The shortest day had come and gone. Sitting in the train, Alan thought about that day when Rosemary had come to Daphne’s house. She had fallen half across the table and knocked over a glass of wine. Then she had said she hated him but he knew she loved him. That was why she had come, to try to get him back. Now, once he was at home, he would make a great effort at being a good husband. It was a long time since he had told her he loved her, and that was something women of all ages wanted to hear. It was a long time since he had bought her anything or taken her anywhere except to one of those cheap restaurants in the High Road. Well, he could remedy that, it was hardly a difficult task. You could control what passed through your mind, especially when you were old. He didn’t want to think of Daphne, yet he remembered how not long ago he could think of nothing and no one else. This was a young man’s behaviour, but he was old, old as the hills.
Seven thirty. Dark as pitch but a moon had appeared and a taxi was waiting outside the station. The driver got out, picked up his case and put it in the back. Loughton was a very nice place. It had always surprised Alan that though it was on the edge of Epping Forest, had some beautiful old buildings, was richly endowed with ancient trees, had a tube station and a bus route passing along its high road, it had never taken its place in the limited category of lovely London suburbs. Hampstead, Highgate, Chigwell, Dulwich. Really, the block of flats where he lived – had lived and would again – was one of those beautiful buildings, built half a dozen years ago when architecture was restored to its former glory. He gave the driver a large tip and got his suitcase carried into the entrance hall.
Lights were on in the flat. He saw that before he stepped out of the lift into the first-floor hallway. The suitcase dropped on to the floor and his finger touched the bell. He had to ring it again, and then she answered.
‘Rosemary,’ he said. ‘Rosie.’
She looked at the case. She looked up at him. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Oh, come on, Rosie. I do live here.’
‘You did. Not any longer. I’m going to have my supper. Good night.’
She closed the door in his face. He rang the bell again and again. The light in the hall was turned off. He picked up the case and went down in the lift. Outside again, he looked up and saw that the lights in the flat were all off too. What had he done with his key? Put it in one of the pockets of his suitcase and never touched it since. On a wooden seat in Traps Hill he set the case down and opened it. No key. He was putting clothes and shoes back when he remembered that this was the new case. The key was still in the old case he had brought with him to Daphne’s.
It was very cold and a white frost was showing on the tops of garden walls. He sat down on the seat where he had put the case and tried to think what to do. Find a hotel? Go to a friend?
If he could find a friend, perhaps he could go to Rosemary in the morning and explain that he had come back, that this was permanent, their separation was over. He got out his phone, called Maureen and was told not very warmly that he could come to Carisbrooke if he liked, but only for the one night. The suitcase was very heavy. He trudged across the High Road and began the climb up York Hill. Loughton, at only ten minutes to eight, was empty. The only people who were ever about on a weekday evening were teenagers in hoods, loafing about in doorways smoking and carrying drinks cans. ‘Lost your way, Grandad?’ one of them called out to him. Alan wondered why he had ever thought it a desirable place to live.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
EVERYTHING STOPS FOR Christmas. Daphne flew to Seville on 22 December and stayed at the Alfonso XIII hotel, accepting a friend’s invitation to Christmas dinner. Melissa’s daughters came home (as they called it, though they hadn’t lived there for years) and Lewis stayed, living in a dream, appreciating how nice everyone was to him and going out the day before Christmas Eve to buy presents for all. Michael took a call from Urban Grange that told him his father had had another bad turn and perhaps he would feel like coming. He went, found his father up, eating a large meal, and went home to phone Caroline Inshaw and say that if she wanted to talk to John Winwood, they should not delay it much longer.
It seemed absurd. John Winwood was close on a hundred years old. He could die not any day but any minute. If only he would, thought Michael. It would be best for him, best for everyone and for peace and quiet. Michael’s children came home for Christmas as they always did. Jane began phoning him a week before, promising him a turkey, ‘all the veg you could possibly want, Dad’, some presents that were really ‘way out’. Richard also phoned. He would stay just Christmas Day and the night and then be off to Seattle to attend a conference that would begin next day. Michael went out and bought each of them an iPod because it was easy and quick. He dialled Daphne’s number on Christmas evening and got a message that said, ‘Alan and I are no longer together. I am in Spain until January second.’
Christmas is often mild and damp in London. A sluggish rain fell. Richard left for Seattle, having spent the previous afternoon loading all the music he could find in his father’s house on to the new iPod. He seemed enraptured by it. Jane, on the other hand, repeatedly said she would never learn how to work hers. She loved it, Dad was so clever to think of it, but she was so hopeless she would never even get it out of its box, let alone make it play music. Michael thought there must be something wrong with him that he was relieved when his children left.
His father didn’t die. On the morning of 10 January, he asked himself if he should buy him a birthday present and immediately castigated himself for being so stupid. He had last given him a present at Christmas 1943. His mother had bought it and he could no longer remember what it had been. She had thrust it in his hands and left him to do the impossible, wrap it up.
He was due to meet Caroline Inshaw at Urban Grange at ten a.m. He got there at twenty to, and as he noted the time, it occurred to him that no one said that any more, no one had said it for years; people said nine forty instead. Caroline walked in at five to ten – there, he was doing it again – and they went along the passage to John Winwood’s room. Michael had arranged this visit with his father, so they were expected. He knocked at the door, he didn’t know why, he never had before, and immediately thought himself stupid. There was no response, so he walked in feeling sick.
Dürer’s hands were up on the wall, but they had been moved to the prime place for showing off anything in that room. Sitting up in bed, sitting in the best armchair, walking to the bathroom, John Winwood could see that picture and, for all Michael knew, be amused by it. At present, his father sat in that best armchair, dressed in obviously new clothes. He must have had some member of Urban Grange staff go out and buy them for him. Michael wondered what Darren or one of the other carers (would you call them that?) had thought about being requested to find and purchase dark blue trousers and a tunic top patterned in scarlet and white with a high collar to enclose his neck. Red, yellow and silver trainers were on his feet. Caroline Inshaw was staring at him.
‘Good morning, Mr Winwood,’ she said. ‘How are you today?’
His father began to laugh. ‘Much as usual. What can I do for you? I don’t know why I ask. I know already. Ask away.’
‘I would like you to tell me if you are aware of what I’m talking about when I ask you about a tin box containing a man’s hand and a woman’s hand and dating from about the year nineteen forty-four.’
John Winwood sighed. ‘You’re a very good-looking woman. Seems a pity you have to spend your time talking about severed hands and buried boxes.’
Michael saw a flush mount into her face. ‘Mr Winwood, would you answer the question, please?’
‘Yes, I am aware. I put the hands in that box. I cut them off. I must have had a reason but I’ve forgotten what it was. The woman’s hand was my wife’s, the man’s a chap called Johnson, Clifford Johnson, who was her lover. I couldn’t have that, could I?’ He looked pleased with himself, supremely contented. ‘I found them in bed. I strangled him first because if I’d kill
ed her first he might have killed me. Then I killed her and cut off their hands. I said I don’t remember why; just for fun, I suppose.’
Caroline said, ‘Mr Winwood, is this true or is it some sort of joke?’
‘You mean you find it funny? Well, there is no accounting for tastes. I turned a bunch of kids out of the foundations of a house, including my son there, and once I was alone, I buried the box in a place where I thought no one would find it for years. And I was right. Shall I go on?’
‘Yes please.’
‘I got rid of him after that. Had him sent down to my cousin Zoe, a soft, sentimental woman who couldn’t have kids of her own. My wife was dead. I sold the house as soon as the war was over and married again. No one asked any questions. I said I was a widower, which was true, and they accepted it. I married a woman called Margaret Lewis. Her husband had been killed in the war, in north Africa, in a place called Mersa Matruh, and he left her a house, a great big place, and a mint of money, never mind how much. A hundred thousand was a hell of a lot in those days. Everyone accepted that I was madly in love with her. It was as easy as falling off a horse.
‘It was my looks that got her. I was very good-looking in those days, it gets them every time.’ He stared searchingly at Caroline Inshaw. ‘With your looks you want to remember that,’ he said. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. I always did. I haven’t worked since I was twenty-three. Then a doctor told me I had a heart murmur. What happened to that? I wonder. Anyway, Margaret lived a long time, died at last, nothing to do with me. I married another rich woman, even richer, called Sheila Fraser. All the interests she had were nothing to me. I never cared about butterflies or – what are they called? The things that eat clothes? – moths. Wildlife, trees, that sort of thing. I couldn’t stand hearing her talk about leaves and fishes and otters and whatever while we were having dinner. She died – that was something to do with me but we needn’t go into that. I was by then a lovely old gentleman, that was what people called me. I didn’t want to live alone any more, so I found the best place in this country to be looked after in. That was here and I’ve been here ever since. I sold the house, I’ve still got plenty of money. It’ll last me out. And when I go, the hedgehogs will have it. Who would have thought I’d live to be a hundred – well, nearly a hundred. Are you going to charge me?’
He suddenly looked much younger. Eighty was hardly young, but just then he could have been taken for eighty.
‘I am. But I want to talk to you some more. I have questions to ask you. I should like you to have a lawyer with you. Are you able to come to London with me? Now, preferably.’
‘I haven’t been out of here for eighteen years. I used to go out. I had a girlfriend in the village and I used to visit her. Those were the days.There’s an old song my mother used to sing, about when he thinks he’s past love, ’tis then he meets his last love. Those were the days.’ He had sung the lines of the song, and now his voice cracked. ‘I don’t think I can go to London,’ he said. ‘It’s too far. I must think. Michael, pass me that glass of water that’s on the bedside table.’
Michael’s legs felt as if they wouldn’t move. They were heavy, as if made of stone. His father growled, ‘I said pass me that glass of water. Come on, look sharp. I don’t want to have to ask the lady, do I?’
Michael managed to lift himself on to his feet, felt he would overbalance but didn’t. Swaying a little, he made his way to the table, picked up the glass and carried it to his father. John Winwood’s eyes were on him, an unflinching stare. Michael turned away, sat down again, but instead of looking once more at his father, turned his eyes down to his hands, which lay in his lap. The room was silent, and then Caroline made a sound, a little gasp. Michael looked up. His father was drinking water out of the glass, not only drinking it but swallowing something.
‘Lock the door,’ John Winwood said. He had a small bottle in his hand.
Michael said, ‘I don’t . . . I can’t . . .’
‘Too late. It’s too late now.’
The bottle dropped out of his father’s hand, fell on to the carpet and rolled an inch or two. The almost hundred-year-old man slumped over the arm of his chair, his face contorted. He began to choke, a dreadful rasping yet liquid sound. Caroline jumped to her feet. Michael flung open the door and cried out, ‘Is anyone there? Come here. We need help.’
Darren came quickly, then Imogen, then a man Michael had never seen before. It had all taken five minutes and it was too late now. The man, who was a doctor said, ‘What did he take?’
‘He told me it was cyanide. He had it with him when he came to live here. I didn’t believe him. I should have believed him.’
The doctor asked Imogen to take Michael and Caroline Inshaw downstairs. He would come to them in ten minutes. They were shown into the austere pale grey room. Neither of them said a word but sat down in silence and waited.
The doctor came in a little before the ten minutes were up. Michael liked him better than Stefani. ‘The autopsy will show,’ said the doctor, ‘but what he took was aspirin. Death from cyanide would look quite different.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘It was probably a heart attack.’
‘So it had nothing to do with the pill he swallowed?’ Caroline Inshaw sounded disappointed but was very likely only shocked.
‘Nothing,’ said the doctor. ‘It wasn’t the first heart attack he’d had but it was the last.’
Michael said, ‘He thought he’d had a heart murmur since he was young,’ but no one took any notice.
Though very ill and not expected to live, Norman Batchelor had survived, seemed very well and came to see his brother Stanley, because it was now he whose life was likely at an end. He had pancreatic cancer and there was very little could be done for him. Stanley often spent the day in bed, and he was in bed with Spot lying beside him when Norman arrived. John Winwood’s death was announced in a tiny item in the newspaper because he was only a few days short of a hundred. Stanley saw it in the Mirror but Helen had read it first and Norman told him all over again.
Norman ate heartily of Helen’s cooking. He had thought that Stanley would have passed away before 5 January, when he had a seat booked back to France on the Eurostar, but things had worked out differently. He was sitting on Stanley’s bed, though he had been asked by both Stanley and Helen not to do so, and when he got to his feet to fetch himself a cup of tea, he was assailed by the worst pain he had ever known. Clasping his left arm with his right hand, he was doubled up by pain. His legs gave way, he groaned and fell to the floor. Spot barked and ran downstairs, Helen came running up, but nothing could be done. It was another instance of too-lateness. Norman was dead. Stanley swore later that the last thing he said before he died was that he had been born on the kitchen table.
When it got to Twelfth Night or some such time-honoured day soon after Christmas, Lewis told Melissa that he must go home. Everyone else had left and he should go too. ‘Why?’ said Melissa. ‘No need to go unless you’ve something important to do at home.’
‘Well, I haven’t. No, I haven’t.’
He stayed. That night he moved from the bedroom he had been sleeping in since Christmas Eve to her bedroom. In March, Noreen Leopold phoned and he was told to invite her to Chiswick. Noreen, who was a quiet, rather sentimental woman, told them they were so romantic, it went straight to her heart. She told Lewis that James Rayment had been turned down by Anita Winwood. Lewis would have liked to know if his uncle had had a proper love affair with Anita, but Noreen was the kind of woman who would have been considered very old-fashioned if she had been living in London, and said when he asked that she wouldn’t know about things like that. He was her father, he wouldn’t have mentioned something like that to her. He did say he was glad she had refused to go off with him because if she had he’d never have met the very sweet lady who became their mother.
Noreen referred to James as an engineer. More like a motor mechanic, Lewis thought. Still, he’d done well, started his own business and reared a flou
rishing family. ‘He often talked about you,’ said Noreen. ‘Said you were the only one of his British relations he missed.’
Lewis thought that was a bit mean considering James had had a room in his parents’ house for months in 1944 and used it – he was thinking of the goings-on in the air-raid shelter – in a way you couldn’t use a hotel in those days, all rent-free. Still, he liked Noreen and once she was safely back in her Tottenham Court Road hotel, he and Melissa took her about to see all sorts of sights: the Tower of London, the National Gallery, Madame Tussaud’s – they were the oldest people there – Harrods (twice) and first class on the train to Brighton. After that, Noreen went on a five-day tour to Cornwall and Lewis and Melissa got married.
Stanley Batchelor died in St Margaret’s Hospital seven days after his brother Norman. ‘That makes two more widows,’ said Maureen briskly. She wasn’t sorry to find a sister-in-law sharing her plight. The family survivors all met at Stanley’s funeral. Old people attend funerals far more than younger ones. You would suppose that such rituals would be too near the bone for the elderly, but it appears not to be so. Perhaps they go because funerals are so personal to them. They have experienced many of them, they know all about the way these things go. There are no surprises.
As well as Maureen and Helen, Lewis was also at Stanley’s funeral, with his new wife Melissa. Everybody stared at her and pretended to be looking at some piece of decoration on the walls of St Mary’s. The men’s verdict was that old Lewis had done well for himself and the women’s that Melissa had had at least one facelift. Michael turned up, a rather unexpected guest. His father had died in his care home and in Michael’s presence, everyone knew that, and to some people his appearance seemed in bad taste. How did he know about the funeral? No one found out. The answer was that Maureen had phoned and told him. Daphne didn’t attend. Alan would very likely be there and it might be awkward for both of them to meet on such an occasion.
The Girl Next Door Page 25