The Girl Next Door (14 page)

14

A
LAN HADN’T ANTICIPATED
the enormous fuss. Perhaps he hadn’t because he gave little thought to what would happen after he had walked out of the flat in Traps Hill and come here to Daphne. That it would be lovely with Daphne he had known and it was. No surprise there. Not only the love-making. He might even say not so much the love-making as the pleasure of being able to walk down the street with her, hand in hand if they chose, making a restaurant reservation in both their names, driving out together in Daphne’s car and going home together, walking up the path to the front door and letting themselves in—together.

But trouble had begun on their first morning. When he got there in the dark and paid off his taxi, he let himself into the house, rather surprised that he could, that she hadn’t bolted the door. She must have thought of that when she gave him the keys, have thought she would never bolt the door again until he did it himself when he lived here with her. He had gone upstairs and found her asleep. He knelt down by the bed and kissed her until she woke and put her arms round him. The phone rang at eight in the morning, the landline. How did Judith get this number?

“From Michael Winwood. I thought of asking him—rather
clever of me, wasn’t it? He had no idea. He seemed to think I was holding some sort of reunion of oldies.”

“What do you want, Judy?”

“For you to come back, of course. Come home now and she’ll forgive you, she’ll overlook it. It was such a monstrous thing to do, but she wants you back just the same. Does she want you back! My God, Dad, she is in such a state as I’ve never seen. She can’t believe it, she says she’s in a nightmare she can’t wake up from.”

“Other men have left their wives. It’s not uncommon.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“No, Judith, it’s not all I can say. I can say a great many things. But I’m not going to say them to you.”

“Owen is absolutely furious. He says it must be Alzheimer’s. He says you could be made to come back.”

Alan didn’t feel like laughing but he did laugh. “Alzheimer’s has only been known or only called that for a few years. What did people blame the failings of the old on before that? Senility, I suppose, which is much the same thing. As for Owen, he can’t talk. He walked out on his first wife. Yes, but he was young, you’re going to say, aren’t you? Good-bye, Judy.”

Fenella was the next to phone. Alan said it was nothing to do with her and she should mind her own business. He had never spoken to a granddaughter like this before and he rather enjoyed it. That was the second day. With Rosemary it was different, he had to talk to her and for as long as she liked. He was treating her badly, worse than badly, and he knew it. With no excuse and no defence, in a strange way he was set free. Her voice on the phone was so unlike the voice he knew that he would hardly have recognised it.

“What have I done? I’d like to know what I’ve done. If I’ve done some awful thing, I’d like you to tell me. I thought I’d been a good wife to you. We’ve passed our Golden Wedding, Alan, and you’ve left me and I don’t know why.”

He didn’t know what to say except that it wasn’t her, it was him. It was his fault, not hers. Fault, of course, didn’t come into it. They had been incompatible for nearly fifty years. Both knew it without even expressing it to each other or, come to that, to themselves. They had made the best of it because when they were young, you dissolved a marriage only because of adultery or violence. He let her talk. He listened because he owed her that. When she had said enough or had exhausted herself, he would leave it to her to say good-bye and put the phone down.

Daphne never commented on these calls or asked what they were about, but after three days of them—Freya and her new husband and his son-in-law Maurice and a cousin Alan hadn’t spoken to for years and two neighbours in the block all called—she went out and bought him a new mobile phone.

“No one can get through to me,” she said. “You’re so popular.”

One of the people who had been trying to get through was Michael Winwood. He knew nothing of the Norrises’ break-up and wanted to talk to Daphne as if she were a sort of therapist. She of all the people he knew, and he had few friends, might listen to him if he talked to her about his father and Urban Grange and his loss of Zoe. While he was waiting to make another attempt to get hold of her, his phone rang. It was George Batchelor, to ask him if he would come to Loughton and “look in” on Clara Moss.

“Who’s Clara Moss?”

“You know who she is, Mike. The charlady who used to char for my family and your mum and dad, lives in Forest Road, old as the hills now. Even older than us as she’d have to be.”

“Mrs. Mopp, we called her,” said Michael, still wincing from the diminutive no one else had ever used. “Well, my father did. It was from a character who was a cleaner in a radio comedy. Moss and Mopp, you see. Not very kind, was it?” But his father was never kind, Michael thought, not saying it aloud. “What about her?”

“Look, Mike, I’ve had a stroke, much better now. I used to pop in and see her, have done for yonks. So would you look in on her? She’ll remember you. Come and have a bite to eat with us first. Maureen’s found a smashing new sherry, and on your way back you could pop in to Clara’s.”

After expressing his sympathy about the stroke, Michael said he would and they fixed a day in August. George put the phone down and Maureen came running in to ask what Michael thought about Alan and Rosemary.

“I never told him. I forgot.”

“Oh, lovey, when that’s all anybody’s talking about.”

“You can tell him when he comes.”

George’s call had cheered Michael up, helping him to realise how much he needed a friend to talk to and encouraging him to try Daphne’s number once again.

“Why not come over?” said Daphne. “This afternoon or tomorrow. You can be our first visitor.”

“Our?”

“Alan Norris is living with me now.” She said it in the same tone she might have used to remark that it was a fine day.

“I’m sorry?”

“Yes, I did say that.”

“What, living with you like
living
with you?” Michael the lawyer said. “Cohabiting, you mean?”

She laughed. “Exactly that. Come to supper and all will be explained.”

Two pleasant and friendly voices enhanced Michael’s feeling of well-being. He did something rare with him. He took the handset of the phone upstairs to Vivien’s room and felt her presence near him. Anything he said and anything that was said to him would be bearable, livable with, if he lay on the bed and made his phone call from there. The number of Urban Grange he had by heart.

Big institutions had begun a response system irritating to most
people, but especially to the elderly, those who expected a human voice, someone who would listen and answer questions. As he touched the keys—you could no longer call it dialling—he thought of the pressing of one for a booking, two for a cancellation, three for an extension, and so on that would ensue, but, no, he got a human voice, a female one of upper-class distinction. How could she help him?

“My name is Michael Winwood. John Winwood is my father.” He felt as if he were in court, in the witness box.

“Mr. Winwood who is a commensal in Urban Grange?”

Michael had never heard the word before. “Well, he lives there.”

She must have had recourse to a computer. “Yes, one of our valued inquilines. We have a Mrs. Zoe Nicholson as his next of kin.”

“Yes. She is now dead and I am his next of kin. Perhaps you would like to make a note of that and take my details.”

He gave them to her; she thanked him and asked if he would be paying Urban Grange a visit in the near future.

“Should I?”

“We do like to see our commensals’ loved ones occasionally, and of course Mr. Winwood would appreciate seeing you.” Back to the computer, followed by a soft sigh. “Mr. Winwood is a very old gentleman.”

Michael said he would call back to give her a day, put the phone down, and rolled over face downwards with closed eyes, imagining Vivien close to him. But she had receded, shrinking away perhaps from that ultraposh voice. Alone again, he went downstairs to look up the two unfamiliar words.
Commensal
meant “resident,” and
inquiline
meant a guest in a house not his or her own.

Y
OU READ ABOUT
such things in the papers, Michael thought when he saw them together in Daphne’s living-room. But in those cases the two people had forcibly been parted when young by war or the
intervention of others. It looked as if these two had been happy enough with other partners, in Alan’s case with a wife, and were brought together by the finding of two hands in a tin box. Yet it was Michael that Daphne had taken home after that reunion. It might have been he and she that the hands brought together, and for a fleeting moment as she gave him a glass of wine, he wished it had been.

That thought passed as he began to tell them—necessarily both of them—about his aunt and the father he had hardly seen since he was a child. “What do you think?” He was looking at Daphne. “Should I go to this Urban Grange and see him? I mean, be the dutiful son? Not that I owe him any duty.”

“Isn’t there a wife? Your stepmother?”

“She died. She was very rich and left him everything, which is why he can afford to live out the rest of his life at Urban Grange.”

“He must be very old,” Daphne said. “Do you want to see him? It doesn’t sound as if you do.”

“He’s a few months short of a hundred. Imagine saying that of anyone when we were young. It’s the equivalent of saying ‘he’s over eighty’ in our tunnels days—I mean
qanats
.” Michael smiled at her. “Do I want to see him? Of course I don’t, I dread it. I’m an old man and I ought to have left those kinds of fears far behind me, but I haven’t.” Michael paused, knowing he should leave it there but unable to stop. “When I look back—and I have to look back because I haven’t seen him for so long—when I do, I see him as a sort of monster, an ugly, shrivelled creature like an alien from a horror film.”

“Oh, Michael.”

“I ask myself, am I going to be shown up to his room or suite or apartment or whatever he has and left there by whoever escorts me, and he comes in, and I—I scream?” He drew a deep breath. The other two said nothing but their hands moved along the sofa and each joined the other. “Sorry. I’m sorry for putting you through
this. Sheila, my stepmother, I suppose she was, though I only saw her once, drank a bottle of whisky and took an overdose of pills. The verdict at the inquest was death by misadventure. I think he—well, helped her die. I shouldn’t be telling you this, I should be telling the police, but he’s my
father.
And he’s almost a hundred years old.”

Alan said, “You can’t tell the police, I see that. Very probably he won’t live long. I don’t know what Daphne will say, but I think you should see your father, steel yourself, make an enormous effort, and maybe stay no more than half an hour. What do you think, Daphne?”

She hesitated. “I knew him, you know. We lived next door. Perhaps ask him if he wants to see
you.
Get this Urban Grange place to ask him. He may be as reluctant to see you as you are to see him. We dislike those we have injured, don’t you think?”

“They’ll say he wants to see me, but I’ll ask. I’ll do that. I will.”

“And now I think we should have our supper.”

15

M
ICHAEL WAS DUE
to visit another extremely old person. When first asked by George Batchelor, he had quite looked forward to this. He had thought a good deal about Clara Moss, that small, thin woman whom his father called Mrs. Mopp and scorned behind her back. After Anita had gone, no one else but Michael was there for him to say unpleasant things to about Clara, how stupid she was, how inefficient, what a hopeless cleaner. She always wore plimsolls, as trainers were called then, and a cotton crossover overall, but even John Winwood couldn’t call her dirty. Michael liked the hugs she occasionally gave him because she smelled of Wright’s coal tar soap. Her hands were scrubbed until they were red and her nails to whiteness. He had noticed that the wedding ring she wore on the third finger of her left hand was loose, slipping up and down, because she had grown so thin after her husband was killed.

One day it was lost. The tale of her losing it stayed in his child’s memory for ever. Anita was still there when it happened, and how to deal with it, or not deal with it, was almost the only time he remembered his parents being in accord over anything. Clara told Anita that her wedding ring had slipped off her finger and fallen down the waste pipe in the kitchen sink. Tentatively, for Clara was always shy
with Anita, she had said it would be stuck in the S-bend and would Mr. Winwood retrieve it for her? She knew he could because she had once before when the pipe was blocked seen him do whatever was necessary. Michael had heard his parents discuss the matter, and John Winwood, agreeing with Anita, said, “Like hell I’m going to take the sink apart for the char’s bloody ring.”

A child doesn’t know how much a dead husband’s ring might mean to his widow, but he knew when he was older. He knew when he was far away with Zoe, when his mother had gone, his father had left the house as far as he knew, and the ring was still down there. It might be still down there now, he thought, when George asked him to visit Clara Moss. For a few days he thought about Clara and the ring. He thought about how he was going to have lunch at George’s on Wednesday of next week and call on Clara afterwards, and he thought it likely George would phone to arrange a time. He didn’t phone. Michael phoned him and a woman answered. It was Maureen, but he didn’t recognise her voice, it was so low and dull and broken.

George was dead. Another stroke had come three nights ago, and he had never wakened again. She had half expected it, but it was still a terrible shock. Michael asked if there was anything he could do, and Maureen in her new, fractured voice said to please come to the funeral. She told him when and where it was and said all his friends would be welcome at the sherry party she would have afterwards. No flowers, please, she said, and sobbed quietly.

H
E WOULD GO
. Michael decided this not entirely out of altruism and not at all from duty. He had no duty to George. But since his visit to Daphne and Alan, he had reproached himself for having given up nearly all social life after Vivien’s death. He had kept up with Zoe, of course he had, but abandoned all his friends. There had been that single visit to George, and that was about it. Zoe would have wanted
him to keep an eye on Brenda, but he never had, reasoning that now she was living with her sister she wouldn’t need him. A funeral wasn’t exactly a social occasion, but he would go to it. It would be a start for getting back into something like the sort of life he used to have. In Vivien’s room he lay on the bed with the curtains drawn and told her all this, certain that if she knew, she would approve.

He would go to the funeral, and the day after that he would phone Brenda at her sister’s and arrange to . . . what? Take her out to tea? Take her and her sister out to tea? That would be best. Meanwhile he would phone Urban Grange. He got off the bed, ran downstairs, and snatched up the phone. A different woman answered. She had a normal sort of voice but sounded harassed, almost distraught.

“Oh, Mr. Winwood, yes. Of course. I’m terribly sorry but we’ve had a—well, a disaster here. Terribly upsetting. May I call you back, say tomorrow? I have your number.”

He couldn’t face waiting for it. “No, I’ll call you. . . . It’s not my father, is it? This—this disaster?”

“Oh, no, not at all. Good heavens, no. I must go. Please call us tomorrow.”

What could it be? If it had been his father’s death, Michael would have been relieved.

G
EORGE’S FUNERAL WAS
at St. Mary’s Church in Loughton High Road. Michael got there early and was shown to a pew halfway down by a man in his fifties who said he was Stanley’s son. Four rows ahead of him he could see Lewis Newman, and near the front on the other side of the aisle Norman Batchelor was with a woman in a smart black suit and pillbox hat who couldn’t be anything but French. Michael hoped Alan and Daphne might be there but realised that they couldn’t be because it was far more likely that Rosemary would be. Strange, interesting, he thought, how all sorts of social occasions were forbidden them now, but they wouldn’t always be,
not when people got used to the set-up, when they were accepted as what his children called an item. If it lasted, if they stayed together. If they lived long enough. That was what you always had to think of at their ages. If they lasted long enough.

A lot of grown-up and even late-middle-age children of George’s two marriages came in. One young woman was carrying a baby, which must, Michael guessed, be George’s great-grandchild or even great-great. Rosemary wasn’t there. Maureen arrived, supported by two women who looked so like her that they must have been her daughters. Everyone rose as the “Dead March” from
Saul
began and George’s coffin was carried in.

Michael didn’t join in the hymn singing and managed not to listen to the eulogy, delivered by Norman. He was thinking about the tunnels and the things the children did, the games they played, the cards and draughts, and wasn’t there backgammon? The awful wartime food they brought and devoured because they were growing and always hungry. He refused to let himself think of his father coming to the cave-like entrance and shouting at them all to come out and never go there again, his voice loud and rough with its coarse accent. Instead he was remembering Daphne in a black cloak with gold stars, saved from Christmas decorations, pinned on it, Daphne peering into her glass bowl and foretelling long lives. She had been right there. He found himself falling asleep. Nodding off, they called it, one of the penalties of growing old.

Maureen, someone told him, couldn’t face the crematorium, and who could blame her? Instead they all made their way up York Hill to Carisbrooke. Michael found himself walking with Lewis Newman.

“Two old widowers, that’s us,” said Lewis in a cheerful tone. “We’re quite a rare breed, you know. I can’t remember the statistics, but usually we chaps die first.”

Michael remembered Lewis had been a GP. “Yes. People tell me I’m lucky.”

“Depends how you look at it. They say we’re very sought after by the preponderance of widows, but I can’t say I’ve noticed.”

“Nor me.” Michael decided that he quite liked Lewis after all.

Some relative left behind at the house had organised a huge spread. Noticing the sherry bottles of every variety, Michael felt greatly touched. Poor old George, he would have enjoyed this. The tears came into his eyes but stayed there as Stanley, retrieving Spot from the laundry room, where he had been shut up during the service, slapped Michael on the back and asked him what he thought of the “lovebirds—Alan and Daphne, I mean.”

Michael thought gossip the prerogative of women, though Vivien had never gossiped as far as he knew. “They seem very happy.” Refusing to expand, he said he expected Rosemary might have been at the funeral.

“We did ask her. Apparently she goes nowhere. Just stays at home brooding. He’ll come back, you know. It’s just a matter of time.”

“I wonder.”

Michael had a glass of Manzanilla and ate a stuffed vine leaf. Here in George’s house, Michael’s conscience troubled him about Clara Moss. It had begun to seem to him that every minute he spent in Loughton without seeing her was letting George down. He had promised George—well, he hadn’t promised, but he had said he would go. After he had tried to talk to Eliane Batchelor and unwisely attempted the French he had acquired from a fortnight in Dijon forty years before, only to be asked in perfect English why he couldn’t speak that language, he began to make his escape. Lewis Newman asked him to share the taxi to Loughton he had ordered, and when Michael mentioned Clara Moss, Lewis said the taxi would drop him off. Taking in Forest Road on the way to the station meant a detour along the edge of the forest and passing their old primary school in Staples Road.

“It’s a good many years since I’ve been along here,” said Lewis. “My mother insisted on bringing me and fetching me home even
after I was far too old for it. The kids next door to us went to Staples Road and they would have brought me, but she wasn’t having any.”

No one brought me or fetched me. I walked up there on my own when I was five. Michael didn’t say it aloud as it would have sounded like self-pity. It
was
self-pity. For something to say, “Let’s not lose touch,” he said, and gave Lewis his card. That meant the other man might make the first move. If they had been women, he thought, they would have kissed. It’s awkward shaking hands in a taxi, so they did nothing but muttered something about its being good to see each other.

Clara’s house was the least well-kept on the outside of any in the row. The black paint was peeling from the front door, but the brass knocker and letterbox shone as brightly as gold. A young woman with an enormous mass of bright ginger hair, in jeans and a sleeveless, low-cut top, answered his knock.

“Yes?”

“I’ve come to see Mrs. Moss. My name is Winwood, Michael Winwood.”

“She never has visitors. Does she know you?”

“She did once.” Unusually assertive, he walked over the threshold so that the young woman was obliged to step back.

“Wait a minute. I’ll have to ask her. She can’t walk very far.”

He was tired of waiting. He followed her into a tiny room with a single bed in it where a little old woman, a very old woman, sat strapped into a wheelchair. His conductor, seeing him close behind her, shrugged and shook her head as if washing her hands of the whole business. Clara Moss was staring at Michael, and in those dark eyes, half buried in gatherings of wrinkles, he could see she was perfectly intelligent and fitted the lawyer’s description “of sound mind.”

“
I know you,” said Clara. “Since I was a girl and you was a little boy. Wait a minute.” It was more than sixty years ago. He knew from photographs and looking in the mirror when he shaved that he was
unimaginably changed. Who wouldn’t be? “I think you’re Michael. You couldn’t be no one else.”

His tendency to weep in times of emotion had affected him earlier when remembering George, and now it was back again. This time a tear fell, and then another.

“Well, I’m off,” said the young woman. “See you on Friday, Clara. You owe me twelve pounds forty-nine, but I can pick it up when I come.”

Clara said, “Thank you, Sam. You’re a good girl.”

The front door closed and Clara smiled at Michael. “She don’t like being called a girl but I always forget. It’s not PC, whatever that may mean.”

“Politically correct. Mrs. Moss, it’s very good to see you. Would you like to come out of that chair?”

“I would, but then I can’t get to my kitchen or the WC.”

He hadn’t heard it called that since he was very young. “Water closet,” the letters stood for. It was
toilet
to everyone now. “I could make us a cup of tea. Shall I?”

“In a minute,” she said. “You tell me what you’ve been doing all these years.”

So he did, but he made the tea first in a spotless kitchen where everything was so neatly and properly arranged that no one could fail to find what they were looking for. He rearranged the wheelchair for her, propping her with pillows from the bed and a big cushion. She had, she told him, a “bit of a dicky heart,” and a thrombosis in her right leg had left her what the nurse who came in called “incapacitated.” “A cripple, she means, but she’s a good girl. Kindness itself.”

He told her about Zoe and his law degree, becoming a solicitor and marrying Babette, then his happy life with Vivien and their children. Hardly knowing why he did, he said, “My father is still alive. He’s nearly a hundred now.”

“Lives with you, does he?”

“I’ve only seen him once since I was a boy.”

Her face sank into even deeper lines, her forehead corrugated. “They say the good die young. Him and me must have been very wicked, then.”

“Not you, Mrs. Moss.”

“No one calls me that no more. The young don’t know the meaning of Mrs. D’you remember your mum? She was a lovely woman—to look at, I mean. Red hair, really red, I mean, not like that Sam. Hers comes out of a packet. That friend of your mum’s that used to come round—I’m not saying there was anything wrong, mind—he had red hair. No one took any notice of it then, it was just ginger hair, but now it’s supposed to be okay on a girl but ugly on a man. Funny the way things change.”

“It is.” Michael thought about what she had just said. “Mrs. Moss, I have to go. May I come back and see you soon? I’ve enjoyed our talk. It’s been wonderful to see you.”

The tears came then and streamed down his cheeks. It was too much for him, Clara Moss herself and his mother and maybe the red hair. He wept, scrubbing at his face with a tissue while she watched him with wide eyes. “Come here,” she said, and as he bent over to kiss her, she reached up and put her arms round his neck. “Poor little boy,” he thought she said, but her voice was too muffled for him to be sure.

I
T WASN’T TOMORROW,
as he had told the woman at Urban Grange it would be, but the day after. He had thought of little in the intervening time but of Clara Moss and her reminiscences. Was it true that redheaded men were thought ugly? Certainly red hair must be considered beautiful on a woman or so many with perfectly pretty hair wouldn’t dye it chestnut or crimson or copper or burgundy or russet or, as people used to say, carrots. Anita’s hair was naturally chestnut and her eyes were almost navy blue. He could remember
that well. Lewis Newman had red hair, or had once when they were at school. Most of it was gone now and what remained was a pale gingery grey. He couldn’t remember Lewis’s father’s hair. Darkish, he supposed, a sort of dull brown like most people’s. He would be long dead now, like everyone else’s father except his. He picked up the handset, walked about a bit carrying it, repeating the number to himself, then dialling it.