Ruth Rendell: The Girl Next Door

Having accepted a glass of Amontillado, Alan handed George the Daily Telegraph . ‘Have you seen this?’

George barely glanced at it. ‘Sure. We take the same paper.’ He nodded in a sage sort of way. ‘I built it.’

‘What, Warlock?’

‘Me and my brother did. Batchelor Brothers. Like we built a good many of the houses on The Hill.’

Alan knew he meant not that George and Stanley had built these houses with their own hands but that their firm had, and on those fields across which they and all the other children had run when the sirens sounded and then the all-clear.

‘When was it, George?’ Rosemary asked.

‘Sometime in the early fifties. Fifty-two, fifty-three?’

‘OK. Now maybe you can tell me if you think our tunnels were underneath Warlock.’

‘Oh no,’ said George. ‘Though that’s what they were, the foundations of a house.’

Rosemary echoed his last words. ‘The foundations of a house. I never thought of that.’

‘They were all gone by the time I acquired the land. We dug new foundations for Warlock. A Mr Roseleaf had it built. Funny name, I thought, that’s why I remembered.’

Norman, having found fault with the sherry as being Spanish and not French, had fallen asleep but now awoke with a snort. ‘So that’s what they were,’ he said. ‘The foundations of a house. That was a funny name too, Warlock.’

‘It means a man who’s a sort of witch,’ said Maureen.‘Very funny, in my opinion.’

‘Nothing to do with witches,’ said George. ‘It was because he’d lived in a street called Warlock Road in Maida Vale.’

‘Well I never,’ said Norman. ‘You were there, Alan, weren’t you? And Rosemary. And Lewis Newman – remember him? And do you remember Stanley’s dog Nipper? He was a nice dog. My mum hardly ever got cross with us, not with anyone, but was she mad when she found Stanley’d been taking the dog out in the evening without asking.’

Rosemary smiled, remembering. ‘Nipper was lovely. We longed for a dog, didn’t we, Alan?’

‘You didn’t find those hands when you were building that house, did you, George?’

‘I think I’d have said, don’t you?’

George softened his scathing tone by struggling to his feet and refilling sherry glasses. Several guests noticed that he was pouring Amontillado into Manzanilla glasses, but no one said anything. Rosemary got Oloroso instead of Amontillado but she didn’t mind; she really preferred the sweet sherry though she hadn’t asked for it as it was known to make you fat.

‘That was where we met,’ she said. ‘In those tunnels.’

‘What, when you were ten?’ George asked.

Rosemary nodded, suddenly embarrassed. Met there, lost each other when someone’s father turned them out, shouted at them to go home and not come back, met again years later, at a dance this time, dated (though that was a term never used then) and got married. It seemed to her that the others were staring at them as if she had described some tribal ritual, ancient and now unknown. Except for her and Alan, they had all been married at least once before, divorced, moved, even lived abroad like Norman.

She said brightly, trying to cover a kind of shame, ‘Who was it that turned us out of the tunnels? Someone’s father? Michael Woodman? Woodley?’

‘It was Michael Winwood’s dad,’ said Norman. ‘They lived on The Hill next door to the Joneses, the Winwoods did. And Bill Johnson’s people lived further up The Hill. Winwood found out we were all going into the tunnels in the evenings. I suppose Michael told him. He just walked across the road, found the entrance and shouted down to us to come out and not come back.’

While he was speaking, his brother Stanley had come into the house very quietly by the back door. Norman jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder, got to his feet and the brothers embraced. Rosemary said afterwards to her husband that she hadn’t known where to look, brothers hugging each other. Whatever next! Alan thought it was rather nice but he said nothing. Throughout his marriage he had often taken refuge in saying nothing. They were always weird, those Batchelors, said Rosemary on the way home. For instance, the way Norman, the youngest, used to go about telling people he’d been born on the kitchen table.

George, more conventionally, shook hands with his brother and pointed to his hip with a doleful look. ‘We were talking about those Winwoods. Remember them?’

‘They lived next door to Daphne Jones on The Hill. I remember her all right.’

That name again, Alan thought. He’d forgotten her and now her name had come up three times in – what? The past couple of hours? At least he hadn’t blushed. What did Stanley mean by that ‘all right’? Alan’s voice sounded squeaky and he wondered if anyone noticed. Rosemary might. ‘Is she still alive? She was older than any of us.’

‘She wasn’t. She just looked sixteen when she was twelve. She wasn’t really older.’ Stanley nodded knowledgeably. ‘I’ve sort of kept in touch with her.’ He seemed proud of it. ‘She’s been married three times and now she’s called Daphne Furness. Lives in Hampstead or St John’s Wood or somewhere. We don’t all cling to our roots.’

Aware of feeling envy, Alan wondered what had come over him. How must it feel now to have known and possibly often seen Daphne Jones over the years? He suppressed the thought. He was an old man, a great-grandfather, and George was hoisting himself to his feet once more and stood as if about to make a statement, swaying. ‘It’s just come to me. I’ve got a photo – a snap we used to call them – of us in the tunnels. Well, me and my brothers and my sister Moira in the entrance. Robert’s not there, he took the snap. Where’s that photo got to, Maureen? Can you lay your hands on it?’

‘Of course I can. How can you ask?’

Alan expected a little black and white or even sepia photograph. Instead Maureen brought out an album that looked too heavy for a small woman to lift. It was brown, with pages of thick card to which what seemed like hundred of photographs had been pasted. Familiar with the contents, though she hadn’t been one of the children in the tunnels, she opened the album at a page with the date 1944 printed on it, and laid it on the coffee table. George shifted along the sofa and gingerly set his foot to the ground, lifting his left leg with both hands. Stanley sat beside him, squeezing between him and Norman.

‘Now let Alan and Rosemary have a shufti,’ said Maureen. ‘You lot can see the pics whenever you want.’

Eventually the album was rearranged so that everyone could see but no one could see very well. George placed one finger on a dim-looking snap of five children crowded together in what was apparently the entrance to a small cave. It was out of focus and as a result looked as if Robert Batchelor had taken it through a thick fog. ‘Me and Stanley and Norman and poor Moira,’ said George. He called her ‘poor’ because she, the youngest but one of them, like Robert, the eldest, was dead.

‘Who’s that?’ said Rosemary, pointing to a boy with a mop of curly hair.

‘Don’t know.’ George produced a magnifying glass, enlarging the boy’s face to a blur. ‘Could be Bill Johnson.’

The other photographs on the page were of little interest to Alan and Rosemary, being of interiors of the Batchelor house in Tycehurst Hill, of Stanley holding a cricket bat, and, mysteriously to anyone not familiar with Norman’s life history, a small shot of a table covered in a checked cloth.

‘Look at that,’ said Norman. ‘I took that. Fancy you keeping it, George. I was born on that table. My mum was walking about the house, waiting for the nurse to come, in labour of course, though we were never told that part. It was never put into words, though that’s what it was. George and Moira carried it out into the garden for Robert to get that shot on account of it was too dark in the kitchen. Fancy you keeping that. Can you unstick it, George, and let me have it?’