The Girl Next Door Read Online Free PDF

Rosemary was proud of walking up without getting more than slightly out of breath. They knew every inch of Loughton, which, when they were children, had been called “the village.” “I’m just going down the village,” you said when you went shopping.
    After the meeting at a dance, the remembering knowing each other as children, the going about together and getting engaged, they had married and bought a house in Harwater Drive, and later, when the children came along and Alan was doing well, a bigger and better one in Church Lane. The pretty fields and the woods that had begun where the best road of all met the top of the Hill and Borders Lane had all been built on, acres and acres, miles and miles, and called the Debden Estate. The wealthy people of Alderton Hill shuddered at the coming of this spillover from the East End of London. Living in less prestigious but still admired and sought-after streets, the parents of Alan and Rosemary and their neighbours also shuddered. Some moved away. Out, of course, out into Essex as far as Epping and Theydon Bois, only to be deterred by the coming of Harlow New Town. “Not in my back yard,” or NIMBY, was an unknown word then, but Nimbys were what they were.
    Alan and Rosemary got married at St. Mary’s Church in Loughton High Road, and Alan’s friend Richard Parr, who had also been in the tunnels, was his best man. A week later when Alan and Rosemary were away on their honeymoon in the Isle of Wight, Richard immigrated to Canada. He and Alan kept in touch for a while, exchanging airmails handwritten on flimsy blue paper. Making phone calls was far too expensive.
    Now great-grandparents—their second great-grandchild had been born three years before—Rosemary and Alan had sold the house in Church Lane, a house they had lived in for nearly half a century. They had bought it for eight thousand pounds and sold it for three million. They moved into a flat, a luxurious first-floor flat in Traps Hill, for they were fit for their age and with a shiver rejected the idea of sheltered housing.

    “ I ’VE GOT SOMETHING to tell you,” said Freya, their younger granddaughter. A social worker, she was in Loughton for a conference in the Lopping Hall. “I’m getting married.”
    Alan said, “Congratulations. Or should I say ‘best wishes’ when it’s the bride?”
    Rosemary said, “Is it David?”
    In a sharper tone than usual, Freya said, “Well, considering we’ve been together for five years, of course it is, Gran.”
    Having no champagne, Alan poured three glasses of sherry. It seemed to be turning into a sherry day. Freya looked at her glass suspiciously before she sipped the contents. It occurred to Alan that she might never have tasted sherry before.
    “Mind you come to our wedding. It’ll be sometime in July,” Freya said as she was leaving.
    “It used to bother me a lot,” said Rosemary, “her living in—well, in sin.”
    “That’s a very outdated expression. Her parents lived togetherbefore they married and so did her sister and Giles. Things have changed. Norman Batchelor lives with a woman he’s not married to.” Alan searched for a word. “It’s perfectly respectable these days.”
    “Not to me,” said Rosemary. “I don’t want the rest of this sherry. We’re drinking too much.”
    Alan said nothing. He had thought of taking Rosemary out for supper, maybe to the King’s Head, but her moralistic attitude, very much in evidence recently, changed his mind. “Do you think we’ve led a dull life?” he asked. “I mean, marrying early, two children, staying married, me working nine till five, you a housewife, gradually moving up the property ladder but never moving out of Loughton. We’ve been abroad, but only to France and Spain. We’ve never even been to America.”
    “What are you getting at, Alan?”
    She rarely called him by his given name. It was always “darling” or “dear.” “I just asked if you thought we’d led a dull