Daddy drove her home that evening. By the time he came back Rowan was in bed, listening apprehensively for the argument her parents seemed to be saving until they were alone. She was asleep before she heard anything. At breakfast they were silent, her father staring at a letter propped against the milk jug. Eventually he told her what it said. “I won’t be doing the job at your school, in case anyone asks you. You might think it’d count for something that you go there, but a spark undercut me by fifty pounds.”
“Won’t we be able to stay here?”
“What the hell do you think?” he snarled, and looked shocked by himself. “I’m sorry, love, I didn’t mean to shout at you.” She was too upset to go to him, and he returned to staring at the letter. “Fifty pigging quid,” he muttered.
“Let your father be, Rowan. Hurry up or you’ll be late for school.” Her mother shooed her to the bathroom to brush her teeth. When Rowan made to look into the dining-room and say a forgiving goodbye to her father, mummy hurried her onward. She was too late. Rowan had already heard one of the worst sounds she could imagine ever hearing: her father weeping.
Chapter Thirteen
At lunchtime on Monday several children came to the shop. Hermione peered out of the back room as the bell rang. Two girls of about Rowan’s age were admiring dresses on the racks while some of their classmates crowded at the window, darkening the shop. The bell jangled as girls swarmed in, and Hermione seemed unable to count them or even to see their faces. They made her room feel so like a cramped dark airless box that she stumbled to her feet. “Some of you will have to go out. Anyone who isn’t buying something. And don’t all block the window. Give the rest of us a chance to breathe.”
They stared at her as if she were senile or mad. One, who had just opened her purse, snapped it shut ostentatiously and stalked like a duchess out of the shop, followed by her friends. The shrill bell rang and rang, and then the shop was quiet until Gwen and Elspeth, the craftswomen who made the toys, murmured together in Welsh. “We were saying,” Gwen explained, “if you wanted to go home where you won’t be interrupted, we could look after the shop.”
“I couldn’t let you do that. People might think it was an improvement, probably would.” Even her attempt at a joke betrayed her nervousness. “If you want to stay, I’d love you to. I’ll stay in the back so I don’t scare away any more customers,” she said, and returned to the latest pile of unsolicited advertising.
Soon all the glossy brochures full of eulogies to plastic toys were in the bin beside her small oak desk. Gwen and Elspeth murmured liquidly in Welsh and glanced at her when they thought she wasn’t looking, concern on their sharp but delicate pale faces. Years of living together had made them look almost like identical twins. She couldn’t blame them for worrying about her. She would be no use to Rowan in this state.
She had been on her way to this state ever since the child had looked in the shop window, through the reflection of the mask. She’d kept seeing a small figure in the devious streets, and whenever she unlocked the shop she felt there were too many still faces in the window. Then her mother had called to tell her Lance had been killed before he could talk to Alison, and Hermione had remembered what he’d said to her: “the little girl”. Perhaps he hadn’t meant Rowan at all.
A feeling that she might be needed had sent her to Waterloo. The sight of the house, of its clusters of dull rooftop windows that reminded her of the eyes of an old swollen spider, had made her too nervous to think. The sisters had discussed Lance guardedly, and Hermione had felt less alone for talking. She’d gone out to make a start on the garden so that prospective buyers of the house wouldn’t be put off before they opened the gate, and then Rowan had appeared with the dead woman’s binoculars.
At first Hermione had thought the black shape was clinging to her chest. She’d seen a bat and told herself it was a kitten. What if they had been Queenie’s binoculars? The child was almost bound to have taken something from the house, but why had she insisted that some friend had given them to her? Rowan had gazed innocently at her and told her that the child was someone she’d met when she was staying with Hermione—a child with Queenie’s real name.
Nobody had seemed to think it mattered. Once Rowan was out of earshot on the dunes, her parents had turned on Hermione. Rowan was upset enough about having to move without all this fuss about an old pair of binoculars. The damn things weren’t even much use, Derek had protested as if that should end the argument: he’d had a squint through them, and the lenses might as well have been plain glass.
Hermione had forced herself to keep quiet until she could choose her words. A night’s exhausted sleep had made her feel more capable, so much so that she’d braved Queenie’s floor to prove to Alison and Derek that she was over her neuroses and should be taken notice of. But the rooms had appalled her, for they’d felt as if Queenie’s death were seeping through them. She’d taken some family albums to browse through at home, and had never felt more eager to be away from Queenie’s house.
And now that she was closer to where she ought to be, she was harassing her customers instead of trying to help Rowan. Delaying would only aggravate her fears, and she had to face what she couldn’t escape. She stood up, feeling unexpectedly lighter and more lithe, and the women smiled at her as if she’d risen from a sickbed. “If you’re staying until we close, could I have a lift to the church?” she said.
They looked relieved and sympathetic. “Any time you’d like to visit the grave,” Elspeth said, “just say.”
When the children passed the shop on their way back to school, she accosted them. “I’m sorry I shouted at you. I’ve had a bit of a family upheaval.”
“Too many of us came in all at once. We’ll come back tomorrow,” one said, and Hermione felt like giving them a present each.
She locked the shop at five-thirty while Elspeth brought the Renault from the car park. As they drove to Gronant along the hillside road, a chill like an essence of autumn reached out from the fields, where the edges of leaves were yellowing. At the churchyard Elspeth said “I’ll be getting Gwen home, then,” as if they weren’t living together, though Hermione didn’t mind: she rather envied them for what they had. She watched the Renault vanish over the hill, and then she let herself into the churchyard.
It was small and neat, half of it shadowed by the stocky chapel. She made her way over the turf, past flowers nestling against grey headstones, an angel poking the stump of her wrist like a gun barrel out of her stone robe. A weeping willow shaded a patch of ground in the midst of the graveyard, inviolable and inaccessible, and beyond it was the family grave.
The newly chiselled name gleamed at her from the marble pillar above the mound that was blanketed with squares of turf. THEIR BELOVED DAUGHTER VICTORIA, IN HER FATHER’S ARMS AT LAST. Queenie must have worded that herself in advance, or surely her mother would have been mentioned. Hermione shivered at the notion of being lowered into arms beneath the earth—and then she remembered that Rowan had said the child called Vicky no longer knew where her father was.
No wonder Queenie had come back if all she had found was emptiness. Hermione believed that when you died you found whatever you expected, but suppose you found only what you were able, consciously or otherwise, to create? Perhaps Queenie, never having created anything apart from her own perfect image of herself, had discovered that she would be alone with it for eternity. Hermione had always thought that the idea of hell presupposed a god, but perhaps hell was yourself after death: perhaps you were judged at the moment of death by that part of yourself you couldn’t lie to, the part that knew everything you’d thought and done in your life. Somewhere in everyone was their own severest critic, and perhaps dying released it from a lifetime of constraints to judge what kind of eternity was deserved.
Hermione’s jaw twinged, but only because her thoughts were making her clench her teeth. It seemed that Queenie had finished hurting her that way. The rotting of the top floor of her house might reflect a loss of interest too. But
she was interested in Rowan—interested enough to make sure she was buried with a lock of the child’s hair.
Hermione glanced around her. The willow screened the grave from the road; the nearest cottages were out of sight beyond the hill. Still, it was absurd to plan: not only did she lack the tools, but it wouldn’t help the family if she were put away for desecrating the grave. Surely there were legal ways to have the locket retrieved.
Was it just her relief at not having the tools that made her feel contemptuously observed? A chilly scent of rot drifted through the graveyard, and she felt as if the watcher were holding its breath. You’ve no breath to hold, she thought with bravado so furious that it enlivened her mind. You killed Lance because he would have told Alison why you made your will the way you did, to keep Rowan where you want to be. You haven’t tried to kill me because nobody will listen to me, because they all think I’m the way you made me, a neurotic child you scared out of growing up.
The stillness was so breathless that she found it hard to breathe. The willow seemed as fixed as the headstones and the church. She turned her back on the grave, feeling suddenly as if she were challenging the watcher to do more than watch. Perhaps it was that provocation that brought the response.
It sounded like a smothered giggle, not so much childish as senile, an expression of malice that couldn’t quite be suppressed. She tried to tell herself she had imagined it, for how could it be where she’d thought it was? Then a voice responded to her thoughts about Queenie and herself, a voice so muffled it sounded withered, and Hermione walked away very fast, not quite running, flinging willow branches aside to make directly for the gate. “That’s right,” the voice had said gleefully from deep in the mound.
Chapter Fourteen
Dear diary, Hermione says she found a picsure of my grandaunt Queenie waring her lockit and shed written on the picsure that she wanted the youngest child of the famly to have the lockit when she was dead, so now Hermione wants to have her dug up…
Rowan hoped that wouldn’t happen: she would feel guilty and creepy if it did. She didn’t want to write about that or about having heard daddy crying to himself. She held her pencil as though she were still writing and gazed across the classroom. Mary was chewing her pencil and shaking her head like a dog at the taste on her blackening tongue. Someone farted, setting off a train of smothered giggles. Rowan hated the school now for reducing her father to tears. She stared at the wall, at the pictures and descriptions of best friends the class had put up before she’d started here, and realised belatedly that Kelly was speaking to her. “Rowan?”
“What do you want?”
“No need to snap. I only wanted to ask if you’d like to come home one night for tea.”
Kelly was a large girl who’d befriended Rowan on her first day and given her a bag of sweets. Rowan liked her but suspected that tea with her might rot your teeth. Just now she didn’t feel like going home with anyone but Vicky, wherever Vicky lived. Before she could speak, Mary hissed “Don’t bother with her, she’s stuck-up.”
Rowan’s response was too sharp for her lips to keep in. “Don’t interfere, you grubby little shoat.”
All the children on Mary’s table jeered as if she’d proved Mary right. “You’d think her father was a duke or something,” Mary smirked. “He’s just an electrician who can’t even get jobs.”
Miss Frith looked up from her desk where she was reading the Daily Post. “Now, Mary, didn’t we agree that people aren’t always to blame if they’re out of work? That’s one reason why we learn to read, so we won’t be bored if we’re out of work and get up to mischief.”
Mary and her friends subsided, but not for long. Just loud enough for Rowan to hear, Mary muttered “Her and her mam and dad lived with a crazy old woman who thought she was the queen of England.”
The bell for the end of lessons shrilled, and Rowan’s voice cut through it. “I’d rather be like my grandaunt Queenie than any of you.”
She hadn’t meant to include Kelly, but Kelly flounced away, trailing a smell of mints and chocolate bars. Rowan was putting her books away when Miss Frith called her to her desk. “Rowan, we know you’re a clever girl who reads well for her age, but school is about other things too. We want to help you grow up. I think we’d be happier if you’d learn to socially interact more, to get on with your peers, which is to say the others in your class.”
Rowan’s growing dislike of the school focused on the teacher. “My grandaunt said you aren’t supposed to split infinitives,” she said.
Miss Frith’s face stiffened. “Wait outside,” she said, and raised her voice and beckoned. “Could I have a word?”
Rowan turned, hoping it was one of her parents, but it was Jo. The teacher closed her out in the corridor, where Paul and Mary picked their noses and made faces at her while she tried to hear what was being said about her. She heard Jo say “They weren’t planning on having a child. She was the start of their money troubles.”
Mary waited until they were walking home and she was safe on the far side of Jo before asking “Why did Rowan’s mam and dad have her if they didn’t want her?”
“I never said they didn’t, and you shouldn’t have been listening.” Jo avoided looking at Rowan until they were at the big house, and then she rang the bell to bring Rowan’s father to the door. “Miss Frith wants to talk to you and Alison about Rowan’s problems at school,” she said.
“It’s the first I’ve heard that she’s got any.” He seemed preoccupied and irritable, but made himself aware of Rowan. “Tell us about them when your mother comes home, all right, babe?” he said, and began to close the door.
“Can’t I come in?” she pleaded.
“Can’t you play with your friends for a bit?” He saw that she couldn’t, and sighed. “Come in if you’ve got to, but stay out of the way until I tell you different. I’m attending to some business.”
As she made for the stairs, along the wide peeled hall that felt like an adventure, he went into the dining-room, where Mr Ormond was scowling at the table spread with receipts and daddy’s books. “The best I can say for all this is that it’s a sorry mess,” the accountant said.
Rowan faltered three stairs up, holding her breath as the accountant went on “I don’t suppose it helps much if I say I told you so.”
“It helps as much as most of what you say, pal. Seems to me you should have more respect for us poor sods who pay your wages. Maybe I can’t spell as good as you, but that doesn’t entitle you to wipe your arse on me.”
“Come now, that kind of language isn’t called for.”
“An ambulance’ll be called for, you little prat, for you if you don’t stop pissing me off.”
When Rowan heard the accountant’s sharp-heeled footsteps striding to the door, she fled to her room. His car droned away, and daddy called “It’s all right now, babe.” But it wasn’t: in the dining-room he’d sounded brutal and coarse, he’d been someone she didn’t know and was afraid to know. At dinner he regretted having lost his temper with Mr Ormond, and mummy was upset about somebody called Julius who had an incurable disease. Usually Rowan felt she could share their preoccupations, but Jo’s comment made her feel as if they didn’t want her to be there. Eventually her mother said “So, Rowan, is there something wrong at school?”
“Daddy not getting the job,” she mumbled.
“Is that all, babe?” her father said roughly. “Don’t lose any sleep over it. We’ll survive. We’ll have to, won’t we?”
“Is that all?” her mother said.
She wished she could run up to the top floor and hide, but her own question wouldn’t let her. “Didn’t you and daddy want to have me?”
“Who told you that? Of course we did. You’re worth everything else in the world to us.”
“Pigging right you are,” her father growled. “Just you tell me who said different and I’ll sort them out for you.”
“Nobody did,” Rowan said, afraid that he might rail at Jo as he had at
the accountant. “We were talking about orphans and abandoned children with Miss Frith.”
Her mother looked dissatisfied. “That can’t be why she wants to see us.”
Rowan was silent, though that was the same as agreeing. How could she have let herself think she was unwanted? No wonder her parents hardly spoke to her during the rest of the meal, even if that made her feel as though she weren’t there or didn’t deserve to be. In bed she lay brooding about school and Miss Frith, who presumably would tell them what Jo had said. Perhaps her rumination made her dream of the school.
It began with the sound of a drill, so tiny that at first she thought it was deep in one of her teeth. No, it was too distant, but then why should it worry her? It was outside the window, towards the school. When she realised that it might be in the school, she slipped out of bed to look.
A tanker soundless as a cloud sailed by. The curtains held her in a soft embrace as she gazed between the houses. The school assembly hall was lit. Now she knew why the sound was painful as a dentist’s drill to her: it was the sound of her father’s loss. The grinding whined into silence, and after a while a man carried a ladder across the lit hall. She was about to close out the sight of him where her father ought to be when she glimpsed movement at the far end of the assembly hall.
Wasn’t he supposed to be working on his own? Surely otherwise he wouldn’t have been so cheap. Rowan fetched the binoculars from a dark corner of her room. Looking through them was even more like dreaming: though the man with his big ears and curly hair was closer, she felt all the more detached. She saw him stop halfway up the ladder and peer sharply across the hall, shading his eyes, before he went on climbing. He must have heard whoever Rowan had glimpsed. Whoever it was clearly wasn’t with him.
She couldn’t see the corridor of classrooms towards which he had stared. She would be able to see from the top floor. Her dream was unusually detailed, for when she crept out of her bedroom she heard the television downstairs, playing an old musical by a local band her parents still liked, the Beatles. She stole upstairs, the binoculars nudging her chest like a baby in a sling.
The Influence Page 9