The Girl Next Door: A Novel

by Ruth Rendell

  “Rosemary. Rosy.”

  She looked at the case. She looked up at him. “Why are you here?”

  “Oh, come on, Rosy. I do live here.”

  “You did. Not any longer. I’m going to have my supper. Good night.”

  She closed the door in his face. He rang the bell again and again. The light in the hall was turned off. He picked up the case and went down in the lift. Outside again, he looked up and saw that the lights in the flat were all off. What had he done with the key to his house? Put it in one of the pockets of his suitcase and never touched it since. On a wooden seat in Traps Hill he set the case down, opened it, and looked for the key. Nothing there. He was putting clothes and shoes back when he remembered this was the new case he had bought, while he had left the key in a pocket of the old case he had brought with him to Daphne’s.

  It was cold and a white frost was showing on the tops of garden walls. He sat down on the seat where he had put the case and tried to think what to do. Find a hotel? Go to a friend’s?

  If he could find a friend, perhaps he and the friend could go to Rosemary in the morning and explain that he had come back, that this was permanent, their separation was over. He got out his phone, called Maureen, and was told not warmly that he could come to Carisbrooke if he liked, but only for the one night. The suitcase was heavy. He trudged across the High Road and began the climb up York Hill. Loughton, at only ten minutes to eight, was empty. The only people who were ever about on a weekday evening were teenagers in hoods, loafing about in doorways smoking and carrying drinks cans. “Lost your way, granddad?” one of them called out to him. Alan wondered why he had ever thought Loughton a desirable place to live.

  27

  EVERYTHING STOPS FOR Christmas. Daphne flew to Seville on December 22 and stayed at the Alfonso XIII Hotel, accepting a friend’s invitation to Christmas dinner. Melissa’s daughters came home (as they called it, though they hadn’t lived there for years) and Lewis stayed, living in a dream, appreciating how nice everyone was to him and going out on the day before Christmas Eve to buy presents for all. Michael took a call from Urban Grange that told him his father had had another bad turn and perhaps he would feel like coming. He went, found his father up, eating a large meal, and went home to phone Caroline Inshaw and say that if she wanted to talk to John Winwood, they should not delay it much longer.

  IT SEEMED ABSURD. John Winwood was close on a hundred years old. He could die not any day but any minute. If only he would, thought Michael. It would be best for him, best for everyone, and for peace and quiet. Michael’s children came home for Christmas as they always did. Jane began phoning him a week before, promising him a turkey, “all the veg you could possibly want, Dad,” some presents that were “way out.” Richard also phoned. He would stay just Christmas Day and the night and then be off to Seattle to attend a conference that would begin next day. Michael went out and bought each of them an iPod because it was easy and quick. He dialled Daphne’s number on Christmas evening and got a message: “Alan and I are no longer together. I am in Spain until January second.”

  Christmas is often mild and damp in London. A sluggish rain fell. Richard left for Seattle, having spent the previous afternoon loading all the music he could find in his father’s house onto the new iPod. He seemed enraptured by it. Jane, on the other hand, repeatedly said she would never learn how to work hers. She loved it, Dad was so clever to think of it, but she was so hopeless she would never even get it out of its box, let alone make it play music. Michael thought there must be something wrong with him that he was relieved when his children left.

  His father didn’t die. On the morning of January 10, Michael asked himself if he should buy his father a birthday present and immediately castigated himself for being so stupid. He had last given him a present at Christmas 1943. His mother had bought it and he could no longer remember what it had been. She had thrust it in his hands and left him to do the impossible, wrap it up.

  He was due to meet Caroline Inshaw at Urban Grange at 10:00 a.m. He got there at twenty to, and as he noted the time, it occurred to him that no one said that anymore, no one had said it for years; people said nine forty instead. Caroline walked in at five to ten—there, he was doing it again—and they went along the passage to John Winwood’s room. Michael had arranged this visit with his father, so they were expected. He knocked at the door, he didn’t know why, he never had before, and immediately thought himself stupid. There was no response, so he walked in, feeling sick.

  Dürer’s hands were up on the wall, but they had been moved to the prime place for showing off anything in that room. Sitting up in bed, sitting in the best armchair, walking to the bathroom, John Winwood could see that picture and, for all Michael knew, be amused by it. At present, his father sat in that best armchair, dressed in obviously new clothes. He must have had some member of Urban Grange staff go out and buy them for him. Michael wondered what Darren or one of the other carers (would you call them that?) had thought about being requested to find and purchase dark blue trousers and a tunic top, patterned in scarlet and white, with a high collar to enclose his neck. Red, yellow, and silver trainers were on his feet.

  Caroline Inshaw was staring at him. “Good morning, Mr. Winwood. How are you today?”

  His father began to laugh. “Much as usual. What can I do for you? I don’t know why I ask. I know already. Ask away.”

  “I would like you to tell me if you are aware of what I’m talking about when I ask you about a tin box containing a man’s hand and a woman’s hand and dating from about the year 1944.”

  John Winwood sighed. “You’re a very good-looking woman. Seems a pity you have to spend your time talking about severed hands and buried boxes.”

  Michael saw a flush mount into her face. “Mr. Winwood, would you answer the question, please?”

  “Yes, I am aware. I put the hands in that box. I cut them off. I must have had a reason, but I’ve forgotten what it was. The woman’s hand was my wife’s, the man’s a chap called Johnson, Clifford Johnson, who was her lover. I couldn’t have that, could I?”

  He looked pleased with himself, supremely contented. “I found them in bed. I strangled him first because if I’d killed her first, he might have killed me. Then I killed her, cut off his hand and then her hand. I said I don’t remember why; just for fun, I suppose.”

  Caroline said, “Mr. Winwood, is this true or is it some sort of joke?”

  “You mean you find it funny? Well, there is no accounting for tastes. I turned a bunch of kids out of the foundations of a house, including my son there, and once I was alone, I buried the box in a place where I thought no one would find it for years. And I was right. Shall I go on?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I got rid of him after that. Had him sent down to my cousin Zoe, a soft, sentimental woman who couldn’t have kids or didn’t. My wife was dead. I sold the house as soon as the war was over and married again. No one asked any questions. I said I was a widower, which was true, and they accepted it. I married a woman called Margaret Lewis. Her husband had been killed in the war, in North Africa, in a place called Mersa Matruh, and he left her a house, a great big country place, and a mint of money, never mind how much. A hundred thousand was a hell of a lot in those days. Everyone accepted that I was madly in love with her. It was as easy as falling off a horse.

  “It was my looks that got her. I was very good-looking in those days, it gets them every time.” He stared searchingly at Caroline Inshaw. “With your looks you want to remember that. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.’ I always did. I haven’t worked since I was eighteen. Then a doctor told me I had a heart murmur. What happened to that, I wonder. Anyway, Margaret lived a long time, died at last, nothing to do with me. I married another rich woman, even richer, called Sheila Fraser. All the interests she had were nothing to me. I never cared about butterflies or—what are they called? Moths? The things th
at eat clothes—wildlife, trees, that sort of thing. I couldn’t stand hearing her talk about leaves and fishes and otters and whatever while we were having dinner. She died—that was something to do with me, but we needn’t go into that. I was by then a lovely old gentleman, people called me. I didn’t want to live alone anymore, so I found the best place in this country to be looked after in. That was here and I’ve been here ever since. I sold the house, I’ve still got plenty of money. It’ll last me out. And when I go, the hedgehogs will have it. Who would have thought I’d live to be a hundred—well, nearly a hundred. Are you going to charge me?”

  Michael’s father suddenly looked much younger, could have been taken for eighty, though eighty was hardly young.

  “I am. But I want to talk to you some more. I have questions to ask you. I should like you to have a lawyer with you. Are you able to come to London with me? Now, preferably?”

  “I haven’t been out of here for eighteen years. I used to go out. I had a girlfriend in the village and I used to visit her. Those were the days. There’s an old song my mother used to sing about when he thinks he’s past love, ’tis then he meets his last love. Those were the days.” He sang the lines of the song and now his voice cracked. “I don’t think I can go to London. It’s too far. I must think. Michael, pass me that glass of water that’s on the bedside table.”

  Michael’s legs felt as if they wouldn’t move. They were heavy as if made of stone.

  His father growled, “I said to pass me that glass of water that’s on the bedside table? Come on, look sharp. I don’t want to have to ask the lady, do I?”

  Michael managed to lift himself onto his feet, felt he would overbalance but didn’t. Swaying a little, he made his way to the table, lifted the glass, and carried it to his father. John Winwood’s eyes were on him, an unflinching stare. Michael turned away, sat down again, but instead of looking once more at his father, turned his eyes down to his hands, which lay in his lap. The room was silent and then Caroline made a sound, a little gasp. Michael looked up. His father was drinking water out of the glass, not only drinking it but swallowing something.

  “Lock the door,” John Winwood said. He had a small bottle in his hand.

  Michael said, “I don’t . . . I can’t . . .”

  “Too late. It’s too late now.”

  The bottle dropped out of his father’s hand, fell onto the carpet, and rolled an inch or two. The almost-hundred-year-old man slumped over the arm of his chair, his face contorted. He began to choke, a dreadful rasping yet liquid sound. Caroline jumped to her feet. Michael flung open the door and cried out, “Is anyone there? Come here. We need help.”

  DARREN CAME QUICKLY, then Imogen, then a man Michael had never before seen. It had all taken five minutes and it was too late now. The man, who was a doctor, said, “What did he take?”

  “He told me it was cyanide. He had it with him when he came to live here. I didn’t believe him. I should have believed him.”

  The doctor asked Imogen to take Michael and Caroline Inshaw downstairs. He would come to them in ten minutes. They were shown into an austere, pale grey room. Neither of them said a word but sat down in silence and waited.

  The doctor came in a little before the ten minutes were up. Michael liked him better than Stefani. “The autopsy will show,” said the doctor, “but what he took was aspirin. Death from cyanide would look quite different.” He sighed and shook his head. “It was probably a heart attack.”

  “So it had nothing to do with the pill he swallowed?” Caroline Inshaw sounded disappointed but was likely only shocked.

  “Nothing. It wasn’t the first heart attack he’d had, but it was the last.”

  Michael said, “He thought he’d had a heart murmur since he was young,” but no one took any notice.

  THOUGH VERY ILL and not expected to live, Norman Batchelor had survived, seemed well, and came to see his brother Stanley because it was now his life that was likely at an end. He had pancreatic cancer, and little could be done for him. Stanley often spent a day in bed, and he was in bed with Spot lying beside him when Norman arrived. John Winwood’s death was announced in a tiny item in the newspaper because he was only a few days short of a hundred. Stanley read it in the Mirror but Helen had read it first, and Norman told him all over again.

  Norman ate heartily of Helen’s cooking. He had thought that Stanley would have passed away before January 5 when he had a seat booked back to France on the Eurostar, but things worked out differently. He was sitting on Stanley’s bed, though he had been asked both by Stanley and Helen not to do so, and when he got to his feet to fetch himself a cup of tea, he was assailed by the worst pain he had ever known. Clasping his left arm with his right hand, he was doubled up by pain. His legs gave way; he groaned and fell to the floor. Spot barked and ran downstairs, Helen came running up, but nothing could be done. It was another instance of too-lateness. Norman was dead. Stanley swore later that the last thing Norman had said before he died was that he had been born on the kitchen table.

  WHEN IT GOT to Twelfth Night or some such time-honoured day soon after Christmas, Lewis told Melissa that he must go home. Everyone else had gone and he should go too.

  “Why?” said Melissa. “No need to go unless you’ve something important to do at home.”

  “Well, I haven’t. No, I haven’t.”

  He stayed. That night he moved from the bedroom he had been sleeping in since Christmas Eve to her bedroom. In March, Noreen Leopold phoned and he was told to invite her to Chiswick. Noreen, who was a quiet, rather sentimental woman, told them they were so romantic, it went straight to her heart. She told Lewis that James Rayment had been turned down by Anita Winwood. Lewis wanted to know if his uncle had had a “proper love affair” with Anita, but Noreen would have been considered old-fashioned if she had been living in London and said that she “wouldn’t know about things like that.” He was her father, he wouldn’t have mentioned something like that to her. He did say he was glad Anita had refused to go off with him because if she had, he’d never have met “the very sweet lady” who became Noreen’s mother.

  Noreen called her father an engineer. More like a motor mechanic, Lewis thought. Still, James did well, started his own business, and reared a flourishing family. “He often talked about you,” said Noreen. “Said you were the only one of his British relations he missed.”

  Lewis thought that was a bit mean considering James had had a room in Lewis’s parents’ house for months in 1944 and used it—he was thinking of the goings-on in the air-raid shelter—in a way you couldn’t use a hotel in those days, all rent-free. Still, he liked Noreen, and once she was safely back in the Tottenham Court Road hotel, he and Melissa took her about to see all sorts of sights, the Tower of London, the National Gallery, Madame Tussauds—they were the oldest people there—Harrods (twice), and first-class on the train to Brighton. After that Noreen went on a five-day tour to Cornwall, and Lewis and Melissa got married.

  STANLEY BATCHELOR DIED in St. Margaret’s Hospital, seven days after his brother Norman. “That makes two more widows,” said Maureen briskly. She wasn’t sorry to find a sister-in-law sharing her plight. The family survivors all met at Stanley’s funeral. Old people attend funerals far more than younger ones. You would suppose that such rituals would be too near the bone for the elderly, but it appears not to be so. Perhaps they go because funerals are so personal to them. They have experienced many of them, they know all about the way these things go. There are no surprises.

  Most of those who survived went to Stanley’s funeral, as did those widows, Maureen and, of course, Stanley’s own widow, Helen. Rosemary was there and so was Lewis with his new wife, Melissa. Everybody stared at her and pretended to be looking at some piece of decoration on St. Mary’s walls. The men’s verdict was that old Lewis had done well for himself, and the women’s that she had had at least one face-lift. Michael turned up, a rather unexpec
ted guest. His father had died in his care home and in Michael’s presence, everyone knew that, and to some people his appearance seemed in bad taste. How did he know about the funeral? No one found out. The answer was that Maureen had phoned and told him. No, Daphne wouldn’t go. Alan would likely be there, and it might be awkward for both of them to meet on such an occasion.

  Alan intended to go. Daphne had sent his other suitcase some weeks before, and in it was his charcoal-coloured, almost-new suit, which he meant to wear. In the time he had lived alone, his feelings for Rosemary had changed. He longed to return to the flat in Traps Hill. He longed for her. Many aspects of her recurred, coming to him in the night, in dreams, and in the daytime when he was out food shopping or while he sat alone in the studio flat he was renting; the sound of her sewing machine, the sight of some new dress she had made, her always slightly wrong fish pie, returned to him. It troubled Alan that most of those who attended the funeral and knew him asked after Rosemary. Was she unwell? Didn’t they know he and she had been apart for months? He replied noncommittally and went home before anyone could carry him off to the graveside.

  The studio flat he rented in Buckhurst Hill wasn’t much more than a room, its kitchen being some small pieces of equipment built into a panel on the wall where the door to the shower (no bath) room was. He tried to get out of it whenever he could. Therefore his attendance at Stanley’s funeral. Back at home, he sat down to think about trying again. Just go to the flat in Traps Hill and ask to come back? Go further than that and tell her he loved her, he always had, and must have been mad to leave her? After a while he fell asleep, as he often did in the afternoons. This time he dreamt that he was back with her, it was eight on a Saturday morning, and she was bringing him a cup of tea, telling him it was going to be a fine day and how would he feel about going to see Freya and baby Clement? He thought it was real, that dream, and when he woke up and found it wasn’t, he lay in the armchair and felt two tears run down his cheeks.