The Influence (15 page)

Chapter Eighteen

When the phone wakened Hermione she thought someone was calling her about the message on the photograph. Knuckling her eyes with one hand, she fumbled her bedroom door open. She must have overslept, for the landing and the stairs were brighter than she expected. The sunlight made her blink stickily, the phone bell shattered her thoughts as they tried to form, and so she forgot to be careful. She was only resting her hand on the banister, not holding onto it, when she stepped on the small pale shape.

It was soft and cold under her bare foot. Perhaps it was where the smell of rot and disinfectant was coming from. She wasn’t sure whether it writhed, but she did, so violently that she lost her footing. Her nails scraped the banister as she failed to grasp the polished wood. Her other hand flailed at the window beside the stairs, knocking over a potted plant, spraying soil across the highest of the miniature Welsh landscapes that hung above the staircase. But she’d grabbed the ledge. She groped clumsily behind her for the banister and steadied herself on the stairs before she turned to face what she had trodden on.

It was an old rag doll in a frilly white dress. She’d stepped on its face, almost dislodging one eye. Now the bland discoloured face was regaining its shape, the cheek filling out sluglike, the mouth she’d trodden crooked settling back into an innocent straight line. “It has to look as if I had an accident, does it?” Hermione said furiously, and stumbled downstairs to the phone.

Alison was already speaking. “I won’t be a moment, I’m just trying to—There you are, Hermione. How are things? How are you feeling?”

What could she say? Shaken and fragile but alive, irate with herself for not having taken care, beginning to feel all the more determined as she realised that the attempt to trip her up meant she was on the right track… “Better than I did, thanks. How’s everyone?”

“Rowan, well—Actually, she’s why I’m calling. If it’s inconvenient you just say so, but she wanted me to ask you if she could stay with you this weekend.”

At least then Hermione could keep an eye on her. She didn’t think Rowan was in danger physically or would be. She glanced up the stairs and caught her breath. The doll had gone. “All right,” she murmured as a challenge. To Alison she said “I’d love to have her. When?”

“Shall Derek bring her straight from school today? Then she’ll be out of the way while we attack the house. Thanks, Hermione, you’re my favourite sister. A few days in the country may do her good,” Alison added as though she were trying to convince herself.

“Don’t you worry about her,” Hermione told her, wondering what Alison had left unsaid. “I’ll look after her as if she were my own.”

“That’s because she is, love.”

Hermione replaced the receiver and then, though her heart still felt painfully magnified by her fall on the stairs, she went upstairs to search the rooms. There was no trace of the doll or of any intrusion. She was on her way to the shop and nibbling a thick sandwich before she realised how wistful Alison’s last words had sounded. Perhaps Alison felt hurt because Rowan wanted to come again so soon. The empty eyes of the backs of the masks in the window grew dimmer as the day wore on, but it wasn’t the masks that Hermione sensed watching her. The attempts to injure her or frighten her seemed both childish and senile, and at least they meant Rowan was being left alone, she told herself.

As she climbed toward home the mountains were greying, the stone swallowing the grass. A house rattled like a trap as it let a car into one of its front rooms. Hermione was hurrying until she saw that Derek’s car wasn’t at her cottage, and then she ran: her phone was ringing. The key scratched its way into the lock, and she knocked the receiver out of its cradle. “Hermione? Is that Hermione? Hermione, is that you?”

“Unless it’s a burglar, mother. Are you well?”

“Oh, trundling along. Getting used to slowing down and watching the days change. They’ve asked me to be secretary at the Women’s Institute, mind you, and already three of the members want your father to look at their gardens. And at least I’ve time to sit and think.”

“That’s the attitude, mother.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about you.”

“Oh yes?”

“No need to sound as if I shouldn’t be. If it’s any consolation to you, I wish now that Alison hadn’t given Rowan’s baby hair to your aunt. I won’t accept that it did any harm, but it’s certainly caused too much fuss. But Hermione, it’s all in the past now. Won’t you try to accept that for your peace of mind and everyone else’s?”

“Believe me, I’ve tried.”

“Try a bit harder, I beg you. Just count yourself lucky that we care enough about you that we managed to get that photograph of Queenie back from the solicitor. You could have been prosecuted for forgery if your father hadn’t told him how upset you were.”

“So nothing’s going to be done,” Hermione said dully.

“Put the idea out of your head, child, or if you can’t do that, have a word with your doctor. Queenie almost split the family, we mustn’t let her do that now. Just let her lie, that’s all I’m asking.”

They were saying their goodbyes when Derek’s car drew up. Hermione had begun to think of putting Rowan off, but she couldn’t help feeling relieved. Rowan ran to her, the binoculars dancing blackly on her chest, as Hermione opened the front door. The child’s hug was unexpectedly fierce. “I get the idea she’s glad to see you,” Derek said as he lifted the small suitcase out of the car.

While she made him a coffee, she learned that he would be rewiring the school after all, and why. “Be good for Hermione,” he called up to Rowan, who was unpacking. He was at the car when she darted out and gave him a quick kiss, but ducked under his arms as he made to hug her. As he drove away, Hermione saw Rowan at the bedroom window, her face blotted out by the binoculars, their huge eyes full of gathering clouds as they lowered to follow the car.

She served Rowan a candlelight dinner. As the dusk turned the hills into heaps of ash, the child’s long face seemed to grow flawless in the soft light. She was obviously troubled about something, but Hermione couldn’t tell which of the subjects she herself raised it might be: school, her father’s second chance there, the house in Waterloo? They were in the kitchen, washing up the dishes, when Rowan blurted “We went to see where mummy works.”

“You and your father?”

Rowan shook her head, and Hermione grew tense. “Was it your idea or your friend’s to go?”

“Why do you keep getting at Vicky? She’s my friend, my only friend. Why can’t you leave her alone?”

“Rowan, you mustn’t talk to me like that.” At least now Hermione knew it had been Vicky’s idea, but Rowan’s vehemence dismayed her. “Aren’t I your friend too? And what do you think your parents are?”

Rowan turned to the draining-board, and a long pale face pressed itself against the window. It was her reflection, taciturn as a mask. “Rowan,” Hermione said “whatever happened at the hospital, talking about it might help.”

The child shivered. “I saw some little boy who looked older than my grandaunt,” she mumbled.

“That’s very rare, dear. You aren’t likely ever to see anything like that again,” Hermione assured her, and played games of Gwen’s and Elspeth’s draughts with her until Rowan was tired enough for bed.

Soon Hermione was in bed herself, awake. If the encounter at the hospital was part of a plan, what about the accident at the school? When she managed to doze she was wakened twice by Rowan’s voice, talking in her sleep. The second time she thought a whisper responded, and she had to stumble to the child’s room in the dusty dawn to see that she was alone.

She overslept until Rowan brought her a cup of tea. At the shop her lack of sleep felt like a vacuum in her skull, a constant threat of pain behind her lumpy eyes. She was grateful to Rowan for showing customers where items were. Sometimes the child seemed to be in two places at once, especially when they were alone in the shop.

At closing time the board that said AUNTIE HERMIONE’S came scuttling down the street, but that was only the rising wind. Rowan was bouncing a ball Hermione had given her to keep. “Now what shall we do?” Hermione said.

“Please may we go for a walk down the valley?”

“Right now?” Hermione hadn’t yet made dinner, but Rowan’s eagerness to return to her favourite haunts seemed reassuring. “Maybe it’ll clear our heads.”

Beyond the flinty parking lot by the road through Holywell, a gravel path led down the valley. Below Saint Winifred’s Well, a Norman shrine whose gift shop sold blinking Christs and various sizes of saint, trees reared over the path, roaring softly. Grass and ferns and thorny creepers spilled over the gravel, and soon the narrow path was tunnelling through green, which smelled like foggy leaves and felt chilly as autumn. “Don’t go out of sight, dear,” Hermione called as Rowan chased her ball.

Rowan picked her ball out of the blackberries and gave her aunt an old-fashioned look. A wind swooped through the lashing trees at her. As she brushed her hair out of her eyes with the hand that held the ball and tugged her skirt down with the other, she looked older than her years yet intensely vulnerable, dwarfed by the trees. Hermione took her hand quickly. “Just walk for a bit so your poor old aunt can keep up with you.”

She had to let go as the path grew twisted and narrower. Overgrown banks obscured the view ahead. The path descended steeply through a dimness like soaked moss and emerged beneath the darkening sky, at the end of the causeway that bordered the first reservoir. A chimney as high as a house stood beside the path, displaying a dark archway Rowan liked to gaze up. Hermione was relieved that she seemed to feel too grown-up now.

On the side of the causeway farther from the reservoir was a sheer drop to a ruined factory. Thick jagged walls topped with weeds stood here and there on the grey foundations. On some of the walls tangles of dry vines flexed their spidery legs in the wind. Hermione wanted to ask Rowan to give her the ball for fear that it might bounce to that edge of the causeway, but she couldn’t risk making her resentful when she needed Rowan to trust her. She managed not to grab at Rowan when, halfway across the causeway, the child let go of her hand.

Rowan went to the railing above the reservoir so swiftly that Hermione’s heart stuttered. Some yards from the wall was the opening through which the reservoir drained, a plughole at least ten feet in diameter. Water poured down a quarter of the rim and trickled down the rest into the foaming darkness, over grass and stalactites of moss that grew on the inner wall. Rowan leaned over the railing. “Is dying like that, do you think?”

“Good gracious, dear, I wouldn’t know. I’m not quite that decrepit, am I?” Hermione was being too studiedly jovial, she knew, but the child had taken her off guard. She thought that death might be very much like falling into a greedy darkness. Even if you passed through to whatever you expected to find, could that include other people? Suppose Queenie couldn’t find her father because he was engrossed in his own afterlife? Perhaps life after death was an endless lonely dream, and whether it lasted for the moment of death or eternity didn’t matter: its kind of time would have nothing to do with life awake, even if one were to invade the other. Her thoughts seemed to be plunging into the slippery dark. “Let’s move on, shall we?” she said as soon as she felt steady enough to walk.

They strolled back past the chimney and followed the path downwards between empty windows shivering with weeds. A wall patchy as the sky towered over the path through an overgrown bank. The branches of the tree that stood against the wall had scraped pale an arc of bricks. Rowan strayed ahead in the premature dusk, bouncing her ball. “Don’t go so fast,” Hermione panted, cursing the weight of her body, the prickly heat that swarmed over her as she tried to run into the wind. Rowan vanished around the side of a building like a huge stained broken tooth, and Hermione ran faster, her legs aching. She grasped the mossy corner of the building and pushed herself around it so that she could see the next stretch of path.

And then she shuddered to a halt and clutched the squelching wall. Rowan’s ball had rolled into a clump of grass that sagged over the path, and she was stooping to retrieve it. She seemed unaware of anything else, of Hermione or the trees that threw themselves back and forth above her with a sound like a stormy sea. She didn’t seem to notice the figure that stood close behind her, a little girl in a long white dress.

Rowan straightened up and walked on, bouncing the ball on the squeaky gravel, and the other followed, gleaming like a tombstone under the sunless sky. As Hermione heaved herself away from the wall, she saw that though the wind was tearing leaves off the trees and dragging so hard at her clothes that she staggered backward, it didn’t trouble Rowan. The child and her companion might have been walking inside glass, their hair and their dresses were so still.

They were almost at the next bend, past which the path was out of sight beyond the high bank. Hermione flung herself after them, her heart pounding so furiously that her blood drove all thoughts out of her head. Then, just as Rowan reached the bend, her companion looked back at Hermione, and smiled.

The smile seemed to blot out the world. That Hermione recognised the face was terrible enough, the long pale face that resembled Rowan’s all too clearly. The pale eyes stared at her as if she were a dog that would have to look away before they blinked, if they ever did. The smile was telling her that there was nothing she could do, despite all her knowledge. The power of that contempt settled about Hermione until she could no longer hear or feel the wind. Then Rowan vanished beyond the trembling grass of the bank, and the other turned like a figure on a music box and followed her. At once the wind almost hurled Hermione to the ground.