The Girl Next Door: A Novel

by Ruth Rendell

  “You mean stabbed you?”

  “It was a kitchen knife,” Alan said, “but it didn’t break the skin.”

  “This happened out in the street? Some young villain tried to mug you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Of course you called the police?”

  “Neither one of us was carrying a mobile. By the time we got home, we said to each other that as nothing had happened, Daphne wasn’t hurt, there didn’t seem any point in calling them.” Lewis knew Alan was lying and lying badly with the clumsiness of someone who habitually tells the truth. “Everything seemed all right, and then Daphne started shaking.”

  Lewis looked at her. “She isn’t shaking now.” He wished he hadn’t accepted that drink. What had really happened? Not that trumped-up mugging, he was sure. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask, but he wasn’t a policeman. “It’s the result of shock. It often happens. Gone now, it appears. You don’t need me.”

  Daphne made an appeal to him. Sitting next to him on the sofa, she laid her hands on his arms, said, “I think you were going to leave, but please don’t. Please stay. It wasn’t true about the mugging or it being outdoors. It happened in here, in this room, but I can’t tell you who it was, I can’t. I wasn’t hurt. As you say, it was the shock of it made me shake. Don’t bother about it but please stay to supper.”

  So Lewis did. It gave him the opportunity to watch the two of them together. They seemed very lovey-dovey, as his mother would have said, though nothing in their behaviour was indecorous. After thanking them for supper and drinks, he said rather grudgingly that when they needed a doctor, he would come to them privately, “but not in the night, and I’d still recommend the National Health Service.”

  It was too late to phone anyone by the time he got home. Not too late for the young, but people of his age had been brought up to believe that it was a breach of good manners to make a phone call after 9:00 p.m. at the latest. He called Stanley Batchelor next morning.

  “You went to Daphne’s place, did you? You actually saw the two of them together?”

  “That’s right.” Lewis’s doctor’s code forbade his telling Stanley about Daphne’s tremor, but not of the attack that apparently caused it. He began hesitantly, skirting around what he knew of the stabbing, but Stanley interrupted him.

  “Rosemary turned up there out of the blue and ran at Daphne with a carving knife. She brought it with her in her bag. Daphne must have expected it because she was wearing some sort of armour. Chain mail, I think it was, or it may have been a bulletproof vest.”

  “Wow. Good heavens.”

  “You may well say so. It’s absolutely true. Rosemary told Maureen herself, and Maureen told Helen. Alan was wounded and an ambulance came. They dressed the wound but Alan wouldn’t be taken to A and E. I don’t blame him, the hours you hang about in those places. No one called the police; you wouldn’t, would you, if no one was really hurt? You’d be too ashamed.”

  This had come about, thought Lewis, because of a builder finding two hands in a biscuit box buried underneath a house. Well, as far as he was concerned, it need go no further.

  20

  MICHAEL WAS IN Vivien’s room lying on the bed and talking to her as he often did, when the phone rang. He let it ring. There was no one he wanted to talk to. It was probably a wrong number. Five minutes later it rang again, and this time he went down to the floor below to answer it. Of course he wished he hadn’t.

  Imogen’s always-recognisable voice said it was Urban Grange and he must prepare himself for a shock. Michael hoped and didn’t attempt to stop himself hoping that his father was dead. But, no. Mr. Winwood, said Imogen, had had “a minor heart attack.”

  “I expect you’d like to see him. If you’d care to come in this afternoon, our resident physician, Dr. Stefani, will be here to talk to you. There is no immediate cause for concern, but of course, as you are aware, your father has reached a very great age.”

  How could he not be aware? Never mind. “I’ll be with you about three.”

  They must wonder at Urban Grange why he had never been near his father until Zoe died. Perhaps they didn’t wonder about things like that. In there they must see all sorts, all sorts that made a world. He had long ago stopped believing in God. Any belief he may have had, had died on that platform at Victoria when his father confessed with no apparent regret to having forgotten to bring Michael’s lunch. His first wife revived his belief for a few years. Babette, of all people, used to go to church and, ridiculously dressed like a Barbie doll, sang hymns about the house as she made perfunctory efforts at cooking and cleaning: “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” and “Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer.” When she left, he also left her faith. It was gone many years before he married Vivien, too late for him to question why this deity had let her die in the prime of life and kept his father alive up till his century.

  He was sitting up in an armchair, wrapped in a dressing gown embroidered not with hands but with dragons, gold dragons on red silk. Once they used to keep people in bed, but not now. Get them up as soon as reasonably or, come to that, unreasonably possible. His father’s calloused, old feet were concealed by argyle socks, the kind you knew were expensive without knowing how you knew.

  Michael sat down in the other velvet armchair. Age had not withered his father’s eyes or his voice. The eyes were fixed on him and Michael noticed for the first time how seldom the old man blinked. Once or twice in Michael’s life, an optician testing his sight had asked him not to blink while she operated some machine. He knew how difficult this was, but his father seemed to pass whole minutes without the flicker of an eye.

  “How are you feeling?” Michael said because that was always what you said to people in hospital.

  “Much the same. Chap called Stefani, an Eyetie of course, wants to see you. That’ll be a relief, get away from me. I can tell you what he’ll say. That I’m stable, that’s their new word. Stable. Nothing to do with horses. The next step will be critical, but I’m not there yet.” His father sneezed, an enormous sneeze, unimpeded by any handkerchief or tissue.

  Michael suppressed a desire to say, Bless you.

  The old man blew his nose on a beautifully laundered snow-white handkerchief he pulled out of his pocket. “I suppose you think that by coming to see me I’ll leave you something in my will. When I go, that is, which won’t be till January.”

  Michael said nothing, though he hadn’t thought about it. What would be the use when his father wouldn’t believe him?

  “There’s plenty left. I’m not leaving it to you but to the Hedgehog Trust. I promised Sheila I would, and it’s one of the few promises I’ve made I’m going to stick to.”

  Now Michael could no longer control himself. “The what?”

  “I thought that would get you. You heard. I’ve always liked hedgehogs. We had one used to come into the garden at Anderby. I put bread and milk out for it. It upset me, hedgehogs always getting themselves killed on the roads.”

  So there was something that upset him. The Batchelor brothers embraced when they met, hugged each other without embarrassment. Michael hadn’t seen it but Maureen had told him, wonderingly, yet with approval. What must that be like, to put your arms round a family member and hold him? Of course he had kissed and hugged Zoe, but no one else when he was small. He never recalled his mother kissing him and as for his father . . .

  “Well, good-bye,” Michael said. “I’ll keep in touch.”

  His father’s laugh was almost frightening to hear. It had been really frightening when Michael was a child. Something about it was Gothic, something belonging in one of those horror films when with a similar cackle a scaly beast slinks out of the mouth of a cave or rears up from a dark lake.

  “Suit yourself. When you come in here—I mean me, when I came in here—they don’t search you, you pay too much for that. If they had, they’d have found the
pills I was carrying. Cyanide. Half a dozen in a bottle. For use if I don’t die soon enough. You don’t believe me? Suit yourself.”

  Downstairs, Michael was shown into a spacious room, carpeted in fashionable grey and furnished with pale hardwoods. Dr. Stefani was tall, suave, and good-looking in a characterless way.

  “Inevitably, there must be concern for a gentleman of your father’s age.”

  Gentleman was a strange sort of usage, Michael thought, and even stranger when Stefani said, “The old ticker is slowing down. Like the clock it is, telling its owner the time. It will soon stop. The time left we cannot count in years or even months. Weeks perhaps.”

  Should he tell this man who seemed to him like an impostor or charlatan? Why bother when he didn’t believe it himself? “He wants to live till January the fourteenth. That’s when he’ll be a hundred.”

  “Just what I would have estimated. Would he like to see a priest, do you think? Some like the last rites.”

  “Ask him on January the thirteenth,” said Michael, fighting an urge to scream with laughter. “Ask him, not me. Good-bye.”

  All trains apart from tubes brought back to him that train journey from Victoria to Lewes, that first one, not his subsequent visits to Zoe. They seemed different, though the same route was followed and the same station reached. The Suffolk countryside was subtly unlike that of Sussex, flatter, bleaker, but still he might have been nine again, stroking and fondling the lady’s little dog. He put his head back against the not very comfortable seat and, though it was the last thing he expected, fell asleep. The dream he had wasn’t of dogs or the lady or—thank God—his father, but of the qanats, where Alan and two of the Batchelors sat on upturned boxes playing cards, and on a pile of old pillows covered in striped ticking sat Daphne, watching them, her long, black hair cloaking her shoulders.

  A voice announcing the train’s arrival at Liverpool Street woke him. For a second or two he was a frightened child again, rubbing his eyes, afraid he might have drawn attention to himself by whimpering. But no one stared at him. He got out and went to find a taxi.

  21

  A LETTER WAS ON his doorstep, such a rarity that he stepped on it entering the house. It had an enclosure, wrapped in adhesive tape. More interesting and suddenly painful was the sender’s address: Anderby, The Hill, Loughton, Essex, and the postcode. Michael sat down at the kitchen table with a small whisky in a tumbler. The sender, Daniel Thompson, wrote that he had recently moved into Michael’s old home, and in the remodelling of the kitchen, the first carried out for over fifty years, the plumber had discovered the contents of the package. Daniel Thompson supposed it might belong to a member of Mr. Winwood’s family. He said nothing about how he had discovered Michael’s whereabouts. But all things were now possible online. Michael unwrapped the tiny package and laid Clara’s wedding ring on the palm of his left hand.

  ROSEMARY HADN’T DRIVEN a car for years but she still had a licence, having renewed it when she was seventy. If she could hire a car and drive it to Hamilton Terrace, if she could take Daphne out in it, killing her would be easy. Didn’t they call the place where the passenger sat the suicide seat? It was impossible. No car-hire company would rent a car to her at her age, licence or no licence. Daphne would never get into a car that Rosemary was driving. Would Daphne go out for a walk with her? And walk where? According to Freya, St. John’s Wood had a nice High Street with clothes shops, but why would anyone choose to go shopping there if they came up from the suburbs? They would go to the West End or Knightsbridge. No, on Friday she must go to the house in Hamilton Terrace as she had arranged. It would be lunchtime or close on, and they would serve her a drink while they talked. They would talk, that was what they believed to be the purpose of the visit. Talk about divorce, financial arrangements, where to live, all the things a couple who were separating discussed. It wasn’t anything she had thought she would ever come to, her marriage was so happy, or that was what she believed. If they had separated, wouldn’t it have been in their forties or fifties, the age, she had read, for people breaking off the old and starting anew? It was an outrage, making that change at the end of their lives.

  How much bleach would be a lethal dose? She looked inside the cupboard under the kitchen sink, took out the bottle, and poured a little of the viscous liquid onto a saucer. The smell was so strong it made her gasp. That was no good then. How about the morphine? That had no smell. When her mother was dying of cancer and no more could be done for her, she had moved in with them to the house in Church Lane. It was so big she could have a large bedroom on the ground floor. Rosemary had nursed her mother devotedly (even though she said it herself), and only when she was no more than a week from the end did they move her into the hospice. The doctor, visiting her, had prescribed morphine when the pain got bad and, when her mother died, told Rosemary she must destroy what was left in the bottle—quite a lot because she hadn’t lived long. He would leave it to her to dispose of it safely. “I know I can trust you,” he had said.

  Trust her not to do what she intended. She put the bottle in her handbag, a bag too small to hold a knife. There need be no disguising what she had done. No refusal to admit her guilt or saying she had made a mistake—what mistake was possible? She would even tell Alan to call the police and she would meekly await their arrival. What symptoms Daphne would exhibit Rosemary didn’t know. Choking? Gasping? Rosemary thought she could watch Daphne’s struggles without a qualm, watch them with interest. She had read a newspaper story of a young girl’s swallowing bath cleanser because her boyfriend had left her and dying from it, but the results which led up to her death were not detailed.

  Judith had come to see her on Wednesday afternoon, and on Thursday evening Fenella was with her, mercifully leaving the children with their father. Her family never left her alone for long. They brought presents, as if a box of chocolates or a vial of perfume could comfort you for the loss of a husband. Judith wanted to arrange a holiday for her, a boat trip up the Danube with Maurice’s sister, whom Rosemary had met only once and taken a dislike to. Fenella suggested Rosemary come to stay with her and Giles, “just for a week or two.” The children would be company for Rosemary, prevent her getting depressed. Rosemary said she would think about both offers. Of course there was nothing to think about as by the time either could take place, she would be in prison or possibly in a mental hospital.

  IT OUGHT TO make him feel young, Michael reasoned, visiting all these old people, years older than himself. It didn’t. Rather, he looked at his father and now at Clara Moss and thought that this was how he might be in ten or fifteen years’ time. If he lived so long. Better if he didn’t, if he could have a stroke that killed at a blow or a heart attack. This time he would creep into Loughton—that was how he put it to himself—not alerting any of the Batchelors but making his way from the station to Forest Road, a walk of ten minutes at most. But before he could put this into practice, a phone call from Maureen told him that her brother-in-law Norman was ill in hospital in France and not expected to live. She thought Michael would wish to know as he was one of the tunnels people. Would he pass it on to Lewis Newman?

  Recalling how Norman always told everyone that he had been born on the kitchen table, lately comparing his birth circumstances to those of the Duke of Edinburgh, who had also been born on a table, but in Corfu, not Loughton, Michael phoned Lewis with his news. Lewis naturally was not particularly interested. He hardly remembered Norman Batchelor. Michael called Maureen back and, this time, much against his original plan, asked if he could see her and would she come with him to visit Clara Moss.

  After lunch—of course Maureen asked him to lunch—they went together to Forest Road. She was in low spirits. It seemed to her, she said, that everyone was “going.” First her George, now Norman, and Stanley had had pains, which might be the forerunner of a heart attack.

  “Well, we’re old,” said Michael. “Recently a prevailing belief has been
that we shall live for ever, thanks to modern medicine. Stanley will probably be saved for another dozen years. I hope so.”

  Winter had come early, and in leafy Loughton all the trees had lost their leaves. It was cold and grey but dry. Oaks kept their leaves longer than any other tree, brown, dried up, and shivering in the wind. Maureen remarked that when leaves turned in England, with a few exceptions they changed to yellow, not copper or red. You had to go to America or Canada for that, where maples abounded, a visit she and George had paid a few years before. Memories silenced her and no more was said until they reached Clara’s door. It was opened by Samantha, in the young woman’s dress of jeans, stripy tee-shirt, and, so common as to seem like part of a uniform, the almost inevitable long, straight hair, its red tinted blond for a change.

  “She’s asleep. She sleeps a lot these days.”

  “Should we come back another day?”

  Michael could tell by Maureen’s tone, though probably Sam couldn’t, that Maureen was hoping to be allowed to leave before seeing Clara. “No, you stay,” Sam said. “She’d want me to wake her up. She’d be mad if she missed you.”

  This appeared to be true. Clara woke slowly, struggled to sit up, helped by Sam. Michael hesitated, then kissed her cheek. “You was always a good boy,” Clara said. “God knows why. You had everything to make you bad.” She had a word for Maureen. “Sorry about your George. There was another good man. But they all go, there’s no help for it.”