Touched (6 page)

Gregory paused a beat. ‘For permission to visit a chap's workplace?' he said in jocular tones. ‘You don't need a licence for that. When it comes to flying, it's a different matter.'

‘Oh,' she said. ‘I—'

‘Think about it,' he said, and he grinned at her through the laurel, so that she thought in that moment he resembled Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, though he didn't. She watched his back as he walked across his lawn, the arrangement and movement of his muscles, and willed him to turn. Just as she was about to give up, he did. She felt giddy. She slapped her hand, as though she herself were one of her children. Baby Caroline was crying, and the sound was a mere backdrop.

The neglect and sprawl of the Pollards' house was remarkable to the children who visited it. Most of the land had been sold off, but the house the Pollards rented came with a sizeable section of disused farm containing many outbuildings, a row of empty cattle pens, two nettle-run fields, and an old haystack that still sagged in a barn. On Saturday, Bob stayed at home, but the four Crale girls arrived, the perambulator stalling and jiggling over the path to the house, baby Caroline sleeping through it all.

‘Welcome,' said Pollard. ‘Have a cat,' he said as a pair of them trotted up to Eva and thumped their bodies against her skirts. ‘Each can have a cat. We got plenty.'

‘Have a cat, Pollard? To keep?' said Eva. Excitement she barely dared trust bubbled inside her.

‘If your mother and father let you. Each. The baby too. Keep 'em here if you prefer.'

‘Thank
you
,' breathed Eva.

‘They're so big,' Jennifer murmured.

‘Some of them is mated from wild cats, brought from the mountains,' he said.

The twins spent the afternoon dipping among the dock leaves in their pastel-checked frocks, one green, one pink, choosing cats to own and keep at the Pollards' while Eva, who had selected a scruffy white, explored the upstairs of the house and Mrs Pollard took over baby Caroline. The girls ran wild, eating cakes and climbing the haystack, which contained sulphurous abandoned eggs and rat holes to collapse into. There were barn lofts, sheds and caravans, an old farmer's office, an abandoned grain store and dangerous machinery. A broken tree house could be accessed by a rope. Freddie was stuck up there, Eva claimed. ‘I'll fetch 'im down,' said Pollard matter-of-factly.

Upstairs in the house, room led into room, largely unused. There were rows of beds beneath a dipping ceiling.

‘Whose are these?' said Eva.

‘Anyone's who wants. Always a bed for you.'

‘Truly?' said Eva, her slow husky voice lifting. No adult had ever been so kind to her, ever approved of her so much or treated her like the others. Love for Pollard bubbled up like a thick, warm substance.

‘Course. You can escape that mad school, help with the nippers, bed down here. The missus would be pleased.'

‘Oh,
thank you.
'

‘This is yours,' said Pollard, gesturing at one of the sagging iron beds covered in candlewick, in dusty eiderdowns and tartan blankets. ‘Or this. Or this. When you want to skip over. I cook up my own breakfast. We'll have one now.'

‘But Pollard, it's
after
noon!'

‘No matter,' he said.

He fried a pan of eggs and bacon in his shed while whistling along to Radio Luxembourg and offering the girls cigarettes as they waited in a fug of smoke and bacon fat.

‘This is your pew,' he said to Eva, removing a pile of tabloids from a chair.

I am his favourite, thought Eva. She felt light-headed, almost dizzy, with astonished excitement.

‘Let me paint the young miss,' said Pollard, poking a paintbrush behind his ear before he handed out plates with one hand and smoked with the other. And suddenly, Jennifer Crale was standing on a stool by the window playing with her plaits, the afternoon light catching her famed dimple through smeared glass, while Eva stood, frozen, in a corner.

Finally, it is all better, thought Rowena once the splendid wallpaper was up and sitting flush with the new arch, replacing the disgraceful dated pattern. Her previous fears were the products of her usual overheated imagination, she thought, not able to let them go entirely, but grateful that this was so.

The damp was quite at bay; the floorboards on the landing were about to be replaced. It was a new start. That unnerving smell of perfume seemed to have gone with the wall. She drank some of the Chianti that the neighbours Gregory and Lana Dangerfield had brought over as a friendly gesture, and she pictured Greg standing near her to pour her more, and a tiny shiver went up her. They were merry, half-camping, a candle pushed into a Mateus Rosé bottle and the children in bed, even the exacting Douglas relaxed, his tie looped over a door handle.

Greg yawned. He rested his head on the back of the chair. ‘I still don't understand the source of that damp,' he said. ‘In fact, there's something I can't quite work out altogether if you ask me, Douglas. Your fourth skylight.'

‘Eh?'

‘Step outside, old chap,' said Greg, and they both stumbled as they rose and laughed.

They stood across the lane on the edge of the green, illuminated by the old-fashioned street lamps and the enchanting blue-green-red lights from the pub, and Greg pointed at the roof.

‘That's the one at the top of the front staircase,' said Douglas.

‘No, it is not, my good man. That one faces the back. Think about it. The window below is in one of the bedrooms, and the other visible skylight is I believe a bathroom?'

‘Yes, bedrooms in the eaves,' said Douglas. ‘They've eked out rooms over time in these cottages. There's only a very shallow loft.'

‘Yes, yes,' said Greg impatiently. ‘But I looked around when you had your wall problem. That tiny window high up in the roof is not accounted for.'

‘Must be in the loft,' said Douglas. ‘For God's sake, let's get another drink.'

‘I think not, if I may be so bold,' said Gregory, hiccupping, and he went back in.

Rowena sat very still as Greg climbed the stairs, silhouetted as he disappeared from sight.

He re-emerged, setting up a creaking on the small staircase.

‘I may be three sheets to the wind, and the corner throws the floor plan, but I surmise there's a space not accounted for – some of the layout is puzzling. Quite illogical. You could be using it, even if for storage.'

‘Oh, who knows in these higgledy-piggledy little places,' said Rowena. ‘This is the most quaint, queer sprawl, all steps and, and – corners, ang-angles.'

Douglas glanced at her and took her glass away. She walked carefully to the kitchen and drank some water, pressing her face to the window and gazing at the black laurel.

After a while, Greg came in as she had hoped he might; as she had dreaded he might.

‘I'm terribly squiffy,' he said in a quick murmur, picking up a glass and putting it down. ‘There are so many words I could say to you—'

‘You must not,' said Rowena, colouring, and that night she kissed Douglas for the first time since the baby was born. She felt as though she would be eaten alive, and she pulled away quickly and pretended she could hear Caroline cry.

In the morning, Rowena woke to the baby's cries with an ache clinging to her forehead, but the light sprang on to the walls and she remembered her new large room downstairs and Gregory Dangerfield's words in her ear, and the hangover rocked inside her head as she rose, but still she sang a few notes as she went to lift baby Caroline to smell her nappy. Eva was, as so often, out of the house, and Douglas had already left for work.

‘Cat, friends,' said Bob. He made bubbles with his spit as Rowena fetched his clothes.

Rowena heard a mewing as she descended the stairs, and she jumped and looked behind her, where the sound seemed to be coming from, but when she glanced out of the thick-set little window that faced the green there was a black-and-white cat among the geraniums on the window box. The smart new basket-weave wallpaper smiled at her. She loved it: she was modern, she was a Londoner. After all those years in London she would never return to her provincial identity, and it was somehow
humorous
to decorate a low-ceilinged cottage thus.

Wallpaper paste and old cigarettes scented the air. She gazed at the quirky white-and-yellow pattern, taking it all in, and there was a stain like a floater on her vision. She tried to resist it, lifting her eyes slowly and persuading herself it was a shadow. She looked again. A small stain had appeared where wall met ceiling, and she closed her eyes and stood very still and kept them closed. She pictured the old lady who had lived here, and starved herself here. This was an old lady's house. An old lady called Evangeline Crale.

Guilt spread through her mind, like the damp: a stain of it.

‘WHERE IS EVA?'
said Rowena.

‘I don't know, Mummy,' said the dark twin Rosemary.

‘She keeps disappearing,' said Rowena. ‘Even more than she usually does.'

Jennifer arrived at the door. ‘She goes to Mr Pollard's,' she said.

‘I need to speak to that man,' barked Douglas. ‘Get him on the phone for me, Ro.'

‘Mummy, a lady gave me this card,' said Jennifer, and Rowena glanced at a woman's name and number while she importuned Pollard to come straight round.

‘I shall ask the actress, Lally Lyn, about this,' she said uncertainly, then held the card out to Douglas, who frowned.

‘Film people nonsense?' he said. ‘Find out exactly what they want first.'

‘Yes, darling,' said Rowena, catching sight of Jennifer, who had her hair loose, its plait-bobbled ashes and golds jumping with light, and she knew very well what they wanted, and mad pride reared inside her even as good sense cautioned her. She thought she saw a shadow of Evangeline by the door. ‘Eva?' she called out, but it was too late.

Jennifer leaned on the arch: the symmetry against the white-and-yellow basket-weave a perfectly composed portrait, except the stain above was growing, a tea-coloured exudation with angry borders the colour of old blood, quite wrecking the expensive wallpaper.

‘Oh, Douglas,' she said weakly, glancing up.

‘Absurd!' he barked. ‘I'll give Pollard a drubbing. He needs to investigate the roof. The plumbing. I'll dock that bloody roll of wallpaper from his wages and he can hang it again.'

Rowena jumped slightly as she recognised the figure of Gregory Dangerfield passing the window in his cricketing clothes. He didn't look in at her. A flash of profile, of a distinctive, almost schoolboyish, curve of hair at his temple. She wanted to see the dark brown eyes that seemed to contain such soulfulness in his rare quieter moments. She cleared up, and found herself working out what time he might come back, and whether she could stroll to the village shop wheeling Caroline past the game. She couldn't do these things, though. She was a married woman.

‘Pollard, what the hell's the meaning of this continued damp?' snapped Douglas when Pollard arrived. ‘Apparently there may be some space up there not being used? Behind a wall? It must be coming from there, for heaven's sakes.'

Pollard hesitated, then spoke, impassive as ever. ‘An old water tank,' he said. ‘I found it. You got a different system now.'

‘Yes?' Douglas waited.

‘That's it,' said Pollard.

‘For goodness' sakes, why didn't you remove the thing?'

‘Rusted in, and wouldn't fit down the staircase, sir.'

‘Well, how the hell did it get
in
?'

‘They's changed the architecture many times over years. That won't be the original staircase, sir. You can see ghosts of others. Look at that wall.'

He pointed. A faint door-shaped outline was visible through the plaster. At the other end of the room, off the hall, a couple of tiled steps led to nothing.

Douglas was momentarily silenced.

‘Lintels poking through upstairs, too,' said Pollard.

‘Show me.'

‘Door once there,' said Pollard, pointing on the landing. ‘That bit of beam sawn off. Lintels showing. Like bodies under the sand. After time and tide, they bulge through.'

‘All right, Pollard. Enough,' said Douglas. ‘So what did you do with the space that encloses the old water tank?'

‘Airing cupboard, sir. Tank was in an old airing cupboard. Small. Nothing much. Took up all the space.'

Douglas looked blank.

‘Continued the tonguey groove up there over it, sir,' said Pollard, pointing at the wall that met a corner outside Bob's room. ‘Nothing else to be done.'

‘Well, you will have to investigate everywhere for the source of this damp.'

‘I have, sir. Water tank was empty, not plumbed in. Nothing is causing it.'

‘Then I'll get someone else in to find it! Get back home, Pollard, and be quick about it.'

‘Where is Eva?' said Rowena as the sun sank in honeyed shadows over the green, geese flying overhead.

No one knew.

‘Don't worry about her, Mummy,' said Rosemary.

‘I do, though,' said Rowena. She laid out her children's baked beans and wondered what Gregory Dangerfield was doing. Mrs Pollard, who ran some sort of kindergarten, had offered to have baby Caroline the next day, and perhaps he would ask her again to visit the power station, though she had been discouraging and he hadn't repeated the offer. The shadows cooled and lengthened; she heard a cheer rising from the cricket field. The men would be off drinking and toasting each other now. The dank dark middle of the room where the wall had stood before it died seemed to clench momentarily in a passing coldness, and there at the end of the arch where it met the wall that faced the green was the shadow of liquid pressing up between the tiles, making them quite loose.

‘No,' murmured Rowena. ‘No, please.' She had a sense that she couldn't control this. She saw herself running, warding back damp, soaking up liquid, but then new damp would push up like mushrooms somewhere else.