The Girl Next Door: A Novel Page 5

  She didn’t lift her foot from the treadle. “You’ve already had a walk.”

  “I know, but I need another. Don’t mind, do you?”

  “Of course I don’t mind, darling. Remember it’s supper at seven, though, won’t you?”

  There were only the two of them, it would only be cold meat and salad, yet it had to be at seven? Why? Because it always was. He knew he couldn’t change it. Down the hill, across the High Road and up York Hill past the bungalow called Carisbrooke and along Baldwin’s Hill to that paved apron of land that jutted into the greensward bordered by the forest. Here had been where young couples parked their borrowed cars. But no longer, Alan thought, not these days when a teenage boy or girl brought a lover home to spend the night under the parental roof. In his day parents wouldn’t even have considered allowing that. No son or daughter would have dreamt of asking. Thirty years later his own son, Owen, had asked and been briskly turned down by Rosemary. Alan would have said yes, remembering the secret meetings with Daphne in her father’s car and the drive up here. The forest had been dark, car headlights going out one by one.

  There were no cars here now. He remembered exactly where Daphne had parked hers, tucking it in under overhanging branches. Our bed is green. . . . She was afraid of nothing, or if she was, she didn’t show it; he, believing stories of boys and girls being arrested and had up in court for indecent behaviour in a public place, was always fearful. But he was young and his nervousness wasn’t enough to impede him when he was in the back with Daphne. He was passionate and greedy and so was she, even when the moon came out from behind clouds and he thought the light was from a policeman’s torch. There had been maybe a dozen occasions. Unlike other users of Baldwin’s Hill, who were afraid of pregnancy or, in the case of the girls, of not being virgins when they married, he and Daphne went “all the way,” as the phrase had it. She didn’t get pregnant, though he had done nothing to prevent it.

  He wrote to her and she wrote to him, but they were a long way apart, and though her family still lived in Loughton, three months is a long time when you’re only twenty. Their letters ceased, though once, two years later, he had a Christmas card from her. Now, standing on the small treeless expanse and looking across the darkening woodland, he wondered what would have happened if he had sent her a card back. But by this time he was going out with Rosemary, his “childhood sweetheart,” as his mother embarrassingly called her, and there was no back of a car on Baldwin’s Hill for them, for Rosemary was saving herself for marriage.

  He turned away and began to make his way back down Stony Path and Harwater Drive. Tiredness hit him as he crossed Church Hill. For an old man he had walked a lot that day, several miles. He was in his seventies. What had he been doing, mooning back to a long-lost youth and a woman who had had three husbands? When he got home, he would get the scissors and cut up the evidence the way you did with an out-of-date credit card and drop the pieces in the bin. Episode Daphne over, he thought. As he unlocked his front door, he heard the soft buzz of the sewing machine and felt a quite unwarranted anger rising in his throat like bile. But he opened the sewing-room door to tell Rosemary he was back.

  “All right,” she said, getting up, “I’ll get supper.”

  Daphne’s card was still in his pocket. Of course it was. Rosemary was the soul of honour, the last woman to forage through his clothes in search of incriminating evidence. What was happening to him that he was thinking of the possibility of deceiving his wife? But he was deceiving her already. That visit to Baldwin’s Hill with its attendant reminiscing was itself deceiving her. His thoughts now were a kind of deceit. Suddenly they deflected to the excavation he and Rosemary had gone to look at and to the hands found there. A man and a woman. Had they been lovers, placed there in their grave, by a vengeful husband or, come to that, a vengeful wife? So long ago, perhaps so long that the reason for their burial would never be known.

  He was still holding Daphne’s card. Instead of cutting it into pieces or otherwise disposing of it, he put it back in his pocket.

  5

  WHEN JO DIED some few months before, Lewis Newman had received letters of condolence from people he had known during the various phases of his long life—one fellow medical student whose name he couldn’t even remember, neighbours from the Birmingham days, those of his friends who were still alive, and his partner in the practice where he had last worked. A letter also came from someone he had been at school with—primary school, as they called it these days. Most of these people, apart from the friends, had read the announcement of Jo’s death in the Times. That was what such announcements were for, Lewis supposed, and now he wondered why he had agreed to his cousin’s (“beloved wife of”) insistence that it should be put there.

  He replied to these letters, as was polite. In Jo’s lifetime, she had replied, and writing to one of the Birmingham people, he thought to himself that this was the first of such missives he had ever written. He saved answering the school friend’s letter till last because it was the most interesting. From Stanley Batchelor, it was scarcely a letter of condolence at all. True, Batchelor did say he was sorry to hear of Jo’s death, but the tone, Lewis thought, was rather that a man who had looked after a woman “through years of illness” must to some extent be relieved by her demise. This was so much Lewis’s own sentiment—something he could never dream of revealing to anyone—that it endeared Stanley Batchelor to him.

  The Batchelors. How memories of the family came back to him now across seven decades. His own family had lived in Brook Road and the Batchelors in Tycehurst Hill. Stanley had a dog, called Nipper. Amazing to remember that. One of Stanley’s brothers, the youngest perhaps, was called Norman, and he used to boast about being born on the kitchen table. The address on the letter was Theydon Bois. So he hadn’t moved far from Loughton or, if he had, had come back again. There was an email address as well. Most people of their age didn’t send emails, hardly knew what an email was. The last line of the letter, before the bit about deepest sympathy, read, If you haven’t thought about this “neck of the woods” for years, the newspaper stories about Warlock will have brought it back to you. An extraordinary business. It would be good to meet sometime if you feel like it.

  Death, thought Lewis, brought old friends, long separated, back together. He had liked Stanley Batchelor very much when they were children. Would he like him now? Like or not, he was the very person with whom to discuss, if not the Warlock business, the place they called something strange—what was it?—yes, the qanats. He couldn’t remember why. That and something else, which, though it had never troubled him, never come near to making him unhappy, had been on the edge of his consciousness ever since he was not much older than the age he had been when he and Stanley Batchelor had been friends. It had bothered his mother. She and Uncle James—no one ever called him Jim—had been close all their lives, though she was seven years older than he. Perhaps because she was seven years older and, as was common in the twenties, had had to look after him when she was a big child and he four years old.

  Lewis had often thought about Uncle James. When Lewis was first married, he had told Jo about him and his curious disappearance.

  “He got killed in the war, didn’t he?”

  “For that to have happened he would have to have joined up, and it seems he didn’t.”

  “It doesn’t much matter now,” said Jo.

  “It matters to me and to Mum. He just disappeared.”

  “I read somewhere that lots of people did. They were in houses that got bombed. Or they were drafted to work in mines and got buried.”

  He said no more. He knew it hadn’t been like that. Uncle James had been staying with them in Brook Road, and while he was there, he seemed to join the army. Up till then he’d been unfit on account of having some minor thing the matter with him, a badly fallen arch on his left foot. On a second try they took him. He was going to go home to London, where he li
ved with an aunt and uncle, but he never got there. His uncle tried to trace him. James hadn’t told him where he would be stationed, that wouldn’t have been allowed, but he did have the names of two men he would be starting his training with and their addresses. Both of them replied. They had never heard of Private James Rayment. The army had never heard of him, though he’d said he had joined up. Efforts to find him had failed. He had disappeared.

  That was sixty years and more ago, and Uncle James had never been heard of since. As Jo said, people disappeared in wartime. It was a good time to change your identity or vanish or hide from authority. In those days you had an identity card and you had a ration book, but that was all. No bus passes, no credit cards, no mobile phones, and since you never drove, no driving licence, probably no bank account. You were free. Free to hide, free to be someone else, free to disappear. Lewis’s family also did all they could to find Uncle James, but they failed. After a time his disappearance mattered less, receded into a sort of semi-oblivion. It wasn’t as if he had died, but rather as if he had gone a long way off, perhaps to live on some distant continent where no one ever went. Perhaps he had. People did rarely go to those places, but sending airmail letters was troublesome and the cost of phoning was prohibitive. Uncle James might have tried to phone but failed to get through, as often happened.

  Lewis’s mother clung to a belief that he would one day turn up out of the blue and present himself on her doorstep. James had often stayed with them in Brook Road, and Gwen Newman, looking back over the past couple of years, now remembered that while there her brother had gone out a lot in the evenings. Not every evening but often, and she had had a feeling that he only stayed in with her and her husband and Lewis because it was expected of him as a guest. When James couldn’t be found, she remarked on this behaviour and what she said had stayed with Lewis all these years.

  “I should have asked him where he was going, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. After all, he was a grown man. He used to get back very late, or I suppose he did. I was always asleep.”

  “Now you mention it,” said Lewis’s father. “I heard him come in after midnight once or twice.”

  “I did ask him once if he’d had a nice evening, but he only said, ‘Lovely, thanks,’ and didn’t tell me any more.”

  “I sometimes wondered why he wanted to stay with us. It must have been rather dull with nothing to do in the evenings.”

  “He had something to do,” said Gwen. “A girlfriend. A woman. He’s gone off with her and maybe she was married. That’s why he never told us.”

  THEYDON BOIS WAS one of those suburbs in Surrey or Essex or Hertfordshire on the edge of London. The tube went to Theydon. It was desirable commuter land with shops, big and small houses, a village green, and it was in Epping Forest. Unfortunately, you could hear the distant roar of the motorway, the M25, not yet built when Stanley first lived there in the sixties. Thinking themselves clever and polyglot, visitors pronounced its name Theydon Bwah, but Boys was correct.

  Stanley and George, Batchelor Brothers, had built several of the houses in Theydon, and Stanley and Helen lived in one of the larger detached ones. Stanley had bought it when his children left home, his first wife died, and he married a woman twenty years younger than himself. When he had written back to Lewis Newman and invited him to lunch, Stanley had supposed he would drive, but Lewis, who had given up his car six months before Jo’s death, chose the tube. Ealing was at one end of the Central Line and Theydon at the other, so he could sit in the train for an hour or more reading one of his favourite and frequently reread books, The Count of Monte Cristo.

  Stanley met him at the station with Spot on the lead. Much to Spot’s dismay, they sat down on a seat outside the Bull because Lewis wasn’t a great walker.

  “Quite like being in the countryside,” he said.

  “We are in the countryside.”

  This was answered by a half smile from Lewis and a shrug from his arthritic shoulders. “My brother George is coming to lunch,” said Stanley. “He’s looking forward to seeing you again.”

  George was the only one of the Batchelors Lewis hadn’t liked. Too bossy and go-ahead.

  “He’s recovering from a hip replacement.”

  “It comes to us all,” said Lewis the GP, trying to be generous.

  “Not to me, I trust. I try to keep all that sort of thing at bay by regular walks with Spot.”

  George had already arrived and was seated in an armchair, his leg up and his stick beside him. His big, black Audi, driven by Maureen, was on Stanley’s garage drive, and she in what Stanley called “the lounge,” drinking sherry with a woman in her fifties with silvery-blond hair, wearing dark green leather trousers and a red satin blouse.

  “We built this house, you know,” said George when Helen had handed sherry to Lewis.

  “And you built Warlock,” said Lewis. “You didn’t put those hands in the foundations, I hope?”

  No one commented on that. Lewis expected someone to say how sorry he or she was to hear of Jo’s death, but no one did. Lewis didn’t mind, he never knew what to say in response to condolence, but he thought it strange. Helen said lunch would soon be ready. Stanley let the dog out into the garden, and George, opening a huge photograph album, showed Lewis the sole picture of the qanats that existed. The entrance to the tunnels was crammed with grinning children, none of whom Lewis could recognise. George began talking about going there, when they found the place and where it was.

  “I reckon I was the first of us to go in there.”

  “It was quite brave,” Stanley said. “The whole thing might have collapsed, the roof fallen in.”

  “Quell,” said George, “was more interested in any adults who might have gone in there, people we’d seen.”

  “Who’s Quell?”

  “Policeman. He came to George’s and we all went over and talked to him. Well, all—those we could find. Those who are still alive. There was me, Norman, George, and Michael Winwood, Alan Norris and that woman Rosemary he married—oh, and Daphne Jones. Daphne Furness as she is now.”

  There was a silence, brought about as so often by the utterance of that name. Only Lewis repeated it. “Oh yes, Daphne Jones . . . This cop wanted to know about adults in there? What, brought along by one of us?”

  “I suppose so,” said Stanley. “Even if we had, he or she would be dead by now.” Before he could say more, Helen came back to tell them lunch was ready.

  It was a good lunch, much appreciated by Lewis, along with the nicely laid table, the silver and glass and the pink tulips in a Royal Copenhagen vase. Such beautifully prepared food and carefully chosen wine hadn’t come his way since Jo fell ill all those years ago. It softened his attitude to the Batchelors without making him wish to disclose who he thought that adult visitor to the tunnels might have been. Yet, he thought, as he increasingly did these days, at his age he hadn’t, what he had not long ago taken for granted, an indefinite future. He was one of the oldest of the tunnel occupants and would not, as he put it wryly to himself, eating his crème brûlée with gusto, see seventy-five again. Arthritis wouldn’t kill him but his dodgy heart might.

  This reverie was interrupted by Helen’s offering him a “penny for your thoughts.” He responded by asking with a reflective smile if anyone under thirty would understand what that meant. His remark went down badly with Helen, who probably supposed that she was generally taken for coming within that age range herself. Maureen failed to improve matters by catching Lewis’s eye and giving him a look that was just not a wink.

  “It’s my belief,” she said as they left the table, “that we shan’t hear much more of those hands. Sorry, but I didn’t want to mention it while we were eating. The police must know by now that they’re never going to find who they belonged to, and anyway, who really cares?”

  Nobody replied to that. They all sat down, and George remarked that his leg was
giving him “gip.” When Maureen was ready?

  “I’ll just have my coffee now Helen’s gone to all the trouble to make it.”

  Lewis passed the rest of his time in Theydon Bois finding out from Stanley how and where to get in touch with Detective Inspector Colin Quell and, when George and Maureen left, said he must go too. It was a long way to the other end of the Central Line. He thanked Helen profusely for his lunch, but he could tell he had offended her with his comment about the penny for his thoughts. Unexpectedly, Stanley said he would come with him to the station. Spot would enjoy another walk.

  “Why do you call him Spot when he’s black all over?” Lewis asked.

  “I asked my grandson to name him and he’s only six. Spot was the only dog’s name he knew. I couldn’t have any more Nippers.”

  “Why didn’t anyone ask me to this meeting you had with the policeman?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Stanley. “Didn’t know how to get hold of you, I reckon.”

  Lewis said no more. Instead he contributed the few doggy tales he could remember, and Stanley rejoined with anecdotes of past canines he had owned. The station was soon reached, and Stanley, to Lewis’s relief, departed, saying Spot would get fractious if expected to hang about. Lewis had been longing for the chance to be alone and think about George’s remark about adults going into the tunnels. It was a fine mild afternoon and sitting on the seat on Theydon Bois station platform no hardship in the sunshine. Even if it took half an hour before the train came, he had plenty to think about.