He would go to the funeral and the day after that he would phone Brenda at her sister’s and arrange to – what? Take her out to tea? Take her and her sister out to tea? That would be best. Meanwhile he would phone Urban Grange. He got off the bed, ran downstairs and snatched up the phone. A different woman answered. She had a normal sort of voice but she sounded harassed, almost distraught.
‘Oh, Mr Winwood, yes. Of course. I’m terribly sorry but we’ve had a – well, a disaster here. Terribly upsetting. May I call you back, say tomorrow? I have your number.’
He couldn’t face waiting for it. ‘No, I’ll call you,’ he said, and then, ‘It’s not my father, is it? This – this disaster?’
‘Oh no, not at all. Good heavens, no. I must go. Please call us tomorrow.’
What could it be? If it had been his father’s death, Michael would have been relieved.
George’s funeral was at St Mary’s Church in Loughton High Road. Michael got there early and was shown to a pew halfway down by a man in his fifties who said he was Stanley’s son. Four rows ahead of him he could see Lewis Newman and near the front on the other side of the aisle Norman Batchelor with a woman in a very smart black suit and pillbox hat who couldn’t be anything but French. Michael hoped Alan and Daphne might be there but realised that of course they couldn’t be because it was far more likely that Rosemary would be. Strange, he thought, how all sorts of social occasions were forbidden them now but they wouldn’t always be, not when people got used to the set-up, when they were accepted as what his children called an item. If it lasted, if they stayed together. If they lived long enough. That was what you always had to think of at their ages. If they lasted long enough.
A lot of grown-up and even late-middle-age children of George’s two marriages came in. One very young woman was carrying a baby which must, Michael guessed, be George’s great-grandchild or even great-great. Rosemary wasn’t there. Maureen arrived, supported by two women who looked so like her that they must have been her daughters. Everyone rose as the Dead March from Saul began and George’s coffin was carried in.
Michael didn’t join in the hymn-singing and managed not to listen to the eulogy delivered by Norman. He was thinking about the tunnels and the things they did, the games they played, the cards and draughts and wasn’t there backgammon? The awful wartime food they brought and devoured because they were growing and always hungry. He refused to let himself think of his father coming to the cave-like entrance and shouting at them all to come out and never go there again, his voice loud and rough with its coarse accent. Instead he was remembering Daphne in a black cloak with gold stars saved from Christmas decorations pinned on it, Daphne peering into her glass bowl and foretelling long lives. She had been right there. He found himself falling asleep. Nodding off, they called it, one of the penalties of growing old.
Maureen, someone told him, couldn’t face the crematorium and who could blame her? Instead they all made their way up York Hill to Carisbrooke. Michael found himself walking with Lewis Newman.
‘Two old widowers, that’s us,’ said Lewis in a cheerful tone. ‘We’re quite a rare breed, you know. I can’t remember the statistics, but usually we chaps die first.’
Michael remembered that Lewis had been a GP. ‘Yes. People tell me I’m lucky.’
‘Depends how you look at it. They say we’re very sought after by the preponderance of widows, but I can’t say I’ve noticed.’
‘Nor me,’ said Michael, deciding that he quite liked Lewis after all.
Some relative left behind at the house had organised a huge spread. Noticing the sherry bottles of every variety, Michael felt greatly touched. Poor old George, he would have enjoyed this. The tears came into his eyes but stayed there as Stanley, retrieving Spot from the laundry room where he had been shut up during the service, slapped him on the back and asked him what he thought of the ‘lovebirds’. ‘Alan and Daphne, I mean.’
Michael thought gossip the prerogative of women, though Vivien had never gossiped as far as he knew. ‘They seem very happy.’ Refusing to expand, he said he’d expected that Rosemary might have been at the funeral.
‘We did ask her. Apparently she goes nowhere. Just stays at home brooding. He’ll come back, you know. It’s just a matter of time.’
‘I wonder.’
Michael had a glass of Manzanilla and ate a stuffed vine leaf. Here in George’s house, his conscience troubled him about Clara Moss. It had begun to seem to him that every minute he spent in Loughton without seeing her was letting George down. He had promised George – well, he hadn’t promised but he had said he would go. After he had tried to talk to Eliane Batchelor and unwisely attempted the French he had acquired from a fortnight in Dijon forty years before, only to be asked in perfect English why he couldn’t speak that language, he began to make his escape. Lewis Newman asked him to share the taxi he had ordered, and when Michael mentioned Clara Moss, Lewis said the taxi would drop him off. Taking in Forest Road on the way to the station meant a detour along the edge of the forest and passing their old primary school in Staples Road.
‘It’s a good many years since I’ve been along here,’ said Lewis. ‘My mother insisted on bringing me and fetching me home even after I was far too old for it. The kids next door to us went to Staples Road and they would have brought me but she wasn’t having any.’
No one brought me or fetched me. I walked up there on my own when I was five. Michael didn’t say it aloud as it would have sounded like self-pity. It was self-pity. For something to say, ‘Let’s not lose touch,’ he said and gave Lewis his card. That meant the other man might make the first move. If they had been women, he thought, they would have kissed. It was awkward shaking hands in a taxi, so they did nothing but muttered something about it being good to see each other.
Clara’s house was the least well kept on the outside of any in the row. The black paint was peeling from the front door but the brass knocker and letter box shone as brightly as gold. A young woman with an enormous mass of bright ginger hair in jeans and a sleeveless low-cut top answered his knock.
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve come to see Mrs Moss. My name is Winwood, Michael Winwood.’
‘She never has visitors. Does she know you?’
‘She did once,’ he said and, unusually assertive, came over the threshold so that she was obliged to step back.
‘Wait a minute. I’ll have to ask her. She can’t walk very far.’
He was tired of waiting. He followed her into a room with a single bed in it where a little old woman, a very old woman, sat strapped into a wheelchair. The red-haired girl, seeing him close behind her, shrugged and shook her head as if washing her hands of the whole business. Clara Moss was staring at Michael, and in those dark eyes, half buried in gatherings of wrinkles, he could see she was perfectly intelligent and fitted the lawyer’s description ‘of sound mind’.
‘I know you,’ said Clara. ‘Since I was a girl and you was a little boy. Wait a minute.’ It was more than sixty years ago. He knew from photographs and looking in the mirror when he shaved that he was unimaginably changed. Who wouldn’t be? ‘I think you’re Michael,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t be no one else.’
His tendency to weep in times of emotion had affected him earlier when remembering George, and now it was back again. This time a tear fell, and then another.
‘Well I’m off,’ said the young woman. ‘See you on Friday, Clara. You owe me twelve pounds forty-nine but I can pick it up when I come.’
Clara said, ‘Thank you, Sam. You’re a good girl.’ The front door closed and she smiled at Michael. ‘She don’t like being called a girl but I always forget. Woman is right, she says.’
‘Politically correct. Mrs Moss, it’s very good to see you. Would you like to come out of that chair?’
‘I would but then I can’t get to my kitchen or the WC.’
He hadn’t heard it called that since he was very young. ‘Water closet’, the letters stood for. It was ‘toil
et’ to everyone now. ‘I could make us a cup of tea. Shall I?’
‘In a minute,’ she said. ‘You tell me what you’ve been doing all these years.’
So he did, but he made the tea first in a spotless kitchen where everything was so neatly and properly arranged that no one could fail to find what they were looking for. He rearranged the wheelchair for her, propping her with pillows from the bed and a big cushion. She had, she told him, a ‘bit of a dicky heart’ and a thrombosis in her right leg had left her what the nurse who came in called incapacitated. ‘A cripple, she means, but she’s a good girl. Kindness itself.’
He told her about Zoe and his law degree, becoming a solicitor and marrying Babette, then his happy life with Vivien and their children. Hardly knowing why he did, he said, ‘My father is still alive. He’s nearly a hundred now.’
‘Lives with you, does he?’
‘I’ve only seen him once since I was a boy.’
Her face sank into even deeper lines, her forehead corrugated. ‘They say the good die young. Him and me must have been very wicked, then.’
‘Not you, Mrs Moss.’
‘No one calls me that no more. The young don’t know the meaning of missus. D’you remember your mum? She was a lovely woman – to look at, I mean. Red hair, really red, I mean, not like that Sam. Hers comes out of a packet. That friend of your mum’s that used to come round – I’m not saying there was anything wrong, mind – he had red hair. No one took any notice of it then, it was just ginger hair, but now it’s supposed to be OK on a girl but ugly on a man. Funny the way things change.’
‘It is,’ said Michael, thinking about what she had just said. ‘Mrs Moss, I have to go. May I come back and see you soon? I’ve enjoyed our talk. It’s been wonderful to see you.’
The tears came then and streamed down his cheeks. It was too much for him, Clara Moss herself and his mother and maybe the red hair. He wept, scrubbing at his face with a tissue, while she watched him with wide eyes. ‘Come here,’ she said, and as he bent over to kiss her, she reached up and put her arms round his neck. ‘Poor little boy,’ he thought she said, but her voice was too muffled for him to be sure.
It wasn’t tomorrow, as he had told the woman at Urban Grange it would be, but the day after. He had thought of very little in the intervening time but Clara Moss and her reminiscences. Was it true that red-headed men were thought ugly? Certainly red hair must be considered beautiful on a woman or so many with perfectly pretty hair wouldn’t dye it chestnut or crimson or copper or burgundy or russet or, as people used to say, carrots. Anita’s hair was naturally chestnut and her eyes were almost navy blue. He could remember that very well. Lewis Newman had red hair, or had once when they were at school. Most of it was gone now and what remained was a pale gingery grey. He couldn’t remember Lewis’s father’s hair. Darkish, he supposed, a sort of dull brown like most people’s. He would be long dead now, like everyone’s father except his. He picked up the handset, walked about a bit carrying it, repeating the number to himself then dialling it.
Posh Voice answered. ‘Oh yes, Mr Winwood. You wanted to know if you should visit your father. I’d say yes, of course. He’s perfectly well – well, he’s very old, of course, so little ailments are to be expected, but he’s really remarkable for his age.’
‘When should I come?’
‘I think my colleague told you when you last spoke to us that we have had a most unfortunate mishap at Urban Grange. One of our inquilines had an accident and we thought we were going to lose her. But thanks to the truly wonderful attention of our medical staff, it looks as if all will be well.’
‘When shall I come?’
‘Shall we say next week? Any day that suits you. Shall we say in the afternoon, perhaps the late afternoon, for tea?’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE PILLS THE doctor prescribed gave her a night’s sleep. You couldn’t call it a good night’s sleep but it was eight hours of unconsciousness. Rosemary’s trouble, among others, was that since her wedding night she had hardly ever slept alone. There had been the three nights when Alan stayed at his mother’s when his father died, and the times when the children were born, but that was all. Now she thought she would never sleep again without pills. And although the pills worked, she would wake up and reach for Alan, then very soon realise that he wasn’t there, that he had left her and she was alone.
Her children and her grandchildren were very good to her. All of them took her side unreservedly. All of them thought she had been cruelly treated and even Owen and the husbands said Alan must have succumbed to senility. This was the onset of Alzheimer’s. She was getting tired of that word. This woman, this Daphne whatever she was called, must have seduced him when he was in a state of bewilderment, unable to understand his sudden loss of memory and his confusion. Owen went to call on him and Daphne, all set to compel his father to pack his bags and leave with him, but instead found himself accepting a glass of wine and only with reluctance refusing to stay for supper. He told Rosemary the pair of them had been recalcitrant, a word he had to define to his puzzled mother, which rather took the force out of it. Fenella was more to be reckoned with. She treated Alan and Daphne to a long diatribe on her grandmother’s sufferings and told them what they knew already, that Freya was pregnant. Alan’s absence would take away all the joy Rosemary would feel in the birth of this new great-grandchild. Alan settled things for the time being by dismissing her.
‘Oh go away, Fenella. You’ve said your piece and it’s not your business anyway.’
‘Isn’t it?’ Daphne asked when she had gone.
‘No, I don’t think it is. It’s my children’s certainly, but not my grandchildren’s. That’s too far removed.’
Fenella walked up the road to Freya’s flat. ‘I’ve seen Grandad. It’s a funny thing to say at his age, but he’s grown. I mean in strength. It’s not long since he never stood up for himself. He really couldn’t stand having Callum and Sybilla around, you know. I could tell, I’m not a psychologist for nothing, but he never said, he just put up with it. He wouldn’t now. He’s grown strong. Must be her doing. I shan’t tell Grandma, of course. She’s in a bad enough way as it is.’
‘Did you tell him about the baby?’
‘Well I did, Frey, but I can’t say it made much impression. Sorry, but he hardly seemed to notice.’
‘That’s the Alzheimer’s,’ said Freya.
It would be a good idea, Judith said, for Rosemary to come and stay with her for a week or two. For longer if she wanted to. She shouldn’t be alone. Rosemary refused. She had to be in the Traps Hill flat, she said, in case Alan came back.
She had done no dressmaking since he went. She cooked nothing unless it was scrambled egg, or heating up some ready meal in the microwave. The long walks she had taken with Alan were a thing of the past, she missed her weekly visits to the hairdresser and gave up the bridge club. In the old days, as she saw her long marriage, she wouldn’t have thought twice about writing a condolence letter to Maureen Batchelor, but no letter had been written and no visit to Carisbrooke had been paid. She stayed at home, deeply miserable. Alan occasionally phoned, mostly to ask if she was all right. Was there anything she needed? Was she all right for money? He seemed to understand that as she had never paid a bill since her marriage or filled in a form or questionnaire from the council, she might need help. She said that Owen or Judith saw to all that and then, invariably, she began to cry.
‘You can’t go on like this,’ said Judith. ‘You’ll be ill.’
‘If I’m ill I might die and that would all be for the best.’
‘I would never have advised this,’ said Judith, who could be pompous, ‘but I think it might be a good idea if you were to go there and see him. Talk to him. I’ll come with you if you like. I know exactly where it is. We could have lunch with Freya and walk down to Hamilton Terrace.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Rosemary snapped, jolted out of her despair and unusually sarcastic. ‘Make a party of it
, why don’t you, and invite the neighbours. This is my life, Judith. This is my life and your father has wrecked it.’
‘Shall we go then?’
‘Yes, all right, why not? Things can’t be any worse than they are.’
Unlike her daughter and her brother, Judith announced the projected visit in advance. She wrote her father a letter, which arrived on a Saturday morning along with fliers, communications from the City of Westminster, mail-order catalogues and pleas for charitable donations. When the post came, Alan and Daphne were sitting up in bed eating the breakfast Alan had just prepared and brought upstairs. They had passed the muesli stage and were beginning on the egg and bacon course when the bell rang. Alan went down again in his dressing gown. It was the postman hoping to deliver a package from a friend for Daphne’s birthday. Recognising his daughter’s handwriting on an envelope, Alan wanted to ignore it but knew he would have to open it sometime. He took it and the package upstairs, where his egg was getting cold. Daphne took the package from him and began opening it.
‘Look, a very pretty scarf. Isn’t that kind? Alan, what’s wrong? You’re wearing a bad news look.’
‘Rosemary wants to come here next Tuesday or Wednesday. Up to us. Judith will bring her.’
On her way home from visiting Freya, an even more frequent happening since her daughter’s pregnancy was known, Judith drove down the road and round the corner into Hamilton Terrace. If anyone came out of the house or just looked out of the window they wouldn’t recognise her car. Her father might know the make and the colour but silver was the most popular shade for a Prius and there were thousands of them about. Nice house, she thought, must be worth a fortune. Had it occurred to her mother that her father might have left her because Daphne was a very wealthy woman? That he might prefer to live here than in a suburban flat? Judith dismissed the thought, though it would certainly be pleasant sharing such a palace, with its covered way leading up to the front porch, its front garden with its pair of lawns and furnished with tubs that overflowed with trailing Thalia fuchsias.
The Girl Next Door Page 15
