The Influence (11 page)

Rowan was behind the house, gazing over the top-heavy privet hedge towards the bay. “You’ll take root if you stand there much longer,” he told her. “Come and see what needs doing to someone’s house.”

“I’d rather not, daddy. My new friend Vicky may be coming to play with me, and I want to be here in case she does.”

He wasn’t prepared to feel so rejected. Maybe she thought it wasn’t ladylike to carry his tools any more. There might come a time when he didn’t know her at all. The idea dismayed him, and he had to make himself concentrate on sketching the rewiring for the newlyweds in Bootle. When he returned to Waterloo, Hermione had arrived.

She was in the front garden, attacking the lawn with shears. “Here I am again, Derek. You’ll be thinking you can’t get rid of me.”

“Don’t break my heart. You know you’re always welcome.”

“Am I? I don’t feel it. I don’t mean you, I mean the house.” She glanced at it as if she expected to see someone watching. “What about you? Do you feel welcome?”

“Rowan does.”

“I’m not sure I like that either.” She plucked grass off the blades of the shears. “Well, you’ll be thinking your neurotic sister-in-law is as bad as ever.”

“You need time to get over things, that’s all. The bad bits of your past are dead now, aren’t they? Queenie and now Lance.”

He thought he’d been too harsh, but she nodded slowly as if to convince herself. “Lance, yes. No mistake about that, he was cut in half by a train. The driver said he looked straight at it and then stepped in front of it. How could anyone do that, Derek?”

“Maybe he couldn’t stand himself any longer, the shame of it and people knowing.”

“That’s what his father thinks. But he was coming here, Derek.”

“So what?” Derek said, feeling obscurely threatened. “He had to be going somewhere.”

“But why would he come all that way and then do that to himself?”

“He’d been talking about Rowan, hadn’t he? Maybe when he came that close he couldn’t stand what he was thinking about her.”

The discussion was making him nervous, the memory of meeting Lance, the sense of Lance’s mind as a dark pit that anyone could fall into if they strayed too near. “You do realise that we’ll never know what he wanted to tell Alison,” Hermione said, and he was about to retort that it didn’t matter when Rowan came round the house.

“Where’s mummy? Oh, hello,” she said to Derek, “I didn’t know you were back. Please may I go just on the dunes where you can see me, and look for my friend?”

“Here I am, Rowan.” Alison appeared at the open front door with a scraper and a length of peeled wallpaper. “What’s wrong?”

She was asking Hermione, who was staring at the child. Hermione cleared her throat nervously. “Did you give her those binoculars?”

“One of her friends did,” Derek said.

“You can have a look with them if you like,” Rowan said, and reached behind her neck for the strap.

“No, no, I just want to see them,” Hermione said hastily. She peered at them, a frown narrowing her eyes. “Perhaps I could just hold them.”

Her attempt to sound casual made Rowan dubious. “My friend said I could keep them as long as we live here.”

Derek let out some of his growing impatience. “What’s the problem, Hermione?”

“They’re hers.” She was speaking to Alison, almost pleading. “I saw them in her room, I’d swear to it. Can’t you see how old they are?”

“Listen, if someone doesn’t—”

“She means Queenie, Derek. She did have some binoculars like these. They weren’t in her room when we cleared it. Rowan, love, I won’t be angry if you say you did, but did you take those from the old lady’s room?”

“I didn’t, mummy,” Rowan said, close to angry tears.

“She used to sit at the top window with them after her father died,” Hermione told Derek as if that should convince him. “She’d watch his grave for hours.”

“They’re Vicky’s. Vicky gave them to me,” Rowan cried.

Hermione clutched Derek’s arm so hard that he gasped. “Who did you say?”

“Vicky. She’s my new friend. I met her when I was staying with you.”

“Oh,” Hermione groaned, swaying heavily against Derek.

He freed his arm and gripped her shoulders and stared into her eyes. “Hermione, you’ll be upsetting the child if you don’t lay off. What’s up with you?”

“It’s all right, Derek, I’ll look after her.” Alison put an arm round her sister. “It’s just one of those coincidences, Hermione.”

“What kind of coincidence?” Derek demanded.

Alison glanced at Rowan and scowled at him. “It’s just a coincidence,” she repeated more forcefully. “She’s thinking of Queenie, that’s all. We only called her Queenie because grandfather used to call her his queen. She was christened Victoria.”

Chapter Twelve

The silence seemed to stretch the air until Rowan’s ears throbbed. The shriek of a seagull felt as if the air were tearing. Derek muttered under his breath, and then Hermione pulled away from mummy. “Rowan,” she said in a voice that meant to sound disinterested, “what’s your new friend like?”

“She’s nice. I can tell she reads a lot and likes old things. She always tells the truth, and she’s awfully clean. Her daddy brought her up, but now she doesn’t know where he is.”

Everything she said appeared to upset Hermione further. “And you say you met her near my house?” Hermione whispered.

“On the beach when I went with granddad. But she said she lived near here.”

“Very near,” Hermione said, and swallowed. “Rowan, will you promise me something?”

“What?”

“Just for me, will you promise not to play with this girl you call Vicky?”

“Do us a favour, Hermione,” Derek interrupted. “She’s got few enough friends round here yet without you losing her one.”

“Just until we’ve had a chance to meet her, then. What about the children who live across the road?”

“Mary and Paul? I don’t like them any more. They’re never clean. They’d sully me.”

“That’s her,” Hermione wailed. “That’s one of her words. My God, you sound just like her.”

Rowan suddenly felt as wicked as Vicky had looked when Paul wanted the binoculars—wicked enough to get her own back on Hermione for making mummy accuse her of lying. She remembered one of Queenie’s words. “They’re such paltry children,” she said.

Perhaps she’d gone too far. Hermione’s face began to shake. “They’re just words out of the books she reads, Hermione,” Derek insisted. “And maybe from the old girl before she died.”

“She’s at an age when she picks things up,” Alison said. “Better get used to it, Hermione. She may be worse when she’s a teenager.”

“It isn’t just that, can’t you see? She might be Queenie standing there in front of us. For God’s sake hold onto her while you still can.”

“I don’t need you to tell me what’s best for my child and her mind,” Derek snapped.

“She’s my child too,” Alison said.

“I never said she wasn’t. I hope that means you’ll take no notice of your sister’s crazy talk.”

He turned away as if he’d said too much. Rowan was ashamed of having caused the trouble, of making them talk about her as if she weren’t there. “I’m sorry, Auntie, I was only teasing you. Daddy’s right, those words are in my books.”

“That’s good enough for me,” her father said. “Clear off then, but stay where we can see you.”

Hermione offered nervously to go with her until mummy said there was no need. Rowan ran onto the dunes. If she was becoming more like Queenie, what was wrong with that? If Vicky was like Queenie too, except less daunting, perhaps Rowan had been drawn to that in her. Talking to her ought to dispel any doubts Rowan had, though she wasn’t sure what she would ask. But there was no sign of Vicky on the dunes or on the beach.

When Rowan went home, the grown-ups were being polite to one another. At dinner, even the most neutral remark to her felt as if it were directed at another of the grown-ups. She was glad when it was bedtime, even when they came up one by one to give her kisses that felt like unspoken words.

On Sunday Hermione seemed determined to be sensible: she dug the garden fiercely all morning and then proposed to see what could be cleared from the top floor. She strode upstairs as if she had never been afraid to do so.

Her bravado didn’t last for long. She obviously disliked the shapes that squatted in the room next to Queenie’s, hands on knees under the dustsheets. Soon all the chairs were uncovered except for the one that looked as if someone were sitting quite still beneath the sheet. The seated shape was only cushions—rotten, by the smell. When Hermione tried to move a chair, the fabric gave way and her fingers sank into the spongy greyness that filled the arms. “You’ll clear this floor out soon, won’t you,” she pleaded. “The sooner it’s livable, the sooner you can get away from here.”

Daddy drove her home that evening. By the time he came back Rowan was in bed, listening apprehensively for the argument her parents seemed to be saving until they were alone. She was asleep before she heard anything. At breakfast they were silent, her father staring at a letter propped against the milk jug. Eventually he told her what it said. “I won’t be doing the job at your school, in case anyone asks you. You might think it’d count for something that you go there, but a spark undercut me by fifty pounds.”

“Won’t we be able to stay here?”

“What the hell do you think?” he snarled, and looked shocked by himself. “I’m sorry, love, I didn’t mean to shout at you.” She was too upset to go to him, and he returned to staring at the letter. “Fifty pigging quid,” he muttered.

“Let your father be, Rowan. Hurry up or you’ll be late for school.” Her mother shooed her to the bathroom to brush her teeth. When Rowan made to look into the dining-room and say a forgiving goodbye to her father, mummy hurried her onward. She was too late. Rowan had already heard one of the worst sounds she could imagine ever hearing: her father weeping.

Chapter Thirteen

At lunchtime on Monday several children came to the shop. Hermione peered out of the back room as the bell rang. Two girls of about Rowan’s age were admiring dresses on the racks while some of their classmates crowded at the window, darkening the shop. The bell jangled as girls swarmed in, and Hermione seemed unable to count them or even to see their faces. They made her room feel so like a cramped dark airless box that she stumbled to her feet. “Some of you will have to go out. Anyone who isn’t buying something. And don’t all block the window. Give the rest of us a chance to breathe.”

They stared at her as if she were senile or mad. One, who had just opened her purse, snapped it shut ostentatiously and stalked like a duchess out of the shop, followed by her friends. The shrill bell rang and rang, and then the shop was quiet until Gwen and Elspeth, the craftswomen who made the toys, murmured together in Welsh. “We were saying,” Gwen explained, “if you wanted to go home where you won’t be interrupted, we could look after the shop.”

“I couldn’t let you do that. People might think it was an improvement, probably would.” Even her attempt at a joke betrayed her nervousness. “If you want to stay, I’d love you to. I’ll stay in the back so I don’t scare away any more customers,” she said, and returned to the latest pile of unsolicited advertising.

Soon all the glossy brochures full of eulogies to plastic toys were in the bin beside her small oak desk. Gwen and Elspeth murmured liquidly in Welsh and glanced at her when they thought she wasn’t looking, concern on their sharp but delicate pale faces. Years of living together had made them look almost like identical twins. She couldn’t blame them for worrying about her. She would be no use to Rowan in this state.

She had been on her way to this state ever since the child had looked in the shop window, through the reflection of the mask. She’d kept seeing a small figure in the devious streets, and whenever she unlocked the shop she felt there were too many still faces in the window. Then her mother had called to tell her Lance had been killed before he could talk to Alison, and Hermione had remembered what he’d said to her: “the little girl”. Perhaps he hadn’t meant Rowan at all.

A feeling that she might be needed had sent her to Waterloo. The sight of the house, of its clusters of dull rooftop windows that reminded her of the eyes of an old swollen spider, had made her too nervous to think. The sisters had discussed Lance guardedly, and Hermione had felt less alone for talking. She’d gone out to make a start on the garden so that prospective buyers of the house wouldn’t be put off before they opened the gate, and then Rowan had appeared with the dead woman’s binoculars.

At first Hermione had thought the black shape was clinging to her chest. She’d seen a bat and told herself it was a kitten. What if they had been Queenie’s binoculars? The child was almost bound to have taken something from the house, but why had she insisted that some friend had given them to her? Rowan had gazed innocently at her and told her that the child was someone she’d met when she was staying with Hermione—a child with Queenie’s real name.

Nobody had seemed to think it mattered. Once Rowan was out of earshot on the dunes, her parents had turned on Hermione. Rowan was upset enough about having to move without all this fuss about an old pair of binoculars. The damn things weren’t even much use, Derek had protested as if that should end the argument: he’d had a squint through them, and the lenses might as well have been plain glass.