Vivien was Chris’s cousin’s daughter, seventeen years younger than Michael. They met at a family wedding. She was as unlike Babette as could be, tall, slender, olive-skinned and black-haired, quiet, a woman who laughed only when there was something to laugh at. She was the headmistress (as they were called then) of a primary school in West Hampstead, and Michael had joined a law firm with premises in the Finchley Road. They bought the house in Ingham Road where a bus passed by and furnished material for Michael’s poetry.
He sometimes thought that he had loved her too much and their children not enough. That was not to say he hadn’t cared for them enormously more than his parents had cared for him. They were never neglected or ignored as he had been, and Vivien made up for his occasional indifference by her adoration of both of them. Guiltily, he confessed to himself alone that he wouldn’t have much cared if he and Vivien had had no children. He was jealous of them too because of the love she had for them, though she took none from him, he knew that. The difficulty was – he discovered this by self-analysis – that he had a problem with love, giving too much of it or not enough, not knowing how to handle it.
She died young, or at least forty-nine seemed young to him. There wasn’t much to be done for breast cancer in those days. Both children were at university. Both were clever, got good degrees; his son went on to graduate studies and medical school for his daughter. They sometimes came home but only because (or so he thought) they associated Ingham Road with their mother. They never went up to the second floor to Vivien’s room, the bedroom he was keeping as she had left it. As for him, he went on dully conveyancing (as he put it), having searches made and drawing up contracts for his clients. As he also put it to himself, his heart was broken. But it had never been much of a heart, damaged early in its life, kicked around by his parents. Only Vivien had been able to mend it, and now she was gone. As a child he had never cried, he knew it would be useless, but since Vivien’s death he cried often, learning how to do it in the long sleepless nights. Self-pity? Maybe. Those who deride it are the ones who have never had cause to feel it.
All the news he ever had about his father came from Zoe. Not well off when Michael was a child, he married twice more. The first of these women was called Margaret and she too died. But death came after a long and apparently happy life. His third wife was wealthy, really rich, and her death made him a rich man. Michael met Sheila once on one of the rare occasions he and his father encountered each other, and he liked her. He was old enough by then to be a judge of character, and this woman impressed him as being utterly unlike what he could remember of his mother. When she died, Sheila left his father everything she had, including the manor house in Norfolk they lived in and all the money, much increased by then, her father had left her. Zoe told Michael that this enabled his father to install himself in a care home. Not at all the kind of residence one associated with such places but a luxurious refuge comparable to an hotel in some Italian resort, though its residents were all over the age of sixty. Michael didn’t want to know. He remembered his father with dread and a kind of disgust.
He was married to Babette at the time. She was fascinated by John Winwood – largely, Michael thought, because he was rich and there might be money to be got out of him – and constructed scenarios about Urban Grange, the luxury home, its inmates attended by nicely dressed young women who looked very unlike nurses and doctors who looked like businessmen, cooked for by a chef who also wrote culinary features for a glossy magazine, and with colour TV, and Jacuzzis in the en suite bathrooms. He barely listened until she suggested they had his father to live with them. Michael could update their house and make a luxury apartment in an extension built on to it for his father. It was partly his vehemently expressed disgust that drove her into the arms of the car salesman she went off with. When Zoe told him she had heard from Urban Grange that his father was very ill and near to death, though he realised he had better go up to Norfolk to see him, it never came to that.
John Winwood recovered – he was always recovering – left his bed, resumed occupancy of a wheelchair and was taken outside among the zinnias and the rhododendrons. But he soon started dying again and was once more at death’s door. Again Michael thought himself bound to go there, again waited a day, then two days, and again John Winwood recovered. The wheelchair was discarded and he experienced a new lease of life, dressing in garish clothes he had one of the staff buy for him, exercising in his room, then running round the grounds like a young man. Michael had never known how old his father was and he was never interested enough to ask Zoe. When he was a child, parents went to great lengths to avoid telling their children their age. Michael could remember to this day how surprised he had been when Norman Batchelor told the rest of them that his father was forty-two and his mother thirty-eight. That John Winwood was now very old Michael knew, but no more precisely than that. He knew too that he was a dying man who never died.
After himself, Zoe was his father’s next of kin. She alone, it appeared, received news of him. From Urban Grange or from John Winwood himself? Perhaps both. Michael told himself that he was uninterested in his father’s fate. He was uninterested in his father. Of all the cruelties and neglect John Winwood had inflicted on him, the worst in his memory was not failing to call the doctor for three days after he broke his ankle, taking him to and showing him over the abattoir where he had once been a slaughterman, or leaving him in bed without water when he had measles, but abandoning him on Victoria station without money or food. That was the worst act and he could never forgive it. He still remembered every detail of that day, the train journey, his fear and his utter loneliness, the kindness too of the lady with the little dog, but even that had never been able to assuage the horror he felt for a father who could do that to his small son. Any love he had for him – not much – was extinguished that day when he met Zoe and learned what love was.
So, indifferent to his father? Was he? No, he thought as little about him as possible now because he had been shown by Vivien that hatred, which was what he really felt, corrupted the mind and spoilt the character. ‘Don’t hate anyone,’ she had said. ‘It’s quite useless, and harms the hater while it does nothing at all to the hated.’ So his dwelling on his father’s iniquities and even some desire he had had for revenge faded away. Sometimes he even found himself humming one of the hymns his father used to sing. He tried to think of John Winwood as dead but failed in this attempt.
As for his mother, Anita, she was a dim, vague figure from the distant past. Where John Winwood had met her, why he had married her, if she had any relatives still living – of the answers to all this he had no idea. All he could remember was her face. That he could still see when he closed his eyes, a face that epitomised not beauty but exquisite prettiness, the tip-tilted nose, the short upper lip, the baby-doll eyes, the round pink cheeks and the abundance of red-gold hair. His wife Babette had a similar facial construction and the red hair; his wife Vivien the antithesis, grave, austere, until she smiled and the sun came out.
‘He seems to have been fond of her insofar as he could be fond,’ said Zoe, who had lately given up never criticising his father. Perhaps she realised he was no longer the child she had to protect from an ugly truth; had she known it, he knew it better than she. ‘Anyway, he may have had a bit of a guilty conscience. Sheila probably took an overdose on purpose whatever the inquest said. She seemed very unhappy to me.’
‘Yes, she did,’ Michael said, waiting for more but none came. What did it matter? No more revelations about his father could shock him now. Any connection had really come to an end on the platform at Victoria station six decades ago. He had just one question, the one he had never asked before.
‘Just how old is he?’
‘He’ll be a hundred next January.’
At no time in his life before had Alan ever concentrated his thoughts on one person in one situation and done so for day after day. He thought of Daphne when falling asleep and Daphne was the first to come to m
ind when he awoke. He set her in her house and saw her moving among the rooms – even those rooms he had never yet seen – he saw her walking up Hamilton Terrace and along St John’s Wood Road, stopping sometimes to talk to some faceless neighbour. He saw her reclining on the sofa where they had lain, a book in her hand, and then she laid the book aside to think – perhaps – of him. Most of all, when dwelling on her, he was asking himself what they were going to do. Would the sort of promise she had made to him ever come true? It was so unlikely; he was too old, and this too must be faced, she was too old. People didn’t fall in love at their age – but they did.
He had supposed, and in a way hoped, that setting eyes on Rosemary after he returned from his visit to Hamilton Terrace would bring guilt, enormous guilt. He might, he had considered while sitting in the tube, even feel a kind of relief that Rosemary’s presence, Rosemary’s existence, would show him their folly, his and Daphne’s, the impossibility of what they had half planned to do and the sheer wrongness of it. But this had passed in a moment, to be replaced by a thought that it would be wrong, even if possible now, to dismiss this joy he and she contemplated. It was something he would bitterly regret for the rest of what life remained to him. Telling himself that he would be a useless companion to Rosemary now, no husband, a shell, his whole mind and heart given to another woman even if he looked like the man she was married to – that was a hypocritical let-out.
Rosemary was a good woman, he repeatedly told himself, devoted to him, a home-maker, his carer, the mother of his children. Then a small voice inside him said that of all that, only the last was true. An image of the sewing machine appeared in his mind’s eye. There had been a song once from a musical about the sewing machine being a girl’s best friend. How ancient that seemed, how antediluvian. Rosemary’s sewing machine had been his worst enemy. The very sound it made, that buzz that was unlike any other, got increasingly on his nerves. No other woman he knew possessed a sewing machine, though many had done when he was young. The only other one he knew of was in the dry cleaner’s they patronised in the High Road, where a woman in a sari sat in the window stitching seams. How grossly unfair he was being! He couldn’t leave Rosemary anyway. It was unthinkable. Yet he was thinking of it as often as he thought of Daphne.
He continued to make his excuse of meetings with Robert Flynn, though growing aware that he would have to think of some alternative reason for going out without Rosemary. He needed a new pretext, this time for staying away overnight. Lying, that he had once believed he found difficult if not impossible, had become simple, largely because – and this was an additional trouble to him – his hearer was so innocent and so trusting. That made untruthfulness so much more outrageous. Yet he and Daphne couldn’t go on as they were, kisses and afternoon visits, however delightful. He knew himself and was aware that for him, lovemaking should take place at night-time, not necessarily in the dark, but at least in artificial light. And in a bed if possible, not on a sofa. It was his age. Wasn’t it true that for this fundamental aspect of our being, for sex and love, we want the circumstances, the setting and the very sounds and scents of our youth? That might well be why some marriages endured more or less for ever. He thought, as he often did, of Daphne’s father’s car at dusk on Baldwin’s Hill. The smell of her now was the same, the feel of her. She was the first woman he had had and, if all could miraculously go well, would be the last.
He would be found out through Robert Flynn. That was why he must think of another excuse. He thought of all this as he told his usual lie to Rosemary and set off for Loughton station. Robert would phone or his wife would, or someone else who knew them both would ring and tell her he had just spoken to Robert, who was complaining he never saw Alan these days. Coming home in late evening, he often thought of that. But he need not think of it now, not now.
Risotto is a dish notoriously difficult to make, or if not that difficult, time-consuming. Once you have started on it with your rice and mushrooms, say, in the pan, stock added and more stock waiting to be added, you cannot leave it. Constant stirring is essential or disaster ensues. The chef at Lotario’s restaurant in St John’s Wood High Street was a superb cook and his risotto was famous, thanks in part to culinary features in glossy magazines. The restaurant was always full by eight thirty, but those who booked for seven – the locals and the elderly mostly – found space and very soft music, pink tablecloths and napkins, always the best colour, and courteous service. And of course the risotto.
Freya and David had been visiting the flat in the block opposite Lord’s of which they now had possession. They would move into Oak Tree Court the following Saturday, but today they were measuring windows for blinds and calculating whether the second bedroom would take a queen-size bed. They arrived there later than they expected, and once inside made two discoveries: that the previous occupants had removed all the light bulbs and that they themselves were highly incompetent both with tape measures and rulers. Near quarrelling, they sought their usual remedy for ill temper, sat down on the newly carpeted floor and drank a couple of glasses each of the bottle of Merlot they had brought with them. This restored their equilibrium, and as it was getting on for eight thirty and growing dark, they set off to find a restaurant.
‘Why not try Lotario’s?’ said Freya. ‘He’s the man who makes the marvellous risotto.’
‘I hate risotto.’
‘Then you can have something else.’
The place was crowded. They hadn’t booked but there was one table available to them, the sort no one wants because it is just inside the door and liable to draughts.
‘I think we should have a pink tablecloth like these, don’t you?’ said Freya, who had something of her grandmother in her.
David was not a talkative man, something that seldom bothered her. They ordered another bottle of Merlot, risotto for Freya, spaghetti vongole for David. He was not a people-watcher either, in her opinion like most men. Her eyes roved round the diners and came to rest on a couple seated at a table diagonally opposite to theirs. The man was facing them and the woman had her back to them. Far from young or even in their middle years, they might have been described as in the prime of old age, straight-backed and both with good heads of hair. It seemed as if they had finished eating, but there were still two half-full glasses of wine in front of them. The man, whom Freya immediately recognised, had his right hand covering the woman’s left hand across the tablecloth and now he raised it to his lips.
Freya said faintly, ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘That always means you do.’
‘You see those people, the woman in the black and white, that old man with her is my grandfather.’
‘D’you want to go over and say hello?’
‘Are you kidding?’
Their food came, the risotto and the spaghetti vongole. Freya took a larger than usual swig of wine. ‘I rather hope they don’t see us. That isn’t my grandmother, you know.’
‘Some business acquaintance, I expect.’
‘He doesn’t have a business.’
David smiled, then laughed. ‘Well, good luck to him.’
‘It isn’t funny,’ said Freya.
The old man was paying his bill. They finished their wine, got up, and began walking towards the door, quite a long way from Freya and David, who kept their eyes downcast. But in Freya’s case, not enough to avoid observing their departure. ‘Did you see that?’ she said as the door closed behind them. ‘He had his arm round her like they were young.’
‘Maybe they feel young.’
‘It’s upset me a lot. I feel sort of disillusioned. I mean, I never dreamt of anything like that. Not Grandad.’
‘It’s not our business, Freya.’
‘Of course it is. He’s my grandad. I really need a drink, something stronger than that red stuff. A grappa. D’you want one?’
‘I’m OK,’ said David. ‘It hasn’t upset me.’
‘Next time,’ said Alan, ‘I’ll stay the night.’
‘Good.’
Daphne wouldn’t want to know how he would manage to stay the night, what far greater prevarication would have to be employed, what far bigger lie be told to explain his absence for perhaps twenty-four hours. Not Robert Flynn this time, he was growing frightened of Robert Flynn, that this innocent and blameless man might suddenly surface like a monster from a calm sea, rear his ugly head (though Alan remembered him as rather a handsome man) and gnash his shark-like jaws, robbing his quarry of an arm or leg. For to lose Daphne now would be like the loss of a limb. Of all that Robert Flynn might do, he must not be allowed to take Daphne from him; better break up his marriage. But that was broken already, wasn’t it?
Worries, mostly related to Robert Flynn, whose function as an alibi he felt he had overused, beset him all the way home in the tube train. He even envisaged walking into the flat and finding not just a wakeful Rosemary sitting there but also Robert Flynn and his wife, whatever she was called, the three of them assembled to examine his lies and excuses and confront him with them. Of course there was nothing of the sort. Rosemary was in bed and presumably asleep, and the copper-coloured silk suit, finished at last, on a hanger in the hallway.
CHAPTER NINE
MICHAEL CARRIED WITH him a large box of chocolates. The flowers he would buy in Lewes, if necessary getting the taxi driver to stop at a florist’s on his way to Zoe’s. A phone conversation two days before with Brenda Miller, Zoe’s carer, friend and companion, had told him there was nothing to worry about. A woman of ninety-two was bound to grow weaker, bound to be frail, but Brenda believed that the doctor, who had called that day, was exaggerating when she said his aunt was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.
‘I thought but I didn’t actually say so that someone of her age could hardly be in the early stages of anything.’
The Girl Next Door Page 9