The Woman Next Door

HESTER

I am starting to wonder whether I did the right thing in leaving the library so hastily.

The afternoon has trickled by in a succession of mindless television programmes, which flicker and squawk away in the background. I’m not watching any of them really, but I’m loth to turn them off. They provide a buffer against the silence.

I keep picturing them all in the pub, getting steadily more inebriated. Faces will be flushed now with alcohol, bulbous elderly noses spidered with red veins, mouths open and revealing yellowing dentures as they laugh and laugh and laugh. At me. I’m sure they will be having a right old time of it. ‘Silly, funny old Hester,’ they’ll say. ‘Isn’t she the strange one?’

Damn them all.

I know full well what Terry would have made of this.

He was always telling me I was too quick to act, too rash. He’d get that look, the one that seemed to suggest he was a man who required a superhuman level of forbearance.

‘Hester, you need to give people a chance,’ he’d whine. ‘You’re so quick to judge.’

What he really meant was, ‘Hester, you should let people walk all over you.’

I never anticipated how much he would still haunt me, fifteen years after he died. He seems to be there, yacking away in my head, almost all the time.

My mouth feels stale and I go to pick up my cup of tea but discover that it is quite cold. I must have been sitting here even longer than I had realized. This happens sometimes. I sit down to watch television, and before I know it, it’s time to put Bertie out and I don’t even remember what I’ve been watching. I gulp it down anyway, wincing a little at the way it coats my mouth with a milky film.

It is then that I hear the purring of a vehicle stopping outside. I get to my feet and go to the bay window that looks out onto the street. An Ocado van has just pulled up outside, directly below my window. The driver, a balding coloured man of indeterminate middle age, hefts himself out of the front and noisily opens the doors on the side of the van. I part a gap in my nets, noticing the sickly greyness that tells me it’s time I washed them again, and stand to the side of the window just so. From this position I can clearly see the contents of the large plastic crates as they are disgorged from the back.

For some reason Melissa has her delivery arrive without carrier bags and it means that I can see exactly what she has ordered from week to week. She has no qualms, it seems, about showing the world all the intimate items, the tampons and deodorants, the panty liners and cotton buds, but I suppose we are all different.

I can tell a lot about the domestic cycles of the house from the shopping. I know when Tilly is home from school because there are slabs of Diet Coca-Cola in the mix, or when Mark is away because the expensive bottled beers he favours are missing. When Melissa is on her own, the shopping contains a lot of organic, low-calorie ready meals. Heaven knows why she needs to diet. Melissa has a wonderful figure and, if anything, could do with a little more meat on her bones.

But this time as I watch the crates emerging from the back of the van it becomes apparent that this is no ordinary delivery.

There’s always rather a lot of alcohol but today I see boxes of what looks like champagne. And is that … Pimm’s?

More crates are yanked from the van with a scraping sound and now I see forests of French sticks in one. Another is positively crammed with expensive soft fruits such as mangoes and bright strawberries. The colours glow, jewel-like, in this grey afternoon and fill me with a dull ache of longing somewhere around my sternum.

Glancing at my own fruit bowl, I see it contains one banana, stippled and overripe, and a forlorn tangerine that has lost its gloss and looks dry to the touch. I sigh and turn back to the window.

The driver closes the doors of the vehicle with a tinny clang.

And then he turns and looks directly at me, a smirk wrapping around his face.

I pull back from the window so fast I crash painfully into the television. It’s an old one and, for a second, the blonde grinning woman on the screen fragments. There is a zigzagging of the image, an angry hiss of static, before the picture rights itself again.

Staggering back into the shadows, rubbing my bruised hip, I reel from the hot scald of humiliation for the second time in a day.

What was he trying to say with that look? That he has seen me before, watching, and finds it odd. I squeeze my hands into fists so tightly my nails bite the soft flesh of my palms.

I walk into the kitchen on trembling legs and slump into a chair, trying to catch my galloping breath.

I have nothing whatsoever to be embarrassed about, yet I seem to ache with shame. Pressing my hand to my cheek I can feel that I am flushed and feverish.

How dare that van driver judge me?

How could someone like him possibly understand someone like me?

It’s not that I’m spying on Melissa. It’s just a way of keeping in touch with what’s going on in her life.

I sometimes find it hard to make sense of where it all went so wrong.

When that little family first moved in next door, I noticed how she carried Tilly, as though the baby were a grenade. Melissa often looked exhausted but she was still beautiful, still wonderfully turned out. A rush of tender motherly emotion would wash over me as I watched her awkwardly rock the tiny bundle in her arms. I knew I could help her if she would let me.

And she did. For a time. In fact, there was a period when I became quite indispensable to her, if you want the truth.

I was always babysitting at late notice for Tilly. Over time I believe she came to think of me as sort of an aunt, although I couldn’t get ‘Auntie Hester’ to stick as a monica, or whatever that expression is.

There was a time when I fancied I might be invited on holiday with them, even though I was never convinced Mark liked me. Melissa had been complaining about the fact that Tilly would never join the children’s holiday clubs when they went to their various resorts. Always classy places, like Mark Warner, or Sandals. Although I imagine these days, with his television career, they go to fancier venues still.

Anyway, all I did was hint that an extra pair of hands could really help but Melissa seemed not to understand. I didn’t want to push it.

Now Tilly is away at boarding school and, when she comes home, she smiles politely and answers my questions, but there is a sense that she is keen to get away. I see it in her eyes. How can things have changed so much?

She’s certainly not that same girl who liked to make biscuits with me in my kitchen. I think of her small arms moving like pistons inside my big mixing bowl, flour dusting her hair, and it’s hard to connect the picture with that near-adult. But there’s no point dwelling on it. Time moves on.

But I don’t see why Melissa and I can’t still be friends, just because Tilly has grown up. She began to drift away as soon as Tilly started primary school, locally.

First, she was never in when I called round to ask her for coffee. At least, I don’t think she was there. Once, I thought I saw movement at an upstairs window but I’m sure I must have imagined this.

Why on earth would Melissa hide from me of all people?

A few months slipped by, then half a year. We always seemed to be coming in and out at different times. Missing each other.

But I think it was the business with the bins that really caused the rift.

You see there’s an alleyway running alongside my house where the bins, for both Melissa’s house and my own, are kept. I have always put the bins out on a Monday morning and our little ‘system’ (as I liked to think of it) was that she would put them back that evening.

When she left them out in the road until Wednesday morning the first couple of times, I thought nothing of it. But then it seemed to become a habit. And that wasn’t the only thing. It’s very clear that one set of bins is for number 140, mine, and another for 142, hers. But she started to put things in randomly, as though it didn’t matter which bin belonged to whom. I’d go to recycle my read copies of the ’Mail and find it was filled with wine bottles and online shopping packaging. It really was quite irritating. I’m very fond of Melissa, but I suppose this began to really bother me on top of everything else.

At first I’d gently remove the items and put them back into her own bin, hoping that it would get the message across. But it carried on until one day when my entire bin was filled with packaging from Habitat. (It contained a duvet. Duck down. 9.5 tog.) I really felt I should say something. So I went round there. I was perfectly polite and friendly. But I think I may have caught her on a bad day.

She is usually immaculate, as I said, from her shining crown of blonde hair to her prettily painted toenails. That day though, she had on some sort of tracksuit thing and her hair was scraped back into an untidy ponytail. Her eyes looked dull and oddly vacant. It was like no one was there, if that makes sense. Although my heart went out to her (really, I longed to give her a hug and tell her it would be okay) I was determined to say my piece.

But it all seemed to go wrong. She listened without commenting and then simply closed the door in my face. I felt as though I had been slapped. I did something quite out of character at home. I found a dusty old bottle of sherry at the back of my cupboard and had a small glass to calm my nerves. The cloying thickness almost made me sick. God knows how long it had been there. But the whole thing really cut me to the quick.

Such a silly business to fall out over; things have never really been the same since.

I couldn’t think of a reason to go round. I would try to make conversation from the front garden (I’d watch for the car and then make sure I was in position) but it has never really been the same.

I so wish that we could be friends again.

Bertie, who always senses when I am distressed, huffs to his feet now. I reach down and scratch the wiry grey hair behind his ears in what I think of as his ‘special spot’. He shudders with bliss and his eyes roll back in his head.

My boy.

I’ve read that King Charles spaniels can live to the age of fifteen. Bertie is only thirteen but I can tell he has lost his lustre a bit lately. He’s not the only one.

‘Shall Mummy get your dinner?’ I say wearily.

His tail jerks and circles like a wonky propeller. I get up. I pour some of his special food into his bowl and place it down on his mat. He starts to eat it with enthusiasm but then loses interest. Sighing again, I open the back door. The kitchen suddenly feels very small.

For one awful moment I think I am going to go quite mad. I’m so very sick of being lonely.

And then, as I stand there, looking out at my overgrown lawn, I have the beginnings of a wonderful idea.

Melissa must be having a party, with all that alcohol arriving. There will be such a lot to do. It would take me no time to knock up some scones or a Victoria sponge. She never was much of a baker. She once told me that my lemon drizzle cake was like ‘sex on a plate’. I was a bit embarrassed by this, to be honest, but I appreciated that she meant it in a complimentary way. And didn’t I have an urge to do some baking earlier? Maybe it was an omen. Perhaps I was meant to leave the library the way I did.

For all I know, Melissa has been waiting for an excuse to patch things up between us. This could be the perfect opportunity to mend bridges.

I’m not even offended that I haven’t been invited. I couldn’t expect her to, when relations were so strained between us.

‘Right, Bertie,’ I say, reaching for my apron, which hangs on a hook on the kitchen door. ‘Mummy had better get busy.’

I’m the older, more mature, person. It’s time to put things right.

MELISSA

The diazepam doesn’t seem to be working. She took it more than two hours ago but she’s still waiting for the blunting sensation to take effect, for all the hard angles in her mind to soften and blur. The sensation of unease she experienced at the hairdressers has clung to her like a succubus.

She keeps telling herself there’s no reason to feel anxious.

Nothing has happened.

All is well.

Melissa stands on the landing and rotates the tips of her fingers into the centre of her forehead. This supposedly wards off headaches, according to Saskia, who picked it up from some alternative therapist. She swears by it, but Melissa remains unconvinced as she gouges hard, rhythmic circles into her skin.

Tilly emerges from her bedroom dressed in pink and green pyjamas that strain across her hips. Her hair is matted on one side and her face is puffy with sleep. She has inherited the distinctive russet brown curls Melissa used to have. It’s a lovely colour and Melissa wishes she herself had been able to keep it.

In every other respect Tilly is her father’s daughter, from the heavyset shoulders and square, blunt-toed feet, to the almost bovine brown eyes, fringed with enviable lashes. Melissa thinks she carries about a stone more than she should, but she is still a very attractive girl when she makes an effort.

Today she has violet smudges under her eyes. Since the GCSE exams finished, she lives in onesies or pyjamas and thick socks and spends her days padding from fridge to bedroom, where she lies like a large tousled cat, tapping at her iPad and dozing.

But today is a party in her honour and she clearly hasn’t been through the shower yet, judging by the cocktail of teenage sweat, stale coffee, and the sickly watermelon-flavoured lip balm she favours rising from her. Her iPad sits lightly on one hand like a prosthesis. Tilly blinks, slowly, as though she has emerged from a subterranean lair.

Mother and daughter eye each other and Tilly attempts an exploratory smile, which morphs into a yawn that smells of sleep. Melissa’s face remains impassive. She doesn’t want to shout at Tilly and yet it would be so very easy to do right now.

‘When are you planning to get ready?’ she says crisply. ‘This is your party, after all.’ Downstairs there is a metallic clatter as the caterers begin to pack away some of their equipment. One of them laughs loudly and says, ‘You wish!’ A song from Melissa’s youth – ‘Babooshka’ by Kate Bush – wails tinnily from the radio on the windowsill. She has already asked them to turn the radio down once. Thank God they are almost done.

Tilly’s eyes are already being dragged towards the abyss of her iPad, where Walter White is paused, staring out at red, baked earth. She has been on a Breaking Bad marathon for the last two days, only pausing to sleep and eat.

‘Soon, Mum. I promise.’

Tilly disappears back into her bedroom.

It’s the gentleness in her voice that has prompted Melissa’s eyes to prickle and ache, unexpectedly. As if Melissa were being humoured. She has made it quite plain that she doesn’t really want a party. But she will obviously play along, just to keep her mother happy. In her own time.

She’d always imagined, in the days when all her tiny daughter did was cry, shit, and feed, that the compensations would come when she was older; when she was a proper person, they would do all the things she never did with her own mother. Melissa pictured her and Tilly cosy on a sofa, bonding over 1980s movies like The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink. Or mother and daughter puffing out their cheeks and complaining good-naturedly about aching feet as they sat down to a good lunch, surrounded by bags from a morning spent shopping.

But none of these fantasies had ever quite come off.

Tilly didn’t like what she called ‘girly’ films, preferring instead to watch violent science fiction thrillers with her father. And the few times Melissa had coaxed her daughter into the West End to shop, they had ended up falling-out and glowering at each other over uneaten salads in Fenwick’s café.

Melissa thought it would be nice to celebrate the end of the GCSEs, that was all. It seemed like the kind of thing a family like them – secure, middle class, loving – should be doing.

Secure.

Middle class.

Loving?

That’s what she’d thought.

Mark is a doctor, specializing in IVF, who had made a decent living by combining private work with his NHS practice at the Whittington Hospital. But two years ago he had taken part in a BBC documentary set in the private clinic in Bloomsbury where he worked two days a week.

The programme was called The Baby Business and it became something of a hit. Every week, thousands of people would discuss the ins and outs of various couples’ reproductive failures and successes (more of the former than the latter) over their morning coffees or at bus stops.

There was Janine and Paul, a young man who had almost died from testicular cancer who longed now to be a father; the Hewlett twins, a pair of sisters who caused a spike in egg donation numbers for a few weeks in late 2013; and a stubbornly un-telegenic, spiky-mannered couple called Trudy and Gary. Every week they bickered with each other on camera and argued with the medical advice given. They were media catnip and Trudy’s lugubrious expression even prompted an internet meme in which her face was overlaid by a bleating goat. When their third attempt at IVF failed, the atmosphere shifted and she became Tragic Trudy.

But Mark was the real star of the show. His salt-and-pepper hair, and warm twinkly manner as he delivered both good and bad news, proved to be a ratings winner. Before long he began to receive invitations onto various daytime television sofas.

The BBC commissioned a follow-up series of TBB, as they called it. At home Mark privately called it BBB, for Babies Bring Bucks. All of this had been welcome in terms of money, but for Melissa, having a spotlight shone into her life, a spotlight that could throw every long-abandoned and grubby corner into the sharpest relief, it felt like a particularly cruel cosmic joke.

Mark couldn’t understand why Melissa wouldn’t accompany him to the various events he was invited to with increasing frequency. She’d always managed to find an excuse. It wasn’t her thing. Or she felt like a night in. No one wanted her there, after all. They’d only be talking shop.

And it was true that she had no interest in this world. Television people bored her. Their natural privilege was a balm that lubricated their way through life, so they never seemed to snag and falter. They had no idea, the Emmas and the Sachas and the Benedicts, of what the world was like for most of the population, despite the desire to entertain and document them.

But her avoidance of the limelight had blown up in her face in more than one way. Firstly, Mark claimed that her unwillingness to enjoy his success helped push him into the arms of Sam. Mark said that the affair was over, really, before it started.

‘It meant nothing. It was a terrible mistake. I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.’

As though it wasn’t far too late to say this.

As a rule, Melissa worked hard to keep her younger self hidden; the small, hard Matryoshka doll that lurked beneath lacquered layers. Mark’s grovelling words, which seemed to drip so easily from his lying lips, finally forced her out of hiding.

Melissa was as shocked as he was when she hit him, and the yellowish patina of his bruised cheek was noticed by Make-Up when he next turned up for filming.

But Melissa was being carried on a tide now, one that washed her to Sam’s flat in a mansion block in Swiss Cottage. The younger woman’s eyes rounded almost comically and she gave a small gasp, like a hiss of gas from a balloon, as Melissa stepped out of the shadows and stood in front of her.

Melissa spoke to her in a measured, calm voice. Afterwards, Sam scurried away on her long, coltish legs, scarlet-cheeked and breathing heavily. She’d left the programme soon after.

They never spoke of it again but the gears of their marriage seemed to turn with more friction now; small irritations Melissa had previously overlooked grated more than ever.

Mark suggested a meal out one evening – ‘to talk’. They went to the new restaurant that had opened down the road, which had just appeared in the Observer magazine. It was as they stepped towards the white canopy of The Bay, between miniature bay trees in square metal pots, that a photograph was snapped – or stolen – as Melissa thought of it. She hadn’t even noticed a flash.

But a week later, a friend of Saskia’s had spotted the Society pages piece in Hello! magazine. Melissa, smiling, in her black sheath dress and heels, making an effort, and ‘Handsome Baby Doc Mark’, solicitously touching the small of his wife’s back as they entered, ‘the exciting new eatery that has opened close to the glamorous couple’s Dartmouth Park home.’

Saskia had been surprised by Melissa’s muted reaction to the piece, and then sympathetic about the sudden onset of food poisoning that sent Melissa rushing to the downstairs toilet, where she vomited and shook so hard that she could feel her teeth rattling in her skull.

It was just one picture. It meant nothing.

That’s what she told herself in the coming weeks, and she almost began to believe it.

But lately Melissa can’t seem to shake the feeling that her whole world is simply a snow globe that could tip over and shatter into a million lethal pieces with the slightest push of a fingertip.

Glancing out of the window on the landing now, Melissa sees that the sky seems to be slung low, like a heavy white blanket. The light has a sickly, oppressive edge to it and the house feels full of shadows. Maybe this headache is a warning that a thunderstorm is coming. It feels as though even the weather is out to sabotage the day.

Giving herself a mental shake, Melissa walks into the kitchen and feels marginally better at the industry there. The caterers have been busy all morning and the fridge is heaving with platters and dishes of colourful, tastefully arranged food, but every surface is clean and shining, ready for the guests to arrive a little later.

Ocado have been and gone; the flowers have been delivered – a tall arrangement of lilies that perfectly offsets the newly hung green and gold wallpaper. Really, everything is looking perfect.

Melissa sweeps her hair back from her shoulders, taking care not to ruin its smooth line. Now she only has to slip into the dress and sandals she bought for today and then it won’t be long until the first guests arrive.

Finally, she allows herself to feel a ripple of pleasurable anticipation. The house looks great, she looks great, and it will be the kind of day that makes all her hard work worthwhile.

Today is about her, Melissa.

And Tilly. Of course.

The doorbell chimes and Melissa walks down the hallway to open the door, wondering if there are any deliveries she has forgotten about.

‘Ah,’ she sighs. ‘Hello.’

Hester – stiff helmet hair, horrible pink blouse, and brown slacks – smiles shyly up at her. She’s a small, scurrying sort of a woman who reminds Melissa of a squirrel.

Melissa hates squirrels.

The sight of Hester now causes a claustrophobic sensation of disappointment to crowd in, as if she is literally stealing her air. It takes her brain a second or two to see that the other woman appears to be holding a tray of scones, of all things.

‘What can I do for you?’ she says, eyeing them suspiciously, her smile tight but bright.

Something shifts in Hester’s expression and she lowers the tray a little before her prim lips twitch.