The Girl Next Door (45 page)

It seemed to Kate, when she thought about it, and she thought about almost nothing else these days, that in her sixty-plus years of life, she’d been two distinct and very different people. There was the woman she had been, had allowed herself to be, for most of her adult life, and that woman lived her life in quiet black and white; and there was woman she had been for the last ten or fifteen years, before she lost him, who had basked in glorious Technicolor for all of that time. How quickly she had gone back to black and white. How weak she must be. And how she hated herself for it.

Chapter One

November 2006

When she couldn’t sleep, which was often, Maggie had learnt that lying damply, tossing in the hot, crumpled sheets of her too big bed, was the worst thing she could do. She didn’t want to take pills, though she had them, hidden in the back of the medicine cabinet, a slender amber pot of blue lozenge-shaped pills, not one missing, all pushed down with a cotton wool ball, the label facing the back of the cupboard, like she was ashamed she had even been prescribed them. She couldn’t read then, or watch television. Her daughter Aly, who knew how it was, though they seldom talked about it, had joined LoveFilm with her mother’s name and credit card details, and optimistically lined up epic boxed series of DVDs –
The West Wing
,
Rome
,
24
,
Grey’s Anatomy
, alongside the older, black and white film collection that Maggie had treasured for years – the Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn films she knew by heart but that Aly didn’t consider constituted entertainment. But Maggie couldn’t always concentrate, couldn’t follow even the simplest stories she knew best. She needed to move, and not to think. If she’d lived alone, she might have run, hard and fast, the way she hadn’t done for years, concentrating only on putting one leg in front of the other and on controlling the screaming pain in her lungs, though she knew it wasn’t a sensible thing to do in west London in the middle of the night. But she didn’t live alone, and she couldn’t do that.

So she did housework, and laundry, and ironing. In the middle of the night. Her home was cleaner than it had ever been. Not that it mattered to her, particularly. Maggie had always been quite laid back about that. More laid back than her husband, Bill, ever had been, certainly. She had accused him, more than once, and not entirely jokingly, of being borderline OCD. Bill would square off a pile of magazines and newspapers on the coffee table (if he wasn’t, in fact, consigning them to the recycling) and dry dishes left to drain on the counter. He couldn’t really relax if jobs like this weren’t done. These were not things that had ever worried Maggie. She’d grown up in comfortable chaos – her mum had kept newspapers until she’d read every word, and since she worked hard, that often took weeks, and they teetered in piles on every available surface. It was clean, her childhood home, but it was almost never tidy. Mess was her natural habitat, she supposed. It was one of the differences between them that had once been endearing, but, across the years of their marriage, had become less a cute contrast and more a wearisome irritation. Sand in the pearl shell.

But the cleaning was almost therapeutic now. She could go into a room and make it different. Achieve something. Fix something. Focus on something real, however mundane. And it was hard work physically. She usually gave up on sleep around 2 or 3 a.m. Then cleaned for two or three hours. Then went back to bed, falling exhausted on to the same crumpled sheets, not noticing them this time. It meant that getting up at 7.30 a.m. to see Stan and Aly off to school nearly killed her every morning, the alarm she had to keep on the dresser across from her bed rousing her from the deepest, furthest away sleep she ever got these days. She would swing her legs out of bed the second she heard it, sitting with her head bowed like a disorientated drunk, willing herself to come around.

She never let herself go back to bed after she’d waved them off, though sometimes – usually – she ached to. Somehow that felt like a slippery slope to her, and the idea of it frightened her. She wouldn’t be
that
woman. She showered and dressed, dried her hair and put on make-up, something she’d learnt to do without ever really looking herself in the eye, and got on with things. She often napped in the afternoons, in front of
Midsomer Murders
, on the deep denim sofa in the sitting room, but she was dressed when she did it, damn it.

It was a new routine, and she hated it, but it was a routine, at least, and there was some strange comfort in that. For a long time, there’d been no routine at all, because they’d all been so very lost, disorientated, like in the dream.

On the top landing, Aly’s door was firmly shut, but Maggie turned the handle silently, braver in the dark night than she sometimes felt in the day, and opened it enough for the pendant on the landing to bathe her daughter’s face in a shaft of soft light. Aly’s face had hardly changed at all since she was a baby. Her rounded nose, her full lips, the slightly chubby cheeks she so hated – they were all the features of her baby face. The eyes, closed now in deep sleep, were her father’s clear bright celadon green. Aly wore her hair long, like every other teenage girl Maggie could think of, and it lay in heavy, wavy layers across her pillow, a dirty dark blonde. Aly would be pleased with how she looked lying there, if she could see. A sleeping beauty. Maggie marvelled, as she had all Aly’s life, that this child had come from her. Her own coarse curls were so brown they were almost black. Her skin was olive. Her eyes were a deep, dark hazel brown, like a Labrador, Bill used to say. From a distance they looked chocolate brown, but up close you could see slivers of amber and emerald and tawny yellow in them. Aly frowned and shifted a little in her sleep, and Maggie closed the door gently. She did this most nights. She and Aly were so out of sync in their waking lives that she needed this contact. Asleep, Aly couldn’t argue with her, couldn’t make that particular face she seemed to reserve exclusively for her mother, didn’t make Maggie feel like she was getting everything wrong.

Along the hall, Stan’s door, proudly marked as such with a US car licence plate from the state of New York that bore the name Stanley, was wide open. Stan lay spread-eagled diagonally across his bed, the duvet kicked back and half on to the floor. Stan’s left hand was down his pyjama bottoms in the position of comfort he had been assuming all his life, and his pyjama top had ridden up so that ten inches of belly were exposed. Maggie smiled and went in, stubbing her toe on a rogue piece of Lego and swearing under her breath. She pulled him around carefully, smoothing his top down and covering his soft skin. She kissed his cheek and lingered for a moment, loving the smell of him, and almost envying the regular, peaceful sound of his breathing. She touched his hair. If it grew, then those would be her dark curls, but by mutual agreement, she and Stan kept it close-cropped, and it was like stroking an animal’s pelt. A sudden tear rolled down her cheek, her sternum contracting in a momentary dull pain. That happened, these days, all the time. Maggie barely noticed.

Her babies were asleep. They were safe, and they were here, and they were sleeping. It brought her a kind of peace, for a while at least.

Maggie tucked him in again, and got on with her labours. She kept a small cleaning kit in each of the bathrooms. It saved making too much noise going up and down the stairs. She cleaned the bathrooms the most. She kept old T-shirts of Bill’s, yellowed at the armpits and stretched at the neck, as cloths and rubbed at the tiles until they gleamed. She scrubbed at the grout and polished the taps. Replaced damp towels from the floor with fresh, clean ones from the airing cupboard on the landing outside her bedroom. Neither of the kids appeared to understand the concept of a towel rail, however often she explained it to them.

It was a beautiful house, and she loved it clean as she had loved it messy. She had lived in it for almost fifteen years. Aly had been a toddler when they’d moved in, and Stan was born five years later, just as she and Bill had finally finished renovating. A grand and imposing Victorian end-of-terrace villa, it sprawled over four floors. She remembered standing at the bottom of the flight of steps that led up to the big dark-blue front door, the day the estate agent had taken her and Bill to see it for the first time, struggling to imagine that a place this lovely, this big, could actually be her home. Their home. Bill was a risk taker then. He’d squeezed her shoulder and said he’d done the sums and they could afford it, and even though she knew he’d done the sums he wanted to do, not the sums he probably should have done, she didn’t press him because she suddenly, desperately wanted to be the woman who lived here. She wanted to sit in an armchair with the children playing on the rug around her in the vast bay window on the upper-ground floor and wait for him to come home at night.

It had been in a state, of course, with peeling William Morris wallpaper and sticky carpets. Even Bill couldn’t have made the numbers work on a property already renovated, not in those days, even in a postcode that was more up and coming than already established. But the rooms had been big, with unbelievably high ceilings, and, thank God, all the period details intact – big marble fireplaces and deep, gracious coving, ceiling roses and picture rails. The agent had banged the doors authoritatively and declared them ‘heavy, solid, almost certainly original’.

There were two huge reception rooms on the ground floor, and four smaller rooms in the basement, which was dark, and had a single, solid door that led out into the surprising, overgrown sixty-foot garden. On the first floor there were three bedrooms and a bathroom, and on the top floor, three more bedrooms. As she had slowly climbed each staircase, with Aly wriggling and chattering on her hip, wandering from floor to floor, Maggie had fallen more and more in love with the house. Finally, years after she’d left her home in Australia, Maggie had the strange and marvellous feeling that she was home again. Bill and the agent were brainstorming the possible renovation and tapping walls in a manly way. Maggie had been uncharacteristically quiet. When Bill had whispered in her ear, anxious and unable to read her, ‘What do you think?’, she had smiled broadly, then buried her face in Aly’s delicious scented neck, and giggled. ‘I think you better buy it right now, ’cos I’m not leaving …’

And she hadn’t.

It had been hard work. They’d laboured in the house while the neighbourhood around them also became more respectable and smart, and while Bill’s property-development business thrived and made sense at first of the sum, and then light work of the mortgage, and while their children grew and played in the garden. They’d stripped all the gruesome wallpaper and pulled up the carpets. At first, that and fresh paint was all they could manage. Then they’d gone room by room, adding curtains, and furniture. A family bathroom with the clawfoot bath that was everywhere that year. And at last the kitchen. They’d taken the back off the basement and installed a vast and fashionable family kitchen/diner down there, with stainless-steel appliances and a seamless white Corian work surface, although Maggie had insisted on a huge old pine kitchen table and mismatched chairs that she’d found at a reclamation yard to stop the place feeling what she would describe to Bill, her nose wrinkled in distaste, as ‘too cataloguey’. There were floor-to-ceiling glass doors that opened all the way back on clever hinges and slides on warm sunny days. Bill always told people he had to get as much fresh air and sunlight as he could in for his Aussie wife, but it was as much for him as for her. They’d put in a master en suite and a small new top-floor bathroom, and decorated everywhere in a warm palette of greens and neutrals, Maggie sneaking a splash of orange and pink in where she thought she could get away with it.

They’d been crazy stupid happy doing that house. Exhausted a lot of the time. There were a million memories in the fabric of the building. Aly riding a trike around a big empty room, a tiny hard hat rakish on her head. Bill, his five o’clock shadow scratching the side of her neck, sliding his hands down the insides of her painting dungarees, desperate to distract her from finishing just one more wall. They’d all laid a handprint in poured concrete and she’d scratched their names under each palm imprint. Heights were scratched into the kitchen doorframe. Bill had filled the foyer with blue balloons the day they’d brought Stan home from the hospital. There was a raised bed in the back garden, made with reclaimed railway sleepers Bill had found, where she’d taught the children to plant seeds and they’d grown tomatoes and lettuces and carrots. She’d loved doing it – every minute of every day of it, she’d loved how it all looked when she was finished – cool and comfortable and lived in, lived in by her happy family, and she’d loved her life. Then.

She loved it still. Several redecorations later, and however many times she climbed that flight of steps and put her key in the lock. In the late nineties, Bill had tried hard to persuade her to move. They could have something much grander now, he told her. The mortgage that had once been terrifying had long been paid off – Bill had been lucky, and he was good at what he did – astute investments and imaginative projects in great areas had made him wealthy far quicker than Maggie would have imagined possible, though Bill had always had a professional confidence that some might think bordered on arrogance. Bill’s father, before he died, had crowed that he’d been right all along – Bill hadn’t needed university with his head for business and property, it would have been a waste of time, he said. He’d been Maggie’s ally – Bill’s mother had never entirely forgiven Maggie for ‘holding Bill back’, though until recently Maggie had never understood what she was supposed to have been holding him back from. Bill wanted to move; he felt he’d earnt it. He had a shopping list of things he wanted – garaging for his car, a garden big enough for a pool … he brought home details of behemoths in Primrose Hill and Hampstead. Tried to enlist the children in his master plan with promises of en suite bathrooms and tennis courts – but all in vain. Maggie was rooted here, and she refused to budge. This was their home. It had driven a small wedge – not injurious, necessarily, but irritating, like a splinter – between them. Bill accused her of not enjoying his money, and thereby tarnishing his own enjoyment of his success. Maggie had tried to ignore the feeling that Bill’s wanting to move was somehow a betrayal of how happy they’d been here. Somehow an indication that none of it was as precious, as memorable, to him as it was to her. The kind of thought that seeps into a marriage and is never really expressed, because it seems so small, at first. But maybe it’s the start of a slight fraying around the edges. A few threads, coming loose. So small a fault at the start that you shake your head and dismiss your own pessimism. But it’s a start.