The Girl Next Door

by Rendell, Ruth

  George had already arrived and was seated in an armchair, his leg up and his stick beside him. His big black Audi, driven by Maureen, was on Stanley’s garage drive and she was in what Stanley called ‘the lounge’, drinking sherry with Helen, a woman in her fifties with silvery blonde hair, wearing dark green leather trousers and a red satin blouse.

  ‘We built this house, you know,’ said George when Helen had handed sherry to Lewis.

  ‘And you built Warlock,’ said Lewis. ‘You didn’t put those hands in the foundations, I hope.’

  No one commented on that. Lewis expected someone to say how sorry they were to hear of Jo’s death but no one did. Lewis didn’t mind, he never knew what to say in response to condolence, but he thought it strange. Helen said lunch would soon be ready. Stanley let the dog out into the garden and George, opening a huge photograph album, showed Lewis the sole picture of the qanats that existed. The entrance to the tunnels was crammed with grinning children, none of whom Lewis could recognise. George began talking about going there, when they’d found the place and where it was.

  ‘I reckon I was the first of us to go in there.’

  ‘And me,’ said Stanley. ‘I was with you. It was quite brave of us. The whole thing might have collapsed, the roof fallen in.’

  ‘Quell,’ said George, ‘was more interested in any adults who might have gone in there, people we’d seen.’

  ‘Who’s Quell?’

  ‘Policeman. He came to George’s and we all went over and talked to him. Well, all – those we could find. Those who are still alive. There was me, Norman, George and Michael Winwood, Alan Norris and that woman Rosemary he married – oh, and Daphne Jones. Daphne Furness as she is now.’

  There was a silence, brought about as so often by the utterance of that name. Only Lewis repeated it. ‘Oh yes, Daphne Jones,’ he said, and then, ‘This cop wanted to know about adults in there? What, brought along by one of us?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Stanley. ‘Even if we had, he or she would be dead by now.’ Before he could say more, Helen came back to tell them lunch was ready.

  It was a very good lunch, much appreciated by Lewis along with the nicely laid table, the silver and glass and the pink tulips in a Royal Copenhagen vase. Such beautifully prepared food and carefully chosen wine hadn’t come his way since Jo fell ill all those years ago. It softened his attitude to the Batchelors without making him wish to disclose who he thought that adult visitor to the tunnels might have been. And yet, he thought, as he increasingly did these days, at his age he didn’t have what he had not long ago taken for granted, an indefinite future. He was one of the oldest of the tunnel occupants and would not, as he put it wryly to himself, eating his crème brûlée with gusto, see seventy-five again. Arthritis wouldn’t kill him but his dodgy heart might.

  This reverie was interrupted by Helen offering him a penny for his thoughts. He responded by asking with a reflective smile if anyone under thirty, for instance, would understand what that meant. His remark went down badly with Helen, who probably supposed that she was generally taken for coming within that age range herself. Maureen failed to improve matters by catching Lewis’s eye and giving him a look that was not quite a wink.

  ‘It’s my belief,’ she said as they left the table, ‘that we shan’t hear much more of those hands. Sorry, but I didn’t want to mention it while we were eating. The police must know by now that they’re never going to find who they belonged to, and anyway, who really cares?’

  Nobody replied to that. They all sat down and George remarked that his leg was giving him gyp. When Maureen was ready?

  ‘I’ll just have my coffee now Helen’s gone to all the trouble to make it.’

  Lewis passed the rest of his time in Theydon Bois finding out from Stanley how and where to get in touch with Detective Inspector Colin Quell, and when George and Maureen left, he said he must go too. It was a long way to the other end of the Central Line. He thanked Helen profusely for lunch but he could tell he had offended her with his comment about the penny for his thoughts. Unexpectedly, Stanley said he would come with him to the station. Spot would enjoy another walk.

  ‘Why do you call him Spot when he’s black all over?’ Lewis asked.

  ‘I asked my grandson to name him and he’s only six. Spot was the only dog’s name he knew. I couldn’t have any more Nippers.’

  ‘Why didn’t anyone ask me to this meeting you had with the policeman?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Stanley. ‘Didn’t know how to get hold of you, I reckon.’

  Lewis said no more. Instead he contributed the few doggy tales he could remember and Stanley rejoined with anecdotes of past canines he had owned. The station was soon reached and Stanley, to Lewis’s relief, departed, saying Spot would get fractious if expected to hang about. Lewis had been longing for the chance to be alone and think about George’s remark on the subject of adults going into the tunnels. It was a fine, mild afternoon and sitting on the seat on Theydon Bois station platform was no hardship in the sunshine. Even if it took half an hour before the train came, he had plenty to think about.

  Whether any of the others had ever taken an adult into the tunnels, he didn’t know, though he thought not. There was an unwritten law not to involve grown-ups. Human beings make laws even when they are only ten or eleven years old and take no notice of them when they feel like it. Whatever others had done, he had flouted that rule. He hadn’t meant to, or rather, he hadn’t wanted to, but Uncle James had kept on at him about it.

  As he sat on the seat in this semi-rural place, the effort of remembering threatened to send him to sleep. He was old and it was true what they said, that the old remember events of their childhood better than what had happened this morning. He rested his head back against the seat and sleep came. A snore that was more like a noisy snort woke him and he realised that the woman who had come to sit next to him must have heard it and perhaps been amused. Age also brings something advantageous: old people no longer feel much embarrassment. There has ceased to be any point in it. It’s a waste of time and time is valuable now. What had he been thinking about before he fell asleep? He had forgotten, and the train was arriving.

  He had also forgotten where he had got to in The Count of Monte Cristo, but it didn’t much matter as he had read it so many times before and a favourite point in the adventure was soon turned to. By this time he had also forgotten all about getting in touch with Detective Inspector Quell.

  He woke up in the night and knew at once that he wouldn’t get to sleep again. Four o’clock was the witching hour. There was no hope at four. He could get up and walk about the house, he could make a cup of tea, drink whisky (a fatal choice, this), stay in bed and read some more, put the radio on. If one of those remedies worked and sleep came back until, say, six he’d think himself very lucky and feel quite cheerful. But it seldom did, so he did nothing and thought about Uncle James instead. It was his fault for telling his uncle something he would never have told his parents, that there was a secret place where he went on summer evenings to meet a crowd of friends and play all sorts of games. It must have been the end of July or early August. Whether it was after the end of term or before that he couldn’t remember, and again he cursed himself for forgetting so much.

  Uncle James was staying with them in Brook Road. It was the time his mother noticed how he was often out in the evenings. Lewis saw it too but it meant nothing to him. He was a child, to whom the ways of grown-ups were necessarily strange. Lying awake, Lewis looked back across his long life, from twelve years old through his teens and Bancrofts School, to Cambridge and medical school; at last, after general practitioner training, a place in a GP partnership in Ealing. Meeting and falling in love with Alison, the whole thing coming to grief until he settled into marriage with Jo. All the way along the road he must have learned how to live, or he should have done, acquiring experience and sophistication. If he had talked to Uncle James then, when he was forty, he would have known where his uncle went
and why he wanted to see the qanats, but not when he was twelve. Not in 1944, when, in spite of the war and the bombs and their parents’ fear for them, middle-class children living in Loughton were naïve and innocent.

  Uncle James nagged him about the tunnels. Lewis wouldn’t have used that word then, it wasn’t respectful, but that was what it was. At last he said yes, but not in the evening. It would have to be a Sunday morning. No one went there on a Sunday, or few did. The English middle class kept the Sabbath day holy. All the shops were shut and all the churches were open. Lewis’s family went to church only on Easter Day or Christmas Eve or for weddings and funerals, but he had been sent to Sunday school when he was younger, and there was a prevailing view held even by non-churchgoing people that you respected Sunday, kept your children from playing in the street and passed a quiet day at home after a heavy lunch. Knowing this as a fact of life taught Lewis that the tunnels would very likely be empty even though it was a fine sunny day.

  A walk across the fields, especially with a popular relative, was not only permitted, it was encouraged. He and Uncle James set off up Tycehurst Hill and turned into Shelley Grove, a still unfinished road where further building had been stopped by the war and where Alan Norris’s family lived in one of the few houses. The path across the fields went past the hollow oak, where picnicking children sat in the room-sized space between spreading branches and ate bread and margarine and fish-paste sandwiches. No children this Sunday morning, though. Nearby, dividing field from field, stood a great screen of elms, destined to be felled in a very few years’ time to make room for house-building, instead of waiting for Dutch elm disease to take them. They took the field path that led up the slope to The Hill and Lewis, remembering a recent visit to Loughton cinema, wished he could do what someone had done to a captive in the film, and blindfold him so that he couldn’t tell where they were or see the entrance to the qanats. But Uncle James was very interested in seeing where they were and paused only for a moment before ducking his head and walking down the steps on the drought-baked clay and under the tarpaulin roof.

  Lewis was no sooner inside than he knew – he hardly understood how – that they were not alone. Several habitual ‘members’, as George Batchelor had named them, were already there. Listening, Lewis heard girls’ voices, though not what they said, and then Uncle James, careless of being overheard, stood surveying the clay walls, the wooden boxes and the bricks that littered the place, and let out a loud peal of laughter.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, and Lewis understood exactly what he meant, he didn’t have to ask. The tunnels weren’t suitable for the plan Uncle James had in mind. Whatever use he had hoped for, they wouldn’t do. They were too dirty, too shabby, to use a favourite word of his mother’s. Lewis knew that, but not what that use might have been.

  ‘Come on then,’ he had said. ‘Let’s go back.’

  But Uncle James had gone on ahead in the direction of the girls’ voices and the two of them came into a big space where several candles were lit. From the savoury smell, potatoes were baking in the old water tank. Lewis knew the potatoes came from Bill Johnson’s father, who grew them on his allotment in Stony Path. They would have been wrapped in clay and dropped in among the red-hot embers. Three girls were poking at them with sticks to test if they were ready. Now, looking back over all those years, he tried to remember who the third one was, having no difficulty in recalling Rosemary Wharton and, of course, Daphne Jones, she of the height, as tall as any of the boys, and with that cloak of long black hair. But who had the third one been? He would never know now. The nameless one turned to stare at Uncle James, but Daphne didn’t turn. Rosemary bent to try and fish something out of the tank and cried out as she burnt her hand. It was only a tiny scorch, the faintest touch of one of those clay-encased potatoes, but she began whimpering and Uncle James stepped forward to help if he could. Was she all right? Was there anything he could do?

  ‘She’ll live,’ said Daphne, and then she did turn round, fixing him with all the brilliance of her large dark brown eyes and compelling admiration for the perfect arcs of her black eyebrows. Did that happen then? he thought at four thirty in the morning. Or did it come later, when, attending his mother’s funeral, he had walked past her outside St Mary’s Church and she, without recognising him, had taken the arm of the man she was with and walked on?

  Uncle James hadn’t pressed his offer of help, it obviously wasn’t needed, and he and Lewis had gone back the way they had come. They crossed the fields and were halfway down Shelley Grove when Uncle James said, evidently forgetting that his companion was twelve and not twenty-five, ‘She’ll make havoc among the men when she’s a bit older.’ Lewis didn’t know the meaning of havoc so said nothing, but he looked the word up in the dictionary when he got home and found it meant chaos, destruction and devastation.

  The last thing he saw before he dropped off was the sight of one of the neighbours coming down Brook Path from St Mary’s Church with a prayer book in her hand. Perhaps it was that book, or the woman’s disapproving glance, that sent him back to sleep at last.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE NORRISES’ FLAT in the block on Traps Hill, though large and with spacious rooms, was not suitable for small children. The windows in the lounge (Alan hated this name for the drawing room) almost filled one wall and gave on to a balcony. In fine weather these windows were open and there was no danger to adults; the railing on the balcony was an absolute safeguard against falling to the stone-paved terrace below. Not so for small children, who could have slipped through the spaces between the railings or dived underneath them. Fenella, Freya’s sister, had a son aged five and a daughter aged nearly three, and when with Fenella’s husband Giles they all came to visit on a Sunday afternoon, no matter how warm it was and how strongly the sun was shining, the windows had to remain closed.

  It was only quite recently that Alan had resented this. Until a few weeks ago he had gone along with the theory, widely believed, that any hardship grandparents must endure was not a hardship at all but a pleasure, a treat, a marvellous dispensation of providence for which they should be the objects of envy. And this applied not only to grandparents – they had after all been through it twenty-five years before – but to the great-grandparents they now were. At their age they deserved a bit of peace on Sundays, not to be besieged by rampaging infants who were being brought up to do exactly as they liked, leaping from one piece of furniture to the next, rolling themselves up in the rugs, hammering on the windows as if this would make them open, demanding Coca-Cola, orange juice, biscuits and chocolate, which their obedient, smiling great-grandmother ran to fetch for them, and climbing on their great-grandfather’s knee to cover up his book or newspaper with sticky fingers. When he mildly expressed this view to Rosemary, adding that having them here ought to be worth it because it was so nice when it stopped, she reproached him for ingratitude. In her opinion – for she had never forgotten his remarks about their dull life – these kind visits of Fenella and her children were surely enough to dispel any thoughts of dullness. If they were lucky enough to live a few more years, Freya would herself have a young family and she also would bring them to see their great-grandparents perhaps on Saturdays.

  Freya and her coming wedding was the current most popular topic of conversation in the Norris family, a subject that barely interested Alan. From a small gathering in the riverside hotel it had turned into a party of two hundred people. All the more reason, he had said, for Rosemary to buy herself a dress, something she refused to do on the grounds of cost when she could make just as attractive a garment herself. Alan disagreed but he could hardly say so, only continue to press a large sum of money on her, an offer that went against the grain with him, for he was the feminist of the two of them, always disliking the notion of a husband and breadwinner bestowing cash gifts on his wife instead of the couple sharing what he saw as their joint resources. It mattered little as it happened, for Rosemary insisted on making this complicated suit from a
pattern he could see, but never say, was beyond her capacity.

  He realised then, insofar as he as a man was capable of doing so, that the clothes she had been making ever since they were married had never been very successful. Lapels were uneven, hems longer at the front than the back, necklines, buttonholes and cuffs not quite symmetrical. The clothes she made were praised because she had made them and not because they looked good. This copper-coloured silk suit would be added to their number but would be worse than usual; Alan admitted to himself that Rosemary, who had never had training in dressmaking, was even less good at it than she had once been because she was getting older. Her fingers were less dextrous and she needed new glasses. Throughout the years when she had made her own clothes, they had seldom attended big parties or important functions. Now they would. This one was very big and he imagined himself accompanying Rosemary, as her husband, in a state he seldom experienced: he would be embarrassed. He made the mistake of having a last and more frank and forceful go at persuading her to buy a dress.

  ‘Are you saying I’ve lost my skill?’ she said in response to his telling her that, having laboured over the neckline of the jacket for half the night, he was afraid that it was still crooked.

  ‘Just look in the mirror. You’ll see it’s not quite right.’

  ‘I can see you’re determined to make me dress in stereotyped clothes instead of something original.’

  They argued a little more and then he gave up. He would have to bear that suit and the pitying looks, possibly the thoughts (though these would not be expressed), of guests who might suppose he was too mean to dress his wife attractively. Thus he was falling into the trap he so dreaded, of sexism and even misogyny. In the afternoon they went out for one of their long walks but had to turn back on Baldwin’s Hill instead of continuing along one of the forest paths. Rosemary was too tired after staying awake at the sewing machine until past one.