The Influence (6 page)

“You’re in a bad way then, aren’t you?” the accountant said accusingly. “I suppose I’ll have to pass these books, but we’ll need to be looking at ways to rationalise your business. You could be on course for a major cash-flow crisis. If you don’t call in all these debts you may not even have the capital to pay your tax this Christmas.”

Derek was tempted to tell him what Tony had said, except that he might cast doubt on it. Better to tell him when they had the money, and then watch his face. Later Tony came to photograph the exterior, and the prospect of the sale sustained Derek through the weekend, while he and Alison cleared out as much of the house as they could. They planned a leisurely drive to fetch Rowan, stopping for lunch in a beer garden on the way, but on Sunday morning Derek was called out to one of the nursing homes beside the dunes. Alison stayed at the house to have dinner waiting for Rowan, and let the light from the hall stretch onto the path like a carpet as Rowan climbed out of the car.

Alison had made scouse, one of Rowan’s favourites ever since she’d had it at Jo’s across the road, but Rowan only picked at the stew. “I’m sorry, mummy, Hermione made sandwiches for tea.”

“That sounds like my sister. Don’t worry, babe, the dinner will keep if that’s all that’s wrong.”

Rowan didn’t answer that until she was in the oversized bath, Alison scrubbing her back while Derek waited with a towel on the far side of the tiled bathroom. Rowan lifted one foot and watched bubbles vanish from her toes, and then she said “Do we really have to move?”

“Hurry up, Rowan, it’s long past your bedtime,” Alison said. “The house is much too big for just the three of us, lovey.”

“We didn’t think you were that struck with it,” Derek said as Rowan walked into the towel, and when she gave him a reproachful look, “Go on then, tell us what you like.”

“All manner of things,” Rowan said like one of her books. “Hearing the sea and the wind when I’m in bed, and the ships saying good night to me like you said they were the first night we stayed here. Being able to go straight out to the beach. And now I thought I’d be able to bring my friends home and play lots of games all over the house. I was really looking forward to living here now, more than anything.”

“Let’s get you to bed now, you’re very tired,” Alison said. As the child wriggled into her nightshirt, delaying so as to hide her face, Alison took her hand. “We can’t afford to stay, Rowan. We may not be going very far, we haven’t even started looking. We won’t be living anywhere you don’t like.”

Rowan’s face struggled out of the cotton neck, blinking back tears. “Why can’t the people who owe daddy money just pay him?” she cried, and looked ashamed at once. “I’ll try not to mind when we move,” she said in a small voice.

The accountant hadn’t made Derek feel guilty, but Rowan did—guilty and too easily taken advantage of. Could Queenie have led her to expect that the house would be her home? Later, as Alison caught up on her sleep to be ready for the dawn bus into Liverpool, he lay beside her, his head crawling with figures, as if he could find a treasure buried in his calculations: however hard Rowan was trying to resign herself, he knew that she secretly believed him capable of some such magic. It was a pity she couldn’t persuade the bank manager, with whom Derek’s interviews had been more frequent lately, and chillier. As he began to sag into sleep he saw all the figures that were chasing one another around his skull turn red.

In the darkest part of the night, Rowan’s voice wakened him. She sounded as if she were using a phone in a dream, pausing every so often for a response. He listened affectionately, though he couldn’t make out a word, until it occurred to him that she might be talking in her sleep because she was unhappy. He slid sleepily out of bed and padded into the corridor.

Her room was dark. When he pushed the door gently, the light that fanned across the carpet fell short of the bed. He thought the light had quieted her, and then his eyes adjusted. Just as he saw that the bed was empty, he heard her voice again. She was on the top floor.

He scrambled up the warped stairs and stepped into the dark. His first barefoot step on the damp uneven carpet chased away the last of his sleep. He could hear Rowan ahead of him. He groped along the wall, over wallpaper that felt like mould and doors cold and slippery as slate, and came to a greyish rectangle that might have been a standing slab of ice. It gave way to his eyes as he stepped through it, and he saw dim hints of Queenie’s room. As the shapes in the room settled onto his vision he saw a figure in white lying on the bed.

Rowan was curled up on the bare mattress, one arm stretched out, the fingers moving slightly as if she felt the absence of a hand she had been holding in her sleep. “Yes, on the beach,” she murmured. Derek lifted her without wakening her and made his way carefully along the middle of the unlit corridor. He tucked her into bed and watched until he was sure she was quiet, and then he crept in beside Alison. He mustn’t have been quite awake up there, he decided, already dozing. For a moment, as he’d gathered Rowan up, he’d felt as if they weren’t alone in the huge unlit room.

Chapter Seven

As soon as her parents had driven away, Hermione set about weeding the garden. A comedian was telling jokes in Welsh on a television beyond an open window, a mower droned on a lawn, but otherwise the hillside above Holywell was quiet as the evening crept down the mountains. Fat clouds the colours of pigeons and doves flocked above the distant strip of sea, stirring drowsily. Around her the gardens and cottages and fields were paying back the hours of daylight to the pale sky. She might have sat and watched the colours of the landscape rekindling gently, but she needed the work as much as the garden did.

She’d made a generous dinner before her parents left for Waterloo, and then she’d eaten too much of it herself. Weeding would keep her from nibbling, from sitting in the cottage like a fat-faced rodent in its larder. She knew she ate whenever she was nervous, but what excuse had she now? Queenie was dead, and so were the terrors of Hermione’s childhood, and perhaps that meant it was time to remember, in between worrying while her parents were on the road and being anxious that Alison and Derek might have taken on too much. Even if Queenie had turned her childhood into a nightmare, she mustn’t let that rule the rest of her life.

The thought felt like the start of freedom. If she could blame Queenie without flinching, perhaps she could also forgive her; perhaps she could accept, as Alison apparently had, that Queenie had been nothing but a lonely embittered maiden aunt with no understanding of children. “You’ll be where I can keep an eye on you,” Queenie had said when Hermione had moved into the cottage. Hermione laughed out loud at that, at having been made nervous by it when she’d been thirty years old. She was too old now for Queenie to seem terrifying, she thought, just as the phone rang in the cottage.

She ran in so hastily that a fist seemed to close around her vision, squeezing it dark as she grabbed the receiver. “Who is it?” she cried.

Her urgency had thrown him, for seconds idled by before he said “It’s Lance.”

“It’s you, is it?” she said, and quieting her panic, “What can I do for you?”

His answer was a mumble that she had to ask him to repeat. “Alison’s number,” he said as if she were deliberately adding to his difficulties.

“Yes, what about it?” She was feeling as protective as she had when she used to warn Alison not to go on the beach with him. “She’s pretty busy just now, Lance. What did you want to say to her?”

“About the little girl.”

Hermione took a long breath while she chose her words. “I don’t think Alison’s husband would appreciate your interest, Lance. If you need to talk to someone, you can talk to me.”

“It’s nothing like that.” He must be pressing the receiver against his face out of frustration with her and his slowness, for his voice blundered closer, blurring. “I was thinking about the old woman.”

“Queenie? What about her?”

“About her will. I want to tell Alison. It’s hard enough for me to talk.”

“I’ll tell her you’re trying to get in touch and then perhaps she’ll call you. That’ll do, won’t it?”

“I hope so,” he said, so inadequately that she waited for the rest. “You could remind her I never hurt anyone.”

Except yourself, Hermione thought. He’d locked away his fantasies and lacerated himself with guilt, and all she felt once she put down the receiver was pity for him. If he’d believed Queenie was capable of seeing into his mind, he must have been even more frightened of her than Hermione had been. She wondered if he might have aggravated her own fears.

Her parents had. She’d dreaded visiting her aunt all the more for knowing they dreaded it and yet gave in when they were summoned. Eating at Queenie’s had been the worst, feeling her waiting for you to drop food on the tablecloth or on the floor so that she could rap the table with her knuckles and cry “Look what the child’s done now.” She made you feel like an animal at the table, feel as if you’d smeared your mouth or dribbled or that your chewing was the loudest sound in the room. Being allowed to leave the table at last had never been much of a relief; the whole house had seemed neurotically aware of Hermione, waiting for her to touch something she shouldn’t, knock over an ornament, peep into one of the numerous rooms the children had been told to stay out of. Long before they left she would be constipated by the sense of always being watched.

She was beginning to feel angry, not afraid. There was no point in pretending Queenie hadn’t been vicious. Hermione dug her fork into the flower bed, remembering the night after Queenie’s father had been buried. Queenie had never been more vicious than that night, when Hermione had ventured up to sympathize with her.

She had been six years old, and glimpsing the hidden world of adults. The family had converged on the house in Waterloo when it became clear that the old man was dying at last. He and Queenie had lived there alone for years. Hermione recalled him dimly as a bony man with a disproportionately large mild face and a shock of grey hair, who’d sat hunched at the head of the dining table and who had emitted questions now and then, questions which she’d never understood and which seemed to elude him too. He must have been trying to recall his tenure as a professor in Liverpool. She hadn’t realised he was dying until Lance had looked into the room she’d shared with Alison, to tell them he was dead.

By then the girls were huddled in Hermione’s bed, where Alison had taken refuge from the screams, their aunt’s screams, so piercing and desperate they’d seemed to come from all over the house. The floor shook as people ran upstairs, and Keith told the girls to stay in their room. The screams grew intermittent, until the girls were breathless with dread of the next scream. The murmur of the adults overhead seemed far too distant, two corridors and a staircase away. When Lance sidled round the door to tell them their grandfather was dead, Hermione ordered him out of the room, though she would have pleaded with him to stay if he had been anyone but Lance.

During the night Queenie calmed down but refused to leave her father’s room. That much Hermione learned in the morning, when Lance’s father Richard took Lance and the girls for a walk on the wintry beach. Between then and the funeral the children were kept away from the house as much as possible, but Hermione gathered that even the doctor hadn’t succeeded in moving their aunt from beside her father’s bed. The family had to give her a drink laced with a sleeping pill before the undertakers could remove the corpse. She didn’t scream when she awakened by the empty bed; she didn’t speak to anyone, even to ask where they’d taken her father. No wonder the house felt like a trap about to spring. No wonder Edith kept the girls at the back of the church during the funeral.

The pews were full of ranks of grey professors. The church smelled of wreaths and mothballed suits. Edith craned to watch Queenie over the grey heads, and Hermione saw her knuckles whitening as she gripped the pew in front. Suddenly a murmur passed through the congregation, for Queenie had reared up, flinging Richard aside as he reached for her arm, and was running stiff-legged toward the coffin, her arms outstretched as if she meant to hoist the corpse. Edith rushed the girls out of the church, and Hermione couldn’t see what happened as the priest and several other men closed in on Queenie, her face glaring wildly above them. Keith and Richard brought Queenie out behind the coffin, but she ignored the ceremony: she stood at the graveside and stared at the sky, smiling bitterly and secretly as if she could see something none of the mourners could. Afterwards the family drove back to Waterloo, where she went straight up to her father’s room and lay on the bed. She refused to speak to anyone or even look at them, and the family was unwilling to leave her alone in the house in case she planned to do away with herself.

Hermione had gathered that from Lance. She felt sorry for her aunt then, even when Lance told her what her aunt had cried as she’d collapsed before the coffin: “He moved, he moved.” When Hermione had finished her bath and Alison was still playing with their bath toys, she stole up to the top of the house. Perhaps if she comforted her aunt, her jaw would stop aching with the fear of entertaining thoughts that Queenie mightn’t like.

At first she knocked timidly, with just one finger. The huge dim passage made that sound dismayingly small, and so did her distance from the rest of the house. Knocking more loudly brought no response, and made her even more nervous. At last she poked the door reluctantly with her finger, poked until the door swung wide.