Ruth Rendell: The Girl Next Door

Rosemary laid her hand on his arm, then closed her fingers on it. ‘You shivered,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘Look where we are. You didn’t know, did you? You’ve been in a dream.’

They were outside Warlock. The house itself looked deserted, all the blinds pulled down at the windows. The great pit, excavated to make a basement, was covered by sheets of tarpaulin in which the heavy rain of a few days before had made shallow puddles.

‘Rather sad, isn’t it? Such a lovely home. Will it ever be the same again?’

Alan, who usually conditioned himself to agree with everything Rosemary said, found himself violently disagreeing. He wanted to say that with its white stucco and chocolate-coloured half-timbering, it wasn’t lovely, it never had been, and if it wasn’t the same again, all the better. And when did she start calling a house a ‘home’? But he didn’t say any of that. He only wondered if this unspoken disloyalty was going to continue, if he could rid himself of it. He withdrew his arm from her hand and felt into his pocket, where the card seemed to move under his fingers as if it was alive. His fingers remembered the feel of hers when she put her hands into his.

It was later, afternoon slipping into evening, and Rosemary, in spite of what he had said about a designer dress, was back at her sewing machine, when he told himself he must choose one of two options: throw the card away, or call the phone number on it. Like a man choosing between infidelity and faithfulness – nothing could be further from his thoughts – he must decide. Of course he wouldn’t make that phone call. He looked back on his chaste and blameless life, reminded himself of his age and hers, and then thought of the many occasions that summer when Daphne had borrowed her father’s car and, parking it under the trees on Baldwins Hill, they had made love on the back seat or in the forest itself. Thou art fair, my love. Our bed is green. The beams of our house are cedars; our rafters are firs . Where had he remembered that from? He opened the sewing room door an inch or two, said to Rosemary, ‘I’m going out for a bit of a walk.’

She didn’t lift her foot from the treadle. ‘You’ve already had a walk.’

‘I know, but I need another. Don’t mind, do you?’

‘Of course I don’t mind, darling. Remember it’s supper at seven, though, won’t you?’

There were only the two of them, it would only be cold meat and salad, yet it had to be at seven? Why? Because it always was. He knew he couldn’t change it. Down the hill, across the High Road and up York Hill past the bungalow called Carisbrooke and along Baldwin’s Hill to that paved apron of land that jutted into the green sward bordered by the forest. Here had been the place where young couples parked their borrowed cars. But no longer, Alan thought, not these days, when a teenage boy or girl brought a lover home to spend the night under the parental roof. In his day, parents wouldn’t even have considered allowing that. No son or daughter would have dreamed of asking. Thirty years later, his own son Owen had asked and been briskly turned down by Rosemary. If it had been left to him, he would have said yes, remembering the secret meetings with Daphne in her father’s car and the drive up here. The forest had been dark, car headlights going out one by one.

There were no cars here now. He remembered exactly where Daphne had parked hers, tucking it in under overhanging branches. Our bed is green . . . She was afraid of nothing, or if she was, she didn’t show it; he, believing stories of boys and girls being arrested and had up in court for indecent behaviour in a public place, was always fearful. But he was young and his nervousness wasn’t enough to impede him when he was in the back with Daphne. He was passionate and greedy and so was she, even when the moon came out from behind clouds and he thought the light was from a policeman’s torch. There had been maybe a dozen occasions. Unlike other users of Baldwin’s Hill, who were afraid of pregnancy or, in the case of the girls, of not being virgins when they married, he and Daphne went ‘all the way’, as the phrase had it. She didn’t get pregnant, though he had done nothing to prevent it.

He wrote to her and she wrote to him, but they were a long way apart, and though her family still lived in Loughton, three months is a long time when you’re only twenty. Their letters ceased, though once, two years later, he had a Christmas card from her. Now, standing on the small treeless expanse and looking across the darkening woodland, he wondered what would have happened if he had sent her a card back. But by this time he was going out with Rosemary, his ‘childhood sweetheart’, as his mother embarrassingly called her, and there was no Baldwin’s Hill in the back of a car for them, for Rosemary was saving herself for marriage.

He turned away and began to make his way back down Stony Path and Harwater Drive. Tiredness hit him as he crossed Church Hill. For an old man he had walked a lot that day, several miles. He was in his seventies. What had he been doing, mooning back to a long-lost youth and a woman who had had three husbands? When he got home, he would find the scissors and cut up the evidence, like you did with an out-of-date credit card, and drop the pieces in the bin. Episode Daphne over, he thought.

As he unlocked his front door, he heard the soft buzz of the sewing machine and he felt a quite unwarranted anger rising in his throat like bile. But he opened the sewing room door to tell Rosemary he was back.

‘All right,’ she said, getting up. ‘I’ll make supper.’

Daphne’s card was still in his pocket. Of course it was. Rosemary was the soul of honour, the last woman to forage through his clothes in search of incriminating evidence. What was happening to him that he was thinking of the possibility of deceiving his wife? But he was deceiving her already. That visit to Baldwin’s Hill with its attendant reminiscing was itself a deception. His thoughts now were a kind of deceit. Suddenly they deflected to the excavation he and Rosemary had gone to look at, and to the hands found there. A man and a woman. Had they been lovers, placed there in their grave by a vengeful husband or, come to that, a vengeful wife? So long ago, perhaps, that the reason for their burial would never be known.

He was still holding Daphne’s card. Instead of cutting it into pieces or otherwise disposing of it, he put it back in his pocket.

CHAPTER FIVE

WHEN JO HAD died some few months before, Lewis Newman had received letters of condolence from people he had known during the various phases of his long life: one fellow medical student whose name he couldn’t even remember, a neighbour from the Birmingham days, those of his friends who were still alive and his partner in the practice where he had last worked. There was also a letter from someone he had been at school with – primary school, as they called it these days. Most of these people, apart from the friends, read the announcement of Jo’s death in The Times . That was what such announcements were for, Lewis supposed, and now he wondered why he had agreed to his cousin’s (‘beloved wife of’) insistence that it should be put there.

He replied to these letters, as was polite. In Jo’s lifetime, she had done this sort of thing, and, writing to one of the Birmingham people, he thought to himself that this was the first such missive he had ever written. He saved answering the schoolfriend’s letter till last because it was the most interesting. It came from Stanley Batchelor and was scarcely a letter of condolence at all. True, Batchelor did say he was sorry to hear of Jo’s death, but the tone, Lewis thought, was rather that a man who had looked after a woman ‘through years of illness’ must to some extent be relieved by her demise. This was so much Lewis’s own sentiment – something he could never dream of revealing to anyone – that it endeared Stanley Batchelor to him.