Near Neighbours Read online

  Dorothea saw quarrels and reconciliations, children being cuffed or petted, girls washing their hair. Once she watched with fascinated horror a free fight, when a drunken man tried madly to get at a jeering woman: they threw plates at each other and overturned the poor bits of furniture, until suddenly a policeman walked in and took the man away, while the woman yelled with laughter.

  It never occurred to the lonely watcher, who would have been genuinely shocked at the idea of listening to other people’s private conversation, that she was looking into these people’s private lives. To her it was like something seen on a stage, and though vivid, quite unreal.

  Belle, who never looked out of the back windows at all if she could help it, spoke of the inhabitants of Linden Terrace as “squalid” and “disgusting”. Dorothea found the squalor, where it existed, pitiful, and was much more impressed by the cheerful thrift and hard work which she was sure predominated. She accepted the fact that their standards were different from her own, but she was far from condemning them wholesale on that account. When there was nothing else to see, she could look at the washing hung like dingy banners from iron poles outside the windows. They were banners, she felt, flying in the cause of respectability and cleanliness, but the washing in itself was not a very attractive sight, and when she had noticed that the big sturdy woman three houses down Linden Terrace had scrubbed her two younger boys’ corduroy shorts again, Dorothea was apt to turn her gaze downward to the garden of the house next door to hers on the left: the garden of Number Six Kirkaldy Crescent.

  It really was a garden, with a neat rectangle of lawn down the middle, and flower beds running the whole length under the high enclosing walls on either side. Only the far end was used as a drying-green, and it was hidden from the house by a trellis on which rambler roses had been trained. From her eyrie, of course, Dorothea could see it quite as easily as the rest of the garden. There was only a small corner hidden from her view up aloft, the corner by the back door.

  She was a little shy of watching the garden of Number Six. The Lenoxes were their nearest neighbours and though Belle had refused to call on them and would not even recognize them if she met them in the Crescent, Dorothea could not resist giving Mrs. Lenox or her pretty daughters a timid half-smile when she saw them. It was always returned, often with a comment on the weather, so Dorothea felt that in an unofficial way she did know them.

  To be caught staring down into their garden, watching them have tea on the lawn beside the ramblers on a fine afternoon, or picking flowers from their borders, would be dreadful. To her mind it was entirely different from looking at the people of Linden Terrace. She could not have explained why, but Dorothea had not a logical mind.

  In spite of her fear of being caught, she never could resist having “just a peep” at their drying-green. Such pretty things hung on the line between two stout wooden posts; even the dish-cloths were gay multi-coloured checks; and if one of the girls did happen to come out to take in garments ready for ironing—well, that was just a lucky chance. Even to herself Dorothea never admitted that it was the Lenoxes she waited to see, not merely their washing. The family had a fascination for her, they represented youth and gaiety and colour, all the things she was starved of in her own life.

  It was most astonishing, she thought, as she gazed downward into the garden of Number Six on this never-ending summer afternoon, herself discreetly hidden by the curtain, how much she could tell about her neighbours from their washing.

  There was Murray, the only son. He must be a great deal more interested in his appearance than Miss Balfour had always understood young men to be. His pyjamas were silk, blue silk that flapped richly and heavily in the wind, and he seemed to wear four or five shirts every week, his socks and handkerchiefs and collars were too many to count and, except for the collars, as brilliant as the flowers below them. As usual, a passing glance sufficed for Murray’s belongings. Dorothea’s real interest was in the feminine undergarments which blew airily on the line. She knew to whom they belonged. Mrs. Lenox’s were all white, exquisitely fine, but very plain. The schoolgirl Holly’s were plain too, but more solid, made to resist a considerable amount of wear and tear. But the three older girls had wisps of pale-coloured nylon, filmy lace, delicate ninon—“how they don’t catch cold—” thought Miss Balfour, even while she admired, and wondered what it would be like to go clad in such things.

  To-day, as she peered out, she saw that Willow’s special nightgown was out. Willow was the eldest, married to a young man in the Merchant Navy, and the appearance of this diaphanous affair of palest pink always meant that he was home from sea. In a moment of madness, Dorothea had once remarked on this to her sister, and Belle, after one swift glance of shuddering distaste, had pronounced her verdict that “the young woman” was shameless, and her husband probably greatly to be pitied.

  Dorothea had not agreed, but knew better than to say so. And yet—Belle was the married woman, not the old maid. It seemed odd that she should be so easily shocked, even though her marriage had been so strange and unsatisfactory, and of course, so very short . . . for six months after she had married Montagu Milner, Belle had returned to Number Four Kirkaldy Crescent alone, and had lived there ever since as if she had never left it as a bride. . . . No explanation had been given to Dorothea, nor had she expected it. Belle’s official title was Mrs. Milner, but in herself she was the older Miss Balfour, increasingly ill-tempered and finding something shocking in what, to her younger sister, was often only natural.

  But then, Belle would have said, Dorothea ought to have been shocked too, and would have been, if she had not “common” leanings, inherited through Mamma from those unfortunately plebeian grandparents whose part in the Balfour family history had always been resolutely ignored by Belle and Papa. The inference was that Mamma—and Dorothea, who took after her—were of coarser grain than Papa and his elder daughter, Dorothea had never minded this, perhaps because she had grown up accustomed to being slightly despised, and she infinitely preferred to resemble Mamma in nature as well as looks. Only—Mamma had had this one great advantage: she was necessary, really necessary, to Papa. No matter how cavalierly he might treat his wife, he could not do without her. Whether he had lost a collar-stud or the bottom had fallen out of his pet shares, he shouted for her as if she were a dog, and like a dog she would come running to him, to find what he had lost, pick up what he had dropped, comfort and help him in any way he needed.

  The rather tousled hair, the eager anxious brown eyes, the little pointed face, all heightened Mamma’s resemblance to a shepherd’s collie, and Dorothea was exactly like her, except that after Mamma died, Dorothea began to look like a collie that is lost. There seemed to be no place for her in life. Papa had never needed her, and Belle needed her, if anything, less than Papa had . . .

  And now they were all gone and she was quite alone in the world. It was a strange feeling, free yet rather frighteningly lonely, to know that she could do as she wished without criticism. She could look out at her neighbours as much as she liked, and a really daring idea came to her so suddenly that she gasped aloud. She could call on Mrs. Lenox. She could even invite her to tea.

  “Goodness!” thought Dorothea. “What would Belle say?” Then, in a rush, the realization that Belle would never say anything to her again swept over her in full force, and she was crouched, trembling on the window-seat of the old nursery, a little elderly spinster, alone in the world—and desolate.

  A girl’s voice floated out from a window on the floor below in the next house, a charming voice, soft, yet clear.

  “Rowan! Oh, Rowan! Be an angel and bring in my nightie! I’m sure it’s dry enough to iron!”

  The back door of Number Six fell to with its muffled bang, and as light footsteps crossed the small courtyard, Dorothea’s bowed head came up in time to see Rowan’s face, vivid with laughing protest, raised to call back to her elder sister above.

  “You lazy thing, Willow! Why can’t you bring in your own washin
g?”

  Willow’s fair head, pale gold as the pollen-sprinkled catkins of her name-tree, was thrust far out.

  “Don’t be so mean, Rowan. You’re down there and I’m up here—”

  “You’ll lose the use of your elegant legs soon, my girl,” answered Rowan, but the threat only made Willow laugh.

  “Go on, bring it in, like a dear,” she said. “I want to iron it before we go out, and Archie’s champing at the bit already—”

  “Well, will you lend me your white petticoat if I do? The frilly one—”

  Willow moaned. “You’ll tear the frill!”

  “Of course I won’t tear it. You needn’t speak as if I were Holly!” cried Rowan hotly.

  “All right, all right! And as you were speaking of legs a minute ago, I never knew anyone whose leg was easier to pull! You can have it this once—but for goodness sake bring in my nightie!”

  From her post at the high window next door Dorothea Balfour listened entranced to the girls’ voices, her own forlorn loneliness forgotten for the moment. This, she thought, was how sisters should be, at ease with one another, arguing, teasing, quarrelling if need be, on equal terms.

  She leaned further forward than usual to watch Rowan Lenox stripping the line, gathering the fragile half-dry wisps under one arm, tossing the pegs into a basket on the grass, all her movements instinct with the careless grace of youth and good health. Finally, with a dazzling pirouette and a swoop like a diving swallow’s, Rowan caught up the basket of pegs and turned to go into the house. As she did so, straightening her lithe body, she saw the sad little face with its pointed nose and lost eyes at the top window of Number Four; and though Dorothea shrank back instantly, she knew that she had been seen. A painful flush rose to her thin cheeks. She felt dreadfully ashamed of herself, caught like this peering at her neighbours, and only a few hours after Belle’s funeral. Somehow that seemed to make it worse.

  She crept away from the window and began to go slowly downstairs through the silent house.

  CHAPTER 2

  Rowan, letting the back door thud behind her, stood in the empty stone-floored passage which ran towards the area in front, with the big kitchen and various dark cupboards and small dismal basement rooms opening off it.

  “Poor old thing!” she thought. “How ghastly it must be for her, left all alone like that—”

  There was a quick patter of high-heeled shoes on the stone stair down from the hall, and Willow burst into the passage.

  “For Heaven’s sake, Rowan!” she cried in angry expostulation. “What have you been doing all this time? I won’t be able to do my ironing now! It’s a bit too much, when I promised you my petticoat too! I’ve a dashed good mind to say you can’t have it!”

  Rowan’s only reply was: “Do you know, Willow, I’d completely forgotten about poor old Miss Balfour. What selfish beasts we are!”

  “I don’t see why.” Forgetting her haste and indignation, Willow looked more closely at her younger sister as she stood in the shaft of dusty sunlight pouring in through the glass panel above the area door, and saw on her face that expression known to the family as Rowan’s Crusading Look.

  “I really don’t see why,” she repeated rather uneasily. “Mrs. Milner and Miss Balfour have always made it perfectly plain that they didn’t want to know us. Mrs. Milner used to avoid us as if we were a particularly dirty puddle she was afraid of stepping in, and—”

  “She’s dead now, and Miss Balfour is all alone,” said Rowan. “Think how awful it must be for her, Willow.”

  “Personally, I should think it couldn’t be anything but a blessed relief. You know Mrs. Milner was a bitch, Rowan. There was no other name for her!”

  “Here. Take these.” Rowan thrust the bundle of washing into Willow’s arms. “I’m going next door to see her.”

  “No, Rowan! Rowan, you simply can’t! You mustn’t! I’m sure Mummy wouldn’t like it!” cried Willow despairingly.

  “I’m going. Now,” said Rowan.

  She slipped past her sister and ran up the stairs. In a moment the front door banged. Willow, still clasping the damp armful of undergarments, followed quickly enough to see, from the dining-room window on the ground floor, that Rowan was standing at the door of Number Four with her hand on the bell.

  “They won’t let her in, of course, and she’ll come back a bit chastened, I expect,” Willow thought. “Poor old Rowan!”

  The same thought had occurred to Rowan herself, as she stood, hatless and in her gay red and white cotton frock, listening to the bell jangling far away inside the big almost empty house.

  As the seconds passed she began to hope that no one would come in answer to her ring: what could she say if she did see Miss Balfour? She had salved her conscience by coming so far—and at that the door opened slowly, just enough to allow a face like a white rabbit’s, with a quivering pink nose, to be seen against the strip of dark hall behind it.

  Her red-rimmed eyes, timid yet disapproving, looked quickly at Rowan and then away.

  This is awful, thought Rowan. She summoned all her resolution, and said, more loudly than she intended: “I—I suppose I couldn’t see Miss Balfour for a minute?”

  The white rabbit shrank away appalled, murmuring in a thread of a voice, “Oh, no, miss, I don’t think so!”

  “Oh—well—” With a sudden inward rush of relief, Rowan was turning to go, when Miss Balfour herself spoke from inside the hall.

  “What is it, Edna? Who is at the door?”

  Rowan stopped, and the white rabbit said: “It’s one of the young ladies from Number Six, Miss Dottie.”

  “If she has a message for me, you had better ask her to come in, Edna, and not keep her standing on the doorstep.”

  It is probable that Dorothea Balfour had never spoken so decisively in her life; certainly the effect on Edna was astonishing.

  With her rabbit’s eyes bulging, she opened the door wider, whispering feebly, “If you’ll please come in, miss.”

  And Rowan, squaring her shoulders, walked into the dim hall, still without the slightest idea of what she was going to say to its owner.

  Years before, when the young Lenoxes were still children, they had often beguiled wet afternoons in planning how to capture the stronghold next door, by strategy or direct assault. Number Four was the giant’s castle, the witch’s cave, the dragon’s lair, and Mrs. Milner, Miss Balfour’s sister, was in each case the giant, the witch, or the dragon, Miss Balfour herself the victim to be rescued from her wicked clutches.

  Rowan was the only one who still played this game. To her it had become a secret romance. And now here she was inside the stronghold, but the dragon was dead and buried and Miss Balfour set free by no human aid from her years of bondage.

  Edna had scuttled out of sight down the basement stairs, leaving her to go on alone, but after a few steps Rowan halted uncertainly, once more wondering why she had been such a fool as to come.

  The hall seemed very long, perhaps because it was so much darker than their own hall next door. Midway of its length it was divided across by a half-glass door with tall narrow panels of glass set in dark wood on either side of it. The only light there was filtered in through the fanlight above the front door, and fell palely down from the glass cupola in the roof. Rowan, blinking after the sunlight outside, saw a small figure all in black standing on the bottom step of the stairs, gazing at her.

  “I’m sorry. I—I couldn’t see very well, coming in from the light,” she heard herself say apologetically, and came forward to stand, once more tongue-tied, in front of Miss Balfour. Holly could not have behaved more awkwardly, she thought, furious at having uttered this inane remark instead of saying simply that she had come—but then, why had she come? To say she was sorry? It would sound so absolutely feeble, and she could not think of a single other thing.

  It was Miss Balfour who broke the silence. In her gentle, rather hesitating voice, she said: “Yes, the hall is very dark. But I suppose yours is the same?”
>
  Rowan could answer this. She seized on the topic eagerly. “No, it isn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “That bit in the middle where the glass door is—we haven’t got that. Our hall is all in one.”

  Miss Balfour appeared to be interested. “Really? I am sure that must make it a good deal lighter,” she said, and went on:

  “What sort of wall-paper have you in your hall?”

  “It’s a creamy-yellow one, quite plain. Of course, it shows the dirt, and lots of people said it was silly in town,” Rowan explained, suddenly quite at ease. “But Mummy wanted to open the door and walk into a bright hall, and not a dark cave, she said, and so she had it. But yours is a very good paper, much better than ours—”

  Miss Balfour looked at the sombre walls, papered from floor to ceiling and all up the stairs in a rich chocolate brown embossed with large flowers and leaves all of the same colour.

  “I daresay,” she answered. “My father chose it when he did the house up on his marriage, and it has lasted ever since. Seventy-three years.”

  “Goodness!” exclaimed Rowan, and added, “But haven’t you got—rather tired of it? I mean, I know it’s good, but—”

  “Yes, I have been tired of it for a long time,” said Miss Balfour with a faint ghost of a smile. “I think, do you know, that I shall have to have it re-papered.” And went on:

  “Won’t you come upstairs to the drawing-room and sit down?”

  Rowan, about to refuse, suddenly realized not only that Miss Balfour wanted her to stay, but that she had made a great effort in asking her.

  So instead of mumbling that she would have to go home, she answered clearly, “Thank you very much,” and followed her hostess up the gloomy stair, carpeted in the same brown as the walls, from which dark old engravings glared down on her head as she passed them.

  The drawing-room was at the top of the stairs to the left, on the first floor, exactly as in Number Six and all the other houses on this side of the Crescent, but apart from its shape—an L with the upright very long and the other leg very short—and the three high windows facing the oval of the Crescent garden, it was quite different. It was impossible to imagine two rooms more different than the Lenoxes’ drawing-room and this into which Miss Balfour now ushered Rowan.