The Influence (3 page)

The walls tottered, the floor reared up. This time Derek caught hold of the flashlight and steadied the beam, and found Rowan on the landing, yawning and digging her knuckles into her eyes. “Mummy, why are you all up here? Why was Hermione shouting?”

Derek closed Alison’s hand around the flashlight and murmured “Was Jo and Eddie’s light on when you went to the car?”

“I think so, but—” But he couldn’t linger while Rowan might see what lay in Queenie’s room or be infected by Hermione’s panic. He hurried Rowan downstairs to her room and saw from her window that someone was still up at Jo’s and Eddie’s, three houses distant on the opposite side of the street. “Just put on your coat and shoes, and we’ll see if you can sleep with your mates tonight,” he said.

“What’s wrong, daddy?”

He was touched by her grave look, her willingness to help and be grown up. “The old lady died tonight, and that’s upset Hermione.”

Rowan clutched her collar to her throat as they stepped out of the porch. The wind from the sea was so cold it seemed to make the stars wince. Jo and Eddie were watching a video, but switched it off when they saw Rowan. “You can sleep in our Mary’s bed, give her a surprise when she wakes up in the morning,” Jo said, and bustled Rowan upstairs without even asking Derek what the trouble was.

He told Eddie about the death, and declined the offer of a Scotch. “I’d better get back and see how they are,” he said, preparing to help calm Hermione so that Alison could let go of her feelings. But when he let himself into the house that felt as if the night were seeping down through the roof, he found the women in the living-room, sipping quietly from large glasses, a bottle of gin and one of tonic on the floor between them. He might have thought they were over the worst if it hadn’t been for the way Hermione had stared at the door to see who he was. He might almost have thought she was more terrified of Queenie now than she had been when the old woman was alive.

Chapter Three

Soon after dawn on the day of the funeral, the sun above Wales drove the mist into the mountains. Rowan stood in Hermione’s small back garden that sloped toward the valley and the reservoirs, and gazed across the sea and through the gap in the hills of the Wirral peninsula toward Waterloo. Eventually Derek took her into the village to buy a child’s telescope. Alison knew he was leaving the family alone to talk.

She wished he didn’t feel he needed to. It wasn’t just that he was slow to form relationships, though they’d had to encounter each other three times outside the hostel before he’d asked her out. Perhaps he still found family life dauntingly unfamiliar, or perhaps, she hoped, he simply found the cottage overcrowded now that the family was gathering. Hermione was in the kitchen with her mother Edith, making ham sandwiches for after the funeral. Alison stayed in the living-room, which was less than half the size of any of the bedrooms in Queenie’s house. Houseplants bloomed on the sill of the mullioned window, on the rough stone mantelpiece, on shelves in alcoves of the shaggily plastered white walls. Her father Keith was sitting on the window seat, gazing mildly at the sky and fingering his chin, the family chin that Queenie’s had caricatured. When he patted the cushion beside him she sat there and laid her head against his shoulder. They stayed like that, silently sharing memories that felt drowsy as the longest summer afternoon of childhood, until he reached for his pipe and she sat up. “You’ll be pleased about the will,” he said. “Sister Queenie had some good in her after all.”

“Don’t you think she always had? She wasn’t vicious really, just lonely.”

“She was one because of the other, but don’t ask me which came first,” he said with a droll blank look. “I only hope her house makes life easier for you and yours.”

“I’m sure it should. Only I keep feeling it was so convenient, her dying when she did, almost as if I—helped her go.”

He straightened up and tried to make his compact features appear stern. “What started you thinking that nonsense? Come on, tell papa.”

“I feel as if I weakened her by making her so dependent on me all at once. She kept herself fit all those years and yet I’m hardly in her house before she’s dead.”

“If you’ve been bothering yourself with that I wish you’d told me sooner. She never would have depended on anyone unless she absolutely had to. Take my word for it, she must have been counting her days when she had you move in.”

Hermione and their mother came through from the kitchen, Hermione guiltily nibbling a ham sandwich. “Budge over and let Hermione sit down,” Edith said to Keith with a hint of rebuke, as if he ought to show her more concern, and Alison couldn’t help thinking resentfully as she stood up that she was the one who’d been trapped in the dark.

She had felt trapped for hours. If she had tried to open the door she would only have pulled the knob loose, and so she had stayed as still as she could, waiting to hear someone, anyone, coming upstairs. She’d tried not to look behind her, especially whenever the creaking of the window sounded like movement on the mattress where the dead woman lay, but now and then she’d felt Queenie rising stealthily from the bed, creeping barefoot behind her and lowering her face with its dead eyes staring in opposite directions, so that it would be level with Alison’s when she had to turn and look. Whenever Alison swung round, Queenie was face up on the bed, and only the dim glow through the rain on the window had made her appear to stiffen her limbs in readiness to rear up from the mattress. Alison had felt trapped in a nightmare version of the schoolyard game in which you had to turn quickly enough to catch whoever was behind you moving.

Perhaps something like that had happened to Hermione as a child; her nerves hadn’t been the same since the day she had run sobbing out of their aunt’s room. All the more reason not to resent the way their mother fussed over Hermione, Alison told herself. “Derek’s taken Rowan shopping,” she said. “They shouldn’t be long.”

Edith lowered her head and gazed at her as if over invisible spectacles, her broad ruddy oval face sinking into its chins. “We’ve been looking forward to seeing our little girl. We were hoping you’d come to stay more often now that we don’t do much driving.”

They lived in Cardiff, a day’s drive away on roads that were never as straight or as clear as they looked on the map. “We will once I’m roadworthy again,” Alison said. “My old car gave up the ghost the week we moved to Queenie’s.”

“We didn’t see that much of you when you were driving. Hermione seems to manage, even if she has to close her shop and take the train to come and see us.”

Just because they were fifteen years younger than Queenie didn’t mean they had fifteen more years of Rowan, Alison reminded herself as Hermione said “Ali’s children need her more than children need my shop.”

“I certainly hope they appreciate you as much as we do,” Edith cried. “Just remember you’re welcome any time you feel you’d rather not be on your own.”

“You’ve no need to worry about me,” Hermione said, so shrilly that she contradicted herself.

“Well, you know best,” her mother said in a tone that managed to combine hope and umbrage, then craned to look out of the window. “Here come Derek and our little girl, and someone else.”

“My brother, I expect,” Keith said.

“No, it’s not Richard. Good God, I believe it’s his son.”

“It could be Lance, they’ve let him out of hospital,” Keith admitted. “I suppose that could be him under the beard.”

It was indeed Lance, whom Alison hadn’t seen for years. She and Hermione had always been wary of him. He’d been twenty, and a civil servant, when the sisters were five and eight, but they had never gone with him along the beach at Waterloo to see his secret, even though that would have taken them out of sight of Queenie’s house. He’d never harmed anyone so far as she knew, but whatever he’d imagined doing must have consumed him with guilt, for when his father had found his cache of magazines he’d not only denied they were his but begun to deny he was Lance. Now Hermione let him in and said brightly “Hello, Lance. We weren’t expecting you, but you’re welcome.”

It occurred to Alison that he was a childhood fear Hermione could deal with. He had grown entirely bald, his cranium as red as his face, which was hidden from the cheekbones downward by a thick gingery beard. His suit was civil-service grey but shabby as social security now. “So isn’t your father coming?” Edith demanded. “We understood he was.”

“He said he would.” Lance paused, his pale lips parting within his beard as if he found it hard to breathe. “And then he said he’d left home because of Auntie Queenie, and he wouldn’t have her thinking he’d forgiven her just because she was dead.”

“We both left home as soon as we were old enough to get away from her living our lives for us,” Keith said. “My only regret was that our parents couldn’t make their escape too.”

“So Richard sent you instead, did he?” Edith accused Lance.

“I wanted to come,” Lance said, more sluggishly than before. His slowness was the price of treatment, Alison realised. “I thought someone should, and I wanted to see the family. I hoped you wouldn’t mind.”

“We’re glad you did,” Hermione assured him.

“You don’t think it’s cheeky of me to pay my respects, then? I was always a bit scared of Auntie Queenie. I used to feel she knew whatever I was thinking.”

Hermione turned quickly to the window. “Is that the cars?” she pleaded.

The limousines weren’t due for half an hour. Derek kept Rowan outside, away from Lance, where she gazed across the bay and pouted because the telescopes had been too expensive. Now and then Derek glanced through the window at Alison, winked at her or made a face like swallowing a slice of lemon by mistake or pretended to jump back from the sight of the family gathering, and she stuck her tongue out at him when nobody was looking: she’d never said that family life had no drawbacks. The family made conversation as best they could, avoiding the subject of Queenie for Hermione’s sake and slowing down whenever Lance had anything to say. The limousines came as a relief.

Derek, Rowan and the sisters rode in the first grey car, Lance and the others followed. Oldsters by the factories on the coast road stood respectfully until the limousines had passed. A train on the shoreside railway raced the limousines through Glan-y-don, another caught them up at Ffynnongroew, and then the cars turned away from Talacre and its caravans clustering near the disused lighthouse, uphill through Gronant to the churchyard.

Queenie and her parents had rented a summer cottage in Gronant. When her mother had died there, Queenie’s father had had her buried near the place they most loved. He’d moved into the room at the top of the Waterloo house so that he could see where he would eventually rejoin his wife. Bright as the sun was, he would have seen little on a day like this. The bay was a swarm of blinding diamonds, the sandy coast where Queenie’s house stood streamed like flames.

The vicar met the party at the door of the chapel, a squat building with plump white walls, and ushered them into the interior, where sainted windows draped colours over the pine pews. It was as calm as Alison hoped Hermione would be. But Hermione peered down the aisle at the coffin. “Who wanted her left uncovered?”

They glanced blankly at one another. “I’ll have them screw the lid on,” Keith said.

“We ought to say goodbye,” Hermione said with some bravado, and stepped forward. Alison paced her, expecting grotesquely to see Queenie’s chin first over the side of the casket. The undertakers had tamed Queenie’s features and lent her cheeks a slumbering bloom that reminded Alison of Queenie’s last days, when she had seemed able to make herself look younger by her unshakable faith in herself. At least she looked more peaceful than Alison had ever seen her—but Hermione stumbled forward, her arms trembling by her sides, and stared into the coffin. “Who gave her that?” she almost screamed.

Chapter Four

He shouldn’t have brought Rowan after all, Derek thought angrily. He’d been afraid that Hermione might lose control, and this was worse than he’d feared. Whatever she was seeing in the coffin, she sounded capable of reaching in and dragging it out. He tried to turn Rowan away from the spectacle, but her head craned around as he urged her toward the porch. There was confusion in the aisle, Edith having grabbed Keith’s arm as he made to slip out to the undertaker’s men, Lance standing glumly in the middle of the narrow aisle, the vicar peering past him. Derek pushed Rowan as far as the vicar. “Look after her while I see what’s going on,” he muttered, and squeezed past the others toward the front of the chapel.

Hermione and Alison were gazing into the coffin. Alison was holding her sister’s forearm to restrain her. Derek hurried forward, trying to hush his footsteps on the thick uneven flagstones. He could see nothing wrong. The old woman’s face was lovingly made up, her hands were folded on her chest, and the undertakers had found a white dress long enough to cover her ankles. “What’s up?” he murmured.

Hermione stared at him as if she was afraid to speak. “We’re wondering how Queenie comes to be wearing that locket,” Alison said.

He’d already noticed it, a heart-shaped gold locket resting on the old woman’s chest, its thin gold chain around her neck. “Not just any locket,” Hermione protested, lowering her voice when Derek frowned at her. “Alison knows what I mean.”

“She means,” Alison said apologetically, “it had Rowan’s hair in it. I suppose it still has.”

Queenie had demanded a lock of Rowan’s hair the first time it was cut, and Derek had never understood why Alison had hesitated. “I told you you should have got it back,” Hermione wailed, her voice rising. “You never should have given her anything of Rowan’s.”