The Girl Next Door (22 page)

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. Daphne Jones, Rosemary could see now as Daphne had been then, 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. Her pride 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’s 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 which 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.

S
EVERAL PHONE CALLS
were made to Daphne and Alan before Michael got an answer that wasn’t a recorded message to say 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, Michael 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, that
wouldn’t have been permitted, but something gas-fired that looked real. Another first time for him was the kiss she gave him when he arrived. They had sherry and blini. Michael could tell the caviar was real. The sherry was in honour of George, Alan said.

“Tell 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 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 Michael wondered incongruously if Daphne had washed and ironed it. “I’m sorry. 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.

“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 Michael had already reached, wouldn’t it be better for him to die sooner? Michael 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
?

Michael 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. The evening he spent 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.

“
W
HAT’S THE MATTER
?”

As soon as he had said it, Alan thought how old-fashioned that was, that no one said it anymore, 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 don’t ask.” 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, he only wanted to say one thing: “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 smiled. “Michael reminded you that I lived next door to them. 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 his 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 with 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. But 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, you all—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 and took a sip. “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?”

“Yes, of course. Go on.”

“That’s a particularly ghastly situation. Two people in a relationship that’s founded on mutual fear. We were enormously attracted to each other and afraid to be alone together. I did go to his house once. I went to the back door and he wouldn’t let me in. He was afraid to let me in, Alan. ‘Don’t set foot in this house,’ he said, and I ran home.

“It was a few weeks later he started a fire in the garden. I was home from school early and I saw him pour petrol on the wood he’d piled up. But it wasn’t only wood. There were two shapes in
sacks—no plastic in those days. Two long shapes in sacks tied at the tops with string. I watched him out of my bedroom window. The fire burnt down and John poured paraffin on more logs and the two things in the sacks. He fetched another can of petrol. I remember thinking he must be desperate to burn whatever that was because petrol was rationed and very hard to come by. It was after that that the fire got out of hand and spread to the shed and trees and someone called the firemen, probably several people did.”

Alan said, “You never told your mother about Winwood? I mean, what Winwood had done to you?”

“I never did. You see, it wasn’t what he had done to me, it was what we did with each other. I know you’ll say I was only twelve, but I’ve explained that. I was old for my age, years older.”

“And now you are young for your age.”

She smiled. “Well, perhaps. You’ve seen what was in the papers and on television about those celebs raping young girls and assaulting them. Some of them told their parents and they weren’t believed. I knew I wouldn’t be believed, and what would I have said? That I’d had sex—well, sort of sex—with the man next door? And say as well that I enjoyed it? I don’t think so.”

Daphne emptied her glass. “I needed that. I’ve never told anyone about John Winwood before.” She put out a hand and took Alan’s. “You don’t mind, do you? About me doing that, I mean.”

“Of course not. Why would I?”

“Some men would. I never spoke to John again. After the fire, I mean. I never saw him again except in the distance. He moved away somewhere and eventually he sold the house. I’ve told the police. About the fire, I mean, nothing about my—my relationship with John Winwood.”

A
LAN MADE SUPPER
, scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. Daphne drank water. He had a glass of wine and then another, hoping to
deaden his feelings. “Drown your sorrows,” people used to say. He hadn’t any sorrow or shock. The emotion he felt he couldn’t define. He had told a lie and he minded about that. Daphne sat close to him and held his hand. She turned on the television, which he didn’t want, but he thought silence would be worse. And more explanations from her, more details, would be worse than silence.

The programme, which was the next instalment of a serial, came to an end. Daphne began to talk about their recent holiday, about walking along the broad top of the city wall of Lucca and about the Roman Forum. They hadn’t taken many photographs, and those they had, they still had to print out from their mobile phones.

“We’re neither of us great photographers, are we? Prefer to keep pictures of what we’ve seen in our memories, I suppose.”

“That’s right,” he said.

“Something else we have in common, if you can have a negative something in common.”

“Why not?”

They went to bed early. As he held her, one arm round her waist, he thought of her at twelve, a little girl in love with a film star lookalike. Waking three hours later, he murmured to himself in the dark, “My world has changed. Everything is changed.”

24

G
IVING A SAMPLE
of his DNA was almost the last thing Lewis Newman did before going off on his boat trip up the Danube. He and Jo had always intended to do the cruise, then Jo fell ill, was ill for months before her death, and that kind of holiday was impossible. He missed Jo, but not as much as he told himself he ought to. Many a bereaved husband would have hesitated to take a trip which could only have reminded him that his wife should have been with him, but for Lewis that couldn’t be and he wasn’t going to let it spoil his cruise.

The trip was luxurious. He had a lovely cabin with en suite bathroom that the company called a stateroom, and on his second evening at dinner time when he approached his table as the ship was moving away from Bucharest, the organiser of the party came up to him and asked him if he would share his table with a lady passenger. She was travelling alone as was he. Lewis didn’t much care for the idea, envisaging a plump, brightly painted blonde in a low-cut, red dress. He had a rooted objection, almost a phobia, to the sight of cleavage on an elderly woman. He sat at his table and got to his feet almost immediately when a pretty sixty-year-old came up to him a little shyly. She was slender and nearly as tall as he, and the dress she wore, quite high-necked, pink wool, showed off a neat figure.

They shook hands.

“Melissa,” she said.

“Lewis.”

“I hope you don’t mind, but I saw your name in the paper when they dug up that ghastly box with the hands. There was a piece in the
Standard
about the people who were children in Loughton when the box was put there. I grew up in Loughton myself, though I was—well, a bit younger. So I thought it would be nice to meet an old Loughton person—oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you were old.”

He laughed. “I’m delighted.”

Two days later, going ashore in Budapest, they were not only eating together but walking together when the party went sightseeing. Instead of returning to the ship for dinner, they dined at a restaurant in Vienna on their last evening. They had discovered that they lived not far from each other in London, he in Ealing and she in Chiswick. There was no end to the coincidences. Both were widowed, her dead husband had been a GP as Lewis had been. As a child she had lived with her parents in Tycehurst Hill. Phone numbers were exchanged and an arrangement made to have lunch and pay a late-autumn visit to Kew Gardens, where Melissa had never been. Lewis felt positively happy when he let himself into his house and picked up the heap of correspondence from the front doormat.

He hadn’t thought about the DNA sample all the time he was away, and now, remembering, he saw nothing from Caroline Inshaw. His head full of Melissa Landon, he wasn’t much interested in the hands in the box and what had happened sixty years ago, except that those hands had brought Melissa and him together. The letters were mostly bills, but one had an Australian stamp. He set it aside, paid one of the bills, and marvelled at another printed in scarlet and threatening him with the steps which would be taken if he kept them waiting any longer for their payment. The money was only three days overdue. Let them wait a little longer.

He had never been one to study the appearance of a letter and the mysterious handwriting of the sender before opening it, but then he seldom heard from previously unknown people. Studying this one told him nothing. He sat down in an armchair and opened it. The address was Perth, and Noreen Leopold, in the first line, introduced herself as his cousin. Lewis immediately thought this must be nonsense as he had no cousins, but he read on, at first disbelieving, then astonished:

I am coming to Britain in the spring, March, I think, and hope to meet you as you are the only cousin I have. You may possibly remember my dad, Jimmy Rayment, who died twenty years ago. He came here and settled at the end of the 1939–1945 war, married my mum,
Betty, and later became the father of five children with her. I am one of them. My dad was always going to get in touch with you but never got around to it.

Here, Lewis laid down the letter, put it aside, and marvelled some more. James, Uncle James, had been living in a distant part of the world, as Lewis’s mother always thought he might have. He had lived all those years in Perth and had all those children. Lewis picked up the letter again and read to the end:
Let me have a line from you. My email address is [email protected]. I would really like us to meet and have a chat about your parents and mine. Your cousin, Noreen.

He would have to tell people. The police perhaps. Those others he had been in the tunnels with. He would think about it and decide what to do next. He read the letter again, went into the kitchen to make himself tea, thought better of it, and poured himself quite a stiff whisky instead. What he really wanted was someone to tell about this and ask his or her advice. There was no one. His life had been quite solitary since Jo died. Well, there was one. He would sleep on it, wait till morning, and then he would phone Melissa.

R
OSEMARY BOUGHT SOME
pink wool and began knitting a jumper. It wasn’t for Sybilla or Callum or the new baby but for herself. The dress she had started once she got back from Freya’s she had finished and was wearing it when she went up to London in the tube. She had made few shopping trips to Oxford Street or Knightsbridge because Alan disliked shopping, like most men, and, while she tried on clothes, would sit on a chair—provided by the assistant—apparently stunned by boredom and half-asleep. Or else he waited outside, standing in the doorway or finding a seat to sit on while he dozed. This first trip since his departure she made alone, walking along Oxford Street to Selfridges and buying herself a pair of shoes and a handbag. She had all the time in the world and shopped slowly, choosing what she wanted as she had never done since she was a young girl. Then, vaguely remembering where most theatres were, she walked carefully to Regent Street and asked a taxi driver to drive her to the Queen’s Theatre, where
Les Misérables
was showing. She had always wanted to see it but Alan never would.

The theatre was open for a matinee. She walked in, felt suddenly shy and frightened, but made herself walk up to the window inside which a girl sat and asked, wondering if she was making a fool of herself, for a seat in the stalls for the evening performance on Friday. Not a fool apparently. It all went without a hitch and she had her ticket. Back now to the shops, but perhaps a walk round Trafalgar Square first. She found a place to eat lunch, and again she wasn’t making a fool of herself. With her food she had a glass of wine and afterwards thought, Why not take a taxi up to Holborn and go home from there? So she did and reached home in triumph. It had been good, it had been
fun.
And the shoes and bag were lovely. She sat down by the phone and phoned her daughter, her son, and both her grandchildren, telling them all about her lovely day and learning that her new grandson’s name was Clement.

I have grown, she told herself, and I am still growing.

“
W
HY NOT COME TO ME
,” said Melissa, “and I’ll cook something. I’d like to.”

So he went. Her house in a street off Chiswick High Street was nothing to look at outside but charming inside, with large, elegant rooms and a pretty garden. She had made a salad and a rich, hot paella. Lewis told her about the hands in the box and the group of people who had been in the tunnels, Michael Winwood and his mother and father, and the letter from Noreen Leopold.

“What do you want to do?” Melissa asked.

“I don’t know. Nothing, I suppose. But I have to answer her letter, and when I answer it, I have to tell her about all of it. Or do I?”

“Not necessarily. But I think you have to tell the others and the police. You and all of you thought the hands were Michael Winwood’s mother’s and your uncle’s, but they obviously weren’t. Hers maybe, but not your uncle’s. Whose was the other hand?”

“I don’t know. No one can know.”

“Surely Michael’s father knows and he’s still alive, isn’t he?”

“I believe so,” said Lewis. “Should I tell Michael first, do you think?”

She said he should. And quickly, perhaps as soon as he got home. “People who live to a hundred are always more or less at death’s door, aren’t they?”

Before making that phone call, Lewis sent Noreen Leopold an email. He told her to get in touch with him in March and that he would like to see her when she was here. The hands were not mentioned. They could go there, if necessary, when she came. He sat at his desk for quite a long time before dialling Michael’s number, even thinking that he need do nothing before Noreen came. But it was too late for that, now that he had consulted Melissa. He must phone and it would be best to get it over with.

T
HE ROOM WAS WARM
. Michael had come because Urban Grange had asked him to, telling him that his father had been unwell the evening before. They had hesitated and nearly sent for him at 7:00 p.m. but the old man had rallied, had got up and shifted himself into an armchair. Some weeks before, John Winwood had asked Darren to buy him a print of “some famous picture” and have it framed. This had been done, and its being brought to his room and shown to him had led to the fast improvement in his health. This morning, Imogen said, Mr. Winwood was a lot better, but they still thought Michael might wish to come, as his father was so very old and it was impossible to tell how long he might last.

So Michael was there, disliking his father rather more than he had since his visits began after his aunt’s death. This feeling was exacerbated by the sight of the “famous picture,” a print of Dürer’s
Praying Hands
. The nursing-home staff might, in their innocence, believe that John Winwood had bought it just because he liked the picture, but Michael knew well that it was there, hanging up on the wall, because of the hands in the biscuit tin and what his father had done.

First thing after their tea had been brought, John Winwood asked, “Like it?”

Michael didn’t answer.

“You always were sulky, a very sullen child.”

His father picked up the plate of biscuits but, in trying to pass it to Michael, dropped it, scattering biscuits, bits of biscuits, and crumbs on the floor. “Leave it,” John said when Michael knelt down and tried to restore the fragments to the plate. “Let them pick it up. That’s what they’re paid for.”

Michael had meant to ask his father about the hands in the box, but since reaching that decision, he’d realised he didn’t know whom they belonged to. One was his mother’s? He didn’t know
that. Now that he had been told that James Rayment had died only about twenty years before, he didn’t know whose the man’s hand was either. Coming to Urban Grange had been pointless. He sat on, drinking his tea, then refilling their cups. His father left his standing there. He had leant his head back, closed his eyes, and appeared to be fast asleep. Michael looked at the crumbs and the broken biscuits and left them there. He too closed his eyes, thought for a while about his children, so remote from him as if they were not his at all, then about Vivien, so good, so loving, his treasure.

He still had his eyes shut when someone came in to take the tray. He heard her click her tongue, exasperated no doubt by the mess. Once she had gone, he sat up and looked at his father across the empty table. The older eyes opened. John Winwood said, “I’m not long for this world.”

Michael thought of saying to not say that or to cheer up and be more hopeful. He didn’t. “I’ll be back,” he said instead. “It won’t be long.”