The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell Page B

shepherded him off the train, carrying his suitcase for him—he was not able to lift it himself—and said she would stay with him until they found whoever—his auntie, was it?—was due to meet him. But no sooner had she spoken than a small, trim, pretty lady in a flowered frock was bending down to greet him, asking if she might kiss him and doing so, wafting over him the most delicious scent of roses.
    “You came alone?” That was the nearest to criticism of his father he ever heard from Zoe for a long time. She said profuse thank-yous to the lady with the little dog, then they went in a car to Zoe’s house. In a car! Which she drove! She wasn’t the first woman he had known to drive but almost the first. She was so gentle and kind, asking him all the things he liked to do and eat and play with, that he thought at first it was some kind of game she was playing, not real. But it was real, and from the worst morning of his life succeeded the best afternoon, and ever since then Zoe had given him a happy life with her and her husband, Chris, and a dog of his own, happiness that went on, punctuated by the minor troubles that flesh is heir to, until the terrible thing happened and Vivien died.
    Among the minor troubles was his first marriage. Babette was a mistake. He had married her because when he was twenty-four, you got engaged to, then married, the first girl you went out with, usually one of the typists in the office. In his case, the secretary heshared with the other newly fledged solicitor in the Lewes law firm he joined when he was qualified. Babette was pretty and chatty. The word for her that came to mind was skittish . At the end of every sentence she uttered, she giggled. For a while he found it charming. Now, if he thought of her at all, it was to reflect that these days and, for twenty or thirty years past, they would have lived together for a while and, when her giggling shredded his nerves and, to be fair, his grim sarcasm drove her to tears, split up with no or not much harm done. Cohabitation but no marriage—who but a puritanical bigot could fault such a system? In his and Babette’s case, when it seemed separation might be difficult, for neither of them had committed adultery or acted with cruelty, Babette fell in love with a silly, pompous man who adored her and ran off with him. The law changed and easy divorce followed swiftly under the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1973.
    Vivien was Chris’s cousin’s daughter, seventeen years younger than Michael. They met at a family wedding. She was as unlike Babette as could be, tall, slender, olive-skinned and black-haired, quiet, a woman who laughed only when there was something to laugh at. She was the headmistress (as they were called then) of a primary school in West Hampstead, and Michael had joined a law firm with premises in the Finchley Road. They bought the house in Ingham Road where a bus passed by and furnished material for Michael’s poetry.
    He sometimes thought that he had loved her too much and their children not enough. That was not to say that he hadn’t cared for them enormously more than his parents had cared for him. They were never neglected or ignored as he had been, and Vivien made up for his occasional indifference by her adoration of both of them. Guiltily, he confessed to himself alone that he wouldn’t have much cared if he and Vivien had had no children. He was jealous of them too because of the love she had for them, though she took none from him, he knew that. The difficulty was—he discovered this byself-analysis—that he had a problem with love, giving too much of it or not enough, not knowing how to handle it.
    She died young, or forty-nine seemed young to him. Breast cancer. Both children were at university. Both were clever, got good degrees; his son went on to graduate studies, and medical school for his daughter. They sometimes came home, but because (or so Michael thought) they associated Ingham Road with their mother.