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Worse? Animal urine seemed to merge with mould. The children had all complained. Douglas had sworn he would work Pollard harder. Rowena, in her hormonal state, her breasts still full of milk, gagged. She was feeding this one herself, as she never had the others, and she felt like a nauseated cow. Even cigarettes tasted off.
    More disturbingly, as she breathed through her mouth, there was a drift of perfume over the mould, that same taste of women’s scent settling on her tongue. It nagged at her. She almost knew what it was. The crying wrinkled features flashed at her. A whiff of rot or animal hit her in the back of the throat and she forgot about it, rushing to the kitchen for water.
    She had such plans for this house, she thought, as she steadied herself at the sink. She had spent weeks and weeks in London, first pregnant, then cow-feeding the baby, looking at
Homemaker
and
Modern Woman
and books from the library containing designs she could never previously have afforded but just might be able to copy with the move out of London. It had felt like an obsession. Except for the wall between the cottages, number 2 was in a reasonable state to do up, but she wondered whether number 3 was rotting. It gave her a pang of worry that she dismissed by fetching elderflower cordial for the family.
    Fronting the green, right in the centre of the small village, stood the most desirable cottages, number 3 The Farings at the end of a small row. Evangeline slipped from the cottage across the lane and on to the grass, and neighbours watched her. She had a small-chinned face that widened at the cheeks and brow like a blunt cat’s, and eyes in which hazel muddied grey, their distance lending her a dreaming, abstracted look. Front doors were left open in the heat; men leaned against fences and smoked pipes; women rocked babies in gardens. Some of them stared openly at the sepia flickering of this strange girl in the glare; a few made disparaging comments; the wife of the milkman crossed herself.
    â€˜Freddie, Freddie,’ Eva murmured, looking down, as though to a small child.
    â€˜She’s talking to
herself.
How does her mother allow that child to look such a sight?’ said Lana Dangerfield, descending from her husband Gregory’s MGB, the magnificent little sports car that had been his present to himself when he had been made manager of the power station.
    Gregory barked with laughter. ‘Good for her,’ he said, and he glanced at the windows of number 3 The Farings, but there were only dark small panes, the house seeming silent and sunken. Rowena Crale was absent, but voices wound down the path from number 2.
    Lana Dangerfield stiffened. ‘I don’t find it amusing,’ she said. ‘The girl looks half crazed.’
    â€˜Perhaps she is.’
    Lana paused. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Possibly then they moved here for Ragdell Place.’
    â€˜The hellhole for halfwits?’
    Lana frowned, as she so often did at her husband. ‘The school for – troubled children,’ she said.
    â€˜Who knows?’ said Gregory idly, and stood lighting a cigarette at his own gate. The Dangerfield children, Peter and Jane, had returned from a friend’s house, and Lana neatened their hair in turn as they passed through the gate.
    â€˜I’ll just smoke this,’ said Gregory, and he wandered across the lawn. He made his way down to the shade of the rhododendrons, the ilexes and variegated laurel at the bottom of the garden, and smoked in their shade. Number 1 The Farings, at the end of the path, housed only a taciturn old widower who hid himself either there or in his allotment, but number 2 was now fuller and noisier.
    â€˜Shut up,’ he muttered at the crying baby, and stood there a while, but her mother didn’t appear.
    Evangeline paddled in the stream again, winding her way down it towards the pond, where ducks nodded. ‘Come, Freddie,’ she called. She glanced up at