The Girl Next Door: A Novel

by Ruth Rendell

  This diatribe was interrupted by the front doorbell. At the same time Judith’s mobile rang. She had never been so glad to hear her husband’s voice: “I thought I might as well come, darling.”

  Maurice’s arrival brought less pleasure to Rosemary. She had always been a little in awe of her son-in-law, but now she seemed to have forgotten all about that. “Judith’s told you, I suppose. She didn’t waste any time. I tried to kill my husband’s floozy.” The word was so outdated, so archaic even, that it had fallen out of use before Rosemary was born, but she used it with a flourish. “I meant to do it. I took a carving knife with me in my bag, and when she said she loved him and wouldn’t give him up, I stabbed her. That is, I tried to stab her, but she was wearing armour.”

  This was not the way they had conducted themselves in the embassies of Cairo and Caracas. However, the denizens of these sanctuaries had recognised one kind of solace. “I think we all need a drink,” said Maurice.

  Another remedy was to go out to dinner somewhere. He suggested it, not tentatively but firmly.

  “If you like. I don’t care. It’s all the same to me. You go if you like. I shall stay here.”

  “The point is to take you out, Mum.” Having raised her mother to a level of dignity, Judith was now demoting her again. “Of course you must come.”

  “I will never go out to dinner again. I may never go out anywhere again. You don’t seem to understand my position. I have tried to kill my husband’s mistress and I will try again until I succeed. Then they will put me in prison for the rest of my life, which won’t be long.” Rosemary’s voice rose to a high note on that last word, a note that became a scream. Then the sobs began. Scream, sob, sob, scream. She tore at her hair, clutched at her clothes, fell facedown into the sofa cushions, sat up again, and emitted staccato screams.

  The other two stared at her, aghast. Both knew they were supposed to slap her face, but neither dared. Judith crept over to her mother and tried to take her in her arms. Rosemary fought her off, but suddenly sat up straight and shuddering, twitching from side to side, heaved a great sigh, and was silent.

  “I’ll stay here with you,” Maurice said to his wife.

  “Thank you, darling.”

  Rosemary spoke. In a voice unlike her normal one, she said hoarsely, “What did you do with my knife?”

  “Left it there, Mum.”

  “Pity. Still, I’ve got other knives.”

  IF ALAN AND DAPHNE, particularly Daphne, had seemed to Judith and her mother to be largely unaffected by the attack on her, their calmness was the result of an iron control both were capable of. They hadn’t previously had much need of it, but now they had. Both, simultaneously, realised that to seem indifferent or to seem perhaps disbelieving that Rosemary’s attempt was seriously meant was their best course. But when it was all over and Alan’s wife and daughter had gone, they succumbed to shock, held each other and lay side by side, aware that the other was shaking.

  After a long time Alan said, “I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s mine.”

  “I didn’t know she was capable of that. I wouldn’t have dreamt of it. I can hardly believe it now.”

  “Everyone we know, everyone we’ve ever known, all the people down this street, the children we knew in the tunnels that are still alive, all of them would be on Rosemary’s side. Do you realise that? They would sympathise with her and condemn us. Would they be right?”

  “I don’t know. D’you know what I keep thinking? This started because of us all meeting in the qanats and Mr. Winwood turning us out of them.”

  IN THE SPARE-ROOM BED, a narrow double, Judith and Maurice lay stretched out side by side like a medieval couple on a funerary slab. Maurice was a tall man and not thin.

  “This was the first bed Mum and Dad ever had,” whispered Judith. “Owen and I were conceived in it.”

  “With difficulty, I should think.”

  “They didn’t get a bigger one till we were quite old. What are we going to do about Mum, darling?”

  “Take her back with us tomorrow?”

  “If she’ll come,” said Judith.

  “I find it hard to believe what she did. I mean, I know what she did, but it remains incredible. Would she try it again? If she comes back with us, we can keep an eye on her.”

  “Oh God. Do you think we have to? I must go to sleep, I’m exhausted. Turn over, darling, and let me put my arm round your waist.”

  “I haven’t got a waist,” said Maurice.

  Rosemary, in the bigger bed in the bigger bedroom, lay awake wondering where she would now be if her attempt on Daphne’s life had succeeded. In a cell at Paddington Green police station, probably. She had seen that place on television; it was quite famous and couldn’t be far from Hamilton Terrace. Tomorrow morning, this morning now, she would be due to appear in a magistrates’ court, possibly one in Marylebone, she thought. It was amazing how much she knew about this sort of thing. She wasn’t the ignorant little housewife her children and evidently her husband thought her.

  Stabbing Daphne, trying to kill Daphne, had done her good. She felt younger and more alive. She could remember perfectly what it had felt like to grasp that knife in her fist—not the way she had ever held a knife before—and drive it into Daphne’s heart. Or what it would have felt like but for that armour the woman was wearing, a breastplate put on deliberately because she feared Rosemary’s just vengeance. Under the duvet, in her peach silk nightdress Alan had once admired and said suited her, she clenched her fist around an absent knife and thrust it up and down against an imagined ribcage, an imagined breast and heart. She would try again. Next time she would succeed. No Judith would be there and no Alan. The rivals for Alan’s love would engage in combat, and she would be the victor because she had right on her side. Rosemary turned on to her side as sleep began to come. She was happier than she had been since Alan left her.

  NO, SHE WOULDN’T go back with Judith and Maurice. She was perfectly all right on her own, she said. In fact, she thought she might spring-clean the flat. It had never had a thorough clean since they’d moved in.

  “I’ll come back and see you on Wednesday. I might bring Freya if she can take the afternoon off. I don’t think I’ll say anything to her about what happened yesterday.”

  “Say what you like,” said Rosemary. “I’m not ashamed of it. Rather the reverse.”

  They left. She was alone, but instead of sitting and brooding, she wrapped herself in an apron and, fetching the requisite brushes, cloths, and cleaning fluids, began the spring-cleaning she had promised Judith she would do. While she worked, she thought about Alan and Daphne, thought about them together, though not exactly as a couple. She and Alan were the couple. The newspapers and the television were full of sex these days. Sex—or, as she preferred to call it, intercourse—was everywhere. It had happened, and not all that gradually, over half a century, yet it was only now that it seemed to have exploded in her face. It was painful and enraging too to think of Alan and Daphne having intercourse. But did they? It was a long time since she and Alan had.

  All this had happened—all of it—because of those tunnels and old Mr. Winwood turning some children out of them. She backed away from scrubbing the en suite bathroom tiles and pictured it. It couldn’t be, it mustn’t be. The only person who could stop it was herself. This time she must go there on her own, giving them no warning. Why had this spring-cleaning seemed a good idea? It was hateful, the sort of chore no young woman would dream of doing, if the women’s magazines and the women’s pages in newspapers were to be believed. She knew from the distant past that once it was completed, the only thing she would get out of it was to sit down in the lounge and look with admiration at her handiwork. And how long would that last? Ten minutes? There would be no real satisfaction, no triumph, just the acceptance that she had done it, and “it” was what she had be
en brought up to do for the rest of her life.

  What had Daphne done for a living? Before all this began, Maureen Batchelor had told her Daphne had been a lawyer. A lawyer who worked as an adviser to a big company, not a solicitor. That would be useful, thought Rosemary, when she tried to make Alan get divorced. It mustn’t happen, it mustn’t get that far. Don’t even think about it. What she must think of was how to get in that house in Hamilton Terrace without one of them opening the front door to her. And no one must know, not her daughter or her son or either of her granddaughters. They must see her—on the coming Wednesday, for instance—as her calm old self, perhaps seated at the sewing machine when they arrived, embarking on some new garment for one of them. Her watchword must be that Alan would come back. She would say it to them to reassure them.

  “He’ll come back.”

  No one would ask if she would take him back. They would be too relieved for that. Her love for them, not long ago the mainspring of her existence, had turned to resentment. She wanted to see no one. All she wanted was to think about the situation from every angle and plan how to get into that house. She wouldn’t be in a hurry. She would take her time. After all, it was her time now, not Alan’s, hers alone to do as she liked with.

  18

  VISITING THE OLD as a duty, caring for the old, should normally come to an end when one is old oneself. Perhaps when one is between fifty and sixty. But no longer, Michael thought. Not when people expected to live into their eighties and nineties. The young visitor, such as himself, was around seventy. He went upstairs and into Vivien’s room, saying aloud as he stood at the end of the bed, “When half the world lives to be eighty-eight, why did you have to die at fifty? When I cared for you so much, why did you leave me to care for people I don’t give a damn about?”

  His father and Clara Moss. He preferred Clara over his father, but that was true of anyone he knew. He had dreamt the night before of his father in that tee-shirt with the skull on it, and out food shopping this morning, he seemed to see skulls everywhere. It was a fashionable adornment. He saw a woman with skulls on the black moccasins she wore, another with skull earrings, and of course a tee-shirt like his father’s. It puzzled him because the woman in the moccasins was elderly, if not as old as his father—who was?—and while it seemed fairly reasonable for a thirty-year-old to dress in such macabre gear, why would an old man or woman want to be so grimly reminded of his or her mortality?

  Clara Moss was due for another visit. Last time Lewis Newman had been with him or at least taken him to her door. He had been to lunch with Stanley and Helen Batchelor. Whatever happened, no one would come with Michael this time, so he was surprised by a phone call from Maureen Batchelor to ask him if he would “look in on” Clara again. It would only be once or twice as she would be able to take it on herself once she was feeling “more up to it.” He asked if she hadn’t been well.

  “I miss George. Of course I do, I’m bound to. Why not come and see me before you go to Clara’s? Come and have a sherry.” Her voice broke on that last word. “Oh, dear, I’m not back to normal yet.”

  Carisbrooke looked just the same but the atmosphere was different. Big George and his big personality had filled it, his loud voice audible all over the bungalow. In his absence, his absence for ever now, Michael found himself subduing his tone so that he had to stop himself from whispering. They drank some sherry, dry oloroso for both this time, dark brown and sharp. Maureen in the black that most new widows avoided these days. She was thinner and paler. It seemed to him that once or twice she looked round the room in a sort of bewilderment, as if trying to find or conjure up George.

  But the sherry put some life into her. He told her about his father and Urban Grange, leaving out a lot, including the skull tee-shirt and his aim to live until he was a hundred. Maureen, unlike her brothers-in-law, had never known Michael as a child or the father they all thought of as an ogre, and she changed the subject as soon and as politely as she could.

  “I ran into Rosemary Norris the other day. You remember her?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I think she’s lost her mind. Does getting senile take you that way? I mean, make you have crazy fantasies?”

  “I don’t know,” said Michael. “How would I know?”

  “She’s having one. Rosemary, I mean. We were in Tesco, lining up at the cheese counter. The queues are worse than at the post office in there. You wouldn’t think they would be now everyone’s got the Internet, would you? What was I saying? Oh, yes, Rosemary. Mind you, I didn’t believe what she told me. I don’t believe it. That’s what I mean about the Alzheimer’s. She said she went to Daphne Jones’s house—Furness, I mean—and stabbed her with a kitchen knife. How about that?”

  “You mean really stabbed her? Was Alan there?”

  “She said she tried to stab her with a knife she took with her, but Daphne was wearing something she called a ‘breastplate’ and the knife wouldn’t go in. The only one that was hurt was Alan. She cut his hand and he wouldn’t go to hospital and she says he’s got blood poisoning as a result.”

  “As you said, it’s some sort of fantasy, Maureen.”

  “Him leaving her has turned her brain. If you’re going to Clara’s now, Michael, I think I’ll come with you. To get my hand in, if you see what I mean. Would you mind?”

  “I’d love it,” he said sincerely.

  No one appeared to be at home in the little house in Forest Road. If he had been alone, Michael might have given up, but Maureen knew Clara’s ways and called through the letterbox.

  Clara’s feeble voice just reached them: “In the flowerpot by the camellia.”

  She belonged in a generation who knew the names of flowers. Maureen fished out the key from among the camellia’s roots and they let themselves in. Most of the ground floors in houses along here, Maureen told him later, had been converted to incorporate hall and living room into one, but Clara’s had always been that way so that the front door led straight into the single big room.

  It smelt of overcooked cabbage and a cheap, lemony room freshener. Clara was half lying, half sitting up in bed, propped up on pillows. She was thinner and paler, as pale as Michael’s father had been, the skin on her neck and her forearms pleated as fine silk can be. Michael kissed her cheek. She put up her creased arms and fumbled to touch his shoulders. He gave her the chocolates he had bought on the way there—the same kind as those he had given her last time and which she seemed to like—while Maureen filled the only vase she could find with water and arranged in it the flowers she had brought.

  He could tell at once that since he had last been here, Clara had deteriorated not only in body, in thinness and weakness, but in her mind too. She began talking now about her youth before the Second World War, when the only possible career for a working-class girl was in a factory or going out cleaning. She had done both, in the first years of the war working in munitions and later when she met and married her husband as a “charlady” to families in Tycehurst Hill and for Michael’s parents. The Winwoods were her only employers on the Hill. It was farther away than she wanted to go, almost twice as far from Forest Road as the bottom of Tycehurst Hill was.

  She knew about George’s death and asked how Maureen was getting on. “At least you had him beside you all those years, dear. I’m glad of that. Not like me, losing mine after not quite two. I’ve sometimes wondered if he’d come back, would we have had kids? Maybe. My sisters had seven between them.” To be sociable, to be polite, Michael thought, she left the subject and asked him about his father. He answered her as best he could, though he would rather have talked about anyone else they both knew.

  “Did he ever marry again, dear?”

  “Yes, he did. Twice. I never met the second one and I only met the third one once. She was called Sheila, a woman called Sheila something.”

  “That wasn’t the name,” Clara said. “I’d know
it if I heard it. Very young she was. Used to come there sometimes, had long, black pigtails. It was after your poor mum passed over and you’d gone down to live with your auntie.”

  “Would you like to get up and let me help you into your chair?” said Maureen.

  Clara said not this time. She was tired. She didn’t know what had come over her but maybe it was old age. “I asked you about your dad getting married again because he said to me once or twice that when she was a bit older, he was going to marry her. But she wasn’t called Sheila, I know that. ‘A bit older?’ I said to him. ‘She’s never going to be as old as you, is she?’ Maybe I spoke out of turn, but he never said nothing.”

  “Mrs. Moss, is there anything I can do for you? Anything I can bring you? I’d like to do something.”

  “There’s nothing I want, dear. What you want gets less and less when you’re as old as what I am. Your dad, he used to call me Mrs. Mopp. After that character in ITMA it was. I never liked it but I couldn’t say, could I? She used to say, ‘Can I do you now?’ I’d never have talked like that.”

  When they were out in a High Road café having tea, Michael asked Maureen what ITMA was.

  “Before your time and mine. George remembered it. It was a radio programme, a comedy show. I-T-M-A, the initials of It’s That Man Again. A comedian called Tommy Handley was in it. Clara often talked about it. Understandably, she didn’t like being called Mrs. Mopp.”

  “Resentment dies hard,” said Michael. “It outlives good memories.” Yet the lady with the little dog lived on in his. “Let me know, won’t you, if anything happens to her?” He mildly despised himself for the euphemism and marvelled that he could talk with such care about the future demise of his father’s cleaning woman while speaking brutally of death and dying in connection with his father.