The Secret House of Death Read online

  ‘Mrs Townsend—er, Susan?’

  She sighed to herself. It wasn’t that she minded his use of her christian name but that it implied an intimacy he might intend to grow between them. I’m as bad as Julian, she thought.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘How rude of me.’

  ‘Not at all. I just wondered . . .’ He had dark blue eyes, a smoky marbled blue-like lapis, and now he turned them away to avoid hers. ‘You do your typing at the window, don’t you? Your writing or whatever it is?’

  ‘I do typed copies of manuscripts, yes. But only for this one novelist.’ Of course, he wasn’t asking about this aspect of it at all. Anything to deflect him. ‘I wouldn’t consider . . .’

  ‘I wanted to ask you,’ he interrupted, ‘if ever . . . Well, if today . . .’ His voice tailed away. ‘No, forget it.’

  ‘I don’t look out of the window much,’ Susan lied. She was deeply embarrassed. For perhaps half a minute they confronted each other over the hedge, eyes downcast, not speaking. Susan fidgeted with the little car she was holding and then Bob North said suddenly:

  ‘You’re lucky to have your boy. If we, my wife and I . . .’

  That doesn’t work, Susan almost cried aloud. Children don’t keep people together. Don’t you read the newspapers? ‘I must go in,’ she stammered. ‘Good night.’ She gave him a quick awkward smile. ‘Good night, Bob.’

  ‘Good night, Susan.’

  So Doris had been right, Susan thought distastefully. There was something and Bob was beginning to guess. He was on the threshold, just where she had been eighteen months ago when Julian, who had always kept strict office hours, started phoning with excuses at five about being late home.

  ‘Elizabeth?’ he had said when Susan took that indiscreet phone call. ‘Oh, that Elizabeth. Just a girl who keeps nagging me to take her dreary cookery features.’

  What did Louise say? ‘Oh, that man. Just a fellow who keeps nagging me to buy central heating.’

  Back to Miss Willingale. Paul hadn’t exaggerated when he had said he had tidied her desk. It was as neat as a pin, all the paper stacked and the two ballpoint pens put on the left of the typewriter. He had even emptied her ashtray.

  Carefully she put all the cars away in their boxes before sitting down. This was the twelfth manuscript she had prepared for Jane Willingale in eight years, each time transforming a huge unwieldy ugly duckling of blotted scribblings into a perfect swan, spotless, clear and neat. Swans they had been indeed. Of the twelve, four had been best sellers, the rest close runners-up. She had worked for Miss Willingale while still Julian’s secretary, after her marriage and after Paul was born. There seemed no reason to leave her in the lurch just because she was now divorced. Besides, apart from the satisfaction of doing the job well, the novels afforded her a huge incredulous amusement. Or they had done until she had embarked on this current one and found herself in the same position as the protagonist. . . .

  It was called Foetid Flesh, a ridiculous title for a start. If you spelt foetid with an O no one could pronounce it and if you left the O out no one would know what it meant. Adultery again, too. Infidelity had been the theme of Blood Feud and Bright Hair about the Bone, but in those days she hadn’t felt the need to identify.

  Tonight she was particularly sensitive and she found herself wincing as she reread the typed page. Three literal mistakes in twenty-five lines. . . . She lit a cigarette and wandered into the hall where she gazed at her own reflection in the long glass. Tactless Doris had hit the nail on the head when she said it didn’t matter how good-looking a person’s husband or wife was. It must be variety and excitement the Julians and the Louises of this world wanted.

  She was thinner now but she still had a good figure and she knew she was pretty. Brown eyes and fair hair were an unusual combination and her hair was naturally fair, still the same shade it had been when she was Paul’s age. Julian used to say she reminded him of the girl in some picture by Millais.

  All that had made no difference. She had done her best to be a good wife but that had made no difference either. Probably Bob was a good husband, a handsome man with a pleasing personality any woman might be proud of. She turned away from the mirror, aware that she was beginning to bracket herself and her next-door neighbour. It made her uneasy and she tried to dismiss him from her mind.

  2

  Susan had just left Paul and Richard at the school gates when Bob North’s car passed her. That was usual, a commonplace daily happening. This morning, however, instead of joining the High Street stream that queued to enter the North Circular, the car pulled into the kerb a dozen yards ahead of her and Bob, sticking his head out of the window, went through the unmistakable dumbshow of the driver offering someone a lift.

  She went up to the car, feeling a slight trepidation at this sudden show of friendship. ‘I was going shopping in Harrow,’ she said, certain it would be out of his way. But he smiled easily.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘As it happens, I have to go into Harrow. I’m leaving the car for a big service. I’ll have to go in by train tomorrow, so let’s hope the weather cheers up.’

  For once Susan was glad to embark upon this dreary and perennial topic. She got into the car beside him, remembering an editorial of Julian’s in which he had remarked that the English, although partakers in the most variable and quixotic climate in the world, never become used to its vagaries, but comment upon them with shock and resentment as if all their lives had been spent in the predictable monsoon. And despite Julian’s scornful admonitions, Susan now took up Bob’s cue. Yesterday had been mild, today was damp with an icy wind. Spring was certainly going to be late in coming. He listened to it all, replying in kind, until she felt his embarrassment must be as great as her own. Was he already regretting having said a little too much the night before? Perhaps he had offered her the lift in recompense; perhaps he was anxious not to return to their old footing of casual indifference but attempting to create an easier neighbourly friendship. She must try to keep the conversation on this level. She mustn’t mention Louise.

  They entered the North Circular where the traffic was heavy and Susan racked her brains for something to say.

  ‘I’m going to buy a present for Paul, one of those electrically operated motorways. It’s his birthday on Thursday.’

  ‘Thursday, is it?’ he said, and she wondered why, taking his eyes briefly from the busy road, he gave her a quick indecipherable glance. Perhaps she had been as indiscreet in mentioning her son as in talking of Louise. Last night he had spoken of his sorrow at his childlessness. ‘Thursday,’ he said again, but not interrogatively this time. His hands tightened a little on the wheel and the bones showed white.

  ‘He’ll be six.’

  She knew he was going to speak then, that the moment had come. His whole body seemed to grow tense beside her and she perceived in him that curious holding of the breath and almost superhuman effort to conquer inhibition that precedes the outpouring of confession or confidence.

  The Harrow bus was moving towards its stop and she was on the point of telling him, of saying that she could easily get out here and bus the rest of the way, when he said with an abruptness that didn’t fit his words, ‘Have you been very lonely?’

  That was unexpected, the last question she had been prepared for. ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ she said hesitantly.

  ‘I said, have you been lonely? I meant since your divorce.’

  ‘Well, I . . .’ Her cheeks burned and she looked down into her lap, at the black leather gloves that lay limply like empty useless hands. Her own hands clenched, but she relaxed them deliberately. ‘I’ve got over it now,’ she said shortly.

  ‘But at the time, immediately afterwards,’ he persisted.

  The first night had been the worst. Not the first night she and Julian had slept apart but the night after the day when he had gone for good. She had stood at the window for hours, watching the people come and go. It had seemed to her then that no one but herself in the whole
of her little world was alone. Everyone had an ally, a partner, a lover. Those married couples she could see had never seemed so affectionate, so bound together, before. Now she could remember quite distinctly how Bob and Louise had come home late from some dance or party, had laughed together in their front garden and gone into the house hand in hand.

  She wasn’t going to tell him any of that. ‘Of course, I had a lot of adjusting to do,’ she said, ‘but lots of women get deserted by their husbands. I wasn’t unique.’

  Plainly he had no intention of wasting sympathy on her case. ‘And husbands by their wives,’ he said. Here we go, Susan thought. Surely it couldn’t take more than ten minutes before they got into Harrow? ‘We’re in the same boat, Susan.’

  ‘Are we?’ She didn’t raise her eyebrows; she gave him no cue.

  ‘Louise is in love with someone else.’ The words sounded cold, deliberate, matter-of-fact. But when Susan made no reply, he suddenly burst out raggedly, ‘You’re a discreet, cagey one, aren’t you? Louise ought to thank you. Or maybe you’re on her side. Yes, I suppose that’s what it is. You’ve got a big anti-men thing because of what happened to you. It would be different, wouldn’t it, if some girl came calling on me while Louise was out of the house?’

  Susan said quietly, although her hands were shaking, ‘It was kind of you to give me a lift. I didn’t know I was expected to show my gratitude by telling you what your wife does while you’re out.’

  He caught his breath. ‘Perhaps that’s what I did expect.’

  ‘I don’t want to have any part in your private life, yours and Louise’s. Now I’d like to get out, please.’

  He reacted peculiarly to this. Susan had thought refusal impossible, but instead of slowing the car down, he swung with hardly any warning into the fast lane. A car immediately behind them braked and hooted. Bob cut into the roundabout, making the tyres screech, and moved on a skid into the straight stretch. His foot went down hard on the accelerator and Susan saw his mouth ease into the smile of triumph. Indignant as she was, for a moment she was also genuinely afraid. There was something wild and ungoverned in his face that some women might have found attractive, but to Susan he simply looked very young, a reckless child.

  The needle on the speedometer climbed. There were men who thought fast dangerous driving a sign of virility and this perhaps was what he wanted to demonstrate. His pride had been hurt and she mustn’t hurt it further. So instead of protesting, she only said dryly, although her palms were wet, ‘I should hardly have thought your car was in need of a service.’

  He gave a low unhappy chuckle. ‘You’re a nice girl, Susan. Why didn’t I have the sense to marry someone like you?’ Then he put out the indicator, slowed and took the turn. ‘Did I frighten you? I’m sorry.’ He bit his lip. ‘I’m so damned unhappy.’ He sighed and put his left hand up to his forehead. The dark lock fell across it and once more Susan saw the bewildered boy. ‘I suppose he’s with her now, leaving his car outside for everyone to see. I can picture it all. That ghastly dog barks and they all go to their windows. Don’t they? Don’t they, Susan?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘For two pins I’d drop back to lunch one day and catch them.’

  ‘That’s the shop I want, Bob, so if you wouldn’t mind . . .’

  ‘And that’s my garage.’

  He got out and opened the door for her courteously. Julian had never bothered with small attentions of this kind. Julian’s face had never shown what he was feeling. Bob was far better looking than Julian, franker, easier to know—and yet? It wasn’t a kind face, she thought. There was sensitivity there, but of the most egocentric kind, the sensitivity that feels for itself, closes itself to the pains of others, demands, grasps, suffers only when its possessor is thwarted.

  She stepped out of the car and stood on the pavement beside him in the cold wind. It whipped colour into the skin over his cheekbones so that suddenly he looked healthy and carefree. Two girls went past them and one of them looked back at Bob, appraisingly, calculatingly, in the way men look at pretty women. He too had caught the glance and it was something of a shock to Susan to watch him preen himself faintly and lean against the car with conscious elegance. She picked up her basket and said briskly, ‘Thanks. I’ll see you around.’

  ‘We must do this more often,’ he said with a shade of sarcasm.

  The car was still at the pavement edge and he still sitting at the wheel when she came out of the toyshop. How hard the past year had made her! Once she would have felt deeply for anyone in his situation, her own situation of twelve months before. She couldn’t escape the feeling he was acting a part, putting all the energy he could muster into presenting himself as an object of pity. He said he was unhappy, but he didn’t look unhappy. He looked as if he wanted people to think he was. Where were the lines of strain, the silent miserable reserve? Their eyes met for a second and she could have sworn he made his mouth droop for her benefit. He raised his hand in a brief salute, started the engine and moved off along the concrete lane between the petrol pumps.

  In another Certainty editorial, Julian Townsend had averred that almost the only green spaces remaining in north-west London were cemeteries. One of these, the overspill graveyard of some central borough, separated the back gardens of Orchard Drive from the North Circular Road. From a distance it still had a prettiness, an almost rural air, for the elms still raised their black skeletal arms against the sky and rooks still nested in them. But, taking the short cut home across the cemetery, you could only forget you were in a suburb, on the perimeter of a city, by the exercise of great imagination and by half closing your senses. Instead of scented grass and pine needles, you smelt the sourness of the chemical factory, and between the trees the traffic could always be seen as if on an eternal senseless conveyor belt, numberless cars, transporters carrying more cars, scarlet buses.

  Susan got off one of these buses and took the cemetery path home. A funeral had taken place the day before and a dozen wreaths lay on the fresh mound, but a night of frost and half a day of bitter wind had curled and blackened their petals. It was still cold. The clouds were amorphous, dishcloth-coloured, with ragged edges where the wind tore them. A day, Susan thought, calculated to depress even the most cheerful. Struggling across the bleakest part of the expanse, she thought that to an observer she must appear as she held her coat collar up against her cheeks like Oliver Twist’s mother on her last journey to the foundling hospital. Then she smiled derisively. At least she wasn’t pregnant or poor or homeless.

  Now as she came into the dip on the Matchdown Park side, she could see the backs of the Orchard Drive houses. Her own and the Norths’ were precisely identical and this brought her a feeling of sadness and waste. It seemed too that their occupants’ lives were destined to follow a similar pattern, distrust succeeding love, bitterness and rupture, distrust.

  Two men were coming down the path from Louise’s back door. They had cups of tea in their hands, the steam making faint plumes in the chill air, and Susan supposed they were labourers from the excavations on the road immediately below her. They had been digging up that bit of tarmac for weeks now, laying drains or cables—who knew what they ever did?—but it had never occurred to Susan to offer them tea. To her they had merely meant the nuisance of having clay brought in on Paul’s shoes and the staccato screaming chatter of their pneumatic drills.

  She let herself out of the cemetery gate and crossed the road. Inside the workmen’s hut a red fire burned in a brazier made from a perforated bucket. As she approached the gate in her own fence the heat from this fire reached her, cheerful, heartening, a warm acrid breeze.

  The men who had the tea cups moved up to the fire and squatted in front of it. Susan was about to say good morning to them when a third emerged from the trench that never seemed to grow deeper or shallower and gave a shrill wolf whistle. No woman ever really minds being whistled at. Does any woman ever respond? Susan fixed her face into the deadpan expression she reserved for such oc
casions and entered her own garden.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the whistling man march up Louise’s path in quest of his tea. The fence was six feet high between the two back doors. Susan could see nothing, but she heard Louise laugh and the exchange of badinage that followed that laughter.

  Susan went through the house and out of the front door to bring in the milk. Contrary to Bob’s prediction, there was no green Zephyr on the grass patch, but wedged into the earth at the far side of the garden she caught sight of its counterpart in miniature. Inadvertently she had left one of Paul’s cars out all night.

  As she stooped to pick it up, shaking the earth from its wheels, Doris appeared from Betty Gibbs’s house with Betty following her to prolong their conversation and their last good-byes as far as the gate.

  ‘An endless stream of them,’ Susan heard Betty say, ‘always up and down the path. Why can’t they make their own tea? They’ve got a fire. Oh, hallo.’ Susan had been spotted. She moved towards them, wishing she felt less reluctant. ‘Doris and I have been watching the way our neighbour runs her canteen.’

  ‘No visit from lover-boy today,’ said Doris. ‘That’s what it is.’

  ‘Louise has been making tea for those men for weeks and weeks,’ Susan protested, and as she did so she felt a violent self-disgust. Who decreed that she should always find herself in the role of Louise’s defending counsel? The woman was nothing to her, less than nothing. How smug she must appear to these perfectly honest, ordinary neighbours! Smug and censorious and disapproving. There was earth on her hands and now she found herself brushing it off fastidiously as if it were a deeper defilement. ‘Come,’ she said and she managed an incredulous smile, ‘you don’t really think Louise is interested in any of those workmen?’