‘Well, Suzanne seemed to know all about it. Let’s get off home and wait to hear from Maureen. She may know more.’
It was hard to say whether she meant more about the Norrises or about George.
Thanks to Helen’s prompt action, George Batchelor was able to respond to treatment quite quickly. The clot-busting drugs, according to the doctor, were effective. He was made to get up when he longed to stay in bed, walked around his private room holding Maureen’s arm and became surprisingly cheerful. It was Maureen who took it badly. Stanley, who had described the Norrises as the perfect couple, could now have applied that term to her and George.
‘I realised Dad might die,’ Maureen said to her daughter. ‘The funny thing is, I’d never really thought of it before.’
‘We’re all going to die one day, Mum.’
‘Yes, but not soon. He might have another stroke, he might have one tomorrow. It’s left me feeling really depressed.’
‘Try and put it out of your mind. How about those friends of yours, those two who’ve split up? At their age? You don’t think about them dying, do you?’
Maureen wasn’t interested in the Norrises. She wasn’t interested in anyone but herself and George. How dreadful, she thought, only to realise how much you love someone when you’re about to lose them. George was at home now, preoccupied with his own health. He had sent her out to buy a sphygmomanometer and took his own blood pressure several times a day. In spite of the doctor’s warning, he overdosed on low-dose aspirins, intended to thin his blood. Apart from a quick visit to the pharmacy, Maureen never went out. She was afraid that if she left him alone he might have another stroke. At night she hardly slept, dreading that if she fell asleep she might wake to find him dead.
Relatives came to visit: Stanley and Helen, of course, and Norman came over from France, bringing Eliane with him. Maureen didn’t want any of them. All she wanted was to stay at home alone with George. There was no need to go out because they had all their groceries delivered anyway. Helen brought chocolates and a bottle of sherry, though Maureen wouldn’t allow George alcohol, she was too frightened. The day came when she was due to take Clara Moss for her MRI, but she’d have to miss that. She did worry a bit about not seeing Clara, but Clara had no phone, strange as that was. Maureen had heard that the young woman next door did her shopping for her, so that would be all right. Still her conscience worried her and she asked Helen if she would go and knock at Clara’s door, just to see if she was mobile.
‘I couldn’t do that,’ Helen said. ‘I don’t know the woman, it’d be very awkward. I’d be embarrassed and so would she.’
Maureen said she sometimes thought she’d never go out again, she’d be too afraid to leave George.
‘He won’t be stuck here for ever,’ Norman said. ‘He’ll want to be out and about and you’ll be with him.’
When she told George that no one had visited Clara Moss, he was disproportionately upset. Well, it seemed disproportionate to her.
‘She can get about, George. She’s not bedridden. I’d call her quite a tough old bird.’
‘I can order a car and have it take me to Forest Road. The driver can help me up the path and once I’m inside Clara’s house I can sit down. I’ll be fine.’
‘I’m not having it, George. You’ll kill yourself. I’ll take the phone away.’
George said all right, he wouldn’t do it but to pass him the two phone books, the one for north-west London and the local one. He would find someone else to look in on Clara and take her to the hospital.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE ENORMOUS FUSS was something Alan hadn’t anticipated. Perhaps because he’d given very little thought to what would happen after he had walked out of the flat in Traps Hill and come here to Daphne. That it would be lovely with Daphne he had known, and it was. No surprise there. Not only the lovemaking; he might even say not so much the lovemaking as the pleasure of being able to walk down the street with her, hand in hand if they chose, making a restaurant reservation in both their names, driving out together in Daphne’s car and going home together, walking up the path to the front door and letting themselves in – together.
But trouble had begun on their first morning. When he got there in the dark and paid off his taxi, he let himself into the house, rather surprised that he could, that she hadn’t bolted the door. She must have thought of that when she gave him the keys, have thought she would never bolt the door again until he did it himself when he lived here with her. He had gone upstairs and found her asleep. He knelt down by the bed and kissed her until she woke and put her arms round him. The phone rang at eight in the morning, the landline. How had Judith got this number?
‘From Michael Winwood. I thought of asking him – rather clever of me, wasn’t it? He had no idea. He seemed to think I was holding some sort of reunion of oldies.’
‘What do you want, Judy?’
‘For you to come back, of course. Come home now and she’ll forgive you, she’ll overlook it. It was such a monstrous thing to do but she wants you back just the same. Does she want you back! My God, Dad, she is in such a state as I’ve never seen. She can’t believe it, she says she’s in a nightmare she can’t wake up from.’
‘Other men have left their wives. It’s not uncommon.’
‘Is that all you can say?’
‘No, Judith, it’s not all I can say. I can say a great many things. But I’m not going to say them to you.’
‘Owen is absolutely furious. He says it must be Alzheimer’s. He says you could be made to come back.’
Alan didn’t feel like laughing but he did laugh. ‘Alzheimer’s has only been known or only called that for a few years. What did people blame the failings of the old on before that? Senility, I suppose, which is much the same thing. As for Owen, he can’t talk. He walked out on his first wife. Yes, but he was young, you’re going to say, aren’t you? Goodbye, Judy.’
Fenella was the next to phone. Alan said it was nothing to do with her and she should mind her own business. He had never spoken to a granddaughter like this before and he rather enjoyed it. That was the second day. With Rosemary it was different, he had to talk to her and for as long as she liked. He was treating her badly, worse than badly, and he knew it. With no excuse and no defence, in a strange way he was set free. Her voice on the phone was so unlike the voice he knew that he would hardly have recognised it.
‘What have I done? I’d like to know what I’ve done. If I’ve done some awful thing I’d like you to tell me. I thought I’d been a good wife to you. We’ve passed our golden wedding, Alan, and you’ve left me and I don’t know why.’
He didn’t know what to say except that it wasn’t her, it was him. It was his fault, not hers. Fault, of course, didn’t come into it. They had been incompatible for nearly fifty years. Both knew it without even expressing it to each other, or come to that, to themselves. They had made the best of it because when they were young you dissolved a marriage only because of adultery or violence. He let her talk. He listened because he owed her that. When she had said enough or had exhausted herself he would leave it to her to say goodbye and put the phone down.
Daphne never commented on these calls or asked what they were about, but after three days of them – Freya and her new husband and his son-in-law Maurice and a cousin he hadn’t spoken to for years and two neighbours in the block all called – she went out and bought him a new mobile phone.
‘No one can get through to me,’ she said. ‘You’re so popular.’
One of the people who had been trying to get through was Michael Winwood. He knew nothing of the Norrises’ break-up and wanted to talk to Daphne as if she were a sort of therapist. She of all the people he knew, and he had very few friends, might listen to him if he talked to her about his father and Urban Grange and his loss of Zoe. While he was waiting to make another attempt to get hold of her, his phone rang. It was George Batchelor to ask him if he would come to Loughton and look in on Clara Moss.
‘Who’s Clara Moss?’
‘You know who she is, Mike. The charlady who used to clean for my family and your mum and dad, lives in Forest Road, old as the hills now. Even older than us, as she’d have to be.’
‘Mrs Mopp, we called her,’ said Michael, still wincing from the diminutive no one else had ever used. ‘Well, my father did. It was from a character who was a cleaner in a radio comedy. Moss and Mopp, you see. Not very kind, was it?’ But his father was never kind, he thought, not saying it aloud. ‘What about her?’
‘Look, Mike, I’ve had a stroke, much better now. I used to pop in and see her, have done for yonks. So would you look in on her? She’ll remember you. Come and have a bite to eat with us first. Maureen’s found a smashing new sherry and on your way back you could go to Clara’s.’
When he had expressed his sympathy about the stroke, Michael said he would and they fixed a date. George put the phone down and Maureen came running in to ask what Michael thought about Alan and Rosemary.
‘I never told him. I forgot.’
‘Oh, lovey, when that’s all anybody’s talking about.’
‘You can tell him when he comes,’ said George.
His call had cheered Michael up, helping him to realise how much he needed a friend to talk to and encouraging him to try Daphne’s number once again.
‘Why not come over?’ said Daphne. ‘This afternoon or tomorrow. You can be our first visitor.’
‘Our?’
‘Alan Norris is living with me now.’ She said it in the same tone she might have used to remark that it was a fine day.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Yes, I did say that.’
‘What, living with you like living with you?’ Michael the lawyer said. ‘Cohabiting, you mean.’
She laughed. ‘Exactly that. Come to supper and all will be explained.’
Two pleasant and friendly voices enhanced his feeling of well-being. He did something rare with him. He took the handset of the phone upstairs to Vivien’s room and felt her presence very near him. Anything he said and anything that was said to him would be bearable, liveable with, if he lay on the bed and made his phone call from there. The number of Urban Grange he had by heart.
Big institutions had begun a response system irritating to most people but especially to the elderly, those who expected a human voice, someone who would listen and answer questions. As he touched the keys – you could no longer call it dialling – he thought of the pressing of one for a booking, two for a cancellation, three for an extension and so on that would ensue, but no, he got a human voice, a female one of upper-class distinction. How could she help him?
‘My name is Michael Winwood. John Winwood is my father.’ He felt as if he were in court, in the witness box.
‘Mr Winwood who is a commensal in Urban Grange?’
Michael had never heard the word before. ‘Well, he lives there.’
She must have had recourse to a computer. ‘Yes, one of our valued inquilines. We have a Mrs Zoe Nicholson as his next of kin.’
‘Yes. She is now dead and I am his next of kin. Perhaps you would like to make a note of that and take my details.’
He gave them to her, she thanked him and asked if he would be paying Urban Grange a visit in the near future. ‘Should I?’ he asked.
‘We do like to see our commensals’ loved ones occasionally,’ she said, ‘and of course Mr Winwood would appreciate seeing you.’ Back to the computer, followed by a soft sigh. ‘Mr Winwood is a very old gentleman.’
He said he would call back to give her a day, put the phone down and rolled over face downwards with closed eyes, imagining Vivien close to him. But she had receded, shrinking away perhaps from that ultra-posh voice. Alone again, he went downstairs to look up the two unfamiliar words. ‘Commensal’ meant resident and ‘inquiline’ meant a guest in a house not his or her own.
You read about such things in the papers, he thought when he saw them together in Daphne’s living room. But in those cases the two people had been forcibly parted when young by war or the intervention of others. It looked as if these two had been happy enough with other partners, in Alan’s case with a wife, and were brought together by the finding of two hands in a tin box. And yet it was he that Daphne had taken home after that reunion. It might have been he and she that the hands brought together, and for a fleeting moment as she gave him a glass of wine he wished it had been.
That thought passed as he began to tell them – necessarily both of them – about his aunt and the father he had hardly seen since he was a child. ‘What do you think?’ He was looking at Daphne. ‘Should I go to this Urban Grange and see him? I mean, be the dutiful son? Not that I owe him any duty.’
‘Isn’t there a wife? Your stepmother?’
‘She died. She was very rich and left him everything, which is why he can afford to live out the rest of his life at Urban Grange.’
‘He must be very old,’ Daphne said. ‘Do you want to see him? It doesn’t sound as if you do.’
‘He’s a few months short of a hundred. Imagine saying that of anyone when we were young. It’s the equivalent of saying “he’s over eighty” in our tunnels days – I mean qanats.’ He smiled at her. ‘Do I want to see him? Of course I don’t, I dread it. I’m an old man and I ought to have left those kinds of fears far behind me, but I haven’t.’ Michael paused, knowing he should leave it there but unable to stop. ‘When I look back – and I have to look back because I haven’t seen him for so long – when I do, I see him as a sort of monster, an ugly shrivelled creature like an alien from a horror film.’
‘Oh, Michael.’
‘I ask myself, am I going to be shown up to his room, or suite or apartment or whatever he has, and left there by whoever escorts me and he comes in and I – I scream.’ He drew a deep breath. The other two said nothing, but their hands moved along the sofa and each joined the other. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for putting you through this. Sheila, my stepmother, I suppose she was, though I only met her once, drank a bottle of whisky and took an overdose of pills. The verdict at the inquest was death by misadventure. I think he – well, helped her die. I shouldn’t be telling you this, I should be telling the police, but he’s my father. And he’s almost a hundred years old.’
Alan said, ‘You can’t tell the police, I see that. Very probably he won’t live long. I don’t know what Daphne will say, but I think you should see your father, steel yourself, make an enormous effort and maybe stay no more than half an hour. What do you think, Daphne?’
She hesitated, then said, ‘I knew him, you know. We lived next door. Perhaps ask him if he wants to see you. Get this Urban Grange place to ask him. He may be as reluctant to see you as you are to see him. We dislike those we have injured, don’t you think?’
‘They’ll say he wants to see me but I’ll ask. I’ll do that,’ Michael said. ‘I will.’
‘And now I think we should have our supper.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THERE WAS ANOTHER extremely old person Michael was due to visit.When first asked by George Batchelor, he had quite looked forward to this. He had thought a good deal about Clara Moss, that small thin woman that his father called Mrs Mopp and scorned behind her back. After Anita had gone, no one else but Michael was there for him to say unpleasant things to about Clara: how stupid she was, how inefficient, what a hopeless cleaner. She always wore plimsolls, as trainers were called then, and a cotton crossover overall, but even John Winwood couldn’t call her dirty. Michael liked the hugs she occasionally gave him because she smelled of Wright’s coal tar soap. Her hands were scrubbed until they were red and her nails to whiteness. He had noticed that the wedding ring she wore on the third finger of her left hand was loose, slipping up and down, because she had grown so thin after her husband was killed.
One day it was lost. The tale of her losing it was something that had stayed in his memory for ever. Anita was still there when it happened, and how to deal with it, or not deal with it
, was almost the only time he remembered his parents being in accord over anything. Clara told his mother that the ring had slipped off her finger and fallen down the waste pipe in the kitchen sink. Tentatively, for she was always shy with Anita, she had said it would have been stuck in the S-bend and would Mr Winwood retrieve it for her. She knew he could because she had seen him do whatever was necessary once before when there was a blockage in the pipe. Michael had heard his parents discuss the matter and John Winwood, agreeing with Anita, say that like hell he was going to take the sink apart for the char’s bloody ring.
A child doesn’t know how much a dead husband’s ring might mean to his widow, but he knew when he was older. He knew when he was far away with Zoe, when his mother had gone, his father had left the house as far as he knew, and the ring was still down there. It might be still down there now, he thought, when George asked him to visit Clara Moss. For a few days he thought about Clara and the ring. He thought about how he was going to have lunch at George’s on Wednesday of next week and call on Clara afterwards, and he thought it likely George would phone to arrange a time. He didn’t phone. Michael phoned him and a woman answered. It was Maureen, but he didn’t recognise her voice, it was so low and dull and broken.
George was dead. Another stroke had come three nights ago and he had never wakened again. She had half expected it but it was still a terrible shock. Michael asked if there was anything he could do and Maureen in her new fractured voice said please come to the funeral. She told him when and where it was and said all his friends would be welcome at the sherry party she would have afterwards. No flowers, please, she said, and sobbed quietly.
He would go. Michael came to this decision not entirely out of altruism and not at all from duty. He had no duty to George. But since his visit to Daphne and Alan, he had reproached himself for having given up nearly all social life after Vivien’s death. He had kept up with Zoe, of course he had, but abandoned all his friends. There had been that single visit to George and that was about it. Zoe would have wanted him to keep an eye on Brenda but he never had, reasoning that now she was living with her sister, she wouldn’t need him. A funeral wasn’t exactly a social occasion but he would go to it. It would be a start for getting back into something like the sort of life he used to have. In Vivien’s room he lay on the bed with the curtains drawn and told her all this, certain that if she knew, she would approve.
The Girl Next Door Page 14
