The Influence (30 page)

Then she felt the sadness in Rowan’s bedroom, a sadness that was ready to be cast out for ever, and she didn’t have to see the child’s eyes narrowing to know where Rowan really was. “You aren’t my child,” she repeated in a voice that felt like ice against her teeth. “I read the diary and you know I did. You couldn’t be bothered to spell like Rowan for long, but I love the way she can’t spell, because it’s her.”

“Don’t you want me to grow up?”

“You haven’t grown up, you’ve done the opposite,” Alison cried with a laugh that tasted poisonous. “This is your second childhood.”

“I won’t listen to you if you mean to be horrid to me. I want to go in my room.”

“I’m not preventing you. You know where it is.”

The child stared dully at her through the dimness that seemed to seep out of the dingy walls. “If you won’t let me pass I’ll go upstairs. I like looking across the water.”

As soon as she began to climb, Alison followed her, trying to ignore the smell of rotten books and stale brick that met her, as if the house were no longer bothering to seem renovated. “You won’t be able to use the binoculars, will you? They disappeared like Vicky as soon as you didn’t need her.”

The child didn’t look back. She climbed towards the dark, refusing to be hurried, in possession of herself and the house. She was ceasing to pretend, since Alison seemed incapable of harming her. She oughtn’t to have made her contempt so evident. It sent Alison leaping upstairs after her, hands outstretched. She had to see what the child was hiding, though she was sure she already knew.

She’d hoped to make the child show her, but now she realised that the only advantage she had over the child was greater physical strength. That was why she was rushing at her, even though she saw herself as Derek or her parents or any observer would see her, charging wildly upstairs to attack her own child. If this was madness, at least it felt like being closer to Rowan than she had felt for months. She swung herself around the bend in the stairs without touching the walls and onto the darkest stretch. The stench of rotten bricks and books swelled out of the dark, and the child turned to face her.

The eyes that glared down at her were far older than a child’s. Had she waited to turn on Alison where a push would do her the most harm? Alison flung herself at the small figure. “Let’s see what you’re hiding,” she gasped.

The child’s hands flew up as if they meant to peck at Alison’s face. The darkness of the top floor seemed to step down toward Alison. She knocked the hands aside and grabbed the neck of the long dress. “You’ll have to kill me to stop me,” she cried.

Whatever she expected, it wasn’t what the child did then. She sat down on the stairs, lowering her hands to steady herself. Alison followed her down, still fumbling at the dress. Mad, you’re mad, a voice wailed in her mind, there’s nothing there, nothing to see. But then why wouldn’t the child let anyone see her undressed since she’d come back from Wales? Alison tugged at the neck of the dress so impatiently that the button flew off and struck the whitewashed wall.

The child’s neck was bare. Alison peered at it, at the tendons that stood out through the pale soft vulnerable skin above her collarbone, and then she undid another button of the dress. Still there was nothing. She was growing desperate to say she was sorry, to tell the child to run to Jo or to anyone who might protect her from her crazy mother. She glanced up, afraid to see what the child thought of her behavior. Deep in the determined innocence of the child’s eyes there was a glint of triumph.

“Don’t be so sure,” Alison breathed, and reached through the child’s hair to the back of her neck. She found the chain at once. She lifted it, and the locket appeared like an insect crawling out of the child’s dress. Alison’s hand clenched on the chain, which tightened around the child’s neck and then snapped.

Alison sprang to her feet, holding the locket fast, and saw that the gleam of triumph in the child’s eyes was unconcealed now. So was the sound of it in her voice as she said “You hurt me.”

“You made me,” Alison cried, appalled that the intruder had made her do that to Rowan’s neck. “You think you can show someone now, do you? I wonder how you’ll explain this.”

The child raised her eyebrows. “Hermione wanted me to have it,” she said.

“You’ll tell them she gave it to you in the graveyard, will you?” Alison’s voice scraped her throat raw. She took a step down so as to be unable to lash out at the child, but even now she could flail at her with the chain. The lock of Rowan’s hair glinted dully in her hand like neglected gold. The intruder didn’t care that she had found it, Alison realised defeatedly: perhaps she had been wearing it only because it had been hers for so many years; now that she was safe in Rowan’s body, it didn’t matter. Nothing could touch her, Alison thought—and then she knew that wasn’t so. If the intruder were certain of her safety, why was she trying to provoke Alison?

A movement made her look up. The child was climbing into the dark. The thought that she was fleeing sent Alison after her, up the stairs where she could barely see the new plaster, which felt cold as ice and as capable of shattering under her hands. On the top floor all three corridors looked extended by the gathering darkness. The small pale figure was already at the door of Queenie’s room. “What are you scared of?” Alison said.

The child turned, one hand on the doorknob. Her face, Rowan’s face, looked sad. “Of you, mummy, while you’re behaving like this.”

She sounded like Rowan, and so did the sadness. That and the sight of the small figure in the midst of so much darkness made Alison feel achingly protective of what she could see and touch, instead of what she had only sensed. “No,” she whispered, “I know my Rowan,” and then her voice came out strong and chill. “What about your father? What must he think of you now?”

The child pulled at the doorknob as if she meant to sidestep the question, then her look of innocence hardened. “You’ll have to ask him when he comes home.”

“When the workman comes home? That’s what you mean, isn’t it? You can hardly bear to pretend you’re his child. I wonder how long you’ll be able to keep it up.” She was saying too much, losing her advantage; that was clear from the way the child had let go of the door. “We both know who I meant. You may not know where your father is, but that doesn’t mean he can’t see you. Perhaps he won’t let you find him because he’s ashamed of what you’ve been doing.”

The child clenched her fists. All at once her eyes looked swollen by rage, and darker than the windowless corridor. Alison had got to her at last, and now Alison was about to learn how dangerous she could be. The empty floors below seemed suddenly cavernous, cutting her off from the world. She thought she felt boards shift underfoot, but that might have been her inadvertent shiver. Then the child looked away as if Alison weren’t worth the effort. She opened the door and stepped into Queenie’s room.

Alison threw herself forward and reached the door just as it met the frame. She shoved at it with both hands and felt it fling the child backwards, and then she followed it into the room. The bare floor and the newly plastered walls were saturated with the darkness that was massing above Wales and flooding across the bay. The smell of stale books hung in the air, and Alison thought the whole room looked rotten with darkness. But the child stood in the middle of it, arms folded, drawing herself together from the shock of being thrown backwards. Perhaps the shock made her careless of what she said, or perhaps her contempt for Alison did. “You stay out of here unless I say you can come in. This is my room.”

“It’s your father’s room,” Alison said deliberately. “If there’s anywhere he can see you, it must be here.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I think you’re going mad, to talk to me this way.”

Alison laughed. However small it sounded in the bare darkness, her laughter felt like an outpouring of relief. “Rowan would never say that. I don’t think any child of her age would. You may as well stop pretending, Queenie. You know you can’t fool me.”

The child’s face wrinkled with rage. It looked as if she had aged in an instant, as if a shrunken old woman were standing there, a woman so senile she’d put on a child’s dress. Then her eyes glinted like coal, and she sneered, stretching Rowan’s lips into a grimace, spoiling her face. The door slammed behind Alison, sealing the dark.

“That didn’t scare me last time, Queenie, and it doesn’t scare me now.” Alison hesitated and then took the risk: she had to. “Is that the best you can do?”

The child’s lips writhed. “Don’t try me,” she hissed.

Alison thought she glimpsed something besides a threat: restraint in case the father might indeed be watching, or even a limit to the harm she was prepared to wreak? “I don’t want to, Queenie, can’t you understand? All I want is my child back.”

“You’ve got her. You should thank God you have.”

Alison’s fury felt like a charge her body could barely contain. “Where’s God in all this? If you’d seen God you wouldn’t have come back, would you?” Suddenly there was a question she couldn’t help asking, however grotesque it seemed to ask this of Rowan’s face that shimmered in the dark. “What did you see, Queenie?”

The child’s eyes widened, with glee or with terror. For a moment the answer seemed to be in them or beyond them, a vast darkness that led somewhere Alison would rather not see. “I know you couldn’t find your father,” she said hastily, trying to reassure herself that all she’d glimpsed was loneliness. “Perhaps you were going about it in the wrong way. You’ve got to try again. You must realise you can’t go on like this.”

The child’s eyes were blank again, the face was a dark mask. “You’ll have to go through everything you loathe all over again,” Alison persisted. “Having your periods every month and being surrounded half the time at school by other girls who are. And then your menopause, and growing older, and all the diseases you may pick up in the meantime—who knows what I’ll bring home from the hospital?” Rage flashed through her as she remembered what she’d almost forgotten. “You’d better understand one thing, Queenie, in case you’re still hoping. I’ll never have another child for you to influence. I’d have an abortion first.”

The small face looked shocked. “You wouldn’t kill a child,” it protested shrilly.

“What do you think you did to Rowan? Believe me, I’d do anything I had to not to have a baby you could get the better of.” Yet her rage was turning to sadness, some of which she thought was Rowan’s, wherever Rowan was in the growing darkness. Might Queenie’s loneliness have been so terrible that she could only take refuge in being a child again, with all the selfishness she had been indulged in as a child? Might she have needed in her loneliness to befriend the only child she had ever cared about, however selfishly? “Queenie,” Alison said as gently as she could, “I did love you, however hard you made it for us to. But I can’t love you while you do this to my child.”

The eyes were contemptuous again, brimming with disbelief. “Nobody will love you unless you give this up,” Alison said, quieter still. “Not even your father.”

“You just stop talking about my father,” the child screamed. “You aren’t fit to have his name in your mouth.”

“Then I’ll talk about Rowan. You’ll permit me to talk about my own child, will you?” There was already more sadness than anger in her voice. “Maybe you don’t want to believe any of us loved you, but you know she did. She loved you and felt closer to you than anyone else did, and that was how you were able to come back, not because of this locket at all. She loved you, and in return for that you stole her life.”

For the first time since they’d entered the bare room, the child’s eyes seemed to falter. She looked momentarily ashamed, and more like a child than she had since that night in Wales. “Is that the best you can do with so much will?” Alison demanded. “Can’t you use it to find your father? If he sees you’ve let Rowan back, don’t you think he’ll make certain you find him?”

She’d claimed too much too quickly. At once the child’s eyes were impenetrable as the clouds that had blotted out the sky. Alison reached behind her and pressed the light switch, to prevent the child from hiding her thoughts in the dark that was swelling into the room, but the bulb failed with a sound like a single note of a distant bell. The child grinned, teeth glinting in the dark, and Alison cried “Did you do that too? Can you honestly be proud of it? You may still be able to play that kind of trick, but you’ll have to do better than that to scare me off.”

She took a deep breath, though it tasted stale, and regained control. “Or are you trying to impress yourself? Are you trying to forget what you can’t do? You can’t stay alive forever like this. If you stay where you are you’ll have to die all over again. And this time you’ll know what’s coming.”

Was that a glimmer of fear in the child’s eyes? But she shrugged with a defiance that seemed both childish and senile, and Alison realised too late that such a fear would make her more determined to stay where she felt safe. “Maybe you needn’t start worrying yet, maybe you’ve a lifetime before you need to, but it’s Rowan’s life, not yours,” she cried. “You just think of her for a moment, that little girl you tricked into giving up her life, and ask yourself if you can bear to live with knowing you’ve left her out there alone in the dark.”

The child shook her head almost reprovingly. “She needn’t be alone, you can keep her with you. Anyway, you should have taken better care of her while you had the chance.”

Perhaps she saw for the first time in all her years that she’d said too much, for she stepped back towards the window, the oncoming dark. She wasn’t trying to provoke Alison now, she was afraid of what an adult could do to a child. That fear drew Alison forward, feeling charged and dangerous. She reached for the child, ready at last to do whatever she had to that would drive Queenie out—and then the old eyes glared at her, seizing her, and the floor vanished.