The Secret House of Death (2 page)

This was a Victorian mahogany affair full of niches and cubby-holes. Susan had sufficient empathy to understand its fascination for a five-year-old with a mania for Lilliputian vehicles and she tried to turn a blind eye when Paul used its shelves for garages, her writing paper boxes for ramps and her ribbon tins for turntables. She poured herself a second cup of tea and jumped, slopping it into her saucer, as the paper clip box fell to the floor and fasteners sprayed everywhere. While Richard, the ingratiating guest, scuttled to retrieve them, Paul stuck a jammy hand on Miss Willingale's manuscript and began to use it for a racing track.

‘Now that's quite enough,' Susan said crisply. ‘Outside both of you till bedtime.'

She washed the tea things and went upstairs. The children had crossed the road and were poking toys at Pollux through the curlicues of the wrought-iron gate. Susan opened the window.

‘You're to stay on this side,' she called. ‘All the cars will be along in a minute.'

The Airedale wagged his tail and made playful bites at a lorry bonnet Paul had thrust into his face. Susan, who hadn't been thinking about Julian nearly so much lately, suddenly remembered how he used to call Pollux an animated fun fur. This was the time Julian used to come home, the first of the commuting husbands to return. Pollux was still there and unchanged; as usual the children littered the front garden with their toys; the cherry trees were coming into bloom and the first lights of evening appearing in the houses. Only one thing had altered: Julian would never come again. He had always hated Matchdown Park, that detestable dormitory as he called it, and now he had a flat ten minutes from his office in New Bridge Street. He would be walking home now to vent upon Elizabeth his brilliance, his scorn, his eternal fussing over food, his didactic opinions. Elizabeth would have the joy and the excitement—and the fever-pitch exasperation—until the day came when Julian found someone else. Stop it, Susan told herself sternly, stop it.

She began to brush her fair shiny hair—thinner and less glossy since the divorce. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered. There was no one to see her but a little boy and the chance of a friend dropping in was almost nil. Married couples wanted to see other married couples, not a divorcee who hadn't even the advantage of being the guilty and therefore interesting party.

She had hardly seen any of those smart childless friends since the divorce. Minta Philpot had phoned once and cooled when she heard Susan hadn't a man in tow, much less was planning on remarriage. What had become of Lucius and Mary, of lovely remote Dian and her husband Greg? Perhaps Julian saw them, but he was Julian Townsend, the editor of
Certainty,
eternally sought after, eternally a personage.

The children were safely occupied on the lawn by now and the first homing husband had arrived, Martin Gibbs with a bunch of flowers for Betty. That, at any rate, awoke no painful memories. Julian had never been what he called a ‘hothouse hubby' and Susan had been lucky to get flowers on her birthday.

And here, exactly on time, was Bob North.

He was tall, dark and exceptionally good-looking. His clothes were unremarkable but he wore them with a grace that seemed unconscious and his masculinity just saved him from looking like a male model. The face was too classically perfect to suit modern cinematic requirements and yet it was not the face of a gigolo, not in the least Italianate. It was an English face, Celtic, clear-skinned and frank.

Susan had lived next door to him and his wife since they had moved to Braeside two years before. But Julian had despised his neighbours, calling them bourgeois, and of them all only Doris had been sufficiently pushing and thick-skinned to thrust her friendship on the Townsends. Susan knew Bob just well enough to justify the casual wave she now gave him from her window.

He waved back with the same degree of amiable indifference, took the ignition key from his car and strolled out on to the pavement. Here he stood for a few seconds gazing at the ruts the green Zephyr had made in the turf. His face had grown faintly troubled but when he turned and glanced upwards, Susan retreated, unwilling to meet his eyes. Herself the victim of a deceiver, she knew how quickly a fellow-feeling for Bob North could grow, but she didn't want to be involved in the Norths' problems. She went downstairs and called Paul in.

When he was in bed, she sat beside him and read the nightly instalment of Beatrix Potter. Strong-featured, flaxen-haired, he was his mother's son, as unlike Julian as could be.

‘Now read it all again,' he said as she closed the book.

‘You must be joking. It's ten to seven.
Ten to seven
.'

‘I like that book, but I don't think a dog would ever go to tea with a cat or take it a bunch of flowers. It's stupid to give people flowers. They only die.' He threw himself about on the bed, laughing scornfully. Perhaps, Susan thought, as she tucked him up again, he wasn't so unlike Julian, after all.

‘I tidied up all your papers,' he said, opening one eye. ‘I can have my cars on your desk, if I tidy up, can't I?'

‘I suppose so. I bet you didn't tidy up the garden.'

Immediately he simulated exhaustion, pulling the bedclothes over his head.

‘One good turn deserves another,' Susan said and she went out into the garden to collect the scattered fleet of cars from lawn and flower-beds.

The street was deserted now and dusk was falling. The lamps, each a greenish translucent jewel, came on one by one and Winters' gate cast across the road a fantastic shadow like lace made by a giant's hand.

Susan was groping for toys in the damp grass when she heard a voice from behind the hedge. ‘I think this is your son's property.' Feeling a little absurd—she had been on all-fours—she got up and took the two-inch long lorry from Bob North's hands.

‘Thanks,' she said. ‘It would never do to lose this.'

‘What is it, anyway?'

‘A kind of road sweeper. He had it in his stocking.'

‘Good thing I spotted it.'

‘Yes, indeed.' She moved away from the fence. This was the longest conversation she had ever had with Bob North and she felt it had been deliberately engineered, that he had come out on purpose to speak to her. Once again he was staring at the ruined turf. She felt for a truck under the lilac bush.

‘Mrs Townsend—er, Susan?'

She sighed to herself. It wasn't that she minded his use of her christian name but that it implied an intimacy he might intend to grow between them. I'm as bad as Julian, she thought.

‘Sorry,' she said. ‘How rude of me.'

‘Not at all. I just wondered . . .' He had dark blue eyes, a smoky marbled blue-like lapis, and now he turned them away to avoid hers. ‘You do your typing at the window, don't you? Your writing or whatever it is?'

‘I do typed copies of manuscripts, yes. But only for this one novelist.' Of course, he wasn't asking about this aspect of it at all. Anything to deflect him. ‘I wouldn't consider . . .'

‘I wanted to ask you,' he interrupted, ‘if ever . . . Well, if today . . .' His voice tailed away. ‘No, forget it.'

‘I don't look out of the window much,' Susan lied. She was deeply embarrassed. For perhaps half a minute they confronted each other over the hedge, eyes downcast, not speaking. Susan fidgeted with the little car she was holding and then Bob North said suddenly:

‘You're lucky to have your boy. If we, my wife and I . . .'

That doesn't work, Susan almost cried aloud. Children don't keep people together. Don't you read the newspapers? ‘I must go in,' she stammered. ‘Good night.' She gave him a quick awkward smile. ‘Good night, Bob.'

‘Good night, Susan.'

So Doris had been right, Susan thought distastefully. There was something and Bob was beginning to guess. He was on the threshold, just where she had been eighteen months ago when Julian, who had always kept strict office hours, started phoning with excuses at five about being late home.

‘Elizabeth?' he had said when Susan took that indiscreet phone call. ‘Oh,
that
Elizabeth. Just a girl who keeps nagging me to take her dreary cookery features.'

What did Louise say? ‘Oh,
that
man. Just a fellow who keeps nagging me to buy central heating.'

Back to Miss Willingale. Paul hadn't exaggerated when he had said he had tidied her desk. It was as neat as a pin, all the paper stacked and the two ballpoint pens put on the left of the typewriter. He had even emptied her ashtray.

Carefully she put all the cars away in their boxes before sitting down. This was the twelfth manuscript she had prepared for Jane Willingale in eight years, each time transforming a huge unwieldy ugly duckling of blotted scribblings into a perfect swan, spotless, clear and neat. Swans they had been indeed. Of the twelve, four had been best sellers, the rest close runners-up. She had worked for Miss Willingale while still Julian's secretary, after her marriage and after Paul was born. There seemed no reason to leave her in the lurch just because she was now divorced. Besides, apart from the satisfaction of doing the job well, the novels afforded her a huge incredulous amusement. Or they had done until she had embarked on this current one and found herself in the same position as the protagonist. . . .

It was called
Foetid Flesh,
a ridiculous title for a start. If you spelt foetid with an O no one could pronounce it and if you left the O out no one would know what it meant. Adultery again, too. Infidelity had been the theme of
Blood Feud
and
Bright Hair about the Bone,
but in those days she hadn't felt the need to identify.

Tonight she was particularly sensitive and she found herself wincing as she reread the typed page. Three literal mistakes in twenty-five lines. . . . She lit a cigarette and wandered into the hall where she gazed at her own reflection in the long glass. Tactless Doris had hit the nail on the head when she said it didn't matter how good-looking a person's husband or wife was. It must be variety and excitement the Julians and the Louises of this world wanted.

She was thinner now but she still had a good figure and she knew she was pretty. Brown eyes and fair hair were an unusual combination and her hair was naturally fair, still the same shade it had been when she was Paul's age. Julian used to say she reminded him of the girl in some picture by Millais.

All that had made no difference. She had done her best to be a good wife but that had made no difference either. Probably Bob was a good husband, a handsome man with a pleasing personality any woman might be proud of. She turned away from the mirror, aware that she was beginning to bracket herself and her next-door neighbour. It made her uneasy and she tried to dismiss him from her mind.

Susan had just left Paul and Richard at the school gates when Bob North's car passed her. That was usual, a commonplace daily happening. This morning, however, instead of joining the High Street stream that queued to enter the North Circular, the car pulled into the kerb a dozen yards ahead of her and Bob, sticking his head out of the window, went through the unmistakable dumbshow of the driver offering someone a lift.

She went up to the car, feeling a slight trepidation at this sudden show of friendship. ‘I was going shopping in Harrow,' she said, certain it would be out of his way. But he smiled easily.

‘Fine,' he said. ‘As it happens, I have to go into Harrow. I'm leaving the car for a big service. I'll have to go in by train tomorrow, so let's hope the weather cheers up.'

For once Susan was glad to embark upon this dreary and perennial topic. She got into the car beside him, remembering an editorial of Julian's in which he had remarked that the English, although partakers in the most variable and quixotic climate in the world, never become used to its vagaries, but comment upon them with shock and resentment as if all their lives had been spent in the predictable monsoon. And despite Julian's scornful admonitions, Susan now took up Bob's cue. Yesterday had been mild, today was damp with an icy wind. Spring was certainly going to be late in coming. He listened to it all, replying in kind, until she felt his embarrassment must be as great as her own. Was he already regretting having said a little too much the night before? Perhaps he had offered her the lift in recompense; perhaps he was anxious not to return to their old footing of casual indifference but attempting to create an easier neighbourly friendship. She must try to keep the conversation on this level. She mustn't mention Louise.

They entered the North Circular where the traffic was heavy and Susan racked her brains for something to say.

‘I'm going to buy a present for Paul, one of those electrically operated motorways. It's his birthday on Thursday.'

‘Thursday, is it?' he said, and she wondered why, taking his eyes briefly from the busy road, he gave her a quick indecipherable glance. Perhaps she had been as indiscreet in mentioning her son as in talking of Louise. Last night he had spoken of his sorrow at his childlessness. ‘Thursday,' he said again, but not interrogatively this time. His hands tightened a little on the wheel and the bones showed white.

‘He'll be six.'

She knew he was going to speak then, that the moment had come. His whole body seemed to grow tense beside her and she perceived in him that curious holding of the breath and almost superhuman effort to conquer inhibition that precedes the outpouring of confession or confidence.

The Harrow bus was moving towards its stop and she was on the point of telling him, of saying that she could easily get out here and bus the rest of the way, when he said with an abruptness that didn't fit his words, ‘Have you been very lonely?'