The Influence (25 page)

Edith held out the large soft gift-wrapped parcel, and the child stood up with a rustle of paper from the corner where she’d unwrapped the Dickens novels she’d asked her parents for. Her movement, slow and graceful yet oddly tentative, and the sight of her—her eyes more withdrawn behind the long lashes than they used to be, the hint of a pout in the shape of her lips set firm now in an expression that looked constantly dissatisfied, her hair coiled tight on either side of her forehead—pierced Alison’s heart, and she wanted to hug her as she had the night Derek had brought her back from Wales, hug her until the child knew how precious she was. But Rowan’s gaze passed indifferently over her as the child glanced toward a noise at the window.

She was still nervous, Alison thought anxiously, and who wouldn’t be after what she’d seen that night months ago? She turned to the window herself, but there was nothing except the abruptly grey day and an icy rain that was becoming sleet, large sad crystals shattering on the glass and trickling down it. She looked away as Rowan crossed the room. “Thank you, grandmama,” Rowan said.

She sounded more old-fashioned than ever, and shouldn’t that mean she was becoming more like herself again? They watched as she unwrapped the present, and Alison realised how tense all the family was, willing Rowan to enjoy herself. Derek asked Jo and Eddie if they’d like another drink, and then everyone was chatting, almost too eagerly. Eddie accepted a drink as Jo said they’d stayed long enough. “Oh, a pretty dress,” Rowan declared. “Thank you.”

“Try it on for us, sweetheart,” Edith said.

Rowan bundled up the parcel and headed for the door. “Don’t be silly, chick, you can undress in front of us,” Jo cried.

That earned her a glance of such withering scorn that she covered her mouth and made a face, not quite comic enough to disguise her confusion. Rowan stalked upstairs, and Eddie murmured to Jo “Just let her alone, angel, let her be herself.”

Derek gave Alison a wistful smile that meant he shared her hopes and fears and secret regrets that were still almost drowned in relief. Having Rowan back was all they deserved to expect, if not more than they had a right to. If she was no longer the child they had taken for granted then surely they were most to blame for that, but some nights Alison hardly slept for weeping quietly and telling herself to be grateful for what they had.

When they heard Rowan coming downstairs, everyone but Paul and Mary turned toward the door. As soon as she came in the women set about telling her how grown-up and elegant she looked in the long embroidered dress, and the men joined in less expertly. She did look grand, poignantly so, yet Alison was reminded of Hermione, not only because it was the kind of dress Hermione used to make but because she could imagine how dismayed Hermione would have been by Rowan’s looking even more like Queenie. “She’s only got books and a dress for Christmas,” little Paul protested.

“That’s because she’s quite a bit older than you,” Patty said. “You play with her a bit now, Mary. Just you remember how she gave you all her comics.”

She seemed disconcertingly less mature than Rowan, especially since she was forcing the children on each other, Mary looking as reluctant to approach Rowan as Rowan was contemptuous of her. “I think we’ll be going,” Jo said and drained her glass. “We’ve kept you folk from your lunch long enough.”

Alison watched her and Eddie and the children dash through the sleet and into their house. As they gained shelter she experienced an unexpected sense of longing, so intense that she stared about the street and the bedraggled garden. The cold, and the thought of being shut out in it, made her shiver. She closed the door hastily and went back down the hall.

Derek and her parents were carrying bowls of vegetables from the kitchen to the dining-room. Rowan was among her new books, and looked impatient, bored. Once she would have set the table, but she hadn’t helped around the house since she had returned from Wales. They were going to have to discuss her unhelpfulness, Alison thought, but not today. “Come on, Rowan, join the family,” she said.

By the time she took the turkey out of the oven, the heat of the biggest plate in the house penetrating her oven glove like a dull knife, they’d sorted out who sat where. Rowan had tried to sit at the head of the table until Edith shifted her with a joke. She obviously resented that and not being served first when Derek carved the turkey. “That’s enough for me, thank you,” she told him, so curtly that Edith gave her a look which would have been accompanied by an audible rebuke any day except Christmas. When Keith poured her a token glass of wine she disconcerted him by saying “Thank you, but I never drink.”

“You used to have a sip as I recall,” Keith said and frowned, perhaps wondering if his memory was growing senile or reminding himself of what she’d gone through since. “Clink your glass of milk with us, then. Here’s to prosperity and happiness for us all in the years to come.”

“Prosperity and happiness,” the adults intoned over the chiming of glasses that touched an echo in the chandelier, and Rowan nodded as if acknowledging gratitude. “You’ve got those now, haven’t you?” Edith said.

“Too right we have,” Derek said, “thanks to Eddie for helping decorate the house and our estate agent for getting us a contractor who owed him a favour. And I got an accountant who’s worth a lot more than that other prat, excuse me, and Ken who owed me all that money paid up just before he would have had to go to court. But nobody would have looked twice at the house if you hadn’t done the garden, Keith.”

“I only did the planning, old chap. You did nearly all the digging.”

“I needed the break from doing my books. It’ll be good to get back to Liverpool, and you don’t mind changing schools again, babe, do you?”

Rowan glanced up when she realised he meant her. “I don’t mind. I’ve no friends at this one.”

“Well, just you make sure you find some in Liverpool,” Edith cried.

Rowan stared at her with a blankness not unlike hostility, and Edith looked away. “Perhaps now you’re doing well,” she said to Alison, “I should be digging out my knitting patterns I bought when Rowan was on the way.”

“Once we’re settled, who knows?”

“I’d like to have a little sister, mummy,” Rowan said. “I expect she’d be like me.”

At least she was calling Alison mummy more readily now. Home from Wales, she’d been stiffly formal—not that Alison could blame her after all that she’d overheard—and then she’d begun to say “mummy” and “daddy” with what seemed to be concealed amusement, which Alison had found more hurtful still. Now she sounded so unexpectedly eager that Alison was confused, and lost control. “I liked having a sister,” she said, and was close to tears until she realised what she was reminding Rowan of. She thought of Hermione, dead of being protective to the last, lying in the open grave while the night wind had its way with her, and Derek massaged her hands to keep her calm. After a while Keith cleared his throat. “I know what you’re waiting for, Rowan. It’s time we pulled the crackers.”

She pulled one with him as if she was doing him a favour, and put on the party hat it contained. Her blank face beneath the paper crown distressed Alison, reminded her of Julius, the ageing child who’d occupied the side room at the hospital. Perhaps the sight upset Edith too. “Shall we have the curtains drawn?” she said abruptly. “I’m feeling cold.”

The sleet on the window was losing its shape the instant it landed. Alison drew the curtains and went back to the table, where the conversation was becoming studiedly jolly. Rowan watched Keith dab gravy from his chin, watched Derek pick up a turkey leg to gnaw, and her contempt was almost palpable. She might have been a monarch tolerating her subjects, Alison thought in dismay: a queen with a paper crown.

After the pudding Rowan helped carry the plates to the kitchen, once Edith had suggested pointedly that she should. Later they played Monopoly on the dining table. Alison had always liked playing board games with her family, but now Rowan scrutinised everyone else’s moves as if she suspected them of cheating, and greeted any penalty she had to pay with a resentment that seemed almost dangerous. Alison was saddened to find she was glad when it was Rowan’s bathtime, the day had left her so exhausted.

Ever since Derek had brought her home from Wales, Rowan had insisted on being left alone in the bathroom. Edith pursed her lips when she heard the child bolt the door, and was visibly uneasy until Rowan came downstairs, her brushed hair shining. “Let me do the honours tonight and read you your bedtime story,” Keith said.

As soon as he was laboring upstairs after Rowan, Edith closed the door of the living-room. “Have you thought of seeing a doctor about her?”

“We did when I got her back,” Derek said. “He was knocked out by how well she was doing.”

“Then he couldn’t have known her.”

“She seems all right to me.”

“How can you say that, Derek? What’s become of her? I know she has to grow up, but I never expected her to turn out so much like—”

“She had to grow up, mummy, that’s right,” Alison interrupted. “We can’t keep her a baby, can we? That’s what Queenie tried to do to Hermione and me, and we don’t want to be like Queenie.”

“But Rowan used to be such a happy child. Call me overanxious if you like, but I wouldn’t let her lock herself in the bathroom, particularly if there’s anything sharp in there.”

“Edith, love, that’s the last thing we need to worry about,” Derek said. “She’s still getting over what happened, but I reckon I’ve never seen anyone who wanted to live more than she does.”

Surely that will to live was worth all her sullenness and withdrawal, Alison tried to reassure herself. Besides, at times she seemed more like her old self, which might mean she was forgetting, though none of them knew precisely what she had to forget: Alison agreed with the doctor that they should let her choose her time to tell. When Derek had found her under the willow, the binoculars lying broken and rusty at her feet, she might have been hiding for hours. She must have smashed the binoculars in a rage at Vicky for taking or abandoning her there, and Alison was glad they hadn’t even heard of the child since. She did her best to persuade Edith of all that. “Just don’t leave her to herself so much she grows into someone you don’t know,” Edith said.

“I didn’t, did I?” Alison reminded her, willing her to smile, and turned as Keith came in. “She fell asleep while I was droning to her,” he said.

“I used to do that sometimes, remember?” Alison said. She poured everyone another festive drink, then went upstairs to check that Rowan wasn’t troubled by dreams. Oddly enough, she had been sleeping more soundly since Derek had brought her back; she no longer talked in her sleep. She appeared to be deeply asleep now, her face upturned on the pillow in the midst of her spread hair, her long lashes shadowing her eyelids, her lips slightly parted, her fingers interlaced on the sheet over her chest. Alison covered her hands with the sheet and stooped to kiss her.

The night tapped at the window with melting fingernails, and Alison faltered, her hands sinking into the pillow on either side of Rowan’s face. For a moment she thought Rowan wasn’t asleep but watching her or at least aware of her. Worse, the prospect of kissing the child had made her shiver. She gazed at the smooth still face and bent to it as if she’d seized herself by the scruff of her neck, and planted a kiss on Rowan’s forehead.

She whispered good night and went downstairs slowly, feeling ashamed to face her family. It seemed she had been so concerned about how Rowan’s ordeal might have affected the child that she had failed to consider how the strain might have told on herself. She would have to keep watch on her feelings. If she was going to imagine things about Rowan, perhaps she would need treatment. It didn’t matter what she went through so long as Rowan was safe.

Chapter Thirty

“Happy Christmas, Rowan,” her grandmother said, and Rowan told herself that her grandmother was pretending not to see her outside the window, prolonging the surprise they were planning to give her by turning and acknowledging her as if they hadn’t realised she was there and running out to hug her tight before they carried her into the house. But her grandmother held out the parcel and gazed across the room, and in a few seconds that seemed to last as long as her entire trek home Rowan understood that her grandmother hadn’t meant her. She felt herself beginning to fade like the sunlight that clouds were drowning as she saw herself step forward inside the room.

That isn’t me, she tried to cry. You’ve all made a mistake, that’s someone else who’s tricked us. Mummy, look at me, why won’t you look at me? Can’t you see it’s really me out here? Then her body that was stepping forward more elegantly than she ever used to looked straight at her. It was only a glance, yet it seemed to cling to her like dusty cobwebs and cover her with darkness colder than the shadow of the sky, for in that instant she saw Vicky looking at her out of Rowan’s own face.

The look said that Rowan might as well not be there at all. Vicky had got what she wanted. Too late Rowan saw how everything Vicky had done with her up to the point where she had fallen in the graveyard had undermined her sense of herself. She’d trusted Vicky when Vicky had been the slyest liar of all: she’d made Rowan think her parents would be better off without her when all the time she had been plotting to take her place. Rowan wanted to fling herself through the window and confront the impostor, except that she was afraid she might pass through like a draught, with no substance and no control. Then her mother turned and looked at her.