Free Touched by Joanna Briscoe Page A

longer in the window.
    â€˜Can you take me out, Gregory?’ she said.
    â€˜Mrs Crale does not feel well,’ he announced, standing. ‘It’s an oven in here. Splendid job, chaps. Can’t wait to see snoozing Crowsley Beck on the silver screen.’
    â€˜I feel sick,’ said Rowena, leaning against Gregory in the cooling air.
    He held her arm. He hesitated, then pulled her against him so she could feel the warmth of his skin beneath his shirt. She quivered. The wine rolled inside her. She wanted life, hot dark urgent life, not guilt, this endless growing guilt.
    â€˜You can,’ she said.
    â€˜I can?’ he said playfully, but his voice snagged.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Are you sure?’ he said earnestly, lifting her chin and looking her in the eye.
    She pressed against him, gazing back. He was all dark brows and shaded sockets, his contrasts black and pale silver in the night, like film.
    She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said.
    The damp was oozing up through the tiles again, a pool now catching the moonlight and infusing the room with the breath of brackish water. Rowena hurried past it. Was it a mistake coming here? The thought came at her obliquely, as though it were not her own. She wouldn’t countenance it, she thought stoutly. They simply had to be patient. She remembered the dead canary, Mrs Crale’s, and almost thought she could smell it as a dank decaying undernote. Its cage was in the side porch, waiting for the Radlett rag-and-bone man. Douglas must have disposed of its body. The damp stain above her – I must face it, face it all down, she thought hectically – was growing and now it started to look faintly avian to her, like the poor shot birds on Mrs Crale’s ugly wallpaper, and oh, she had done wrong. She vomited, between the sink and the kitchen floor, and then stood there panting. ‘My God,’ she said out loud. Her forehead cold; she cleared up, gagging again, and washed herself.
    She forced herself up the staircase to check on Bob and Caroline. Was that where Eva hid, then, somewhere in the loft, up here? She glanced at the hatch in the landing ceiling, dimly illuminated. It was barely a loft, Douglas had said: the bedrooms themselves were built into a portion of the roof, so there was only a shallow tent-shaped storage space up there. Was poor Eva crouched in the loft? Rowena didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to see her strange daughter in her strange Victorian clothes talking to her awful invented friend. She did not. She checked on her little ones, ran down the stairs and back up the other staircase into her own room, and there was Douglas spreadeagled and asleep. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured. ‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’

8
    THE NEXT DAY, Pollard knocked through the wall on the upper floor in under two hours, the bricks, lath and plaster succumbing limply to his blows in a settling spray of dust and dirt, as though already defeated.
    Jennifer offered to take baby Caroline to Mrs Pollard’s. Rowena watched her as she darted all the way round the back to the far staircase to fetch Caroline’s sun bonnet from her room. Rosemary stayed at home to draw, Rowena cleared up, and the boy was behind her again. Boy, she wondered? Why had she thought there was a boy? Bob was running around by himself, noticeably energetic in the garden, but she had felt something like a glimmer or a lash on the side of her eye: a knowledge that someone was there. It was as though the air was disturbed. She drew herself up and dismissed it quite strictly, and Jennifer dashed back into the room with Caroline’s little mint-coloured sun bonnet and set off with the perambulator.
    Eva had shown Jennifer a new track she had found across the fields behind the stream that they could use when the weather was hot and the mud had all dried, though baby Caroline bounced up and down on groaning springs, asleep or crying. It was faster than going by