The Influence Read Online Free

up at Jo’s and Eddie’s, three houses distant on the opposite side of the street. “Just put on your coat and shoes, and we’ll see if you can sleep with your mates tonight,” he said.
    “What’s wrong, daddy?”
    He was touched by her grave look, her willingness to help and be grown up. “The old lady died tonight, and that’s upset Hermione.”
    Rowan clutched her collar to her throat as they stepped out of the porch. The wind from the sea was so cold it seemed to make the stars wince. Jo and Eddie were watching a video, but switched it off when they saw Rowan. “You can sleep in our Mary’s bed, give her a surprise when she wakes up in the morning,” Jo said, and bustled Rowan upstairs without even asking Derek what the trouble was.
    He told Eddie about the death, and declined the offer of a Scotch. “I’d better get back and see how they are,” he said, preparing to help calm Hermione so that Alison could let go of her feelings. But when he let himself into the house that felt as if the night were seeping down through the roof, he found the women in the living-room, sipping quietly from large glasses, a bottle of gin and one of tonic on the floor between them. He might have thought they were over the worst if it hadn’t been for the way Hermione had stared at the door to see who he was. He might almost have thought she was more terrified of Queenie now than she had been when the old woman was alive.

Chapter Three
    Soon after dawn on the day of the funeral, the sun above Wales drove the mist into the mountains. Rowan stood in Hermione’s small back garden that sloped toward the valley and the reservoirs, and gazed across the sea and through the gap in the hills of the Wirral peninsula toward Waterloo. Eventually Derek took her into the village to buy a child’s telescope. Alison knew he was leaving the family alone to talk.
    She wished he didn’t feel he needed to. It wasn’t just that he was slow to form relationships, though they’d had to encounter each other three times outside the hostel before he’d asked her out. Perhaps he still found family life dauntingly unfamiliar, or perhaps, she hoped, he simply found the cottage overcrowded now that the family was gathering. Hermione was in the kitchen with her mother Edith, making ham sandwiches for after the funeral. Alison stayed in the living-room, which was less than half the size of any of the bedrooms in Queenie’s house. Houseplants bloomed on the sill of the mullioned window, on the rough stone mantelpiece, on shelves in alcoves of the shaggily plastered white walls. Her father Keith was sitting on the window seat, gazing mildly at the sky and fingering his chin, the family chin that Queenie’s had caricatured. When he patted the cushion beside him she sat there and laid her head against his shoulder. They stayed like that, silently sharing memories that felt drowsy as the longest summer afternoon of childhood, until he reached for his pipe and she sat up. “You’ll be pleased about the will,” he said. “Sister Queenie had some good in her after all.”
    “Don’t you think she always had? She wasn’t vicious really, just lonely.”
    “She was one because of the other, but don’t ask me which came first,” he said with a droll blank look. “I only hope her house makes life easier for you and yours.”
    “I’m sure it should. Only I keep feeling it was so convenient, her dying when she did, almost as if I—helped her go.”
    He straightened up and tried to make his compact features appear stern. “What started you thinking that nonsense? Come on, tell papa.”
    “I feel as if I weakened her by making her so dependent on me all at once. She kept herself fit all those years and yet I’m hardly in her house before she’s dead.”
    “If you’ve been bothering yourself with that I wish you’d told me sooner. She never would have depended on anyone unless she absolutely had to. Take my word for it, she must have been counting