Touched

by Briscoe, Joanna

  ‘Where are we?’ said Rowena sharply as Douglas drove carefully through parkland. ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  ‘We just need to have a talk with Dr Singh,’ said Douglas in the same gentle tones.

  ‘Douglas, what do you mean?’ said Rowena.

  A turreted mansion, gracious but institutional, appeared at the end of the drive, nurses circling the front lawn in coats over uniforms, chaperoning people who were clearly psychiatric patients.

  ‘Douglas!’ shouted Rowena, grabbing the door handle, but a doctor was walking towards them with a welcoming smile.

  The doctor held her gently by the arm and made her stand, still smiling, and Rowena leaned over to wrench open the back door and let Freddie out. He took her hand with his little one as she tried to pull herself free of Dr Singh.

  Just outside the main gates, Lally Lyn, the actress, popped up from the luggage space where she had hidden beneath a blanket, her tinkling laugh filling the car.

  ‘Oh, darling!’ she said. ‘Oh, I so nearly gave myself away! This reminds me terribly of a play I was in years ago. I was a silly young thing, grotty little rep company. The mistress hid in the back of the car, then leapt up like a jack-in-the-box once the wife was out of the way. Oh, Doug sweetest, what a lark.’

  She kissed the back of his neck and clambered into the front seat. ‘Whoops!’

  ‘I don’t know that that felt altogether right,’ said Douglas, stroking his chin. ‘Though Dr Singh did say—’

  ‘Oh, poor girl’ll be much safer,’ she said, touching up her lipstick in the mirror. ‘You’ve been saying she’s been going off her trolley almost since July. Let alone since ill-starred Jen. Now, let’s plan a smashing Home Sweet Home picnic on the floor for the kids’ supper!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Douglas absently, as the day began to soften into twilight and he drove with an abstracted expression through country lanes that graded into suburbs. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘let’s drive by my mother’s grave. I never visit it. Right near here. I want to pay homage to the old girl.’

  ‘Of course, my sweetheart,’ said Lally. ‘When did she die?’

  ‘Just before we moved into The Farings, around Easter,’ he said, slowing the car. ‘It was pretty sad, the whole thing. I think Ro felt it badly. We were about to pack her off to live with her goddaughter or someone, all the way up in Inverness.’

  ‘Heavens! The sticks.’

  ‘Yes, well. The old girl was pretty past it, but she wanted to stay in her home, and I half think she died of a broken heart. Let herself starve before we could move her. I always felt a bit rotten. She was a dear.’ He stopped the car. ‘Here it is.’

  ‘But I’m terribly puzzled,’ said Lally, getting out of the car. ‘Doug, darling, I saw her – well, I thought – only last night. I assumed it was your mother,’ she said, frowning. ‘She had the Crale eyes!’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, darling,’ said Douglas, and tickled her so she giggled.

  ‘Well, who was that old lady, then? I’m sure I’ve seen that same old dear a couple of times in the window upstairs, silly billy.’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Douglas. ‘Where? What kind of old lady, for heaven’s sakes?’

  ‘Clothes just like Eva’s. Faded Victorian garb in the dusk. She was outside your house, looking up towards the window.’

  NOW

  I THINK POLLARD is returning to me. He shows himself more and more; we watch each other.

  ‘Who was your favourite?’ I said to him when I finally saw him on my street.

  He smiled. He was silent for a while.

  ‘You know,’ he said.

  Pollard had simply left that day, and despite a massive search, he was never found. He abandoned me, and he didn’t tell me how to find him. I wanted him and missed him for the rest of my childhood.

  The police discovered Jennifer’s pink room; they found all the portraits that had been hoarded for Mrs Pollard in case Jennifer was ever taken away from her, and they carted them out in piles, to be presented in the court case. If it hadn’t been for the older baby who started speaking, Jennifer would have grown up there, at her home of Brinden.

  Eventually, almost five years after the Pollards had escaped, Delyth Pollard was tracked down to a bungalow outside the Mumbles in Wales, where Jennifer was found pampered and confined, dressed in a playsuit, with her increasingly mousy hair back-combed into bunches. She was nursing a bloated Mrs Pollard, who had a tumour on her thyroid, and had begun to tut in impatience at her lethargic charge. Jennifer’s childhood was over, and the somewhat fleshy seventeen-year-old with her flat face gazed vacantly with vast eyes when the police arrived. Mrs Pollard was arrested and sent to Holloway, where she died soon afterwards; Arthur Pollard was sentenced in his absence, while Jennifer was declared unfit to be returned to a home environment, and was sent instead as a weekly boarder to Ragdell Place.

  Her eyes seemed to contain nothing. It was only after she returned that people hinted that she disturbed them with her doll face and her empty expression and her way of saying so little. The therapists at Ragdell said that Jennifer presented signs of capture-bonding, for she claimed that Mrs Pollard had loved her and Mr Pollard had been kind to her in her imprisonment. He never laid a finger on us, though the police, and much later the therapists, decided that he did. In her early twenties, Jennifer’s celebrated looks made a partial return in the form of a puffy glamour, like a sedated actress’s, and she began to live with a nurse she had met at Ragdell, who was besotted with her beauty.

  Perhaps it is not always the strange ones who are strange.

  When I think of our dear mother at Crowsley Beck, I remember her auburn fall of hair – in the sun on the green or catching the light as she gazed in hope out of the window. Even now, I cannot bear to think about what happened to her there.

  Despite our neighbour Gregory Dangerfield’s previous entanglements and the fact that he remained married for propriety, he claimed that Rowena Crale was his true love, and he went to see her during the time she was in hospital. I suspect they conducted their affair just as they always had, in the wards, in secret places. The copse in the grounds was quite thick, she once told me, smiling to herself.

  Poor Gregory died early, developing lumps just like his dog Bob, his body riddled with cancer. My father divorced my mother, and she never loved anyone again but Gregory, and stayed loyal to his memory. Eventually, she was released from the hospital, and once I had my own home, she came to live with me, because I owed her that for the agony I had caused her.

  There are other people now in Crowsley Beck, a new family at The Farings. I went back recently for the first time in my adult life. It was smarter, paint-shinier, richer, the ideal commuter village, though the railway station had closed decades before. The power station had been decommissioned, and Ragdell Place turned into a hotel. After years of neglect, Brinden had been taken over by developers as its notoriety gradually faded. I didn’t want to look at it; I didn’t want to spoil the memory of that summer when it was my playground, or think of Jennifer there, obediently holding flowers.

  Children ran across the shining grass, beeches replacing the elms, the pond ringed with a fence. There were blinds, not curtains, at The Farings, and the outer wall that faced the green seemed to bulge faintly, the bricks compacted and undulating. Children’s voices emerged from inside the house; a cat that looked somewhat like Meribell sat on the wall, and scales were played with amateur force on a piano. As I left, I looked up at the tiny window of the room in the roof, and the sun caught it in its emptiness.

  Je Reviens.

  AFTERWORD

  I spent my first years in the village of the damned.

  This was the picture postcard idyll that is Letchmore Heath in Hertfordshire, just north of London, which was the location for the celebrated 1960 film based on John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos. Village of the Damned features a colony of demonic blond children terrorising the law-abiding residents of a sleepy village. It wa
s here I spent my first four years, the place preserved for me in a series of detailed memories that possess an almost hyper-real clarity.

  I never revisited it until last year, when my son was invited to a bar mitzvah in nearby Radlett. I was curious, and we decided to drive through the village on the way back.

  There it was. It was like a dream made real, a memory rolling out in front of me in brilliant colour, more polished and privileged than it had been, but so exactly as I had remembered it, I could find my way to certain houses without hesitation and recall the layout of the two cottages in which we had lived. A skylight featured in my memory, as did the pattern of wallpaper up close, the texture of tiles: that microscopic vision, only possible for a very young child in its small world, was burned into my mind with what turned out to be quite disquieting accuracy.

  When Random House approached me to write a Hammer novella, this shimmering archetypal English village leapt into my mind immediately as the setting. That, and a girl dressed in Victorian clothes on a green, were my starting points. Was it because of the famed film? I don’t think so, though that may have overlaid my memories and enhanced my decision to set the novella in the early 1960s; and I’m sure that something of the Midwich children’s stares ended up in the blank gaze of Jennifer Crale. It was more a sense that perfection can be eerie. Beneath the grass-bright surface of such prettiness there had to be more going on: it seemed to me that the quiet margins of such a place and a time would foster unease. I spent my later childhood in a more obviously haunted house in the middle of a moor, but it was this tight little village that suggested ghosts to me, and so my Crowsley Beck was born.

  In 1963, parochial England was still muffled in a time warp, little changed since the fifties. The Swinging Sixties had yet to take hold. While the new decade was beginning to explode elsewhere, it would only just have been starting to spread its tendrils into the quaint cluster of pensioners and churchgoers, of sewing circles and obedient children that formed a village such as Letchmore Heath. Kennedy was still alive that summer; the moon was still virgin territory; fashion, music and casual sex were happening, but not for married women. In that tension between different eras, between women’s status and their suppressed desires, lay much that was simmering, seething and capable of transforming anger or despair into mental distortion.

  Ghosts don’t sit easily with our vision of that decade, and I liked the idea of setting Victorians – a real one, and an odd, aspiring one – there among the bright home-knits and mown grass. Crowsley Beck uses the very heart of the village of my infancy, and then invention takes over. There was no Brinden there, though shades of that house once existed elsewhere; naturally, no nuclear power station was ever built so close to London; no cottages that I knew were knocked through, and nor was there a school for disabled children, though the aerodrome and the psychiatric hospital existed.

  All my novels are haunted, but until I was asked to write Touched, I didn’t realise this. One way or another my characters are haunted by their pasts, their mistakes, their longings; pursued by guilt and desire so strong, it could infiltrate a life. If you make that haunting manifest, there is much to experiment with, and playing with the conventions of the ghost and horror story affords a strange sort of pleasure. Houses in rebellion, secret rooms, figures glimpsed obliquely, unexplained smells are here juxtaposed with more earthly horror. I wanted the discomfiting, downright dodgy element of the Pollards in my story so that live humans coincide with more benign presences, the living wreaking more damage than the restless dead. I wanted to explore love so determined it goes rotten, poor Evangeline unable to move beyond her identification with her grandmother; I wanted to find haunting where characters don’t expect it, while they’re looking elsewhere.

  I wrote this novella with an urgency and intensity that was a release after the agonies of creating a longer novel. Strangely, I did something I had never done before as a writer: I saw the plot in almost complete form, perceiving the structure, the time frame and the characters simultaneously, and I sat there in a frenzy of invention one afternoon in the British Library. It was only Freddie, the lost child, who – appropriately enough – came in later, starting out as an imaginary friend of Eva’s but taking on an independent life and past.

  The supernatural or paranormal comes into its own in film and shorter fiction. There are very few full-length ghost novels, the short story or novella allowing a suspension of disbelief that would be strained by a longer work. The novella seems the perfect length for a ghost tale, and the greatest of all, The Turn of the Screw, is only around forty-three thousand words long.

  I had always liked the Gothic, the dark, disconcerting and somewhat unsavoury in literature. It’s the glimpse of the intangible that intrigues me; the almost-thereness, the glimmer of awareness of another presence, or the stain of an emotion, just beyond our normal comprehension. Giving free rein to what might lie in the shadows taunts and tantalises, and in strange ways liberates the writer to move into unexplored realms. As a reader, I love to be disturbed. In Touched, I wanted the darkness in the brightness to spring to life.

  Joanna Briscoe, 2014

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted inwriting by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781448185320

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Arrow Books in association with Hammer 2014

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Joanna Briscoe, 2014

  Joanna Briscoe has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs

  and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Arrow Books in association with Hammer

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099590828