The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page B

saying that on a lovely day such as this one they should go out for a walk. He intended to go and he didn’t want to go alone. “Buy yourself a dress for once,” he said. “We can afford it. We can afford designer—isn’t that what they call it?”
    She made no reply but agreed to the walk, and although neither of them felt up to their marathons of a few years ago, the round-trip of down the Hill and along Brook Road to the High Road and the cricket field, up Traps Hill, and home, was quite within their power.Alan had told himself he didn’t want to go alone but in fact he did want to. To walk in the spring sunshine along these familiar streets, past these familiar houses and gardens, and to think was what he wanted. As it happened, Rosemary wasn’t saying much. She also was perhaps thinking, and in her case of the lamentable state society was in when it countenanced young couples getting married in hotels instead of St. Mary’s Church. But he mustn’t be disloyal even in thought.
    He put his hand in his jacket pocket to touch the card which had been in there for the past ten days or so. Its presence troubled him a little because it shouldn’t be there, he should never have picked it up, or he should at least have destroyed it when he got home. Instead he had read it several times over: Daphne Furness , it said, 67A Hamilton Terrace, London NW8 . Then came an email address and a mobile phone number. He thought of her as she had been in George Batchelor’s living-room, looking years younger than any other woman there, her wonderful legs, those shoes. Don’t go there, he told himself, using an injunction Freya or maybe Fenella had taught him. Don’t.
    Rosemary laid her hand on his arm, then closed her fingers on it. “You shivered. Are you all right?”
    “Perfectly.”
    “Look where we are. You didn’t know, did you? You’ve been in a dream.”
    They were outside Warlock. The house looked deserted, all the blinds pulled down at the windows. The great pit, excavated to make a basement, was covered by sheets of tarpaulin in which the heavy rain of a few days before had made shallow puddles.
    “Rather sad, isn’t it? Such a lovely home. Will it ever be the same again?”
    Alan, who usually conditioned himself to agree with everything Rosemary said, found himself violently disagreeing. He wanted to say that with its white stucco and chocolate-coloured half timbering, it wasn’t lovely, it never had been, and if it wasn’t the same again, all the better. And when did she start calling a house a home ? But he didn’t say any of that. He only wondered if this unspoken disloyalty was going to continue, if he could rid himself of it. He withdrew his arm from her hand and felt into the pocket, where the card seemed to move under his fingers as if it were alive. His fingers remembered the feel of hers when she put her hands into his.
    Later, with afternoon slipping into evening, and Rosemary, in spite of what he had said about a designer dress, back at her sewing machine, he told himself he must choose one of two options: throw the card away or call the phone number on it. Like a man who was choosing between faithfulness and infidelity—nothing could be further from his thoughts—he must decide. Of course he wouldn’t make that phone call. He looked back on his chaste and blameless life, reminded himself of his age and hers, then thought of the summer when on many occasions Daphne had borrowed her father’s car and parked it under the trees on Baldwin’s Hill, and they had made love on the backseat or in the forest itself. Thou art fair, my love. Our bed is green. The beams of our house are cedar and our rafters of fir. Where had he remembered that from? He opened the sewing-room door an inch or two, said to Rosemary, “I’m going out for a bit of a walk.”
    She didn’t lift her foot from the treadle. “You’ve already had a walk.”
    “I know, but I need another. Don’t mind, do you?”
    “Of course