The novel starts with Sylvia Manson, a married woman having an affair with a younger man named Terence Lambert. She awakens in his apartment during the night and decides to leave without waking him. She’s in no rush; she goes to his bedroom window and looks out at the neighborhood. She spots a woman walking down the street, and then a man almost running after her. He attacks her from behind, and Sylvia calls out to Terence because she cannot get his bedroom window open. The attacker is chased off when the woman screams and neighbors come out to the street to assist her. Before Terence can get to the window, Sylvia gets a good look at the attacker; Terence sees nothing.
Later, when Sylvia and Terence learn about other attacks on women in the neighborhood, Sylvia becomes concerned. She knows that she got a good look at the attacker, and she believes that no one else did because he always rushes up from behind. She would like to tell the police what she saw, but that would mean having to explain what she was doing in Terence Lambert’s apartment in the middle of the night, and such a threat to her marriage is not a risk that she is willing to take. Without telling Sylvia first, Terence decides to go to the police himself with the information about the attacker that Sylvia told him.
(This article about the novel The Witnesses contains spoilers about the novel and the film based on it: The Bedroom Window [1987].)
Sylvia’s and Terence’s decisions lead them into complications that neither one of them foresee. They are living in their own private world, having closed themselves off because Sylvia is not interested in revealing their affair or ending her relationship with Terence. They started with one big lie about the affair, and then they start telling more lies to keep it hidden. At first, their intentions about the attacker are noble: They don’t want to see more young women attacked and possibly killed. But they cannot continue crafting their own small world on such shaky foundations, and the ensuing police investigation is really a parallel plot line that eventually converges on their lives and forces everything to crumble around them.
The author switches points of view: Sometimes readers see the unfolding events from Terence’s perspective and sometimes from Sylvia’s. Inspector Quirke and Sergeant Jessup, the police responsible for the investigation of what becomes a serial murder case, are most often described from Terence Lambert’s point of view, but every once in a great while, the police detectives are given their own brief perspective on the crime and the evidence. Toward the end of the novel, Inspector Quirke and Sergeant Jessup are well aware of Sylvia and that she and Terence are at least acquainted. They are not quite sure of the connection between the two just yet. The following is an excerpt from their conversation about the case.
[Sergeant Jessup speaking here first.] “Lambert gave a detailed description of the alleged attacker, and it was later proved in court that he couldn’t have seen him at all clearly at the time.”
“Right. But the anonymous note gave basically the same description.”
“No evidence who wrote that, sir. Could have been Lambert himself.”
“The handwriting chaps think it’s unlikely Lambert wrote the address on the envelope.”
“He could have got someone to do it for him,” said the sergeant.
“Who could he have asked?”
“The girl friend.”
“The Manson woman, you mean?”
“It could have been, sir. She’s mixed up in it somehow, I swear.”
The inspector looked doubtful. “Not just the friend of a key witness?” he asked.
“I suppose it’s possible, sir, but somehow I don’t think so. There is something that doesn’t add up there.” (page 193)
By this point, Terence Lambert has become a credible suspect, and in noir fashion, it’s all his own fault. It started with going to the police to give a description that Sylvia saw, not him. But Terence takes it a step further by following the original suspect, Chris Henderson, thereby putting himself in locations where attacks and murders have occurred, sometimes with witnesses who can describe him and pinpoint his whereabouts. This turn in events puts a strain on Terence’s and Sylvia’s relationship because she refuses to give him an alibi to help prove his innocence. She will not do anything that threatens her marriage, even though she started harming her marriage when she agreed to start seeing Terence.
In the last paragraphs of the novel, Terence tries desperately to get help from Sylvia, to get her to provide him with an alibi to help clear all suspicion that he could be the murderer, but she refuses. She is willing to accuse him of physical assault because he grabs her hard enough to hurt her, but in so doing, she does the very thing she feared the most: She exposes her affair with Terence and her involvement as a witness for the attack on the woman in Terence’s neighborhood.
Her [Sylvia’s] eyes blazed at him. “You’re hurting me—let me go.”
“Sylvia, you must help me. Can’t you see? You must speak up.”
“Never,” she said. “How can you be so selfish?”
“Selfish? It’s you who’s selfish—a monster of selfishness.”
“There’s a train coming!” she cried, beginning to struggle. “Let me go.”
He felt her straining to get away from him, he tightened his grip, moved his hands closer together, sliding them up along her shoulders toward her neck, and he saw fear come into her eyes and felt a surge of power. His breath was coming in great hissing gulps.
“Help,” she screamed. “Help!” and he squeezed her throat so as not to hear her voice. Dimly he heard feet running, a whistle, hands wrenching him roughly back, so that he fell. Through a thickening mist he heard her say, “This man, he attacked me, he jumped at me from behind.” (pages 199–200)
Sylvia doesn’t realize that the police by now will have questions for her. She doesn’t realize that they are already aware of her connection to Terence and that she cannot claim he is a stranger to her.
The film adaptation The Bedroom Window doesn’t end on such a cynical—albeit realistic—note. The film’s ending is a Hollywood version of making everything right about a bleak story. I still enjoyed it, however, maybe as much as the novel. Even though the film follows the novel pretty closely, there are some glaring differences, which really make it easy to like both independently and for different reasons. Here is a list of just a few of the differences between the film and the novel:
◊ The film takes place in Baltimore, Maryland. The novel takes place in London, England, but this fact isn’t confirmed until page 129. I knew the author hailed from New Zealand, and I was pretty sure that the story took place in former British colony, if not England itself. But I found it a bit annoying that the setting wasn’t made clear earlier in the novel.
◊ Terence wants to help Sylvia in the film; he comes up with the idea of going to the police. Neither one of them ever send any anonymous tips or letters to the police. In the novel, it is Sylvia’s idea that Terence should contact the police about what she has witnessed, although he finally decides on his own to go to the police after protesting to her about the idea. Sylvia sends what the police call a “crank letter” using letters that she cut out of newspapers and sends the message via the post.
◊ In the film, Sylvia is worried that the assailant will strike again, but she soon forgets about this worry and has no intention of helping Terence in anyway. She doesn’t come across as someone who spends more than a little bit of time worrying about anything unless it could disrupt her already established life. Sylvia suffers some pangs of guilt off and on throughout the novel—until the prospect of losing her family becomes very real to her near the end.
◊ Terence Lambert works at Wentworth Development Corporation (WDC) in the film. His boss is Collin Wentworth, Sylvia’s husband. This adds some real tension to the story, but not nearly as much as the tension that is developed in the novel. In the novel, Terence is an accountant, like Sylvia’s husband Edgar Manson, but he doesn’t work for Manson. Their paths never cross.
◊ Terence has never seen the suspect, Chris Henderson, before he goes to the police station for the police lineup in the film. Henderson works at the docks in Baltimore Harbor. In the novel, Terence has seen the suspect (also named Chris Henderson) before. Henderson works at the garage where Terence took his car to be fixed before he sold it.
◊ Terence actually meets the female victim of the attack that Sylvia witnessed from his bedroom window in the film. They develop a relationship, and she helps Terence clear his name, which is definitely not part of the novel. In the novel, neither Terence nor Sylvia ever meets Chris Henderson or any of his victims. The screenplay for the film adaptation is really very clever at updating the story in the novel and moving it from London to Baltimore.
When I started reading the novel, I was curious about the title, specifically the use of the plural (The Witnesses). Sylvia is the obvious witness, and Terence tries to take on that role, but he is unsuccessful. He soon learns that it is difficult to be a credible witness, especially when dealing with police detectives who have a lot of practice talking to people who claim to have information about crimes. By the end of the novel, however, the choice of the plural is much more obvious.
◊ Others in the neighborhood heard a female voice, not a male voice, as Terence claims, coming from his bedroom window on the night of the attack in his street.
◊ There are many more witnesses than Terry Lambert and Sylvia Manson ever imagined to their comings and goings, when they are apart and when they are together.
◊ Julie Manson, Sylvia’s daughter, may have tailed her mother after her friend Barbara talked about seeing Sylvia out with another man. She might be a witness to her mother’s infidelity.
◊ The police detectives have tailed Sylvia and are themselves witnesses: They know that she and Terry Lambert are at least acquainted.
◊ Witnesses unknown to Terence and Sylvia have come forward to the police to say that they have seen someone who looks like Terry Lambert in the same locations where several of the attacks and murders have taken place.
The novel ends with Sylvia accusing Terence of assaulting her, but readers don’t really know what happens past that point, not from the author anyway. Given the tone of the writing and the way Sylvia and Terence have convinced themselves they are living in their own private world, it wasn’t hard for me to imagine that their world is about to come crumbling down. I like the way the story just stops because it left it up to me to imagine what was coming for the two main characters.
The Witnesses, by Anne Holden • New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971
List of main characters: Sylvia Manson • Terence Lambert • Edgar Manson, Sylvia’s husband • Julia and Marion Manson, their daughters • Inspector Quirke, police detective • Sergeant Jessup, police detective • Chris Henderson, principal murder suspect
The image of the front cover is from the first edition, as noted above. The page references in this article refer to this first edition.
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