by Ruth Rendell
“You flatter me, Guy,” she said, very sarcastic. “I didn’t realize we were on such intimate terms so early in our relationship.”
“Oh, shut up, Mummy, please,” Leonora said.
She took no notice. Guy could have sworn the old man—well, he was maybe forty—gave him the ghost of a wink. Tessa said, “I appreciate you must have a very warm, outgoing temperament, but if you don’t mind awfully, I’d prefer it to be Mrs. Chisholm for a while.”
He felt like saying that in that case she could call him Mr. Curran. But of course he didn’t. He said nothing, he called her nothing, he didn’t want Leonora kept away from him. They talked about drugs all through the meal, that is, the parents did. It sounded as if it was all rehearsed. They couldn’t know about him but they had made intelligent guesses. The father said dealing in drugs was a more despicable crime than murder or molesting children, and the mother said that, much as she hated the idea of taking life, in her opinion capital punishment should be introduced for pushers.
He was never asked back, but nor was Leonora forbidden to see him. No doubt, they knew this was something they were unable to enforce, short of moving away. Sometimes he saw Tessa doing her shopping, once coming out of the Gate Cinema. She was a very well-dressed woman, he would grant her that, and her figure was fantastic. She had those very thin long ankles that make other women’s legs look like carthorses’. But the lines were forming thick and fast on her face, there was a new, deeper one, each time he saw her. When he started taking Leonora about in a more or less official way, her accredited boy-friend, he was sometimes at the house without invitation. Then Tessa treated him with the utmost coldness or placed her little sharp barbs into his most tender places. It was as if she stuck those silver or copper or pewter daggers on the ends of her fingers into his eye sockets. He had to shut his eyes and bear it.
So he wasn’t training for anything then? How was his father? Where was his father? Did he think his mother would ever spare the time to come and see the Chisholms? He did realize, didn’t he, that once Leonora went to university he might not be able to see her for three years?
But soon after that they split up, she and Anthony Chis-holm, the little mews house was sold, and Leonora for a while was aghast, devastated by a divorce she had never foreseen. Her father had found another woman, her mother another man. Leonora confided in him that she hated them all, she never wanted to see her parents again, and he rejoiced in secret. Even then, young as he was, he understood the influence they had on her. Now that she wasn’t speaking to them, but longing to get away, find a place of her own, shake the dust of their thresholds off her feet, he knew she would come to him. He would have a house to take her to and they would be married. In him she should find mother and father as well as husband and lover.
She came round. The rift lasted no more than a few weeks, and suddenly they were all, so quickly, friends again, the two couples hob-nobbing, dining out in a foursome. Leonora was again talking about what Mummy said and Daddy did, and now too, incredibly, what Susannah thought and what Magnus advised. She called it civilized behaviour.
Guy accepted it, he had no choice. Besides, he had other things to think about and he told himself that, in spite of everything, he was sure of Leonora. One morning he realized he was a rich man. At eighteen he was much richer than the Chisholms would ever be.
He had phoned her every day for years. That kind of statement is never quite true. How could it be? He had tried to phone her every day. Most days he reached her. It was a kind of challenge for him or a quest, a labour of love.
When she was at university she said she didn’t like his daily phone calls, they embarrassed her. He never took that very seriously. In her holidays he phoned her at Tessa’s or at Anthony’s, wherever she happened to be living. She went on to teacher-training college and he tried to phone her every day at the students’ hall of residence. Quite often he didn’t reach her but he persisted. He phoned her when she went to live with Anthony and Susannah and when she moved into that room with Rachel Lingard and when she got the flat with Rachel and Maeve Kirkland.
Usually someone else answered the phone. He didn’t know why that was. When she was at her father’s, Anthony or Susannah would answer, and now at the flat it was likely to be Rachel or Maeve. It was a good many years since she had lived with her mother, and he hadn’t heard Tessa’s voice since the Portland Road house-warming party. But he recognized it as soon as he heard it. It was Tessa who answered when he phoned Leonora’s flat on the day after their lunch in the wine bar.
A languid, “Hallo?” Tessa was either languid or sharp, these moods alternating.
He said tersely, “Leonora, please.”
“Who is that?” As if she didn’t know.
“It’s Guy Curran, Tessa.” He drew a long breath. “And how are you after all this time?”
It was as if she had two taps inside her head. From one came a drawling, sluggish trickle, from the other a swift-splashing flow. She turned on the flood tap.
“I’m glad to get a chance to speak to you. Leonora is simply too kind and sweet to say what has to be said. Another girl would have got the police on to you by now. At least. Do you realize it would be quite possible for her to go to a judge in chambers and get an injunction forbidding you to pursue her?”
He didn’t say anything. He held the receiver at arm’s length, grubbed about for a cigarette. The voice chattered angrily out of the receiver. He held it in the hollow between chin and shoulder, lit his cigarette.
“I know you’re still there,” he heard her say. “I can hear you breathing. You’re like one of those heavy breathers and just as sinister. That’s the horrible thing, you’re sinister, you’re a kind of gangster. It’s appalling that my daughter should be associated with someone like you—these awful phone calls, day after day, this Saturday lunch thing, like a kind of endurance test. I don’t understand it, it’s beyond me, unless you’ve hypnotized her in some way.”
The only course might be to put the phone down and try later. He was thinking that when he heard Leonora say, “Come on, Mother, give it to me.” She had stopped calling the woman “Mummy” at any rate. “I’m sorry about that, Guy,” she said. “My mother’s gone out into the kitchen with Maeve. I don’t want you to think I’ve been complaining about you. It’s all in her head really. I’m afraid she’s got a very negative attitude towards you, she always has had.”
“So long as you don’t take any notice, my sweetheart,” he said.
She didn’t tell him not to call her that. “It’s hard not to take any notice of one’s own mother, especially if you’re as close as we are.”
The chill touched the back of his neck again. So the woman exerted a real influence. Leonora listened to the woman. Why did she want to be close to a person like that? Because she was her mother? He hadn’t seen his mother for seven years, let alone been close to her. It was something he couldn’t understand, this family unity, but he understood the results of it.
He listened to Leonora’s voice, which was as pleasurable as actually taking in the content of what she said. They talked for a while. She was going out for lunch somewhere on the river with her mother, stepfather, and brother, and, for some reason, Maeve, and meeting up with the ginger dwarf later on. The last week of the primary school she taught at started next day, then the long summer holidays.
“I’ll phone you tomorrow,” he said.
Her tone throughout had been very sweet and affectionate. If the evil influence or influences that put her against him were removed, the love she had once felt for him would return. He corrected himself. “Felt for him,” not “once felt for him.” It could never die, only be submerged. Someone had told her, was probably constantly telling her, that the ginger dwarf would be a more secure bet than he, a safe life partner, more suitable. That same person was poisoning her mind against him personally, calling him a crook.
It was interesting to speculate, or would be interesting if it weren’t so vi
tal to his happiness, how things would change if Tessa Chisholm—or whatever she was called now—Mandeville?—were simply removed from the scene. He poured himself a Campari and orange juice with plenty of ice and walked out into the walled garden. A wonderful summer they were having, sunny and warm every day. His orange trees in the blue-and-white Chinese jars had fruit on them, green still but turning, a lemony bloom on their cheeks.
The garden furniture came from Florence, bronze-coloured wrought iron, and on an island in the little round pond was a bronze dolphin. Clematis climbed the walls, Nelly Moser and Ville de Lyon, pale pink and deep pink, against the dark shiny mantle of ivy. Leonora hadn’t been to his house for ages. She had been coming, he now remembered, the previous summer and had phoned to say she couldn’t because her mother was ill. Tessa again. He didn’t for a moment believe she had really been ill. The woman was a strong as a horse. She ate like a horse too, for all that she was so thin. He imagined her now in the garden of some hotel in Richmond, eating at a table under a striped umbrella, guzzling avocado and roast duck and God knew what, those long thin gilt-tipped fingers busy with knife and fork.
It was more than possible that she had introduced Leonora to this William Newton. She was the sort of woman who would find a prospective husband for her daughter and bring them together. But he mustn’t think like that. He wouldn’t even put it into thought-words, the idea of Leonora marrying anyone but him. Tessa would. Tessa would be doing it all the time.
He had long ago lost touch with Linus, but Danilo he still knew. Danilo wouldn’t hesitate. A couple of grand was all it would take and Tessa Mandeville would be quietly removed from this life without Danilo’s having sight or sound of it, his hands clean, knowing neither the time nor the place of her death. He, Guy, wasn’t serious, of course. But why not be serious? Why make a joke of everything, treading so lightly with dancing steps on the surface of things? Why not confront the situation fair and square, confront the undoubted fact that Tessa Mandeville stood between him and his life’s happiness, kept him from his love?
With his glass in his hand, looking at its contents, the most beautiful drink in the world, the ravishing colour of an orange-pink rose, Guy lay back in his bronze chair and remembered. Long ago, nine years ago, when he first came here. They had been here in his garden and she had said, looking into his eyes, “I am you, Guy. Just as much as I’m Leonora, I’m Guy.”
She had meant they were so close that she was he and he was she. And then, very soon, all too soon, Tessa Mandeville had come between them. Killing Tessa would be too good for her.
She had married a man called Magnus Mandeville. Absurd name but not one you would forget. He was a solicitor, had in fact been the solicitor she had gone to when she and Anthony Chisholm were seeking a divorce. No wonder she knew so much about going to judges in chambers and applying for injunctions.
The Mandevilles had gone to live in some suburb on the outer extremities of south London, or perhaps Magnus had lived there before. Tessa had never worked, or not since the birth of Robin, who was two years older than Leonora, and he remembered Leonora saying she had got married as soon as she left college, which was when she was twenty-one. It was art school she had been at and she was supposed to know all about art. This had been important in his relationship with Leonora, or important in altering his relationship with Leonora.
When he looked back he could see that there had been a definite precise point when Leonora had changed towards him. Or, rather, when she had ceased to show him a devoted, uncritical love. Someone had put her off him, he knew that quite clearly. It had happened when he was twenty-two and she was nineteen. Then it was, when she came home from college for the long summer vacation, that she had seemed to stop wanting to touch him. In that August, which he had looked forward to desperately all summer, she kept finding excuses for not being alone with him, she had begun gently to extricate herself from his embrace.
The strongest possibility was that Tessa had found out he had been Leonora’s lover and indicated her violent disapproval. He had never thought of that before. Having that set-to with Tessa on the phone had wonderfully cleared his mind. The more he thought of it, the more apparent it became that it was Tessa who had been the prime mover against him.
He phoned Leonora as soon as he thought she would be home from school. This time it was Rachel who answered. Leonora had met Rachel at university and they had been friends ever since. Guy didn’t like the sort of girls who were overweight and hyperintellectual, who wore steel-rimmed glasses, took no interest in their appearance, and whose greatest ambition was to end up as head of Friends of the Earth.
“Off sick, are you?” he said. “You’ll never make it to the top that way.”
“I have a client here with me,” she said. “It happened to be more convenient.”
He knew what she meant by a “client.” “Some child abuser, I suppose?”
“How did you guess? Leonora isn’t back yet. I shan’t be here to tell her you rang but she’ll know. Surprise day will be when you don’t ring.”
Leonora came in before she put the phone down. “What’s she got against me?” he said. “What have I ever done to her, the bilious bitch?”
“Perhaps you’re not very nice to her either, Guy.”
“Have you had a good day?” he said. “Are you very tired? Will you have dinner with me?”
“Of course I won’t. I never have dinner with you. I have lunch with you on Saturdays.”
“Leo,” he said. Sometimes he called her Leo, and in the same tone as he sometimes called her sweetheart. “Leo, your mother doesn’t go out to work, does she?”
He understood that she was so surprised at getting an ordinary question from him instead of a plea to love him that she answered without thinking, she answered gratefully. “No, she doesn’t, she never has, I thought you knew that. She does voluntary work at some hospital down there. Would it be the Mayday Hospital? Tuesdays and Thursdays, I think. Oh, and something at the CAB on Wednesday mornings.”
“The what?”
“Citizen’s Advice Bureau. I think she got it through Magnus. And they both work for the Greens.” At least she was realizing the question was odd coming from him. “Why on earth do you want to know?”
“One of the people who work for me mentioned knowing her at art college. She asked if she was working and I said I’d find out.”
This utter fabrication was accepted. Leonora tended to believe what she was told. Habitual truth-tellers do. He was encouraged to press on. “It’s 15 Sanderstead Way they live, isn’t it?”
“Seventeen, and it’s Sanderstead Lane.”
“Where shall we go for lunch on Saturday? Let me take you to Clarke’s.”
“I’m just as happy in a wine bar, Guy. Or McDonald’s, come to that. I don’t really enjoy food when I know that what you spend would buy meals for a whole family in Bangladesh for a month.”
“Would it please you if I sent the cost of lunch at Clarke’s to Bangladesh?”
“Yes, very much, but I still wouldn’t want to go there.”
“I’ll phone you tomorrow,” he said.
When she was fifteen and he was eighteen he had made love to her for the first time in Kensal Green Cemetery. If you told people a thing like that—not that he did tell people—they’d say, How revolting! or How macabre! But it wasn’t revolting or macabre. Those who talked like that didn’t know the cemetery, which was really like a vast overgrown wild garden that happened to have weathered grey stones among the long grass and wonderful tombs like little houses. There were big dark trees and wild flowers and in the height of summer wreaths dying on new graves. The cemetery was full of butterflies, small blue ones and big brown-and-orange ones, because there were no poisons or pollution in there to kill them.
Where they were was so quiet and wild and beautiful, with long seed-headed grasses swaying and creamy foxgloves growing among the grass, with tall pink flowers he didn’t know the name of and moss growing over a
sunken slab, moss that had its own tiny yellow flowers growing on it, that it was like a lost paradise. There were bushes with pointed silver leaves and small firs like blue Christmas trees and overhead a great spreading tree covered with green cones. The smell of London didn’t come in here. It smelt like when you sniffed the jars of herbs in the health-food shop.
She was wearing a dress, very thin and soft and sort of smoky blue and mauve colours with a low neck and puff sleeves and no waist. It was one of the few hot days of a cold summer. She was wearing the dress and a pair of knickers and blue espadrilles and nothing else. When she lay on her back her breasts were soft and spread like little silk cushions. He laid her in a nest of grasses and scattered elderflower petals. He lifted the dress and drew it up to her neck. It lay there round her neck as a scarf might. She wasn’t afraid, she was very excited, and when he entered her she wasn’t hurt. He told her afterwards that was because she loved him and wanted him.
What Tessa said when she saw the creased dress all covered with green stains, he never knew. Perhaps Leonora contrived for her mother not to see it. It was when Tessa finally found out that things began to go wrong. If you loved someone like that when you were fifteen, if you loved him so much that though you were a virgin love-making didn’t hurt you at all and you didn’t bleed, that love didn’t change. It didn’t just go away, it was as much a part of you as your love for your parents or your brother, your love for yourself.