The Girl Next Door: A Novel Read online

  “Of course. Whatever it is, are you sure? Don’t tell me anything you may regret when you think about it in the long watches of the night.”

  “I won’t regret it.”

  He told her about keeping Vivien’s room the way it was when she died. “I go and sit there sometimes and I talk to her. This room reminds me of it because it’s beautiful in the same sort of way. Do you think it wrong of me—self-indulgent, sentimental even?”

  “Not if it comforts you.”

  “I don’t know if it does. I don’t know if anything would. But I have a sort of feeling that I’d feel terrible if I got rid of it—I mean, turned it into a spare room or something. I’d feel bereft. If one of my children came to stay. I’ve got two other spare rooms but would I have to offer that room to them?”

  “Do they ever come?”

  “No. Well, they do. They come for flying visits from abroad—flying in two senses—but they never stay. I feel I ought to mind but I don’t really, not while I know they’re happy.”

  “I never wanted children. People say you regret it if you don’t have them but I can’t say I do. Shall we go and eat?”

  She had cooked black-olive pasta with a salad of avocado and artichokes, followed by crème caramel. The cheese was Shropshire Blue, which she said she was hooked on, so she hoped he liked it. He did and took red wine with it. The dining-room had orange walls and black furniture. He wondered if she lived alone or sometimes alone or had someone that a few years ago people would have called a “significant other” but no longer did. She played some Mozart that he had heard before but not for years. That kind of music brought tears to the eyes, and although he loved it, he was glad it didn’t last long. He left just after nine, saying he went to bed early and would catch the bus round the corner in Abbey Road.

  “I write poetry about buses,” he said. “Well, doggerel really. ‘A wonderful bus is the one-eight-nine, A special favourite of mine, It goes straight down from my abode, To lovely leafy Abbey Road.’ There’s more but I won’t inflict it on you.”

  She laughed, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and watched him go until he turned the corner. It was twenty past nine. She was putting the plates and cutlery in the dishwasher when the phone rang. It was one of those calls when you know who it is. She knew. Of course she couldn’t have done so, it wasn’t the kind of phone that tells you a name, but she knew, though not quite so well as to dare say, “Hallo, Alan.”

  He didn’t introduce himself, he didn’t need to. “I’m on the kind of phone that you can carry about but it’s not a mobile, so you couldn’t know who it was.”

  “But I could. I did.”

  “Ah. I’m out on the balcony with a spotty cat.”

  “You took your time about calling me.”

  “I know. I was afraid. I must see you. Soon. Friday?”

  “Of course. I must see you too. In the afternoon whenever you can.”

  SPOT SMELT THE smoke as he and Stanley turned the corner. Spot sat down on the pavement and howled. The fire appeared to be in one of the houses in Farm Mead, for by the look of it from the road, smoke was pouring out of the back windows and certainly from the front. A woman Stanley knew by sight came running out of the open front door with a frying pan in her hand. By this time he had called 999 for the fire brigade, as he still called it.

  Leaving Spot up the road, tied on a long lead to a pavement tree, Stanley asked the woman how it had happened. She put the frying pan down in a flowerbed.

  “I was frying chips,” she said, half-sobbing. “I love chips.”

  You could see that by the shape of her, thought Stanley. “Your smoke alarm didn’t go off?”

  “I’d taken it out. The noise made me jump every time it went off.”

  There was nothing to say except reproach, but anything that he might have said was cut off by the howling of sirens from the help that arrived. Firemen—they probably weren’t called that anymore—leapt out of their vehicles and rushed up the path with hoses and some sot of fire-extinguishing substance. The woman who loved chips tried to follow them but was sent back again, by which time Stanley had untied the dog and, because Spot refused to pass the house, set off in the opposite direction to take a roundabout route home.

  It was only the second fire Stanley had ever seen. During the war when he was a child, Loughton had been a surprisingly quiet place, though only about twelve miles outside central London. The East End had taken it badly, but the East End was nearer than that. He had seen pictures of the Blitz and films, though there was of course no available television. Children, such as Stanley and his brothers and sister, collected the chunks of twisted metal that were shrapnel from antiaircraft shells, they heard distant bombs falling and heard the big guns boom, enough to drive them all crowding into the air-raid shelter, but there was no fire as there appeared to be no incendiary bombs nearby. The fire he saw, the first fire as against this chip-pan one, was big; a conflagration, his father called it when they told him about it.

  It was December and it must have been 1944, for Stanley remembered it was the day after his birthday. He and George were walking home from Roding Road School, the secondary modern, where George had been a year and he had just started. Usually, they’d have walked home up Tycehurst Hill, but this time they took the Hill because George said, let’s see what’s happened to the qanats. It was after Mr. Winwood had turned them all out but not long after—weeks or months, he couldn’t remember. They saw the smoke rising up into the air behind the house called Anderby, the Winwoods’ house. It was coming from the back garden and they stood there staring.

  “Michael’s not there,” Stanley remembered George saying. “Mr. Winwood sent him away to his auntie,” and Stanley had said, “He’s always sending people away.”

  The fire took a sudden violent turn and flames came, roaring through the gap between Anderby and the Joneses’ fence. It had caught the shed that adjoined the fence and the summerhouse beyond, when the fire engines charged up the Hill, bawling with a far more strident howl than these two had made so many years later for the little frying-pan fire. As the men got out with their hoses and ran up the path, Mr. Winwood had come out and led them round the side of the house, no doubt the quickest way. But he came back, waving his arms about and shouting to Stanley and George.

  “Get off home, the pair of you. What the hell d’you think you’re doing gawping there?”

  People didn’t swear at children then, and hell was swearing. They had gone, not lingering long enough to see what had become of the tunnels, not knowing till years later when George acquired the land. Stanley had never discovered how the Anderby fire started, and he had never asked George about it when George might have known the answer. Where had everyone else been? Daphne and her mother and her brother? Perhaps Daphne still remembered.

  Stanley apologised for being late home. It was all Spot’s fault, refusing to pass a house in Farm Mead where there had been a fire.

  “I called the fire brigade.”

  “My hero,” said Helen. “And it’s fire service. Your dinner’s all ready.”

  He sometimes thought he would have married her even if she hadn’t been able to cook, but the cooking helped. This evening it was grilled calamari, coq au vin, and Eton mess or fresh fruit salad if he chose. He chose the Eton mess, pulling in his once-flat belly.

  “What do they call fire engines these days, sweetheart?”

  “Fire engines,” said Helen.

  7

  DAPHNE DID REMEMBER the fire at Anderby. She remembered the smell before the fire started. The smell is familiar to everyone now, in the world they live in, but not then. Who possessed cars? Even her father, who was (as he put it himself) “quite well-off,” had no car until several years later. Petrol was quite hard to get. She had smelt it when her uncle came by car, carried a tank of the stuff, and poured it into the tank. Now she smelt it again.
She opened the kitchen window. Outside, the smell was much stronger.

  It was twenty-five to four. She had just got home from school, a quick walk up the Hill from Loughton High School for Girls, which was at the bottom of Alderton Hill. On the way up she said hallo to Mrs. Moss, who was Mr. Winwood’s char. Everyone called her Clara, but Daphne’s mother had told her that at her age it would be polite to call her Mrs. and refer to her as the cleaning lady. In the kitchen a note had been left for Daphne to say her mother had gone to see Granny in Brooklyn Avenue and she’d be back before four. Egg sandwiches were in the fridge. Fridges were quite rare, Daphne knew. Most people didn’t have them. As for egg sandwiches, whatever else was hard to come by in those war years, chickens were always clucking about up here, and eggs, though supposed to be rationed, were plentiful. She took a sandwich outside and saw the flames. Standing on the stone-built terrace, she could see over the fence and the hedge and see the Winwoods’ garden a mass of glowing red, crimson where the fire was, and flames shooting up everywhere, now licking the shed on the other side of their fence, threatening the Anderby summerhouse.

  She was a bit near the fence for comfort. She ought to phone someone—but whom? Would they expect her to do it, and how would she do it? Just as she thought that she must try and had gone back to the phone, she heard the fire engines arrive. Running into the living-room, throwing open the front window, she saw the fire engines and George and Stanley Batchelor outside. Then Mr. Winwood came out of his house, gesticulating and shouting. For once he didn’t see her and wave. Daphne retreated into the back garden. She could feel the heat coming from the glowing fire; it was like being right in front of a powerful electric heater. She found a wheelbarrow on the opposite side of the lawn that their gardener had left on the path, stood on it, and gazed into the glare. The firemen were training their hoses on it now, trying to save the summerhouse; it was too late for the shed and for the ash tree. Its branches had caught and what autumn leaves remained, incandescent and glittering. The flames had crept up its trunk, then burst into a rush of fire, scattering sparks and weaving among the branches of the poor ash tree.

  Daphne was just saying aloud, “Oh, the poor tree,” when her mother arrived, running across the lawn.

  “My darling, are you all right? What on earth happened?”

  “I don’t know.” She wasn’t going to mention the petrol. It was just one of the many things she didn’t mention to her parents. She didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. It was safer for everyone to keep silent on so many things. “It started just after I got back from school. I thought I ought to call the firemen but someone else did.”

  She had never been frightened or even alarmed. At least, not once the fire engines arrived. What became of Mr. Winwood for the rest of the day she didn’t know and didn’t ask. Her parents didn’t like him, so why speak of him to them? She never mentioned him, knowing of their dislike. Best to be silent on all sorts of awkward subjects. She stood on the wheelbarrow again at dusk just before it got too dark to see. The shed had gone, the summerhouse was charred black on its garden side, the fire was dead, just cinders and ashes. She seemed to remember from earlier short and long whitish sticks and thinner white sticks and something like a long, curved rod with ridges all along its length. By the evening all this had gone, coated with ash. In the morning Mr. Winwood was out there with a torch and a rake—she saw him from her bedroom window—levelling everything and leaving just a round, pale gray patch on the lawn. By the time he had finished it had begun to rain and soon it was pouring.

  It was so long ago, she thought as she waited for Alan, and no doubt some of it she had imagined and some of it she had forgotten. Perhaps she would tell him what she remembered and perhaps not. Maybe tell him the whole story when the time was right. Come in the afternoon, she had said to him, and that could be anytime between two and five. It gave him an awful lot of leeway. There was a bit of Browning she remembered, the only bit of Browning she knew except that stuff about O, to be in England that everyone knew. I shall see him in three days, and just one night, but nights are short, then two long hours, and that is morn.

  WHATEVER BECOMES OF US, Alan thought, walking along the familiar roads to Loughton station, whatever becomes of Daphne and me, let us never be the elderly couple sitting in our wheelchairs, hand in hand, in front of the telly. Anything but that. The last thing Rosemary had said as he was leaving was to bid him tell Robert Flynn that he and Isabel must come to them for lunch and to give Alan some possible dates. He could forget that, she wouldn’t be surprised if he did. She had lately taken to quoting the Tammy Wynette song and saying he was just a man. The sewing machine had its cover on today, and Rosemary, awaiting the arrival of Freya and Freya’s mother, their daughter Judith, was doing the hand-stitching, tacking up a hem she had already pinned in place. Alan had looked up Hamilton Terrace on the London map for the third or fourth time. By now he knew exactly where it was, could have found Daphne’s house blindfolded, after dark, and in a power cut.

  Like a teenage boy, he didn’t know what he would say to her when she opened the door to him. Yet he had thought he could say anything to her. Now as he got out of the train and made his way along the canal to the bridge and Maida Vale, he felt himself struck dumb, like poor Papageno with a padlock on his mouth. Now he was only a couple of hundred yards away, he wanted the distance to be longer, and crossing the street, he sat down on a seat to use up five minutes, breathing deeply before he approached her front door.

  “WHERE’S GRANDDAD?”

  Rosemary said he had “gone up to town” to see a friend, a Mr. Flynn. “Oh, Ma,” said Judith, “not ‘up to town.’ You sound like Jane Austen. You’ll be saying ‘five-and-twenty past’ next.”

  “I do say five-and-twenty past. It’s five-and-twenty past three now. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, Gran,” said Freya. “You say what you want. Why not?” They were drinking tea and eating the carrot cake Rosemary had made that morning. “You’ll have to tell Granddad my news. We’ve found a flat and got a mortgage on it, and we hope to move in before the wedding.”

  Rosemary, who had lifted a forkful of cake halfway to her mouth, set it down again. She was the only one of them to use the fork provided. “Can’t you wait until after the wedding?”

  “We’ve been living together now for years, Gran, so what’s the difference?”

  “It seems such a pity. It used to be called living in sin and still is as far as I’m concerned.”

  This blighted the conversation. After a few seconds of silence, Rosemary made a small effort to put things right, but her wording was unfortunate. “So where is this flat of yours?”

  “I wonder,” said Judith, “why ‘of yours’ gives that question such a pejorative sense?”

  “All right, Mum. Leave it. It’s in St. John’s Wood, Gran. More or less opposite Lord’s.”

  “Oh, yes, cricket,” said Rosemary. “I’m sure it’s very nice.”

  IT WAS SEVERAL hours before he even noticed what the house was like. He walked through the glass-covered way and pressed the bell. It rang like a bell and not like chimes or a couple of bars of music. When the door came open, he might have regained his voice, he didn’t know. He stepped inside, and without those elusive, unnecessary words he took her in his arms, kissed her lips, and held her there as close to him as they could be.

  “We have a lot of talking to do,” he said when he let her go, “a lot of remembering and reminding each other.”

  “So that we know about the other one’s life, so there aren’t any gaps.”

  “I want to get used to you, I want the details.”

  “I love you already,” she said, and his heart leapt. “I think I’ve loved you since the car on Baldwin’s Hill and the forest. Do you remember?”

  “Oh, yes, I remember.”

  “Let’s go and sit down. Come in here. See the big sofa? We’ll s
it there and we should have some drink. Red wine. I’ve got a very nice delicious burgundy. Would you like that?”

  He nodded.

  They sat and talked, each with a glass of wine. They talked about their lives, what they had done, where they had been, Alan saying his had been dull, the same place, the same job, Daphne’s anything but. He didn’t mention Rosemary, not even as “my wife”; she only spoke of “my first husband,” “my second husband.” He had always thought of time as being constant, proceeding at the same pace, and wouldn’t have believed it could pass so quickly.

  “Oh, Alan,” she said, breaking into his account of a phase of his life, “never call me darling or dear, will you? Call me by my name.”

  “Daphne.”

  “Yes, always Daphne.”

  He kissed her again then, the two of them slipping back to lie in each other’s arms along the length of the deep, soft sofa. He was young again. It wasn’t even necessary to close his eyes. He laid his hand on her left breast, but she gently lifted it away. “Not this time, Alan. Next time. Soon.”

  The latest time he could leave for home was nine thirty. “There’s a Persian restaurant round the corner,” she said. “We can walk there.”

  “Why Persian? Why not Iranian?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s always Persian when it’s a restaurant. They’re the latest thing. We’ve got a Korean one too, presumably South Korean. When you’re here all the time, we’ll try them all.”

  Could it ever be? Was it possible? At Warwick Avenue station, just before the train came in, they kissed again, and Alan, looking over her shoulder just before they moved apart, saw that no one was staring at them. They were no more the cynosure of all eyes than if they had been eighteen.