by Ruth Rendell
Guy had heard the word before, but only on television. He would—then and now—have given a lot to have a voice like that. Leonora introduced him.
“Robin, this is Guy. Guy, this is my brother.”
Already, at the age of fifteen, Robin Chisholm was practising that teasing mockery that was such a feature of his unpleasant character. It wasn’t clever or amusing, it was just rude.
“Guy,” he said. He said it slowly and with a certain puzzlement. He said it again, thoughtfully, as if it were the name of someone he had known long ago but couldn’t quite place. “Guy. Yes—don’t you find it difficult being called that? I mean, if Nora hadn’t said, I’d have put you down as a Kevin, say, or a Barry. Yes, Barry would suit you.”
He looked like an innocent child, smiling, wide-eyed, his cheeks plump and rosy, defying the object of his insults to take offence. For they were insults, Guy was in no doubt about that. Leonora’s brother was implying that his name was far too upper-class for its possessor.
She defended him. “Oh, shut up. You’re in no position to mock people’s names. Robin may be all right now while you look like an infant but it’ll be no joke when you’re old.”
Even then, in a very unnatural way, Robin Chisholm was proud of looking younger than he was. Most people are at thirty but not at fifteen, for God’s sake. Guy, seeing him occasionally, not often but too often for his own comfort, thought he purposely cultivated the baby-face look. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see Robin with his thumb in his mouth. Well, he would have been surprised, he’d have run screaming from the room.
The Chisholms had sent their daughter to a state school and a prestigious university. Their son attended a public school with high fees but dropped out of the polytechnic he’d just squeezed into and went instead “into the city.” He was twenty-three when he started having those black-outs. They thought it was a tumour on the brain, then epilepsy. There turned out to be nothing wrong with him. Guy privately thought Robin had carefully planned and staged it all to extricate himself from the firm he was working for, an investment company that was plunged into a financial scandal of mammoth proportions a week or two after he entered hospital.
He was the sort of person the world would be better without. Someone else could see to his destruction, though, not Guy. It wasn’t he who had told Leonora about Con Mulvanney. Further to that, Guy, who, having failed to get hold of Danilo that evening, had been considering the matter for half the night, decided that her brother, of all those who surrounded her, probably influenced her the least. Of course she loved him, that went without saying—she said it often enough for all that, said it of far too many people, Guy thought—but Robin irritated her, she didn’t altogether approve of him.
All this made him dream of Robin. Robin was dead, pushed down all those flights of stairs in Portland Road, his bleeding body discovered by Maeve. This wasn’t at all a fantastic or irrational dream, and it therefore alarmed Guy all the more. He couldn’t phone St. Leonard’s Terrace before eight-thirty or Danilo before nine at the earliest. Making coffee for himself, he kept touching wood as he moved about the kitchen. It was an old habit of superstition he had believed long shed.
If you touched wood, the action fended off disaster. It kept away—what? Evil spirits? His grandmother, from whom he had learned wood-touching, not helping others to salt, not passing a knife to a friend, avoiding the divisions between paving stones, hadn’t specified the precise function of these acts. They just kept you safe. Funny he should think of her now when he hadn’t for years. Luckily, the kitchen, lavishly refitted in limed oak, was a paradise for wood-touchers.
A sleepy Danilo answered the Weybridge phone at ten past nine. Guy was nearly out of his mind because there had been no answer from St. Leonard’s Terrace in spite of his trying ten times between eight-thirty and now. He was sure Robin must be dead, and with his death Leonora lost forever, but he called Danilo’s hit man off just the same. Danilo took his change of heart with a show of ill temper but agreed to meet him for a drink at a club called The Black Spot at six. Certain now that he was too late, that Robin’s corpse was even at this moment being identified by Maeve in some mortuary, Guy nevertheless had another try at the Chelsea number.
Rather a strange thing happened. The phone was picked up but before anyone spoke into the mouthpiece Guy heard Robin’s voice bellowing from a distance.
“Answer the bloody thing, can you? I’m in the bath.”
Then accents like his grandmother’s, it must be the Irish cleaning woman, said, “Hallo, who’s speaking? Mr. Chisholm’s busy.”
Guy gasped with relief. He was on the point of saying, “Tell him to go back to bed and stay there,” but thought better of it.
The Black Spot was all bar and floor. There were no tables, nowhere to sit except on a stool up at the long black-and-silver counter. It was very dark, American-style. The first person Guy saw was Carlo sitting on a stool next to his father and drinking something dark and frothy from a brandy glass. It was probably Coke but the glass it was in made it look sophisticated, even sinister. Guy was rather surprised. Then he reflected that he would very much have liked to go into bars like this one when he was ten, only he never got the chance.
Carlo was wearing junior designer jeans and a black sweat-shirt with BREAD-HEAD’S KID printed on it in luminescent pink. He said, “Hi” to Guy and continued eating prawn fries out of an ashtray. Danilo was in caramel-coloured herringbone silk tweed, a suit with an enormous wide-shouldered jacket, and under it an open-necked crimson shirt.
“You’re not looking too good,” said Danilo.
Guy shrugged impatiently. That was what Danilo always said every time they met. “It’s the light in here, if you can call it light.” He asked the barman for a large vodka martini. “We can’t talk,” he said to Danilo, cocking a thumb in Carlo’s direction.
“I can’t help it, mate. What was I to do? One of the nannies has got flu, the other’s walked out. Tanya’s sister’ll have the other kids, she won’t have him. Last time he was there he put her Apocalypse Now video in the microwave. He said he wanted to see what would happen.
“Mervyn,” he said to the barman, “take him round the back and let him watch Mork and Mindy. Five minutes, that’s all I ask.”
“It’s not on, Dad. There’s only Buck Rogers in the Twenty-fifth Century.”
“Go round the back and watch that then.” Danilo had to have another glass of the red wine he favoured. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he said dramatically to Guy. “Don’t ever.”
“Don’t ever do what?”
“Bell me with that changed-me-mind crap.” He lowered his voice deeply. “You could have made a murderer out of poor old Chuck, d’you realize that?”
Poor old Chuck, whoever he might be, was certainly a murderer already, several times over. Besides, what was the difference? It was either one victim or the other. Guy knew arguing with Danilo was quite useless. He said he was sorry, he realized he’d been a bit thoughtless.
“Immature,” said Danilo, “that’s what you’ve been. Call a spade a spade. Now you listen to me, Guy. We’ve nearly had a very nasty accident in this particular area. I want you to think carefully. Do you or do you not want me to pursue this matter? The original party you wanted wasted I quite understand is out of the firing line, and for personal reasons I’m not sorry, but from what you said on the blower this morning I got a sort of hint you’d someone else in mind. No, don’t answer now. Name no names. I want you to think very carefully, like I said.”
“I have thought.” They were alone in the bar but for a man and a girl kissing up at the far end. Guy thought, that’s just what the fuzz would do, it’s an old one, that, a WPC and a DS in a clinch but all ears really. Just the same he said, very softly, “Rachel Lingard,” and he gave the address in Portland Road. Because Chuck might only need to recognize her and not know her name, he took one of his cards out of his pocket and wrote on it: “Short, round-faced, fat, glasses, da
rk hair scraped back, about 27,” a cruel but accurate description of Rachel, so that there could be no confusion with Maeve or—for God’s sake!—Leonora.
In the light of this, it struck him as odd there was no reply at all from their flat when he phoned at nine, at midday, at four, and at ten. In the meantime he also phoned Georgiana Street. No one answered there until ten-thirty at night, when Newton finally replied to his fourth call.
“Leonora’s in bed. She was tired and she went to bed early.”
“She’ll talk to me.”
“She won’t. I’ve told you, she’s in bed.”
“Surely you’ve got a bedside extension.”
Newton said obscurely, “I’m a poor man, Your Majesty,” and put the phone down.
It was much the same next day. Guy had to see his accountant, phoned the flat in Portland Road from the restaurant where he was giving the man lunch. He tried Georgiana Street, then St. Leonard’s Terrace. Maeve answered.
“I’m living here. I was going to move in with Robin after Leonora’s wedding anyway, so we thought I might as well now.”
“Do you happened to know where Leonora is?”
“I should think you say that in your sleep, don’t you? It’ll be on your tombstone. ‘Guy Curran, 1960 to whatever, RIP, Where’s Leonora?’ No, I don’t know where she is. You’re a bloody menace, d’you know that?”
He had to go back to the accountant. Coffee had been brought in the meantime. Guy had a large brandy with his. A taxi took him back to Scarsdale Mews and his own telephone.
The room and the green garden seen through the French windows seemed to turn red, dyed by his anger. To keep his anger down he had to hear her voice; it was like a tranquillizing drug. He needed his fix of her voice.
She wasn’t at Portland Road, she wasn’t at Georgiana Street. Where does she go, he thought, where does she hide? Probably Rachel hides her, takes her to work with her, anything to keep her from me. Later on he phoned Lamb’s Conduit Street. Janice picked up the receiver.
She’d only been out there four or five years but she already had an Australian accent. For some reason the sound of his voice made her giggle. It was as if she and Susannah had just been talking about him—no, more as if she was recalling some trick played on him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was laughing about something when you phoned and I couldn’t stop. I’ll fetch Susannah.”
A nice woman, Susannah. You often couldn’t understand why people married other people, mostly you couldn’t, but in this case he could easily see what there was about Susannah that had appealed to Anthony Chisholm.
“Hallo, Guy,” she said with real warmth, putting a thrilling emphasis on his name as if she were really pleased to hear from him, as if he were someone she loved and hadn’t heard from for months. “It was so nice to see you the other day. It must be ages since we last met.”
He had meant to be cool and light, to make small talk. But her words moved him. He was near the edge today anyway, he was nearly out of control. “Too long,” he said, and, “you were always good to me, Susannah. You alone of all of them. Even Leonora’s father turned against me.”
“Now, Guy, I’m sure that’s not true. Anthony and I have always liked you. The thing is … Excuse me just a moment.” He heard her lay the phone down and go to close the door. This was so that that giggling little Janice didn’t hear. “Guy, Leonora’s a grown-up woman, she has her own life. I understand how bitter it must be for you to see her prefer William, but if she does, what can anyone do about it? As a matter of fact, I’d like you to know I think your—well, your constancy to Leonora is a very beautiful thing. You’ve been like one of those knights of old who were devoted for years to their ladies. You really have. But, Guy, my dear, it has to be over now—you see that, don’t you?”
“It will never be over,” he said, speaking low.
“What did you say?”
“It will never be over, Susannah. You see, I believe, I know, she’ll return to me. I know we’ll be together for the rest of our lives and we’ll look back on this as a temporary madness.”
“If you like to look at things like that, I can’t stop you. I’d just like to save you from prolonging your unhappiness, that’s all.”
Why not come right out with it? “There was an invitation to the wedding on your mantelpiece yesterday. It was there when I came, but before I left someone had taken it away.”
She answered immediately with no hesitation. “Oh, no, Guy. You must be mistaken. Anyway, we wouldn’t have an invitation, would we? We’re giving the wedding.”
That was unanswerable. Was it possible he’d imagined it? He thought, Susannah wouldn’t lie to me, not Susannah. He asked her if she knew where Leonora was. No, but she expected to see her tomorrow. Leonora was coming to her mother’s funeral.
Probably the lot of them would go, Guy thought after he had rung off. Tessa and Magnus Mandeville, Robin and Maeve, William Newton, and even some of the Newton relations. They were all drawn into the great Chisholm spider’s web. A little fantasy showed Guy a glimpse of a future in which, now Leonora and he were married, the Chisholms drew in his family, or what there was of it, what could be found. They were capable of going hunting for his mother, for his grandmother, if the old girl was still alive. He imagined them all at some vast dinner table, celebrating something. Robin’s wedding? His wedding to Leonora? Why not? Why not?
He made several more attempts at Georgiana Street and Portland Road. No reply at either. Newton was preventing her from answering the phone or Rachel Lingard was. The latter was actually more likely, for Leonora would have had to go home to find suitable clothes to wear at the funeral. Still, tomorrow should not only see the end of Susannah’s mother but also of Rachel.
No doubt Chuck or Chuck’s man had so far had no opportunity of doing the trick. Guy would know if he had. It wasn’t that he expected Danilo to phone and tell him the deed was done. Leonora would. Leonora would turn to him in trouble. It brought him a small qualm to think how unhappy she would be. She was really fond of that ugly, fat, ego-tripping Rachel with her superior manner and her ruthless manipulating of other people’s lives. Learning that Rachel had died in a car accident (or been lethally mugged or fallen off a river bridge) would upset her so much that she certainly wouldn’t go ahead with that absurd wedding. She would turn to him for comfort.
In the morning he phoned the flat in Portland Road as early as he reasonably could, just after eight. He was in his bedroom and he touched wood, this time the Linnell bedhead. Someone took off the receiver but didn’t speak. He knew who it was.
“I know that’s you, Rachel,” he said. “It’s pointless pretending with me.” He wanted to say what the kids where he came from said when they begged from a woman and got nothing: “Die, bitch, die.” But she really would die and someone might overhear. “I’d like to speak to Leonora, please.”
She put the phone down.
He dialled the number again and let it ring. When it was clear she wasn’t going to answer and was stopping Leonora from answering, he laid the receiver down so that the ringing would go on and on to torment her. Perhaps he should go to Susannah’s mother’s funeral but he didn’t know where it was. It was now three days since he had spoken to Leonora. Had it ever been so long, apart from at holiday time or when she was at college? Even when she had the bed-sit and the phone was downstairs, it had never been as long as three days. He panicked when he thought that way, so he made an effort to rid his mind of it. The receiver restored to its rest, he went off in the Jaguar to a paintings sale at Wallington in Surrey.
Driving back, he came to the gates of Croydon Crematorium. This would be the place, he thought, and he parked the car half-way up the pavement and waited. It came to him how. wonderful it would be just to see her. If he did, he would leave the oar and go in, follow the mourners, sit discreetly at the back of the crematorium chapel. He imagined her the way he would dress her to go, for example, to her own mother’s funera
l, an event devoutly to be wished for in four or five years, say, after their own wedding. A simple black dress by Jean Muir with a single flounce six inches from the hem, a wide-brimmed black hat, black suede pumps, and gleaming black stockings with seams. He liked the idea of her in a veil, her face mysteriously hidden, disclosed only to him.
They would walk in side by side, he supporting her, she clinging to his arm. He imagined her in the front pew kneeling to pray a little before the service started. The long thin coffin containing Tessa’s long thin body appeared, borne by half a dozen bearers—Magnus, Anthony, Michael Chisholm, Robin—but he would be there too, surely, among them? Trying to solve the dilemma of how to be at Leonora’s side and at the same time an undisputed member of the inner family, Guy looked up to see a slow sad procession of cars moving out from the gates.
He jumped out of the Jaguar. The first car was full of very old people, white heads like dandelion clocks. He peered, he scanned them. The second car was full of very old people. Two slightly younger grey-headed people sat in the third car. Someone said behind him, “Excuse me, you can’t park there.”
It was a traffic warden. He drove home. Fatima was still there, polishing. Guy went upstairs and tried to phone Leonora on his bedside extension. It reminded him of what Newton had said, mocking him, calling him “Your Majesty.” No one answered, either in Portland Road or Georgiana Street.
She wouldn’t forget about lunch with him, would she? They had made no arrangements as to time. But perhaps there was no need for that, they always met at one. The Savoy, he thought, at one. The front door closed as Fatima let herself out. He went down and made himself a large drink, vodka and ice and a few drops of angostura. That wedding invitation kept returning to his mind. It occurred to him for the first time that if they were sending out invitations to this ridiculous wedding, it was odd that they hadn’t sent one to him. Odd, that is, in their assessment of things. Not in his. In his it would be grotesque inviting him to Leonora’s marriage to someone else. But they wouldn’t see it like that. They would see him as an old friend with the same sort of right to be invited as that bitch Rachel—more right, because he’d known Leonora longer. So why hadn’t they invited him?