The Girl Next Door (6 page)

‘Do you know what this means, Raoul?’ she asked him.

Raoul peered at the note. ‘That’s 4B.’ He always identified everybody with their apartment number. It made Eve smile – it seemed Orwellian. ‘Mrs Wallace. She’s English, like you.’

‘Really? Where’s the space she’s talking about?’

‘On the roof.’ He said it as though it was obvious.

‘Oh.’ Eve waited for Raoul to expand. He usually did. Jesus, the night doorman, who normally worked the midnight to 8 a.m. shift, never said a word that wasn’t necessary. Che, 4 p.m. until midnight, said a little, but his Cuban accent was so strong Eve didn’t understand much of it, although she liked his face, and his ready, shy smile. Raoul, she had realized, was her best bet if something needed to be explained. He was like Les Dawson in a pinny and fake boobs leaning on the garden fence.

‘Mrs Wallace has been trying to make a garden, up on the roof, for years. I don’t even remember when she started. With the board, with the management company… These things take forever. Every year, they talked about it, and nothing happened. Last year, they finally decided to do it. Turn the roof into a terrace. There’s money, you know, now, for seats, and flowers and things. To make it nice. Now Mrs Wallace wants to make a committee, of people who live in the building, to help her.’

‘What a lovely idea!’

Raoul smiled. ‘So she’s gonna get one helper, I see…’

‘More than one, surely. It’s such a nice plan. And I suppose most people would like to use it.’

Now he snorted. ‘They’d like to use it, all right. That’s not the same as wanting to do the work, though, Miss Eve.’

Eve shrugged.

‘I tell you who won’t be helping, that’s for sure…’ Raoul leant in conspiratorially, and lowered his voice to a stage whisper. He smelt like cigars.

She leaned back. ‘Who?’

‘The Stewarts. Eight A
and
B.’ He placed heavy emphasis on the ‘and’. ‘Penthouse. Mrs Stewart is always with the little dogs, you know?’ He shrugged, making dismissive tiny dog shapes with his chubby hands, and chuckled. ‘Not happy, not happy at all.’

Eve whispered back. ‘Why not?’

‘They knocked through the two apartments, made one huge place. They have the whole floor now. That took so long, so much noise and mess, you know. They wanted the roof, too, just for themselves. They don’t want nobody above them, you know?’ He put one hand on top of his head, palm upward. ‘Nobody higher.’

Eve nodded, ‘I understand.’ She thought she almost did. ‘And Mrs Wallace?’

‘Mrs Wallace has lived here since before me. And I came in 1978.’

‘She lives alone?’

Raoul nodded. ‘Now she does.’

He might have said more, but the young Chinese guy Eve had seen a few times in the elevator came in to check his post. She tried to make eye contact with him, said ‘hi’, but got little back except a distracted mumble. She got better conversation out of the doorman than she did out of her own neighbour. Nice.

Raoul went to answer the phone, and Eve took one last look at the flyer, memorizing the date – Wednesday at 8.

*

‘You should definitely do it! Sounds great! You’re the green‐fingered one in the family.’

Ed seemed disproportionately keen on the beautifying committee – his response was affectedly animated when she told him about it over dinner. Eve felt guilty. She knew he was worried about her – that’s why he wanted her to go.

‘Great way to meet the neighbours!’

They’d eaten pasta and drunk large beers at the Italian on the corner, and now they were sitting on a bench in the park. Ed had changed out of his suit, into shorts and deck shoes. It was nine o’clock, but it was still hot. He had his arm around her shoulders, and she was inhaling the smell of him, her face leaning against his chest.

‘I know I need to meet people.’

‘And you will. It’s much easier for me.’ Of course.

‘It wasn’t always like that. Easier for you.’

‘I know.’ He squeezed. She’d been the noisy one, when they met.

At their wedding, four years earlier, Ed had delighted in telling everyone, during his speech, that Eve had pioneered the very 21st‐century form of mate finding – she had picked him up in a shop. Not even in a supermarket. In a dry cleaners. He made some joke about a wedding being the traditional place to meet someone, and this being a unique variation, since she was having a bridesmaid’s dress cleaned, from her sister’s wedding the previous weekend, and he was picking up his grey pinstripe for a work colleague’s wedding the next one. So they’d met not at, but because of, a wedding. Or, rather, two weddings.

She was already in deep discussion with the assistant when he came in. He couldn’t see the face, but he didn’t mind watching the bottom for a minute or two while he waited. She had a great voice, too. Deeper than her size and blondeness suggested, and a bit gravelly, for a girl. He stood, amused, as she detailed each stain on the champagne satin strapless dress. Sweat, each side, nearest the armpit. Red wine, just to the left of the navel. Mud, on the hem. Something – not definitely, but very possibly profiterole filling – under the right boob. Each stain came with a little explanation. ‘It was bloody hot, in the marquee. Great band, though. Bopped till I dropped.’ ‘Some idiot did that.’ ‘They didn’t have a proper wedding cake – trust my showy sis – she had one of those profiterole tower French things. I ate about twenty‐five of them.’

Finished, she turned to him, apologetically, and he saw green eyes. Big green eyes. And a nose that turned up at the end. It stopped her from being beautiful, relegating her for eternity to cute and appealing, but he’d always had a thing about noses like that.

‘Sorry!’

‘Don’t be. Sounds like a hell of a wedding.’

‘Yep. The full monty. Still slightly hungover, actually.’ It was Wednesday. She grimaced, her eyes wide and smiley.

He didn’t want her to go, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say. She hesitated, it seemed, just for a second or two, and when he didn’t say anything, he swore she almost shrugged, before heading for the door.

He passed her, five minutes later. She was sitting alone in the beer garden at the front of the King’s Head, a few doors down from the dry cleaners, staring at her mobile phone.

‘Hello again.’

‘Hiya.’ She looked up and smiled.

‘Hair of the dog?’

‘What?’ The ski run nose crinkled.

‘Back there… just now… you said you were still hungover…’ Idiot.

She laughed. ‘Yeah.’

Something stopped him from walking away from this semi‐embarrassing situation. Afterwards, he always told her it was the nose, and the green eyes. But really, it was the commentary in the dry cleaners. He couldn’t resist.

She was waiting, she said, for friends. He was early, he said, for friends. He sat. They had a drink. And another. Her friends were late. His friends were never coming, of course. By 8.30 he had her phone number, and the rest, as he always said, was history.

They’d never met, before that day in the dry cleaners, but it turned out that their lives had been running in close parallel, all those years. They’d been born six weeks apart, in 1978, in towns in Kent. She was from Tunbridge Wells, he was from Sevenoaks. He’d been reading PPE at Cambridge while she was up the road at Nottingham, getting her own degree in Education. They’d been living three streets apart in Chiswick for eighteen months before they met, both sharing with college mates, drinking at the same pubs, eating at the same restaurants. An old friend of his had gone out with a workmate of hers, and they’d been invited to some of the same parties, but they’d never set eyes on each other. Eve loved the romanticism of that. The idea that they might have walked past each other, at the bus stop, in the aisle of Waitrose, in the cinema queue. That fate waited until they were ready before she intervened and pushed them into that same space together.

And Eve had been looking for him. She’d been looking forever. In all the wrong places, wasn’t that how the song went?

Ed, in contrast, had not been looking at all. He was concentrating, hard, at work. He’d joined the bank, with a golden hello of £10,000, the year he’d graduated, while his friends were playmates, and bumming around. He’d never wanted to do that. He wanted to work, and to succeed. Not at any price, perhaps. But it mattered to him. He supposed, without analysing it too much, that it was because of where he came from. An only child, his parents were working class. He’d been to state school, from there to Cambridge – the first from his school to go. He’d definitely had a chip on his shoulder, then, at Cambridge. He’d watched all the privileged, public school boys and sometimes simmered with resentment about how easy it had been for them to get to where they were. It was when he left that he realized Cambridge had levelled the playing field for him – the rest didn’t matter any more. If he worked hard, and if he did well, nothing else would matter and nothing else could stop him. So the travelling, and the endless navel contemplation – it didn’t make any sense to him, when you could be getting on with it all …

Eve was different. She wasn’t posh, exactly. He thought of her as being a generation ahead of him. Her grandparents might have been working class, but her parents had both been to university, products of the same upbringing that drove him. Her father was a solicitor in Tunbridge Wells, her mother had been a teacher before she stopped work, Seventies‐style, to raise Eve and her sister. Eve had none of the sense of entitlement he had come to despise at Cambridge, and he wouldn’t call her spoilt. She was just… more relaxed about life. She’d done the travelling, taking a backpack around Vietnam and Cambodia and places, when she was twenty‐one. She loved teaching, she said, but she didn’t seem ambitious for herself. She didn’t want to be a department head. Or headmistress. She wanted the kids she taught to have fun, to think she was the best teacher since Mr Chips, and she wanted them to do well. Full stop. She slept like a baby. The first time they’d spent the night together, he’d lain awake beside her and watched her even breathing, her unlined face, perfectly peaceful, and been envious. She still slept that way now. He rarely got more than five or six hours a night. His brain never really stopped.

Wednesday, 8 p.m.

‘Blimey,’ Eve thought. ‘I’m overdressed.’

She’d showered at 7, and put on a clean white linen dress, and fresh make‐up. Ed was working late. At 7.55, she look a last look at herself, making thumbs up at herself in the mirror in their hall, then laughing at herself for doing it, and called the elevator, pushing the up button for the first time since she’d moved in. And now she felt faintly ridiculous. She must be late. There were six or seven people – men, women, and one disgruntled‐looking toddler – sitting on folding chairs placed in one corner of the roof – each one in shorts and flip‐flops. Most of them held the ubiquitous water bottle all New Yorkers seemed to carry always, although she saw a small table in the corner, with jugs of something colourful, and a stack of paper cups. All of them were looking at her.

When, in the past, Eve had flirted with diet and exercise, she’d always been struck by the cruel and unfair way that six weeks’ effort in the kitchen and the gym could be undone by six days of eating what you wanted, on holiday, or over the Christmas break. Six weeks to lose a stone, and find the beginnings of a flat stomach, and six days to put half of it, and a bicycle tyre at the waist, back on. It seemed to her now that her self‐confidence was like that. She’d spent her entire adult life building it up, years and years, and now, in the space of weeks, it was seeping away. Nearly twenty years of cultivating the belief that strangers were friends she just hadn’t met yet, and that she was interesting, and nice. And within two months, she wasn’t at all sure why anyone would want to talk to her at all. That wasn’t fair. She couldn’t remember being so cross with herself before. She dug her fingernails into her palm, and stepped out into the sunlight.

‘Hello, everyone. Sorry I’m late.’

‘You’re not late. Come and join us.’ This, clearly, was Mrs Wallace. The English accent (could be Suffolk, Norfolk?) was faint, but still unmistakable. ‘I’m Violet, Violet Wallace.’

Violet Wallace was clearly elderly, but still tall and upright. She wore half‐rimmed glasses on a chain, and a necklace of large stones that looked like turquoise, with its grey threads, but were a deep lavender colour. Her hair was snow white, and obviously quite long – she wore it in a pleat secured with what appeared to be lacquered chopsticks.

‘And you are?’ There was something of the head‐mistress about her, and Eve felt vaguely like a sixth former.

‘Eve Gallagher. We’re the new tenants in 7B.’

‘Hello.’ Violet smiled at her, not quite so scary after all. ‘They told me you were English. Welcome. To the building, and to our little committee. We’re glad to have you…’

The door behind her opened and a beautiful brunette that Eve recognized from the park appeared. Eve had seen her a few days ago, playing near the Alice in Wonderland sculpture, with three adorable dark‐haired children – two boys and the sweetest little girl. They’d been having so much fun, laughing and running and climbing. At least Eve was no longer the smartest person in attendance. Rachael looked like she’d stepped out of the window of DKNY on Madison Avenue, through the Red Door of Elizabeth Arden on 5th, on to the roof. Mind you, she looked like that in the park, too, in a sweatshirt and jeans. How
did
you get your hair to do that… ?

‘Hey, Violet. Not late, am I?’

‘Not a bit. Find a seat, Rachael. Still some spare chairs – I was erring on the side of optimism… This is Eve.’

Rachael smiled, hi.

‘In fact, why don’t I do a bit of an introduction, before we get started? You probably don’t know most of us, yet?’

Eve scanned the faces. Some she recognized, but she knew no one by name. ‘That’d be good.’

‘Well, you’ve met me, and Rachael. This is Maria.’

‘We’ve met, actually!’ Maria beamed. ‘We’re just next door, aren’t we? Hey, Eve.’

Eve smiled gratefully. Maria had knocked on the door their second day with a plate of delicious homemade cannoli. She was lovely, and had said Eve should ask for anything she needed. Eve hadn’t, of course, but she suspected she could…