by Ruth Rendell
Going Wrong
Ruth Rendell
GOING WRONG
For Fredrik and Lilian
Contents
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
CHAPTER ONE
She always had lunch with him on Saturdays. This always happened, was an absolute, unless one of them was away. It was as certain as that the sun would rise in the morning, sparks fly upward, and water find its own level. He found comfort and reassurance in it when things were bad. Whatever else might happen to bring him doubts and make him afraid, he knew she would have lunch with him on Saturday.
Usually, when he went to meet her at one o’clock on Saturday, he was optimistic. This time he might persuade her to have dinner with him one evening in the week or let him take her to a theatre. She might agree to see him before next Saturday. One day she would, she was bound to, it was only a matter of time. She loved him. There had never been anyone else for either of them.
When he repeated those words to himself as he walked to their meeting, he felt a tremor of apprehension. His heart misgave him. He remembered what he had seen. Then he told himself for the hundredth time that it was all right, he was worrying unnecessarily. He held up his head and braced himself.
He was on his way to a wine bar quite near to where he had first met her. She had chosen it, knowing he would have picked somewhere expensive. If he arrived in a taxi she would remind him of his wealth, so he was on foot, having got out of his cab at the top of Kensington Church Street. He was wealthy by the standards of all but the really rich, and seemed a millionaire in the eyes of most of the people she knew. Lefty, “green” do-gooders, who thought there was something morally proper about not having a freezer or a microwave, about going on camping holidays and riding a bike. He could have given her anything she wanted. With him she could have a beautiful life.
She would come to their meeting by walking along the Portobello Road. Its picturesqueness appealed to her: the Saturday stalls, the hubbub, the people. That was what he disliked, it reminded him too much of the bad parts of his childhood and youth, of what he had left behind. Instead he took the long, austere Kensington Park Road, the wide impersonal avenue that led northwards. The trees were dark green and dusty with high summer. It was hot, the sun white on the pavements, the air above the tarmac distorted into dancing glassy waves by the heat. She disliked his sunglasses, she said they made him look like a mafioso, so he would take them off when he came into the darkness of the restaurant. He was hoping they would meet this side of the restaurant, she coming from the west, from where she lived on the other side of Ladbroke Grove. Then she would see he hadn’t come in a cab.
He glanced down the mews on the left. He couldn’t help it. though it hurt him rather, bringing a sweet and bitter nostalgia. In one of those pink-painted, window-boxed doll’s houses she had lived with her parents, the one with the balcony like a fire-grate and a front door white as whipped cream. It was as if she had chosen this place for their lunch today to torment him. Only she was not the kind who did things like that. The point was she had no idea it would torment him, she no longer understood how he felt, and he had to make her understand. He had to make her feel the way she used to feel about him when she passed the block of council flats where he had grown up, a few streets away in Westbourne Park. For a moment he wondered what it would be like to know that she yearned for him as he did for her, that the mere sight of a place where he had lived would bring to her a rush of memories and tenderness and longing for the sweetness of the past. He thought stoutly, I can make her feel like that again.
When he was fourteen and she was eleven they had wandered these streets. His gang. Not innocent children at all, tough kids, white and black, big for their ages, most of them, brilliant shop-lifters, inveterate smokers of marijuana. Those were the early days of his dealing and very well he had done at it, made a little fortune leading schoolchildren astray. They were rich, some of those school-kids, with parents living on the “right side” of Holland Park Avenue. His mother had never known or cared where he was so long as he didn’t bother her, and why would he? He was five feet ten and shaving, taking a girl of eighteen about, still going to school most days, but rich enough to forget about all that. Taxis were what he used for transport when he wasn’t driving his girl-friend’s car.
But she … He had loved her from the first, from the moment she came down Talbot Road and stood there On the corner watching them, four of them sitting on the wall having their first joint of the evening. She was small and very young, with a grave face, hungry for experience. The others weren’t interested but he went on looking at her and she went on looking at him, it was love at first sight for both of them, and when the joint came round to him he stuck it on a pin and handed it to her and said, “Here—don’t be shy.”
Those were the first words he had said to her. “Here—don’t be shy.” So gently he’d said them that Linus had given him his long Muhammad Ali look and spat in the gutter. She took the joint and put it to her lips, made it wet, of course, they always did the first time. But she wasn’t sick, she didn’t do anything stupid, just gave him that heart-breaking smile of hers that ended with a small giggle.
Her parents stopped it a month later. They stopped what they called “playing in the street.” It was dangerous, anything might happen to her. Of course they went on meeting, he and she, after school, on the way to school and the way back. There had never been a time since then when he hadn’t known her—gaps, of course, three and four months long, when she was at college—but never a real separation. No separation of her from him was possible, he told himself as he came into the wine bar and went down the spiral staircase.
He paused to take off his sunglasses. The place had a thirties theme and the music they were playing was a selection from Astaire-and-Rogers movies. All around the walls were photographs of old film stars like Clark Gable and Loretta Young and long-forgotten people that meant nothing to him. She was there already, sitting at the bar with an orange juice talking to the French boy who was the barman there. He wasn’t jealous—or at least only when it was reasonable to be jealous. He liked looking at her when she was unaware of being watched.
She was a very dark girl in the way Celts can be dark, which is not at all the way of Indians or Middle Eastern people or even the Spanish. Her skin was always brown, summer and winter, but now in a hot summer she was deeply tanned. None of her features was beautiful, except her dark blue eyes, but they added up to beauty, to something entirely pleasing and satisfying. They made you say, “This is how a nice, good, intelligent, interesting woman of twenty-six should look.” Her face in profile was what he saw now, the small straight nose, the chin that was slightly too big, lips that were a red rose petal, and its mirror image, the eyebrows that flew off into her hairline. Her hair was like a page’s in a Rossetti painting. Her mother had once said that, her mother. It was the darkest that brown can be without being black, hanging just below her ears like a metal bell, a fringe cut across her forehead. She was in white, white shorts to the knees, white shirt with big sleeves rolled up, a belt that was red, white, and blue joining them up but slack on her tiny waist. Her brown legs were very long
, long enough and shapely enough to wear thick white socks and running shoes and still look beautiful. Those absurd earrings! Black vases with double handles, like something out of the mummy’s tomb. They moved him, those earrings, to an unbearable tenderness.
The barman must have whispered something to her. She turned round. He would have given anything to see delight dawn on her face, to have seen her face as his would be when he saw hers. If only he could have deluded himself that her expression was not—dismay. Gone at once, wiped away by duty and politeness and the decent goodness that was so much a part of her character, but there first of all. Dismay. Disappointment that he was there already, that he hadn’t been late or sent at the eleventh hour a message that he couldn’t come. It felt like a long thin pin going into his heart. Then he deluded himself. He was imagining it. She was pleased to see him. Why else make and keep these regular Saturday arrangements? Look at her smile! Her face was suddenly radiant.
“Hallo, Guy,” she said.
When first he saw her, even when she had spoken to him, he found it hard to speak. For a moment. He took her extended hand and kissed first her left cheek, then her right. As he might kiss any woman friend. And he felt her lips move in the accepted way against his left cheek, his right.
“How are you?” He had managed it. The ice that held the back of his tongue frozen was broken.
“I’m fine.”
“Will you have a real drink now?”
She shook her head. Wine she would drink sometimes, spirits never, and she mostly kept to fruit juices and fizzy water. It was a long time since the days when, after school, they had sat on a gravestone in Kensal Green Cemetery drinking the brandy Linus said had fallen off the back of a lorry. You can drink a lot of brandy when you are eighteen and fifteen. Your heads are strong and your stomachs made of iron.
He asked the barman for another orange juice and a vodka and tonic. Somewhere in the world there must be perfect sun-ripened oranges without seeds, oranges as big as grapefruits and sweet as heather honey. Those were the ones they should have here to squeeze for her into a tall crystal glass, frosted white all over from a freezer, a glass from Waterford, precious, chased with leaves and flowers, which would be smashed when she had drunk the contents. Thinking of it made him smile. She asked him what amused him and began frowning when he explained.
“Guy, I want you to stop thinking about me like that. Stop thinking of me in those terms.”
“What terms are those then?” he said.
“Romantic fantasy. It has nothing to do with the world we actually live in. It’s like a fairy story.”
“I don’t only think of you like that.” He looked deeply at her, spoke in a slow, measured, and reasonable way. “I believe I think of you in every possible way a man can think of the woman he loves. I think of you as the nicest girl I know and the most beautiful. I think of you as unique, as clever and gifted, and everything a girl should be. I think of you as my wife and the mother of my children, sharing everything I have and growing old with me, and me being as much in love with you in fifty years’ time as I am now. That’s how I think of you, Leonora, and if you can tell me any other ways a man can think of the brightest star in his heaven, well. I’ll do those too. Does that satisfy you?”
“Satisfy me! It isn’t a question of satisfying me.”
He knew she had heard that speech of his before, or something very much like it. He had composed it long ago, learned it by heart. It was none the less true for that, and what else could he say but the truth? “Please you then. I want to please you. But I don’t have to say that again, you know that.”
“I know I’m not going to be your wife, I’m not going to be the mother of your children.” She looked up when the orange juice came, gave the barman the smile that should have been his. “I’ve told you enough times, Guy. I’ve tried to tell you nicely. I’ve tried to be honest and behave properly about this. Why won’t you believe me?”
He didn’t answer. He raised his eyes and looked sombrely at her. Perhaps she took this heavy look of his for a reproach, for she spoke impatiently.
“What is it now?”
It was hard for him but he had to ask. If he didn’t ask now, he would do so later. If not today, he would ask tomorrow on the phone. Better ask now. Better to know. He had to know what he must fight against, if he had an adversary. His throat dried a little. He badly didn’t want his voice to be hoarse.
“Who is he?”
His voice was hoarse. He sounded as if someone had him by the throat. She was surprised. He had caught her off guard.
“What?”
“I saw you with him. Walking along Ken High Street. It was last Tuesday or Wednesday.” He was pretending, in a breathless voice, a casualness he didn’t feel. It was not only the day that he knew, indelibly, but the hour, the precise time to the minute, the precise spot. He could find it if he were to go there now, as if their footprints were engraved in the pavement. He thought he could find it blindfold or in his sleep. And he could see them, the two of them, images petrified in his memory, their happy faces—no, not that, he was inventing that—outside the Kensington Market.
“A little runt of a fellow,” he said, and now he was savage. “Ginger hair. Who is he?”
She hadn’t wanted him to know. That gave a scrap of comfort. Her cheeks reddened. “His name’s William Newton.”
“And what is he to you?”
“You’ve no right to ask me these questions, Guy.”
“I have a right. I’m the only person on earth who has a right.”
He thought she might dispute that but she only said sulkily,
“Okay, but don’t make such a big thing of it. Remember, you did ask, so you have to accept the answer.” Did she know how that made his heart fall through his body? He looked at her, holding his breath. “I’ve known him for about two years, as a matter of fact. We’ve been going about together for a year. I like him very much.”
“What does that mean?”
“What I say. I like him a lot.”
“Is that all?”
“Guy, this is very hard for me to talk about when you look at me like that. William is becoming important to me and I am to him. There, now you know.”
“Is he your lover?”
“Does it matter? Yes. Yes, of course he is.”
“I don’t believe it!”
She tried to say it lightly. “Why not? Aren’t I attractive enough to have a lover? I’m only twenty-six, I’m not bad-looking.”
“You’re beautiful. I don’t mean that. I mean him. Look at him. Five feet six, sandy-haired, a face like a zebra without the stripes—and what’s a zebra without stripes? What does he do? Has he got any money? No, don’t answer that. I could see he hasn’t. A poverty-stricken ginger dwarf—I don’t believe it. What do you see in him? For Christ’s sake, what do you see in him?”
She said equably, looking at the menu, not even looking up, “Do you really want to know?”
“Certainly I want to know. I’m asking you.”
“Conversation.” She lifted her eyes. He thought she sighed a little. “If he talked to me all day and I never heard another person talk as long as I lived, I’d never get bored. He’s the most interesting man I ever knew. There, Guy, you did ask.”
“And I’m boring?”
“I didn’t say that. I said that to me you’re not as interesting as William. Not just you, no one is. You asked me why I go about with him and I told you. I fell in love with William for the things he says and—well, for his mind, it’s as simple as that.”
“You fell in love?” Oh, the horror of uttering those words! He would have expected to die before he spoke them, or that speaking them would kill him. He felt weak and his hands went out of control. “You’re in love with him?”
She said formally, “I am.”
“Oh, Leonora, you can say that to me?”
“You asked me. What am I supposed to do? Tell lies?”
Oh yes, tell lies;
tell me any lie rather than this awful truth. “And you go to bed with him for his conversation?”
“You want to make it sound ridiculous, I know that, but, yes, oddly enough, in a way I do.”
She ordered melon with prosciutto without the prosciutto, followed by pasta. He had gambas and tournedos Rossini. He made an effort to speak, to say anything, and succeeded only in sounding like some scolding chaperon. “I wish you’d have a decent meal for once. I wish you’d have something expensive.”
He could tell she was relieved he had changed the subject, or she thought he had. The truth was he couldn’t bear to go on talking about it. The words hurt. Her words stayed in his ears, pressing and drumming: I fell in love with him.
“As it is,” she said, “I don’t like you paying. I don’t belong in a world where men pay for women’s food just as a matter of course.”
“Don’t be absurd. It’s not a question of sex, it’s a question of me earning about fifty times what you do.” He shouldn’t have said it, he knew that as soon as he had. It was a fault with him, which he recognized, to be unable to resist expressing pride in his success as a self-made man. The frown was back on her face, drawing together those winged eyebrows. He began to feel angry as well as miserable. That was the trouble; when they were together, on these rare occasions, always in the glare of noon, always in public, he was unable to keep his temper.
“I know you hate what I do for a living,” he said, staring at the two frown lines, the steady blue eyes. “It’s because you don’t understand. You don’t know the world we live in. You’re an intellectual and you think everyone’s got your taste and knows what’s good and what isn’t. It’s something you can’t understand, that ordinary people just want ordinary pretty things in their homes, things they can look at and—well, identify with if you like, things that aren’t pretentious or phony.”
“‘His position towards the religion he was upholding was the same as that of a poultry keeper towards the carrion he feeds his fowls on: carrion is very disgusting but fowls like it and eat it, therefore it is right to feed fowls on carrion.’”