The Influence Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    That Sunday morning, Rowan was sitting in a garden chair outside Hermione’s cottage. Writing didn’t feel like writing here; it felt like being part of the long September morning, the sound of church bells across the hills, a chiming as minute as the glitter of the distant sea. Now and then pale patches of grass that at first she’d thought were smoke sailed uphill toward her, and then a breeze would spill over her like cream. When she laid the diary on the lawn beside her, an invisible reader turned the pages. She gazed across the bay toward Waterloo and wondered what her grandaunt’s house felt like now.
    It hadn’t felt the same since the night Queenie had died, but Rowan wasn’t sure what the difference was. Perhaps it just felt emptier. A feeling of emptiness and being called had taken her upstairs that night, still half asleep, to Queenie’s floor. She was sad that she hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye. You could be sad when someone died even if you’d been scared of them when they were alive. Though Queenie’s room seemed vast Rowan had always felt closed in by the vastness, by the smell of books and disinfectant and by the dusty net curtains that made the outside world look like a faded pattern in the fabric. Queenie would want to know everything she’d done that day, would ask question after question until it was worse than being at school, especially since Rowan had always felt that Queenie already knew the answers. She’d felt as if the questions were gobbling her up.
    Once Rowan had been as frightened as Hermione had always tried not to seem. Every night she’d had to say good night to her grandaunt, had had to climb on the bed that felt like a mound of lumpy dust and hug the old lady’s bony shoulders. Rowan had closed her eyes as she craned to kiss the old lips, dry as a bird’s beak. She’d opened them as she retreated from the bed—and once, just a few nights before the old lady had died, Rowan had frozen, for the old lady had been gazing past her in such dismay that Rowan had been terrified to look.
    It had only been the light, which had dimmed momentarily. If Queenie had been frightened of the dark, why hadn’t she let daddy fix her electricity? He’d said that by rights it shouldn’t be working at all. The memory made Rowan shiver in the sunlight, and she watched birds gather like weights on opposite branches of a sapling until her grandmother called her from the kitchen window. “Come here a minute, lovey. Would you like to take your granddad for a walk while we make the lunch?”
    “Or a drive if you want to save your legs,” he said from the living-room window.
    “That’d be enormous, great,” Rowan cried, and ran in to the toilet before anyone could tell her to go, ran out again to her grandfather. “Please may we go to Talacre?”
    “Bingo land again, is it? Well, you should choose, since it’s your last day.”
    She giggled at the way he was trying to sound enthusiastic. “I don’t mean Talacre exactly. I wanted to walk to the lighthouse.”
    “Aren’t you afraid of Virginia Woolf? Sorry, I expect that’s over your head.”
    “I know who she is, she writes books. My grandaunt had one in her room. When I grow up I want to write books for people to read. I try to now, but the storeys won’t stay still long enough.”
    “You’re an old-fashioned young lady, aren’t you? Not that we’d ever change you for a newer model.”
    “I do like old things.”
    “That must be why you’re going out with me. Well, let’s get to the beach before the tribes of Homo Transistorus begin their bottle-breaking ceremonies,” he said, and ushered her out to the small blunt car.
    He braked all the way down the valley. On the coast road trees enclosed the car in a deep green tunnel broken by arches of sunlight, and then the coast flattened out beneath a hillside boiling with foliage. Soon the car turned toward the open sea. Beyond a bridge over the railway was