‘Where’s Grandad?’
Rosemary said he had gone up to town to see a friend, a Mr Flynn. ‘Oh, Ma,’ said Judith, ‘not “up to town”. You sound like Jane Austen. You’ll be saying “five-and-twenty past” next.’
‘I do say five-and-twenty past. It’s five-and-twenty past three now. What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing, Gran,’ said Freya. ‘You say what you want. Why not?’ They were drinking tea and eating the carrot cake Rosemary had made that morning. ‘You’ll have to tell Grandad my news. We’ve found a flat and got a mortgage on it and we hope to move in before the wedding.’
Rosemary, who had lifted a forkful of cake halfway to her mouth, set it down again. She was the only one of them to use the fork provided. ‘Can’t you wait until after the wedding?’
‘We’ve been living together now for years, Gran, so what’s the difference?’
‘It seems such a pity. It used to be called living in sin, and still is as far as I’m concerned.’
This had the effect of blighting the conversation. After a few seconds of silence, Rosemary made a small effort to put things right, but her wording was unfortunate. ‘So where is this flat of yours?’
‘I wonder,’ said Judith, ‘why “of yours” gives that question such a pejorative sense?’
‘All right, Mum. Leave it. It’s in St John’s Wood, Gran. More or less opposite Lord’s.’
‘Oh, yes, cricket,’ said Rosemary. ‘I’m sure it’s very nice.’
It was several hours before he even noticed what the house was like. He walked through the glass-covered way and pressed the bell. It rang like a bell and not like chimes or a couple of bars of music. When the door came open, he might have regained his voice or not, he didn’t know. He stepped inside and without those elusive unnecessary words he took her in his arms, kissed her lips and held her there as close to him as they could be.
‘We have a lot of talking to do,’ he said when he let her go, ‘a lot of remembering and reminding each other.’
‘So that we know about the other one’s life, so there aren’t any gaps.’
‘I want to get used to you, I want the details.’
‘I love you already,’ she said, and his heart leapt. ‘I think I’ve loved you since the cars on Baldwin’s Hill and the forest. Do you remember?’
‘Oh yes, I remember,’ he said.
‘Let’s go and sit down. Come in here. See the big sofa, we’ll sit there and we should have some drink. Red wine. I’ve got a very nice delicious burgundy. Would you like that?’
He nodded.
They sat and talked, each with a glass of wine. They talked about their lives, what they had done, where they had been, Alan saying his had been dull, the same place, the same job, Daphne’s anything but. He didn’t mention Rosemary, not even as ‘my wife’; she only spoke of ‘my first husband’, ‘my second husband’. He had always thought of time as being constant, proceeding at the same pace, and wouldn’t have believed it could pass so quickly.
‘Oh, Alan,’ she said, breaking into his account of a phase of his life, ‘never call me darling or dear, will you? Call me by my name.’
‘Daphne.’
‘Yes, always Daphne.’
He kissed her again then, the two of them slipping back to lie in each other’s arms along the length of the deep, soft sofa. He was young again. It wasn’t even necessary to close his eyes. He laid his hand on her left breast but she gently lifted it away. ‘Not this time, Alan. Next time. Soon.’
The latest time he could leave for home was nine thirty. ‘There’s a Persian restaurant round the corner,’ she said. ‘We can walk there.’
‘Why Persian? Why not Iranian?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s always Persian when it’s a restaurant. They’re the latest thing. We’ve got a Korean one too, presumably South Korean. When you’re here all the time, we’ll try them all.’
Could it ever be? Was it possible? At Warwick Avenue station, just before the train came in, they kissed again and Alan, looking over her shoulder just before they moved apart, saw that no one was staring at them. They were no more the cynosure of all eyes than if they had been eighteen.
Unlike the Batchelor brothers, old Mr Newman had been a hands-on builder in his youth. While George and Stanley had dabbled with this and that, a bit of bricklaying, a smidgen of touching up paintwork, enjoying being foremen and bossing others about, Harry Newman had been a general builder. He told his grandson Lewis that he would have liked to build his own house, a house for himself, but he never had the time, he was too busy earning his living, supporting a wife and children. When he retired, he had nothing to do, a common complaint among men of his age.
‘If you can’t build yourself a house, Grandad,’ said Lewis, ‘you could build us an air-raid shelter.’
Available to the British householder were two kinds of bomb shelter, the Anderson and the Morrison, both named after the politicians who thought them up. Lewis found a piece in the newspaper about them, the former buried underground and composed of wooden struts, corrugated iron and sandbags, and the latter like an iron table and kept inside but strong enough to support a collapsed house on its roof. He showed it to his grandfather, not knowing – not believing such a thing possible – that Harry Newman, with the exception of a few very large-print words in the Daily Mirror, was unable to read. Not that Harry would say so. What he said was that he wasn’t going to have any truck with rubbish like that, he’d build his own. And he did. But for his son and his family, in the Newmans’ back garden in Brook Road, his own home being a council house in Roding Road.
It was a very good air-raid shelter, and when it began to look as if Loughton would be bombed and the sirens went every night, sometimes several times, the Newmans, all five of them, descended into its depths with flasks of tea, hot-water bottles, blankets and eiderdowns, and sometimes egg sandwiches. But the work had been too much for Harry. He had some sort of illness. It was only a small ‘episode’, which Lewis the doctor now supposed had in fact been a thing called a transient ischaemic attack, or ITA, treatable today but unrecognised in those days and usually leading to a stroke. It had led to one. Lewis remembered seeing his grandfather’s useless arm, his twisted face, and then being told of his death. Harry had been staying in Brook Road for his last months, and now a room was freed up for Uncle James to come and stay when he liked.
Lewis could never understand why Uncle James wanted to stay, and at first he didn’t seem to enjoy it very much. Loughton was boring, there was nothing to do. The East End of London, where James went to college and had a room, was perfectly safe; there had been no air raids for months. There was no point in him living out here and having to take the tube every day. Lewis liked James and he was glad when he ‘changed his tune’, as Lewis’s mother put it, and decided to stay on. The reason he gave was that Lewis’s father would soon be called up but he wouldn’t; he was in a reserved occupation and could stay here to look after his sister. Most of this, Lewis found out later, wasn’t true; there was no reserved occupation and no call-up. Charlie Newman, approaching forty, was too old.
Soon afterwards James started going out in the evenings, sometimes staying out till midnight. No one said anything of this to Lewis but he sensed that his parents didn’t like it. Then came the request to see the qanats. Lewis could no longer remember how James came to know about the tunnels; Lewis must have told him, but if he had, he certainly regretted it. James had said the tunnels wouldn’t do, but still Lewis wondered if he had really liked them, had ever gone up there without him, in the evenings perhaps, in the dark, and stayed out till midnight. But why? If the others – the Batchelors and Daphne Jones and Richard Parr and Alan Norris and Rosemary Wharton and Michael Winwood and Bill Johnson – if they ever found he went there, they would take it out on Lewis, they would punish him. No one was supposed to tell anyone about the qanats, let alone show them.
James stayed with them on and off throughout the summer of 19
44, the qanats summer, and left, never to come back, at the end of the year. Lewis thought it was November or December but he could have been wrong about that. His mother was anxious but not really worried. ‘He’s gone off abroad somewhere,’ she said. ‘He always wanted to. And not a word of thanks to me after he stopped here dozens of times.’
Charlie Newman told the police his brother-in-law was missing but they weren’t willing to look for him. They told him they never judged a young man of twenty-five, of sound mind and in good health, to be missing. All the chances were that he had gone off of his own accord. Charlie said he had some girl and had ‘shacked’ up with her, an expression his wife admonished him for using in front of the child. But Lewis had a secret, he had seen something he hadn’t understood and had made a promise to himself that he would tell no one. In fact, he never did speak of it to anyone until thirty years later, when he told Jo.
He was a child. He knew something about babies being born because Norman Batchelor had told them all about his own birth on the kitchen table, about his mother having a pain and pushing him out. But he knew nothing about how Norman had got inside Mrs Batchelor. For years he never thought about what he saw in the air-raid shelter.
‘I’ve read a book about that,’ said Jo. ‘Or like that. The Go-Between. And there’s a film. There’s a boy that sees a couple having – well, intercourse, only he doesn’t know what it is.’
‘Like me.’
‘What did you see?’
He had gone down into the air-raid shelter one afternoon to fetch a book he had left down there. It must have been the summer holidays, because he wasn’t at school. The night before, there had been an air-raid warning that lasted only a short time, but they didn’t know that before it began and he had taken the book down with him. The shelter should have been in darkness, but through the grille in the door he could see a candle burning. He opened the door a couple of inches and saw two people on the bottom bunk, a woman on her back and a man on top of her, moving up and down but not hurting her. The man was Uncle James. He couldn’t see the woman’s face and he thought they hadn’t seen him. He retreated up the steps, feeling strange, mystified, yet aware that he had seen something he shouldn’t have seen. And heard something he shouldn’t have heard, a kind of sighing gasp from the woman. Though not a cry of pain.
He had crept away up the steps again. If anyone had asked him how he felt, he’d have said ‘upset’. He was too old to cry but he felt like crying, though he couldn’t have said why. Jo wanted to know why they were there. A bit ridiculous, wasn’t it, making love in an air-raid shelter in the middle of the afternoon?
‘People had nowhere to go then. This was the nineteen forties.’ Jo was younger than he, young enough to have missed that time when the only people allowed to make love were married couples. ‘They couldn’t go to a hotel. They were quite likely to be asked for their marriage certificate.’
‘Did you ever find out who the woman was?’
‘I was only a child, Jo. I wasn’t interested in that. I didn’t want to think about it. All I remember about her was that she was wearing stockings and had ginger hair – well, red hair. I think now that James wanted to see the tunnels because he had an idea they might be a substitute meeting place for himself and the woman. When he saw them of course he knew that couldn’t be. Maybe after giving it a try-out he knew the shelter couldn’t be either.’
‘So he and the woman decided to go away together?’
‘I suppose so. That’s what the police must have thought when they refused to look for James.’
‘What was the book you went down there to fetch?’
Lewis laughed. It was a long, long time since recalling what he had seen in the shelter had upset him. ‘Probably The Count of Monte Cristo. It was about then that I read it for the first time.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
ABOUT A YEAR after Vivien’s death Michael gave up his car. He had only had a car to take her about in, she and her wheelchair; he very seldom used it without her as a passenger and when she was gone it brought him additional pain, an actual sharp physical pain in the region where his heart was, to get into the driving seat with no Vivien beside him. It had come to the point where his only purpose in keeping the car was to drive himself to see Zoe. It was parked in the street on the residents’ parking, and to keep the battery from getting flat he had to drive it round West Hampstead a couple of times a week: down Fortune Green Road, around those streets named after ancient Greek heroes, Agamemnon, Achilles, et cetera, sometimes down to Shoot Up Hill and back along Iverson. The battery still occasionally went flat, he had to call the RAC and they did it at first as part of the deal but then said said if this went on they were afraid they would have to charge him over the odds. So he gave up the car and it was a considerable relief.
Aunt Zoe, who wasn’t his aunt and who he had never called aunt, still lived in Lewes. Now he went down by train and enjoyed the Sussex scenery as he had never been able to before. Visiting Zoe had always been a pleasure and not a duty and it was even better when that pleasure was reached in a train. Zoe had put an immediate end to the horrors of his childhood from the first moment he saw her. His mother was gone, departed sometime in the year of the qanats; dead, his father told him, ill, in hospital, then again dead. She hadn’t shown Michael much love but she was his mother, she was all the mother he had. He lived in the house called Anderby with his father, who spoke to him when he had to issue some instruction or tell him off and who put food in front of him, mostly fish-paste sandwiches and Spam. Then suddenly his mother wasn’t dead but had gone away and left them. Michael remembered the utter bewilderment he had felt. His father had found out about the tunnels, come to the entrance and shouted at them all to go home, never to go there again. He took Michael home with him and thus took from him all his companions. Michael was told he must go away and live with his father’s cousin. She had a nice house and a new husband and Michael must learn to like her.
‘I never did but you’re not much like me so maybe you will. Like it or lump it. She says she’s met you once or twice. I don’t remember but perhaps you do. She’s no kids of her own and can’t have any and she wants you and that’s the main thing. You’ll go down to Lewes on Thursday in the train.’
John Winwood who no one called Woody any more went upstairs and started singing ‘Abide with Me’. Michael didn’t much trust his father, he had no reason to, but he did think he meant to come with him in the train. But his father had no intention of doing that. He packed a bag for Michael, this time singing ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ while he did so, stuffing the bag with odd socks and clothes Michael had grown out of. He came to the station with him, saw him on the train and said he’d talked to the guard and ‘given him a tip’ to see Michael didn’t ‘get into mischief’. Then he went away without waiting for the train to depart, saying as he left that he’d forgotten to bring the sandwiches he had packed up for him.That train journey, rain streaming down the carriage windows, cold weather for September, was the worst morning of Michael’s life, and he had known some bad mornings. The feeling he had was a mixture of panic and despair. He had a ticket, but no money. He needed the lavatory but had no idea where to find it – if it even existed on a train. A lady he would remember all his life, plump, kindly, with a little dog on her lap, asked him if he was all right and was anyone with him? He brought himself with dreadful shame to ask where the lavatory was and she offered to show him, carrying the Yorkshire terrier with her. After that, relieved and comforted, he stroked the little dog and talked to it all the way to Lewes.
She shepherded him off the train, carrying his suitcase for him – he was not able to lift it himself – and said she would stay with him until they found whoever – his auntie, was it? – was due to meet him. But no sooner had she spoken than a small, trim, pretty lady in a flowered frock was bending down to greet him, asking if she might kiss him and doing so, wafting over him the most delicious scent of roses.
‘You
came alone?’ That was the nearest to criticism of his father he ever heard from Zoe for a long time. She said profuse thank-yous to the lady with the little dog and they went back in a car to her house. In a car! Which she drove! She wasn’t the first woman he had known to drive, but almost the first. She was so gentle and kind, asking him about all the things he liked to do and eat and play with, that he thought at first it was some kind of game, not real. But it was real, and from the worst morning of his life succeeded the best afternoon, and ever since then Zoe had given him a happy life with her and her husband Chris and a dog of his own, happiness that went on, punctuated by the minor troubles that flesh is heir to, until the terrible thing happened and Vivien died.
Among the minor troubles was his first marriage. Babette was a mistake. He had married her because when he was twenty-four you got engaged to, then married, the first girl you went out with, usually one of the typists in the office. In his case, the secretary he shared with the other newly fledged solicitor in the Lewes law firm he joined when he was qualified. Babette was pretty and chatty. The word for her that came to mind was ‘skittish’. At the end of every sentence she uttered she giggled. For a while he found it charming. Now, if he thought of her at all, it was to reflect that these days, and for twenty or thirty years past, they would have lived together for a while and, when her giggling shredded his nerves and, to be fair, his grim sarcasm drove her to tears, split up with no or not much harm done. Cohabitation but no marriage – who but a puritanical bigot could fault such a system? In their case, his and Babette’s, when it seemed separation might be difficult, for neither of them had committed adultery or acted with cruelty, Babette fell in love with a silly pompous man who adored her and ran off with him. The law changed and easy divorce followed swiftly under the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1973.
The Girl Next Door Page 8