The Girl Next Door: A Novel Read online

  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.

  AS 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?”

  ALONE 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 children, 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.

  ALAN AND ROSEMARY 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.”

  “So sherry’s not an old person’s drink,” said Alan. “I bet you if you went into the King’s Head”—they were just approaching this hostelry—“and asked for sherry, the young woman behind the bar wouldn’t know what you were talking about.”

  George, the eldest of the Batchelor siblings still living, was still in the town where he had been born and grown up, a not uncommon phenomenon in outer London suburbs. This was true also of Alan and Rosemary and almost of George’s brother Stanley but not of George’s brother Norman. So it was a surprise to walk into George and Maureen’s living-room in the sprawling bungalow called Carisbrooke and find Norman sitting beside his brother on a sofa, George’s leg stretched out in front of him and supported on what Maureen called a pouffe.

  “How are you, Norman?” said Rosemary. “Long time no see.” Alan particularly disliked that phrase, which she believed the people she called “Chinamen” used.

  “I live in France now. I’m not often here.” Norman went off into a gushing eulogy of French culture, food, drink, the countryside, the health service, his house, and transport. A glazed look came over Maureen’s face, the expression of someone who has heard it all before. She got up and returned with a trolley laden with glasses and bottles of various sherries, oloroso, amontillado, and Manzanilla among others.

  Having accepted a glass of amontillado, Alan handed George the Daily Telegraph. “Have you seen this?”

  George barely glanced at it. “Sure. We take the same paper.” He nodded in a sage sort of way. “I built it.”

  “What, Warlock?”

  “Me and my brother did. Batchelor Brothers. Like we built a good many of the houses on the Hill.”

  Alan knew he meant not that George and Stanley had built these houses with their own hands, but that their firm had, and on those fields across which they and all the other children had run when the sirens sounded and then the all clears.

  “When was it, George?” Rosemary asked.

  “Sometime in the early fifties. ’Fifty-two, ’fifty-three.”

  “Okay. Now maybe you can tell me if you think our tunnels were underneath Warlock.”

  “Oh, no,” said George. “They’d been there, though. That’s what they were, the foundations of a house.”

  Rosemary echoed his last words. “The foundations of a house. I never thought of that.”

  “They were all gone by the time I acquired the land. We dug new foundations for Warlock. A Mr. Roseleaf had it built. Funny name, I thought, that’s why I remembered.”

  Norman, having found fault with the sherry as being Spanish and not French, had fallen asleep but now awoke with a snort and said, “So that’s what they were. The foundations of a house. That was a funny name too, Warlock.”

  “It means a man who’s a sort of witch,” said Maureen. “Very funny, in my opinion.”

  “Nothing to do with witches,” said George. “It was because he’d lived in a street called Warlock Road in Maida Vale.”

  “Well, I never,” said Norman. “You were there, Alan, weren’t you? And Rosemary. And Lewis Newman—remember him? And do you remember Stanley’s dog, Nipper? He was a nice dog. My mum hardly ever got cross with us, not with anyone, but was she mad when she found Stanley’d been taking the dog out in the evening without asking.”

  Rosemary smiled, remembering. “Nipper was lovely. We longed for a dog, didn’t we, Alan?”

  “You didn’t find those hands when you were building that house, did you, George?”

  “I think I’d have said, don’t you?”

  George softened his scathing tone by struggling to his feet and refilling sherry glasses. Several guests noticed that he was pouring amontillado into Manzanilla glasses, but no one said anything. Rosemary got oloroso instead of amontillado, but she really preferred the sweet sherry, though she hadn’t asked for it as it was known to make you fat.

 
“That was where we met,” she said. “In those tunnels.”

  “What, when you were ten?” George asked

  Rosemary nodded, suddenly embarrassed. Met there, lost each other when someone’s father turned them out, shouted at them to go home and not come back, met again years later, at a dance this time, dated (though that was a term never used then), and got married. It seemed to her that the others were staring at them as if she had described some tribal ritual, ancient and now unknown. Except for her and Alan, they had all been married at least once before, divorced, moved, even lived abroad such as Norman.

  She said brightly, trying to cover a kind of shame, “Who was it that turned us out of the tunnels? Someone’s father? Michael Woodman? Woodley?”

  “It was Michael Winwood’s dad,” said Norman. “They lived on the Hill next door to the Joneses, the Winwoods did. And Bill Johnson’s people lived further up the Hill. Winwood found out we were all going into the tunnels in the evenings. I suppose Michael told him. He just walked across the road, found the entrance, and shouted down to us to come out and not come back.”

  While Norman was speaking, his brother Stanley had quietly come into the house by the back door. Norman jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder, got to his feet, and the brothers embraced. Rosemary said afterwards to her husband that she hadn’t known where to look, brothers hugging each other. Whatever next! Alan thought it was rather nice but said nothing. Throughout his marriage he had often taken refuge in saying nothing. They were always weird, those Batchelors, said Rosemary on the way home. For instance, the way Norman, the youngest, used to go about telling people he’d been born on the kitchen table.