Arvon shortlisted entry- The Lady Next Door by Sarah Deacon

The Lady Next Door by Sarah Deacon

Sunlight streams through the fanlight at the top of the front door. In one pane, some imperfection in the old glass breaks it against the pale painted wall inside; a smear of ephemeral colour.

We always referred to her as ‘the lady next door’. She wasn’t the old lady or the sweet lady or the lady with the flowers. She was just ‘the lady next door’.

Opposite the transient rainbow on the hall wall is an antique coat stand. There are several coats nestled in its recess and a silk scarf drapes over an empty hook.

We knew her; don’t get me wrong. I often stopped for a chat on the doorstep, about the kids or how well the azaleas were doing. She had the emergency spare key to our house and I to hers.

At the base of the stand are shoes, all neatly paired.

She was in her 60s; not very old, not young. She had grey hair. She wore unnoticeable clothes from M&S and was quiet and didn’t complain about us.

She was unremarkable so she was just ‘the lady next door’.

Her name was Margaret Draper.

The floor of the hall splits, like arms in semaphore, one pointing straight ahead and the other reaching up the wooden stairs to the floor above. Downstairs three wide, high doors lead away.

When you see so little of someone it’s easy to not realise you haven’t seen them for ages. It was only when the postman asked us to take in a package he’d already tried to deliver twice that we realised. We both knocked, but I hovered on the front step while Dan turned the emergency key in the lock and went in. I stared at the antique coat stand in her hall, until Dan came back out and we closed the door, went home and called the police.

There’s a chill in the kitchen. There’s a chill in the whole house, as though it has been shut up while the occupants are on holiday, or as though the house is holding its breath.

There are personal items dotted around the clean, old kitchen cupboards: a vase, a novelty cruet set and an oversized teacup. The personal items feel impersonal; uninspired gifts perhaps, occasionally dusted.

There’s a milk pan in the sink, filled with water to soak. A cup sits on the countertop beside; the sticky residue at the bottom is beginning to moulder.

There’s a lot of procedure when someone dies. There are police, then medical people. Then the people who take the body away. The police asked if we knew of any family, but we didn’t. They said we had to wait for the coroner’s inquest before there could be a funeral and told me to find a solicitor to deal with it all. The solicitor asked if I would mind looking in the house for a Will or details of any next of kin. There didn’t seem to be anyone else who could do it, so I agreed.

The window in the lounge looks straight down the garden. Standing at the sill you can see the first sheltered daffodils beginning to shoot amid swathes of snowdrops. Even curled up on the squashed sofa cushion you can see the tops of the azaleas and the trellis that spring will festoon with flowers. And as though mirroring the outside, inside there is colour. Bright flowers twine across the fabric of the sofa and a collection of glassware in vivid blues and reds and greens scatters across shelves and tabletops. On the other sofa cushion tumble embroidery threads in vibrant hues, beside a part-finished cross-stitch. There is more colour in this one room than in the whole rest of the house. This room is fiercely alive.

There are two photographs in here. On the mantelpiece is a black and white headshot of a radiant young woman, taken as though she were a 1950s movie star. The other is a framed snapshot on the windowsill of the same woman, though several decades older. She is sharing a glass of champagne with another woman with high cheekbones and a thin, pointed chin. There’s an anniversary card on the table between them.

I’d never been inside her house before. Her handbag was in the lounge so I started with that. It was so quiet, it felt weird, like I wasn’t supposed to be there even though I knew it was OK. Going through her bag felt like prying but I found an old address book and a diary. She had really neat handwriting. My calendar in the kitchen is a mess, and none of it’s even for me, it’s all what the kids are doing or what shift Dan’s on.

I heard Dan next door, heavy footsteps on the stairs. It was loud in the silence of her lounge and I felt suddenly guilty that she’d had to put up with us.

I put everything back, just as I’d found it, and took only the address book home.

The door to the front room creaks when it opens, as though begrudging unfamiliar movement. It’s spotlessly tidy inside, yet slightly dusty. It’s a room for best. Beyond the oak table that dominates, it’s sparsely furnished. On one side of the chimney stands a tall bookcase, shelves filled with old hardbacks, long outdated encyclopaedia and ancient tomes on housekeeping. If you were to take down a volume you would find that most are inscribed: to Margaret love Mummy and Daddy, Christmas 1958; Happy Birthday Mum, love Margaret and Lou; to Meg love L; to Meg, Happy Christmas 1976 love L; to my darling Meg, love L.

As though to make up for the lack of furniture, stacked paintings line the walls. All are of fishing boats from the turn of the last century, battling out at sea, or tied up in the harbour. You might notice that it is always the same harbour.

Hidden amongst them is a photograph, formally posed, the legend at the bottom declaring it to be the lifeboat crew of 1906. The men are seated or standing with folded arms like a grammar school photo. One of them draws the eye. Behind the moustache and whiskers he has high cheekbones and a thin, pointed chin, like the lady in the anniversary photo in the lounge.

Hardly any of the numbers in the address book worked – people had either moved or died. The few that did answer were just people she had known like me, enough for a Christmas card each year but nothing more.

I went to her house again, venturing further this time, and found a filing cabinet in the spare room. There was a Will in it, leaving everything to her friend Louise Mantel.

I don’t have a Will. I thought at the time that I should get one, but the house and bank accounts are in joint names anyway, so I’m not sure it really matters.

The house is silent; the house is holding its breath. The door to the front room is firmly shut, the door to the lounge is slightly ajar, and the stairs lead upwards.

The coroner said it was a known heart condition that killed her and they let us have the funeral. I put an ad in the paper thinking someone might turn up who was related, but no one did. I didn’t know what to do with the ashes after so I took them back to the house and put them on the mantelpiece in the lounge, next to a beautiful old picture of a woman from the 50s or 60s.

The solicitors found out that Louise Mantel had died nearly twenty years ago, and we all resumed our hunt for next of kin.

It’s dark on the narrow landing, even in the middle of the day. Three doors run off it, mirroring the three doors in the hall below.

The back bedroom is the dumping ground. It’s the room where things with nowhere else to live have come to rest. The bed is made up but has not been slept in for years.

I went round for a couple of hours one evening to go through the papers in the filing cabinet more carefully. I didn’t find anything useful, but I did find a gold edged invitation to a reception at the Italian Embassy in London.

I was once invited to a do at the Mayor’s office, but that was for everyone at work, and I didn’t get to go anyway because Becky had a tummy bug.

I pictured Margaret as a young woman in an elegant dress and long gloves, gliding up sweeping stairs.

I doubt the do at the council was like that.

Somewhat incongruously there is a metal filing cabinet against the wall and by the window a cheap table supporting a computer and printer.

I came to like it at Margaret’s house. It was a place to escape to. I found an original 60s Biba dress in the wardrobe, though I couldn’t even get it over my hips. There were bits of paper with squiggles on it that I couldn’t understand and I fantasised that she had something to do with codebreaking. From old envelopes I found that she’d lived in quite a few different places, never one place for very long until she had come here nearly twenty years ago. I found one old letter addressed to Louise Mantel, showing that once they had shared a house.

A lot of the books in the dining room had writing in them. I thought it was such a lovely idea I wrote in the front of the Guinness Book of Records we got for Dan’s nephew last birthday, though we hardly ever see him so I don’t know that it will mean much.

In the master bedroom the curtains are drawn and only a small amount of light permeates the thick material, giving the room an air of twilight. It’s the bedroom of a lady of a certain age. There are warm slippers by the bed. The top of the dressing table is barely visible beneath pots of creams and unguents and a brush lies between them; a soft brush for thin hair.

The solicitors couldn’t find a next of kin, so they decided to sell the house and then work out who to give it to. We got someone round to value the furniture. He even threw in fifty quid for the ugly boat paintings in the front room.

There’s a notebook on the bedside table, kept for thoughts in the middle of the night when sleep proves elusive. It’s written in secretarial shorthand.

The sun outside has found a tiny gap between the curtains and draws a thin line across the pretty, blue duvet and the cold hand that rests there. The shaft of sunlight ends on a photograph beside the bed; it is the same woman as that on the mantelpiece below.

Eventually I ended up with one box of things to give to the solicitors to pass on. I put in the photographs that were on display. I put in the invitation to the Embassy and a couple of books with inscriptions in. I put in her diary and her purse and the cross-stitch she had been working on.

Downstairs there is a knock at the door. The sound rings through the chill of the house.

The plastic container of her ashes took up most of the box, so not much else fitted in.

After a pause there is another knock followed by muffled voices on the doorstep.

Sitting at home, after Dan had driven the keys to the estate agents, I looked round my house at the toys and cheap furniture and wondered if I had enough to fit in a box.

The silence of the house stretches, made deeper by the sudden sound.

There isn’t much.

Then a key slides into the lock, and the house prepares to breathe.