Ruth Rendell - The Girl Next Door

The studio flat he rented in Buckhurst Hill wasn’t much more than a room, its kitchen being some small pieces of equipment built into a panel on the wall where the door to the shower (no bath) room was. He tried to get out of it whenever he could. Therefore his attendance at Stanley’s funeral. Back at home, he sat down to think about trying again. Just go to the flat in Traps Hill and ask to come back? Go further than that and tell her he loved her, he always had, and must have been mad to leave her? After a while he fell asleep as he often did in the afternoons. This time he dreamed that he was back with her, it was eight on a Saturday morning and she was bringing him a cup of tea, telling him it was going to be a fine day and how would he feel about going to see Freya and baby Clement? He thought it was real, that dream, and when he woke up and found it wasn’t, he lay in the armchair and felt two tears run down his cheeks.

Happily Rosemary had rediscovered a couple of girls she had been at school with. Sylvia and Pamela were both widows and ‘well left’, as such women used to be described when husbands had died and left them a stack of shares and a considerable income. Now the three of them were friends again and had taken to attending the cinema together, going to the theatre, signing up for French conversation lessons – age was no bar – going on weekend trips in luxury coaches and river boats and buying tickets for book festivals.

It was while Rosemary was away at one of these that Alan made his carefully planned trip to the flat he longed to return to. The suitcase he left in the studio. Daphne had sent it on but his key wasn’t inside. It was lost. Perhaps he had never put it in there. He called round to the flat as any male visitor might but without the flowers such a man would have brought. Anyway, no one was at home. It was a bitter disappointment. He tried again, in the afternoon this time, on the following Wednesday. Rosemary was at a matinee of a play called Once , and this time with a man also called Alan that she had met at the Harrogate Literary Festival. The Alan she was married to decided that to call in the morning might be wiser, and he did so on a Monday.

He was sick with trepidation. Like some young lover, he had woken up at four a.m. and lain in a sweat of dread. Suppose she turned him away again? Suppose she saw who it was through the window and refused to open the door? But he must do it, he must go there. She opened the door to him, all smiles, in a new dress that plainly wasn’t one she had made. She looked years younger than when he had last seen her, and that wasn’t a cheering thought.

‘Rosie,’ he said. ‘Can I come in, Rosie?’

She nodded, the smile still there. No changes had been made to the flat. It was just as it had been when he left it. He sat down and she said she would make coffee. It was going to be all right, more than all right. She brought in the coffee and he noticed at once that it was far better than it used to be. She had learned how to make coffee in his absence. Grown slimmer since he left her, she had become cleverer and somehow more charming. She sat down, began to talk about some play she had seen and some literary festival she had been to in Yorkshire.

‘You took yourself to a theatre on your own?’ he said. ‘Well done.’

‘I wasn’t on my own.’

It was a simple sentence. It sent a shiver through him. He drank his coffee, said he was living in a studio flat but now he thought he would give it up. There was no point in keeping it. Rents were so high, he had had no idea.

She picked up the tray and carried it to the kitchen. When she came back, she told him she thought he had a key ‘to this place’.

‘I did have, but I’ve a confession to make. I seem to have lost it.’

‘Well it doesn’t matter, does it?’ she said. ‘You don’t need it. Better not give up this studio of yours. Not till you’ve bought something bigger, I should think.’

‘Rosemary. Rosie, I thought I should come back here. I want to come back to you.’

‘Don’t bother to sit down again. It’s been nice to see you but I have to go out in ten minutes. Back to the studio, eh?’

‘Rosie, let me come back.’

‘I don’t think so. It won’t do. You left me for no reason and now I’m leaving you.’ She opened the front door. ‘Bye-bye, Alan. I’m sure we’ll meet again some day.’

He sat down on the same seat he had sat on all those weeks ago when he had been turned away by the woman with the cat. This eviction, he felt, was final. He had no idea what he was going to do, now or in the future.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

WHILE JOHN WINWOOD was alive and Zoe was in touch with him, Michael had thought about his father with dread and tried more or less successfully to forget about him. Once she was dead and the duty fell on him, the ancient man had spoiled his life just by existing, as he had spoiled it when he was a child. Now he had gone. Michael felt happier than he had perhaps for ever. For even when he had Vivien, his father was there, was in the world, a threatening presence that might descend upon them, himself, his wife and their children, and carry out some frightful act of destruction. But not now, no more. Even he couldn’t come back from the dead.

With no father there, a brooding presence, he found he liked his children better. When one or the other came to stay, he began to enjoy their company. He returned Jane’s hugs with tender enthusiasm, enquired about Richard’s business, asked after his new wife, the newly arrived baby. When would Richard bring his family to see him? Jane was getting married again? He didn’t add the once inevitable suffix, ‘at last’. He said good, he was happy. When would he get to meet her fiancé?

Some two or three months after he heard from Rosemary that Alan was now living in a house he had bought in Epping, Michael encountered Daphne Jones in the Café Laville. He always thought of her as Daphne Jones. This was his first visit to the Café Laville. He had never belonged to that great sect whose doctrine is to buy, as a habit in the middle of the morning, a mug of coffee with a lid on and drink it on the premises or take it to home or work. He did it now, getting off the 46 bus on his way to Warwick Avenue station, because he saw Daphne inside. She was sitting at a table on that balcony bit of the café that overhung the canal and enjoyed a magnificent view of a glittering stretch of water all the way to the distant bridge beyond. Little Venice, it was known as.

She welcomed him to her table with the kind of smile he hadn’t seen on a woman’s face since he lost Vivien. ‘If Venetians come here on holiday, do you think they’re flattered or disappointed?’

‘I don’t suppose they come,’ said Michael.

‘You were the boy next door for years, but I don’t think we ever spoke, not even in the qanats. What brings you down here?’

‘A wonderful bus is the forty-six,’ he said. ‘It takes you right out to the sticks. I was going to the tube station but I’ve forgotten why. Have lunch with me?’

So she did. Three months later, he was spending half his time with her in the house in Hamilton Terrace and half at home. He was happy. Vivien’s room he had locked up, opening it only when Jane and her husband came to stay.