‘Yes, of course.’
‘That’s a particularly ghastly situation. Two people in a relationship that’s founded on mutual fear. We were enormously attracted to each other and afraid to be alone together. I did go to his house once, I went to the back door and he wouldn’t let me in. He was afraid to let me in, Alan. “Don’t set foot in this house,” he said and I ran home.
‘It was a few weeks later he started a fire in the garden. I was home from school early and I saw him pour petrol on the wood he’d piled up. But it wasn’t only wood. There were two shapes in sacks – no plastic in those days. Two long shapes in sacks tied at the top with string. I watched him out of my bedroom window. The fire burnt down and John poured paraffin on more logs and the two things in the sacks. He fetched another can of petrol. I remember thinking he must be desperate to burn whatever that was because petrol was rationed and very hard to come by. It was after that that the fire got out of hand and spread to the shed and trees and someone called the firemen, probably several people did.’
Alan said, ‘You never told your mother about Winwood? I mean, what Winwood had done to you?’
‘I never did. You see, it wasn’t what he had done to me, it was what we did with each other. I know you’ll say I was only twelve but I’ve explained that. I was old for my age, years older.’
‘And now you are young for your age.’
She smiled, ‘Well, perhaps. You’ve seen what was in the papers and on television about those celebrities raping young girls and assaulting them. Some of them told their parents and they weren’t believed. I knew I wouldn’t be believed, and what would I have said? That I’d had sex – well, sort of sex – with the man next door? And that I’d enjoyed it? I don’t think so.’
She emptied her glass. ‘I needed that. I’ve never told anyone about John Winwood before.’ She put out a hand and took his. ‘You don’t mind, do you? About me doing that, I mean.’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Why would I?’
‘Some men would. I never spoke to John again. After the fire, I mean. I never saw him again except in the distance. He moved away somewhere and eventually he sold the house. I’ve told the police. About the fire, I mean, nothing about my – my relationship with John Winwood.’
Alan made supper, scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. Daphne drank water. He had a glass of wine and then another, hoping to deaden his feelings. ‘Drown your sorrows,’ people used to say. He hadn’t any sorrow or shock really. The emotion he felt he couldn’t define. He had told a lie and he minded about that. Daphne sat close to him and held his hand. She turned on the television, which he didn’t want, but he thought silence would be worse. And more explanations from her, more details, worse than silence.
The programme, which was the next instalment of a serial, came to an end. Daphne began to talk about their recent holiday, about walking along the broad top of the city wall of Lucca and about the Roman forum. They hadn’t taken many photographs and those they had they still had to print out from their mobile phones.
‘We’re neither of us great photographers, are we? Prefer to keep pictures of what we’ve seen in our memories, I suppose.’
‘That’s right,’ he said.
‘Something else we have in common, if you can have a negative something in common.’
‘Why not?’
They went to bed early. As he held her, one arm round her waist, he thought of her at twelve, a little girl in love with a film star lookalike. Waking three hours later, he murmured to himself in the dark, ‘My world has changed. Everything is changed.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
GIVING A SAMPLE of his DNA was almost the last thing Lewis Newman did before going off on his boat trip up the Danube. It was a cruise he and Jo had always intended to do, and then Jo fell ill, was ill for months before her death, and that kind of holiday was impossible. He missed Jo, but not as much as he told himself he ought to. Many a bereaved husband would have hesitated to take a trip that could only have reminded him that his wife should have been with him, but for Lewis that couldn’t be and he wasn’t going to let it spoil his cruise.
The trip was luxurious. He had a lovely cabin with en suite bathroom that the company called a stateroom, and on his second evening, when he approached his table as the ship was moving away from Bucharest, the organiser of the party came up to him and asked him if he would mind sharing his table with a lady passenger. She was travelling alone, as was he. Lewis didn’t much care for the idea, envisaging a plump, brightly painted blonde in a low-cut red dress. He had a rooted objection, almost a phobia, to the sight of cleavage on an elderly woman. He sat at his table and got to his feet almost immediately when a pretty sixty-year-old came up to him a little shyly. She was slender and nearly as tall as he, and the dress she wore, quite high-necked pink wool, showed off a neat figure.
They shook hands.
‘Melissa,’ she said.
‘Lewis.’
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said, ‘but I saw your name in the paper when they dug up that ghastly box with the hands. There was a piece in the Standard about the people who were children in Loughton when the box was put there. I grew up in Loughton myself, though I was – well, a bit younger. So I thought it would be nice to meet an old Loughton person – oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you were old.’
He laughed. ‘I’m delighted.’
Two days later, going ashore in Budapest, they were not only eating together but walking together when the party went sightseeing. Instead of returning to the ship for dinner, they dined at a restaurant in Vienna on their last evening. They had discovered that they lived not far from each other in London, he in Ealing and she in Chiswick. There was no end to the coincidences. Both were widowed, her dead husband had been a GP as Lewis had been. As a child she had lived with her parents in Tycehurst Hill. Phone numbers were exchanged and an arrangement made to have lunch and pay a visit to Kew Gardens, where Melissa had never been. Lewis felt positively happy when he let himself into his house and picked up the heap of correspondence from the front doormat.
He hadn’t thought about the DNA sample all the time he was away and now, remembering, he saw there was nothing from Caroline Inshaw. His head full of Melissa Landon, he wasn’t much interested in the hands in the box and what had happened sixty years ago, except that those hands had brought him and Melissa together. The letters were mostly bills, but there was one with an Australian stamp. He set it aside, paid one of the bills and marvelled at another printed in scarlet and threatening him with the steps that would be taken if he kept them waiting any longer for their payment. The money was only three days overdue. Let them wait a little longer.
He had never been one of those people who study the appearance of a letter and the mysterious handwriting of the sender before opening it, but then he seldom heard from previously unknown people. Studying this one told him nothing. He sat down in an armchair and opened it. The address was Perth, the sender a woman called Noreen Leopold, who in the first line introduced herself as his cousin. Lewis immediately thought this must be nonsense as he had no cousins, but he read on, at first disbelieving, then astonished.
Noreen continued, I am coming to Britain in the spring, March, I think, and hope to meet you as you are the only cousin I have. You may possibly remember my dad, Jimmy Rayment, who died twenty years ago. He came here and settled at the end of the 1939–1945 war, married my mum Betty and later became the father of five children with her. I am one of them. My dad was always going to get in touch with you but never got around to it.
Here, Lewis laid down the letter and marvelled some more. James, Uncle James, had been living in a distant part of the world, as his mother always thought he might have. He had lived all those years in Perth and had all those children. Lewis picked up the letter again and read to the end. Let me have a line from you. My email address is [email protected]. I would really like us to meet and have a chat about your parents and mine. Your cousin, Noreen.
He would have to tell people. The police perhaps. Those others he had been in the tunnels with. He would think about it and decide what to do next. He read the letter again, went into the kitchen to make himself tea, thought better of it and poured himself quite a stiff whisky instead. What he really wanted was someone to tell about this and ask their advice. There was no one. His life had been quite solitary since Jo died. Well, there was one. He would sleep on it, wait till morning and then he would phone Melissa.
Rosemary bought some pink wool and began knitting a jumper. It wasn’t for Sybilla or Callum or the new baby but for herself. She had finished the dress she had started once she got back from Freya’s and was wearing it when she went up to London in the tube. She had made few shopping trips to Oxford Street or Knightsbridge because Alan disliked shopping, like most men. While she tried on clothes, he sat on a chair provided by the assistant, apparently stunned by boredom and half asleep. Or else he waited outside, standing in the doorway or finding a seat to sit on while he dozed. This first trip since his departure she made alone, walking along Oxford Street to Selfridge’s and buying herself a pair of shoes and a handbag. She had all the time in the world and shopped slowly, choosing what she wanted as she had never done since she was a young girl. Then she walked to Regent Street and asked a taxi driver to take her to the Queen’s Theatre, where Les Miserables was showing. She had always wanted to see it but Alan never would.
The theatre was open for a matinee. She walked in, feeling suddenly shy and frightened, but made herself go up to the window inside which a girl sat and ask, wondering if she was making a fool of herself, for a seat in the stalls for the evening performance on Friday. Not a fool apparently. It all went through without a hitch and she had her ticket. Back now to the shops, but perhaps a walk round Trafalgar Square first. She found a place to eat lunch and again she wasn’t making a fool of herself. With her food she had a glass of wine and afterwards thought, why not take a taxi up to Holborn and go home from there? So she did and reached home in triumph. It had been good, it had been fun. And the shoes and bag were lovely. She sat down by the phone and phoned her daughter, her son and both her grandchildren, telling them all about her lovely day and learning that her new grandson’s name was Clement.
I have grown, she told herself, and I am still growing.
‘Why not come to me,’ said Melissa, ‘and I’ll cook something. I’d like to.’
So he went. Her house in a street off Chiswick High Street was nothing to look at outside but charming inside, with large elegant rooms and a pretty garden. She had made a salad and a rich hot paella. Lewis told her about the hands in the box and the group of people who had been in the tunnels, Michael Winwood and his mother and father and, of course, the letter from Noreen Leopold.
‘What do you want to do?’ Melissa asked.
‘I don’t know. Nothing, I suppose. But I have to answer her letter, and when I answer it I have to tell her about all of it. Or do I?’
‘Not necessarily. But I think you have to tell the others and the police. You all thought the hands were Michael Winwood’s mother’s and your uncle’s, but they obviously weren’t. Hers maybe but not your uncle’s. Whose was the other hand?’
‘I don’t know. No one can know.’
‘Surely Michael’s father knows and he’s still alive, isn’t he?’
‘I believe so,’ said Lewis. ‘Should I tell Michael first, do you think?’
She said he should. And quickly, perhaps as soon as he got home. ‘People who live to a hundred are always more or less at death’s door, aren’t they?’
Before making that phone call, Lewis sent Noreen Leopold an email. He told her to get in touch with him in March and that he would like to see her when she was here. The hands were not mentioned. They could talk about them, if necessary, when she came. He sat at his desk for quite a long time before dialling Michael’s number, even thinking that he need do nothing before Noreen’s visit. But it was too late for that now that he had consulted Melissa. He must phone and it would be best to get it over.
The room was very warm. Michael had come because Urban Grange had asked him to, telling him that his father had been unwell the evening before. They had hesitated and nearly sent for him at seven p.m., but the old man had rallied, had got up and shifted himself into an armchair. Some weeks before, John Winwood had asked Darren to buy him a print of ‘some famous picture’ and have it framed. This had been done, and it was bringing it to his room and showing it to him that occasioned the fast improvement in his health. This morning, Imogen said, Mr Winwood was a lot better but they still thought Michael might wish to come, as his father was so very old and it was impossible to tell how long he might last.
So Michael was there, disliking his father rather more than he had since his visits began after his aunt’s death. This feeling was exacerbated by the sight of the famous picture, a print of Dürer’s praying hands. The nursing home staff might, in their innocence, believe that John Winwood had bought it just because he happened to like the picture, but Michael knew very well that it was there, hanging up on the wall, because of the hands in the biscuit tin and what his father had done.
‘Like it?’
This was the first thing John Winwood said after their tea had been brought. Michael didn’t answer.
‘You always were sulky, a very sullen child.’ His father picked up the plate of biscuits but in trying to pass it to Michael, dropped it, scattering biscuits, bits of biscuits and crumbs on the floor. ‘Leave it,’ he said when Michael knelt down and tried to restore the fragments to the plate. ‘Let them pick it up. That’s what they’re paid for.’
Michael had meant to ask his father about the hands in the box, but since reaching that decision he’d realised he didn’t know who they belonged to. One was his mother’s? He didn’t really know that. Now that he had been told that James Rayment had died only about twenty years before, he didn’t know whose the man’s hand was either. Coming to Urban Grange had been pointless. He sat on, drinking his tea, then refilling their cups. His father left his standing there. He had leant his head back, closed his eyes and appeared to be fast asleep. Michael looked at the crumbs and the broken biscuits and left them there. He too closed his eyes, thought for a while about his children, so remote from him, as if they were not his at all, then about Vivien, so good, so loving, his treasure.
He still had his eyes shut when someone came in to take the tray. He heard her click her tongue, exasperated no doubt by the mess. Once she had gone, he sat up and looked at his father across the empty table. The older eyes opened. John Winwood said, ‘I’m not long for this world.’
Michael thought of telling him not to say that or to cheer up and be more hopeful. He didn’t. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said instead. ‘It won’t be long.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SEVERAL ATTEMPTS THAT Michael made to speak to Alan received no reply. Sometimes when a discussion seems the only course to take but efforts to secure that meeting repeatedly fail, the need for it grows less and less until it no longer looks important. Michael made one last attempt, and this time Alan answered. He had seemed a pleasant and thoughtful man to Michael since they had met at George Batchelor’s house after so many years, but his tone this time, if not exactly gloomy, was detached and preoccupied. Yes, they could meet, Alan said, but not in Hamilton Terrace, as he described Daphne’s house without using her name. He named a pub in Hampstead within walking distance of Michael’s house.
That tone in his voice was such as to make Michael wonder if he was speaking to the same man. Of course he was. But hadn’t he wondered something like that when he encountered Alan at Daphne’s house a couple of months after that first meeting? This happy man who looked years younger? No longer, he felt, without seeing him. He walked past one of the turnings leading out of the Finchley Road. A clear, fine evening, rather cold under that sky, it was still early, so that few people were in the pub. Michael watched Alan come in. He looked no
older but a tired man, a disappointed man. The thought came to Michael that if you couldn’t be with the person you loved and who loved you, to be alone was best. He asked Alan what he would like and fetched him beer and himself a glass of white wine.
They asked after each other’s health. Both were well, though Alan didn’t look it. ‘You must have been wondering who put the hands in the box,’ Michael said.
‘I have no idea. How could I have? Does anyone?’
Michael said, ‘I think the police know but they haven’t told me. I also know and I haven’t told them. I know whose the hands were, or rather I know whose they were not. You remember Lewis Newman?’ Alan nodded. ‘He phoned me and told me the man’s hand wasn’t that of a man called James Rayment who was his mother’s brother.’
‘Did you think it was?’
‘I had no reason to think so.’ Michael winced a little, wrinkling his nose and widening his mouth. ‘The other hand was that of my mother, you see.’ He spread his own left hand on the tabletop. ‘One doesn’t like thinking things of that sort of one’s mother.’
‘I imagine not.’
‘You see, she was my mother. Before I was born, for nine months I was carried inside her body. I don’t like to think of it.’
The Girl Next Door Page 23