The Influence (16 page)

She fought her way into it, appalled that anything so insubstantial could be so difficult to overcome. When she struggled round the bend, digging her fingers into the muddy bank, Rowan was alone on the path. “Rowan,” she called shakily, but the child didn’t look back. Hermione was afraid Rowan was ignoring her or cut off from her somehow until she realised that the wind which was flapping Rowan’s clothes was also blowing her own voice away. She drew a breath that filled her throat with damp. “Rowan,” she shouted, “let’s go home now.”

Rowan dawdled back to her, bouncing the ball. Hermione grabbed her hand as soon as it was within reach. Once they turned, the wind was behind them, but she wished they could go faster up the steep path. Whenever bushes flourished the undersides of their leaves she thought a pale figure was rearing up at her. As the clouds began to break, the snatches of light at the path ahead, and then at the deserted streets of Holywell, were pale shapes too.

She slammed the front door and sat Rowan in the kitchen with a glass of orange juice while she searched the cottage, and then she halted in the living-room, staring at the photograph album she’d brought from Waterloo. She turned to a photograph of her aunt at Rowan’s age, gazing into the lens with a wilfulness that had survived the browning of all those years. She slipped it free of the corners that held it, and made herself carry it into the kitchen. “Rowan,” she said as though her mind were on some other subject entirely, “do you know who this is?”

Rowan looked up, licking orange from her upper lip. She glanced at the photograph, and her face grew innocent at once. “I couldn’t say, auntie.”

Hermione turned away hastily. She hurried back to the album, almost crumpling the photograph as she replaced it in its plot. The face of the child behind Rowan on the path had been even more symmetrical, a perfected image of that childhood self. Having recognised it wasn’t what dismayed her most: it was the knowingness with which Rowan had avoided the truth. She’d seemed just like Queenie except for the face.

Except for the face—“God help us,” Hermione whispered, and sat down quickly lest she lose her balance. At last she knew why Rowan had to seem like Queenie. “So that you won’t be noticed,” she muttered, and waited for the mocking whisper to tell her she was right but helpless. There was no whisper, only a watchful silence, and she knew she had to act now, while she could. She had to do what she could hardly bear to think of.

Chapter Nineteen

As soon as he came back from Holywell, Derek set about stripping the staircase wall. He strode up to the top floor and began to peel the paper off while there was enough light for him to see by. He was pulling down the first strip when the weight of sagging plaster tore it loose. Lumps of plaster clattered against the metal legs of the ladder, shaking it under him; dust the colour of pale flesh blinded him. He held onto the ladder until he could see and then, though he was coughing, he began to laugh. Under the doddering plaster the bricks were sound and dry. “Do your worst, you old sod,” he mocked the wall, and moved the ladder down two stairs to attack the next stretch of paper.

He was halfway down when Alison came to look. She made a face at the mess on the stairs and gave him a kiss which plastered her mouth like a clown’s. After dinner she helped him strip the rest of the staircase wall. They labored downstairs with cartons of rubble, and then they took a bath together and made love lingeringly. Afterward Alison lay and gazed at the ceiling. “It just feels empty now,” she murmured. “It feels as if it’s waiting for someone to move in.”

She was asleep before they could talk about Rowan. In the morning he had to make an early start on rewiring the top floor, since he would be working at the school next week. He’d lifted floorboards to expose the dusty innards of the house when Tony rang from the estate agent’s. His contact in the planning department thought there should be no objection to another nursing home, and a contractor who owed Tony a favour had agreed to work on the house for cost. Derek felt better than he had for months, maybe years.

He was drilling the walls on the top floor when the phone rang again. He hoped it was Rowan, because then he would know she was over whatever had made her so taciturn on the drive to Wales. But Alison told him it had been her mother.

By mid-afternoon he’d finished threading the top floor, and soon he was training wire down the exposed bricks above the stairs. Shortly before dinner he was able to shout down to Alison to switch on the circuit breaker. When the entire top floor lit up around him, he wished Rowan had been there to perform the ceremony. He felt as if he’d conquered the house.

Alison had brought a property newspaper from the estate agent’s. During dinner she wanted him to look at photographs of houses. He agreed with most of those she’d marked. At last he said “What did your mother want?”

Alison pointed to her mouth and chewed to show she couldn’t speak. She seemed to take her time about swallowing. “There won’t be any exhumation, you’ll be glad to hear.”

“I should damn well hope not. That’s what your mother said, is it?”

“Yes.”

“That all?”

Alison frowned at his impatience. “No, not quite.”

“Don’t bother telling me if it’s a family secret.”

Alison reached for his hand across the table. “Why do you say things like that, Derek?”

“I just don’t feel comfortable with them sometimes. Don’t let it bother you.”

“It does. I can’t help that. I don’t know what more we can do.”

“Maybe you try too hard. I could have done without a family conference on what we were going to call Rowan.”

“I quite liked involving them. She’s my parents’ only grandchild, you know. I wasn’t aware that you resented them so much.”

“I never said I did. I just wish I didn’t feel expected to check whatever we do with them first. We even had a conference over what we were going to do about this house, for God’s sake, as if we couldn’t decide for ourselves.” He felt bewildered by himself, arguing like this when life was going well for them at last, and yet he seemed unable to stop. “I notice you keep saying your family.”

“Our family, then.” The corners of her eyes glittered under the chandelier until she dabbed at them. “You’ve no reason to feel excluded, you know. They’re the family I’ve always had, and I wouldn’t change them for anyone, but I chose you.”

“You still haven’t told me what your mother said.”

“You know perfectly well, Derek. She said Hermione wrote that message on the photograph.”

He thought of Rowan, running away from him to Hermione. “I know she’s your sister, but I wish we hadn’t let Rowan go to her this weekend.”

“Dear me, Derek, what do you think Hermione’s likely to do to her? She only wrote that message because she cares about Rowan so much.”

“Seems like a crazy way to care.”

Alison’s voice sharpened. “What was that, Derek?”

“Listen, I’m not getting at you or your parents, but even you’ve got to admit that the rest of them are pretty odd.”

“You don’t need to mince words with me.” She seemed angry that he had. “Say what you’re thinking,” she said.

“Fair enough, I will,” he said distractedly, staring at Wales under the gathering darkness and wondering when Rowan would call. “I think there may be a crazy streak in your family that missed you and your father. That can happen, can’t it? You should know, you’re a nurse.”

“Don’t you try to bully me. That won’t convince me, you know.”

“I shouldn’t need to. Don’t tell me you can’t see it for yourself.” When she stared tight-lipped at him he burst out “Your grandfather thought your aunt was keeping him alive when he ought to be dead, and if you ask me she thought she was never going to die at all. And your cousin chucked himself under a train. Reckon that’s normal, do you?”

“Who else have you in mind, Derek?”

“I already said, not you. But if you mean your sister, I’m not arguing. All that stuff about her tooth and then about that pigging locket, and even about Rowan’s friend, about a child, for God’s sake! I know she had a rotten childhood, but so did I, what with my mam dumping me on her folks whenever she wanted a man round while my dad was away at sea and then her folks treating me as if it was all my fault. I nearly jumped off a bridge onto the railway once. Never told you that before, did I? But you can’t use your childhood as an excuse for the rest of your life.”

“Derek, if you really believe—no, I won’t say it.”

He was meant to know, and it infuriated him. “I’m telling you, I wouldn’t have let Rowan go this weekend if I hadn’t felt bad about the row I had with your sister, as if that wasn’t her fault too for going on about Vicky and the binoculars and all that other crap.”

Alison sat forward so violently that the chandelier rang. “You wouldn’t have let Rowan go to my sister? She has two parents, if you’d care to remember.”

“I know that. We aren’t talking about that.” He saw that she was about to say it wasn’t up to him to choose the subject, and so he blundered on “I just want to keep you and Rowan safe from all this craziness.”

Her stare grew softer but no friendlier. “Derek, I know you mean well, but you mustn’t try to undermine relationships I’ve had all my life. Queenie almost split the family. I hope for the sake of our marriage you don’t want to. And as long as we’re discussing irrational behavior, we might remember the way you went after Ken like some young ruffian in the street and seemed proud of it too.”

“Look, I’m not blaming anyone for anything. Or if anyone’s to blame for the way Rowan is, I am as much as anyone. I wish I could spend more time with her. I will when I can if she wants me to.”

“What do you mean, the way she is? Are you suggesting she’s mentally ill?”

“I just mean she’s a loner, the way I used to be.” He refused even to consider what Alison had said—he wished she hadn’t brought it up. “Let’s call this the end of the round and go back to our corners. I want to phone and see how Rowan is before she goes to bed.”

“Can I trust you to talk to Hermione without upsetting her?”

“I managed yesterday. You phone if you think you’ve got to protect her from me, but I want to talk to Rowan.” When Alison turned to stare across the bay he went into the hall, past the shifting of silvery leaves. The argument had been Hermione’s fault, he thought. He had to take time to put away his anger before he dialled her number. After a while he dialled again slowly, to make sure of the digits, and stood there listening and gazing up the stairs at the dark. He waited as long as he could before he went back to Alison. Though it was almost Rowan’s bedtime, there was no reply from the cottage.

Chapter Twenty

Dear diary, they can make adverts look oldfashuned on televishun so I ecspect they can do it to picsures, becose Hermione showed me one that looked like Vicky ecsept it was too old…

Rowan let her pencil stray above the page. She hadn’t written what she felt. Out beyond the window, dusk was settling like mud into the bay. Over in Waterloo the first lights were sparkling, lights of houses that looked distant as stars. That sight used to make her deliciously homesick, but now it reminded her that her parents hadn’t wanted her, that she was a burden to them. She felt as if she didn’t belong anywhere.

The only person she could tell was Vicky, except that now Hermione had managed to make Rowan uneasy about her. Hermione had taken a dislike to Vicky without even having met her, all because of the binoculars. That was just Hermione’s being odd as she sometimes was, and she might have rubbed something on the photograph to make it look older—but where had she got a photograph of Vicky, and how did she know what Vicky looked like? Rowan would rather ask Vicky than her aunt, since Vicky always told the truth. She was watching the lights multiply beyond the bay when the doorbell rang.

She ran to the window too late to see who came into the cottage. She heard murmuring downstairs but could make out no words until Hermione called to her. “Rowan, dear, would you get your coat and come down?”

Rowan undressed the hanger in the wardrobe and hesitated at the top of the stairs, for Hermione was saying “I do hope it isn’t inconvenient, but you did say that if I had to go to Gronant I could get in touch with you.”

“I said so. Is that the child I hear coming?” A woman Rowan knew but couldn’t place stepped into the hall and eyed her. The woman’s face was sharp but delicate as china, her eyes made up as though the china had been painted. “Here she is.”

Hermione appeared, buttoning her coat hurriedly. “Rowan, you remember Elspeth. She and Gwen make the toys for the shop. You’re going to stay with her while I go somewhere.”

Something about her urgency made Rowan demur. “May I just phone home so they’ll know where we are?”

“No time now. We shouldn’t be long, we should be coming back here to sleep.”

How could Rowan believe her when Hermione was pretending not to be nervous, so brightly that even Elspeth seemed suspicious? All Rowan could do was be hurried out of the cottage by Hermione and down the path to the squat red French car.

As they drove along roads sunken in shadows of hedges, Hermione began to chatter. She used to eat when she was nervous, but this was worse. She kept trying to point out sights to Rowan, who was watching the lamps of the far coast as they glittered across the dark cold fields. Hermione fell silent as they passed the graveyard outside Gronant, stones glimmering like clouds over a moon, then recommenced chattering at once, almost stammering. “Here we are, Rowan, nearly there now. You’ll be good, won’t you? Perhaps Elspeth will let you watch television. I’ll be as quick as I can.”