Authors: Ruth Rendell
Going Wrong (7 page)
“You can’t be serious, Leonora.”
She was serious. She’d see him on Saturday. Where would he like to have lunch?
That was long before he began asking himself what the reason for it could be. He hadn’t even considered it could have had something to do with his offer of a loan or with his ways of making a living, still less with Con Mulvanney. By then the Con Mulvanney affair was six, seven months in the past. He told himself that she was upset about the move, the problems she and Rachel had been having in getting contracts signed, exchanged, a completion date decided on. In a month or two. when they had moved into the flat in Portland Road, things would be different. She would come back to him.
Some might say she had never gone away. He began telling himself she hadn’t. He saw her regularly, there was no one else for her and no one serious for him, no one that counted. He phoned her every day, much easier now she had a home of her own and her own phone. They had lunch on Saturdays. Every day he heard her voice and once a week he saw her. There were couples he knew who didn’t see each other as often as that. If you told anyone you saw your girl-friend once a week and phoned her every day, they would say you were going steady. He reassured himself in this fashion, he comforted himself.
But a man can’t be expected to live celibate and there were other girls. Naturally, there were. There wouldn’t have been if she hadn’t withheld herself. Give him the chance and he would be the most constant lover, the most faithful of husbands. He never told her about the girls, she didn’t ask, and he didn’t ask her if there were other men. But he had taken it for granted that though he had to have a girl-friend, he was a man; she didn’t have to have a boy-friend. She could live without sex.
“A fine example of the double standard,” said Rachel, speaking of another couple they knew.
It wasn’t quite like that. He made this compromise because he couldn’t face a starker reality. He convinced himself there was no starker reality. This was reality: that she wasn’t very highly sexed; for companionship she preferred the company of women. But she loved him—why else would she talk to him every day and have lunch with him every Saturday?
One day, he had thought, things will change. She’s enjoying her freedom, she likes supporting herself, doing her job, trying to run a household on a shoestring, putting those absurd principles of hers into practice. But one day the novelty will have worn off. She’ll want to get married,
all
women want to get married, and it was him she’d marry. In a way it was as if they were engaged, betrothed since childhood, the way some of those Asian people were. These days a girl wanted to prove herself, show she could be as self-reliant as a man, before doing what all women do, settling down with a man. He even said as much one Saturday when, after lunch, he went back to the new flat with Leonora.
The stairs they had to climb were incredible. He wouldn’t have believed so many London flats were without lifts. Rachel was there in one of her typical designer outfits of ancient skirt from a Monsoon sale (probably the first-ever Monsoon sale) and grey Oxfam jumper. He looked at their house-plants and their posters, their Reject Shop crockery and the sofa they’d bought off a pavement in the Shepherds Bush Road, and after a while he’d made that remark about women proving themselves.
“You’re a Victorian, you know, Guy,” said Rachel. “The last one. You ought to be in a museum. The Natural History Museum, d’you think, Leonora? Or the V and A?”
“No, you’ve got me wrong,” he said, trying to keep his temper, catching sight in a fly-spotted mirror of his young handsome face, his thin athletic figure—a Victorian! “You’ve misunderstood. I believe women are equal to men. I know women need to have careers and their own money and a job to go back to after they’re married. I know what women want.”
They screamed with laughter. They clutched each other. Rachel said something about Freud. He still didn’t know what he’d said that was wrong or funny. After a while it didn’t bother him much because it was Rachel who’d made the remark, not Leonora. And he laughed at Leonora over Saturday lunch when she reproved him for saying Rachel’s trouble was sour grapes.
He was passing through a long phase of
knowing
she’d come round to marrying him one day. The possibility of her meeting someone else never really occurred to him. Or rather, with a chill like the first frost on the air of autumn, the possibility would occur and he would phone her to reassure himself. Not to explain his feelings, for they were only feelings, never as strong as suspicions, but to listen to her voice and attempt to detect in it some change. And on Saturday he would watch her and listen to the inflexions of her voice, on the watch for some subtle alteration. She was always the same, wasn’t she?
She talked as she always did about the old times, about their youth, and then about her family and her girl-friends, what they’d been doing and saying. None of it interested him, but he liked to hear her talk. It was funny really what she’d said about this William Newton’s conversation when she hadn’t really much conversation herself. There was never a word from her about TV or music or the latest West End hit or fashion or sport. He tried to imagine the content of this fabulous conversation she had with Newton, but imagination failed him.
It was now a week since he had seen her with Newton. He was on the other side of Kensington High Street, crowded traffic-laden Kensington High Street, walking in the direction of Church Street, and they had been on the other side hand in hand. His Leonora and a skinny red-haired fellow, not much taller than she was.
Hand in hand. He had felt a rush of blood to his head, felt his face grow red as if he were embarrassed, as if he were
ashamed.
Passionately, he hadn’t wanted them to see him, and they hadn’t. Afterwards, having a drink at home, he had thought of it as one of the worst shocks of his life, comparable to the one he had received on the day when that woman came to his house and told him about Con Mulvanney.
“You aren’t looking too good,” said Danilo.
“I’m perfectly okay.”
For a moment Guy felt affronted. In his new Ungaro jacket and thin Perry Ellis sweater he had been pleased with his appearance. It wasn’t his habit to spend much time in front of the mirror, a quick glance was enough to convey the desired impression of deep tan, sepia brush of shadow on the hard jaw-line, white teeth, a lick of black hair. And the hard, muscular, yet thin, body shape. But that glimpse, caught as he left the house ten minutes before, had shown him something else, something tired and worn perhaps, something
haggard.
“I’ve been under a bit of pressure,” he said. “My migraine’s been coming back.”
“You want to eat feverfew.”
“What the hell is feverfew?”
“God knows. I read about it in one of Tanya’s papers. She’s into all this alternative stuff. Seriously, though, you don’t look too good.”
They were in a restaurant in that expensive region round the back of Sloane Square. Danilo was a short spare leonine-faced man with a big head and yellowish-brown eyes like an animal’s, a fierce small carnivore. Though he was no more than five feet four, some inches shorter than William Newton, and had longish springy sandy hair, Guy would never have called him a ginger dwarf. Danilo wore a very casual but very expensive suit of nearly black seersucker with the jacket sleeves rolled up to show the blue silk lining. He had on a blue shirt with fine dark green stripes but no tie. His two rings were of white gold, one set with a round boss of lapis, the other a square block of jade. A few years back, when it was still possible. Danilo had carried on a very profitable business importing imperial jade from China. That was where Guy’s cuff-links had come from. Danilo was not Spanish or of South American origin and his given name was really Daniel, but there had been no less than five Daniels in his class at primary school, so he had rechristened himself. As well as an importer of various illegal substances, Danilo was a one-remove murderer. Or so Guy believed.
The only area in which Danilo wasn’t macho was drink. He had a spritzer in a tall glass. Guy drank more than he ate. He tended to do that, though he ate as well, a fine thick strip of Scottish fillet steak, brought to the table whole, charred outside, blue in, divided into two for them with one dextrous stroke of the knife.
Danilo talked about the villa in Granada he had sold and the house he had bought in the Wye Valley, a Welsh castle with thirty acres, which he intended to furnish with the contents of a Swedish baroque manor-house. There was an order prohibiting the removal of any of these tables and chairs and pictures from Sweden, but Danilo was fixing things to get around that. He wasn’t a particularly self-centred man, and if he was callous, he was not hard-hearted to his friends. This invitation had not been extended for him to talk about himself.
“How’s Celeste, then? That still on?”
Guy lifted his shoulders. Any mention of Celeste always embarrassed him.
“The works of art—keeping you in the style to which you’re accustomed?”
“I haven’t got any money worries, Dan,” said Guy. “That’s not a problem. You and I, that’ll never be a problem with us, right?” They had once said to each other, years ago, that a man was only half a man if he couldn’t make himself rich.
“Then it has to be little Miss Leo.”
Guy wouldn’t have allowed anyone else to call Leonora “little Miss Leo” but he minded Danilo’s doing it less than he would some other people. Danilo loved her too, in a more brotherly way, of course, and he hadn’t seen her for years, but he still retained for her that tender regard which is born out of a nostalgia for old wild times. She had been more skilful at nicking stuff off Boots’s counters than any male companion of theirs. Once, in a single swoop, she had pocketed an electric toothbrush, a hair dryer, and a set of heated rollers. Thinking of that reminded Guy of another companion of theirs and helped him put off the moment.
“You ever hear from Linus?”
Danilo laughed. “That one, he came to a bad end. Well, I would reckon, I don’t
know.
Someone told me he went to Malaysia and they hung him for having a little bit of weed on him.”
“You believe that?”
“No, I don’t believe most of what I’m told. What’s with Leonora then? Come on, you’re going to tell me, you might as well come out with it. She getting married, is that it?”
It was unpleasantly near the bone. He said stoutly. “She won’t do that. Well, not unless it’s to me. I want to ask you, Dan, I mean, if I want to …” Guy looked round. There was no one within earshot, but he lowered his voice, “… get someone out of the way, could you—well, fix things?”
The irises of the yellow eyes didn’t change but the pupils did. They seemed to elongate, becoming black stems instead of spots. Danilo touched a red tongue to his thin lower lip.
“The boy-friend?” he said.
Guy was taken aback. “How d’you know there’s a boyfriend?”
“There’s always a boy-friend. You want him wasted?”
Again Guy made that impatient gesture with his shoulders. “I don’t think so. I don’t know.” He saw that table in the hotel again, planted Maeve there instead of old Mrs. Chisholm, put William Newton in the place of Janice and her fiancé. “There’s someone poisoning her mind against me, Dan, but I don’t know who. I don’t know which one. I thought I did. If I knew, I’d … I
just don’t know.”
“It can be done,” Danilo said calmly. “For a friend I could get a nice neat job for three grand.”
“And ten nice neat jobs for thirty grand? I can’t have a massacre, can I? I can’t blast the lot of them off the face of the earth. Dan, I know there’s just one of them that’s turning her against me, one or at the most two, one or two she wants to please and be in good with. They’ve told her every lie they can fabricate about me.”
“The fiancé it’ll be.”
“I don’t think so.
I don’t know.
Christ, if I only knew. I’m all sorts of a fool, Dan. I’ve brought you here for bloody nothing. I don’t know who to name to you. I’ve brought you here for nothing.”
“The steak was magic,” said Danilo. “I’ll break my rule and have a small Chivas Regal.”
Guy said, “Dan, why did you say that? Why did you say that about Newton?”
“What did I say?”
“You called him ‘the fiancé.’”
“You must have said.”
“I didn’t. I said she wasn’t, she wouldn’t. I mean, this Newton, he exists, of course he does, but he’s just a chap takes her about, he’s no more to her than Celeste is to me.”
Danilo gave him a hard look, penetrating but not unkind. “Okay, I remember now. Tanya told me. She saw it in some paper. Yesterday or the day before. She said to have a look at this and wasn’t it the Leonora Chisholm I know. It said the usual stuff about the engagement being announced and the marriage shortly to take place. Leonora Chisholm and William Newton. That’s how I know the guy’s name, it must be, you never told me. That’s why I thought it was him you wanted disappeared.”
G
uy’s bed was a four-poster, japanned, with canopy in the Chinese style, made by the firm of William Linnell in 1753. Gilded flying dragons seemed just to have alighted on the curving scarlet horns of its pagoda-like top. Its curtains were of yellow silk. There was one very much like it in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The bedroom walls were covered with a Shiki silk paper. There was no carpet on the wood-block floor but Chinese pillar rugs with dragons and animal masks and cloud motifs.
At eight-thirty on Saturday morning Guy was in his four-poster bed with Celeste Seton. She was still asleep but he was awake, contemplating the making of coffee, eating some small light thing, as yet undecided on, and then going for an hour or two to his health club. Guy looked at Celeste’s exquisite face on the pillow, like a precious delicate bronze, and thought how beautiful she was but avoided otherwise thinking about her. As soon as he thought about her he was filled with guilt. The idea that he loved one woman and used another for sexual purposes was shameful and abhorrent to him.