The Girl Next Door (2 page)

By the moonlight he could see that he was caked with mud, yellow filth, his hands and arms, his feet and trousers halfway up his
thighs. No one was about. Few people ever were on these wartime evenings. And there was silence, not a light showing, not a note of music heard, not a word spoken, not a child’s cry. As he opened the gate and let himself into his garden, he glanced at the Joneses’ house next door, at the faint strand of light showing underneath the blackout curtain from what he thought might be Daphne’s room. Lovely Daphne—if only she were a bit older and had money, she might become his next wife.

He let himself into the house by the back door, taking a look at the summerhouse from the doorstep. What a way out of his difficulty that would be, to get those bodies, the man’s and the woman’s, across the road and slide them down the hole as he had slid their hands. But impossible. He would be seen. He had no car, he couldn’t drive. The idea must be given up, and the only way would be to destroy the bodies by fire before the police returned to search the place.

Only after the fire had burned the bodies and wrecked the garden did he realise he could never inherit Anita’s money because as far as anyone knew she wasn’t dead. Officially, to the police or the lawyers or her relatives, she could never die. There was no death certificate, no funeral, no will, no death notice. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought, My face is my fortune, always remember that. A headline in a newspaper told him that a direct hit had destroyed the police station in Woodford, which was only a few miles from Loughton. A lot of officers had been killed, and Woody wondered if this was why the police failed to come back. They had forgotten about him and let him alone. No one ever called him Woody again.

2

I
T IS A
fantasy many have, a kind of dream, a place to think of to send one to sleep. It begins with a door in a wall. The door opens, confidently pushed open because what is on the other side is known to the dreamers. They have been there before. They have seen somewhere like it, somewhere real, but less beautiful, less green, with less glistening water, fewer varied leaves, and where the magic was missing. The secret garden is always the same, perfect, the plants in flower, the sun always shining, a single bird singing, a single dragonfly in flight. The dreamers never leave the secret garden. The garden leaves the dreamers, replaced with that sense of loss that is sadness and hope departed, perhaps the first they will ever have.

Their garden was not beautiful. It had no flowering trees, no roses, no perfumed herbs. Tunnels, they called it at first. The word
qanat
, an impossible word, was found by Daphne Jones and adopted by the rest of them. It means, apparently, in some oriental language, a subterranean passage for carrying water. They liked it because it started with a
q
without a
u
. Their teachers at their primary schools taught them that no words could ever start with
q
unless followed by
u
, so Daphne’s idea appealed to them and the tunnels became qanats. In time to come the qanats became their
secret gardens. They were Daphne, of course, Michael Winwood, Alan Norris, Rosemary Wharton, Lewis Newman, Bill Johnson, and all the Batchelors, Robert, George, Stanley, Moira, and Norman and the rest. They discovered the qanats in June in the last year of the Second World War, tunnels that were secret gardens to them or to those of them who had dreams and imagination. They never said a word about them to their parents, and in those days few if any parents asked their children where they went in the evenings, telling them to come home only if the air-raid sirens sounded.

It was not countryside where the qanats were. Building had begun on these fields before the war started and had stopped when the first sirens sounded. They were on the edge of Essex, an outer suburb of London on the borders of Epping Forest. Green meadows still remained, divided by tall, thick hedges composed of many varieties of trees, uncut, seldom even trimmed, squat oaks two hundred years old, screens of elms flourishing before Dutch elm disease was heard of, blackthorns and hawthorns creamy white in spring, crab apples with pink-tinted blossoms. In the fields where hay was no longer cut grew yellow ragwort and blue speedwell and red campion and bee orchis. Painted Ladies and Red Admirals and Peacocks deserted the wildflowers and made for the buddleia in the gardens of the houses of the Hill and Shelley Grove, and dusk brought out the Red Underwing and the Lime Hawk moths. The children thought the fields would always be there; they knew nothing of change. They played in the grass and the hedges, running home to Tycehurst Hill and Brook Road when the sirens set up their howling. Bombs dropped, but not here, not on Loughton, only one in the whole war. One day, when no siren had gone off for a week, a group of them, several of the Batchelors and Alan and Lewis, came upon a cave, a hole in the ground that looked like the entrance to a tunnel.

June 1944. School hadn’t broken up for the summer holidays and wouldn’t for another month. It stopped at three thirty in the
afternoon and everyone had come home. The Batchelors, Robert and George and Stanley and Moira—Norman was recovering from chicken pox—all went out into the fields, and Stanley took Nipper on the lead. Alan and Lewis and Bill were already out there, sitting up in the hollow oak, in the broad, circular space where someone a hundred years ago must have chopped off the top of the tree and a dozen branches had grown up around it. In summer when it rained, you could sit in there and not get wet, protected by a canopy of leaves. It had been raining that day but was no longer, so Alan and Lewis came down and joined the others in their wandering up the slope on the other side towards the Hill. Would they ever have found the qanats if Moira hadn’t spotted a rabbit dive into the hole? Not one of the boys would even have noticed it, not even Stanley, the animal lover, not even Nipper, who had seen the Joneses’ dog on the pavement outside the Joneses’ house and begun plunging about on his lead, barking and growling. Stanley had to stay outside while the others went into the hole. Someone had to hold on to the dog. The Joneses’ dog was making such a racket that Daphne came out to grab it and drag it back into the house.

Inside the hole were steps, muddy and rain-soaked, cut out of the clay. Who had cut those steps? Who had made this place? They didn’t know. A passage led along under the field, under the grass and the wildflowers and through the tree roots. It was dark, but not so dark you couldn’t see each other or the tarpaulin roof, but you could tell you’d need candles in the night-time. The walls were just earth, but earth composed of ginger-coloured clay, the kind of clay their fathers complained about when they had to dig the garden. The seven of them, for Daphne Jones had joined them, saying Stanley had told her where they were, emerged into a wide, round area like a room that other passages led into. It was no secret garden, but it had certain secret-garden qualities. It was quiet. It would have been silent apart from the noise they made. It was still and welcoming. It was dark until you lit it.

“We could come in here,” George said. “We could bring food and stuff. It’d be good if it was raining.”

“It’d be good anyway,” said Alan.

“I’m going to explore,” said Moira, and they all went with her, discovering what passages there were and how deserted it was, as if no one had ever been there but to dig it out, dig steps down to it where they had come in, cover it up with tarpaulins, then had just gone away and abandoned it to the rabbits and the squirrels.

“Qanats,” said Daphne Jones, and qanats they became.

A
S YOU GET OLDER
, you forget names: those you studied with, worked with, lived next door to, the people who came to your wedding, your doctor, your accountant, and those who have cleaned your house. Of these people’s names, you forget perhaps half, perhaps three-quarters. Then whose names do you never forget, because they are incised on the rock of your memory? Your lovers (unless you have been promiscuous and there are too many) and the children you went to your first school with. You remember their names unless senility steps in to scrape them off the rock face. Alan Norris had not had enough lovers to forget the names of those he had had, and his wife had had none. This subject they never discussed. Nor did they think about those people they had been to their first school with, but they remembered the names. They had also been in those tunnels that they gave a peculiar name to, but they had no reason to think about it until it was all over the papers.

“Qanats,” said Alan, who something over fifty years ago had married, if not the girl next door, the girl in the next street.

Rosemary said she had always disliked that name, even when she was only ten. “Why not
tunnels
? That’s what they were, after all.”

The
Daily Telegraph
spread out on the dining table, Alan was reading about a discovery made by three Polish builders under a
house called Warlock on the Hill. Reading about it and looking at a picture of what they had found, a biscuit tin and its contents.

“What a name,” said Rosemary, reading it over his shoulder. “Zbigniew. Is that how you pronounce it?”

“No idea.”

“That’s the one who dug it out. They were putting in a basement, it says. That’s the last thing we want in Loughton, basements. Those things are hands, are they? Just bones by this time, thank goodness. They’ll never finish doing that basement now.”

Alan said nothing. He was reading about the builders with the strange names unearthing the tin box with their digger and the police coming and afterwards all digging being made to stop. The tin had once contained shortbread biscuits. When found, it held the skeletal hands of a man and a woman.

“I wonder,” said Rosemary, “if they’ve closed it all up. I mean, put wire all round the garden and that blue-and-white tape you see on TV. We could go up there for our walk and have a look.”

“We could.” Alan’s voice had a faint ironic edge to it, not lost on Rosemary.

“Not if you don’t want to, dear.”

He folded the paper up. “There’s no mention of the qanats—the tunnels, I should say. Only of finding these things under Warlock. We don’t even know if it was in the qanats that they were found.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t call them that.”

“The
tunnels
then. We don’t even know what they were, tunnels dug in a field and covered up with tarpaulins. George would know. I think he would. If we’re going for a walk, why not go and see George and Maureen?”

“If you like.”

“Why did we never know what the tunnels were, darling?”

“I suppose we never asked. Our parents would have known, but we never asked them. We never even told them.”

“We knew they’d have stopped us going there.”

Rosemary went back to her sewing while Alan returned to memories of the qanats. The things they used to do, the games they played, the food they ate that they had brought with them, dense wholemeal bread—how he had longed for white bread—with jam made from turnips and rhubarb, fish-paste sandwiches, potatoes wrapped in clay and baked in an old water tank they found and made a fire in, their fortunes told by Daphne Jones. The name again brought him a shiver of ancient excitement. Acting Mary, Queen of Scots, and the murder of Rizzio. Why Mary, Queen of Scots? Why, come to that, the murder of the Princes in the Tower? Lady Jane Grey? He had forgotten. In spite of those rediscovered memories, so many reasons for things were lost, buried deep underground like those hands. He had a vivid memory of Stanley Batchelor bringing his dog, a white dog with black patches, and Alan had loved it, he and Rosemary hugging the dog and stroking it and saying to each other, “He’s so lucky. Why can’t I have a dog?” Eventually he could, his beloved Labrador, and Rosemary her spaniel, when the war was over.

He took the paper with him to find Rosemary. She was in her sewing room, sitting at the treadle, her fingers guiding the hem of the dress she was making for Freya. Possessing and using a sewing machine was commonplace when they were first married. Rosemary had made all her own clothes over the years. When sewing grew less common, she made their children’s clothes, and now, at least their great-grandchildren’s. “Because they’re much nicer than anything I could buy.”

Alan disagreed but he didn’t say so. In one phase she had tried making his shirts, but he put a stop to that. The hand that held the cloth in place was wrinkled now, the veins prominent, but the joints had no sign of arthritis. Rosemary looked up and lifted her foot from the treadle.

“I think we should go and see George Batchelor and take the
paper with us,” said Alan. “It’s ages since we saw the Batchelors.” An unwelcome thought struck him. “If he’s still alive.”

Rosemary laughed. “Oh, he’s alive. I saw Maureen in the High Road last week. He’d had his hip done and he was just coming back from St. Margaret’s.”

“And still living in the same place?”

“Not the same phone, though. Maureen gave me her mobile number. Shall I phone them, darling?”

A
LONE AMONG THEM
, Michael Winwood had a parent still living. They had little contact with each other. There had been no positive quarrel. Neither had ever said to the other, “I will never speak to you again,” but Michael intended never to see his father, and he was sure his father never intended to see him. He wondered if John Winwood had read about the hands, the man’s hand and the woman’s, in the biscuit box, or if perhaps such a discovery would mean nothing to someone of his father’s age. The old man would be a hundred in less than a year’s time and would no longer be compos mentis. Perhaps Michael would have cared if his father had been poor and living in wretched circumstances, but, according to Zoe, he was in the most luxurious old people’s retreat in Suffolk. His home was an apartment with en suite shower rather than a room, and he had everything an ancient human being could require. Michael didn’t care, he felt no guilt.

What would Vivien have said about the hands in the box? What would she have said about his father? He would go up to her room, the room that had once been hers, and ask her. Just tell her, really. Lie on the bed beside where she had once lain and talk to her about it. When he closed his eyes, he could see the house called Anderby on the Hill, and on the other side of the road, where there were no houses then, he could see the tunnels, the entrance, and the children gathering. A week after the tunnels’ discovery, there were more chil
dren, twenty or thirty children. He could see them following each other down the steps and into the long hole, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin without a piper, disappearing into the darkness under the tarpaulin, and then the lights coming on in the depths as someone began to light the candles.

When he thought about Anderby, which he couldn’t help doing sometimes, though he tried not to, he usually heard his father singing. That phrase, if you said it to anyone, sounded nice, especially as it was hymns he sang. He wasn’t religious, Michael and his mother and father never went to church, but his father had as a child. Hated it, Michael had once heard him say, but the hymns he sang he remembered, the tunes and most of the words. “Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us” and “summer suns are glowing over land and sea.” That one about the sun was meant to make you happy, but when John Winwood sang those words, it was preparatory to coming downstairs and snarling at Michael to get out of his sight.

Michael went upstairs and told Vivien about the hymns, laughing as if it were funny.

A
LAN AND
R
OSEMARY
walked over to York Hill, having invited themselves to tea.

“We don’t drink tea,” said Maureen Batchelor on the phone. “George says it’s an old person’s drink, and when I say we
are
old, he says there’s no need to rub it in. Come and have a sherry, why don’t you? It’s never too early for sherry.”