The Girl Next Door

by Rendell, Ruth

  Before she broke the direful news to her mother, Judith had given some thought to the possibility of her tears, hysterics, stony silence or rage, but none to what would happen next. Rosemary might want to run away, come home with her, send for her brother Owen, send for a doctor (was that possible these days?) or more likely a solicitor. But all she said was, ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘Well, nothing, Mum. What can you do?’

  ‘I can’t really believe it, you know. Not your father. It’s going to turn out that this woman is a doctor, some sort of specialist, more women than men are these days. He’s been consulting her about something serious, he went to hear the news of some scan or other he’s had and the news was so good he took her out to dinner and they celebrated. That will be it.’

  Judith had never known her mother to be so inventive. It was plausible, but it wasn’t true. ‘He didn’t tell me because he knew it would worry me,’ Rosemary said.

  Then why didn’t he tell you afterwards? Judith wanted to ask but knew her mother would only have an alternative explanation to put forward. It made her speculate as to what her father would have invented to convince her. He had more imagination than she and might even at this moment be sitting in a train elaborating some fiction. It was getting on for seven. She would very much have liked another glass of wine, but if she did, she dared not drive home. Wait, leave the car here and take the tube? But to be here when these two confronted each other? No, absolutely not. She looked at her silent, rigid-faced mother, and took note of what she generally ignored or never saw at all: how wrinkled her face was, how sunken her eyes and hooded their lids, her jawline drooping, her upper lip clustered with parallel vertical lines. The first thing you noticed about her hands along with the corrugated nails was the overlay of branched purple veins. Veins too pushed out the thin fabric of her stockings. She was old. Things like this didn’t happen to old people, but evidently they did.

  ‘When do you expect Dad home?’

  Her mother seemed to have forgotten all about the mysterious doctor. ‘Will it make any difference what time I expect him?’

  ‘Oh Mum, would you like me to stay?’ She said it because she knew she ought to. The prospect was awful. ‘I could phone Maurice. I could leave the car here.’

  Rosemary said suddenly, ‘What did she look like, this woman?’

  ‘All Freya said was that she was tall and dark and – well, she said “quite old”.’

  ‘I see.’ Her mother looked as if she did see. ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better, that she’s old? It makes it worse. No, I don’t want you to stay, darling. I’ll see him alone.’

  In the past few minutes her old mother had not so much grown older; she had grown up. At her age she had seen at last what life was about.

  While his daughter was checking up on him, Alan was in bed with Daphne. They had been there since late morning apart from a break for lunch at Carluccio’s, from where they had returned for more lovemaking and then sleep. He went downstairs in the evening and fetched a bottle of champagne he had put on ice in the afternoon and cut two large slices from the carrot cake he had bought while they were out. They loved carrot cake – it was one of the many things they had in common – and both thin, never thought about their weight. Too old for that nonsense, said Daphne. The champagne was drunk, the cake was eaten, and at nine Alan said he’d better go. God knows he didn’t want to, but he’d better. Daphne put on a dressing gown and fetched him a key to her front door – three keys, rather, as it was always well locked up.

  ‘You may need it,’ said Daphne. ‘I’ve had a premonition.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like you.’

  ‘Ah, but it is. Remember, I used to be a fortune-teller.’

  He thought of that when he was in the tube, precisely when the train was passing through Snaresbrook. Up there was his old school, and why he was remembering that he didn’t know. What had she foreseen? Nothing. He felt the keys in his pocket as once he had felt her card.

  It was ten thirty when he got out of the train, and he was tired. The walk home to Traps Hill was shorter than any Loughton walk he had taken in the past, but even when they lived in Harwater Drive, right at the top of Church Hill, he had never thought of taking a taxi. He was older now and a taxi was waiting. But still he walked, and as he walked, he thought of his past life as drowning men are said to do: the tunnels; schooldays and university; Daphne, always Daphne, parting; and then Rosemary and marriage, children and grandchildren and retirement. How we grow away from our children, he thought. He cared very little what his children thought of him now. They probably loved him in a remote kind of way. Did he care what Rosemary thought? What he wanted was what most men wanted and it came to him as a devastating truth. They didn’t want trouble, that was it, for life to be without trouble, to have peace, and that was odd in the far more warlike of the sexes.

  Rosemary would be asleep at ten to eleven. She always was. He closed the front door softly. She was sitting in the living room with the door to the balcony open. A half-empty glass of red wine was on the table in front of her. There are some who tremble at moments of anxiety, some feel sick, some who flush; Alan turned white.

  ‘I need a drink of water,’ he said, went into the kitchen and filled a glass.

  Rosemary said nothing. She sat, holding her wine but not drinking.

  ‘You had better say what you have to say,’ he said.

  She set down her glass and looked into it, her hands round the stem. ‘Why her?’ she said. ‘That’s all I want to know. If it was someone young I could understand, but why her? Why that old witch?’

  He didn’t ask how she knew. Maybe she had talked to Robert Flynn. It didn’t seem important. ‘Insults don’t help.’

  ‘There’s another thing I want to know. Have you had relations with her?’

  That was exactly what he expected her to ask, the very words. He could have written the script for her. Over the past weeks, months now, he had told so many lies that he was in the habit of it. He was so practised that he could easily tell another. He could easily say no, he had betrayed her so often, was he now to betray Daphne? ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

  She lifted her head, stood up and cried out, ‘How could you? How could you?’

  ‘There’s no answer to that, Rosemary. You know there isn’t.’

  ‘Are you sorry? Do you want me to forgive you?’

  ‘Can we talk about it tomorrow? I want to go to bed.’

  He thought she would start crying. She didn’t. She said, ‘Have there been lots of others? Right through our marriage, have there been others?’

  ‘No. No one else. I’m going to bed.’

  When a crisis of this kind happens in a marriage, the first action that is taken, even before words are exchanged, is that one of the partners – spouses, they used to be called – moves out of the marital bed into the spare room or on to a sofa. When Alan went into the spare room with his night things, he found that Rosemary had been there before him, her nightdress already on the bed, her little radio that she called a wireless on the cabinet along with her reading glasses.

  Neither of them slept much. He thought, we can thrash this out over and over, as people do, or I’ve been told people do, and in the end I shall go. She has never lived alone in all her life. What will she do? I won’t desert her, I will be there, I will do anything she asks – except stay with her. I am old but I won’t tell myself that on those grounds I am entitled to some happiness for the years that remain to me. I’m not; no one is. He slept a little, woke up and got up at five thirty.

  She was already up and not in her dressing gown as she would normally have been at this hour. She wore a floral dress she had made herself. Her hair was carefully arranged in waves and curls as if the night before she had used those rollers she sometimes did for a special occasion the next day. He saw to his horror that it was not ‘as if’; that was what she had done, and he shivered. It was her way of trying to get him back.

/>   ‘Alan, if you will promise not to see her again I will forgive you. I will let bygones be bygones. Just promise me and we can forget all about it.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘After all, it was very short-lived, wasn’t it? You could call it a moment of madness. You’re over seventy years old. You don’t want this kind of upheaval, do you? Just tell me you won’t see her again and let this be the end of it. I won’t hold it against you.’

  This was something he hadn’t expected. She was being reasonable and that was unusual to say the least. Men want peace and a quiet life. He had had more than half a century of a quiet life and he wanted no more of it. He wanted Daphne and their ages didn’t matter.

  He said the things he had thought of in the sleepless night: he would be there when she needed him, he would never desert her, and he added others: she could have the flat, he would give her any income within reason that she asked for, but he was going. He would stay only to pack a case. Then what he had feared happened, what he had been so relieved about because it appeared not to be going to happen. She stood up, clenched her fists and began to scream. She beat her fists against his chest and screamed into his face. Of course he was much stronger than she but still he was shaken by it. He held her by the arms, enduring the noise, knowing the remedy was to slap her face but unable to bring himself to do this. A horrible change took place. Instead of screaming, she began kissing him, clutching his shoulders and covering his face with kisses.

  ‘Rosemary, stop,’ he said. ‘Please stop.’

  She threw herself on to the sofa, sobbing now. He went into the bedroom he had shared with her until the previous night, found a suitcase and threw clothes into it. Most of his stuff would have to be sent, but who would send it? One of his children? He heard Rosemary shouting now. She was standing in the bedroom doorway.

  ‘No one will speak to you, do you know that? Your children won’t have anything to do with you. You’ll never see your grandchildren again. Have you thought of that?’

  He found his mobile phone and the charger, which he dropped into the suitcase. Rosemary came in and snatched the phone out of his hand. Back in the living room, he picked up the landline receiver and called the number of a taxi service he had sometimes used, but never to be driven the distance he wanted now. ‘Hamilton Terrace, London North-West Eight,’ he said. Rosemary would know the address now but she would have to know it sooner or later.

  She had begun shouting that she would like to kill him. Going back into the bedroom, he found her pulling all the clothes he had packed out on to the floor. She had dropped his phone into the washbasin in the bathroom and run both taps on to it. He put the clothes back, a jumble of shirts and odd socks and pyjamas. She watched, waiting, he supposed, for him to leave the room again. He did, but with the case, that he put a leather strap round. She was muttering threats, how she hoped he would die, how she would like to kill Daphne. The landline phone rang to tell him his taxi was waiting in the block car park. He said goodbye and she screamed at him again. He closed the front door behind him and walked out of the rear door into the car park, savouring peace and silence.

  Three quarters of an hour later, he put the keys Daphne had given him into her front door locks, the top one, the middle one and the bottom one, feeling that he had come home.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  LONG AGO LOUGHTON had really been a village, and right up to the Second World War and beyond, its residents still talked about going down to the village when they went shopping. Like any village, it had its class system; and everyone, including the children, knew that the poor lived in Forest Road and Smarts Lane, the middle class in those streets bounded by Hillcrest Road and Rectory Lane and the rich ones in Church Lane and Alderton Hill. Everyone knew everyone else or knew of them, as is true of villages, so when the cleaner gave up her job at Anderby, on The Hill, on account, she said, of ‘goings-on’, the news spread along Smarts Lane where she lived and reached the ears of Clara Moss in Forest Road. She was already working for the Batchelors in Tycehurst Hill, but she could do with a second job. So it came about that Clara Moss, a soldier’s widow, her husband killed in the first year of the war, came to work for John Winwood and his wife Anita. As for the ‘goings-on’, she didn’t care about that, it wasn’t her business. The house next door to Clara’s had just been sold in the year before the war came for two hundred pounds. If theirs was worth the same, it made her feel rich.

  She never grew rich. She might have done when she was old and the house would have sold for two hundred thousand pounds. But where would she have lived? She had no children to take her in and she was afraid of old people’s homes. You heard such dreadful things about them. She would have been all right in her house if she hadn’t had her knee done, but the pain was so bad she couldn’t carry on as she had been. Nor could she work, not at her age. When Fred died in the war after a year of marriage she had been nineteen, and now she was eighty-five. She was waiting for the second knee to be done. Clara loved the NHS, it had been good to her when it did her hip and her broken wrist when she fell on the ice, but it did keep you waiting. Months had gone by since they said the knee must be done. It had started giving her gyp, as Mr Batchelor put it. Clara loved Mr Batchelor almost as much as the NHS – not that she would have admitted that even to herself. He had had his hip done on the private and hadn’t had to wait, but what was the result? He was still limping about and he still used a stick.

  Now she had to have an MRI scan and Mrs Batchelor was going to take her in the car. Clara liked this Mrs B much better than the first one that she’d worked for when she first went to Carisbrooke, but she wished it was Mr Batchelor that was taking her. It was for something to do with her heart, this scan. It was true that when you got to her age there was always something wrong with you. She wanted someone to talk to, and not just the TV. It was small and the colours faded as if she was sometimes looking at it through fog. The people on it weren’t real and it was real people she wanted, though there was no one left now. Her sisters were dead, and their husbands. She couldn’t expect nephews and nieces to bother with her even if they knew where she lived. Fred’s family were long gone. When she was young it was family you knew, not friends. They were your friends.

  Since her knee had got so bad, the girl next door had done her shopping for her. Mrs B said she shouldn’t call her a girl, it wasn’t politically correct, whatever that meant. It had nothing to do with politics as far as Clara could see. She should say ‘young woman’, Mrs B said. When she remembered, Clara compromised and said ‘young lady’. The young lady next door was called Samantha and she had a partner instead of a husband. Clara didn’t know what to think about that so she didn’t think about it. Samantha went to the supermarket for her and when she came back and Clara tried to pay her she often wouldn’t take the money. Not that it came to very much, tea and bread and Flora and Tiptree jam, half a dozen small eggs and a bit of ham. In the days when she could make it round the corner to the surgery, the lady doctor had told her she should be eating vegetables and fruit, but Clara had never liked that kind of food and now she couldn’t walk so far she didn’t have to hear that sort of thing. That was one blessing.

  Maureen Batchelor and Helen Batchelor were having tea at Carisbrooke. George had graduated from the sofa to a new armchair with a foot rest and Stanley was in the garden, throwing a ball for Spot. Having taken care to eat no more than a ginger biscuit each, Maureen and Helen were exchanging views on their favourite subject, the stubbornness of men, their intractability and tendency to hide their heads in the sand when threatened by anything unpleasant. George, wishing he could be outside with his brother and the dog, had nodded off. Helen was holding forth on men’s unwillingness to go to a doctor even when anyone could tell they had all the symptoms of cancer or heart disease, to which Maureen rejoined with a tale of a friend of hers whose husband had now had a stent and a quadruple bypass as a result of refusing to keep a hospital appointment.

  George opened
his eyes and struggled to his feet. ‘Need a bit of fresh air,’ he said, and taking hold of his stick took two steps towards the open French window, then one more before crumbling at the knees, the stick slipping from him, and crashing to the floor. Stanley came running across the lawn, followed by Spot. Helen was already on her knees beside George, her arm under his head, lifting him a little to check his face, if he could lift an arm and if he could speak. ‘Nine nine nine,’ she said to Maureen. ‘Now. Ask for an ambulance and tell them he’s had a stroke.’

  The women behaved in exemplary fashion, as Stanley said afterwards, and Maureen said it was funny they had been talking about that very thing and then this happened. The ambulance came quite quickly and took George away to the stroke unit at St Margaret’s Hospital, Maureen sitting beside him and holding his hand. His mouth was pulled down on one side but he could speak and he could see. Left behind at Carisbrooke, Helen cleared away the tea things while Stanley poured her a stiff gin and tonic.

  ‘You need it, baby,’ he said, though she hadn’t argued.

  She was sitting down, stroking Spot for comfort and sipping the gin, when her phone rang, or rather began playing ‘I Walk the Line’. It must be Maureen with news, though it was a bit soon. Instead of her sister-in-law, it was a woman she knew from her bridge club who lived in a flat in Traps Hill.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Helen.

  ‘It’s true. They’ve split up. Alan’s left her for someone else, I don’t know who. At his age! He must be seventy-five. But people don’t grow old like they used to, do they? I’ll let you know if I find out any more.’

  Stanley, with a very small glass of wine because he was driving, said, ‘What was all that about?’

  Helen told him.

  ‘Alan Norris? No, it can’t be. Him and Rosemary are the perfect couple. No, no, it must be someone else.’