The Woman Next Door

by Liz Byrski

  *

  Bali

  Polly swims with long, slow strokes up and down the pool, deliberately stretching her limbs to work the tension out of her body. There is something wonderfully healing and relaxing about being in the water, especially in the dark on a warm night under a sky speckled with stars. She rolls onto her back and floats there for a while gazing upward, wondering briefly if she could change her mind and actually live here. The possibility hovers enticingly: a small house, a pool, day after endless day in such glorious surroundings. Alistair is right, it is good for the soul, although right now not even this can dispel her anxiety or heal her hurt.

  This morning Steve had done a search and found Leo’s sister’s phone number in Cornwall. At least they think it has to be the number. It’s the only J. Croft in the directory, and Steve had Googled the corresponding address and brought up an image of it on street view.

  ‘What do you think?’ he had asked, homing in on number thirty-two.

  ‘I think I should have done this myself ages ago,’ Polly had said, sitting down beside him at the table. ‘What a lovely place, those narrow streets and the cute little houses.’

  ‘Yes, but what about this one?’ Steve asked. ‘Has he told you anything about the house, could this be it?’

  Polly studied the white house with its mullioned windows and canary yellow front door. ‘It’s like something out of Doc Martin,’ she’d said, ‘the front door opening straight onto the pavement. It’s quite big, isn’t it? Can you pull back a bit so we can see the location? He said it’s on a steep street and looks out across the river to a village on the opposite side.’

  Steve moved the cursor and clicked it, bringing up a panoramic view.

  ‘That’s it,’ Polly said. ‘It must be, the river runs past the back of the house.’

  ‘There you are then,’ Alistair had said. ‘You can call him, ask him what he thinks he’s playing at.’

  ‘Yes,’ she’d said, ‘I can.’ And she had put the number into the contacts list on her mobile. But she knew then that, desperate as she was and still is to speak to Leo, to hear his voice, to demand some sort of explanation for the way he has abandoned her over Christmas, she just wasn’t quite ready to call him.

  Along with her anger and hurt she feels shamed by all sorts of small slights that seem to have become a part of the way he treats her. Logically she knows that it’s not her fault that this is happening, but it doesn’t change how it affects her.

  ‘I’m like Spud,’ she’d told Alistair, referring to a dog they’d had as children. ‘Remember how, if you trod on his paw and hurt him, he’d yelp and then behave as though it was his fault and he’d do that funny apologetic face and try to lick you to death? I can’t call Leo until I know that I won’t somehow apologise or take responsibility for the way he’s treating me. I have some thinking to do first.’

  Alistair had raised his eyebrows but refrained from saying anything, which had clearly not been easy for him. And now it’s evening, well night-time really, and Steve has gone to bed, Alistair is reading in his chair on the terrace, and she is floating silently in the pool wondering what to do. Eventually she swims across to the shallow end, climbs out and sits down on the sun lounger, drying her face and hair with the towel. Her mobile is lying there on the low table with her book and her glasses, and she sees that there is a little red flag indicating that she has email. Polly clicks on the icon and opens her inbox.

  The email is from Leo and for a moment she stares at it in confusion. What is in this message that he couldn’t say on the phone or face to face on the computer screen?

  Darling Polly, he begins. I know I am a complete bastard, and I am so sorry for my silence. The fact that I haven’t been in touch doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking of you all the time, wishing we were spending Christmas together. I know my behaviour is inexcusable, but I have been under such pressure because I hate being here, and want so much to be with you. I struggle to be myself when I am with my family, there are so many expectations. One day perhaps I’ll be able to explain this to you. I hope you will accept this for now and forgive me.

  Tomorrow I’ll be heading back to London, and I will call you as soon as I get home. I hope you’ve had a lovely Christmas, and that you found your brother in good health. Love always, Leo x

  Polly reads the message several times, then she gets to her feet, walks back to the terrace and, without speaking, hands Alistair the phone.

  ‘Are you sure you want me to read it?’ he asks, looking up at her.

  ‘Positive,’ she says.

  He reads it, glances up at her, then reads it again. ‘So how do you feel now?’

  She shrugs. ‘I don’t think I know. Flat certainly. Confused. Annoyed. I do know he hates going there and didn’t want to go there for Christmas. But why could he not phone or Skype – why just an email?’

  Alistair shakes his head. ‘Search me. Why does he hate being with his family so much? Does he hate his sister? I mean, I know you think he had problems with his mother.’

  ‘I don’t think so, it’s just that he can’t handle her condition.’

  ‘Poor darling,’ Alistair says in a tone of biting sarcasm. ‘I wonder how she feels about that.’

  ‘Maybe she’s just a really difficult person – after all, he did say that he would have to tell her about me face to face, he was going to do it over Christmas.’

  ‘You mean he hasn’t told her yet?’

  ‘Well, maybe by now.’

  ‘Or maybe not!’

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  Alistair sighs. ‘I don’t think you really want to know what I think.’

  ‘I do,’ she says, slipping down into the chair next to him. ‘I know I’m not going to like it but I do want to know.’

  ‘I think he’s a prize tosser,’ Alistair says. ‘He’s secretive, keeps sections of his life quarantined from each other; compartmentalised. I bet he hasn’t told her and he won’t – he’ll find a way not to. Lord knows why. And I think there should be a statute of limitations on the amount of time that men can get away with pathetically blaming their bad behaviour on their mothers. So I don’t trust him. I think Stella was right.’

  ‘Stella?’

  ‘Yes, she called me. While you and Leo were away in the southwest.’

  ‘She called you?’

  He nods. ‘She did and she sounded surprisingly like her old self. But in view of what you’d told me I didn’t take too much notice of what she said.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘She said she thought he was shifty. And I said, “Go on with you, you’re just jealous”. And she laughed and said, “Well yes, I am a bit, I don’t want him taking Polly away. But what I don’t like about him is that he just never looks you in the eye”.’ Alistair pauses for a moment. ‘And then she said she’d mentioned it to Mac, who’d been there helping her with something, and he’d said exactly the same thing; no eye contact, always looking just past you.’

  Polly stares at him in amazement. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Stella asked me not to. Said she didn’t want to upset you. Maybe it was nothing to worry about but she wanted me to know in case . . .’

  ‘In case of what?’

  He shrugs. ‘I don’t know . . . just “in case”. And she sounded okay, but because of what you’d said about dementia I thought she might be wandering a bit. So I did as she asked and just kept it to myself.’

  Polly nods. ‘I see. He makes eye contact with me.’

  ‘Of course he does.’

  ‘Is it because he’s shy, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know, Polly, I’ve never met the guy. Do you think he’s shy?’

  She sighs, shaking her head. ‘I think he’s awkward when he’s not in his own environment – he’s ill at ease outside that.’

  ‘I thi
nk you should ignore this message for a couple of days at least,’ Alistair says. ‘Don’t let him think that you’re hanging out to hear from him. Make him sweat. Look, he may be, as I said, a prize tosser, or just very bad at relationships and family stuff, as you said. But he may also be a manipulative bastard who’s messing you around. And right now I favour the latter.’

  Polly stares out over the pool to the frangipanis beyond, and the silky darkness of the sky. ‘I suppose I think he’s just not coping very well,’ she says. ‘And the eye contact is probably a sort of shyness. And it seems a bit childish to pay him back by playing his game, making him sweat, as you say.’

  Alistair gives a little snort of impatience. ‘Polly darling, you are a wise and strong woman but this man has had the upper hand with you ever since you got into that long and seductive email exchange with him. The night you met you didn’t go to his room for a drink, you didn’t agree to breakfast and later you didn’t stay on in London. But – and you’re not going to like this – he sucked you in by email and since then it seems as though he’s been calling all the shots over what happens while also dumping all his existential angst about his family and his work and his little crisis about getting old onto you. You need to pull back a bit, reclaim some of yourself before you lose any more ground.’

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  When Stella wakes up on the second day of January she is surprised to find herself lying on the floor. As she tries to turn onto her side to sit up she is stiff and sore, and struggling to stretch her arms she realises that she is trapped inside the duvet, which is wrapped tightly around her. She fights her way out of the cocoon wondering how she got there. Her head was resting on two pillows so she can’t have fallen out of bed. I must have put myself here, she thinks as she drags herself into an upright position. How ridiculous. She scrambles awkwardly onto her knees and then to her feet, and sits down abruptly on the edge of the bed contemplating the fact that she is fully dressed. ‘I really must be losing my marbles,’ she mumbles, kicking at the bedding on the floor, ‘no wonder everyone’s flapping around me as though I’m a basket case.’ And she stands up, feeling like a naughty child anxious not to be caught up to some mischief. Lord knows what Polly or Joyce would think if they knew she’d put herself to bed on the floor. And she pads across to the bathroom, takes off her clothes and turns on the shower.

  Polly, she murmurs, back today, now what was it I was going to tell her? And as she pours shampoo onto her hair she remembers that last night she was looking for something, something so important that she was really upset. ‘But of course I can’t remember it now,’ she says aloud, ‘isn’t that just typical?’ The important thing that she needs to remember hangs like a charcoal coloured cloud on the edges of her consciousness, just out of reach. It’s still there when she’s dressed and sitting on the verandah drinking her tea, and as she stares at it it morphs into a scornful dark grey face, taunting her, laughing at her. Bugger off, she tells it, reaching out to bat it away, but it won’t go, and the laughter echoes through her head. Stella covers her eyes and gasps in recognition as the face settles into its features. ‘I don’t know why you’re so upset, Stella,’ the face says. ‘It’s not important, it meant nothing.’ She can see him clearly now. ‘Really it was nothing, you’re making a fuss about nothing.’ Stella’s eyes fly open and she stands up quickly, knocking her cup to the floor. The garden is dazzlingly bright in the morning light and for a moment she pauses, swaying slightly, a little dizzy, trying to get her bearings again.

  ‘Bastard,’ Stella says aloud. ‘It was you, wasn’t it? You’re why I slept on the floor. Well I remember now and I will not forget this.’

  And kicking aside the shattered fragments of her cup she hurries back into the house and stops. There is a pen and a pad of ruled paper on the kitchen table, and a couple of sheets are covered with her own writing, writing that was once neat and precise and is now a scrawl. Of course, I was writing it, she thinks, and she sits down at the table and begins to read what she had written the previous night. Dearest Polly, it begins, there is something I need to tell you and if I don’t write it down now I fear I may not remember it later. Stella stops abruptly, looking down at the wavering words and lines, unable to make sense of them, but recalling how she sat there last night, tense with the urgency of trying to get everything down. Her writing doesn’t seem like real writing, just like scrawls, perhaps she needs her other glasses. Well, it doesn’t matter, Polly’s eyes are better than hers, she’ll be able to decipher it, now she just needs to finish it. She picks up the pen and begins to write again, covering page after page, the need to put it all down burning furiously inside her. As she writes her sense of urgency increases – she must get it all done before something happens to stop her. And the more she writes the more convinced she becomes that something will stop her and that she won’t be able to tell Polly what she needs her to know. At last the writing is finished and with a sense of relief Stella folds the pages, puts them into an envelope, writes ‘Polly’ on it, and wanders between the rooms trying to decide on the best place to put it.

  She feels cross now, and giddy. The effort of writing has exhausted her and her head is spinning with a mix of past and present. She opens the door to the spare room and is horrified to find it in chaos. Papers all over the place, empty shoe boxes, others full of more papers. And shoes; why is there a pile of shoes in the middle of the bed? Who put them there and whose are they? She thinks she recognises some of her own in there but then she can’t be sure. She puts the letter to Polly on the bookshelf and picks up a shoe.

  ‘These might be mine,’ she says aloud, ‘perhaps I should have a look for the other one.’ And clutching it she sets off to her bedroom to find the other shoe. But she remembers then that she was going to make a phone call and she sits down on the side of her bed trying to remember who she needs to talk to. Alistair, yes, Alistair. She has to tell him about sleeping on the floor and all that other stuff, just in case he ever needs to know. But maybe she should take some of the papers with her. Shoe in hand she returns to the spare room and gathers a bundle of papers which slip and scatter from her grasp as she heads for the kitchen. There she dumps them on the table where they lift off in the draft from the open door. Stella stares at them, shrugs and still holding one shoe reaches for the phone.

  Twenty minutes later, having explained everything to Alistair several times over, she stares in dismay at the papers scattered across the kitchen. There is an old theatre program there too and she pulls it towards her and opens it. Among the list of photographs and profiles of the cast of some play she doesn’t remember she sees her own and Annie’s. Me and Annie, she says, I must tell her, she’d like to see this . . .’ The doorbell rings making her jump.

  ‘Bugger off, I’m too busy,’ she says, and continues staring at the images, but the bell rings again, this time for longer.

  ‘Oh for goodness sake!’ she says aloud and she gets to her feet and marches down the passage to the door. A skinny woman with long, wavy, grey hair, wearing jeans and a t-shirt is standing there holding a plastic box.

  ‘Yes?’ Stella says, and she thinks the woman looks taken aback.

  ‘Oh! Hi, Stella,’ the woman says. ‘How are you?’

  ‘What business is that of yours?’ Stella says angrily. She can see that the woman is shocked, but Stella has no time for door-to-door sales people or charity collectors, which is what this person obviously is. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Er . . . well, I just thought you might like some fish . . .’

  ‘I don’t buy at the door,’ Stella says, recalling how briskly Nancy used to deal with the brush salesman. She’s about to close the door when the woman steps forward as though she wants to come in; her foot is just inside the door. Stella looks down at the foot in a navy and white sports shoe.

  ‘Oh, I don’t want you to buy it,’ the woman says. ‘It’s just that Bill went out with a friend on his fis
hing boat and they caught heaps of fish, and they cleaned it all, so I thought you might like to have some. I’ve kept some for Polly too. She’s due back today, isn’t she?’

  Who is this woman, Stella wonders, the cheek of it, standing here with her foot in the door, with fish, talking about Polly?

  ‘You do know who I am, don’t you, Stella?’ the woman says. ‘I’m Jennifer, Bill’s wife, remember? Bill and Jennifer up the road at number twenty-three.’ She glances across to Joyce’s house then gets her phone from her pocket. ‘How about I give Joyce a call, she’ll vouch for me.’ And she dials a number and starts talking.

  Stella stands in the doorway for what feels like quite a long time staring at this intrusive stranger with the box of fish.

  ‘Joyce is on her way,’ the woman says eventually.

  But Stella has had enough of this nonsense. ‘Get out of here,’ she says, kicking at the woman’s foot. ‘Take your foot and your smelly fish out of my house now, and don’t come here again or I’ll call the police.’ And she takes a couple of steps forward and pushes her in the chest.

  The woman staggers, loses her balance and falls backwards down the front step onto the path.

  ‘Oh, Jennifer! Goodness me, are you all right?’ someone cries, and Stella sees Joyce step over the low wall between their driveways and run across the lawn to the fish woman.

  ‘She tried to come into my house with fish,’ Stella calls. ‘Shall I call the police?’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The flight home seems endless and Polly, who has dozed, watched two movies, dozed again, eaten everything the flight attendants have offered her, drunk two glasses of wine, and tried several times to concentrate on her book without success, is thankful when they begin the descent. She’s longing to get home even though she suspects she’s heading for rough waters. Tomorrow she’ll contact the aged care people and see if they have found a place for Stella.

  ‘Give her my love,’ Alistair had said as she left. ‘And call any time about the mysterious Mr Croft. You know I love giving you pretentious, intrusive advice. We’re always here for you.’