The Girl Next Door: A Novel

by Ruth Rendell

  The doorbell rang. It was two minutes to three.

  THEY KNEW EACH OTHER, of course. You could say they had known each other all their lives. Daphne said, “Rosemary.” That was all, just the given name.

  Rosemary said, “Good afternoon.”

  Judith introduced herself. Neither she nor her mother spoke to Alan, but they sat down side by side on the sofa when Daphne asked them to. That was all anyone said for perhaps two minutes, a very long time. Judith, the intermediary, broke the silence and said, “I think my mother would like you, Dad, and Mrs. Furness to tell us what you intend to do.” Judith tried to smile but it turned into a grimace. “If anything.” Rosemary was fidgeting with her handbag, lifting it from one side of her and transferring it to the other, shoving it between her left arm and the arm of the sofa. She held tightly to it by its strap and the zip which held it closed. “Or what you intend to do, Mother.”

  Another silence, during which Judith wondered why her mother had brought with her what was probably the largest handbag she possessed, and then Rosemary said, “I don’t intend to do anything. I’m alone, my husband has been taken from me, and I want him back.” She said to Alan, not for the first time, “You’ve broken my heart. It can be mended if you do what you ought to do and come back to me. Leave that woman and come back.”

  “I don’t much care to have this conversation in front of my daughter,” said Alan.

  “Too bad. I’m not leaving.” Judith looked at Daphne for the first time. “Can I have a cup of tea? Can we all have tea?”

  Without replying, Daphne stood up and poured tea into Judith’s cup and Alan’s and her own, Rosemary having covered hers with her hand, like someone preventing the refilling of a wineglass. The milk jug was passed silently between Alan and his daughter. Daphne passed them the meringues.

  “Haven’t you anything to say to me?”

  Alan looked at his wife. “I’m not coming back, Rosemary. I’ve told you many times. I’ve no fault to find with you—sorry, that’s a horrible way to put it. I expect you have faults to find with me. We no longer get on. I want to live with someone I get on with.”

  “And that applies to her?”

  “You know it does.”

  Rosemary moved the bag onto her lap. “And all those years you spent with me mean nothing?”

  “They mean a lot. They meant a lot. We have shared our home, we have two children. It’s over now. It’s over for a lot of couples as we’ve seen among our friends. They break up, earlier than it is for us, but eventually we are doing it too. I will make it as easy for you as I can, I will help you to get used to it, even one day to think it’s for the best.”

  “If that’s all you’ve got to say, I’ll ask her.” Rosemary swung round and fixed her eyes on Daphne. “One good thing, everyone that knows us, all his friends, side with me. More than that, they’ve come to hate him. Their sympathy is all for me, they’ve shown me what friends are. But just the same, they want him to come back and then they’ll return to him. We’ll be as we used to be. Do you understand?” Daphne said nothing, she gave a small nod. “I don’t know what he sees in you. You were never specially good-looking and you haven’t improved. Who has? You’ve apparently got a lot of money.” Rosemary waved a hand round the room. “But he’s not badly off himself. When he retired, he got a big golden handshake and he’s got a huge pension. You’re no chicken, you’re older than him and me. I suppose he wanted a change. Was that it? So will you give him up, send him back to me? Will you let him come home with me? Come back with me now, back to his home? Will you?”

  Rosemary had seemed perfectly calm, but as she spoke the last two words, she snatched up a cup from the table and hurled it across the room. It struck a painting on the wall and shattered. Another followed it.

  “Stop that, Rosemary,” said Alan.

  “I’ll break the place up until she answers me. Will you give my husband back to me, Daphne whatever your name is? You’ve changed it often enough.”

  “No,” said Daphne in a voice of ice. “I don’t want him to go, but he must do as he chooses, go or stay.” If she had left it there, all might have been more or less well, but she didn’t. “I love him. I love him and want to keep him here with me.”

  Rosemary stood up. She unzipped her handbag, and at once Judith knew why Rosemary had brought such a big one. From its depths she took a long knife, the carving kind that has a thin blade and a point on its end. She held it like a dagger, blade pointing down. People think they know about such events, they see them happening day after day on film and television, on computer screens and mobile phones. Reality is different. No one moved, but Daphne, who took a step backwards, and then Alan. He tried to seize Rosemary by the shoulders but she spun round, slashing at him and cutting the palm of his hand. Blood splashed, more than could be expected from a cut palm. Rosemary spun round and stabbed at Daphne, stabbing vainly at the air, at her hair, and grazing her neck. Rosemary pulled the knife back and plunged it at Daphne’s chest just where her heart must be. The vulgar jacket, armoured with studs, deflected the blade before it could penetrate. Alan seized Daphne, pulling her back, forcing her behind him. The knife, still in Rosemary’s hand, slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor.

  ALAN WAS HURT the most. Judith called 999 for an ambulance. She picked up the knife and wiped the trace of her father’s blood off the blade. With great presence of mind she fetched a fruit-and-nut loaf from Daphne’s kitchen, with butter and a pot of jam. When the paramedics came, they encountered a happy family gathering, and if their smiles were strained and Rosemary was shivering, no one seemed to notice. Judith explained that her father had been cutting bread. No one remarked on the unsuitability of the knife for this, and Alan’s request not to be taken to hospital but have his wound dressed on the spot was reluctantly agreed to. Alan agreed to go to the hospital and have the wound checked the following day, but he had no intention of doing so.

  “EVEN IF I’D driven you here,” said Judith, “I wouldn’t feel up to driving back. Do you have a taxi number?”

  Daphne gave her a number to call. Daphne didn’t speak. She had picked up the broken pieces of the cups and removed the life-saving jacket. Because it was turning cold, she wrapped a shawl round herself and put on the central heating. Judith said to her father, “Have you got any drink? I could use a brandy, and come to that, so could Mum.”

  “I suppose so.”

  It was fetched. Daphne fetched herself and Alan a glass of wine each, a gesture of possession not lost on Rosemary. She began to cry, mopping up her tears with a couple of the paper table napkins, put out with the tea things.

  “I’ll stay the night with you, Mum.”

  “Do as you like,” said Rosemary. “Nothing matters anymore.”

  The taxi came and took them away. Alan and Daphne, who hadn’t stirred from their seats since Daphne fetched their wine, now rose simultaneously, threw their arms round each other, and sank onto the sofa.

  17

  ONE MORE VISIT was paid to Clara Moss before Michael went to Urban Grange. This time he was admitted to the house in Forest Road not by the red-haired Sam but by a much older woman, who introduced herself as “Mrs. Next-Door.” Clara was in bed. She hadn’t felt like getting up, she said. He had heard this phrase before, used by old people coming to the end of their lives. Zoe had said it before she was taken to the hospital, and he remembered hearing it from Vivien’s mother in her last days.

  “I don’t know why, dear,” said Clara, “but I just didn’t feel like getting up.” He had brought her a box of chocolates and they seemed to bring her inordinate pleasure. “I’ll have just one a day, make them last.”

  “I’ll bring you some more. I’ll come over and see Mrs. Batchelor in a week or two and bring you a bigger box. Then they’ll last longer.”

  “How’s your dad?”

  “Going strong. I’m going to s
ee him next week.” Now he would have to, there would be no escape. Her eyes had closed and her head turned a little away, but she put out her hand as if feeling for his. He took the hand and held it lightly, sensing that she would prefer this to a firmer clasp. After a minute or two her hand slackened and her breathing grew regular. She was asleep.

  “Sam and me,” said Mrs. Next-Door, “we’ll be in every day, take it in turns. She isn’t long for this world.”

  “Ring me. I’ll give you my phone number.”

  It wouldn’t be a week or two, he thought, recalling his words, but not so long. Then he thought, I’d never have met Clara Moss again but for those hands. Finding those hands brought me to her and her to me.

  ABSURD FOR A man of his age to be so nervous. No, worse than that: so frightened. The train took him to Ipswich. He had never been there before, and he found the town—city?—unprepossessing. But the country around, seen from a station taxi, was beautiful. Years ago he and Vivien had spent a weekend at a hotel in Southwold, a long way up the coast. Here it was all green fields and woods, each village they passed through with its own pretty church and in some cases a big Georgian house that these days newspapers called mansions. The biggest, at the end of a long avenue of trees Michael didn’t know the name of, the taxi driver introduced him to as Urban Grange. The day was bright but with a cold wind blowing, and the old man being wheeled across the lawn that the drive bisected was wrapped in blankets and swathed in a duvet. Michael thought with a sinking heart, Maybe that’s him. How can I tell? The driver enlightened him.

  “See that old guy as looks as if he’s still in bed? He’s been here since it started twenty years ago. Like the oldest inhabitant, aged ninety-eight.”

  Not the oldest, thought Michael, but he didn’t say so. The receptionist he recognised by her voice. Next time, if there was a next time, he would recognise her by her looks. She was a beauty with waist-length, blond hair, in a white dress as unlike a nurse’s uniform as could be imagined. Her name, it said, above the left breast, was Imogen. He felt like asking how her inquilines were, but thought he had better not.

  “Mr. Winwood expects you, Mr. Winwood.” She picked up the phone. “Darren will take you along to the principal garden apartment.”

  “I expect I can find it.”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Winwood. We never expect our visitors to go unescorted.”

  Darren, whom she made sound a boy of sixteen, was a middle-aged man dressed like a butler and wearing some kind of insignia round his neck. Following him along a corridor whose windows showed lavish gardens, Michael had lost his fear. It had been the same when he was young. You were afraid, and often badly afraid, two or three weeks ahead of the looming event, but when the time was at hand, the fear receded until what remained was only curiosity.

  John Winwood looked old. He looked about as old as a human being could ever get to be, like bones in a bag of skin. No hair remained on his head but a white wisp above each ear. It was warm in Urban Grange and, it seemed to Michael, even warmer in this room, and his father was wearing—of all things at his age—a short-sleeved tee-shirt, which showed forearms where the skin looked more pleated than wrinkled. He sat in a luxurious velvet armchair of a rich coral colour with a matching footrest on which his feet, in espadrilles, stretched out. But the tee-shirt was what shocked Michael. Everything else was more or less what he expected: the jeans that were casual wear for everyone of any age, the tiny gold nodule under his ear that was a deaf aid, the yellow claws that were his fingernails, the pallor of his face, usual in the very old. Any young person would have accepted the tee-shirt as within a present-day trend, commonly seen. On John Winwood, Michael felt it as an affront, a horror, as, walking up to his father, he took in the white, grinning skull painted on the black cotton.

  It was worn, he supposed, as defiance, but Darren appeared to accept it, perhaps to be used to it. On him, after all, it would be an acceptable, even favoured, weekend garment.

  “I’ll leave you,” he said. “Please ring if there’s anything you need or when you and Mr. Winwood senior are ready to say good-bye.”

  “Long time no see,” said the old man—the older of the two old men. Michael hadn’t heard the phrase uttered for many years. Perhaps the last time was when his father had brought Sheila to the house in Lewes.

  “How are you?” Michael didn’t know how to address his father. As a child he had called him Dad. “How are you, Father?”

  “That’s what you call me now, is it? Why have you come?”

  “To see you. Because you’re my father.”

  “That’s true. I am. No question about that. The problems in that area came later.” His father’s eyes were clear and surprisingly young-looking. No doubt he had had his cataracts removed, just as he possessed that tiny jewel of a hearing aid and implanted porcelain teeth. “You look older than your age. How’s your wife?”

  “She died,” Michael said, terrified some insult would follow.

  There was none. “They do. All mine did. You going to marry again?”

  Through almost closed lips, “No,” Michael said.

  “Nor me.”

  They stared at each other without speaking. John Winwood’s gaze was the first to fall but he broke the silence. “We’ve nothing to say to each other, have we? Nothing much. I never liked you. I never liked your mother either. I don’t know why I married her. In those days you had to marry someone, it was the done thing, and it might as well be a looker. I don’t like people, it’s as simple as that. Did you inherit that?”

  “No.”

  “I thought it might be in the genes. I’m going to stay alive till January the fourteenth. That’s my birthday. You may not know that but it is. I shall be a hundred and I’m going to live till then, and then I’ll die. I won’t pass away or ‘give up the ghost’—that comes from the Bible, did you know?—I shall die.”

  “I’ll come again before that.”

  His father would tell him not to bother. He waited for it.

  “All right. You do as you please. Make an appointment. I pay a fortune for this place so that I can make choices and tell folks what to do. Another bit from the Bible. I was brought up on it and made to go to church, that’s why I sing hymns, as you may not know. I’m like that chap who was a centurion and said to one, ‘Come and he cometh, to another go and he goeth, and to a third do this and he doeth it.’ That’s all I want someone for, to do this and he doeth it.”

  His father’s laughter, a shrill cackle, made Michael jump. He rang the bell and asked Darren to come and escort him to the exit. He was suddenly thinking of the train and the platform at Lewes, the lady with the little dog, and the tears came into his eyes. His father wasn’t looking at him.

  “Why do you wear that tee-shirt?” Had he ever asked his father a question before? Certainly not a question that might be construed as rude.

  “I like it.” His father closed his eyes.

  Darren escorted Michael to reception, where he asked Imogen to call him a taxi. If she noticed his drying tears, she made no comment on them. They seemed to irritate his eyes and swell his face. In the guests’ cloakroom he sat on one of the velvet settees—velvet was the fabric of choice in Urban Grange—and gave himself up to weeping. Anyone who came in would take this as a sign of understandable emotion, quite naturally brought on by visiting his dying father. But he was crying for the lady with the little dog who would be dead long since and the dog too of course. I wish I believed in an afterlife, he thought, so that she could be there but far away from that man’s centurions and ghosts.

  Imogen came in and told him his taxi had arrived.

  MAURICE COULD BE TOLD, but not the girls. Fenella would want to have Rosemary sectioned, and Freya would advise telling the police. Her husband, on the other hand, told Judith that she had done the right thing—which meant doing nothing—and it would all blow over.

  “
I wish I’d killed her,” said Rosemary. “She’s no fool, she guessed I’d attack her and that’s why she wore that ridiculous, vulgar garment that’s about fifty years too young for her. Next time I try it, I’ll succeed.”

  “There mustn’t be a next time, Mother.”

  “Why do you keep calling me Mother?”

  Because you don’t call a would-be murderess Mum, Judith wanted to say. She said nothing. Some sort of awe attached to a woman who would do what Rosemary had attempted to do.

  “I’ve wasted my whole life on him. After we were married, a friend of mine called Melanie told me that your father had been going out with Daphne Jones before he met me. Well, not before he met me, because we met in the tunnels, but when we were grown-up and met for the second time. D’you know what else she told me? That he slept with her. No, I don’t suppose that shocks you, it wouldn’t. But people didn’t then. Or the people I knew didn’t.”

  “But why did you mind if it was before he met you?”

  “He had met me. When we were children. He met her then too. He forgot me for years but remembered her, couldn’t wait to get his hands on her.”

  “Does all that matter now?”

  “Of course it matters. How do I know he hasn’t been sleeping with her all these years? People behave like that, I’ve read about it. They meet and then they don’t see each other for a few years, and they meet again and it all starts again. That’s how it was with your father and that woman.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Judith.

  “It’s an intelligent guess. And you’ve got to remember that she’s very well-off. That house! You think that didn’t weigh with him? Of course it did. He’s got money, but people always want more. D’you know what he asked me the other day? Did I think we’d led a dull life? Always living in the same place, not being adventurous, never been further abroad than France and Spain. Well, he’s abroad now, isn’t he? He’s in the finest residential street in London. That’s what the papers call it and I think—”