by Ruth Rendell
He told them about the restaurant in Stratton Street and suggested they join him and Celeste. Newton said he didn’t think so, thanks. Guy’s eyebrows went up. Well, had they eaten or hadn’t they? They had to eat.
Guy thought a ghost of a smile crossed Newton’s face at that remark, he couldn’t think why. Newton was a bit taller than he remembered, by no means a particularly short man, though the horsy face and ginger hair were just as he recalled them. And he was wearing glasses. Guy thought that any young person with a scrap of self-esteem who had trouble with his eyes would have gone into contact lenses.
“We eat at home, Guy,” Leonora said. “We had something earlier.”
“That must be hours ago.”
“We’ll come with you and have something cheap,” she said. “We’ll have pasta, just one course.”
She wanted to be with him! Now they’d met she couldn’t bear to go straight home! She could see him in contrast to Newton. She could see him with Celeste. He felt a great warmth and affection for Celeste quite suddenly and he took her hand. The gesture was not lost on Leonora, who looked at their joined hands but did not take Newton’s. When they got to the restaurant the two women went straight to the ladies’ cloakroom. He was left alone with Newton and girded himself for a fight or a silence.
But Newton, who Leonora had said at lunch on Saturday was something at the BBC, a producer of documentaries on social questions or something equally boring, began to talk about the film they had just seen. He asked if Guy had liked it and why. Guy hadn’t much liked it but he found it hard to say why not, so he changed the subject by asking Newton if he liked Paris, if he had been there recently and would he have liked to have been there for the 200-year anniversary of the Revolution. He lit a cigarette because that helped him concentrate.
Newton didn’t wave the smoke away or anything like that, but he moved his chair a little. To Guy’s surprise he had a drink, the same gin and tonic as Guy himself, instead of alcohol-free beer, which might have been expected. He’d been to Paris in the spring, he said, to see the Gauguin exhibition, which he began to describe and praise. Guy wondered if this was designed to get at him, a snide attack on his hand-done original-oil-paintings enterprise. Newton seemed to see that he was bored, stopped talking about Gauguin and said Paris would be too crowded, and anyway he usually went to Scotland for a couple of weeks in August, though he wouldn’t be doing that this year.
Guy knew why he wouldn’t be doing it this year. Why he thought he wouldn’t be. Where had the women got to? They had been away ten minutes. Perhaps they were scratching each other’s eyes out somewhere over him. Scotland in August meant only one thing, as far as he knew. He had to find something to talk to the man about.
“Shoot, do you?”
“Only in self-defence,” said Newton, “and no grouse has attacked me yet.”
Whoever said that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit was right, thought Guy. “It’s surprisingly easier to become a good shot than you might think. There’s something very satisfying when you bring down your first bird.”
“If that’s the way you look at things, yes, I expect it is. Considering the stalwart band of thickies who do it so excellently, it must be. I shouldn’t care to shoot birds or animals. The fact that they’ve been bred for the purpose of being shot rather makes things worse.”
“What would you like to shoot then? People?” Guy laughed rather loudly at his own joke.
“I’ve managed to live for thirty years in reasonable contentment without shooting anything, Guy, and I expect I can go on in the same way for another thirty. A death-dealing banging about doesn’t appeal to me.”
“A man should be able to handle a gun,” Guy said. “I belong to a rifle club. Of course we shoot at targets.”
Newton slightly inclined his head, the way a bored person does who doesn’t really want to be rude but doesn’t care much either. Guy said, “The girls have been a long time.” Another nod from Newton. Guy didn’t know what made him think of it, but having thought of it, he felt an unexplainable surge of excitement. “Ever done any fencing?” he said.
Now Newton turned to look him fully in the face. He looked right into Guy’s eyes. The smile was there again, very slight, somehow in the eyes and inside his head rather than in any movement of the lips. Guy saw that his eyes, which he would have remembered as greyish or fawnish out of Newton’s presence, were in fact a deep blue-grey, of that shade which is less like an animal’s than any other.
He took a long time replying. Then he said, “At school.”
“At school?”
“And a bit later on. You belong to a fencing club, do you?”
“Me? No, why should I?”
Guy knew Newton must be getting at him, something he wasn’t going to put up with, and he was about to repeat his question when Leonora and Celeste came back. They both looked pleased with themselves, Guy thought. Leonora asked what they had been talking about and Newton said, grinning, that it had been about martial arts.
They gave their orders, Leonora and Newton sticking to their decision to eat pasta, though Guy did his best to make Leonora change her mind. He didn’t care what Newton ate. That wasn’t quite true, as he would really have liked to see him eat something poisonous, something laced with cyanide perhaps, or infected with one of those fashionable germs, listeria or salmonella, and roll about the floor in front of the women, groaning and frothing at the mouth. He hated Newton and his grin and his cool clever eyes. He was talking more about fencing now, or rather about early prize-fighting, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when—before the days of bare-knuckle fighting—men attacked each other on public stages with blunted blades and often with “sharps.” Guy thought it an unsuitable subject at table and with women present.
This then was an example of Newton’s vaunted “conversation.” Apparently he possessed a pair of sabres which, crossed, ornamented a wall in his flat in Camden Town. He was thinking of selling them; Leonora didn’t want them in their new home. Guy would have liked to know where they had in mind but wasn’t going to ask. Celeste asked.
“I’m selling my flat. Leonora’s selling her share of their place to her friend, who owns half of it already.”
“Rachel’s grandmother died and left her some money, so she’ll buy my half,” Leonora said. “We’re not in a hurry, anyway. I shall live at William’s place in the meantime.”
Why did no one ever tell him these things? Why was he kept in the dark? It was a wonder that Rachel bothered to work at all, the way her rich relatives kept dying and leaving her slabs of wealth. His steak arrived, an enormous bloody wedge of it, which he fancied Newton was looking at in a mocking way, though when he raised his eyes he saw that the other man had his back to him and was saying something to Celeste. Guy was drinking rather a lot. No one wanted any more out of the second bottle of wine, so he finished it and began drinking shorts, dry martinis without ice, though it was so warm.
Before the bill came Newton leaned towards him and said they would split it.
“Absolutely not,” Guy said. “I invited you.”
“Please, Guy,” Leonora said, “we’d much rather.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, I wouldn’t entertain it for a moment.”
“Well, thanks for entertaining us then,” Newton said and he immediately got up and went off to the men’s.
Had that been a dig at him for using a phrase which a clever bastard like Newton might think was incorrect or out of date or silly or whatever people like him did think? He was instantly sure that Newton was double-crossing him and meant to sneak up to the waiter and pay his share before the bill came to Guy. That this had not happened, that the bill when it came was for the four of them, surprised him very much. What was the man up to? What was his game?
A taxi now had to be secured. Leonora looked tired, she looked as if she hadn’t enjoyed the evening, had found it for some reason a strain and was now worn out. She had seen Newton and him together of cou
rse for the first time. Was she, after what she had seen, having—glorious idea!—second thoughts about Newton? Had she compared them and Newton, as he must, had come out wanting?
“If you’re going north,” he said to Newton, “why don’t you take the first taxi? Leonora can come with us and we’ll drop her on our way.”
“I can’t do that, Guy, I’m staying at William’s till Friday. And we won’t take a taxi, we’ll go by tube.”
“Green Park to Warren Street and then up the Northern Line,” said Newton, smug and cool. “Nothing easier. Good night. Good night, Celeste, it’s been nice meeting you.”
In the taxi Guy said, “I should have asked her for his phone number. If she’s at his place, I won’t be able to talk to her tomorrow.”
“Try the phone book,” said Celeste.
“Yes, he’ll be in the book. What did she say to you all that long time you were in the Ladies’?”
“This and that. She talked about us and about William.”
“He’s a bit of a shit,” he said.
“I liked him, I thought he was very nice.”
“But you can’t imagine a woman falling in love with him, can you? The idea’s grotesque.”
“I’ll tell you what she said if you like. She said she was really happy to see you so happy with me. She said I was beautiful and you were lucky to have me and she was sure you knew your luck and she hoped we’d be very very happy. D’you want to know what else she said?”
“Not really,” said Guy. “It doesn’t sound very inspired. I don’t suppose you want to come back with me, do you? Not if you have to get up early for that L’Oréal job. I’ll tell the driver to go along the Old Brompton Road, shall I? Celeste, you’re not crying, are you? For God’s sake, what is there to cry about?”
Guy fell asleep very quickly and dreamt he was fighting William Newton with swords. They were in Kensington Gardens, on the lawn by the Albert Memorial below the Flower Walk. It was very early in the morning, dawn, the sun not yet risen, and there was no one about but they themselves and their seconds. His second was Linus Pinedo and Newton’s was a man whose face Guy couldn’t see because it was covered by a fencer’s mask. Guy had done a certain amount of fencing some four or five years before, had taken lessons and belonged to a club, but had given it up in favour of squash, which was so fast and better exercise. But in the dream he was very good, he was like some thirties’ film star in The Prisoner of Zenda.
His aim was only to wound Newton, though perhaps severely, but the man was clearly terrified and scarcely able to put up a defence. Guy, intending a thrust to his left arm—Newton, at any rate in the dream, was left-handed—jumped forward, executing the move called the balestra, followed it by a flèche at great speed, which passed in a single swift lunge through Newton’s heart.
Newton made no sound but sank on to his knees, his foil dropped, his hands clasped together on the forte of Guy’s sword. He fell over onto his side onto the green, now blood-splashed, grass. The death rattle issued from his pale lips and he gave up the ghost in the masked man’s arms. Guy withdrew his sword, which came out clean and shining.
Linus looked into Guy’s eyes and said, “That’ll give you breathing space, man. That’ll give you time.”
Guy felt happy, he felt an enormous relief. Newton was dead, so Leonora couldn’t marry him. Now he could discover at his leisure the slanderer who had poisoned her mind against him. He bent over the dead man, feeling grateful to him, almost caring for him. The masked man, in a single swift gesture, took off his mask and revealed to Guy, who was now trembling and horrified, his identity. It was Con Mulvanney.
In the morning, still quite shaken from the dream, Guy looked up Newton’s number in the phone book, found his address in Georgiana Street, which he then looked up in the ABC London Street Atlas. Linus’s opinion in the dream, that getting Newton out of the way would give him time, now returned to him. Newton might not, as a man, be a serious threat, but he was there and Leonora would marry him on September 16, no doubt soon regretting the step she had taken, though by then it would be too late. One thing to be glad about was that divorce was relatively easy.
Why had Con Mulvanney come to him in the dream? If Guy had inherited little from that hopeless feckless mother of his, and derived less, he had at any rate brought with him, through the years and changes, some of her superstitions. To this day he would not walk under ladders. His broken-down push-chair had been made to take avoiding detours, often to the very real danger from passing cars to its dirty-faced infant occupant. He touched wood in times of anxiety, and threw salt over his left shoulder when some was spilt. Omens he trusted, while saying he didn’t believe in them. Premonitions he recognized in sudden vague apprehensions. The totally unexpected appearance of Con Mulvanney in his dream, something that had never happened before—he had never before dreamt of Mulvanney—was a clear omen. What else could it be?
He began to wonder if it was possible anyone had told Leonora about Con Mulvanney. On the face of it it seemed unlikely. Very few people knew. Of course hundreds, thousands knew who he was and what had happened to him, though no doubt most of them had now forgotten; but surely only he himself and that woman knew his own connection with Mulvanney’s death.
The police knew. Correction—the police had been told. It wasn’t the same thing. They had found nothing, they had probably in the end not believed her or knew it would be hopeless to prove it.
The woman had a name he would never forget, no one could forget; she was called Poppy Vasari. She had threatened to tell everyone she knew. But what would be the point in naming him to people as the supplier of LSD to Mulvanney when his name would mean nothing? To the police … now, that was another story.
But suppose she had carried out her threat and talked of it to friends and acquaintances, given some sort of description of him? “A handsome dark man, very young.” He had been only twenty-five at the time. Or, “Very well-off, the way these people are, living in one of those pretty houses in a mews in South Ken.” Those details would be enough to arouse the suspicions of anyone who knew him only slightly. Robin Chisholm, say, or Rachel Lingard. Suppose they had then asked his name? Poppy Vasari would tell them, of course she would. She had nothing to lose.
And they would have told Leonora.
No surer way could have been found to put her off him. Four years ago. That was about the time she began radically to change towards him, to change her mind about that holiday, to turn down his invitations, to wean herself gradually away from him, to refuse his offer of money to buy that flat. And once she was in the flat, to cease altogether to go out with him in the evenings, to cease kissing him (except in the way she kissed Maeve, on both cheeks), sending others to answer the phone when he rang, gradually achieving the present situation of daily phone calls and lunch on Saturdays.
At ten he dialled Newton’s number. Leonora answered.
There was a pause, a silence, when she heard who it was, then she spoke cheerfully as if she was really pleased, asking him how he was, saying how much they had enjoyed the previous evening and meeting Celeste.
“Where would you like to have lunch on Saturday?” he said.
“Anywhere you like, Guy. Clarke’s if that’s what you’d like. After all, we’ve only got four more.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Some of the people who worked there called it a factory, Guy had been told, but to him it was always the studio. It was at Northolt, in Yeading Lane. Guy usually drove out there every couple of weeks to see how things progressed. His other enterprises, the travel agency and the club in Noel Street, got on perfectly well without his presence, and if he went to the club sometimes that was because he enjoyed it.
Tessa, the fine arts graduate, had called the studio a sweat-shop, though of course she had never seen it. This was in any case a manifest lie, as the people Guy called his work-force painted in clean, light, airy surroundings, with plenty of space, did not work particularly long hours, and were reaso
nably well paid. He could have paid them more because the paintings were selling better than he had ever imagined they would, but as it was they earned more than they would have by teaching, more, for instance, than Leonora did. Instead he was seriously thinking of starting a second studio to cope with the demand.
No one seemed to mind him looking over their shoulders while they worked. No doubt that was because, as he frankly told them, he knew nothing about art but admired what they did. He paused and watched a very talented young Indian girl who had been at St. Martin’s School of Art painting in the tears on the cheeks of the weeping boy. It was wonderful to see the skill with which she did this. How wet the tears looked! Like real drops of water, as if someone had lightly splashed the painted face. And surely she had managed to make the child look sweeter than usual and sadder. Guy could almost identify with him, recalling distant days of deprivation in Attlee House.
What Tessa, and to a lesser extent Leonora, meant by saying that what was done here was morally and—there was some other word, yes, “aesthetically”—wrong, remained a perpetual mystery to him. It was true that his artists had a basic pattern or guide to follow, that there were affinities here, though remote ones, with painting by numbers. But was that very different, any different, from what had gone in the studios of those Old Masters? Guy remembered his feeling of triumph when, on holiday in Florence, he had found out from a guide how people such as Michelangelo had workshops like his, with young painters in them learning their craft, copying the master’s pictures, filling in backgrounds, working regular hours and working to order. Leonora had laughed when he told her this and said it wasn’t the same thing, though she had not explained how it differed.
And it wasn’t as if these people’s original work were any good. The girl he watched putting the finishing touches to King and Queen of the Beasts had actually once shown him one of her own paintings. He had said, “Very nice,” but it was terrible, just lines of sludge with something that might have been eyes peering out. In the house in Scarsdale Mews he had a Kandinski that was the nearest thing to it he had ever seen, but at least the Kandinski was in bright colours and very big and complex, which accounted, no doubt, for the very high price he had had to pay for it.