The Couple at No. 9(39)

Rose



January 1980


I was so used to it just being you and me that it felt strange at first having someone else in the house, sharing our only bathroom, our small kitchen, having to be extra polite about which of the four TV channels to watch. It felt like having a permanent guest and it was hard to relax. I felt the same about our last lodger, Kay, and those feelings had never gone away. I hoped to get a job when you were old enough to go to school, but until then the only way I could earn money was by renting out a room in our home.

However, unlike Kay, you took to Daphne straight away. She was like an aunt to you, and even though she was quiet with me, she chatted away to you, as if she was more comfortable in the presence of children. She sat for hours on the sheepskin rug in the front room with you, playing with your Sindy dolls. She even knitted your favourite doll a jumpsuit, in sage green and cream. You loved it.

I assumed she might stay in her room more often but every evening she came and sat with us, handing me a cup of tea even though she’d only just got home from a shift at the pub. Every week she brought back logs for the fire. She was thoughtful.

Daphne had a cash-in-hand job as a cleaner at the Stag and Pheasant so was out most afternoons, and you went to playschool three mornings a week. We usually sat down to dinner at the same time – Daphne liked to cook stews in one of my old brown casserole dishes that had been my parents’. Most days there was one bubbling on the stove, and sometimes, if she was feeling extra creative, with dumplings. That was mainly what she ate that winter: thick meaty stews. ‘It’s cheap and easy,’ she said, chopping the carrots so professionally I wondered if she’d ever worked in a restaurant. She spent ages in the kitchen in her baggy jumpers with holes at the wrists that I suspect she’d knitted herself, slicing up whatever meat she could get her hands on from the butcher, standing at the counter with one leg bent, like a flamingo. ‘Oh, I’ve had so many different jobs over the years,’ she’d said, when I asked. ‘What haven’t I done?’

Even then, at the beginning, when things were good, when I was oblivious to what lay ahead, something about Daphne intrigued me. Apart from that first night, we seemed to have forged an unspoken agreement not to talk about our pasts. But I found myself wanting to know more about her, yet realizing if I probed too deeply she might do the same with me, and that I might reveal things that could put us in danger.

What or who was Daphne running from?

But in those weeks, those first few weeks in particular, I felt more secure having another grown-up in the house. I felt cared for, and it was a lovely, unusual feeling. Something I hadn’t felt since Audrey.

It was a cold winter. Our leaded windows were opaque with condensation and there was a fine layer of frost on the internal glass. The stone floor in the kitchen was like stepping on an ice-rink – we could even feel it through our socks – but it was cosy in our little cottage, just the three of us, away from outsiders. Safe.

A few weeks after Daphne moved in, when you were in bed and we were sitting watching Hart to Hart on TV, she asked if I’d like to go to the pub with her one night. The most socializing I did was at the odd WI meeting with Melissa or when I helped out at the local church while you were at playschool, and even then I worried about whether it was too much, whether I was being too complacent.

‘Could Joyce and Roy babysit?’ she suggested. ‘We wouldn’t have to be back late.’

Joyce and Roy were the kind elderly couple who lived next door, a cottage similar to this but without the thatched roof. They doted on you and sometimes looked after you when I took part in the church bell-ringing twice a month. I trusted them. They weren’t gossips, didn’t ask too many questions, had one son a bit younger than me, whom they rarely saw, and no grandchildren of their own. They gave you presents at birthdays and Christmas, skipping ropes with hand-painted handles and Weeble sets, and when Joyce was in her front garden pruning her roses she always stopped to say hello, her face lighting up when she saw it was you.

I felt bad asking them to look after you just so that I could go to the pub. But Daphne looked so excited at the prospect, with her gap-toothed smile, her hair messily hanging down over her shoulders. She was the only other woman my age in the village whom I knew. What harm could it do to go out for one evening? To have a few drinks and act like normal women in our thirties, instead of two hermits?

So I said yes, and when I asked Joyce and Roy the next day they were delighted to help. They came over the following evening – a Friday – with a tube of Smarties for you, and I said you could stay up a little later to be with them. But my heart still felt heavy as I waved goodbye on the doorstep, you standing between them, Roy in his brown big-buttoned cardigan and Joyce in her floral dress, the light from the hallway spilling out onto the driveway. And then, when Joyce closed the front door, we were plunged into darkness. The air was so cold our breath fogged in front of us and frost sparkled on the ground. We clutched on to each other as we negotiated the hill into the village without slipping. Daphne was wearing her velvet patch coat, a black polo neck and flared burgundy cords, a long scarf wrapped around her neck, and I had changed into a long flowered dress and boots under the thick sheepskin coat I’d bought in a charity shop five years ago. I tried not to feel jittery, just the two of us in the dark, tried not to think about being watched from the hedgerows, telling myself nobody would think to look for me in Beggars Nook. I tried instead to concentrate on Daphne, my lodger, the person who – despite all the promises I’d made to myself after Kay – was becoming a friend.