Touched (2 page)

Two of Pollard's men had arrived for a renewed battering at the wall.

‘It almost seems almost as though it were
rotting
,' said Rowena. ‘It needs to come down.'

Builders' grunts followed, and the crash of three hammers chipped a piece of brick. The wall groaned, resisted, shuddered.

‘Dynamite,' said Gregory, accompanying Rowena out into the sunshine. ‘Why did you use Arthur Pollard, by the way?'

‘Oh, my husband found him. Through a recommendation, I think. It was harder, from London. You know him. His work?'

‘I'm sure he's fine. He lives in the village, but people round here tend to use other builders. Most of his employment is in Radlett, and even as far as St Albans, I understand.'

‘Oh. Oh dear.'

‘No, I'm sure his work's fine. Villagers are lemmings. As you'll see. Several of them do use Mrs Pollard's kindergarten, though. You've been living in London?'

‘Yes.' She nodded, in an abstracted fashion.

‘Welcome to Crowsley Beck. Twenty miles from Piccadilly Circus, but a different world entirely. There, look, the bells are drowning out old Pollard. You and your husband must come round for drinks.'

The bells paused. The wall screamed, protested, cried.

‘You'll have an interesting-shaped room there,' said Gregory, and Rowena nodded, a line of anxiety on her forehead smoothed by her smile.

It was only after he had left and the dust had settled that she smelled another smell, barely there over the affronting odours. She turned, and her nose caught the faintest drift of women's perfume. She recognised it, but she couldn't think what it was.

The children wheeled, breathless, into church as the bells bowled over the green, the vicar almost bowing in his greeting as this large new family swelled his congregation, and Evangeline slipped off among the reeds.

The hymns sounded through the village.

There across the green from the church was the post office and shop with its large Wall's freezer, then the duck pond, the war memorial, the pub, the copse; on the other side of the post office, the winding back lanes with their cottages. Pansies grew in baskets and the rooks cawed black across the green. The whistling roads of south Hertfordshire led outside the village past flat ploughed fields of crow and flint, bone-shaped knobbles of puddingstone among the crops, to the stables where village children rode. Then to the private schools, boys' and girls', and then to the aerodrome where the men flew on Saturdays, and beyond that, the nuclear power station with its spherical reactor partly concealed in a dip. The school for retarded, handicapped or unmanageable children was in the other direction: Evangeline Crale's new school from September.

Pollard and his men carried on working while the Crales were at church. With no one to watch it, the wall began to spew its guts, hair and lime putty with foul brown dust and eructations of damp. It moaned like a tree falling.

‘Where is Eva?' said Rowena, scanning the green after church. In her heart, she always feared that one day Evangeline, who roamed, might simply fail to return. The country, she thought, with a new realisation, would afford her more opportunities to wander. ‘Where
is
Eva?'

Evangeline, known as Eva to her family, was hiding in the stream. Its flow had fallen to a trickle, but its banks were still putty cool, and she lay her head against them and found their mosses as her pillow. The sky above was a brilliant blue through leaves. Her invisible friend Freddie had arrived just after her in the village, and she hugged him in the stream, for he was younger than her, and she chatted reassuringly to him. She sidled near the new house before the others had crossed the green from church, and Pollard saw her, and smiled. Other villagers loitered at gates for gossip after church, and stared and whispered in consternation or amusement. They had never seen a girl like this. Was she in fancy dress? Was she something from one of the film companies? But there were inconsistencies: her hair ribbon was synthetic, her mud-streaked petticoats revealed sandals.

Rowena crossed the green, becoming too hot inside her blouse and worrying about the lamb that was roasting in the old gas oven. There was a splash of light on a window in the roof of her new house that made her look up, then close her eyes against its glare. She felt conspicuous: she was watched. She didn't know how to behave, somehow, within a small village, and she felt awkwardly certain that she was incongruous, and that Evangeline would be bringing shame to the family already. Three of her children walked in a neat line beside her, while she pushed the youngest in the pram that had seen her through five babies, even the twins lying head to toe.

Evangeline was kneeling near the fence of number 3 and picking daisies from the verge. Her hair and hands were brown with mud. Her small sharp teeth were showing in her feral face as she sang a nursery rhyme to herself. She looked up and glanced at the others, then looked back down. ‘I will get my revenge,' she muttered to Freddie, whom no one else could see.

‘Evangeline, go inside. How dare you, really how dare you? There isn't sufficient hot water for so very much washing,' said Rowena, tutting at her third daughter with an impatience that met terrible sympathy, and Evangeline merely hung her head before going up to the bathroom under the eaves, where the ceiling sloped sharply and only the loofah was unpacked. In the bath, which she ran cold on the hot day, she skimmed her hands over her body. Then she let herself cry.

Downstairs, the roasting lamb was making the kitchen explosive with heat, and the wall still screamed like a sow. Pollard and his men had taken to it again after a short break. Rowena put her hands to her ears, feeling heat and noise crowding in on her with a plunge of panic about how she would manage to cook for seven in this ancient kitchen, and told her children to go upstairs to play. Jennifer, the beauty, lingered and gazed at her mother, running her corn-fat plaits through circled thumbs and fingers, up and down, as she often did, and said, ‘It's all right, Mummy. It's all all right.'

Rowena smiled at her, and the combination of Jennifer's placidity and loveliness calmed her. Looking at her was like encountering a breathtaking countryside view; it soothed the soul. Rowena had never in her life seen such a beautiful child. How had she given birth to a girl who looked like an exquisitely wrought doll? She felt proud, though she knew that nature's trickery was outside her hands. With the exception of poor Eva, the others were healthy and appealing, but not out of the ordinary. Jennifer Crale resembled a doctored photograph. She could be a young film star in
Life
magazine, with her rose-dusted cheeks, her row of pearly teeth with their endearing gap in the middle, her eyes so large and intensely blue it was almost difficult to land upon her gaze. Her lashes seemed to weigh her eyelids down, like the Victorian dolls that Eva treasured with their glaze of pink, their sooty slotted eyes and rosebud smiles.

‘What a
pretty
girl,' the vicar's wife had already said.

‘You insult her,' said the verger. ‘The girl is quite beautiful.'

‘Thank you,' said Rowena, who had heard it all before, but enjoyed it, always, anew, with the same sense of surprise and lack of entitlement. ‘Thank you.'

Rowena now prodded the lamb and gagged slightly at the steam from the potatoes. She felt trapped in some stranger's scullery, the stove an unsteady monster, old fly strips hanging just beyond her reach.

‘It's too hot in here,' she said to Jennifer. ‘Will you go and fetch the baby's sunshade from her room?'

‘Yes,' said Jennifer. She hesitated. She picked up a spoon and stood there playing with it.

‘Don't you
like
doing things for your baby sister?' said Rowena. ‘You didn't want to go up to fetch her from her nap earlier.'

‘Oh, I
do
,' said Jennifer. ‘Of course, Mummy. It's just I get a bit lost on that side of the house. I – if I go upstairs.'

‘Darling! You've been there dozens of times when Granny lived there.'

‘Yes,' said Jennifer, then she gave her smile with its charming dimple, and went out into the garden and round on to the lane to enter number 3's front door, the only way of accessing that side until the dividing wall was knocked down.

It was ridiculous to cook a roast on a day like this, thought Rowena. They could have had a salad with ham or eggs, followed by a jelly, but Douglas expected his Sunday roast, even when the temperature must be in the nineties and she had only an oven that wobbled on its legs, rocking with each blow to the wall. She turned at a movement in the passage outside the kitchen, but it was merely the play of sun and shadow. The carrots were turning to mush, so she went to gather her children.

The twins played in the garden with the baby, but her only son Bob was upstairs in number 3, the front cottage. She ran into that section and climbed the stairs, and felt momentarily sad at the top. She stood still. Bob was kneeling on the floor above the stubborn wall.

He grinned up at her. His rusting golliwog bucket was half full of a crumbling brown substance. He was digging into the floor itself.

‘Bob!' she cried. ‘Whatever are you doing?' She snatched his beach spade. ‘What
are
you doing?'

‘Digging floor, Mummy! Look, I make a hole.'

He spun round and kicked his heel against the hole, gouging up more rotting wood resembling earth.

‘Soon on the other side!'

Rowena knelt down. ‘It's revolting!' she said to him. Tentatively, she pressed her finger where he had dug. It was soft and damp. The floorboards were decaying; the thumping below shook the whole building. A mildewed scent stuck to her finger, and as she rose, she again caught the perfume. It was familiar, but she couldn't remember what it was. For the briefest flash of a moment, a face came to her, an old face crying, but it was her mind playing tricks, and she turned it off like a light switch.

‘I hear dem,' said Bob conversationally. ‘I keeping worms in this!' He was stirring the contents of his bucket with his spade. ‘I hear dem talk at sleep time,' he said, almost chattering to himself. ‘Walk.'

‘What are you talking about, Bob?' said Rowena mildly, but she wasn't really concentrating; she leaned against a wall and closed her eyes as it juddered against her cheek. Where was Douglas? He had gone off to the pub for a half-pint – something he never did in London – with one of the new neighbours after church with some excuse about the village cricket team, and now he wouldn't even be back to carve the joint. She pictured him striding in with his shirtsleeves rolled up as the joint congealed, wielding the carving knife as though he were caressing a woman. She felt sick.

‘Please,' she called down weakly. ‘Leave the wall. Just while we have luncheon. Perhaps – perhaps you could start on the windows?'

‘Yes, Mrs Crale,' called back Arthur Pollard.

Evangeline lay in her bathtub, watching bubbles cling to her thighs like little river insects, and wringing more mud out of her hair. The warmth of her tears spread pleasingly into the cold of the bathwater. She lay her head under the surface and dreamed, planning to hide potatoes from lunch in her petticoat pockets. She was happier up here, close to where her grandmother had slept, in her air, in her love. She climbed out.

Arthur Pollard suddenly appeared in the doorway.

‘I apologise,' he said.

‘No, it's all right,' said Evangeline, blushing, and for a moment she was pinned by indecision and stood in front of him in just her underwear.

‘Was going to wash me hands. I'll be out of your way.' His fair hair was further lightened with dust.

She tossed her layers of muddied clothes into the washing basket and scampered out of the room, then went to collect a fresh gored petticoat and a chemise from her grandmother's trunk that she kept in the bedroom she shared with the baby, and slipped into the kitchen where she ate a portion of lamb that had been saved for her, hiding half a dozen cold potatoes to eat later.

Douglas Crale dozed in his chair after lunch, his shirt buttons undone, while the twins helped their mother clear up. Eva rocked the crying baby, as she was best at that and her mother bothered her less if she helped with little Caroline. A railway set had been laid out for Bob. Eva held the baby against her chest, the cotton of her frock bearing the faint yellow lines of long folding, and she chattered at her, letting her pull strands of her hair and kissing her with the edges of her teeth. Soon she had her asleep, and she slipped upstairs, leaving the others to their afternoon. Her age-faded clothes dipped into the shadows of the stairwell, and no one noticed her leave, because they were used to her disappearances and her dresses were the hue of shadowed walls and her hair the dullness of a mouse back.

At the top of the stairs sat Pollard. He smelled of the carbolic soap Rowena had put in the bathroom for his use, and he had a packet of sandwiches in wax paper on his lap.

‘Want one?' he said.

Eva nodded.

She took a bite and then another. ‘These are much nicer than ours,' she said in her slow, low voice. ‘What are they?'

‘Sandwich Spread,' he said thickly through his chewing, and handed her another one. She paused, then put it in her petticoat pocket and giggled.

‘Secret supply,' he said in level tones, winking at her. He had a face like a grown-up elf's, strong but fine-featured, she thought.

She laughed, but quietly, so her mother wouldn't hear her, and then smiled at him.

‘
Secret
supply,' he said, still chewing, and she laughed again.

‘Pollard,' she said. ‘Be careful.'

‘What's she called?' he said in matter-of-fact tones.

‘Who?'

‘You know who.'

Eva's expression froze. She tried to think of other names, other people, but only one would come to her.