Going Wrong

by Ruth Rendell

  They inhabited different worlds. It wasn’t that she preferred her world, he thought, no one could. The point was that it was all she could afford and she was proud. The “box thing” had a printed pattern of vine leaves and grapes all over it. He turned the plastic tap and the pale yellow wine dribbled out. He hated sherry, so there wasn’t much choice.

  “If you have to have a cigarette, you can always go out on the balcony while I’m seeing to this.”

  It opened out of her bedroom. The bed was made but in the sort of way people do who only use a duvet and two pillows. He couldn’t help asking himself how many times William Newton had shared it with her, perhaps even the previous night. The room had an air of having been hastily tidied. A drawer in a chest was stuffed too full to shut properly. One leg of a pair of green stockings hung out. There were books on the floor on one side of the bed, one of them lying open and face-downwards. The glass doors to the balcony were open. He went out, leaned on the iron rail and lit a fresh cigarette.

  The roofs and spires of Notting Hill lay below him, the looped crescents and the great bow of Ladbroke Grove. Dusty trees made nests of dark green among the custard-coloured Victorian terraces, the new red blocks, the dove grey of stucco and the dark grey of stone. Yes, it would be right for them to live somewhere near here, in the place where they had been born, where they had first met, where their lives had been interlinked.

  He felt a yearning nostalgia for it, as if he couldn’t bear to be away another instant. To return to South Kensington would be like going into exile. Why hadn’t he come to live on her doorstep, sold his house and bought another here, so that he would see her every day and she him?

  He would find a pretty house. There were plenty on the market, estate agents’ windows were full of them. With prices falling, a million would buy a little dream at the “best end” of the Grove. Lansdowne Crescent perhaps or some other street among those concentric circles of faintly shabby elegance. He imagined her furnishing it. He would come home for lunch and find her sitting on the floor among carpet samples and books of fabric and books of wallpaper, some poofy interior designer nodding and smiling, suggesting this and that while she concentrated, her face wearing that grave frown …

  “Lunch is ready, Guy,” she said behind him.

  He surfaced. It was like emerging from a warm scented bath in which one has fallen half-asleep. Awakening from these dreams brought him a sharp unhappiness, but still he couldn’t stop them or even control them. He followed her through the room, carrying his empty glass and his pinched-out cigarette end.

  She had laid the tiny table in the kitchen. He sat squashed up against the side of the fridge. The wine box was on the table next to a carton of orange juice and, between two plates, pastrami and salad for him, cheese and salad for her. He longed for a cigarette, and in spite of being there alone with her, having achieved, if temporarily, what was the summation of all his wishes, he felt his temper rising. It was her pride he was fighting, he thought, the arrogance that made her stoutly endure this poky dirty kitchen, eschew decent food, deny herself good clothes.

  “Do you remember saying you’d share my house with me when we got married?” he said.

  “No, I don’t remember.”

  “It was a long time ago. Nine years. It was when you first came to the house.”

  “Yes, I remember, but I don’t think I said that.”

  “All right. Do you remember saying ‘I am Guy and you are Leonora’?”

  “Oh, Guy, probably. I was a child. I did Wuthering Heights for O Levels.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  She was eating bread and cheese, putting up a pretence of enjoying it more than all the delicate food he offered her. “It’s a book,” she said kindly. “The girl in it talks like that—well, she says, ‘I am Heathcliff.’”

  He shook his head impatiently. “I don’t understand why people want to be always saying things out of books. Surely life’s more important.”

  “Sometimes things in books apply to life.”

  He didn’t understand and her laughter irritated him, making him angrier. He said in an abrupt change of subject, “Do you think what your brother does for a living is exactly what you’d call pure and ethical?”

  “What?”

  “Swapping sums of money. He must be contravening currency regulations all the time.”

  She got up to take away their plates, took Greek yoghurt and a dish of stewed dried fruit out of the fridge. “I’m not responsible for what Robin does for a living or what anyone else does, come to that. It’s nothing to do with me. I’m only responsible for what I do—oh, and maybe what William does.”

  Greatly daring, “Does that apply to me too?” he said.

  “I’m not responsible for you, Guy, or what you do. I’ve told you before, I know how you make a living and I don’t care for it, but it’s not my business. Except, well …” He saw her face change. She laid down her spoon. “I suppose I really ought not to let you buy meals for me if I don’t approve of the source of your income.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” He pushed the yoghurt away from him. “I can’t eat this muck, Leonora. It’s like being at the fucking Festival of Mind, Body and Spirit. I can’t eat fermented sheep milk.” He took out a cigarette without thinking, saw her eyes on it, crushed it in his palm, his anger boiling. “Who does bloody Robin think he is, telling tales of me? It’s not as if his own hands are clean. He’s lucky not to be in jail.”

  She said, “Guy, I really don’t know what you’re on about and I don’t think you do.” She was filling the kettle, bent on making filthy instant coffee, he thought. “Do you know anything about nervous breakdowns?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Nervous—mental—breakdowns. People do have them. you know. It’s when everything gets too much for them and they lose their hold on reality and can’t cope—all that sort of thing. Only, Guy, I think you’re having one. Well, I think you’re going to have one if you aren’t careful.”

  That made the second woman this week to tell him he was going mad. He hoped the look he was levelling at her, patient, controlled, bored, though with seething undercurrents, would silence her, maybe make her say she was sorry.

  With near disbelief he heard her say, “Guy, William’s got a friend he was at university with who does Jungian therapy, he’s very good.” Mercifully, she was interrupted before she had said more than, “If you’d just think of seeing …”

  The kitchen door opened and a tall, thin, almost unrecognizable blond girl came in. Her face was white, her eyes glazed. Pausing in the doorway, holding the handle, swaying a little, she started past them. Guy thought she was drunk and silently cursed this unexpected interruption.

  Leonora jumped up in consternation.

  “Maeve, what is it?”

  “Robin … It’s Robin, he’s been in an accident.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Robin Chisholm wasn’t dead or even badly injured. Guy felt angry with Maeve for causing Leonora unnecessary anxiety. The woman made a drama out of everything. No doubt going in the ambulance to hospital with him and seeing him taken off for a brain scan had made her hysterical. But as far as Guy could tell, Robin had simply got a mild concussion and a few cuts and bruises. To add to that black eye, he thought.

  She had told her tale after Leonora had ministered to her with an aspirin and a glass of the stuff he wouldn’t dignify with the name of wine that came out of that cardboard box.

  “We were coming out of the park, you know that bit where the roads sort of meet and come out into the Bayswater Road and there are lights and everything, where the Royal Lancaster is. I don’t know what you call it.”

  “The Victoria Gate,” said Guy.

  She took no notice of him. She hadn’t since she came in. He might as well not have been there, except that it wasn’t natural, when talking, to avoid ever looking to the right side of the room. She kept her bead turned away the way she might if ther
e were vomit on the floor.

  “Well, we were coming from the Kensington Gardens side, we were going to go in the Swan for a drink. You know it’s always dicey crossing the road there because the traffic tears round the—is it called the Ring? So we were very very careful but naturally looking to the right, if you see what I mean, we didn’t think the left mattered on account of the lights being red and nothing being there anyway. And men it happened. This car came tearing out of whatever that road’s called by the side of Hyde Park Gardens …”

  “Brook Street,” said Guy, expecting no acknowledgement and getting none.

  “Robin had gone over ahead of me. My shoe-lace was undone. I was bending down doing up my shoe-lace, only he didn’t realize and he’d gone on over. This car came tearing out of nowhere—well, out of”—she looked at him at last—“Brook Street, I suppose, right through the red light; the lights might not have been there for all the notice he took. Thank God Robin’s pretty quick on his feet and I saw and I yelled. I screamed out, ‘Robin! Look out!’ The car hit him, but only a glancing blow. It didn’t hit his head, he hit his head on a lamp-post.

  “There are never any police about when you want them, are there? A great crowd gathered, though, you can always depend on that. I wasn’t in shock then, the shock didn’t hit me for about an hour—well, it doesn’t, does it? Most of the people came there just to gawp and get the maximum thrill—you know the type—but there was one man with a bit of sense who phoned for an ambulance. The ambulance man asked me if I got the number of the car but of course I hadn’t, you have other things to think about at a time like that.”

  Guy felt a certain relief, though Danilo’s hit man would certainly have used fake registration plates. A failure but a brave attempt. Better luck next time. Maeve at any rate had no suspicion, as far as he could tell, that the incident in the park had been any more than the result of a piece of reckless driving. What Guy would have liked to say was that it served Robin right for having the bad manners to go across a fairly dangerous street on his own, leaving his girl-friend on the pavement tying up her shoe-lace, but he thought better of it. Leonora seemed both upset and relieved, Maeve much restored by having told her tale and got it off her chest.

  “Is there anything to eat?” she said. “We never got around to lunch, as you can imagine.”

  If only Leonora had chosen that moment to go to the bathroom or something, he could have said what he wanted to, something on the lines of, “Oh, really, how amazing, I’d have expected them to be serving caviar and blinis in the ambulance,” or, “You mean you never went to the dear old Swan after all?” But Leonora stayed, dispensing extravagant sympathy and a pastrami sandwich.

  Fortified, Maeve gave a deep sigh, helped herself to more from the vine-patterned box. Her face had grown pinker; she was really a very pretty girl, if you could use that word about someone so statuesque, with such flashing blue eyes and so much lion’s-mane hair. Guy was just thinking that her legs were the same sort of length as another girl’s height, when she turned to him and said with the utmost venom,

  “It’s all thanks to you. If you hadn’t bludgeoned him he’d have had a better idea of what he was doing. He was half-blinded, do you know that? He’s been having the most crushing headaches. If anything shows up on the brain scan it’s just as likely to be through you.”

  Guy’s reply was to extend his neck and turn his face from side to side so that she could see the deep scratch marks, which, though healing, looked rather worse man they had immediately after Robin had inflicted them.

  She said with a light scathing laugh, “Oh, I’ve no doubt he had to defend himself.”

  “Yes, like a fucking tom-cat,” said Guy, he couldn’t help himself. “They do tend to get run over in the Bayswater Road.”

  Both girls were on him for that. How could he? How could he talk like that? When poor Robin was lying in a hospital bed, when he might have some serious injury. Hadn’t he any ordinary human feelings?

  “Haven’t you any affect?” said Maeve incomprehensibly.

  He apologized to Leonora, who said that that was all right, but perhaps he had better go now. She would have to phone her parents. Perhaps she would go to the hospital to see Robin, she and her mother would go together. It pleased Guy that there had been no mention of the ginger dwarf in all this. He, it appeared, was quickly forgotten. If only Maeve had taken herself off after the announcement had been made, he was sure Leonora would have come running into his arms for comfort. When the story was being told, at one point she had actually rested her hand on his shoulder, as on the natural place to steady herself. He must, ideally, try to be with her when the news ultimately came of Robin’s death, as in a day or too it must.

  Next day, as usual, he phoned her. She was at home. That in itself was good, was reassuring. You would expect her to run to the man she talked of marrying but she hadn’t done that, she had stayed at home. He had no qualms about ingratiating himself with her.

  “How is Robin?”

  “Do you care?”

  “Leo, of course I care. Just because we had a bit of a disagreement when we were both pissed—I mean, for God’s sake. Men do fight, it’s the way they are, you have to accept that.” Did they? Not in her world perhaps. “It doesn’t mean I’d bear a grudge, no way.”

  “I suppose I don’t really understand. It’s not just me as a woman. William wouldn’t either.” His heart dropped. His heart was a small cold stone dropping through him. “Robin’s okay,” she said. “They’re keeping him in till tomorrow. It isn’t just the accident. They’re harking back a bit to that trouble he had four years ago—you know, when he was in hospital all those weeks?”

  It had been around the time she had changed her mind about going to Samos with him. Weeks had gone by and she had been cold to him and he angry with her. But he seemed to remember some trouble of Robin Chisholm’s—headaches, dizziness, suspected epilepsy. Of course, it ultimately turned out there was nothing wrong with him.

  “It so happens it was exactly four years ago,” Leonora said. “Well, he must have gone into hospital the first week of August and he stayed there till nearly the end of September. I don’t see how that could affect him now, do you, Guy?”

  Guy said no, he didn’t think so, and especially (trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice) since all the tests that first time had been negative. Was Maeve feeling better?

  “She’s in a really bad nervous state, Guy.” He loved the way she kept calling him by his Christian name in that confiding way. “It must have been an awful shock. I think she’s very much in love with Robin.”

  Too bad, thought Guy. She’ll just have to bear it when her love comes to nothing. I’m very much in love and who gives a shit about me? Something was bothering him, something about Robin Chisholm, though he couldn’t think what it was. Often these days he experienced this fuzziness, a cutting off, almost. To call it confusion was too strong, it wasn’t as bad as that.

  “Will you have dinner with me tonight?” he said.

  “No, Guy, dear, I never do. You know that.”

  “No one need know, Leo. I’ll be very discreet about it. They needn’t know.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  He expressed it carefully. “Your family. The people who’re close to you.”

  She was silent. When she spoke she sounded distressed. How is it that you can love someone and yet be glad when they’re distressed? “Oh, Guy, how I wish … It’s no use. Phone me tomorrow,” she said.

  His heart, which seemed to have shrivelled to the size of a pea, was suddenly huge, was swollen and soft and palpitating.

  She had sounded as if she was going to cry. And over him. She had been moved to tears by him.

  “Darling Leonora, have dinner with me tomorrow, any day, you name the day. Or I’ll come over. Shall I come now?”

  “No, Guy, of course not.”

  “Then let’s meet tomorrow.”

  “We’ll have lunch on Saturday,” she sa
id. “Goodbye.” The phone went down before he could protest.

  When he dialled her number next morning he still hadn’t been able to identify what was haunting him, what unease lay just below the surface of his consciousness. He had had a curious dream. He was an observer, watching but invisible, at a meeting of the residents’ association of a block of flats in Battersea Park. This mansion block was in fact where no buildings could be, in the centre of the Pleasure Gardens, overlooking the pier. The residents included Rachel Lingard, Robin Chisholm, and Poppy Vasari. They were discussing applications from people who wanted to come and live in the flats. One was from himself. Rachel read his letter and read out his name.

  “Guy Patrick Curran, 8 Scarsdale Mews, W.8.”

  Dreams were strange because that wasn’t quite his address. His address was 7 Scarsdale Mews. Robin Chisholm said nothing. He spat. He spat the way he had after Guy had hit him at Danilo’s party.

  Poppy Vasari, who was even dirtier and more unkempt than in reality, said, “We don’t want him. He’s a murderer. He murdered my lover with a substance classified Class A under the Misuse of Drugs Act, 1971.”

  After that Guy wanted to leave. Even though they couldn’t see him he wanted to escape. Knowing he was dreaming, that this was dream substance and dream time, he began willing himself to wake up. Before he did, a man he didn’t know and had never seen before got to his feet and began to sing a song about opium. He sang that opium poppies first grew on the spot where Buddha’s eyelids fell when he cut them off to stop himself from falling asleep. Guy woke up shouting and groaning.

  He tried to phone Leonora at ten in the morning. There was no answer. He made a second attempt at just before eleven and got Rachel Lingard.

  “You get a lot of holidays in the Social Services.”

  She had an accent like the head of a women’s college at Oxford making a television appearance. “I’m not on holiday. I’m at home in bed with a bug. You got me up.”

  Guy restrained an impulse to say that was the only thing she was ever likely to be in bed with. It wouldn’t be true anyway. Even the plainest, most repulsive girls got men these days. He didn’t know why, but it was so. Rachel had never been without a man all the time he had known her, she always had some bearded or spotty-faced intellectual in tow.