The Girl Next Door: A Novel

by Ruth Rendell

  On his way home in the tube, he thought not of Clara Moss but of the Norrises. Perhaps Rosemary did have Alzheimer’s, perhaps that would make her fantasise about killing Daphne. He knew nothing about the disorder, eschewing all thoughts on the subject because at his age he might be a candidate for it. Strangely, because Alan and Rosemary had never been friends of his, he wanted to know what had really happened if anything. It wasn’t his business, but when did that ever stop one’s trying to find out what the business that wasn’t one’s own, in fact, was?

  A breastplate? It sounded like one of those television serials set in the Dark Ages where men with swords bounded about on horseback and women wore nothing but scraps of armour just to cover their erogenous zones. Having some knowledge of Daphne’s house, he tried to imagine the scene, but the picture that appeared was of the kind of women in the serial fighting each other with knives, not a rare event. When he had changed onto the Jubilee Line he thought of getting off at St. John’s Wood and walking down to Hamilton Terrace. But to what purpose? At first he had had some idea of being that confidant, that someone to talk to they might need, of being, as the current jargon had it, there for them. But it wasn’t in his nature to do that. In all his life the only person to wish to confide in him was Vivien. He had listened and comforted because she was his wife and he loved her. The train stopped at St. John’s Wood, the doors opened, closed, and he went on to Swiss Cottage, where he got out.

  19

  PRIDING THEMSELVES ON their stoicism, Alan and Daphne pretended to each other that they were unaffected by what had happened. Rosemary had made a feeble attempt to hurt Daphne, no more than that. It was a gesture more than a life-threatening onslaught. She hadn’t intended serious harm.

  That was at first. That was how they were in the hours following Rosemary and Judith’s departure. Shock came twenty-four hours later, manifesting itself in a shivering on Daphne’s part, a trembling of her whole body that she couldn’t control. For Alan, his wounded hand was a constant reminder, but thanks to the immediate treatment he had had, it would soon be healed.

  But he was aware of it all the time, conscious of who had cut him, his wife of more than half a century, and that many would say she had right on her side.

  He wasn’t afflicted with tremors as Daphne was but with repeated visions of that knife in Rosemary’s grip and of his own hand ineffectually attempting to reach it and stop its progress. All that had come of that was the damage to his hand. Daphne’s leather jacket had saved her. Had she worn it because she had a premonition of what Rosemary would do? He and Daphne had got into the habit of telling each other everything. Everything about their past, their present, their cares, their fears. He had never achieved this with Rosemary in all their years together. He had often tried, but she had been too ready to be shocked, disgusted, or disbelieving, and when he had told her she could tell him anything she chose, she only said there was nothing to tell, she didn’t have those sorts of secrets even if others might. But Daphne had no such inhibitions, had told him all about her past—or so he believed—and listened to his confessions of his own, mild and irreproachable as it was, with a smile.

  So her trembling, her shaking hand when she lifted a cup or a pen, alarmed him. It was unlike her. He feared it as a symptom of a pathological loss of control.

  “I don’t want to go to a doctor,” she said when he suggested it. “He or she will ask me if I’ve had any sort of shock, and it’s no good going at all if I don’t tell the truth. Now if we knew a doctor, if we had a friend who was a doctor, I’d go to him, but we don’t.”

  “We do. Lewis Newman.”

  “We did once. We hardly know him now.”

  “I’m worried about you. I’m going to phone him.”

  “I rather like him,” said Daphne, the hand that touched his arm trembling.

  TELLING PEOPLE WHAT she had done was for Rosemary a way of showing them the gravity of her case. Everyone would understand and would sympathise. There could be no opposing view. Right was on her side. She was a good, virtuous woman, married for fifty-five years, the mother of her husband’s children, one who had never looked at another man and one who had devoted herself to him. The first to be told of her attempt to stab—to kill?—Daphne Jones (as she always thought of her) had been Maureen. She thought it likely Maureen would tell other people, at any rate the Batchelor family, Stanley and Helen in Theydon Bois, Norman in France, and they would no doubt tell their children. The more who knew the better. She thought a little about Alan. She had cut his hand, but that was his fault; he shouldn’t even have been in Daphne Jones’s house. He was Rosemary’s husband and she wanted him back, in spite of what he had done. What was all this about except an effort to get him back?

  Though she had taken it for granted all those Batchelors would tell their friends and their children, she had somehow assumed that Judith and Maurice wouldn’t tell theirs. It was the kind of thing they would want to keep in the dark. So it was a surprise when Fenella appeared at the front door with Callum and Sybilla and greeted her with “Oh, Gran, what have you done? How could you?”

  Rosemary instinctively said, “Not in front of the children.”

  They all came in, Fenella replying that they wouldn’t understand and her son and daughter rushing to that usually forbidden place, the balcony, in pursuit of the neighbour’s cat. Not expecting them, Rosemary had left the French windows open. The windows were now closed, the screams silenced by stuffing mouths with chocolate truffles from the box on the coffee table.

  “I would never have imagined you could do such a thing,” said Fenella, referring to the knife incident.

  “I couldn’t imagine it myself till I did it.”

  “Thank God you didn’t succeed.”

  “That’s your opinion, dear. I wish I had succeeded. They wouldn’t put me in prison at my age.” Rosemary laughed. “They’d give me a few weeks’ community service. Or maybe just a caution. I’ll make us some tea.”

  “No, you stay there, Gran. I’ll make the tea.”

  She spoke as if Rosemary were an invalid, but of the psychiatric rather than the physical order, Fenella’s tone of the sort generally known as humouring. Rosemary left her to it, wishing she could be alone to make her plans. Her job now was to find a way of getting into that house or luring Daphne out of it, preferably unaccompanied by Alan. One way might be to appear changed in her attitude, to convince Alan that she had relented towards him, that she forgave him and wanted to be friends with both of them. She might even tell him that having thought it over carefully, she could be persuaded to a divorce. She’d like to keep the flat, but he’d agree to that—wouldn’t he?—living as he did in Daphne Jones’s beautiful house. . . . Callum had rolled himself in one of the rugs, and Sybilla was kicking his head. Rosemary told them in an abstracted tone not to be so naughty and returned to her thoughts.

  When their mother came back, Sybilla had got the French windows open and Callum was climbing over the balcony rail.

  They were both dragged back into the living-room, loudly rejecting the grapefruit juice that was the only alternative to tea. Rosemary sat with her eyes shut, wondering how to get hold of Daphne Jones’s phone number. Perhaps instead she could do what Judith had done on that previous occasion and write a letter.

  No decision had been reached by the time Fenella and the children left. Many attempts had been made to convince Rosemary that she should depend more on her family, confide in Fenella herself, in Freya and their husbands, be alone less and come to stay with one or the other of them whenever she felt like it, spend some time with Owen and his wife, or why not go away on holiday with her sister? Surely Maureen Batchelor would go with her. Rosemary agreed to nothing. She had never liked Owen’s wife; she might as well be honest about it now. As for Maureen, the woman would probably be afraid to be alone with Rosemary in case she got herself stabbed. Having always disagreed with Alan about Fen
ella’s children, she was now being honest with herself. They were badly behaved, very much so, and she was glad to see the back of them. As they departed, she said to Fenella, “Phone me before you come again, won’t you?” Rosemary left off the almost requisite dear or darling.

  Alan always used to say that when you have a decision to make, things always get better when you make up your mind to what you’re going to do. Make up your mind, settle it, and you have gone a long way to lifting the load that is weighing on you. Well, she had made up her mind. She would write her letter tomorrow morning and write it to Alan—or should it be to Daphne Jones? He would recognise her handwriting, whereas if Daphne picked up their correspondence first, she might not. But she would still open it, wouldn’t she? She would take it for some sort of apology as it would indeed be. Anyway, Rosemary would write it, and perhaps to both of them, however much she loathed the idea of coupling their names together on the envelope.

  TO BE A DOCTOR of medicine means that a fairly large proportion of the people you meet will tell you of their ailments and ask you what should be done. Most of them know they shouldn’t do this, but still they do it, accompanying their request with an apology. Lewis Newman had a friend who had a PhD and who had been unwise enough to call himself “doctor.” For a little while, that is. He soon learned better. But everyone knew Lewis was a doctor of medicine and a member of the Royal College of Physicians, and there was no hiding it. So he wasn’t surprised when Alan Norris phoned to ask for his advice. It was his own fault, he thought, for giving the man his card. Still, he didn’t much mind. He rather liked Alan and this woman he had run off with. They were his childhood friends, a long, long time ago but still fresh in his memory. Besides, he was only human and wanted to see where they lived and what they were like together and even to make some estimate as to whether their relationship, as it was called today, would last.

  Daphne Furness must have a GP, an NHS one, or a doctor she saw privately, so why wasn’t she seeing her or him? Possibly because she didn’t want her doctor to know that Alan Norris (or any male person) had moved in with her.

  “I could pop over tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “Just have a look at her.”

  “She shakes,” said Alan. “But come and have supper with us. It’ll be nice to see you.”

  Daphne shook even more when she saw Rosemary’s letter. It was addressed to her and Alan, but she opened it with him beside her, her hand shaking. “ ‘Dear Alan and Daphne,’ ” she read aloud, though Alan could see the letter as well as she could, “ ‘This is an apology. I want to say I am sorry for what happened last week. I don’t know why I made that attack on you, Daphne. Violence is always unnecessary and useless. I deeply regret it now. If you can forgive me, I would very much like to see you both. The only way to get through this trouble is to talk, and that is what I would like to do. It may be that you would think a divorce the best way forward and that it is time to move on. I firmly believe that we should discuss it and for that we must meet. Would you let me come to your house again but in a spirit of friendship? You could come here if you prefer it.

  “ ‘Please do not ignore this letter. I am very anxious to talk to you both. Rosemary.’

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Daphne. “What do you think?”

  “Could you bear it? I think she’s sincere. My granddaughter Fenella would say her attempt on your life sort of cleansed her of those murderous feelings.”

  “Why Fenella?”

  “She’s a psychologist.”

  “And the letter has sort of cleansed me of shaking. It’s stopped.”

  Alan kissed her. “I’m so glad. We’ll still have Lewis over, shall we?”

  ROSEMARY WAS BACK at her sewing machine. She possessed a dress pattern she had never used because she considered it too ambitious for her. In the sewing room was a dress length, several metres of flowered silk, also never used. On the crest of a wave, as she put it to herself, resulting from that letter and imagining its reception in Hamilton Terrace, she had pinned the pattern to the silk, tacked it up, and was now machining a side seam. If she could finish it in time, she would wear the new dress when she paid her visit to Daphne and Alan, or when they came to her. Fantasising, she pictured herself in the dress when the police came and arrested her, charging her in Daphne’s drawing-room with wilful murder—did they still say wilful or was that American? Her photograph would appear in the papers, which would describe her as a “pretty elderly woman, elegantly dressed” and would inevitably give her age. Daphne Jones was older, she thought, maybe by three years. Rosemary completed the seam, removed the tacking stitches, and was about to start on the next one when the phone rang.

  Daphne? Alan? It was neither of them. Robert Flynn said how sorry he was to hear that she and Alan were separated. It was sad, she said, but she hoped it wouldn’t be permanent. Robert talked about his long friendship with Alan, grown rather distant in recent years. Rage, which had been in abeyance since her return to the sewing machine, suddenly surged up in her.

  “Don’t you dare tell me you knew nothing about it!” she shouted down the phone. “You were his alibi. All the time he was with her, he told me he was meeting you. He told you the whole thing and you were prepared to lie for him. Lies, lies, lies, that’s what I had to put up with. And I was his wife for more than fifty years.”

  Robert Flynn stammered that he was sorry, it was nothing to do with him, he knew nothing about it.

  Rosemary screamed, “Liar!”—and crashed the phone down.

  Her breath was still coming in rapid gasps when it rang again. Alan’s voice said, “Are you all right? You sound ill.”

  “I’m not ill. Your friend Robert Flynn phoned and—well, he made me cross. I’m all right now. Did you get my letter?”

  “That’s what I’m calling about.”

  “I thought she would.”

  He made no reply to that. “You want to talk to both of us, you said. When would you like to come?”

  Both of us had once meant her and Alan. “Would Friday suit?”

  He said it would. Maybe in the morning. That would give her time to decide. Not to kill Daphne, that was already decided on, but how to do it and how too to make the maximum show of it. Make a show that everyone passing and everyone in the gardens of Hamilton Terrace might know how Rosemary had been wronged and what she had done.

  “Give my regards to Daphne.”

  It was absurd. The only regard she had for Daphne Jones was hatred. Returning to the sewing machine, she tried to adjust the needle to the point in the sleeve seam she had reached, but it ran crookedly. The stitches would have to be unpicked. She pulled the beginnings of a dress out, rolled it up, and stuffed the material into the table drawer where she kept scissors and cotton reels and a box of pins. How much she would like to seize Daphne Jones’s hand, thrust it under the needle, and start the machine. Daphne had thin hands with long fingers. The needle would try to enter the back of that hand, would plough up skin and veins and bones even if it failed, as it would, to penetrate to the palm. Rosemary savoured it. In the past she had always hated torture, stories about it in the papers, books with torture in them. She could easily and happily contemplate it carried out on Daphne: the rack, electric shocks, St. Catherine’s wheel. She had never known but always wondered what the wheel did to you. Come to that, what did the rack do? Whatever it was, she would like to see it done to Daphne Jones.

  She had till Friday to decide how she would do it. Characters in books often tried to make their killing look like an accident. Some tried to make a death look like suicide. She went into the room Alan had called his study, though he never studied anything in there. One wall was covered in bookshelves that were full of books. Green-and-white Penguins of the 1940s filled two shelves, books by writers once famous: Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie. There was one by A. E. W. Mason called The House of the Arrow. She had read that when t
hey were first married. It was about the arrow poison South American tribes used, something like strychnine called curare. She knew she wouldn’t be able to get hold of it. Imagining dropping poison in Daphne’s drink was no more than fantasy. Far more practical was to push her downstairs or in front of, say, a bus. St. John’s Wood was full of buses, coming and going. But that too was impossible. Suggest to Daphne that they go out for a walk and push her under that little bus, the single-decker that ran past the tube station? It again was no more than fantasy.

  Besides, the bus had a driver. In her previous life (as Rosemary thought of the time when Alan was with her) she had cared for people, what happened to them, and sometimes how she could help. If she pushed Daphne in front of the number 46 or 187, wouldn’t she be involving the driver in something he would never forget? Wouldn’t he remember for ever how he had been guilty, if involuntarily, of causing a woman’s violent death? She had seen something like that on television, a train driver who had ploughed through a car on a level crossing and saw the dead couple and their children his train had slaughtered in nightly dreams. It wouldn’t just be Daphne Jones who suffered. . . .

  She had arranged to go to Hamilton Terrace on Friday, so she had better make up her mind.

  IN THE DAYS when he practised, Lewis had had a private paying patient in Hamilton Terrace, a man with nothing wrong with him but who liked to have a tame physician on call. The calls came pretty often and in the night. Eventually Lewis left him, but he retained a memory of the street, particularly of what it looked like at midnight, silent, empty, and faintly lit. The patient, who was anything but patient, lived a long way up, almost on the corner with Carlton Hill, but the number of his house gave Lewis a good idea of where Daphne’s must be.

  After he had been in the place five minutes and already been given a large gin and tonic, he had begun wondering if Daphne’s illness, rather like that of the other resident of Hamilton Terrace, was no more than a ploy or excuse to see him. Then she said she had had “the shakes,” which had started the previous week after she had had a “shock.” She hesitated, looked at Alan, whose hand she was holding, thereby inexpertly concealing the plaster that covered the palm, and said in a low voice not much above a whisper, “Someone pulled a knife on me.”