‘It must be Eva?' she said eventually. ‘She's older than you, but she's not a lady!'

The girl shook her head. ‘Thank you,' she said hesitantly, almost bobbed again, and ran after her parents.

 

Eva was absent, as she increasingly was.

‘She has gone to help my missus as I understand, Mrs Crale,' Pollard said to Rowena the next evening. ‘If that is acceptable to you.'

‘Yes,' said Rowena after a moment of contemplation, encouraged by this unprecedented adult acceptance of poor Eva.

Rowena had arranged that Mrs Pollard was to have baby Caroline for three hours each weekday morning while she herself supervised the decorating and cooked for the family, for there had been too much tinned soup and sardines. She was reading recipes at night and was determined to make more of an effort.

The twins Rosemary and Jennifer set off with baby Caroline in her pram, out along the narrowing lanes at the top of the village, then west across the track leading over empty fields to the Pollards' house, Brinden.

‘My dears,' said Mrs Pollard, standing in her porch in a lemon-yellow housecoat and clasping Jennifer and Rosemary, one hand each. Her wide blue eyes in her round childish face widened until she was a series of circles, her voice a scoop of meringue. ‘I only saw you playing from a distance last time, though we are looking after your cats, Ginger and Rosie. Dear Evangeline has been telling me all about you.'

She looked at them as she spoke, studying them for the first time, smiling at dark stolid Rosemary, then turning to Jennifer.

She gazed, stared at her, her mouth still; then her eyes moistened momentarily. ‘Why,' she said, ‘I – I – Mr Pollard had told me about you – girls – all your family – but – I didn't know—' She blinked and composed herself. ‘Come in, dears. Bring dear Caroline into my little family of babies and then we big girls will pour ourselves out some Ribena.'

‘Thank you,' said Rosemary and wheeled the pram round the side of the house into the back garden, where her cat Rosie sat on a wall.

‘Look what I have for you!' said Mrs Pollard, holding two yoghurt pots. ‘Ski with real fruit. You must try it, girls.'

Jennifer's sapphire irises, the saturated Technicolor intensity of her colouring, seemed to pull the light of the room to her, but she ate unawares and licked the yoghurt off her raspberry-shaded top lip and said thank you prettily, her spaced pearl teeth gleaming white as she smiled.

‘Where is Eva?' said Rosemary.

‘Why, looking after the babies as ever,' said Mrs Pollard.

 

Evangeline waited in the fields in her grey serge for Mr Pollard to emerge from his day's work, then she skipped along the lane and caught his arm, and she looked up at him and smiled, and they chatted together about her pregnant cat Meribell, and about the many many places in the house, in the farm, in the outbuildings, to conceal oneself in a game of hide-and-seek.

‘You don't know the half of them,' said Pollard cheerfully, ‘though you're the sharpest of your sisters. I'll plant some of them Caramacs you like in the nooks and crannies, and if you find them, you shall gobble them.'

He laughed, and Eva laughed with delight, and gave him a kiss on his dusty cheek. His face was like an almost-handsome boy's, delicate and triangular but weathered, with tilted bright eyes and a curved smile.

‘You don't mind about
any
thing, do you?' she said. ‘No rules here, no punishments, no – normal grown-ups.'

‘A treasure hunt before we get to hide-and-seek,' he said. ‘Don't forget there's up the trees. Platforms. Bet you ain't found the animal shelters behind the haystack yet.'

‘Oh, Brinden is the most fun place in
the
world,' she said.

 

At home, Rowena crept up the stairs. She was nervous there. As the cottages merged, 2 and 3 The Farings became a larger house, all bewildering shapes and angles, yet there was something about the half that had belonged to Mrs Crale that retained a sadness, a dull whine of discomfort. She would not even look at the stain, at the pool of water in the corner, she decided: Pollard would fix it all, once he had knocked a doorway through the two cottages upstairs, ripped out the old kitchen on Mrs Crale's side, and completed the papering and painting of bedrooms. And if he was incapable of sourcing and remedying the damp, Douglas said, he would bring up a more qualified fellow from town.

Today the house smelled of Milton disinfectant, of foods failing in the heat, the meat swelling, the Cheddar sweating in beads. The old fly papers Rowena couldn't reach hung completely still by the open window, the insect fragments on them desiccated. She now acknowledged to herself that she didn't like going up the stairs on Mrs Crale's side, the landing outside Bob's room uneasy in its varying light. She had noticed that Jennifer didn't like those stairs either; she would ask again whether it was possible to remove the staircase altogether once the top floors were knocked through, so they could go up through the back steps only.

Bob slept, and Rowena had to traverse the pool of sadness to wake him. Sounds came to her: voices, words, sentences half-caught. It was Eva, who must have returned from wherever she had gone to. Wasn't she supposed to have grown out of imaginary friends at this age, she wondered? Ridiculously, Rowena almost felt she herself knew Freddie by now. She frowned. Perhaps Eva would make friends at Ragdell Place. Rowena pictured a straggle of unfortunates, grimacing and staring, poking, pinching, wetting, and she shuddered, and regretted, for a moment, putting her down for that school, because even though Eva's behaviour and appearance were becoming more extreme with age, she kept more and more to herself. She was, as she reminded Douglas, little trouble in some ways. ‘She is a full-blown embarrassment,' snapped Douglas.

A cacophony of murmuring made her shudder, and she woke Bob and hurried downstairs with his warm protesting body in her arms.

ON THURSDAY, EVANGELINE
stood scowling in the dazzle of sunshine on the set of the film
Blush
as the crew shot a scene on location in Crowsley Beck. She hung around all morning, hoping to be noticed.

‘
There
she is,' said Rowena, approaching. She tried to draw Eva towards her for a hug to which she submitted stiffly.

‘She just likes being on her own, Mummy,' said Rosemary solemnly. ‘She has Freddie.'

‘Yes, darling,' said Rowena, drawing in her breath as Jennifer was accompanied on to the green, followed by the actress Lally Lyn who had requested that the lovely Miss Crale play the role of her young sister.

‘Looks more like her daughter,' Gregory muttered to Rowena a little too audibly.

Rowena tried not to smile. The daring of this man was meat and drink to her. She wanted to stay outside, lapping it up, away from the shadows. She willed him to touch her, anywhere – brush her arm, her shoulder – but he didn't.

‘Keeping it all on home territory, darling,' said Lally in an aside to Rowena. ‘The only time in my
life
! Some of the other scenes will be shot in bloody Cornwall. Isn't she angelic?'

Jennifer Crale stood bolt upright on the green with her short skirt protruding starchily, her plaits looped Heidi-style, each strand corn-sheaf regular, and lights and reflectors trained on her even on this most glaring of summer days, while Lally Lyn wore a blonde beehive hairpiece falling into long tendrils by her ears that made her look top heavy, her lipstick like hoar frost. A make-up artist dashed over and ran a large brush over Jennifer's cheeks.

After half an hour during which various departments worked around her, the clapper board shut and Jennifer spoke. ‘Yes, I shall, Gloria,' was her only line in the one scene in which she was to appear. She was barely audible.

She said her line a dozen or so more times. ‘Cut,' shouted the director.

Lally Lyn whispered something reassuring in her ear and she smiled.

She tried again.

‘Could the audience – would you mind? – scooting off?' called an assistant director, wiping his forehead, and the loiterers slowly moved away.

Village children were encouraged to keep playing in the background while Lally and Jennifer spoke: Rosemary and Bob played catch with Peter and Jane and the post office children. Eva joined them, wearing laddered stockings on this hot day, a pinafore and velvet ribbon, and she blew her nose on her grandmother's lace handkerchief. With her colourless hair, she looked like a drab spirit among the healthy rosy children in their bright skirts and shorts.

‘Girl in apron,' called out the first assistant director. ‘Could you please get yourself out of the shot.'

Eva ignored him and carried on playing. ‘Catch!' she called to Bob, then to Freddie.

‘The girl in the white dress and grey apron, we are catching you on camera,' called the first assistant director on a loudhailer, and Eva stiffened. She heard laughter. She stared at the film set. Her beautiful sister stood in the middle like a glorious statue bathed in heavenly light. Eva's face seemed to burn. In her head, she was there, there shining instead of Jennifer. There and normal and loved and praised. She could say that stupid line. She clutched her grandmother's dress, her link with her, and wondered whether she might combust. She glanced at one of the windows in her house.

‘I want to
play
with the others,' she said to the assistant director who strode over to her.

‘Not in that get-up. Sorry, lovey.'

‘I should like to
be
in the film.'

The assistant director's mouth twitched. ‘Sorry, lovey, you haven't got the right look,' he said.

Eva stayed still. The assistant director gestured to a colleague who strode over, and they each took an arm and hauled her off the grass.

‘Grandmamma,' she said, looking at her home again, that picture-pretty cottage dozing on a village green. It had been cowed, violated, but the sun glanced off a skylight and at the sight of that, the sign of it, she was resolved.

Rowena went upstairs to tidy some sheets, a job she had been putting off, because whatever she told herself, she simply didn't like going up on that side of the house. Bob's room was the problem. It was still, in her mind, the bedroom of old Evangeline Crale. It was where she had starved herself. Rowena shuddered quite violently.

In the face of Eva's fury, Rowena could barely think about it; yet for all her dismissal, guilt gathered there, as stagnant, sour-edged and undeniably present as the pool of water downstairs. What Rowena always pictured as she lay stroking Bob to sleep was Mrs Crale as she had been when a neighbour had visited her, her head turned to the wall, her eyes close up to the daffodil-print paper that still lined the room. As Rowena lay there kissing little Bob, she gazed at the yellows that slightly overshot their brown outlines and bled into the chalk background. Those cataract-clouded blue eyes in porcelain-delicate skin had studied the same patterns. Rowena could almost smell Mrs Crale there as she willed her life to seep away: her skin, her saliva and tears impregnating the faintly worn wallpaper by the bed. Would she find white
hairs
if she looked on the floor, she wondered, and shuddered.

Rowena sped past the door now, and into the comfort of sunlight in the room baby Caroline shared with Eva, when Eva, who had been a semi-nocturnal creature even from the beginning, was ever there. Caroline didn't stir. Her mouth was open, dribble emerging from it in a shining trickle. Rowena watched her. For a few moments, she didn't breathe. Rowena snatched her up, suddenly fearing for her children in ways she couldn't specify, and hugged her hard to her, burying her nose, almost snorting the milk-warm scent of her skin, because there was the faintest undertow of the perfume that bothered her in the room, emerging from Eva's trunk of clothes. She pressed against Caroline's hot cheek so hard that the baby began to cry, bawling loudly with life and protest that destroyed the skeins of scent and decay. She should not, could not, be up here on her own, thought Rowena, and called out quite urgently to Bob, who was on the green outside, to come home. Jennifer was still standing there under a beam of light that was like her own sun.

Bob bounced in holding Rosemary's hand, and Rowena kissed them both and sat them down for their orange juice.

Later, when the church clock struck six, she went by herself and stood at the gate, breathing in the still-hot air. There was a boy behind her, needing her. No, there wasn't, she thought impatiently. But there was a smell, like ice lollies; ice lolly warmed on skin. She made herself turn. This was all Eva's doing. The infernal Freddie creature she insisted on. The film people were packing up, and the trickle of the stream across the green was just audible, comforting after the North Circular, the ducks circling the pond. She stood and watched, sensing that life held far more than was apparent within the dozing confines of Crowsley Beck. New excitement was beginning to take hold of her through the fug of baby-feeding sleepless nights, just as new anxieties were unexpectedly gripping and shaking her mind.