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her delight, her features almost discomfitingly perfectly arranged. That small straight bridge of a nose, lightly freckle-strewn. The calmness of the rosebud mouth when closed. The complete tranquillity of her being that broke into bubbles of delight.
    â€˜What are you doing,
Mr
Pollard?’ said Eva.
    â€˜Watching ’em play,’ he said.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜But it’s you I’ve invited to my house tomorrow.’
    â€˜Yes, Pollard. Can I invite Freddie? He’s my friend.’
    Pollard nodded in assent.
    â€˜You can’t see him.
Apparently
he’s imaginary.’
    â€˜That’s as may be. Come in my lunch break for that big fat pie the missus is going to make you, and I can toddle back over for half an hour as well. Brinden, the house is called. Out across fields behind the stream. Or you can go round Beeck Lane and through the spinney, top of the village.’
    She nodded. ‘I know my way round already.’
    Rowena stood in the kitchen when the dishes were cleared and sipped a sherry. A small figure flitted past the door and she looked up, expecting to see Bobby, but it was nothing, and she realised that the alcohol went to her head too quickly in the heat. Through the ilex, the rhododendron and laurel, she could catch a pale grey glimpse of the Big House, as she had heard it called.
    Douglas’s snuffles and sleepy starts sounded from the sitting room to a backdrop of canary chatter, and the baby had begun to cry from the path outside. Looking vaguely round for Evangeline, Rowena ignored the clamour, just for a quarter of an hour more, mentally blocking it out. She could barely believe that this house was hers, with all its low-ceilinged prettiness, its curving plaster, its nooks and cupboards and little passages. It was as though she would now be a proper woman, a grown-up wife and mistress of a lovely house at last, and not the play-acting imposter she sometimes felt herself to be. Numbers 2 and 3 The Farings were postcard cottages, age-softened and settled, with their deep-set windows and boxes of geraniums, their uneven floors and cool pantries, their small gardens tangles of mature flowers and shrubbery. The modern house in London had contained no soul, and little opportunity for her decorating dreams; The Farings, by contrast, possessed so much character, she found it hard to believe there weren’t other people there. That was why she was faintly nervy, she realised, imagining movement in other rooms, because it simply didn’t seem as though it was theirs yet.
    She stood up straight and looked out at the garden. She was still sore from Caroline’s birth; she bled all these weeks later, and she was using ingenuity to avoid Douglas, who was clearly becoming restless. She must, must lose the pregnancy weight by the end of the summer to be as trim as she had been previously despite all those babies. (‘Body of a maiden,’ her mother-in-law had commented after Bob’s birth. It was Caroline who had tipped her.) She crept into the sitting room to avoid the grizzling, and braced herself for what she might see.
    Pollard had left, finally, but the wall still seemed hunched like some wounded animal that was catching its breath. On the side where the old Mrs Crale had lived, it was covered in wallpaper, and the stains over there showed more clearly than on the paint and plaster of this side, where yellow maps with furring brown borders spread over the corner between wall and ceiling. The craters that Pollard and his men had made showed live white patches of spores or mildew clinging to brick. Horsehair hung in patches over the wallpaper with its twining trellis and bird design, birds’ heads and tails cut off, as though shot, where the builders had gone through to the brick. Others were caught mid-flight by hammer blows, their poor wings blasted, cuffs and ruffs of broken paper round their necks.
    Rowena held her breath. The smell: was it cat? Rat?