Touched

by Briscoe, Joanna

  She bellowed, rapping on the window, protesting, and all along she thought she heard the voice of Jennifer, sobbing from far off, but she knew it was only her own catching breaths, and eventually Mrs Pollard came down in a dressing gown and enormous curlers, smelling of sour milk, and clutched Rowena to her breast.

  Mr Pollard followed and loitered in the shadows.

  ‘Why are you painting my daughter?’ said Rowena, spitting out her words.

  ‘Oh – it is a kind of shrine to her, dear,’ said Mrs Pollard, gazing with her round unblinking eyes.

  And Rowena turned and saw further pictures through the semi-darkness of a room peopled by slightly skewed Jennifers, recognisable but wrong in ways that were hard to define.

  ‘She’s not dead,’ she shouted.

  The Pollards looked kindly and slightly doubtful.

  ‘We keep the candles burning,’ was all Mrs Pollard said.

  ‘Have the police seen this?’

  ‘Well, of course,’ said Mrs Pollard softly. ‘They admire my Arthur’s handiwork, and they sometimes have their tea in here so we can focus on dear Jennifer. “She is so beautiful,” they always say,’ she added, and in her voice Rowena detected an undisguisable note of pride.

  19

  THE NEXT MORNING, Rowena watched the green, jumping at blonde hair, at any girl of Jennifer’s height, and waited for Gregory Dangerfield’s lunchtime visit. She had grown reckless. It seemed to her almost certain that Douglas would have noticed them together, and yet he appeared to remain oblivious, working all hours in London, talking to the police, and returning late. The village gossiped about her, she realised. She had replaced Lally Lyn as the principal subject of conjecture, but it was of little concern.

  She saw Eva sometimes, a shabby wraith on the green as autumn wept, while the boy always played around her on the periphery of her awareness, slipping between rooms, approaching her only from behind to tug with his eyes. He played games with her, scurrying and ruffling the air, then hiding in the shadows. She felt him laughing as she tried to find him.

  Eva sat in the tiny Victorian room, doing her lacemaking and tatting and working on an elaborate sampler of the green for her grandmother, whom she addressed as she sewed, singing, soothing and chatting.

  She could never have kept her grandmother in her home without Arthur Pollard’s collusion, she thought. Accepting all that he was told without question, he had cleared that old airing cupboard, covered over the doorway and suggested fashionable long wood panels to Rowena Crale before the family had arrived; then Eva had filled it with the objects her dear grandmother had treasured over so much time, and dedicated countless hours to its decoration, covering it all with the dust she had gathered.

  The plotting had started the Easter that Douglas and Rowena had broached their plans to send old Evangeline away and move into her house. Over the school holidays, Eva had stayed at number 3 The Farings and looked after her grandmother, who was unable to eat in her shock. They plotted, whispered, talked all through the holidays as old Evangeline grew thinner. They would create their own happiness, they said.

  ‘I remember you when you was so high – a little missy in frocks and lace and ribbons,’ Pollard said a few hours later when Eva had arrived at Brinden in search of fresh food.

  ‘Only I stayed with Grandmamma in the school holidays,’ said Eva proudly. ‘She gave me her clothes because we are almost one person.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you, Pollard, you always did more work for her than you needed to, and for that, how can I ever thank you?’

  ‘No need to now, missy. You did help me, didn’t you?’

  Eva turned away.

  Pollard laughed. ‘My little outcast. You’re the black sheep like me, chickabiddy,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We wrong ’uns find each other, and then there’s no knowing what we do. Nothing to stop us, eh, missy?’

  Eva laughed too, then she frowned. ‘How can I be better?’ she said.

  ‘You can’t be, my chickabiddy. I like you just the way you are.’

  ‘But it’s Jennifer you gaze at.’

  ‘For my paintings.’

  ‘I wish you would paint me.’

  ‘It’s you I want to talk to. You, my grey little ghostie. I like an odd one. One day you will make a good man proud.’

  ‘You! You!’

  ‘None of that talk, now. You behave, missy.’

  She hesitated. ‘Yes, Pollard.’

  ‘That one,’ he murmured, tilting his head towards Jennifer’s portrait, ‘her head is full of nothing. Dull girl if you ask me, missy, and a bit strange in the head, but that’s enough of that. Fetch me a couple of eggs and a few windfalls and we’ll cook them up to go with our fried potatoes.’

  In the garden, Jennifer dully fed the row of babies from their bottles, Ginger butting her and Mrs Pollard leaning over to kiss her head on her way to the kitchen.

  ‘That woman has too many, and keeps losing them,’ she would say, crooning and re-brushing Jennifer’s hair.

  Mrs Pollard kept an eye on Jennifer through the window as she always did, and made sure she never wandered from sight, while Jennifer sat captive in the cabbages playing with the Tressy doll Mrs Pollard had bought her and shivered a little. Autumn was scenting the air, and the babies now lay in a row covered in their yellow waffle blankets, while those beginning to crawl clambered unsteadily over the rockery in their jerseys.

  ‘You,’ said the oldest, due to leave that week: a mischievous one-year-old in a home-knit who had started to say a few words. She pointed at Jennifer.

  ‘Yes?’ said Jennifer, smiling down at her and taking her hand.

  ‘You the curl,’ she said.

  ‘Curl?’ She frowned. ‘Do you mean – girl?’

  ‘Yes! Curl!’

  ‘I’m the girl?’ said Jennifer, looking vacant.

  The toddler nodded vigorously, gurgling with laughter. She danced around Jennifer a little, clinging to her legs, and tugged insistently at her mother’s sleeve on collection.

  Rowena was at home watching the green, as was her habit, looking for Jennifer. One day, she thought; one day soon, she prayed, Jennifer would emerge as Evangeline had.

  Eva returned and spent the night in the small room, working on the sampler, chatting, and arranging the food she had brought from Brinden on dainty crockery for her grandmother; but poor pregnant Meribell was unwell, so as the birds woke, she made her way across the fields in the cold thin light, stumbling on flint and puddingstone, to ask Pollard what remedy she should use and whether Meribell was ready to kitten.

  Brinden appeared to shimmer in the dawn, gold seeping into blue, and Eva looked forward to the bacon and eggs Pollard would fry her in his shed before she returned, but as she came closer, she saw vehicles there in the dip of land. The house and its immediate surroundings were ringed with tape, and a figure Eva recognised as the lady policeman who had interviewed her was standing stiffly outside the back door.

  Eva froze, then ran across the rest of the field, tripping and weeping with fear, crawled under the tape and went straight to Pollard’s shed.

  His paints were out by his easel; the air was hung with fresh bacon fat, and blue roses were lined up on his workbench waiting for their stems, but there was no note for her, no sign.

  She screamed, scanning the horizons, calling his name, then she put her head on the bench and cried more loudly than she ever had, except once.

  They had all escaped, said the police. Mr and Mrs Pollard had simply driven away with Jennifer, as though they had had forewarning. They interrogated Eva, and she sobbed and shouted and showed her ignorance during their questions. Later, as the sun touched the fields, and the trees shivered with bright morning, she lay on the ground and cried for what she had done. She spilled her grief and regret and called, ‘Jennifer, Jennifer.’ She lay face down on the earth, her pinafore dirtied, her face smeared with mud and tears.

  She had wanted to help Pollard because he had helped
her, but now that they had taken Jennifer and gone, she most bitterly regretted it. She screamed and wept into the mud until it filled her mouth.

  The day of the car rally, she had slipped out of the little room, hurried along the lane and found Jennifer behind the church, where she had been talking to the vicar’s wife while the rest of the family went ahead. Jennifer had then lingered to watch the motor cars, that fresh early afternoon stained with petrol exhaust in all its milling and confusion. Eva took her by the hand and dragged her the long way, all around the lanes and the spinney, across the mud track, Jennifer protesting and whining about her lunch, to Brinden. She had brought the most beautiful girl the villagers had ever seen, and had given her to Pollard. He had always wanted Jennifer, Eva thought, and here she was as a gift, though Eva hated her, hated Jennifer for the way people were with her, hated her even as she loved her.

  ‘Not for me,’ said Pollard, nodding. ‘I got me roses. I got you to talk to. For the missus. We’ll paint her up nicely and give the missus some pictures. She’ll love that more than I can say. Come along, Jenn’fer.’

  So Mrs Pollard, mother of none, had her Jennifer, the very loveliest girl she had ever met, the daughter she had always dreamed of, and she cosseted her and pampered her, fed her milk and rice puddings and cakes, rocked her to sleep in the wicker chair, then dressed her in her creations. And Jennifer, who always was a pliable girl, became more and more like the doll she so resembled, until she blinked, her rosebud mouth held open, more often than she spoke.

  20

  ‘THIS ISN’T THE right direction for Finchley,’ said Rowena, frowning at a road sign.

  ‘I—’ Douglas cleared his throat and tapped lightly on the wheel with his index finger. His mouth tensed. ‘I just want to show you somewhere on the way,’ he said. He smiled at her, slightly awkwardly.

  Rowena glanced at her watch, that elegant little Chopard her mother-in-law had once given her, which she tried to wear every day. ‘We need to be in the house before the removal vans arrive,’ she said.

  Her mind roamed anxiously through The Farings, now almost emptied. There were still a few pieces of furniture to be packed, but she wondered whether she had forgotten anything of importance. She went methodically through every room and its contents, and, for the first time in several weeks, she strayed into the Victorian airing cupboard. White hair seemed to be there above an eiderdown on the whiteness of the pillow; large sunken eyes turned to her in the mirror. She darted straight out again. Closing the tongue-and-groove behind her, she hoped to forget, in some balmy future, that vision. The house had done its worst at the end, with its urinous splashes and spores; the floor on the landing impassable; the leaks weighting the ceiling until it resembled a rain-drenched tent; faces pressing into her poor bruised mind. They had had to sell The Farings for almost nothing. But then they had got half the house for nothing: for nothing at all.

  Within weeks of her arrival, the staff at Ragdell Place had recommended Evangeline’s transferral to an ordinary grammar school, and so the children could be educated in London and there was nothing to keep them there.

  When they left it, Crowsley Beck could not have been more beautiful. Artists came there to paint and photograph the green with its snow-lined ring of elms for Christmas cards. Another production company had been shooting there, Jennifer’s absence an ache that couldn’t be dulled as Rowena stared at the crew and remembered. The lamp posts were twined with holly; a Christmas tree had been erected on the green, its candles lit by the church’s carol singers in the blue of the late afternoons; the low fences and the war memorial were capped with snow, the pub shone blue-green-red across the white, and the stream gurgled black behind. Door knockers bore wreaths, the post office featured an illuminated Nativity, and Gregory Dangerfield’s sports car wore a bonnet.

  Gregory had made a cash purchase on a tiny flat in a spot between the village and Finchley that he and Rowena had chosen for its anonymity. ‘Welcome to the scandalous Lady Crale’s love nest,’ he said, carrying her into it and leaning over the bed to kiss her.

  The month before, Rowena had sat in the grey-green shadows by the window looking on to the grass. It was the day after the President was shot, and the pink suit kept coming into her mind. Builders were about to come in to dismantle the remains of the ceiling and examine the state of the joists. Was it worth it, she wondered dully? She knew the answer. Bob played a game that involved chasing around energetically by himself with a ball in the far side of the L-shaped room, while she merely sat listening to him. After a while, he stopped and all was quiet, and she knew that Freddie had left the game and crept beneath her skirt. If she looked down from the swivel lounge chair she sat on; if she challenged the busyness at the corner of her eye, the shadow would disappear less quickly now. It was becoming less shy. It was brushing her hem. He was the age he would have been had he lived.

  It was her boy. She could admit it now, in grief, in longing for him in her arms.

  She had been pregnant with another son and he had died before he was born, though no one talked about it at the time, and she had suffered in a guilty silence that wrapped her in something close to despair. She hadn’t wanted to be pregnant again so quickly after the birth of the troubled infant who was her third daughter. She had held the protesting girl she had reluctantly named Evangeline, while clearing up after twins and vomiting with the new pregnancy, and she had taken baths until they were as scalding as she could tolerate, and bought gin to complete the job, and the cramps had started almost immediately, followed by the agony and mess. She had never told Douglas that the infant was a boy, but she had seen his body, and the pregnancy had been further advanced than she had known. When he was born, this tiny dead thing, he had a grazing of red hair, the only one of the Crale children to do so.

  ‘I play with Freddie,’ said Bob shyly to Rowena as she looked out at the green.

  ‘Oh, Bob,’ said Rowena. She straightened his hair, carefully. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I play with him just now!’ said Bob. Bob the dog barked outside. Rowena stiffened.

  ‘. . . OK, Bob,’ she said gently.

  ‘Then he come to you.’

  Rowena paused.

  ‘How?’ she said.

  ‘Come over to you. Here. He want to play with you, Mummy.’

  Rowena gazed at the convex surface of the ceiling, pocked and stretched.

  ‘What does Freddie look like?’ she asked quietly as she drew Bob on to her lap to kiss his head, and he wriggled.

  ‘Boy. Big boy.’

  ‘Eva always said he was little,’ said Rowena.

  ‘No! Freddie here,’ he said, lifting his hand in the air and holding it above him.

  ‘And what – what else?’

  ‘Nice. I like Freddie.’

  ‘Good. What else does he look like? Darling?’

  ‘Mmmm . . .’ said Bob, shrugging. ‘Hair orange!’

  ‘Orange?’ said Rowena, wonderingly. ‘Red?’

  Bob shrugged.

  ‘A bit like mine?’

  Bob knelt unsteadily on her lap and played with her hair. ‘More more more orange!’

  ‘I have to leave,’ Rowena said to Douglas that evening when he came in from work, tossing his hat and scarf on the sofa and putting his feet up on the coffee table.

  ‘Oh, Ro,’ he said.

  ‘Please. I don’t want to live in this house any more.’

  Douglas grunted. ‘Get a chap a drink?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Rowena.

  ‘You know, you know, Ro, it wouldn’t be too bloody soon for me,’ said Douglas, surprising her. ‘The building costs will bankrupt me here.’

  ‘Oh . . .?’ said Rowena.

  ‘And that asinine Beeching will be closing so many of the branch lines, I’ve been wondering how I’ll get in to work, unless I stay in digs in the week.’ He sighed. ‘I think we should sell up, Ro.’

  Rowena looked away. ‘I have to leave, and yet, and yet, I am leaving – him,’ sh
e whispered. ‘Again.’

  ‘Again? What are you talking about?’

  Rowena flared a furious red and her eyes filled. The speed of her heart made her feel breathless.

  ‘You know. He never leaves me.’

  ‘Who the hell are you talking about, Rowena?’ said Douglas, standing up suddenly and taking her by the shoulders.

  ‘Him. The—’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me what’s bloody obvious?’ shouted Douglas. ‘You think I need telling?’

  ‘You’ve seen him?’

  ‘I thought you’d have the bloody grace to keep your dirty secrets to yourself. But no. Well, yes, by God, we are leaving.’

  ‘Douglas, darling, please, please be kinder. I can’t help it. He follows me, he haunts me. I can’t – I don’t know how to stop it – I—’

  Douglas raised his hand, and he slapped her across the face.

  Rowena was silent. She lifted her eyes. ‘I will never forgive you for that,’ she said in a quiet voice.

  The horse-chestnut-arched lanes, the aerodrome, the private schools, the power station in its dip in the fields, all flew starkly past the car, winter-coloured, as they left Crowsley Beck. The children had gone ahead to the new house, dispiritingly similar to their former London home, supervised by Rowena’s mother who had come up from Hampshire for the weekend to help.

  ‘But where are we going?’ said Rowena, frowning, as Douglas drove past a golf course and slowed the car. ‘The removal vans may not be far behind us. Shenley, this says. This isn’t the right way, is it?’

  She could see Freddie reflected in the car windows, and pretended to apply her lipstick in the mirror so she could show him that she was checking on him. He was bouncing on the back seat in a restless rearrangement of light. Once she thought she saw a movement behind him too, but it was nothing.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ro,’ said Douglas. ‘Darling,’ he added with an unusual softness to his voice. He stopped the car in front of some large gates, swiftly got out and spoke to a security man in a booth, and the gates opened.