She heard the word ‘Grandmamma’ followed by a crooning like a lullaby. She is quite mad, Rowena thought sadly.
She waited. She ran her fingernails lightly under the beading, crouched down, and when the rain was at its most torrential, she pushed the section of tongue-and-groove very gently until it opened a little.
For a few seconds, she watched what she could see of Eva, a thin and dirty-haired girl leaning over the bottom shelf in that choking cupboard, now close and dark with rain.
‘Sweet Grandmamma,’ she said, and she seemed to be rubbing the bedding on the shelf. ‘You need to stay warm.’ She was leaning over the lower bunk, and there were more murmurings barely audible to Rowena.
‘Eva,’ said Rowena gently.
Eva screamed. In one movement, she stretched herself further over the bed, yanked an eiderdown over the pillows, then stood in front of the wadded shelf with its unseemly heap of bedclothes. She stayed there, visibly trembling.
‘Thank God,’ said Rowena in a croaky whisper. The room was cooler yet ever thicker with sour odours. She saw the canary behind glass, now listing so its lumpy body was bent almost double, and jolted away.
‘Eva?’ She took Eva into her arms, covering her head with kisses. ‘Come down,’ she said, pushing her towards the door. Rain pelted the skylight.
‘I will return,’ said Eva as they left.
‘No, you will not,’ said Rowena quite fiercely.
‘Je Reviens,’ said Eva very clearly.
‘My God,’ said Rowena. ‘That. That – perfume. You sound – you sound quite mad. Don’t, don’t darling. This has got to stop.’
On the landing, Rowena pulled Eva to her again, and Eva lay her head against her mother’s shoulder. Rowena stroked her hair.
‘Come back to us, Eva,’ she said. ‘You’re so thin. My darling, you are so thin. Please. What are you doing up here? This horrible, horrible old room.’
Eva smiled. She shook her head.
‘Have you seen Jennifer?’ said Rowena in a low voice.
‘No,’ said Eva.
‘Really?’ said Rowena, her voice catching in her throat. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
Rowena nodded slowly, her head heavy.
For the first time in many months, Eva put her arms around her mother. ‘I am here,’ she said in her low slow voice. ‘That means Jennifer will come back too.’
‘How can I know that?’ said Rowena, but a hope rose through her.
After a bath and a meal that she ate in hungry silence, Evangeline stood up quite abruptly and began to walk out of the room.
‘Where are you going?’ said Rowena.
‘I need to go back up,’ said Eva, and began to hurry towards the staircase.
‘You do not,’ said Rowena, following and putting her hand on Eva’s shoulder. ‘Sit down on the sofa. You are not going up to that horrible creepy cupboard.’
‘I need to,’ said Eva, a hard expression appearing on her face.
‘Certainly not,’ said Rowena with fresh force. ‘Sit down. Tell me. Tell me now, Eva, where you’ve been all this time.’
Eva smiled. ‘In the fields, Mother.’
‘You’ve been here, haven’t you? You’ve been in that room?’
‘I need to get back up there.’
‘You are not going up there.’
‘I need to look after her. She can’t be on her own.’
‘Who?
‘She can’t.’
‘Jennifer?’ said Rowena with a cry.
Eva shook her head slightly. Pity crossed her face.
‘Who?’ said Rowena again, tears sliding down her cheeks without restraint.
Eva reached up and wiped them.
‘Grandmamma,’ she said simply.
Rowena stared at Eva. She drew in her breath. ‘Eva,’ she said in a fast furious growl. ‘Do you not realise what you’re saying? What are you saying? What are you talking about? This is illness—’
Eva shrugged.
‘Well?’ snapped Rowena.
‘What could I do?’ said Eva. ‘She only wanted to stay in her house.’
‘This is ancient history, Evangeline.’ Rowena felt heat rush to her head.
‘But how – how could I not help to keep her at home? How could I let you push her out of her home when all her heart wanted was to be at her own, own home and she needed help?’
‘Eva, Eva!’ Rowena was shouting. ‘Stop! Stop! You sound mad. Don’t you realise? If you talk like that, they will take you away. Darling. How long have you spent up there?’
‘I’ve been looking after Grandmamma,’ said Eva in a low steady voice. ‘Feeding her, talking to her, sewing, mending—’
‘You’ve been up there, hiding up there, all this time?’
Eva said nothing.
‘Oh God,’ said Rowena. ‘Those noises.’ She reached across, and took Eva’s wrists, holding them so hard that Eva pulled them away. ‘They will think you’re mad.’
‘Who will?’
‘Everyone. The police. Doug – Daddy. Everyone, everyone. They will put you away if you say things like that, don’t you understand?’ She clutched her again, urgently.
‘I’m being shut away anyway,’ said Eva sulkily.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘Oh – Ragdell.’ Rowena took a deep breath. ‘No, no, darling,’ she said more gently. ‘Much worse than that. You speak like that and they’ll put you in – I don’t know – a reform school, institution, somewhere where they can help you. Treat you. ECG. I don’t know—’
Eva shrugged. ‘She needs feeding, changing, lov—’
‘You must not SAY this stuff. You are not understanding me. This isn’t normal. They’ll give you – I don’t know – a lobotomy. Don’t you see? And if you say these things to the police, perhaps, perhaps they will not return Jennifer to us either when they find her. They won’t think we are suitable parents.’
‘I would never tell the police,’ said Eva in a hiss. ‘Anyway. Grandmamma needs protecting.’
‘Good God, Eva. This is the very last time you will tell these stupid tales. This is a diseased fantasy. You must, must stop, darling.’
‘I know exactly what I am telling the police of my whereabouts,’ Eva said calmly. ‘Which meadow, dwelling, field and garden I have been staying in. I planned it all out in our room.’
Rowena shook her head, her jaw slack.
‘Where is Jennifer?’ she said.
‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.’
The front door opened to the noise of a torrent from the gutter.
‘Have the police called since lunch?’ came Douglas’s voice, the urgency in his tone audible.
‘Yes,’ answered Rowena. ‘But nothing to report. Eva is ba—’ she called before he came into the main room, instinct warning her, but he was already there and staring at Eva.
Eva had struggled to her feet, her eyes like a dazed sea creature’s beneath the plastered water-rat hair of her bath.
He strode over and hit her on the cheek.
‘Douglas!’ shrieked Rowena. She leapt up and tugged him away from where Eva was now standing, her eyes wide with shock. ‘Douglas!’ she cried, and she grabbed his arm.
Eva opened her mouth, turned, and ran upstairs, a thin battered figure, more ghostly than she had ever been.
‘I think I hate you,’ Rowena said to her husband.
16
THE POLLARDS WERE on their annual holiday to Wales but the police wanted to inspect Brinden without further delay, and Rosemary knew where the spare key was hidden.
Early the next morning, Rowena and Rosemary accompanied the police while a lady officer was booked to interview Evangeline at The Farings. The rain had stopped, but the police van skidded on the path, and the overgrown nettles, docks and bushes soaked their legs on the path to the side door. Rowena had never seen so many snails; the large cats mewled in a chorus, aggressively rubbin
g against their legs until Rosemary stumbled. She had brought food for Rosie and Ginger, but when she laid it in front of them, there was a hissing, spitting fury of cats, a yowling of torn ears and despair.
‘We must bring them more, Mummy,’ said Rosemary. ‘Especially Ginger. I have to look after him for Jennifer. Meribell went away quite quickly. I think she died. Poor Eva.’
The house was silent, shuttered and dark, marginally tidier in the cluttered areas, but cheerless in a fashion neither of them had seen before. Fly nets were placed over plates of dried meat and fruit, now browning. Seedlings left on a windowsill were drooping. Rowena picked her way through the semi-cellar rooms at the back of the house, over lawnmower parts, tools and rusting containers, oil staining her legs as she clambered through the warren of storage spaces she had previously navigated, but she could no longer find the door to the pink bedroom. It wasn’t where she had remembered it; there was only a wall where she had thought the door would be, and the mangle was elsewhere, the tricycle nowhere to be seen, and she was uncertain about her orientation. She returned a different way to where she thought the pantry was, and came out through a door to the kitchen yard instead.
Rowena found Mrs Pollard’s dining room, where the oil portrait of Jennifer jumped out at her in the gloom, and she began to cry again. ‘It is wrong,’ she said. ‘Oh, Rosemary, don’t look.’ But Rosemary was crying too, sobbing red-faced as she rarely did. They cried together, clutching each other as the police began their search. The house and grounds were too big to inspect in one day, they said, and they would work until nightfall, then call in more officers the following day to comb the entire place if necessary.
‘I do not,’ said Evangeline at The Farings, sitting on the sofa in her grandmother’s dress and pinafore, kicking up one leg after the other and revealing the trim of her gored petticoat until she was frowned at.
The lady policeman was asking her lots of questions that she could answer very easily, although she was grilled extensively and the police officer thought it fit to chide her for the suffering imposed on her mother. Eva sat up straight and answered in her level chalky voice. She had been sleeping in the fields and gardens all around, she said; it was so hot, so airless inside. She missed her grandmother, and her parents should not have taken her house and knocked down her wall. She was very angry with them for that; so angry, she would rather avoid them. She had spent some time at the Pollards’. Had she seen Jennifer there? Yes, her sisters had played there in the past, and she had seen Jennifer there recently. How often did she see Jennifer? Not often. How would she describe Jennifer’s character? It was hard to say: she was quiet, undemanding, but of a sunny disposition. ‘All anyone ever notices about her is how she looks,’ said Eva. ‘It is all about her.’
She was questioned for over three hours. She managed not to address Freddie, recalled all the answers she had prepared, and was twice asked to repeat details of her whereabouts, itemising nights spent at Brinden, in woods, sheds, hedges and the garden, demonstrating a consistency that finally satisfied the officer.
Rowena returned and talked to the police officer as Rosemary made cups of tea, awkwardly placing an arm around her crying mother, while Evangeline disappeared upstairs. There were new framed pictures on the walls of her grandmother’s staircase, Eva noticed, a modern jagged black-and-white rug on the landing. She spat on it, and rubbed the spittle in with her foot.
Bob emerged from his room and wrapped his arms about her, laughing. ‘I seen Freddie more van you, Evie!’
Evangeline looked down at his round eyes gazing up at her. She tousled his hair and bit her lip.
‘Have you, Bob?’
‘Yus yus. When you away, Freddie here!’
‘You looked after Freddie?’
‘I like Freddie.’
‘Yes, Bob. I haven’t seen Freddie for an age.’
‘I sees him,’ said Bob.
‘I don’t. Where?’
‘By Mummy’s back. Kitchen. Here. I like Freddie!’
‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘What does he look like? How old is he?’
Bob shrugged.
‘Smaller than you?’
‘Bigger,’ said Bob firmly, nodding.
‘Bigger or smaller than me?’
‘Bit – bit smaller.’
‘Who does he like most?’
‘Mummy,’ said Bob instantly.
Child Actress Vanishes, said the headline, accompanied by a still from Blush in which a widening effect of the lens flattened Jennifer’s face, and, as in the film, lent her an almost ordinary appearance. In black-and-white, her hair’s blondeness could have been mouse toned, and the eyes that had seemed to possess an almost worrying glare in the footage were unremarkable in the still.
Brinden was revisited, fields and woods as far as Epping searched; every rally driver who had gathered in the village at the time of Jennifer’s disappearance was interviewed and profiled.
There was, thought Rowena, quite simply spite in The Farings. Could they really live in this village where the house turned against them and they lost children? Dreams, already shattered, were irretrievable: it was the nightmare now that she fought.
The walls on either side of the arch between the two houses were openly flaunting their canker, the ceiling opening slowly in brown-ringed sections of plaster. Sometimes rooms were bathed with Je Reviens; at other times, decay dominated. The wallpaper was furry with bulges of mould, as though mice ran under it. In a previous period, the decomposition would have made Rowena despair. Now it merely formed the backdrop to chaos as the past soaked in.
Eva’s absences increased once again, but now she would appear just as her mother showed signs of agitation.
She crept down the stairs, her stockinged feet making no noise, but Rowena grabbed her as she entered the main room.
‘You must stay at home more!’
‘Do not worry about me,’ said Eva. ‘I am safe. It’s the summer.’
‘But where do you go?’
Eva gazed. ‘Same,’ she said, her lips’ stubborn set momentarily silencing Rowena. Rather than her usual dress, petticoats and pinafore, she was wearing an elaborate lace blouse with a long skirt that was too big for her.
Rowena gave an exasperated sigh. ‘You will look for Jennifer?’
Eva nodded.
‘Everywhere?’
‘Yes.’
‘Everywhere you go, Eva. Call and search.’
‘Yes, I’ll look.’
‘Eva,’ Rowena called just as Evangeline was leaving. She turned, clasping her skirt at the waist. ‘How did you know Jennifer had disappeared?’
‘I didn’t,’ said Eva.
‘But you did. When—’
‘When?’
‘When I found you. You knew. You comforted me and said not to worry.’
‘Oh, I—’ said Eva, and she paused.
‘You know something,’ Rowena said, her voice catching.
Eva dropped her gaze. When she looked up, her eyes glistened.
‘No, Mummy.’
‘You never call me “Mummy”. What is it you know? You must tell me.’
Eva paused for the smallest fragment of time.
‘I heard you calling for her from upstairs. I don’t know where she is,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure she’s safe.’
Later in the day, Rowena lay on the floor gazing at the ceiling as Bob had his nap and Rosemary played with the post office children. The night had once more been devoid of sleep, Rowena only dozing just before the alarm went, then turning sick with tiredness to her pillow to cry. The ceiling sagged. Do your worst, she thought. If it fell on her, it would take away all pain and all fear. There was a tap from upstairs, a rush, a burp of sound, and a stain moved over the ceiling in front of her eyes to meet others, so slowly, so slowly she was barely certain, and she smelled again the cat’s urine, along with the scent. She could, she noticed, only detect the perfume at certain times of the month.
She willed the stain further, h
er head fuzzy. Fall on me, she thought. She heard Greg’s car door slam outside. She knew when he arrived home at lunchtime – he said he preferred his wife’s cooking to the canteen sludge, and that anxious, good plain wife was always ready in a pinny – just as she knew the time he swung out again, his jacket over his shoulder, spinning his hat on to the seat beside him.
She lay there and felt herself a little, longing for him as tears rolled down the sides of her face. The walls seemed to creep in on her. Squash me, she thought. There was a knock on the door, and she turned her head but didn’t get up. A cockerel cried outside, at the wrong time of day, and water shimmered in the corner.
‘Rowena?’ called Gregory softly. He inched open the door. ‘Rowena.’
‘In here,’ she said.
The sun pattered in tentative warmth over the tiles, and there he was, immensely tall above her.
‘“She loosed the chain, and down she lay,”’ he said. ‘How exquisite you are, Lady Crale.’
She smiled up at him. ‘You are beautiful,’ she said, barely moving her mouth.
He knelt beside her and stroked her feet, trailing his fingers up her calves so she shivered. He stroked her for a long time. She tried to pull him closer, but he resisted, lingering on her thighs, playing, tickling, holding back, occasionally dipping to kiss the crook of her elbow and her neck until she grasped him.
‘Patience, Lady Crale,’ he said, murmuring right inside her ear. ‘I want to kiss the freckles on your haughty nose. Your hair is ember-coloured in the sun. Your figure is the finest I have ever seen. Patience.’
‘No,’ she moaned.
‘No one here?’ he said, feeling in his pocket.
She shook her head. All she wanted, she thought, was him inside her right now, hard and insistent, ridding her of loss, of guilt, of misery, of everything. He plunged into her and she cried out and she was alive; she was alive. She loved him.
‘We could make this a regular meeting,’ he said afterwards. ‘Suddenly I have developed a taste for the power station’s reconstituted shepherd’s pie.’
‘Oh yes. Yes.’
‘Every day at ten past one. We will find places to be together. To do . . . whatever you need to do until your daughter comes back.’
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