‘And after all that effort you don’t even want me to wear the thing.’
He said nothing. He was looking at the four parked cars on the slope above the green hill that descended past Baldwin’s Pond to Blackweir. The occupants of those cars, unlike himself and Daphne, were all behaving in a decorous manner: smoking, one of them looking through binoculars at the spire of High Beech church protruding from the dark green woods, another asleep. Standing a little way apart from Rosemary, he thought of Daphne, as he now did every day: Daphne in her father’s car, Daphne in his arms, Daphne in the dark slipping out of those of her clothes that must be shed. Desire drove out fear.
He was wearing the jacket with her card in the right-hand pocket. He shouldn’t be carrying it with him. He should leave it at home in a safe place. Rosemary came up to him and took his arm, necessarily his left arm, while his right hand felt Daphne’s card. It seemed to him a betrayal and, loosening his fingers, he withdrew his empty hand from his pocket. They walked home.
‘I think I’ll have a lie-down.’
‘I’ll bring you a cup of tea,’ said Alan.
Here was another trap he was falling into, that of the spouse who thinks to compensate for his unfaithfulness by performing small selfless services for the betrayed one. How did he know so much about infidelity when he had never committed it? He went into the kitchen and made the tea, a cup for him and a cup for her. She was fully clothed but covered by the duvet, with the almost finished copper-coloured suit lying over the end of the bed. Why? He didn’t ask. He went back to the kitchen and laid Daphne’s card on the table: an address, an email address, a mobile number, a landline.
Hamilton Terrace was where she lived. In a newspaper he had recently read a piece about the most desirable places in London, and the journalist had mentioned Hamilton Terrace as the nicest street. He had never been there, but he tried to imagine what the houses looked like. Very different from Loughton, no doubt, and then he saw that Loughton was cited as among the most attractive of the outer suburbs. He hadn’t a mobile phone, had never felt the need for one, but if he possessed such a thing he could make calls from anywhere, he could make, he thought shamefacedly, secret calls. He wouldn’t phone Daphne, but tomorrow he would go out and find a shop where they sold such things and buy himself one. Meanwhile, he put the card back in his pocket.
The DNA extracted from the hands found underneath Warlock was all very well, thought Colin Quell, reading what the pathologist had to say. Most of it was beyond the understanding of even the most intelligent, and Quell considered himself highly intelligent. But he couldn’t see the use of it when there was nothing to compare it with. Sixty or seventy years ago, that area of Loughton might well have abounded with people whose DNA matched or came close to matching that of the hands. But they were all gone now, all dead. He might, he thought, ask those people called Batchelor to give samples of DNA, ask that exotic-looking woman Daphne Furness, but that would only be of use if one of the hands might conceivably have belonged to a relative of theirs.
It was a surprise to get a phone call call from Daphne. She had said she would phone, but Michael had doubted that she really meant it; people didn’t. Would he come for a drink, just him, no one else? Or on second thoughts, come for supper, she said. She remembered where he lived and said he should take the 189, it stopped just round the corner from her.
Her house was even more unexpected. The drawing room, as her husband Martin had called it, was all his own work, everything in it chosen by him with care and taste.
‘It reminds me of my aunt Zoe’s house.’ He found himself talking about Zoe, how good she had been to him, and how now that she was so old, ninety-six, he dreaded her dying.
‘Not many people dread the death of someone so old.’
‘I don’t want to talk about how awful my parents were, though they were. My father was worse than my mother; at least she wasn’t violent. Zoe was loving and kind from the moment I went to live with her. D’you know, I couldn’t believe at first she wasn’t joking or playing some sort of game.’
‘Do you see her often?’
‘She still lives in Lewes. In a cottage but rather a big one. I go down about once a month and it’s not a chore, I think we both enjoy it.’
‘I’ll fetch us a drink,’ said Daphne. ‘Sauvignon all right?’
When she came back, he was standing by one of the bookcases, reading all the titles. She thought how thin and bony he looked. Frail was the word, but not ill, his face creased with wrinkles but his hands long and shapely. He took the wine and tasted it with evident pleasure. ‘May I tell you something?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is, are you sure? Don’t tell me anything you may regret when you think about it in the long watches of the night.’
‘I won’t regret it.’
He told her about keeping Vivien’s room the way it was when she died. ‘I go and sit there sometimes and I talk to her. This room reminds me of it because it’s beautiful in the same sort of way. Do you think it wrong of me – self-indulgent, sentimental even?’
‘Not if it comforts you.’
‘I don’t know if it does. I don’t know if anything would. But I have a sort of feeling that I’d feel terrible if I got rid of it – I mean, turned it into a spare room or something if one of my children came to stay. I’d feel bereft. I’ve got two other spare rooms but would I have to offer that room to them?’
‘Do they ever come?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Well, they do. They come for flying visits from abroad – flying in two senses – but they never stay. I feel I ought to mind but I don’t really, not while I know they’re happy.’
‘I never wanted children. People say you regret it if you don’t have them, but I can’t say I do. Shall we go and eat?’
She had cooked black olive pasta with a salad of avocado and artichokes, followed by crème caramel. The cheese was Shropshire blue, which she said she was hooked on so she hoped he liked it. He did and took red wine with it. The dining room had orange walls and black furniture. He wondered if she lived alone or sometimes alone; perhaps she had someone that a few years ago people would have called a ‘significant other’. She played some Mozart that he had heard before but not for years. It was the kind of music that brought tears to the eyes, and although he loved it, he was glad it didn’t last long. He left just after nine, saying he went to bed early and would catch the bus round the corner in Abbey Road.
‘I write poetry about buses,’ he said. ‘Well, doggerel really. “A wonderful bus is the one-eight-nine, A special favourite of mine. It goes straight down from my abode, To lovely leafy Abbey Road.” There’s more, but I won’t inflict it on you.’
She laughed, kissed him lightly on the cheek and watched him go until he turned the corner. It was twenty past nine. She was putting the plates and cutlery in the dishwasher when the phone rang. It was one of those calls when you know who it is. She knew. Of course she couldn’t have done, it wasn’t the kind of phone that told you a name, but she knew, though not quite so well as to dare say ‘Hallo, Alan.’
He didn’t introduce himself; he didn’t need to. ‘I’m on the kind of phone that you can carry about but it’s not a mobile, so you couldn’t know who it was.’
‘But I could. I did.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I’m out on the balcony with a spotty cat.’
‘You took your time about calling me.’
‘I know. I was afraid. I must see you. Soon. Friday?’
‘Of course. I must see you too. In the afternoon, whenever you can.’
Spot smelt the smoke as he and Stanley turned the corner. He sat down on the pavement and howled. The fire appeared to be in one of the houses in Farm Mead; by the look of it from the road, smoke was pouring out of the back windows and certainly from the front. A woman Stanley knew by sight came running out of the open front door with a frying pan in her hand. By this time he had called 999 for the fire brigade, as he still called it.
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Leaving Spot up the road, tied on a long lead to a pavement tree, Stanley asked the woman how it had happened. She put the frying pan down in a flower bed.
‘I was frying chips,’ she said, half sobbing. ‘I love chips.’
You could see that by the shape of her, thought Stanley. ‘Your smoke alarm didn’t go off?’
‘I’d taken the battery out. The noise made me jump every time it went off.’
There was nothing to say except reproach, but anything that he might have said was cut off by the howling of sirens from the help that arrived. Firemen – they probably weren’t called that any more – leapt out of their vehicles and rushed up the path with hoses and some sort of fire-extinguishing substance. The woman who loved chips tried to follow them but was sent back again, by which time Stanley had untied the dog and, because Spot refused to pass the house, set off in the opposite direction to take a roundabout route home.
It was only the second fire Stanley had ever seen. During the war, when he was a child, Loughton had been a surprisingly quiet place. The East End had had it bad, but then the East End was nearer to central London. He had seen pictures of the Blitz, and films, though there was of course no available television. Stanley and his brothers and sister had collected the chunks of twisted metal that were shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells, they heard distant bombs falling and the big guns boom, enough to drive them all crowding into the air-raid shelter, but there were no fires as there appeared to be no incendiary bombs nearby. The one fire he saw, the first fire before this chip pan one, was big; a conflagration, his father called it when they told him about it.
It was December and it must have been 1944; Stanley remembered it was the day after his birthday. He and George were walking home from Roding Road School, the secondary modern where George had been for a year and Stanley had just started. Usually they’d have walked home up Tycehurst Hill, but this time they took The Hill because George said, ‘Let’s see what’s happened to the qanats.’ It was after Mr Winwood had turned them all out but not long after – weeks or months, he couldn’t remember. They saw the smoke rising up into the air behind the house called Anderby, the Winwoods’ house. It was coming from the back garden and they stood there staring.
‘Michael’s not there,’ Stanley remembered George saying. ‘Mr Winwood sent him away to his auntie,’ and Stanley had said, ‘He’s always sending people away.’
The fire took a sudden violent turn and flames came roaring through the gap between Anderby and the Joneses’ fence. They had caught the shed that adjoined the fence and the summer house beyond when the fire engines charged up The Hill, bawling with a far more strident howl than these two had made so many years later for the little frying pan fire. As the men got out with their hoses and ran up the path, Mr Winwood had come out and led them round the side of the house, no doubt the quickest way. But he came back, waving his arms about and shouting to Stanley and George.
‘Get off home, the pair of you. What the hell d’you think you’re doing gawping there?’
People didn’t swear at children then, and ‘hell’ was swearing. They had gone, not lingering long enough to see what had become of the tunnels, not knowing till years later, when George acquired the land. Stanley had never discovered how the Anderby fire started and he had never asked George about it when George might have known the answer. Where had everyone else been? Daphne and her mother and her brother? Perhaps Daphne still remembered.
Stanley apologised for being late home. It was all Spot’s fault, refusing to pass a house in Farm Mead where there had been a fire.
‘I called the fire brigade.’
‘My hero,’ said Helen. ‘And it’s fire service. Your dinner’s all ready.’
He sometimes thought he would have married her even if she hadn’t been able to cook, but the cooking helped. This evening it was grilled calamari, coq au vin and Eton mess, or fresh fruit salad if he chose. He chose the Eton mess, pulling in his once flat belly.
‘What do they call fire engines these days, sweetheart?’
‘Fire engines,’ said Helen.
CHAPTER SEVEN
DAPHNE DID REMEMBER the fire at Anderby. She remembered the smell before the fire started. It was a smell familiar to everyone now, in the world they lived in, but not then. Who possessed cars? Even her father, who was (as he put it himself) ‘quite well off’, had no car until several years later. Petrol was hard to get. She had smelt it when her uncle came by car, carried a tank of the stuff and poured it into the tank. Now she smelt it again. She opened the kitchen window. Outside the smell was much stronger.
It was twenty-five to four. She had just got home from school, a quick walk up The Hill from Loughton High School for Girls, which was at the bottom of Alderton Hill. On the way up, she said hallo to Mrs Moss, who was Mr Winwood’s char. Everyone called her Clara, but Daphne’s mother had told her that at her age it would be polite to call her Mrs and refer to her as the cleaning lady. In the kitchen, a note had been left for her to say her mother had gone to see Granny in Brooklyn Avenue and she’d be back before four. There were egg sandwiches in the fridge. Fridges were quite rare, Daphne knew. Most people didn’t have them. As for egg sandwiches, whatever else was hard to come by in those war years, chickens were always clucking about up here and eggs, though they were supposed to be rationed, were plentiful. She took a sandwich upstairs to her bedroom and looked through the window at the next-door garden. She watched the fire take hold, until the Winwoods’ garden was a mass of glowing red, crimson where the fire was and flames shooting up everywhere, now licking the shed on the other side of their fence, threatening the Anderby summer house.
She ought to phone someone – but who? Would they expect her to do it, and how would she do it? Just as she thought that she must try and had gone downstairs to the phone, she heard the fire engines arrive. Running into the living room, throwing open the front window, she saw the fire engines and George and Stanley Batchelor outside. Then Mr Winwood came out of his house, gesticulating and shouting. For once he didn’t see her and wave. Daphne retreated into the back garden. She could feel the heat coming from the glowing fire; it was like being right in front of a powerful electric heater. She found a wheelbarrow on the opposite side of the lawn that their gardener had left on the path; she stood on it and gazed into the glare. The firemen were training their hoses on the fire now, trying to save the summer house; it was too late for the shed and for the ash tree. Its branches had caught, and what autumn leaves remained, incandescent and glittering. The flames crept up its trunk, then burst into a rush of fire, scattering sparks and weaving among the branches.
Daphne was just saying aloud, ‘Oh, the poor tree,’ when her mother arrived, running across the lawn.
‘My darling, are you all right? What on earth happened?’
‘I don’t know.’ She wasn’t going to mention the petrol. It was just one of the many things she didn’t mention to her parents. She didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. It was safer for everyone to keep silent on so many things. ‘It started just after I got back from school. I thought I ought to call the firemen but someone else did.’
She had never been frightened or even alarmed. At least, not once the fire engines arrived. What became of Mr Winwood for the rest of the day she didn’t know and didn’t ask. Her parents didn’t like him, so why speak of him to them? She never mentioned him, knowing of their dislike. Best to be silent on all sorts of awkward subjects. She stood on the wheelbarrow again at dusk, just before it got too dark to see. The shed had gone, the summer house was charred black on its garden side, the fire was dead, just cinders and ashes. She seemed to remember, from earlier, short and long whitish sticks and thinner white sticks and something like a long curved rod with ridges all along its length. By the evening, all this had gone, coated with ash. In the morning, Mr Winwood was out there with a torch and a rake – she saw him from her bedroom window – levelling everything and leaving just a round pale grey patch on the lawn.
By the time he had finished it had begun to rain, and soon it was pouring.
It was so long ago, she thought as she waited for Alan, and no doubt some of it she had imagined and some of it she had forgotten. Perhaps she would tell him what she remembered and perhaps not. Maybe tell him the whole story when the time was right. Come in the afternoon, she had said to him, and that could be any time between two and five. It gave him an awful lot of leeway. There was a bit of Browning she remembered, the only bit of Browning she knew except that stuff about Oh, to be in England that everyone knew. I shall see her in three days, And just one night, but nights are short, Then two long hours and that is morn.
Whatever becomes of us, Alan thought, walking along the familiar roads to Loughton station, whatever becomes of Daphne and me, let us never be the elderly couple sitting in our wheelchairs, hand in hand, in front of the telly. Anything but that. The last thing Rosemary had said as he was leaving was to bid him tell Robert Flynn that he and Isabel must come to them for lunch and to give Alan some possible dates. He could forget that, she wouldn’t be surprised if he did. She had lately taken to quoting the Tammy Wynette song and saying he was just a man. The sewing machine had its cover on today and Rosemary, awaiting the arrival of Freya and Freya’s mother, their daughter Judith, was doing the hand-stitching, tacking up a hem she had already pinned in place. Alan had looked up Hamilton Terrace on the London map for the third or fourth time. By now he knew exactly where it was, could have found her house blindfolded, after dark and in a power cut.
Like a teenage boy, he didn’t know what he would say when she opened the door to him. And yet he had thought he could say anything to her. Now as he got out of the train and made his way along the canal to the bridge and Maida Vale, he felt himself struck dumb, like poor Papageno with a padlock on his mouth. Now that he was only a couple of hundred yards away, he wanted the distance to be longer, and he sat down on a seat to use up five minutes, breathing deeply before crossing the street to her front door.
The Girl Next Door Page 7