The Girl Next Door: A Novel Read online

  Whether any of them or any of the others had ever taken an adult into the tunnels, he didn’t know, though he thought not. The unwritten law was not to involve grown-ups. Human beings make laws even when they are only ten or eleven years old and take no notice of them when they feel like it. Whatever others had done, he had flouted that rule. He hadn’t meant to, or, rather, he hadn’t wanted to, but Uncle James had kept on at him about it.

  Sitting on the seat in this semirural place, the effort of remembering threatened to send him to sleep. He was old and it was true what they said, that the old remember events of their childhood better than what had happened this morning. He rested his head back against the seat and sleep came. A snore that was more like a noisy snort woke him, and he realised that the woman who had come to sit next to him must have heard it and perhaps been amused. Age also brings something advantageous: old people no longer feel much embarrassment. There has ceased to be any point in it. It’s a waste of time, and time is valuable now. What had he been thinking about before he fell asleep? He had forgotten and the train was arriving.

  He had also forgotten where he had got to in The Count of Monte Cristo, but it didn’t much matter as he had read it so many times before and a favourite point in the adventure was soon turned to. By this time he had also forgotten all about getting in touch with Detective Inspector Quell.

  HE WOKE UP in the night and knew at once he wouldn’t get to sleep again. Four o’clock was the witching hour. There was no hope at four. He could get up and walk about the house, he could make a cup of tea, drink whisky (a fatal choice, this), stay in bed and read some more, put on the radio. If one of those remedies worked and sleep came back until, say, six, he’d think himself lucky and feel quite cheerful. But it seldom did, so he did nothing and thought about Uncle James instead. It was Lewis’s fault for telling his uncle something he would never have told his parents, that he went these summer evenings to a secret place to meet a crowd of friends and play all sorts of games. It must have been the end of July or early August. Whether it was after the end of term or before that he couldn’t remember, and again he cursed himself for forgetting so much.

  Uncle James was staying with them in Brook Road. It was the time his mother noticed how James was often out in the evenings. Lewis saw it too but it meant nothing to him. He was a child to whom the ways of grown-ups were necessarily strange. Lying awake, Lewis looked back across his long life, from twelve years old through his teens and Bancroft’s School, Cambridge, and medical school, at last after general-practitioner training, a place in a GP partnership in Ealing. Meeting and falling in love with Alison, the whole thing coming to grief until he settled into marriage with Jo. All the way along the road he must have learned how to live or he should have done, acquiring experience and sophistication. If he had talked to Uncle James then, when Lewis was forty, he would have known where his uncle went and why he wanted to see the qanats, but not when he was twelve. Not in 1944, when, in spite of the war and the bombs and parents’ fear for them, middle-class children living in Loughton were naïve and innocent.

  Uncle James nagged him about the tunnels. Lewis wouldn’t have used that word then, it wasn’t respectful, but that is what they were. At last he said yes, but not in the evening. It would have to be a Sunday morning. No one went there on a Sunday, or few did. The English middle class kept the Sabbath holy. All the shops were shut and all the churches were open. Lewis’s family went to church only on Easter or Christmas Eve or for weddings and funerals, but he had been sent to Sunday school when he was younger and the prevailing view, held even by non-churchgoing people, was that you respected Sunday, kept your children from playing in the street, and passed a quiet day at home after a heavy lunch. Knowing this as a fact of life, Lewis knew that the tunnels would likely be empty even though it was a fine sunny day.

  A walk across the fields, especially with a popular relative, was not only permitted, it was encouraged. He and Uncle James set off up Tycehurst Hill and turned into Shelley Grove, a still unfinished road where further building had been stopped by the war, and where Alan Norris’s family lived in one of the few houses. The path across the fields went past the hollow oak, where picnicking children sat in the room-size space between spreading branches and ate bread and margarine and fish-paste sandwiches. No children this Sunday morning, though. Nearby, dividing field from field, stood a great screen of elms, destined to be felled in a few years’ time to make room for house-building, instead of waiting for Dutch elm disease to take them. They took the field path that led up the slope to the Hill, and Lewis, remembering a recent visit to Loughton cinema, wished he could do what someone had done to a captive in the film and blindfold Uncle James so that he couldn’t tell where they were or see the entrance to the qanats. But he was interested in seeing where they were and paused only for a moment before ducking his head and walking down the steps on the drought-baked clay and under the tarpaulin roof.

  Lewis was no sooner inside than he knew—he hardly understood how—that they were not alone. Several habitual “members,” as George Batchelor had named them, were already there. Listening, Lewis heard girls’ voices, though not what they said, and then Uncle James, careless of being overheard, stood surveying the clay walls, the wooden boxes and the bricks that littered the place, and let out a loud peal of laughter.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, and Lewis understood exactly what he meant, he didn’t have to ask. The tunnels weren’t suitable for the plan he had in mind. Whatever use he had hoped for, they wouldn’t do. They were too dirty, too shabby, to use a favourite word of Lewis’s mother’s. He knew that but not what that use might have been.

  “Come on then,” he had said. “Let’s go back.”

  But Uncle James had gone on ahead in the direction of the girls’ voices, and the two of them came into a big space where several candles were lit, and from the savoury smell, potatoes were baking in the old water tank. Lewis knew the potatoes came from Bill Johnson’s father, who grew them on his allotment in Stony Path. They would have been wrapped in clay and dropped in among the red-hot embers. Three girls were poking at them with sticks to test if they were ready. Now, looking back over all those years, Lewis tried to remember who the third one was, having no difficulty in recalling Rosemary Wharton and, of course, Daphne Jones, she of the height, as tall as any of the boys and with that cloak of long, dark hair. But who had the third one been? He would never know now. The nameless one turned to stare at Uncle James, but Daphne didn’t turn. Rosemary bent to try to fish something out of the tank and cried out as she burnt her hand. It was only a tiny scorch, the faintest touch of one of those clay-encased potatoes, but Rosemary began whimpering and Uncle James stepped forward to help if he could. Was she all right? Was there anything he could do?

  “She’ll live,” said Daphne, and then she did turn round, fixing him with all the brilliance of her large, dark brown eyes and compelling admiration for the perfect arcs of her black eyebrows. Did he remember that? he thought at four thirty in the morning. Or did it come later when, attending his mother’s funeral, he had walked past her outside St. Mary’s Church and she, without recognising him, had taken the arm of the man she was with and walked on.

  Uncle James hadn’t pressed his offer of help, it obviously wasn’t needed, and he and Lewis had gone back the way they had come. They crossed the fields and were halfway down Shelley Grove when Uncle James said, evidently forgetting that his companion was twelve and not twenty-five, “She’ll make havoc among the men when she’s a bit older.”

  Lewis didn’t know the meaning of havoc so said nothing, but he looked the word up in the dictionary when he got home and found it meant chaos, destruction, and devastation. The last thing he saw before he went back to sleep was the sight of one of their neighbours coming down Brook Path from St. Mary’s Church with a prayer book in her hand. Perhaps it was that prayer book or the woman’s disapproving glance that sent him back to sleep
at last.

  6

  THE NORRISES’ FLAT in the block on Traps Hill, though large and with spacious rooms, was not suitable for small children. The windows in the lounge (Alan hated this name for the drawing-room) almost filled one wall and gave onto a balcony. In fine weather these windows were open and there was no danger to adults; the railing on the balcony was an absolute safeguard against falling to the stone-paved terrace below. Not so for small children, who could have slipped through the spaces between the railings or dived underneath them. Fenella, Freya’s sister, had a son aged five and a daughter aged nearly three, and when with Fenella’s husband, Giles, they all came to visit on a Sunday afternoon, no matter how warm it was and how strongly the sun was shining, the windows had to remain closed.

  Only quite recently had Alan resented this. Until a few weeks ago he had gone along with the theory, widely believed, that any hardship grandparents must endure was not a hardship at all but a pleasure, a treat, a marvellous dispensation of providence for which they should be the objects of envy. And this applied not only to grandparents—they had after all been through it twenty-five years before—but to the great-grandparents they now were. At their age they deserved a bit of peace on Sundays, not to be besieged by rampaging infants who were being brought up to do exactly as they liked, leaping from one piece of furniture to the next, rolling themselves up in the rugs, hammering on the windows as if this would make them open, demanding Coca-Cola, orange juice, biscuits, and chocolate, which their obedient, smiling great-grandmother ran to fetch for them, and climbing on their great-grandfather’s knee to cover up his book or page of his newspaper with sticky fingers. When he mildly expressed this view to Rosemary, adding that having the children here ought to be worth it because it was so nice when it stopped, she reproached him for ingratitude. In her opinion—for she had never forgotten his remarks about their dull life—these kind visits of Fenella and her children were surely enough to dispel any thoughts of dullness. If they were lucky enough to live a few more years, Freya would herself have a young family, and she also would bring them to see their great-grandparents, perhaps on Saturdays.

  Freya and her coming wedding was the current most popular topic of conversation in the Norris family, a subject that barely interested Alan. From a small gathering in what he thought of as a glorified pub, it had turned into a party of two hundred people in a riverside hotel. All the more reason, he had said, for Rosemary to buy herself a dress, something she refused to do on the grounds of cost when she could make just as attractive a garment herself. Alan disagreed but he could hardly say so, only continue to press a large sum of money on her, an offer which went against the grain with him, for he was the feminist of the two of them, always disliking the notion of a husband and breadwinner’s bestowing cash gifts on his wife instead of the couple’s sharing what he saw as their joint resources. It mattered little as it happened, for Rosemary insisted on making this complicated suit from a pattern which he could see, but never say, was beyond her capacity.

  He realised then, insofar as he as a man was capable of doing so, that the clothes she had been making ever since they were married had never been very successful. Lapels were uneven, hems longer at the front than the back, necklines, buttonholes, and cuffs not quite symmetrical. The clothes she made were praised because she had made them and not because they looked good. This copper-coloured silk suit would be added to their number but would be worse than usual; Alan admitted to himself that Rosemary, who had never had training in dressmaking, was even less good at it than she had once been because she was getting older. Her fingers were less dextrous and she needed new glasses. Throughout the years when she had made her own clothes, they had seldom attended big parties or important functions. Now they would. This one was very big, and he imagined himself as accompanying Rosemary, as her husband, in a state he seldom experienced. He would be embarrassed. He made the mistake of having a last and more frank and forceful go at persuading her to buy a dress.

  “Are you saying I’ve lost my skill?” she said in response to his telling her that, she having laboured over the neckline of the jacket for half the night, he was afraid it was still crooked.

  “Just look in the mirror. You’ll see it’s not quite right.”

  “I can see you’re determined to make me dress in stereotyped clothes instead of something original.”

  They argued a little more and then he gave up. He would have to bear that suit and the pitying looks, possibly the thoughts (though these would not be expressed) of guests who might suppose he was too mean to dress his wife attractively. Thus he was falling into the trap he so dreaded of sexism and even misogyny. In the afternoon they went out for one of their long walks, but had to turn back on Baldwin’s Hill instead of continuing along one of the forest paths. Rosemary was too tired after staying awake at the sewing machine until past one.

  “And after all that effort you don’t even want me to wear the thing.”

  He said nothing. He was looking at the four parked cars on the slope above the green hill that descended past Baldwin’s Pond to Blackweir. The occupants of those cars, unlike himself and Daphne, were all behaving in a decorous manner, smoking, one of them looking through binoculars at the spire of High Beech Church, protruding from the dark green woods, another asleep. Standing a little way apart from Rosemary, he thought of Daphne, as he now did every day: Daphne in her father’s car, Daphne in his arms, and Daphne in the dark slipping out of those of her clothes that must be shed. Desire drove out fear.

  He was wearing the jacket with her card in the right-hand pocket. He shouldn’t be carrying it with him. He should leave it at home in a safe place. Rosemary came up to him and took his arm, necessarily his left arm, while his right hand felt Daphne’s card. It seemed to him a betrayal, and loosening his fingers, he withdrew his empty hand from his pocket. They walked home.

  “I think I’ll have a lie-down.”

  “I’ll bring you a cup of tea,” said Alan.

  Here was another trap he was falling into, that of the spouse who thinks to compensate for his unfaithfulness by performing small selfless services for the betrayed one. How did he know so much about infidelity when he had never committed it? He went into the kitchen and made the tea, a cup for him and a cup for her. She was fully clothed but covered by the duvet, with the almost finished copper-coloured suit lying over the end of the bed. Why? He didn’t ask. He went back to the kitchen and laid Daphne’s card on the table: an address, an email address, a mobile number, a landline.

  Hamilton Terrace was where she lived. In a newspaper he had recently read a piece about the most desirable places in London to live, and the journalist had mentioned Hamilton Terrace as the nicest street. He had never been there but he tried to imagine what the houses looked like. Very different from Loughton, no doubt, and then he saw that Loughton was cited as among the most attractive of the outer suburbs. He hadn’t a mobile phone, had never felt the need for one, but if he possessed such a thing, he could make calls from anywhere, he could make, he thought shamefacedly, secret calls. He wouldn’t phone Daphne, but tomorrow he would go out and find a shop where they sold such things and buy himself a mobile phone. Meanwhile, he put the card back in his pocket.

  THE DNA EXTRACTED from the hands found underneath Warlock was all very well, thought Colin Quell, reading what the pathologist had to say. Most of it was beyond the understanding of even the most intelligent, and Quell considered himself highly intelligent. But he couldn’t see the use of it when there was nothing to compare it with. Sixty or seventy years ago that area of Loughton might well have abounded with people whose DNA matched or came close to matching that of the hands. But they were all gone now, all dead. He might, he thought, ask those people called Batchelor to give samples of DNA, ask that exotic-looking woman Daphne Furness, but that would only be of use if one of the hands might conceivably have belonged to a relative of theirs.

  IT WAS
A SURPRISE to get a phone call from Daphne. She had said she would phone, but Michael doubted that she really meant it, people didn’t. Would he come for a drink, just him, no one else? Or on second thoughts, come for supper, she said. She remembered where he lived and said he should take the 189, it stopped just round the corner from her.

  Her house was even more unexpected. The drawing-room, as her husband Martin had called it, was all his own work, everything in it chosen by him with care and taste.

  “It reminds me of my aunt Zoe’s house.” He found himself talking about Zoe, how good she had been to him and now she was so old, ninety-six, he dreaded her dying.

  “Not many people dread the death of someone so old.”

  “I don’t want to talk about how awful my parents were, though they were. My father was worse than my mother; at least she wasn’t violent. Zoe was loving and kind from the moment I went to live with her. D’you know, I couldn’t believe at first she wasn’t joking or playing some sort of game.”

  “Do you often see her?”

  “She still lives in Lewes. In a cottage but rather a big one. I go down about once a month and it’s not a chore, I think we both enjoy it.”

  “I’ll fetch us a drink,” said Daphne. “Sauvignon all right?”

  When she came back, he was standing by one of the bookcases, reading all the titles. She thought how thin and bony he looked. Frail was the word, but not ill, his face creased with wrinkles but his hands long and shapely. He took the wine and tasted it with evident pleasure. “May I tell you something?”