Touched Read Online Free Page B

the house, checking it, and was satisfied. Afternoon softened, Rowena hushed the baby, and the actress who lived by the centre of the green walked past in her short pink floral dress, much commented on by Crowsley Beck residents. She nodded at Rowena, whose auburn chignon and profile of a model posing as an air hostess made her noticeably smart and attractive for a villager.
    The twins sat down for their extra studies, the television and canary cage covered with cloths until the early evening, and Bob made the baby mud pies. ‘Near
your
room. Near
my
room,’ he sang to her and gave her a rough kiss so she grizzled, then he repeated it.
    Rowena glimpsed the damp wall again, and this time she let out a low moan, for it seemed to be weeping. It might never succumb, she thought, and then what would they do? She had a momentary vision of a dark tunnel of recalcitrance, unspecified trouble. There was something indefinably resistant about the builder who worked on it, too. He was set on his course; he was self-contained. The other smell was now more apparent, borne by the wafts of damp.
Je Reviens
, it was called. Of course. Rowena was pleased with herself for remembering, but something about it made her uncomfortable, and she couldn’t think what it was.

3
    â€˜GOOD MORNING,’ SAID the vicar, faint bemusement crossing his face as a scrawny girl in a lightly stained Victorian child’s costume walked past the post office towards Beeck Lane. He summoned his genial smile. He had a range of smiles, beams and expressions of gravity at his disposal, suitable to the occasion and the day of the week. ‘Can I help you?’ he said eventually.
    â€˜No, thank you,’ said Evangeline in her husky voice.
    He paused. ‘And you are?’
    â€˜Evangeline Crale.’
    â€˜Crale . . .’ said the vicar, pausing again. ‘There is a new family in the village named Crale. They came to the church. You’re a relation?’
    â€˜Yes,’ she said. ‘I
am
.’
    â€˜I hope you approve of their choice of new home,’ he said, spreading a plump hand towards the green with the air of one who owned it. ‘Can I help direct you? Where are you going? The family live at the other end.’
    â€˜To Poll— Mr Pollard’s house.’
    â€˜I hope Mrs Pollard is there too,’ said the vicar, dropping his affable tone as easily as he had adopted it.
    â€˜She is. He told me.’
    Eva slipped away down a little path hung with flower baskets between cottages, her skirts sepia toned as though gas-lit under a dull sky; he waited, but she didn’t reappear, and a few minutes later she was bounding across the fields, the pallor of her clothes glowing beneath clouds.
    Pollard’s house was bigger than it first appeared to be. An old farmhouse patchily clad in weathered rendering, it crouched in a dip of field on the edge of the village. Up close, there seemed to be no end to it: a low extension at a right angle behind the main front, outbuildings both intact and in various states of collapse; a disordered alley of greenhouse, sheds, empty animal pens. Fertiliser bags and rusting sheets of corrugated iron seemed to cover mounds of earth or vegetation, with chickens wandering loose and rabbits in a makeshift cage. It was clearly no longer a working farm. Cats seemed to be everywhere. There were several noticeably large cats among them. Eva was unsure whether to enter through a door under a sagging porch, where the windows were blank, or a side door near a caravan and vegetable patch. She chose the side door. A vast tortoiseshell wound itself round her skirts as she stood waiting, and she jumped as she glimpsed its size, absorbing it as some lynx, some escaped creature from a circus or zoo. But it was just a domestic cat, its broad brindled face wrinkling in supplication as it looked up to her with an insistent mew, and she stroked it, its tail filling her hand. Her other hand was