The Girl Next Door: A Novel

by Ruth Rendell

  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 the 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 have built his own house, a house for himself, but he had 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, Granddad,” 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 had 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 them to his grandfather, not knowing—not believing such a thing possible—that Harry Newman, with the exception of a few 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 good air-raid shelter, and when it began to look as if Loughton would be bombed and the sirens went off 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, only a small “episode.” Lewis the doctor now supposed it had been 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. He had been staying in Brook Road for his last months and had now freed up a room 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 very much. Loughton was boring, there was nothing to do. The East End of London where he 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 was glad when he “changed his tune” as Lewis’s mother put it and decided to stay on. He said 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 exactly when 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 he wondered if James 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 James 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 1944, the qanats summer, then 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’d 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 “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. 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 Lewis knew nothing about how Norman got inside Mrs. Batchelor. For years he had never thought about what he had seen 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. An air-raid warning the night before had lasted only a short time, but they didn’t know that it would 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. Lewis couldn’t see the woman’s face and 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.

  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 1940s.” 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 reverting to 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.”

  8

  ABOUT A YEAR after Vivien’s death, Michael gave up his car. He had only had a car to take her about in it, she and her wheelchair. He 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. His only purpose in keeping the car had be
come to drive himself to Lewes to see Zoe. The car 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 come at first as part of the deal, but then 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 whom he had never called aunt, 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 summer 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 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, whom no one called Woody anymore, went upstairs and started singing “Abide with Me.” Michael didn’t much trust his father, he had no reason to, but he did think his father 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. His father 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 “the boy didn’t get into mischief.” Then Michael’s father 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 Michael. That train journey, rain streaming down the carriage windows, cold weather for October, 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 existed on a train. A lady he would and did 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, then they went in a car to Zoe’s 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 all the things he liked to do and eat and play with, that he thought at first it was some kind of game she was playing, 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 his and Babette’s case, 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.

  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 that 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 forty-nine seemed young to him. Breast cancer. 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 because (or so Michael thought) they associated Ingham Road with their mother. They never went up to the third 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, 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, rich, and her death made him a rich man. Michael met Sheila once on one of the rare oc
casions he and his father encountered each other and 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 Sheila died, she 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 associates with such places, but a luxurious refuge comparable to a 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 a solicitor, partner in a law firm on the Finchley Road, and married to Babette. 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 on by nicely dressed young women who looked very unlike nurses, doctors who looked like businessmen, cooked for by a chef who also wrote culinary features for a glossy magazine, and with colour TVs and Jacuzzis in en suite bathrooms. He barely listened until she suggested they have his father 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 Michael she had heard from Urban Grange that his father was ill and near to death, though, he realised he had better go up to Norfolk to see him, but 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 was never interested enough to ask Zoe. When he was a child, parents went to great length 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.