The Secret House of Death (3 page)

That was unexpected, the last question she had been prepared for. ‘I'm not sure what you mean,' she said hesitantly.

‘I said, have you been lonely? I meant since your divorce.'

‘Well, I . . .' Her cheeks burned and she looked down into her lap, at the black leather gloves that lay limply like empty useless hands. Her own hands clenched, but she relaxed them deliberately. ‘I've got over it now,' she said shortly.

‘But at the time, immediately afterwards,' he persisted.

The first night had been the worst. Not the first night she and Julian had slept apart but the night after the day when he had gone for good. She had stood at the window for hours, watching the people come and go. It had seemed to her then that no one but herself in the whole of her little world was alone. Everyone had an ally, a partner, a lover. Those married couples she could see had never seemed so affectionate, so bound together, before. Now she could remember quite distinctly how Bob and Louise had come home late from some dance or party, had laughed together in their front garden and gone into the house hand in hand.

She wasn't going to tell him any of that. ‘Of course, I had a lot of adjusting to do,' she said, ‘but lots of women get deserted by their husbands. I wasn't unique.'

Plainly he had no intention of wasting sympathy on her case. ‘And husbands by their wives,' he said. Here we go, Susan thought. Surely it couldn't take more than ten minutes before they got into Harrow? ‘We're in the same boat, Susan.'

‘Are we?' She didn't raise her eyebrows; she gave him no cue.

‘Louise is in love with someone else.' The words sounded cold, deliberate, matter-of-fact. But when Susan made no reply, he suddenly burst out raggedly, ‘You're a discreet, cagey one, aren't you? Louise ought to thank you. Or maybe you're on her side. Yes, I suppose that's what it is. You've got a big anti-men thing because of what happened to you. It would be different, wouldn't it, if some girl came calling on me while Louise was out of the house?'

Susan said quietly, although her hands were shaking, ‘It was kind of you to give me a lift. I didn't know I was expected to show my gratitude by telling you what your wife does while you're out.'

He caught his breath. ‘Perhaps that's what I did expect.'

‘I don't want to have any part in your private life, yours and Louise's. Now I'd like to get out, please.'

He reacted peculiarly to this. Susan had thought refusal impossible, but instead of slowing the car down, he swung with hardly any warning into the fast lane. A car immediately behind them braked and hooted. Bob cut into the roundabout, making the tyres screech, and moved on a skid into the straight stretch. His foot went down hard on the accelerator and Susan saw his mouth ease into the smile of triumph. Indignant as she was, for a moment she was also genuinely afraid. There was something wild and ungoverned in his face that some women might have found attractive, but to Susan he simply looked very young, a reckless child.

The needle on the speedometer climbed. There were men who thought fast dangerous driving a sign of virility and this perhaps was what he wanted to demonstrate. His pride had been hurt and she mustn't hurt it further. So instead of protesting, she only said dryly, although her palms were wet, ‘I should hardly have thought your car was in need of a service.'

He gave a low unhappy chuckle. ‘You're a nice girl, Susan. Why didn't I have the sense to marry someone like you?' Then he put out the indicator, slowed and took the turn. ‘Did I frighten you? I'm sorry.' He bit his lip. ‘I'm so damned unhappy.' He sighed and put his left hand up to his forehead. The dark lock fell across it and once more Susan saw the bewildered boy. ‘I suppose he's with her now, leaving his car outside for everyone to see. I can picture it all. That ghastly dog barks and they all go to their windows. Don't they? Don't they, Susan?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘For two pins I'd drop back to lunch one day and catch them.'

‘That's the shop I want, Bob, so if you wouldn't mind . . .'

‘And that's my garage.'

He got out and opened the door for her courteously. Julian had never bothered with small attentions of this kind. Julian's face had never shown what he was feeling. Bob was far better looking than Julian, franker, easier to know—and yet? It wasn't a kind face, she thought. There was sensitivity there, but of the most egocentric kind, the sensitivity that feels for itself, closes itself to the pains of others, demands, grasps, suffers only when its possessor is thwarted.

She stepped out of the car and stood on the pavement beside him in the cold wind. It whipped colour into the skin over his cheekbones so that suddenly he looked healthy and carefree. Two girls went past them and one of them looked back at Bob, appraisingly, calculatingly, in the way men look at pretty women. He too had caught the glance and it was something of a shock to Susan to watch him preen himself faintly and lean against the car with conscious elegance. She picked up her basket and said briskly, ‘Thanks. I'll see you around.'

‘We must do this more often,' he said with a shade of sarcasm.

The car was still at the pavement edge and he still sitting at the wheel when she came out of the toyshop. How hard the past year had made her! Once she would have felt deeply for anyone in his situation, her own situation of twelve months before. She couldn't escape the feeling he was acting a part, putting all the energy he could muster into presenting himself as an object of pity. He said he was unhappy, but he didn't look unhappy. He looked as if he wanted people to think he was. Where were the lines of strain, the silent miserable reserve? Their eyes met for a second and she could have sworn he made his mouth droop for her benefit. He raised his hand in a brief salute, started the engine and moved off along the concrete lane between the petrol pumps.

In another
Certainty
editorial, Julian Townsend had averred that almost the only green spaces remaining in north-west London were cemeteries. One of these, the overspill graveyard of some central borough, separated the back gardens of Orchard Drive from the North Circular Road. From a distance it still had a prettiness, an almost rural air, for the elms still raised their black skeletal arms against the sky and rooks still nested in them. But, taking the short cut home across the cemetery, you could only forget you were in a suburb, on the perimeter of a city, by the exercise of great imagination and by half closing your senses. Instead of scented grass and pine needles, you smelt the sourness of the chemical factory, and between the trees the traffic could always be seen as if on an eternal senseless conveyor belt, numberless cars, transporters carrying more cars, scarlet buses.

Susan got off one of these buses and took the cemetery path home. A funeral had taken place the day before and a dozen wreaths lay on the fresh mound, but a night of frost and half a day of bitter wind had curled and blackened their petals. It was still cold. The clouds were amorphous, dishcloth-coloured, with ragged edges where the wind tore them. A day, Susan thought, calculated to depress even the most cheerful. Struggling across the bleakest part of the expanse, she thought that to an observer she must appear as she held her coat collar up against her cheeks like Oliver Twist's mother on her last journey to the foundling hospital. Then she smiled derisively. At least she wasn't pregnant or poor or homeless.

Now as she came into the dip on the Matchdown Park side, she could see the backs of the Orchard Drive houses. Her own and the Norths' were precisely identical and this brought her a feeling of sadness and waste. It seemed too that their occupants' lives were destined to follow a similar pattern, distrust succeeding love, bitterness and rupture, distrust.

Two men were coming down the path from Louise's back door. They had cups of tea in their hands, the steam making faint plumes in the chill air, and Susan supposed they were labourers from the excavations on the road immediately below her. They had been digging up that bit of tarmac for weeks now, laying drains or cables—who knew what they ever did?—but it had never occurred to Susan to offer them tea. To her they had merely meant the nuisance of having clay brought in on Paul's shoes and the staccato screaming chatter of their pneumatic drills.

She let herself out of the cemetery gate and crossed the road. Inside the workmen's hut a red fire burned in a brazier made from a perforated bucket. As she approached the gate in her own fence the heat from this fire reached her, cheerful, heartening, a warm acrid breeze.

The men who had the tea cups moved up to the fire and squatted in front of it. Susan was about to say good morning to them when a third emerged from the trench that never seemed to grow deeper or shallower and gave a shrill wolf whistle. No woman ever really minds being whistled at. Does any woman ever respond? Susan fixed her face into the deadpan expression she reserved for such occasions and entered her own garden.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the whistling man march up Louise's path in quest of his tea. The fence was six feet high between the two back doors. Susan could see nothing, but she heard Louise laugh and the exchange of badinage that followed that laughter.

Susan went through the house and out of the front door to bring in the milk. Contrary to Bob's prediction, there was no green Zephyr on the grass patch, but wedged into the earth at the far side of the garden she caught sight of its counterpart in miniature. Inadvertently she had left one of Paul's cars out all night.

As she stooped to pick it up, shaking the earth from its wheels, Doris appeared from Betty Gibbs's house with Betty following her to prolong their conversation and their last good-byes as far as the gate.

‘An endless stream of them,' Susan heard Betty say, ‘always up and down the path. Why can't they make their own tea? They've got a fire. Oh, hallo.' Susan had been spotted. She moved towards them, wishing she felt less reluctant. ‘Doris and I have been watching the way our neighbour runs her canteen.'

‘No visit from lover-boy today,' said Doris. ‘That's what it is.'

‘Louise has been making tea for those men for weeks and weeks,' Susan protested, and as she did so she felt a violent self-disgust. Who decreed that she should always find herself in the role of Louise's defending counsel? The woman was nothing to her, less than nothing. How smug she must appear to these perfectly honest, ordinary neighbours! Smug and censorious and disapproving. There was earth on her hands and now she found herself brushing it off fastidiously as if it were a deeper defilement. ‘Come,' she said and she managed an incredulous smile, ‘you don't really think Louise is interested in any of those workmen?'

‘I know
you
don't. You're too discreet to live.'

‘I'm sorry, Doris. I don't mean to be a prig.' Susan took a deep breath. ‘I just hope things will work out for the Norths, that's all, and that they won't be too unhappy.'

The other two women seemed for a moment taken aback. It was as if unhappiness as the outcome of the Norths' difficulties had never occurred to them. Excitement, perhaps, or huge scandal or further sensational food for speculation, but nothing as real as grief. Doris tossed her head and Susan waited for the sharp retort. Instead Doris said mildly and too loudly, ‘I'll be in with Paul at the usual time.'

It was a sound characteristic of Louise North that had alerted her and caused the swift artificial change of subject. Behind them on the Braeside path came the sharp clatter of the metal-tipped high heels Louise always wore. Roped into this conspiracy of gossip, Susan didn't turn round. Her back was towards Louise but the other women faced her and it was both comic and distasteful to see the way they drew themselves up before Betty, the weaker of the two, managed a feeble smile and a twitch of the head.

Susan would have felt less weary of them and less sickened had they accorded the same treatment to Julian a year ago. But as soon as trouble between her husband and herself became evident these women had positively fawned on him. In Matchdown Park, surely the last bastion of Victorianism, the adulterer was still fascinating, the adulteress fallen. Deliberately she crossed back into her own garden and gave Louise a broad smile and a hearty untypical, ‘Hallo, there!'

Her neighbour had come into the garden on the same mission as her own and in her hands she held two pint bottles of milk, their foil tops pecked to pieces by blue tits. ‘Hallo,' said Louise in her little girl's voice that always had a whine in it.

‘Bob gave me a lift into Harrow this morning.'

‘Oh, yes?' Louise couldn't have sounded less interested, but just the same she approached the fence, picking her way across the soggy grass. Her heels sank in just as her lover's car tyres had sunk into the grass plot.

Louise always wore very high heels. Without them she would have been less than five feet tall, about the size of a girl of twelve, but like most tiny women she set herself perpetually on stilts and piled her hair into a stack on top of her head. Beneath it her little white face looked wizened and shrunken. Of course, it was particularly cold this morning and as usual Doris had begun to shout about the low temperature at the top of her voice, reiterating her urgent desire to get back to her fire as she made her slow way back across the road.

‘Freezing! I've never known such weather. Goodness knows why we don't all pack up and go to Australia!'

‘It isn't as cold as all that,' Louise whispered, and now she was leaning over the fence. It only reached to the average person's waist, but she rested her elbows on it and stared wistfully at Susan. ‘There are worse things,' she said, ‘than a bit of cold.'