Rowan wouldn’t admit that, even to Vicky. “I’m sad for that boy. I don’t ever want to be like him.”
“You won’t be yet. It isn’t natural to be like him.”
That didn’t sound as reassuring as it ought to be. All it meant was that Rowan would take longer to wither, for her limbs to turn scrawny and fragile, her hands and feet to curl into useless claws, until she was nothing but a lolling doll to be treated like a baby and pushed about in a wheelchair. “I don’t ever want to grow old,” she said, shivering amid the mugginess.
A child’s cry echoed through a corridor, an overhead speaker paged a doctor, a telephone rang. When these sounds faded, Vicky was still gazing at her. “Maybe you won’t have to,” Vicky said.
Chapter Seventeen
On Thursday evening Derek and Eddie papered the hall of the house. Rowan admired Eddie’s deftness in clothing the walls with hardly a wasted inch, but shook her head when they asked if she wanted to help. Even in the sewing-room, where her mother was stripping the walls, she didn’t help much. She didn’t want to be alone, Derek realised. He was glad when she was in bed and, surprisingly quickly, asleep.
The hall was finished when he went downstairs. He and Alison had chosen a paper embossed with silvery leaves, so that the eye was caught by the fall of light on silver rather than by the irregularities in the wall beneath. He took her hand as Eddie brought in a large white Chinese lantern. “Now you can get rid of that old thing,” Eddie said, and clattered up the ladder to remove the stained-glass lampshade. When the lantern was hung, the light turned the hall a dozen different shades of silver. “Now at least you won’t be putting off anyone who comes to view the house as soon as they step through the door,” Eddie said.
“You must let us pay you for that at least,” Alison protested.
“No chance. Call it the present we never gave you when you moved in. If you want to show your appreciation you can let this poor overworked bugger come with me for a drink.”
Derek sensed that she wanted to talk about Rowan, but she let go of his hand. “He’s never needed my permission.”
“I’ll stay if you want me to, love.”
“Go on, you deserve a drink. Get away from the family and try and relax for a while.”
Did she mean that as a rebuke? Eddie must have thought so, for when they were in the smoky pub and being served by a woman whom Derek had seen meeting her children at the school but who seemed not to want to be recognised, Eddie said “Something up at home?”
“Nothing worth mentioning. How do you mean?”
“Just thought there was an atmosphere in there before.”
“It’ll be that we don’t know how to take what happened at the school. I mean, they’ve asked me if I want the job and I’d be a fool to myself if I said no, but I’d rather not have got it that way.”
“He couldn’t have been much of a spark. Better he did it to himself than put our kids at school in danger.”
“I reckon,” Derek agreed. They found themselves a corner table, and Eddie said “Any interest in your house?”
“If there is, nobody’s told me.”
“I saw a couple looking, but something must have scared them off. The size of it, most likely. You know what me and Jo were saying you should do? Get outline planning permission for a nursing home. See if your estate agent doesn’t think so.”
“I might at that,” Derek said, imagining the house full of people and light, every bedroom a home.
“If it was half the size I’d make you an offer myself. We could do with more space now the kids are getting bigger. We’re starting to get on one another’s nerves.”
“Oh, aye.”
“You should count yourself lucky having just Rowan. Mary’s after a room of her own because she doesn’t want Paul to see her undressing, would you believe? And she can’t share with her sister because Patty’s up there watching her portable telly after Mary’s in bed. So now we’ve got Jo calling Patty a selfish cow and keeping on at me about looking for a bigger house, but will she get up off her arse and look for one while I’m out all day working? Will she buggery. Too busy giving the neighbors tea and cakes so they’ll order stuff from her catalogues so she can get another free percolator or some other crap. And then she whines on about how she never sees me because I’m out working all hours. They don’t appreciate us, do they?”
“Maybe we don’t appreciate them.”
“What’s that? Whose side are you on? You’re with your own kind now, mate, no need to be scared to speak up. Get that down you and I’ll buy you another, and then maybe you’ll talk some sense.”
This was an aspect of pubs Derek didn’t care for, going out for a drink so as to bare one’s home life. Discussing it with Alison was hard enough sometimes. He told Eddie how he’d bounced the accountant and was having to sue Ken. Eddie kept nodding, but looked dissatisfied. “I wanted to tell you, that lampshade was sort of a peace offering from Jo,” he said eventually, shouting now that the pub was packed. “She’d have come over herself but she was sorting out the brats. She wanted you and Alison to know she’s sorry if she let Rowan hear too much.”
“When was this?”
“Didn’t Rowan tell you? Perhaps it doesn’t matter, then.” He went on reluctantly “Jo thought she might have heard her and the teacher saying Rowan wasn’t, you know, planned.”
“Who says she wasn’t?”
“Don’t shout at me, pal, I wasn’t there. I expect your wife must have.”
She wouldn’t, Derek thought, and then: she must have. While he was doing his best to keep their secrets, she wasn’t even bothering to keep them in the family. At closing time he and Eddie leaned into the dark wind from the sea as they walked home. “We’ll have a go at your ground floor on Sunday,” Eddie called across the road as Derek stepped into the house.
The smell of soaked wallpaper and bare plaster from the darkness of the sewing-room reminded him of Queenie’s rotten books. Alison was lying on the sofa in the living-room, a mug of cocoa by her dangling hand. Her sleepy smile began to fade as she saw his expression, before he said “I found out what the trouble is with Rowan at school.”
“It’s nothing too bad, is it? She’s still recovering from seeing Julius at the hospital.”
“It’s worse.”
“Oh dear, what now?”
“She heard Jo and her teacher saying we hadn’t wanted her. I thought we were keeping that to ourselves. If I’d thought you might tell anyone I’d have made you promise.”
“You might have asked me, you certainly wouldn’t have made me. I told Jo in confidence. She thought she might be pregnant when they weren’t planning it, and all I said was how glad we were to have Rowan even though it was by mistake.”
“How about how you nearly had to find a second job, Rowan cost so much to keep?”
“Jo may have said we must have had a hard time, and I suppose I’d have had to agree, but that’s all.”
“You didn’t maybe mention we once talked about having her adopted?”
“What do you think? And may I remind you that was your idea, which I wouldn’t even consider. I don’t think you did really. You’d had too much to drink if I remember rightly, and I think you have now.”
“Drink or no drink, I don’t go shooting off my gob about how we didn’t want Rowan.”
“Keep your voice down. Do you want her to hear? I’ll have a word with Jo first thing in the morning. I wish I’d never told her, believe me.”
“Just never tell anyone else.”
“Do you think I would? Poor little thing, she wouldn’t even admit it was Jo and Miss Frith she heard. I think she believed what we told her, don’t you?”
“I hope she did.”
“She must have, surely.” All the same, she shivered and drew her shoulders up. “Won’t you hold me at least? I know I was wrong. I don’t know why Miss Frith wants to see us, but I’ll want to see her to make certain this doesn’t go any further.”
Derek sat by her on the sofa and put one arm around her shoulders, and she rested the side of her face against his chest. “We mustn’t hurt each other,” she mumbled. “I’d never do anything to hurt either of you. You’re all I’ve got, you know.”
Except for the rest of your family, Derek thought, but that thought led to a tangle of doubts. He laid his cheek against Alison’s hair, and she moved his free hand to her breast. “We better hadn’t say anything else to Rowan,” he said. “Only if it looks as if she’s wondering how we really feel about her. Come on, let’s go up to bed.”
And Rowan, who had been wakened by a whisper in her ear or a touch on her face that she thought she must have dreamed, stole away from the foot of the stairs, back to her room. She didn’t know how she was managing to tiptoe when her body felt so stiff and meaningless, but perhaps her fear that her parents would realise she’d overheard them was making it work. She’d crept downstairs in search of company just as her father had come home, looking so fierce she’d hidden, and she had heard everything. Vicky was right: they had lied to her—lied about the most important thing in the world. She could trust no one but Vicky. She crawled into bed and lay there, too dismayed even to weep. “I don’t want to live,” she whispered, and for a moment she felt less alone. She felt as if someone had smiled at her out of the dark.
Chapter Eighteen
When the phone wakened Hermione she thought someone was calling her about the message on the photograph. Knuckling her eyes with one hand, she fumbled her bedroom door open. She must have overslept, for the landing and the stairs were brighter than she expected. The sunlight made her blink stickily, the phone bell shattered her thoughts as they tried to form, and so she forgot to be careful. She was only resting her hand on the banister, not holding onto it, when she stepped on the small pale shape.
It was soft and cold under her bare foot. Perhaps it was where the smell of rot and disinfectant was coming from. She wasn’t sure whether it writhed, but she did, so violently that she lost her footing. Her nails scraped the banister as she failed to grasp the polished wood. Her other hand flailed at the window beside the stairs, knocking over a potted plant, spraying soil across the highest of the miniature Welsh landscapes that hung above the staircase. But she’d grabbed the ledge. She groped clumsily behind her for the banister and steadied herself on the stairs before she turned to face what she had trodden on.
It was an old rag doll in a frilly white dress. She’d stepped on its face, almost dislodging one eye. Now the bland discoloured face was regaining its shape, the cheek filling out sluglike, the mouth she’d trodden crooked settling back into an innocent straight line. “It has to look as if I had an accident, does it?” Hermione said furiously, and stumbled downstairs to the phone.
Alison was already speaking. “I won’t be a moment, I’m just trying to—There you are, Hermione. How are things? How are you feeling?”
What could she say? Shaken and fragile but alive, irate with herself for not having taken care, beginning to feel all the more determined as she realised that the attempt to trip her up meant she was on the right track… “Better than I did, thanks. How’s everyone?”
“Rowan, well—Actually, she’s why I’m calling. If it’s inconvenient you just say so, but she wanted me to ask you if she could stay with you this weekend.”
At least then Hermione could keep an eye on her. She didn’t think Rowan was in danger physically or would be. She glanced up the stairs and caught her breath. The doll had gone. “All right,” she murmured as a challenge. To Alison she said “I’d love to have her. When?”
“Shall Derek bring her straight from school today? Then she’ll be out of the way while we attack the house. Thanks, Hermione, you’re my favourite sister. A few days in the country may do her good,” Alison added as though she were trying to convince herself.
“Don’t you worry about her,” Hermione told her, wondering what Alison had left unsaid. “I’ll look after her as if she were my own.”
“That’s because she is, love.”
Hermione replaced the receiver and then, though her heart still felt painfully magnified by her fall on the stairs, she went upstairs to search the rooms. There was no trace of the doll or of any intrusion. She was on her way to the shop and nibbling a thick sandwich before she realised how wistful Alison’s last words had sounded. Perhaps Alison felt hurt because Rowan wanted to come again so soon. The empty eyes of the backs of the masks in the window grew dimmer as the day wore on, but it wasn’t the masks that Hermione sensed watching her. The attempts to injure her or frighten her seemed both childish and senile, and at least they meant Rowan was being left alone, she told herself.
As she climbed toward home the mountains were greying, the stone swallowing the grass. A house rattled like a trap as it let a car into one of its front rooms. Hermione was hurrying until she saw that Derek’s car wasn’t at her cottage, and then she ran: her phone was ringing. The key scratched its way into the lock, and she knocked the receiver out of its cradle. “Hermione? Is that Hermione? Hermione, is that you?”
“Unless it’s a burglar, mother. Are you well?”
“Oh, trundling along. Getting used to slowing down and watching the days change. They’ve asked me to be secretary at the Women’s Institute, mind you, and already three of the members want your father to look at their gardens. And at least I’ve time to sit and think.”
“That’s the attitude, mother.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about you.”
“Oh yes?”
“No need to sound as if I shouldn’t be. If it’s any consolation to you, I wish now that Alison hadn’t given Rowan’s baby hair to your aunt. I won’t accept that it did any harm, but it’s certainly caused too much fuss. But Hermione, it’s all in the past now. Won’t you try to accept that for your peace of mind and everyone else’s?”
“Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“Try a bit harder, I beg you. Just count yourself lucky that we care enough about you that we managed to get that photograph of Queenie back from the solicitor. You could have been prosecuted for forgery if your father hadn’t told him how upset you were.”
“So nothing’s going to be done,” Hermione said dully.
“Put the idea out of your head, child, or if you can’t do that, have a word with your doctor. Queenie almost split the family, we mustn’t let her do that now. Just let her lie, that’s all I’m asking.”
They were saying their goodbyes when Derek’s car drew up. Hermione had begun to think of putting Rowan off, but she couldn’t help feeling relieved. Rowan ran to her, the binoculars dancing blackly on her chest, as Hermione opened the front door. The child’s hug was unexpectedly fierce. “I get the idea she’s glad to see you,” Derek said as he lifted the small suitcase out of the car.
While she made him a coffee, she learned that he would be rewiring the school after all, and why. “Be good for Hermione,” he called up to Rowan, who was unpacking. He was at the car when she darted out and gave him a quick kiss, but ducked under his arms as he made to hug her. As he drove away, Hermione saw Rowan at the bedroom window, her face blotted out by the binoculars, their huge eyes full of gathering clouds as they lowered to follow the car.
She served Rowan a candlelight dinner. As the dusk turned the hills into heaps of ash, the child’s long face seemed to grow flawless in the soft light. She was obviously troubled about something, but Hermione couldn’t tell which of the subjects she herself raised it might be: school, her father’s second chance there, the house in Waterloo? They were in the kitchen, washing up the dishes, when Rowan blurted “We went to see where mummy works.”
“You and your father?”
Rowan shook her head, and Hermione grew tense. “Was it your idea or your friend’s to go?”
“Why do you keep getting at Vicky? She’s my friend, my only friend. Why can’t you leave her alone?”
“Rowan, you mustn’t talk to me like that.” At least now Hermione
knew it had been Vicky’s idea, but Rowan’s vehemence dismayed her. “Aren’t I your friend too? And what do you think your parents are?”
Rowan turned to the draining-board, and a long pale face pressed itself against the window. It was her reflection, taciturn as a mask. “Rowan,” Hermione said “whatever happened at the hospital, talking about it might help.”
The child shivered. “I saw some little boy who looked older than my grandaunt,” she mumbled.
“That’s very rare, dear. You aren’t likely ever to see anything like that again,” Hermione assured her, and played games of Gwen’s and Elspeth’s draughts with her until Rowan was tired enough for bed.
Soon Hermione was in bed herself, awake. If the encounter at the hospital was part of a plan, what about the accident at the school? When she managed to doze she was wakened twice by Rowan’s voice, talking in her sleep. The second time she thought a whisper responded, and she had to stumble to the child’s room in the dusty dawn to see that she was alone.
She overslept until Rowan brought her a cup of tea. At the shop her lack of sleep felt like a vacuum in her skull, a constant threat of pain behind her lumpy eyes. She was grateful to Rowan for showing customers where items were. Sometimes the child seemed to be in two places at once, especially when they were alone in the shop.
At closing time the board that said AUNTIE HERMIONE’S came scuttling down the street, but that was only the rising wind. Rowan was bouncing a ball Hermione had given her to keep. “Now what shall we do?” Hermione said.
“Please may we go for a walk down the valley?”
“Right now?” Hermione hadn’t yet made dinner, but Rowan’s eagerness to return to her favourite haunts seemed reassuring. “Maybe it’ll clear our heads.”
Beyond the flinty parking lot by the road through Holywell, a gravel path led down the valley. Below Saint Winifred’s Well, a Norman shrine whose gift shop sold blinking Christs and various sizes of saint, trees reared over the path, roaring softly. Grass and ferns and thorny creepers spilled over the gravel, and soon the narrow path was tunnelling through green, which smelled like foggy leaves and felt chilly as autumn. “Don’t go out of sight, dear,” Hermione called as Rowan chased her ball.
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