Michael felt sick. He would never hold anyone’s hand again. Never, never. He couldn’t bring himself to ask her if the man was James Rayment, though he knew it must have been. The room had become quiet. Clara breathed silently. Lilian Beecham said to him, ‘Get you a cup of tea, shall I?’
He shrugged, moved his hands from side to side in a gesture that might have meant anything. The tea came and to his surprise he was glad of it. A vehicle had drawn up outside with ‘Ambulance’ printed on its side. He half rose and turned to check that this was what it was. The moving hands that wandered across the coverlet were still now. He had only ever seen death happen once, and that was when Vivien had slipped, silent and still, from life to insensibility to death.
He knew it when he saw it. ‘Tell them they won’t be needed,’ he said to Sam. ‘She’s gone.’
Rosemary too lay in bed. She did nothing. Although there was a small television set in Freya’s spare room, she didn’t watch it. Nor did she read or listen to radio programmes. Usually considerate, as her neighbour put it, she forgot all that and in the flat in St John’s Wood Road behaved as if she were in a hotel. Freya or David, home on paternity leave, brought her breakfast, and Judith, who called in every day, told her it would do her good to get up and move around, maybe go out for a walk. Only Fenella, arriving with Sybilla, had the nerve to tell her she wasn’t ill and should pull herself together. Sybilla bounced up and down on the sofa until her great-grandmother shouted at her to stop and threatened her – the ultimate in child abuse – with a ‘good hard smack’.
Rosemary sat at the dining table, silent and patient. ‘Like a dog,’ said David, ‘waiting for its dinner.’
‘Well, she is waiting for her dinner or her lunch,’ said poor Freya, then, back in the kitchen, ‘What are we going to do?’
‘She’ll go when the baby’s born. You’ll see.’
‘I won’t be here to see.’
Unlike Norman Batchelor’s mother and Princess Andrew of Greece, Freya wasn’t preparing to give birth on a table. Her due date was past and the hospital had started making ominous noises. That afternoon, after Rosemary had been given her tea, a scone and a piece of carrot cake, Freya doubled up and winced. ‘I’m having a pain.’
‘Shall I drive you to the hospital?’
‘Not yet. Much too soon.’
While refusing to watch television in her bedroom, Rosemary enjoyed it on her hosts’ much larger set. Everything they watched she deemed immoral or called a disgrace and asked for the channel to be changed or changed it herself. She preferred programmes about bird life or handicrafts in Cumbria or clothes for the elderly. Freya sat down and watched with her, getting up from time to time to walk about the flat, secretly timing her pains. At six p.m. she said to her grandmother, ‘We’re leaving for the hospital now, Gran. Will you be all right on your own?’
‘Why the hospital? Are you ill?’
‘I’m in labour. I’m about to have the baby.’
‘Are you?’ Rosemary looked at her, mystified. ‘Nobody tells me anything.’
‘Will you be all right on your own? Or shall I fetch Mum?’
Rosemary didn’t reply. She went into her bedroom, heard Freya and David call out, ‘Bye, Gran. See you later,’ and sat on the bed, thinking. She had of course brought nothing with her, had borrowed a nightdress from Judith and a blouse and skirt. These she left in a neat pile on the bedside table. Next she stripped the bed. She dressed in the clothes she had come in, checked she had her front door key and returned to the living room, where the phone was ringing. Like two earlier calls, she ignored this one too. It would be Judith, whom Freya must have called in the car on one of those mobiles people had.
Out in the street Rosemary would have taken a cab home but she doubted the driver would drive her all the way to Loughton. She had taken the tube here so why not take it back again? I have changed, she thought, I am a different person from the woman who came here ten days ago. I no longer care. Caring has departed. All my life I have cared for other people, husband, children, grandchildren, friends, relatives, neighbours. Now I don’t, I only care for me. She walked along Hamilton Terrace and crossed Maida Vale, rather pleased with herself for not having a heavy bag to carry. Since her marriage, and rarely before that, she had never been into a café or restaurant on her own, not even for a cup of coffee or a sandwich. Alan had always been with her, or one of her children or a friend. Outside the Café Laville she hesitated, then pushed open the door and went in.
The place would be full later, she guessed, but now there were only a few people sitting at tables, all couples of course. A man came up and asked her what she wanted and she said a cup of black coffee. He asked if she meant an Americano, and not having the faintest idea what that was, she agreed. It was easier that way. In future, she thought, she would always go for the easy option. The coffee was quite nice. She didn’t want anything to eat. A bill came – ridiculous for a drop of coffee – but she found the precise sum in her purse, laid it on the table and added a five pence piece.
The tube took her to Baker Street, where she changed, as she remembered doing in reverse, for Liverpool Street. A lot of people were in the train for Loughton, commuters of course, and she was rather pleased for using the word appropriately. She had never been one and wouldn’t have cared to join their number and make this tedious trip every day. No taxis were waiting outside Loughton station. She didn’t feel like waiting for one to come, so she walked, very tired by the time she reached Traps Hill.
The stripy cat was sitting outside her front door. It was a very large cat, long-haired and with a pleasant, even kindly expression. She had never invited it in but she did now. There would be no one else to welcome her home. She was in her teens before her parents had a dog but there was always a cat in the house, never allowed to sit on armchairs or on the settee. Defiant now, even of the long dead, Rosemary lifted up the purring bundle and laid it on the sofa.
She slept better that night than she had ever done at Freya’s. Having forgotten all about Freya and her imminent delivery, she remembered without much enthusiasm or anxiety in the morning. No doubt someone would call and tell her. Someone did, at nine a.m.
‘Everyone’s been in a state about you,’ said David. ‘Not me, I knew you’d be all right. Judith’s phoned all the rellies. Fenella wanted to call the police but I don’t think she did. Incidentally, I’m a dad. Freya had a baby boy at one a.m. Three and a half kilos.’
Apart from knowing it was a measurement of weight, Rosemary hadn’t the faintest idea of what that was in pounds. She sent her love to Freya, thought about phoning Judith and decided against it, decided against phoning anyone. The stripy cat had got out of a window and was sitting on the balcony. Putting him out of the front door to find his way home, she told him she had nothing for him but would buy cat food when she was out. There were no bathtubs at Freya’s, so she had a bath, luxuriating in it, dressed in one of what Fenella had been heard to call ‘Gran’s own creations’ and got out her winter coat from the mothproof bag it had been in since March.
When she was in her teens and the war was over but clothing coupons were still in use, her mother didn’t take her ‘up to Town’ to buy clothes but to Leytonstone and Bowman’s department store on the tube or to Ilford’s shops on the bus. Instead of clothes, the raw materials were what they went there for, dress lengths as they were called, or remnants, just enough fabric to make a skirt or blouse. No T-shirts and scarcely any trousers in those days. They bought wool too, but more often, while the war was on, unpicked old garments to knit up again. It was her mother who had taught her to sew; according to the teenage Judith, behaving like a typical teenager, she hadn’t been much of a teacher.
Rosemary had been undeterred and was undeterred now. She walked to the shop that was run by an Asian family but had once been Penistans – the teenage schoolboys who were her contemporaries had made much of that name – and went on a shopping spree. A length of green silk, the same sort of fabr
ic as the copper-coloured silk she had made into the dress and jacket for Freya’s wedding, was her first purchase, then came a few yards of fine wool, next a few metres of tweed and lastly some very expensive blue velvet. Mumtaz, as the shop was now called, thought it was Christmas and were all smiles. Rosemary had spent a fortune. There was too much stuff, in both senses of the word, for her to carry home, and Mumtaz said they would depart from their rule, and bring it to her in the van.
Back at home she was hunting through her large stack of patterns when the van arrived. Another rule was broken when Mr Ashok carried the baskets of materials into the flat for her. Her phone was ringing and she saw that several messages had been left. Let the phone ring and let the messages sit where they were. She would sit on the floor, pin the pattern she had chosen to the blue velvet and cut it out. While she was machining there would be no interruptions from Alan wanting her to go out for a walk or watch TV with him or give up her work and buy a designer frock. The phone rang again. She lifted the receiver and shouted into it, ‘Go away.’
The blue velvet was the same colour as the cloak her mother had made her, aged seven, to wear over her dress when she went to parties. She thought about it as she cut, thought too about meeting Alan three years later. It was at a dancing class held at the tennis club down Traps Hill, a great contrast to the tunnels where they had next encountered each other. Daphne Jones, Rosemary could see now, had been a young witch with her crystal ball and her cards. When Alan first went off with her, or went off to her, Rosemary had been shattered, ‘devastated’ was the word everyone used, but that feeling hadn’t lasted. It was her pride that was hurt, she decided, and now she remembered what her grandmother had told her when she was little, told the whole family who were there.
‘When you get old,’ she had said on the occasion of her brother Tom dying, ‘you don’t have much emotion. It goes. At about seventy, I’d say. All those things and people you were passionate about, angry or adoring or longing, they all go, and a kind of dull calm takes over. I used to worship Tom. Now he’s dead I don’t much care. That’s how it is with me.’
Now Alan’s gone, said Rosemary to herself, I don’t much care. I did at first but now I don’t. That’s how it is with me. Calm, at peace, thinking ahead to all the clothes she would be able to make uninterruptedly, she began to pin the velvet pieces together. Tomorrow she would go to the shop that had reopened when knitting became fashionable again two or three years ago, and buy enough wool to make herself a twinset. Something for the new baby too? I don’t think so. Freya wouldn’t appreciate it, so why bother?
Why do anything at all I don’t enjoy? I won’t. That’s how it is for me now.
Several phone calls were made to Daphne and Alan before Michael got an answer that wasn’t a recorded message saying they were in Italy. When he said he had given a DNA sample to the police and that Lewis had been asked for one also, Daphne said, ‘Come round.’
‘Shall I? You’re only just back from your holiday.’
‘Never mind that. We’d love to see you.’
Putting on his coat, he thought how she talked as if she and Alan had been together for a dozen years or more. It was cold and Daphne had lit a fire in the beautiful room – not a real fire, of course, that wouldn’t have been permitted, but something gas-fired that looked real. Another first for him was the kiss she gave him when he arrived. They had sherry and blinis. Michael could tell the caviar was real. The sherry was in honour of George, Alan said.
‘Tell us all about the DNA,’ said Daphne when they had raised their glasses in George’s memory.
‘I told you on the phone.’ Michael was diffident now he had come to the purpose of his visit. It was going to be a monstrous thing to say, so he began with Lewis. ‘This woman didn’t say but I could tell she thinks the man’s hand might have belonged to Lewis’s uncle James Rayment.’ He couldn’t go on without prompting.
Alan did the prompting. ‘And the woman’s?’ He realised too late what he was asking. ‘No, perhaps I shouldn’t ask that.’
‘You should if I’m to tell you.’ Michael wanted to say that it wasn’t easy for him, then despised himself for being self-pitying. ‘Because the woman’s hand might be my mother’s.’
‘Michael!’ Daphne seemed to shrink, clasping her own hands. ‘How terrible for you.’
‘Well, yes.’ The ready tears were there, waiting to fall. He swallowed hard, which sometimes helped. ‘That’s why my DNA. They haven’t got the results yet. Clara Moss saw them together, my mother and Rayment, I mean.’ That his father had seen them was more than he could bear to say. But thinking it made the tears fall. If Daphne put her arms round him it would be too much for him and he might collapse. She didn’t. Alan passed him a beautifully laundered handkerchief and he wondered incongruously if Daphne had washed and ironed it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m inclined to cry.’
‘Is it a relief?’
‘I suppose it is. I even cry when I realise they think my father put the hands there and buried them. That means my father killed them both.’
Neither Alan nor Daphne spoke. Michael said, ‘I may have told you, I don’t remember, but he’ll be a hundred years old in January. He’s absolutely compos mentis, the same as ever. I don’t know if either of you knew him.’
Alan shook his head but Daphne said, ‘I did.’
‘Of course. You lived next door.’
Alan was looking at her strangely. It seemed she had turned rather pale, but she was always pale. Michael wanted to say that his father wanted to live until his hundredth birthday but if the police came to the conclusion he had already reached, wouldn’t it be better for him to die sooner? He wanted to say it but knew he would only cry again, so he made himself ask them about their holiday, mostly spent in Florence and Rome. That was safe, tearless territory as he had never been there. Daphne and Alan were not the kind of tourists who inflict their travel experiences on their friends, accompanied often by slides, postcards and photographs on their mobile phones. They simply said they had had a wonderful time, mentioned a church or two, the pyramid of Cestius and the marvellous food. Alan said Michael should stay to supper but Daphne said nothing, her expression suddenly shut in and – could it be frightened?
He went. Daphne saw him to the front door, and if he had feared he had in some way offended her, when she kissed him again and briefly put her arms around him, he knew he was mistaken. He spent the evening in Vivien’s room, lying on the bed with his arm round his imagined wife, longing for her and for a while forgetting his father.
‘What’s the matter?’
As soon as he had said it, Alan thought how old-fashioned that was, that no one said it any more, or no one under sixty. They said, what’s wrong?
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’ Daphne tried a smile and more or less failed. ‘The classic reply. No, of course there’s something wrong. You can tell, can’t you?’
He nodded.
‘I don’t need to confess anything to you. I never confessed anything to my husbands. They didn’t ask so I didn’t tell.’
‘I’m not asking.’ He thought, she’s going to tell me she had an affair with Michael, or even with Lewis Newman. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything.’ After that there was only one thing he wanted to say. ‘I love you.’
‘I know, and I love you.’ She had been sitting next to him on the sofa. Their sherry glasses were empty. ‘Would you get me a small brandy, Alan?’ She stood up and moved into one of the armchairs, not far away, just not touching him.
‘I’ve never known you to drink spirits.’
‘Only when it’s medicinal,’ she said and smiled. ‘Michael reminded you that I lived next door to them,’ she said. ‘My parents disapproved. I mean of both of them, John and Anita. Not that we called them that. They were Mr and Mrs Winwood.’ She took a sip of the brandy and gave a small gasp. ‘I knew him. He knew me. We talked over the garden fence. I was twelve, going on twenty-five.’
/> Instead of turning pale, a dark flush had spread across Alan’s face. ‘What are you saying, Daphne?’
‘He was very good-looking. That was the age of the film star, much more then than ever since. He looked like Errol Flynn. They say Errol Flynn was stupid. I don’t know. John Winwood wasn’t stupid, just insensitive, and he wasn’t charming or kind or gentle – well, he wasn’t unkind to me. He was just amazingly good-looking. You wouldn’t think a twelve-year-old could feel like I did but I did. I wasn’t in love with him but I was madly attracted. Madly, Alan.’
His mouth was dry. ‘What happened?’
‘We met. Quite often. Anita was out with some man. I never knew who but it might have been Lewis’s uncle or this soldier she knew or – well, anyone. I think she must have been quite promiscuous, though I didn’t even know the word then. We met in John’s house. It was easy, just next door. I suppose my parents thought I was out with the crowd of you, you and Rosemary and Bill Johnson and the Batchelors and Lewis and Michael. I was sometimes, but often I was with John.’
‘You mean you slept with him?’
‘Not exactly. Not what the expression means. No, I didn’t. We did everything except the thing people mean when they say “slept with”. We didn’t do that because though I was twelve I could have had a baby. You know what I mean. Do you know how terrified girls were then, even very very young girls like me, of getting pregnant? Never mind, we were, I was. I think John was aware of that and he didn’t mind. He was afraid as well, of me, of my parents.’
‘Why did it stop?’
‘John turned us – well, all of you – out of the qanats so that we could go there, he and I, use the place, I mean, instead of his house. I don’t know why not his house. Anita had gone or had died; later he said she had died. I was frightened and I said I wouldn’t see him again. I didn’t threaten him, I mean like saying I’d tell my parents, I never did that. I just stopped seeing him except in the street sometimes or over the garden fence. Alan, I knew something horrible had happened in that house.’ Daphne raised the brandy glass to her lips again. ‘I missed John. I didn’t even like him, I was afraid of him but he was afraid of me too.’ She hesitated. ‘There’s more. Shall I go on?’
The Girl Next Door Page 22
