by Ruth Rendell
“At that precise moment? That would make it the biggest coincidence of all time.”
“Well, maybe it would, if you were lovers right up till then, if you were living together or sort of living together, like us, I mean, if you’d promised things and were going to make it permanent. Then it would be really strange. If it was me it would be really strange. But was it like that, Guy?”
He said nothing. He shrugged. It was she who didn’t understand. The streets were dark but shiny with yellow light, the brassy light from lamps, a cold summer night, the cold small hours of a summer morning. The scratches on his face felt sore. He told her to leave the car in the street, not to put it away. A cat crouching on the opposite wall gave him a long inscrutable look from its light-filled, almost pupil-less yellow eyes. Perhaps it was a connoisseur of scratches. If people asked he would tell them he had been clawed by his neighbour’s cat.
This was a night when he would have preferred not to have Celeste with him. It would be unthinkable to send her home. Poor thing, he thought, poor fellow-sufferer. And then anger filled him, anger against Rachel Lingard and those Chisholms, all the Chisholms. His fists clenched. Celeste went ahead of him upstairs, but not jauntily, not with any air of part-possession of the house, more as if she expected him to call her back, even send her away.
She sat on the Linnell bed, picking the gold tips off her plaits. “Guy,” she said, “sweet Guy, was it just marijuana you dealt in, and maybe a bit of acid?”
How he would have seized this lifeline if Leonora had asked him! There was no point in prevaricating with Celeste. He didn’t have to impress her. It wouldn’t be true to say he didn’t care what she thought of him, rather that he believed in her unqualified forgiveness. “The hard stuff too,” he said. “Everything.”
“Opium?”
“Heroin, yes. Heroin’s opium, isn’t it?”
How absurd that, after all these years and the fortune he had made, he still didn’t quite know. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to know. She nodded, watching him.
“People don’t come to any harm from the stuff itself,” he said. “It’s the related things—dirty needles, infection, unrestricted use. And it’s no worse than being addicted to drink, only alcohol’s socially acceptable. And as for dealers, you might as well condemn a wine merchant.”
“I’ve a friend whose grandfather was Kurdish,” she said. “He was an aga.” She must have seen his incredulous smile starting. “No, that’s not only a Swedish stove, it’s a kind of feudal lord in parts of Turkey. They all grow poppies there, they make base morphine. It’s what you do in that place, that part of Asia. It’s funny what you say about the man and the bees because that’s what they once did, kept bees, but now the smugglers pack the hives full of the drug.
“Her mother’s family is very big. They have four laboratories processing morphine in the villages near Van. Her grandfather sent the young men away to learn the chemistry and two of her uncles got caught in Iran and executed. Thousands of smugglers and chemists get executed in Iran all the time.”
“Why do they do it then?” he said hollowly.
“Poverty.”
The word fell with a hollow sound. Poverty was a condition he had once known well, but the word itself was seldom heard in this house.
“You could say it’s not all bad then, not if it creates employment.”
She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “They don’t use it themselves. No way. And there’s no other work, not even in the fields. They don’t have a choice about what they do. You can earn six thousand pounds taking a kilo of heroin to Istanbul, and much more per kilo if you’re a chemist.”
He had never heard her talk like this before, that serious tone, that articulate, almost authoritative manner replacing her usual lazy simple speech. It was more the way Leonora and her friends might talk.
“I expect it’s much the same in South America,” she said. “You may not die through using it, though you do, thousands do, but you sure do die getting it to the users.” She said in a voice he’d never heard from her before, hard and clear and aimed straight at his guilt, his soft sensitivities: “Shame on you, Guy, shame on you.”
He wasn’t angry, he felt rather sick. It came to him that he had drunk a great deal, but the effects were only now becoming apparent. Not able to see very clearly, suffering a slight duplication of vision, he looked at the cuts on his face in the bathroom mirror—the deep scratch across his upper lip that would probably scar, the scorings on his throat. What kind of a man would scratch another man? Now that Guy thought of it, he remembered Robin had always worn his nails rather long, another unpleasant habit.
Celeste had got into bed and was lying with her arms over her head and her face in the pillow. He lay beside her, reached for the switch and turned out the light. The sudden darkness moved his memory. The last time they had had lunch together, he and Leonora, last Saturday, she had confessed to him she had been out with a friend of Robin’s. Someone Robin had been in partnership with was one of the men between him, Guy, and William Newton. And there had been another man she had met at a party given by Robin. It wouldn’t be going too far to say Robin had hated him so much that he had thrown one man after another in his sister’s way. He had practically pimped for her. Guy heard himself make a sound, a kind of groan.
Celeste heard him too. She put her arms round him and held him close.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Something Guy hadn’t thought of on that night was that Leonora might be angry with him because he had given her brother a black eye. That he had done so he was certain. Robin Chisholm would have more explaining-away to do than he had. Guy’s doctor had looked at the scratches and not believed the story of the cat. He had scarcely believed the true story of a fight with another man but he gave Guy an anti-tetanus injection.
Leonora was in Georgiana Street. He reached her there in the afternoon. Yes, she knew all about the fight; Robin had told Maeve on the phone that morning and Maeve had told her and then Robin himself had told her. Guy wasn’t surprised. It just confirmed what he already knew of the closeness of that family and the influence each one of them exerted over the others. Robin was telling everyone how Guy had sprung upon him “like a madman” for no apparent reason, only he privately knew that the reason was his absurd obsession with Robin’s sister.
“Not at all,” Guy said coldly. “He insulted Celeste.”
That interested her. “Did he? What did he say?”
Guy told her, not minding in the least that she knew he could be heroic and chivalrous. “Are you angry with me?”
“Not more than usual. I expect it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.”
“Has Robin told you awful things about me?”
There was a hesitation. “When? D’you mean recently?”
He could hardly have asked for clearer confirmation. “Never mind,” he said. “Where shall we have lunch on Saturday?”
Suppose she wouldn’t because he had given her brother a black eye? The silence lasted about fifteen seconds but it was an hour to him. “You choose,” she said. “I’m always choosing, it’s time you did, especially as there won’t be many more.”
He winced at that. “We’ve got three more from now,” he said. Hundreds more, he told himself stoutly, that wedding’s a dream, it’ll never happen. He said, making his voice light and teasing, “Come off it, sweetheart, you know you’re not really getting married.”
There was more silence. This time it really did last for nearly a minute. A click on the line made him think for an awful instant that she had rung off.
“Leo, are you still there?”
“I’m wondering,” she said in a remote voice, “what to say. I don’t know what to say to you when you talk like that. I suppose that if you want to live in a world of illusion, I just have to let you.”
He let it pass, he even laughed, a knowing, sophisticated laugh. “Where shall we have lunch?”
“Come and have it with me in Port
land Road.”
“We wouldn’t be alone.”
“We aren’t exactly alone in restaurants. Rachel’s hardly ever there on Saturdays, and Maeve will go out with Robin. They always do.”
“I’d love to,” he said.
After the Drugs Squad had searched his house he had given up dealing. Well, he had phased it out. And it hadn’t been altogether easy. He had been in actual danger. One of his suppliers had threatened him, if not with death, with some kind of attack, with spoiling his “handsome face.” It was rubbish saying only women cared about their looks, he no more wanted to be scarred than a girl would. He had gone about in fear for a few weeks, had carried a gun. Nothing had in fact happened, and within six months he had given up all dealing. He never heard from the police again or from Poppy Vasari. No direct evidence came from Poppy or anyone else that she had carried out her threat and whispered everywhere his part in Con Mulvanney’s death.
But in the ensuing months the Chisholms changed towards him. Leonora changed. He didn’t care about the others, but Leonora was his life. First, she wouldn’t go to Samos with him, then the other refusals began. Less and less would she go out with him in the evenings. Anthony became cold and distant. Now, when he looked back, he could remember Anthony’s almost violent repudiation of the money he wanted to “lend” Leonora for that flat.
“You must see it’s out of the question.”
“It would be a loan,” he had said. “She has to get a loan from somewhere. Why not me?”
“Are you seriously asking that?”
“Yes, of course I am. Why shouldn’t I offer her an interest-free loan?”
“Because you’re a man and she’s a woman,” Anthony had said roughly. “Good God, man, you’re not a relation, you’re not her brother or her cousin even. What kind of an obligation would that put her under?”
And Robin, at that time, in those months? The trouble was that Guy couldn’t remember Robin at all that autumn and winter, apart from that remark about getting a lady in your power in one easy lesson. But he could imagine all too well the conversations between him and Poppy Vasari, the woman who was his neighbour in the block of flats by Clapham Common.
“Your sister’s thinking of marrying him?”
Robin cocking his head on one side, his fair curls bobbing, his face winsome as a ten-year-old’s. “That wouldn’t be a good idea?”
“You won’t ask that question when I’ve told you how he makes his living. I’d like to start by telling you what he did to my friend.”
But if he gave Danilo three thousand pounds to dispose of Robin Chisholm—and he could imagine doing that, he could imagine not being too worried if the “disposal” was that far removed—it wouldn’t undo the past. It wouldn’t, at any rate, undo what Robin had told Leonora in that fateful August four years ago. Perhaps not, but it would prevent Robin’s poisoning her mind against him now, and he had no doubt that was going on at present, all the time. How many more vile slanders had been repeated, for instance, during that phone conversation about Robin’s black eye? And there was another aspect. If all else failed, there was no way Leonora was going to go through with her wedding on September 16 if her brother was killed two weeks before that date.
He was unpleasantly aware that he was no longer talking to Leonora every day. It was no longer possible to get hold of her every day. Living as she did for three or four days a week in Georgiana Street, she never answered the phone during the day. When he asked her why not she said it hadn’t rung or she was out.
He could hear Robin saying, “Don’t answer it, there’s your remedy. Nothing will happen to you if you don’t answer the phone, you know. There are no penalties attaching. There’s no inquisitor going to get hold of you and have you up before the bench and make you say why you didn’t answer the phone. Let me give you three little words on magnets to stick on the fridge: LET IT RING.”
She could so easily. No one important would phone Newton in the day. They knew he was at work. Few people knew she was there. If it rang it would be him, and however much she might want to speak to him, she could be made to believe it was wiser not to. Her family had her under their thumbs, under their five thumbs, six if you counted Rachel Lingard, and you almost had to, she and Leonora were so close, like sisters.
It was Friday when he phoned Danilo.
“No need to apologize,” said Danilo. “These things happen in love and war.”
Guy hadn’t been going to apologize. He knew very well that the fight had considerably enlivened a flagging party and given guests a subject of conversation that would last for months.
“Tanya was upset, but she’ll forgive you.” Danilo laughed so loudly that the phone made a noise that hurt Guy’s ear. “So what’s with you then?”
“Dan,” Guy said, “it’s him, he’s the one.”
He felt a reluctance to speak an actual name. It had physical symptoms, a constriction of the throat, a whisper of nausea. Danilo was silent but his breathing was just audible, the faint small gasps a man makes before he sneezes. The sneeze didn’t come but a snigger instead, very soft and breathy.
“How about my financial transactions?”
“There are other swap jockeys.”
Danilo seemed not to be listening. He said, “It was a good party, wasn’t it? We were lucky with the weather.”
“Fuck the weather. Do you want the money now?”
“Of course I do. I trust you, but there are limits.”
He had only twice been to Portland Road. The first time was soon after they moved in and he was invited and Rachel called him a Victorian. The next occasion was a house-warming party Leonora and Rachel and Maeve had given. They had been in the flat two or three months. By then he had lost his special place in Leonora’s life. No one, least of all she herself, would have described him as her boy-friend. Nobody would have spoken of him to the Chisholms as the man “your sister” or “your daughter” was going to marry. She still sometimes went out with him. She had told him they ought to meet less often, they ought to “see.”
A year and more was to pass before the coming of William Newton. Perhaps that was why, although he hated him, he didn’t blame Newton for her defection. She had already, long since, allowed her family to persuade her he and she were unsuited. There was no man at the party for her but Guy himself, though Maeve had someone, Robin Chisholm’s predecessor, and even Rachel had an owlish fellow in glasses. He tried to remember if Robin, on that occasion, had been particularly antagonistic or if Rachel had, but he could only recall the malicious false sweetness of Tessa who, encountering him for the first time since those loan-and-mortgage discussions, commented that she was surprised he wasn’t married yet.
“I was sure you’d arrive with some glamorous creature in tow. I said so to Magnus, didn’t I, Magnus? ‘Guy Curran will turn up with some beauty from a TV commercial, I said.’”
The street was unchanged, the Prince of Wales still looking like a nice pub to take your girl for a pre-dinner drink. He could live here—give him half a chance! He hated the fantasies that came to him unbidden but he was often unable to control them. Now he imagined in spite of himself that he was buying one of these houses, the whole house, of course, because a miracle had happened, because Leonora said she had really loved him all along. She liked the area, she would want to stay. Dinner at Leith’s, he thought, drinks first in the Prince of Wales, just he and she, dining out in the first week after they came back from their honeymoon. He’d have taken her to India, to Kashmir, Jaipur, Agra, and a week in the Maldives. Hand in hand, by moonlight, they would approach in awe that gleaming palace that was the Taj Mahal, turn to each other and kiss in the shadow of its shimmering walls.
The top bell had all three names on a card above it. Her voice came out of the entry-phone, polite, hostessy, expressing pleasure that he was so early. The stair carpet was already worn, the walls already marked. It was a long way up, too, forty-two stairs. He counted. And when he considered what he could gi
ve her … ! She need never climb stairs again so long as she lived.
She was wearing a track suit. Gear for a day at home, no doubt. It was dark blue and probably had looked all right until the first time it was washed. Since then it had been washed about five hundred times. He reminded himself that she didn’t dress up for Newton. It was a good sign, those dark blue pants and top, bare feet and Dr. Scholl sandals. She could be relaxed with him, she didn’t have to bother.
“Fantastic earrings,” he said.
She smiled, and about as widely as she ever did for him. The earrings were cheap Indian things, he could tell that at once, but pretty: white enamel daisies with yellow centres. They nestled against the peach-pink lobes, the golden-brown neck, like real flowers tucked through her ears.
He didn’t know what he had expected of the flat, perhaps that they might have done great things with it. But what could be done with three bed-sits, a kitchen, and a tiny bathroom? Posters and house-plants, things from the Reject shop and things from the Indian shop. Fastidiously, he noted that it wasn’t even very clean, not the way his house was with Fatima coming in four days a week. He stood about in the kitchen while she opened packets from Marks and Spencers and cut up a loaf from her favourite Cranks. After a while he lit a cigarette.
“Do you mind, Guy? This flat is a smokeless zone.”
“I don’t believe it,” he said.
“None of us smokes and we don’t like the smell, so we decided it was only sensible to have a total ban.”
“Can I have a drink?”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry. I forgot. You should have asked before. There’s sherry up on the shelf there and white wine in the fridge. It’s in one of those box things, you turn the tap on.”