Ruth Rendell: The Girl Next Door

Alan said nothing. He was reading about the builders with the strange names unearthing the tin box with their digger and the police coming and afterwards all digging being made to stop. The tin had once contained shortbread biscuits. When found, it held the skeleton hands of a man and a woman.

‘I wonder,’ said Rosemary, ‘if they’ve closed it all up. I mean, put wire all round the garden and that blue and white tape you see on TV. We could go up there for our walk and have a look.’

‘We could.’ Alan’s voice had a faint ironic edge to it, not lost on Rosemary.

‘Not if you don’t want to, dear.’

He folded the paper up. ‘There’s no mention of the qanats – the tunnels, I should say. Only of finding these things under Warlock. We don’t even know if it was in the qanats that they were found.’

‘I do wish you wouldn’t call them that.’

‘The tunnels, then. We don’t even know what they were, tunnels dug in a field and covered up with tarpaulins. George would know. I think he would. If we’re going for a walk why not go and see George and Maureen?’

‘If you like.’

‘Why did we never know what the tunnels were, darling?’

‘I suppose we never asked. Our parents would have known, but we never asked them. We never even told them.’

‘We knew they’d have stopped us going there.’

Rosemary went back to her sewing room, while Alan returned to memories of the qanats. The things they used to do, the games they played, the food they brought with them: dense wholemeal bread – how he had longed for white bread – with jam made from turnips and rhubarb; fish-paste sandwiches; potatoes wrapped in clay and baked in an old water tank they found and made a fire in, their fortunes told by Daphne Jones. The name again brought him a shiver of ancient excitement. Acting Mary, Queen of Scots, and the murder of Rizzio. Why Mary, Queen of Scots? Why, come to that, the murder of the Princes in the Tower? Lady Jane Grey? He had forgotten. In spite of those rediscovered memories, so many reasons for things were lost, buried deep underground like those hands. He had a vivid memory of Stanley Batchelor bringing his dog, a white dog with black patches, and Alan had loved it; he and Rosemary hugging the dog and stroking it and saying to each other, ‘He’s so lucky. Why can’t I have a dog?’ Eventually he could, his beloved Labrador, and Rosemary her spaniel, when the war was over.

He took the paper with him to find Rosemary. She was sitting at the treadle, her fingers guiding the hem of the dress she was making for Freya. Possessing and using a sewing machine was commonplace when they were first married. Rosemary had made all her own clothes over the years. When sewing grew less common, she made their children’s clothes and now their grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s. ‘Because they’re much nicer than anything I could buy.’

Alan disagreed but he didn’t say so. There had been a phase when she tried making his shirts but he put a stop to that. The hand that held the cloth in place was wrinkled now, the veins prominent, but there was no sign of arthritis in the joints. Rosemary looked up and lifted her foot from the treadle.

‘I think we should go and see George Batchelor and take the paper with us,’ said Alan. ‘It’s ages since we saw the Batchelors.’ An unwelcome thought struck him. ‘If he’s still alive.’

Rosemary laughed. ‘Oh, he’s alive. I saw Maureen in the High Road last week. He’d had his hip done and he was just coming back from St Margaret’s.’

‘And still living in the same place?’

‘Not the same phone, though. Maureen gave me her mobile number. Shall I phone them, darling?’

Alone among them, Michael Winwood had a parent still living. They had very little contact with each other. There had been no positive quarrel. Neither had ever said to the other, ‘I will never speak to you again,’ but Michael intended never to see his father and he was sure his father never intended to see him. He wondered if John Winwood had read about the hands, the man’s hand and the woman’s, in the biscuit box, or if perhaps such a discovery would mean nothing to someone of his father’s age.The old man would be a hundred in less than a year’s time and would no longer be compos mentis. Perhaps he would have cared if his father had been poor and living in wretched circumstances, but according to Zoe, he was in the most luxurious old people’s retreat in Suffolk. His home was an apartment with en suite shower rather than a room, and he had everything an ancient human being could require. Michael didn’t care, he felt no guilt.

What would Vivien have said about the hands in the box? What would she have said about his father? He would go up to her room, the room that had once been hers, and ask her. Just tell her, really. Lie on the bed beside where she had once lain and talk to her about it. When he closed his eyes he could see the house called Anderby, on The Hill, and on the other side of the road, where there were no houses then, he could see the tunnels, the entrance and the children gathering. A week after they’d discovered them, there were more children, twenty or thirty children. He could see them following each other down the steps and into the long hole, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin without a piper, disappearing into the darkness under the tarpaulin, and then the lights coming on in the depths as someone began to light the candles.

When he thought about Anderby, which he couldn’t help doing sometimes, though he tried not to, he usually heard his father singing. That phrase, if you said it to anyone, sounded nice, especially as it was hymns he sang. He wasn’t religious; Michael and his mother and father never went to church, but his father had as a child. Hated it, Michael had once heard him say, but the hymns he sang he remembered, the tunes and most of the words. ‘Lead us, Heavenly Father, Lead Us’ and ‘Summer Suns Are Glowing Over Land and Sea’. That one about the sun was meant to make you happy, but when John Winwood sang those words it was preparatory to coming downstairs and snarling at Michael to get out of his sight.

Michael went upstairs and told Vivien about the hymns, laughing as if it was funny.

Alan and Rosemary walked over to York Hill, having invited themselves to tea.

‘We don’t drink tea,’ said Maureen Batchelor on the phone. ‘George says it’s an old person’s drink and when I say we are old, he says there’s no need to rub it in. Come and have a sherry, why don’t you? It’s never too early for sherry.’

‘So sherry’s not an old person’s drink,’ said Alan. ‘I bet you if you went into the King’s Head’ – they were just approaching this hostelry – ‘and asked for sherry, the young woman behind the bar wouldn’t know what you were talking about.’

George, the eldest of the Batchelor siblings still living, was still in the town where he had been born and grown up, a not uncommon phenomenon in the outer London suburbs. This was true also of Alan and Rosemary and almost of George’s brother Stanley, but not of George’s brother Norman. So it was a surprise to walk into George and Maureen’s living room in the sprawling bungalow called Carisbrooke and find Norman sitting beside his brother on a sofa, George’s leg stretched out in front of him and supported on what Maureen called a ‘pouffe’.

‘How are you Norman?’ said Rosemary. ‘Long time no see.’ It was a phrase Alan particularly disliked. It was a phrase that she believed the people she called ‘Chinamen’ used.

‘I live in France now. I’m not often here.’ Norman went off into a gushing eulogy to French culture, food, drink, transport, the countryside, the health service and his house. A glazed look came over Maureen’s face, the expression of someone who has heard it all before. She got up and returned with a trolley laden with glasses and bottles of various sherries, Oloroso, Amontillado and Manzanilla among others.