The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Forster

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Rose Pendlebury has little in common with her Islington neighbours. Her street has been invaded by young, confident, upwardly-mobile people without, it seems, a care in the world. She keeps herself to herself, and only her husband Stan is aware of her bubbling anger, her terrible prickliness and her ability to take offence.

  But when Alice and Tony move in next door with their enchanting toddler Amy, Mrs Pendlebury begins to come out of her shell, as gradually her new neighbours undermine her traditional, cautious privacy. Mrs Pendlebury may not be ripe for transformation, or even happiness, but she is not too old to change.

  About the Author

  Margaret Forster is the author of many successful novels, including Lady’s Maid, Have the Men Had Enough?, The Memory Box and, most recently, Over; two memoirs (Hidden Lives and Precious Lives), and several acclaimed biographies, including Good Wives.

  ALSO BY MARGARET FORSTER

  Fiction

  Dame’s Delight

  Georgy Girl

  The Bogeyman

  The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff

  The Park

  Miss Owen-Owen is At Home

  Fenella Phizackerley

  Mr Bone’s Retreat

  Mother Can You Hear Me?

  The Bride of Lowther Fell

  Marital Rites

  Private Papers

  Have the Men Had Enough?

  Lady’s Maid

  The Battle for Christabel

  Mothers’ Boys

  Shadow Baby

  The Memory Box

  Diary of an Ordinary Woman

  Over

  Non-Fiction

  The Rash Adventurer:

  The Rise and Fall of Charles Edward Stuart

  William Makepeace Thackeray:

  Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman

  Significant Sisters:

  The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1838–1939

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Daphne du Maurier

  Hidden Lives

  Rich Deserts & Captain’s Thin:

  A Family & Their Times 1831–1931

  Precious Lives

  Good Wives:

  Mary, Fanny, Jennie & Me 1845–2001

  Poetry

  Selected Poems of

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Editor)

  For my sister Pauline,

  to satisfy Nathan and Ben

  The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury

  Margaret Forster

  Chapter One

  THE WHITE NET curtains moved slightly in the breeze coming through the inch or two of open window, opened at such cost, with such tuggings and pullings, never again to be satisfactorily closed. Such was the price she paid, these days, for a bit of fresh air. When the wind snaked through in the winter she’d have to fill the crack up with newspaper where it would rot and discolour and be disgusting to remove in the following spring. Always endless thoughts of season after season, of nights drawing in and out, each chasing the other in continuous movement. Better to be happy, touched by the drifting curtains, cooled by the air, diverted by what she, Rose Pendlebury, could guiltily see.

  The guilt was her own invention. Everyone these days was quite happy to live in greenhouses, to flash their all before everyone else and even wave to perfect strangers, flaunting their behaviour. The children were brought up to it, taught to run and jump from one end of these brilliantly lit houses to the other, with never a thought of drawing the curtains on their occasional nakedness. And the adults behaving like people on a stage, sitting down at big tables and eating in full view, then moving away to laugh and shout and be looked at. Rose sighed at such confidence.

  But it made a pretty show. Often, at night, she walked along Rawlinson Road, just to admire. Each house was different and yet the same. Everywhere a wild profusion of greenery twisted and climbed up white walls, the dark leaves lit by spots of light or tumbling beneath huge balloons of orange or white, floating bulbous suns that fascinated her. There were acres of gleaming tiles and glowing wood and never a carpet among them. And where did they sit when they were not prancing about? She could not see. Perhaps they walked for ever, like puppets on strings. It was none of her business what they did and she did not care, was only intrigued. They did not bother her, except in the garden. There was no escaping the threat presented there. Once, each garden had its high wall and what went on on either side was a mystery, a matter of small noises. She would never have dreamed of looking out on her neighbours from the top of her house. But they had got round that, built their terraces, raised up their patios, erected their new additions at the back until it was all as public as a railway station and twice as noisy. It was the parties held on these platforms that she found most unbearable. All summer long they were filled with great hordes of shrieking people who did not seem to know what sleep was. Every word, every laugh – and how they laughed! – could be clearly heard. She had no wish to eavesdrop, no wish at all, but knowledge of her neighbours’ business was thrust upon her and she resented it.

  Her husband, Stanley, said it was all harmless. There were few things in life that Stanley did not classify as harmless. It was his way out of every situation that looked as though it might involve him in some kind of effort. She had suggested he might have a word with their right-hand neighbours, the Stewarts, after they had had parties on the terrace until three in the morning on two successive June Saturdays. She was not asking him to do anything as vulgar as go and shout and complain in an unfriendly and unreasonable manner, but a quiet word, a gentle hint that after midnight they might at least go inside or modulate their voices, would not go amiss. But Stanley did not go. He did not refuse to go – refusing was too definite a step on his part – but he smiled and said ‘live and let live’ was his motto and that the weather was bound to break soon anyway. So she said no more. Never at any time did she consider talking to the Stewarts herself. If there was One thing she prided herself on, it was keeping herself to herself.

  She was aware that her standards were not other people’s, particularly in this street she lived in. Twenty-six years ago when they had bought No. 6 Rawlinson Road hardly anybody knew anybody or if they did they were quiet about it. It took her two years to identify who lived in Nos. 4 and 8 on either side, and even longer to recognize who inhabited 17 and 19 opposite. Gradually, over the years, she had fitted people into the other thirty houses but only with very few did she have any truck. She said good morning to some, but only with the Dalys at No. 8, their adjoining left-hand neighbour, had she ever had any kind of dealings. Mrs Daly had started it. Going out of her front door one day she had been quite alarmed to hear a voice say, ‘Cold, isn’t it?’ and she had looked over the privet and seen a tall, bespectacled lady going into her front door. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘yes, it is, for the time of year.’ Th
at had beer the beginning of an endless stream of pleasantries in the same vein. She came to depend on them, and when, after five years, Mrs Daly said, ‘Good morning, nice, isn’t it? We’ve the telephone men coming today, so if ever you need to telephone just you come in and use it,’ ‘Oh,’ she had said, ‘that’s nice, thank you.’ She never ever would take such blatant advantage, of course, as she was sure Mrs Daly knew, but it was neighbourly to offer. It pleased her. The invitation remained one of the nicest things that had ever happened to her and she was fierce in her determination to stop Stanley spoiling it. He wanted to go and use the Dalys’ phone one winter – it was long before Frank had one installed – when she fell and broke her leg but she told him furiously that the public call-box barely ten yards round the corner had been good enough for the last five years and was good enough now. ‘Whatever you think best’ had been Stanley’s motto for that day but he had taken his time about going. In the event, he had used the Dalys’ phone, for, as he related it, he had met Mrs Daly at the gate and she had said, ‘Isn’t it icy? I’m frightened I’ll fall and break a leg,’ and he had said, ‘That’s just what my wife has done. I’m off to telephone for the doctor.’ Oh, how Rose Pendlebury had raged at him! But the damage was done. The Dalys’ phone was used, if just that once. The next day a blancmange for the invalid had been presented at the front door. ‘Did you ask her in?’ she had questioned Stanley, terrified of the shame if he hadn’t. He had, but she had refused. Relief and pleasure had engulfed her.

  Now, the Dalys were dead, and below in the street the new people were moving in. She had, of course, known all about it though there had been no For Sale board – there never were these days, property was so sought after – but still it was a shock. She hadn’t thought it would happen quite so soon. It was April and Mrs Daly had only passed on at the beginning of March. Somebody had acted with indecent haste, that was clear, but who she was not sure. The Dalys had no children. It had taken several years of delicate inquiries to establish that they never had had any, but one of the most memorable interchanges of Rose Pendlebury’s life had taken place over the low part of the garden wall when Mrs Daly had confessed she had never been blessed and Rose had told her of Ellen’s death and Frank’s departure. It had been a totally revealing but utterly unemotional scene after which they had both plucked dead heads off flowers for a long time. There were, however, nieces and nephews and a few brothers and sisters so presumably one of, or all of, these had inherited the house and everything in it. Rose only knew one thing: none of them had come near at the end. A crowd had arrived two years ago for Mr Daly’s funeral and departed the same day, but since then none had been near. Keen enough to sell the house and get their money, but no thought for who gave it to them. When she stormed about this state of affairs Stanley said you never could tell.

  It was no use dwelling on the past. The Dalys had gone. No more nice chats at the front door or over the wall, no longer the comfortable feeling that in the middle of this invasion one’s own sort was next door. Those people down there in the street were not her sort. She could tell at a glance that they were the same kind as the others that had moved in during the last few years. It had begun with No. 23. One day a big skip had appeared outside the door and the wreckage had started. The skip was filled and removed, filled and removed, so many times she thought the house must now be a shell. Peering in her clever way through the windows every time she passed she saw that was just what it was, Every wall seemed to have been knocked down, every floor uprooted. Stanley spent hours working out what it must have cost. Ten months it took, and then a family had moved in through the bright yellow front door with its brass knocker and letter-box. They had been followed at regular intervals by other families buying other houses and doing the same kind of thing to them as those at No. 23 to a greater or lesser extent. They all had the same look to them, a look that Rose Pendlebury reacted to very strongly and aggressively.

  There were, she noticed, several slightly different features about the new arrivals. She had been, perhaps, a little hasty lumping them with the others, or was it that she had looked harder and closer than she had ever had an opportunity to do before? To begin with, there was no large removal van stacked with pine tables and brass bedsteads. Instead, a Dormobile came four times and discharged a mound of shabby-looking furniture that might have come out of her own house. Oh yes, she told herself, I’m no fool, I know my furniture is shabby and I can see the similarity. Nobody these days had three-piece suites and large wardrobes except her and, apparently, the new people next door. But they were young and looked like the others.

  Mrs Pendlebury moved away from the window as the last chair was carried in. Her legs ached with all the standing and her eyes watered. She sat down for a minute on one of the beds and looked around her with dissatisfaction. The room she was in was the spare room. All the rooms were spare rooms, she reflected, except the three they used to eat and sit and sleep in. Six spare rooms, all with beds. Even when they had bought the house it had been obvious the rooms would be spare. Stanley’s sister had been scathing. ‘I say what I think,’ Elsie had said, ‘and I think it’s silly, plain silly, for folk nearly fifty to buy a big house like this. What will you do with all the rooms? You won’t let them. Rose would never take boarders. You have to think of your future. And the garden – the size of it!’ Neither Stanley nor Rose had replied. They had waited until Elsie had returned to her plywood bungalow and then they had toured the rooms and breathed easier. They had had their eye on Rawlinson Road all their married life. From their two rooms in Stoke Newington they had visited the lovely squares in Islington on Sunday afternoons and picked out Rawlinson Road as grand but not too grand, quiet but not too quiet and convenient for shops and transport without being on top of them. The canal was near and it was only a short bus ride to Highgate where one could get on the heath or visit Kenwood. Stanley said it was an investment and Rose, who cared nothing for such things, was simply proud. It was lovely to have a house, a whole house, with space inside to wander about and not feel claustrophobic. Elsie had actually tried to suggest it was wrong for them to buy the house as there was just the two of them but Rose was not plagued by any feelings of guilt. They had worked hard for this house, they had paid for it in cash – £1,200 that had taken them twenty-five years to save, twenty-five years of rigid self-denial and discipline. They were entitled to it. What they intended to do with all the rooms was none of Elsie’s business.

  Frowning into a mirror that she had thought so splendid when she bought it but now saw was vulgar, with its plaster frame of violently pink roses, Mrs Pendlebury touched her hair and pinched her white sagging cheeks. She looked terrible, but there was no one but herself to tell her that she looked terrible and she did not take much notice of herself. Stanley was a hypochondriac, forever trailing off to the doctor with this and that, but she never went. She was sensible, she stayed indoors and went to bed if she had a fever, but she had no intention of taking pills and potions for what she knew were the incurable ills of approaching old age. She never moaned about her back or her legs. The only thing she was prepared to admit she ought possibly to do something about was her eyes. There was something wrong with them and if it was just that after nearly seventy years of perfect sight she at last needed spectacles, then she was prepared to have them. To ignore the real advances of medical science would be perverse. Besides, she missed being able to see everything she wanted to see. Stanley had been going around for years in a haze, unable to see the most essential things like bus numbers, and she had despised him for his dependency on other people. It constantly mortified her to realize how he plagued the life out of perfect strangers over such things.

  She went slowly down the stairs and into the back kitchen. The paper was peeling off the pantry wall again. Irritably, she stuck it back on, slapping it against the wall with her hand. It was a damn nuisance. Stanley said he would repaper it ‘presently’, but he never would. It had to be endured in its messiness like many o
ther things. She slapped it again then stood back to see if it would cling. Slowly, the paper began to curl and droop and she had to turn to the sink to control her rage. Stanley said these little things were sent to try us – but were they so little? This back kitchen had never been right. It was only a lean-to really, a back addition that had never been properly planned. The house was solid but the addition was flimsy, a miserable, poky little hole that she spent more than half her time in. She had nodded her head in approval when she saw all the newcomers making a point of tearing down their similar additions first. Down they all came at the first blow of a sledgehammer and in their place were erected splendid constructions of glass. We mustn’t complain, said Stanley. But why not? Why shouldn’t she complain?

  The garden was a consolation. Washing the dishes she looked out on it and sniffed and felt better. She had seen them admiring it from their patios and she had felt scornful that none of their money could give them what she had built over all these years. The oval of grass at this end hadn’t a weed or bit of clover in it, only a sprinkling of daisies at the top. The lilac and japonica bushes had been tended so carefully and trained so skilfully from young bushes that now they formed a hedge all along the left-hand wall. The apple trees and roses were pruned every season and the borders kept clear for the small flowers to grow. Yet in spite of the hours and hours spent on it, the garden looked natural. There was nothing stiff or geometrical about it. It was mature but gay, organized but artistic. The house might drive her mad, but the garden never.

  She promised herself a half-hour walking about in it after the dishes were done. She would manage it before Stanley came back, before he was there to bumble about and spoil everything, scattering his horrid cigarette ash everywhere. They were too much together since he had retired. She had known he would get on her nerves with his getting up at all hours as though she didn’t still have her work to do. Today, Tuesday, was the only day he went out on his own to the Club. On Tuesday afternoons they had a bingo afternoon for pensioners at the Community Centre (he always called it the Club) and he enjoyed that. He’d tried to get her to go but she was furious at the suggestion. She had always hated games, always hated get-togethers, he knew that. She wasn’t sociable. She had other interests – let him go if he needed it. She would please herself.