‘No, it is not, my good man. That one faces the back. Think about it. The window below is in one of the bedrooms, and the other visible skylight is I believe a bathroom?’
‘Yes, bedrooms in the eaves,’ said Douglas. ‘They’ve eked out rooms over time in these cottages. There’s only a very shallow loft.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Greg impatiently. ‘But I looked around when you had your wall problem. That tiny window high up in the roof is not accounted for.’
‘Must be in the loft,’ said Douglas. ‘For God’s sake, let’s get another drink.’
‘I think not, if I may be so bold,’ said Gregory, hiccupping, and he went back in.
Rowena sat very still as Greg climbed the stairs, silhouetted as he disappeared from sight.
He re-emerged, setting up a creaking on the small staircase.
‘I may be three sheets to the wind, and the corner throws the floor plan, but I surmise there’s a space not accounted for – some of the layout is puzzling. Quite illogical. You could be using it, even if for storage.’
‘Oh, who knows in these higgledy-piggledy little places,’ said Rowena. ‘This is the most quaint, queer sprawl, all steps and, and – corners, ang-angles.’
Douglas glanced at her and took her glass away. She walked carefully to the kitchen and drank some water, pressing her face to the window and gazing at the black laurel.
After a while, Greg came in as she had hoped he might; as she had dreaded he might.
‘I’m terribly squiffy,’ he said in a quick murmur, picking up a glass and putting it down. ‘There are so many words I could say to you—’
‘You must not,’ said Rowena, colouring, and that night she kissed Douglas for the first time since the baby was born. She felt as though she would be eaten alive, and she pulled away quickly and pretended she could hear Caroline cry.
In the morning, Rowena woke to the baby’s cries with an ache clinging to her forehead, but the light sprang on to the walls and she remembered her new large room downstairs and Gregory Dangerfield’s words in her ear, and the hangover rocked inside her head as she rose, but still she sang a few notes as she went to lift baby Caroline to smell her nappy. Eva was, as so often, out of the house, and Douglas had already left for work.
‘Cat, friends,’ said Bob. He made bubbles with his spit as Rowena fetched his clothes.
Rowena heard a mewing as she descended the stairs, and she jumped and looked behind her, where the sound seemed to be coming from, but when she glanced out of the thick-set little window that faced the green there was a black-and-white cat among the geraniums on the window box. The smart new basket-weave wallpaper smiled at her. She loved it: she was modern, she was a Londoner. After all those years in London she would never return to her provincial identity, and it was somehow humorous to decorate a low-ceilinged cottage thus.
Wallpaper paste and old cigarettes scented the air. She gazed at the quirky white-and-yellow pattern, taking it all in, and there was a stain like a floater on her vision. She tried to resist it, lifting her eyes slowly and persuading herself it was a shadow. She looked again. A small stain had appeared where wall met ceiling, and she closed her eyes and stood very still and kept them closed. She pictured the old lady who had lived here, and starved herself here. This was an old lady’s house. An old lady called Evangeline Crale.
Guilt spread through her mind, like the damp: a stain of it.
6
‘WHERE IS EVA?’ said Rowena.
‘I don’t know, Mummy,’ said the dark twin Rosemary.
‘She keeps disappearing,’ said Rowena. ‘Even more than she usually does.’
Jennifer arrived at the door. ‘She goes to Mr Pollard’s,’ she said.
‘I need to speak to that man,’ barked Douglas. ‘Get him on the phone for me, Ro.’
‘Mummy, a lady gave me this card,’ said Jennifer, and Rowena glanced at a woman’s name and number while she importuned Pollard to come straight round.
‘I shall ask the actress, Lally Lyn, about this,’ she said uncertainly, then held the card out to Douglas, who frowned.
‘Film people nonsense?’ he said. ‘Find out exactly what they want first.’
‘Yes, darling,’ said Rowena, catching sight of Jennifer, who had her hair loose, its plait-bobbled ashes and golds jumping with light, and she knew very well what they wanted, and mad pride reared inside her even as good sense cautioned her. She thought she saw a shadow of Evangeline by the door. ‘Eva?’ she called out, but it was too late.
Jennifer leaned on the arch: the symmetry against the white-and-yellow basket-weave a perfectly composed portrait, except the stain above was growing, a tea-coloured exudation with angry borders the colour of old blood, quite wrecking the expensive wallpaper.
‘Oh, Douglas,’ she said weakly, glancing up.
‘Absurd!’ he barked. ‘I’ll give Pollard a drubbing. He needs to investigate the roof. The plumbing. I’ll dock that bloody roll of wallpaper from his wages and he can hang it again.’
Rowena jumped slightly as she recognised the figure of Gregory Dangerfield passing the window in his cricketing clothes. He didn’t look in at her. A flash of profile, of a distinctive, almost schoolboyish, curve of hair at his temple. She wanted to see the dark brown eyes that seemed to contain such soulfulness in his rare quieter moments. She cleared up, and found herself working out what time he might come back, and whether she could stroll to the village shop wheeling Caroline past the game. She couldn’t do these things, though. She was a married woman.
‘Pollard, what the hell’s the meaning of this continued damp?’ snapped Douglas when Pollard arrived. ‘Apparently there may be some space up there not being used? Behind a wall? It must be coming from there, for heaven’s sakes.’
Pollard hesitated, then spoke, impassive as ever. ‘An old water tank,’ he said. ‘I found it. You got a different system now.’
‘Yes?’ Douglas waited.
‘That’s it,’ said Pollard.
‘For goodness’ sakes, why didn’t you remove the thing?’
‘Rusted in, and wouldn’t fit down the staircase, sir.’
‘Well, how the hell did it get in?’
‘They’s changed the architecture many times over years. That won’t be the original staircase, sir. You can see ghosts of others. Look at that wall.’
He pointed. A faint door-shaped outline was visible through the plaster. At the other end of the room, off the hall, a couple of tiled steps led to nothing.
Douglas was momentarily silenced.
‘Lintels poking through upstairs, too,’ said Pollard.
‘Show me.’
‘Door once there,’ said Pollard, pointing on the landing. ‘That bit of beam sawn off. Lintels showing. Like bodies under the sand. After time and tide, they bulge through.’
‘All right, Pollard. Enough,’ said Douglas. ‘So what did you do with the space that encloses the old water tank?’
‘Airing cupboard, sir. Tank was in an old airing cupboard. Small. Nothing much. Took up all the space.’
Douglas looked blank.
‘Continued the tonguey groove up there over it, sir,’ said Pollard, pointing at the wall that met a corner outside Bob’s room. ‘Nothing else to be done.’
‘Well, you will have to investigate everywhere for the source of this damp.’
‘I have, sir. Water tank was empty, not plumbed in. Nothing is causing it.’
‘Then I’ll get someone else in to find it! Get back home, Pollard, and be quick about it.’
‘Where is Eva?’ said Rowena as the sun sank in honeyed shadows over the green, geese flying overhead.
No one knew.
‘Don’t worry about her, Mummy,’ said Rosemary.
‘I do, though,’ said Rowena. She laid out her children’s baked beans and wondered what Gregory Dangerfield was doing. Mrs Pollard, who ran some sort of kindergarten, had offered to have baby Caroline the next day, and perhaps he would ask her again to visit the
power station, though she had been discouraging and he hadn’t repeated the offer. The shadows cooled and lengthened; she heard a cheer rising from the cricket field. The men would be off drinking and toasting each other now. The dank dark middle of the room where the wall had stood before it died seemed to clench momentarily in a passing coldness, and there at the end of the arch where it met the wall that faced the green was the shadow of liquid pressing up between the tiles, making them quite loose.
‘No,’ murmured Rowena. ‘No, please.’ She had a sense that she couldn’t control this. She saw herself running, warding back damp, soaking up liquid, but then new damp would push up like mushrooms somewhere else.
The children were watching The Saint and chattering in the dining room, Douglas reading his newspaper. She felt the need, again, to count the children. She knelt down and pressed her fingers against several tiles, which had loosened themselves and gave slightly beneath her hand, little springs of water appearing in rectangles. She laid her head against the edge of the arch, but it was cold, even covered in wallpaper. At that moment, she smelled the perfume again. It was the old Evangeline Crale’s. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please.
‘I just need a walk,’ she called to Douglas. ‘Just one turn round the green.’
She let herself out of the door and breathed in the freshly rinsed air. Several villagers were out walking in the late sunshine, and nodded to her. There was another new family who had moved in just before the Crales; they were friendly and had already asked the older girls round to play. Rowena chatted briefly to them, then the daughter lingered as her parents walked to the pond.
‘Mrs Crale,’ she said, almost bobbing, politely. ‘Please, who is the face looking out of your window?’
Rowena paused. ‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘The lady.’
Rowena frowned.
‘She wears pale clothes.’
Rowena paused again. ‘It must be Eva?’ she said eventually. ‘She’s older than you, but she’s not a lady!’
The girl shook her head. ‘Thank you,’ she said hesitantly, almost bobbed again, and ran after her parents.
Eva was absent, as she increasingly was.
‘She has gone to help my missus as I understand, Mrs Crale,’ Pollard said to Rowena the next evening. ‘If that is acceptable to you.’
‘Yes,’ said Rowena after a moment of contemplation, encouraged by this unprecedented adult acceptance of poor Eva.
Rowena had arranged that Mrs Pollard was to have baby Caroline for three hours each weekday morning while she herself supervised the decorating and cooked for the family, for there had been too much tinned soup and sardines. She was reading recipes at night and was determined to make more of an effort.
The twins Rosemary and Jennifer set off with baby Caroline in her pram, out along the narrowing lanes at the top of the village, then west across the track leading over empty fields to the Pollards’ house, Brinden.
‘My dears,’ said Mrs Pollard, standing in her porch in a lemon-yellow housecoat and clasping Jennifer and Rosemary, one hand each. Her wide blue eyes in her round childish face widened until she was a series of circles, her voice a scoop of meringue. ‘I only saw you playing from a distance last time, though we are looking after your cats, Ginger and Rosie. Dear Evangeline has been telling me all about you.’
She looked at them as she spoke, studying them for the first time, smiling at dark stolid Rosemary, then turning to Jennifer.
She gazed, stared at her, her mouth still; then her eyes moistened momentarily. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘I – I – Mr Pollard had told me about you – girls – all your family – but – I didn’t know—’ She blinked and composed herself. ‘Come in, dears. Bring dear Caroline into my little family of babies and then we big girls will pour ourselves out some Ribena.’
‘Thank you,’ said Rosemary and wheeled the pram round the side of the house into the back garden, where her cat Rosie sat on a wall.
‘Look what I have for you!’ said Mrs Pollard, holding two yoghurt pots. ‘Ski with real fruit. You must try it, girls.’
Jennifer’s sapphire irises, the saturated Technicolor intensity of her colouring, seemed to pull the light of the room to her, but she ate unawares and licked the yoghurt off her raspberry-shaded top lip and said thank you prettily, her spaced pearl teeth gleaming white as she smiled.
‘Where is Eva?’ said Rosemary.
‘Why, looking after the babies as ever,’ said Mrs Pollard.
Evangeline waited in the fields in her grey serge for Mr Pollard to emerge from his day’s work, then she skipped along the lane and caught his arm, and she looked up at him and smiled, and they chatted together about her pregnant cat Meribell, and about the many many places in the house, in the farm, in the outbuildings, to conceal oneself in a game of hide-and-seek.
‘You don’t know the half of them,’ said Pollard cheerfully, ‘though you’re the sharpest of your sisters. I’ll plant some of them Caramacs you like in the nooks and crannies, and if you find them, you shall gobble them.’
He laughed, and Eva laughed with delight, and gave him a kiss on his dusty cheek. His face was like an almost-handsome boy’s, delicate and triangular but weathered, with tilted bright eyes and a curved smile.
‘You don’t mind about anything, do you?’ she said. ‘No rules here, no punishments, no – normal grown-ups.’
‘A treasure hunt before we get to hide-and-seek,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget there’s up the trees. Platforms. Bet you ain’t found the animal shelters behind the haystack yet.’
‘Oh, Brinden is the most fun place in the world,’ she said.
At home, Rowena crept up the stairs. She was nervous there. As the cottages merged, 2 and 3 The Farings became a larger house, all bewildering shapes and angles, yet there was something about the half that had belonged to Mrs Crale that retained a sadness, a dull whine of discomfort. She would not even look at the stain, at the pool of water in the corner, she decided: Pollard would fix it all, once he had knocked a doorway through the two cottages upstairs, ripped out the old kitchen on Mrs Crale’s side, and completed the papering and painting of bedrooms. And if he was incapable of sourcing and remedying the damp, Douglas said, he would bring up a more qualified fellow from town.
Today the house smelled of Milton disinfectant, of foods failing in the heat, the meat swelling, the Cheddar sweating in beads. The old fly papers Rowena couldn’t reach hung completely still by the open window, the insect fragments on them desiccated. She now acknowledged to herself that she didn’t like going up the stairs on Mrs Crale’s side, the landing outside Bob’s room uneasy in its varying light. She had noticed that Jennifer didn’t like those stairs either; she would ask again whether it was possible to remove the staircase altogether once the top floors were knocked through, so they could go up through the back steps only.
Bob slept, and Rowena had to traverse the pool of sadness to wake him. Sounds came to her: voices, words, sentences half-caught. It was Eva, who must have returned from wherever she had gone to. Wasn’t she supposed to have grown out of imaginary friends at this age, she wondered? Ridiculously, Rowena almost felt she herself knew Freddie by now. She frowned. Perhaps Eva would make friends at Ragdell Place. Rowena pictured a straggle of unfortunates, grimacing and staring, poking, pinching, wetting, and she shuddered, and regretted, for a moment, putting her down for that school, because even though Eva’s behaviour and appearance were becoming more extreme with age, she kept more and more to herself. She was, as she reminded Douglas, little trouble in some ways. ‘She is a full-blown embarrassment,’ snapped Douglas.
A cacophony of murmuring made her shudder, and she woke Bob and hurried downstairs with his warm protesting body in her arms.
7
ON THURSDAY, EVANGELINE stood scowling in the dazzle of sunshine on the set of the film Blush as the crew shot a scene on location in Crowsley Beck. She hung around all morning, hoping to be noticed.
‘There she is,�
� said Rowena, approaching. She tried to draw Eva towards her for a hug to which she submitted stiffly.
‘She just likes being on her own, Mummy,’ said Rosemary solemnly. ‘She has Freddie.’
‘Yes, darling,’ said Rowena, drawing in her breath as Jennifer was accompanied on to the green, followed by the actress Lally Lyn who had requested that the lovely Miss Crale play the role of her young sister.
‘Looks more like her daughter,’ Gregory muttered to Rowena a little too audibly.
Rowena tried not to smile. The daring of this man was meat and drink to her. She wanted to stay outside, lapping it up, away from the shadows. She willed him to touch her, anywhere – brush her arm, her shoulder – but he didn’t.
‘Keeping it all on home territory, darling,’ said Lally in an aside to Rowena. ‘The only time in my life! Some of the other scenes will be shot in bloody Cornwall. Isn’t she angelic?’
Jennifer Crale stood bolt upright on the green with her short skirt protruding starchily, her plaits looped Heidi-style, each strand corn-sheaf regular, and lights and reflectors trained on her even on this most glaring of summer days, while Lally Lyn wore a blonde beehive hairpiece falling into long tendrils by her ears that made her look top heavy, her lipstick like hoar frost. A make-up artist dashed over and ran a large brush over Jennifer’s cheeks.
After half an hour during which various departments worked around her, the clapper board shut and Jennifer spoke. ‘Yes, I shall, Gloria,’ was her only line in the one scene in which she was to appear. She was barely audible.
She said her line a dozen or so more times. ‘Cut,’ shouted the director.
Lally Lyn whispered something reassuring in her ear and she smiled.
She tried again.
‘Could the audience – would you mind? – scooting off?’ called an assistant director, wiping his forehead, and the loiterers slowly moved away.
Village children were encouraged to keep playing in the background while Lally and Jennifer spoke: Rosemary and Bob played catch with Peter and Jane and the post office children. Eva joined them, wearing laddered stockings on this hot day, a pinafore and velvet ribbon, and she blew her nose on her grandmother’s lace handkerchief. With her colourless hair, she looked like a drab spirit among the healthy rosy children in their bright skirts and shorts.
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