The Girl Next Door: A Novel

by Ruth Rendell

  “His wife was dead by then?” Michael didn’t care, he didn’t want to know, but she seemed to want him to ask.

  “She died in June 1985, a few weeks after he asked me what I told you he asked me. Five or six years later he went into Urban Grange. Sheila had become a heavy drinker and she used an enormous amount of what they call prescription drugs. There was an inquest and the verdict was death by misadventure.” Zoe wiped her upper lip and her forehead with a tissue. “That’s all. I don’t want to say any more. But someone had to know, and who but you?”

  These visits always terminated in Michael’s leaving in the early evening. Zoe needed to be in bed by eight. Michael and the two old women sat by the French windows in the sunshine and talked about what they had been doing in the weeks since his last visit. In the case of Zoe and Brenda, what they always did was read the papers and novels, watch television, go for short walks, Zoe in the wheelchair, Brenda pushing it. They repeatedly said how lucky they were. To be living here, to have their own home still, for Zoe’s carer shared everything with her, happiness and gratitude as well as material things. Michael told them about his reunion with friends of his childhood, but said nothing about the discovery of the hands, which they seemed not to have heard of.

  Brenda left the room to make tea, and he said quickly and breathlessly, “Zoe, stay alive for me.” He could hardly believe he was saying this, but he went on in this uncharacteristic way, “You are all I’ve got.”

  “That’s what I should be saying to you. Anyway, you have your children.”

  “I know. I’m very lucky.” Strange how little he thought about them. “Forget what I said.”

  “I don’t think so.” She laughed. “It’s not very often one gets such things said to one at my age.”

  He kissed both women before he left, giving Zoe a hug as well and letting his cheek lie against hers for longer than usual. He might never see her again.

  “WHAT SHALL WE DO?” After three days, Freya was still indignant.

  “Well, nothing,” said Judith. “I don’t suppose it will come to anything. You’re getting married in two weeks’ time. We don’t want some family upset, do we? And, my God, there would be one if you were thinking of telling your grandmother what you saw. It’ll all blow over anyway.”

  “He had his arm round her, Mum. He kissed her hand.”

  Judith started laughing.

  “It’s not funny. These are your parents.”

  “It just goes to show how enormously things have changed. Even when I was your age, and that isn’t as long ago as you think, old people didn’t have girlfriends and take them out to dinner in London restaurants, the girlfriends didn’t wear four-inch heels, old men didn’t put their arms round them in public. The old men might have been sugar daddies, but not with women of their own age. You did say she was about his age?”

  “About that. Very good for her age but about that.”

  “You should see how good that is for women in general, Freya. You won’t always be young, you know, and you’ll appreciate having a boyfriend when you’re seventy.”

  “But what about poor Gran?”

  “What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.” Judith paused to consider. “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Oh, Mum. Please.”

  A GREAT MANY budding romances must be broken up by the couple’s having left the school they both went to, parted when they went to separate universities. More now than when he was young, Alan was thinking, because at that time fewer girls went on to higher education. But Daphne had gone to Cambridge and he had gone to Reading, and though they had made promises to write—very few expensive long-distance phone calls in those days—their letters dwindled until they ceased altogether. Besides, their relationship—not a word ever used then—was strange. Because of the strong sexual element it necessarily had to be private. Not for them the going to the cinema in the evening, followed by the good-night kiss. Love-making was what they did, kissing yes, adoring yes, with the sighs and gasps of passion, the talk that followed consisting mainly in planning when they would next meet, where she could park her father’s car so as not to be seen by the neighbours, where he would wait, but not where they would go. That was always the same. Up to Baldwin’s Hill and the enclosing forest. On warm summer nights, the forest floor itself, in leafy caverns made by arching roofs of branches. In green clearings and sometimes, adventurously, against the smooth sealskin trunk of a great beech tree.

  Where did her parents think they were? They never talked about their parents, of course not. But once he asked, and Daphne said, visiting a friend of hers, a girl she had been at school with, who lived in St. John’s Road, sufficiently far away to warrant taking the car. Apparently, her father and mother never checked up on her. It was a foretaste of his own insecure alibi with Robert Flynn. What goes around comes around was a phrase he had never liked, but here it was apposite. Suppose there had been gap years in those days, suppose she had gone with him to Reading University. There had been some question of it, but her getting to Cambridge was what her parents had wanted, and the prestige of it overcame her—what for him?—love? Lust? Excitement? All those? And to Cambridge she went. He turned to Melanie, but her laugh got on his nerves and he gave her up for Rosemary, who he hoped would be as anxious for sex as Daphne had been. It seemed to him that he had established himself as her boyfriend and Rosemary as his girlfriend with the sole aim of getting her into bed or into the back of some borrowed car. But she held out—oh, how she had held out!—and finally gave way on a painful and messy wedding night in a hotel in Torquay.

  Things got better in that area (as Rosemary called it), and he had no complaints. As far as he knew, nor did she. As far as he knew because they never discussed it. Rosemary wouldn’t, the whole subject embarrassed her. Should he have married Daphne? Found her again? After all, he knew where she lived or her parents lived. On the Hill, opposite where the qanats had been and by that time Warlock stood, next door to Mr. Winwood, who had lived alone without wife or son. He could have found her. It would have meant jilting Rosemary and the consequent terrible fuss made by her parents and his. Besides, life hadn’t been unhappy, only dull. And he had his children and grandchildren.

  He was in the tube train on his way to Hamilton Terrace to spend the night with Daphne. That was how he put it to himself, the expression have sex with or something more explicit not having been in use when he last made love to her. He had been young then and he was old now, but this troubled him less than the lie he had told Rosemary. Robert Flynn was not much good to him this time, the tubes ran so late, and why on earth would he stay with Robert? The whole thing was absurd. It was some years since he had seen Robert or talked to him, yet he and Rosemary had discussed the man, he to give verisimilitude to his fabrication, even describing Robert’s home because she liked hearing about domestic interiors, his health in comparison to Alan’s fitness, and his loneliness since his wife went away on holiday with her sister. Ridiculous and very wrong. No more Robert now but a visit to an old school reunion to be held, not at Bancroft’s, where he had been a pupil, but for some mysterious reason, in Dorset. In one of those refurbished barns tarted up with a bar and grand banqueting hall in the middle of Hardy country. It almost frightened him thinking of the description of this place he had given. He was afraid of his skill at mendacity. It seemed almost criminal to do it so well.

  This evening he and Daphne were not going out for dinner. She would cook for him.

  “What do you like best to eat?”

  “Oh, anything,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What do you like best?”

  “Something no one makes anymore. Steak and kidney pie.”

  He was sure she would forget. His choice seemed as unlike anything she might cook as possible. Surely she was a grilled-calamari woman or a creator of risottos like the restaurant they had been to the pr
evious week.

  She hadn’t dressed up for him but wore the simple frock he had so admired her in on their first date. He could tell she was avoiding any appearance of festivity or occasion. They had kissed when he arrived, then lain on that sofa in each other’s arms, whispering what were once, long before his time, called sweet nothings. Sherry was drunk, quite a lot of it, and lines came into his head—Shakespeare, of course—about alcohol provoking the desire but taking away the performance. He needed no aphrodisiac to encourage the desire. As for the performance, he had resolved not to think about that, but he did, inevitably.

  The steak and kidney pie was excellent, all it should be, and it was a shame he did less than justice to it. Afterwards they drank red wine with their cheese and then she put on some Bach. He had never associated her with Bach or indeed any kind of music, but it calmed him, which was perhaps what she intended. Apropos of nothing, no words they spoke leading up to it, she said, “It doesn’t matter at all. Remember we have been there, done that.”

  “I know.”

  They went upstairs with their arms round each other. She turned the lights off, all but the bedside lamp. He could see the forest and its green floor, bracken fern coming into leaf, and the woven tree branches overhead. The beams of our house are cedars; our rafters are fir. . . . He held her in his arms and her face against his had the skin of his young lover. It was all right, it was going to be and remain all right. Behold thou art fair, my love, and our bed is green.

  “YOU’RE A PSYCHOLOGIST,” said Freya. “You’re better fitted to do it than I am.”

  Her sister cast up her eyes, a habit of hers. “You mean you’re passing the buck.”

  “Well, I can’t do it, can I, Fen? I’m getting married on Saturday and I’ll be away in Morocco for a fortnight. That would really be passing the buck. It would be best to wait till I’m gone. Pick a time when Granddad’s not there, that’s essential.”

  “Obviously,” said Fenella. “This is all very difficult for me. I shall have to find someone to be with the kids, I can’t take them with me. Suppose she—well, bursts into tears?”

  “Mum’ll take the kids. She’ll be so thankful not to have to tell Grandma herself.”

  “You’d better give me the details all over again. I don’t want to get it wrong.”

  IT HAD LONG been a principle of Rosemary’s that it was not for a wife to concern herself overmuch with what her husband did. This had always included how he passed his days while at “business,” while with his male friends—he would have no female friends—what his interests were, anything to do with politics or the inside of a car engine. This was why she had never asked him about Robert Flynn, what Robert had said and what Alan had said. Alan’s doing his best to memorise the details of a house he had never been in had been in vain because Rosemary had never asked him what it was like. So when he returned from Dorset and the old school reunion, she asked him only if he had had a nice time. She was a little surprised because he insisted on telling her what they had eaten at the reunion banquet in the great hall and how pleased he had been at not having to share a room in the hotel booked for them. But she merely said how glad she was he had enjoyed himself. She had learned on the BBC’s early-evening news of a serious delay on the Great Western line on Saturday afternoon, and she hoped it hadn’t made him late, but he had only given the perfectly acceptable answer that the Penzance train was held up, not his.

  The copper-coloured silk suit was no longer hanging up in the hall outside the sewing room but had been moved, still suspended, to their bedroom. Like Ahab to Elijah or Orwell’s Gordon to a houseplant, “Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?” said Alan aloud when he saw it. But he didn’t mind it, he didn’t mind anything. He was happy. He knew he shouldn’t be. Taking Rosemary out to dinner that evening was a monstrous thing to do. You don’t compensate for adultery by such acts, but he had already asked her and she had accepted. She might, she said, even wear the suit—but better not perhaps. It must be worn for the first time at Freya’s wedding, that had been her original intention and she must stick to it.

  He had forgotten all about Freya’s wedding, and for a moment a cloud passed across his sunny sky as he remembered he had promised Daphne to spend Saturday night with her. But how he was going to manage this, he had had no idea. On the other hand he had had a good idea that at the wedding he would get a chance to talk to Rosemary’s sister and suggest to her that she and Rosemary should go away somewhere on holiday together. Switzerland, maybe. He wasn’t fond of Switzerland, a good reason for Rosemary, who loved it, to go with Elizabeth instead of him. The copper-coloured silk suit fluttered a little in the breeze from the open window, showing with irritating clarity the asymmetry of its lapels.

  Out for a walk later in the day, he sat on a log under the forest trees and tried to phone Daphne, but failing to get a signal, the mobile made no more than a shrill noise. In the evening, secretly out on the balcony, he managed to speak to her, arranging that “come what may” he would spend Thursday with her, though not, alas, Saturday night.

  It was an unfortunate day to have chosen, or perhaps other choices he made were unfortunate. Having spent a lovely day with Daphne, forgetting his resolve not to make love on a sofa in the afternoon, he might have left an hour earlier but instead got into the tube at Warwick Avenue at half past seven and changed at Oxford Circus onto a Central Line train bound for Theydon Bois. West End shops stay open much later than usual on Thursdays, and the overdressed woman laden with bags from Selfridges and Zara, sitting in the far corner of the carriage, passed unrecognised by him. He, however, was spotted by Helen Batchelor, who quickly made up her mind not to “see” him.

  She would probably have done nothing about it had she not come into Loughton the next day to visit her brother-in-law George, who was recovering at home from a heart attack, a mild one but still not to be dismissed. Having handed over the obligatory bunch of flowers and box of Quality Street, she wished George a rapid improvement and left to do some shopping in the High Road, leaving her car on the only parking place she was likely to find on a Friday afternoon. Rosemary was also out shopping, to buy a spare pair of tights lest the ones she would be wearing for the wedding spring a ladder at the crucial time.

  They had met only once before. Rosemary would have passed her by with a vague sense of having seen that woman somewhere, but Helen, who was more observant than Rosemary and had better sight, greeted her with a “Hi, Rosemary, how are you?”

  Rosemary said she was fine, thanks, thinking what else can you say and why do people ask?

  “What a coincidence,” said Helen. “I haven’t seen either of you for years, and then all of a sudden I see your husband”—she had forgotten his name—“in the tube on Thursday night and you in the High Road on Friday. I’d got in at Bond Street and he got in at Oxford Circus.”

  Rosemary said nothing. She gave a vague nod. The other woman—was she called Helen?—began telling her about George, poor George, and his heart, which he never took care of as he should. Rosemary excused herself by saying she must get on and went to buy her tights in a kind of daze. This Helen must be wrong, of course. She probably drank, she looked as if she did. Alan was at home. She took the new pair of tights into her bedroom and came out to find him on the balcony, reading something. It might be poetry or some “classic”; she took little interest in what he read, it always seemed such a waste of time. He looked up, smiled at her, and said something about how nice it was to be able to sit out here in the sunshine.

  “Whatever were you doing getting into the tube at Oxford Circus last night?”

  Instead of blushing, which wasn’t his way, he turned white. She didn’t notice but he did, or, rather, he felt it happen, a shuddering withdrawal of blood from his cheeks. Unable to speak, he clenched his hands, then managed, “I went to Robert’s club, left him there. Cavendish Square.”

  “I thought Owen was driving you out t
o the Norfolk Show.”

  Why would he ever have wanted to go to an agricultural show, and why would their son, living and working in Winchester, have driven him there? It was the feeblest and most unlikely excuse. But he had made it and she remembered.

  10

  POSSESSING NO GRANDER CLOTHES, Alan had worn a suit for the wedding, probably his best suit if you categorised such garments, but the first man he saw when they arrived was in morning dress. The day was beautiful, warm and sunny. He hadn’t envisaged a garden, but the hotel had one, large, with lawns, rosebuds, shrubbery, tall trees, and a river frontage.

  A man dressed like a Yeoman of the Guard whom Rosemary called a master of ceremonies was ushering guests in through a kind of tent or marquee attached to the back of the hotel. Taking their places in a queue, Alan was conscious of women ahead of them, and soon behind them, dressed elegantly compared to poor Rosemary. He suddenly felt enormous pity for her along with his guilt. If only someone would come up to them and tell her how nice she looked, even ask her where she had bought her suit. But no one did, and they were soon shaking hands with David and kissing Freya. Rosemary, who had already told Alan how odd it was to see the bride and, come to that, the groom before the ceremony had taken place, said, “Happy is the bride that the sun shines on.”

  Alan doubted that he would have winced at that six months ago. He did now. Was he imagining the look Freya gave him? There she stood in a white-lace creation, cut low, her left arm full of white roses, her eyes penetratingly on him for no more than a few seconds but narrow with condemnation. Or so he thought, his guilt thinking for him. Back in the garden, Rosemary had spotted Judith and Fenella and Fenella’s husband, Giles, and homed in on them. It would have been better to have approached people they didn’t know and introduced themselves, but Alan knew Rosemary would never do that. He thought, perhaps again imagined, that his other granddaughter gave him a look that was not exactly hostile but rather of the reproving sort a mother reserves for her disobedient child. Judith, on the other hand, had an ironical smile on her face, sheltered by a cartwheel hat. He dipped under the hat to kiss her, thinking, They know. My daughter and my granddaughters know. Just as Helen Batchelor knew.