The Secret House of Death

by Ruth Rendell

‘I know you don’t. You’re too discreet to live.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Doris. I don’t mean to be a prig.’ Susan took a deep breath. ‘I just hope things will work out for the Norths, that’s all, and that they won’t be too unhappy.’

  The other two women seemed for a moment taken aback. It was as if unhappiness as the outcome of the Norths’ difficulties had never occurred to them. Excitement, perhaps, or huge scandal or further sensational food for speculation, but nothing as real as grief. Doris tossed her head and Susan waited for the sharp retort. Instead Doris said mildly and too loudly, ‘I’ll be in with Paul at the usual time.’

  It was a sound characteristic of Louise North that had alerted her and caused the swift artificial change of subject. Behind them on the Braeside path came the sharp clatter of the metal-tipped high heels Louise always wore. Roped into this conspiracy of gossip, Susan didn’t turn round. Her back was towards Louise but the other women faced her and it was both comic and distasteful to see the way they drew themselves up before Betty, the weaker of the two, managed a feeble smile and a twitch of the head.

  Susan would have felt less weary of them and less sickened had they accorded the same treatment to Julian a year ago. But as soon as trouble between her husband and herself became evident these women had positively fawned on him. In Matchdown Park, surely the last bastion of Victorianism, the adulterer was still fascinating, the adulteress fallen. Deliberately she crossed back into her own garden and gave Louise a broad smile and a hearty untypical, ‘Hallo, there!’

  Her neighbour had come into the garden on the same mission as her own and in her hands she held two pint bottles of milk, their foil tops pecked to pieces by blue tits. ‘Hallo,’ said Louise in her little girl’s voice that always had a whine in it.

  ‘Bob gave me a lift into Harrow this morning.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Louise couldn’t have sounded less interested, but just the same she approached the fence, picking her way across the soggy grass. Her heels sank in just as her lover’s car tyres had sunk into the grass plot.

  Louise always wore very high heels. Without them she would have been less than five feet tall, about the size of a girl of twelve, but like most tiny women she set herself perpetually on stilts and piled her hair into a stack on top of her head. Beneath it her little white face looked wizened and shrunken. Of course, it was particularly cold this morning and as usual Doris had begun to shout about the low temperature at the top of her voice, reiterating her urgent desire to get back to her fire as she made her slow way back across the road.

  ‘Freezing! I’ve never known such weather. Goodness knows why we don’t all pack up and go to Australia!’

  ‘It isn’t as cold as all that,’ Louise whispered, and now she was leaning over the fence. It only reached to the average person’s waist, but she rested her elbows on it and stared wistfully at Susan. ‘There are worse things,’ she said, ‘than a bit of cold.’

  ‘I must want my head tested, hanging about here,’ Doris shouted, still on the pavement, still staring frankly at Louise. ‘I’m a mass of chilblains as it is.’

  ‘Well, I really am going in,’ Susan said firmly and she closed the front door behind her. For a moment she had had the uneasy notion that Louise too wanted to confide in her, only it was impossible. She hardly knew the woman. The idea that an intimacy might be about to grow between her and the Norths really frightened her. Yesterday they had been the merest acquaintances, while now . . . It almost seemed that Julian had been right when he said you chose your friends but your neighbours were thrust upon you and the only protection was to hold yourself aloof. No doubt, she had been too forthcoming. It might even be that her reputation for discretion at which Doris had hinted had reached the North’s ears, so that separately they had decided to make use of her as the repository of their secrets.

  Susan shrugged, hardened her heart and settled herself at her desk. It was a bore, but there was nothing to be afraid of. And why did she suddenly feel this curious dichotomy, this desire both to be miles away and at the same time to go outside once more and look at Braeside, that strangely secret house where the windows were seldom opened and where no child ever played on the lawn? It was as if she wanted to reassure herself, to settle a doubt or allay a fear.

  Presently she spread her hands across the keys and emptied her mind.

  At half past three she went into the kitchen. A resolution had been forming subconsciously while she worked and now she brought it out into the open. In future she would have as little as possible to do with the Norths. No more accepting of lifts, no more garden talks. It might even be prudent to be on the alert for their comings and goings to avoid bumping into them.

  The drills were screaming behind the back fence. Susan put the kettle on, watching the big elms sway in the wind with the pliability of grass blades. From here she could just see the workmen’s fire glowing crimson in its punctured bucket and the workmen’s faces, ‘dark faces pale against that rosy flame’ as they passed across the threshold of their hut. The sight of another’s hearth which others share and enjoy always brings a sense of exclusion and of loneliness. The brazier, incandescent and vivid, its flames burning translucent blue against the red heart, brought to mind the improvised stoves of chestnut sellers and she remembered how she and Julian, on their way to a theatre, had sometimes stopped to buy and warm their hands.

  The sky was blue now like arctic ice and the clouds which tumbled across it were pillowy glacial floes. Susan’s kettle bumped, the drills shrilled and then, clearly and succinctly through the louder sounds, there came a gentle tap at the front door.

  Pollux hadn’t barked. It must be a neighbour or a familiar visitor to the street. Surely it was too early for Doris to be bringing Paul? Besides, Doris always came to the back door and Doris always shouted and banged.

  The drills died away on a whine. Susan crossed the hall and the little tap was repeated. She opened the door and when she saw who her caller was she felt an actual dismal sinking of the heart.

  What was the use of resolving to avoid people when those people intruded themselves upon you? Louise North wasn’t wearing her little girl’s size eight coat, but had wrapped it round her thin shoulders. She stepped inside, shivering, before Susan could hinder her and the little hammer heels rattled on the wood-block floor. Louise was trembling, she was scarcely steady on her feet.

  ‘Spare me five minutes, Susan? Five minutes to talk?’ She lifted her eyes, bending her head back to look up into Susan’s face. Those eyes, the pale insipid blue of glass beads, were watering from the cold. But she’s only come from next door, Susan thought, unless she’s crying. She is crying. ‘You don’t mind if I call you Susan, do you? You must call me Louise.’

  You’re at the end of your tether. Susan almost said it aloud. Two tears coursed down Louise’s thin face. She brushed at them and scuttled towards the living-room. ‘I know the way she muttered. ‘It’s just the same as my house.’ Her heels left a twin trail of little pits, ineradicable permanent holes in the parquet.

  Susan followed her helplessly. Louise’s face was muddy with make-up applied over stale make-up and tear-stains. Now in the warm quiet living-room she dropped her head into her hands and tears trickled through her fingers on to the gooseflesh of her wrists.

  3

  Susan stood by the window and waited for Louise to stop crying. She was anxious not to prejudge her, but she felt impatient. Louise had no handkerchief. Now, in a feeble and embarrassed way, she was fumbling in the pockets of her coat and looking vaguely about her for the handbag she hadn’t brought.

  In the kitchen the kettle was bumping on the gas. Susan knew it was the sponge she had put inside it years and years ago to absorb the lime deposit the water made. The sponge had become petrified with time and the noise of this piece of rock lurching against the kettle lining made the only sound. Susan went into the kitchen, turned off the gas and fetched Louise a clean handkerchief.

  ‘I’m ever so sorry,’ Louise g
ulped. The tears had made her childish face pink and puffy. She put up a hand to her hair, retrieving wisps and poking them back into the piled lacquered structure that gave her an extra two inches. ‘You must think me very uncontrolled, coming here and breaking down like this when we hardly know each other.’ She bit her lip and went on miserably. ‘But my friends are all Catholics, you see, and I don’t like to talk to them about it. I mean, Father O’Hara and Eileen and people like that. I know what they’d say.’

  Susan had forgotten Louise was a Catholic. Now she remembered seeing her go off to church sometimes with Eileen O’Donnell, black lace scarves in their hands to put over their heads at the mass. ‘Of course, I can’t get a divorce,’ Louise said, ‘but I thought—Oh, dear, I can’t put it into words. I’ve taken up your time getting into a state and now I can’t seem to say it.’ She gave Susan a sidelong glance. ‘I’m like you, you see, I’m rather reserved.’

  Susan didn’t altogether care for the comparison. Reserve doesn’t take itself into a neighbour’s house and weep and borrow handkerchiefs. ‘Well, suppose you sit there and calm down a bit while I make the tea?’

  ‘You’re awfully kind, Susan.’

  The drills began their deafening clamour while Susan was cutting bread and butter. She began to think what she should say to Louise when she returned to the living-room, but she feared any advice she could give would differ hardly at all from that proffered by Eileen or the priest. As to what Louise was about to say to her, she had no difficulty at all in guessing. It would be a defiant recital of how love gave you the right to do as you chose; how it was better to spoil one life now than ruin two for ever; how you must take what you can get while you were still young. Julian had said it all already and had expressed it more articulately than Louise ever would. Should there be any hesitations or gaps in her narrative, Susan thought bitterly, she could always provide excuses from Julian’s own logical and entirely heartless apologia. She went back with the teacloth and the plates. Louise was standing up now, watching the quivering elms and the cold rushing sky, her face stricken with woe.

  ‘Feeling a bit better?’ Susan asked, and she added rather repressively, ‘Paul will be in in a moment.’ She hoped her face made it plain to her visitor that she didn’t want her son, the child of a broken marriage and already the witness of grown-up grief, to hear yet again an adult’s marital problems and see an adult’s tears.

  But Louise, like her husband, had little interest or concern to spare for other people’s anxieties. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said pathetically, ‘and Doris Winter with him, I suppose. Susan, I’ve been screwing up my courage all afternoon to come to you. It took me hours and hours before I dared. But you were so nice and friendly to me in the garden and I . . . Look, Bob’s going to be late tonight and I’ll be all alone. Would you come in to me? Just for an hour?’

  The side gate clicked and slammed. For a second the two women’s eyes met and Susan thought how innocent Louise looked. As if she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Why bother with flies when you can torture people?

  ‘Hi, there!’ Doris called from the back door. ‘Late again. I’m dying for a cup of tea.’

  ‘Will you stay and have one?’

  Louise shook her head and picked up her coat from the chair. Her face was still blotched and tear-stained. She looked up when Doris came in and a small pathetic smile trembled on her lips.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know you’d got company,’ said Doris, ‘or I wouldn’t have come bursting in.’ Her eyes were wide with excitement at the idea she might by chance have come upon adventure at the least likely time and in the least likely place. She drew her stiff red fingers out of the woollen gloves and, turning towards Susan, raised an interrogatory eyebrow. Susan didn’t respond and it amused her to see Doris’s greedy anticipation gradually give way to chagrin until, like a battery in need of recharging from some source of power, she attached herself to the radiator and said sulkily, ‘All right for some. I’ve been frozen all day.’

  Then Louise said it. Afterwards Susan often thought that if her neighbour had kept silent or merely made some harmless rejoinder, the whole ensuing tragedy would have taken a different course or perhaps have been altogether averted. In spite of her determination not to be involved, she would have accepted Louise’s invitation for that night out of weakness and pity. She would have learned and understood and been in a position to defend.

  But Louise, fumbling with her coat and hesitating whether to pocket Susan’s handkerchief or leave it on the chair arm, turned those watery glass bead eyes on Doris and said, ‘I’ll have my central beating next winter. They’re soon going to put it in.’ A tiny spark of enthusiasm brought colour into her cheeks. ‘I expect you’ve seen the man here.’

  Doris’s always active eyebrows jerked as if she had a tic and almost disappeared into her fringe.

  ‘I’ll just see you to the door,’ Susan said coldly. Rage bit off the christian name she had meant to use and which would have softened the dismissal. That Louise should come here and cry about her love affair, then persist in employing the blind she had used to deceive everyone, filled her with choking anger. The dishonesty and the duplicity were past bearing.

  Louise tripped as she crossed the hall and Susan didn’t put out a hand to steady her. The metal heel left a pit and a long gash in the parquet Susan and her cleaner, Mrs Dring, kept so carefully polished. Illogically, this wanton damage was more maddening than Louise’s slyness and her lack of control. At the front door she stopped and whispered:

  ‘You’ll come tonight?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t leave Paul.’

  ‘Come tomorrow then, for coffee,’ Louise pleaded. ‘Come as soon as you’ve taken Paul to school.’

  Susan sighed. It was on the tip of her tongue to say she would never come, that the Norths and their problems were nothing to her. Bob would be away for once, so like a child, Louise wanted Susan’s shoulder to cry on. Didn’t it occur to her that Susan was always alone, that Julian had gone away for good? It was all Julian’s fault. If he had been here, he wouldn’t have allowed her to be the Norths’ mediator and counsellor, but then if he had been here none of this confiding would have begun. It was only because she had been deserted and divorced that the Norths thought her a suitable adviser. Her experiences qualified her; she might be supposed to understand the motives of wife and husband; her knowledge gave her the edge over the priest and the devout unworldly friends.

  ‘Louise . . .’ she said helplessly, opening the door and letting the chill damp air wash over her hot face.

  ‘Please, Susan. I know it’s ugly and beastly, but I can’t help it. Please say you’ll come.’

  ‘I’ll come at eleven,’ Susan said. She could no longer resist that look of agonised supplication. Still exasperated but almost resigned, she followed Louise outside to call the boys in for their tea.

  Louise’s heels tap-tapped away into the side entrance. Her shoes had pointed toes, curled and wrinkled at the tips where her own toes were too short to reach. In her long floppy coat and those absurd over-large shoes, she reminded Susan of a little girl dressing up in her mother’s clothes.

  For a moment Susan let her gaze travel over the Braeside façade. Of all the houses in the street it was the only one whose occupants had never troubled to improve its appearance. Susan was no admirer of rustic gnomes, of carriage lamps or birdbaths on Doric pediments, but she recognised a desire for individuality in the Gibbs’s potted bay tree, a wistful need of beauty in the O’Donnells’ window boxes.

  Braeside was as stark now as it must have been when it was first built ten years before. Since that time it had never been painted and the perpetually closed windows looked as if they would never open. The house belonged to the Norths and yet it had an air of property rented on a short lease as if its owners regarded it as a place of temporary sojourn rather than a home.

  No trees had been planted in the front garden. Almost every other house had a kanzan or cypresses or a prunus. The Braeside
garden was just a big square of earth planted entirely with daffodils and with a few inches of turf bordering it. The daffodils looked as if they were grown by a market gardener to sell, they stood in such straight rows. But Louise never even cut them. Susan could remember how in springs gone by she had sometimes seen her neighbour walk carefully between the rows to touch the waxen green leaves or stoop to smell the fresh and faintly acrid scent of their blossoms.

  They were as yet only in bud, each tightly folded yellow head as sealed as the house itself and, like it, seeming to hold secrets.

  Susan called the children and hustled them in through the side gate. The Braeside windows looked black and opaque, effective shutters for a woman to hide behind and cry her eyes out.

  Coping repressively with Doris’s curiosity and trying to give Paul an adequate but necessarily untruthful answer to his question as to why Mrs North had been crying, left Susan exhausted and cross. She badly needed someone with whom she could discuss this crisis in the Norths’ lives and she thought rather wistfully of how Doris must be now regaling John with its latest phase. A man would see the whole matter more straightforwardly—and less subtly—than she could; a man would advise how to avoid involvement with kindness and tact.

  When the phone rang at seven-thirty she knew it must be Julian and for a moment she thought seriously of casting her troubles on his shoulders. If only Julian were more human, less the counterpart of an actor playing a brittle role in an eternal drawing-room comedy! And since his new marriage he had grown even more suave and witty and in a way unreal. Contemptuous he had always been, misanthropic and exclusive, besides having this odd conviction of his that dwellers in a suburb were quite alien to himself, sub-human creatures leading a vegetable or troglodyte existence. He was indifferent to their activities, although the doings of his own circle often aroused in him an almost feminine curiosity, and as soon as Susan heard his voice her hopes went. Consulting Julian would be only to invite a scathing rebuff.