Going Wrong (v5)

by Ruth Rendell

  He told her about Tessa’s visit. Her face clouded over. She said nothing. “I’ve got a headache,” he said. “I usually have these days. D’you think it’s being angry most of the time?”

  She went home with him. “You have to accept it,” she said gently. “Sooner or later you have to accept she’s going to marry William.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  She knelt on the paving, picking up the pieces of broken vase. He wished he hadn’t said what he had said, but she didn’t reply. Danilo would be back tomorrow night, he’d keep on trying to phone him from ten onwards. Probably, to compensate for all the trouble he was causing, he’d have to give Danilo another fifteen hundred, but who cared?

  Celeste said, “Buy her a really nice wedding present, why don’t you?”

  She was never bitchy, but this time … ? Surely she didn’t mean it seriously? He poured himself a last drink, vodka on the rocks, realizing as he did so that he had been drinking non-stop since the Campari orange he had when Tessa came at five.

  In the morning, while Celeste was still asleep, he phoned the flat in Portland Road. Maeve answered. She was about to leave for work. He didn’t ask for Leonora, not immediately.

  “How’s Robin?” He really wanted to know. Worrying about Danilo’s hitman getting at Robin had kept him awake most of the night.

  “He’s fine,” she said. But did she know? Had he just been fine when she left him the night before?

  “You’ve spoken to him this morning?”

  “Just now, Guy.”

  Oh, the relief! It wasn’t that he cared about Robin Chisholm’s fate but he realized, after that black eye and what Tessa had said, that Leonora might so easily blame him for any harm that came to her brother.

  “He rang me. He’d had such a super sleep, he was feeling really refreshed, you know, he sounded on top of the world. Isn’t that great?”

  Guy said it was and could he speak to Leonora?

  “She isn’t here, Guy. She’s at William’s.”

  He phoned the Georgiana Street number. It was early, of course, it wasn’t yet nine, but he was still surprised to hear Newton’s voice—no, more than that, astounded, thrown. He nearly put the receiver down. Instead he said, “It’s Guy Oman.”

  “Oh, hallo.” It wasn’t said in a friendly way. But Guy would have despised the man even more than he already did if he had spoken in a hearty or ingratiating manner.

  “How’re you?” he said in his best transatlantic style, but coldly.

  “I’m extremely well and I hope you are. Now, what can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to speak to Leonora.”

  Most people, before imparting unwelcome information, say that they are afraid. “I’m afraid I’ve something rather unpleasant to tell you …” Newton didn’t do that and Guy noticed.

  “She’s not here.”

  “Now come on,” said Guy, the ready anger rising. “I’ve just been told less than five minutes ago that’s she’s with you.”

  The man sounded bored, still within the limits of patience. “Less than five minutes ago she was. Two minutes ago she went out. Would you like me to tell you where?”

  “Of course I would. Where is she?”

  “At her father’s. Susannah’s mother has died and Leonora has gone with her to see to things, register the death and see undertakers. I’ve now told you all I know, so if you’ll excuse me, I’ll ring off as I’m already late. Goodbye.”

  He had no idea where Susannah’s mother had lived, had barely known Susannah had a mother. Hopeless to try and find them, hopeless to pursue that inviting image of himself sitting in a waiting room with Leonora, talking to her softly, then taking the two of them out to a wonderful lunch somewhere. A comfort for Susannah, whom he had never disliked, take her mind off her mother, whom she had probably been fond of. He would have to catch Leonora later in Lamb’s Conduit Street.

  He took a cup of tea up to Celeste. “Thank you, sweet Guy,” she said.

  She opened her eyes and then she put out her arms to him. It was weeks since he had made love to her. Sexual desire seemed to have been drained out of him by all that had happened, by fear and anger. But he bent down and let her hug him. She was warm and sweet and she felt silky to touch. He lay down beside her and held her, not realizing how very hard he must have clutched her until she struggled and freed her nose and mouth from the pressure of his face, until she gasped, “No, Guy, you’re hurting!”

  While she was in the bath he called Anthony Chisholm’s number. The line was engaged. Five minutes later it was still engaged. He got the operator to check it, was told the number was indeed engaged speaking, and decided to give up until the afternoon. Fatima arrived as he was leaving the house. She made a noise like a distressed hen-bird with a lost chick when she saw the black-and-pink shards. Guy got his car out. He was going to Northolt to the studio, then to make a check on a picture sale at a motorway hotel at the start of the M.l. Backing the car across the cobbled mews, driving slowly down towards the Earl’s Court Road, he wondered if perhaps he had outgrown his house. In his position he was past the little mews-house stage. After all, he would be thirty in January. A house in Lansdowne Crescent or maybe even something in the neighbourhood of Campden Hill, Duchess of Bedford Walk … Would Leonora mind being that side, the good side, of Holland Park Avenue?

  Carry On, Kittens did better in Barnet than even Lady from Thailand. The woman who was running the sale and with whom he had a nasty lunch in the motel dining room (oval plates piled with gristle-bound blackened steak, tinned peas, tomato halves, chips, mushrooms as slimy as slugs, and broccoli spears like toy farmyard trees) told him she could sell twice, three times, as many. Guy undertook to provide that number. On the motel phone he tried to call Lamb’s Conduit Street and failed but succeeded in getting Tanya at her boutique. Danilo was expected home in the late evening, certainly by eleven.

  Guy had a ferociously unpleasant image of Robin Chisholm pressing the button on his entry-phone, opening the door in his towelling robe to the man who had come to mend something or read some meter. The silenced gun or cosh, or, if Danilo’s “help” was being really vicious these days, the thin swift stiletto.

  He drove to the travel agent’s. Business was booming there too. In the office at the back he phoned the flat in St. Leonard’s Terrace. There wasn’t going to be an answer, the bell rang and rang, ten times, fifteen. He put the receiver back and redialled. This time Robin’s voice answered after four rings. Probably he’d misdialled that first time. It was a great relief to hear Robin saying, “Hallo, hallo?” with increasing irritability.

  They buoyed him up wonderfully, the considerable and varied successes of the day. Things hadn’t gone so well for a long time. Going home, even going to the West End, it would have been usual to take a route north of Regent’s Park, but he found himself approaching the Euston Road. Across Tavistock Place, into Guilford Street, and Lamb’s Conduit was just down there … He wasn’t supposed to see her except on Saturdays, except for Saturday lunch, but—well, come on. She wanted to see him. Hadn’t she said how much she wished they could be together again?

  It was hot, the still, yellow heat of London in sunshine. Any place he had been in with her and been happy brought him pain. It was as if he had two levels of feeling about her, the upper, in which he was optimistic, cheerful, confident, and the lower where fear was, and doubt. The places they had been together evoked images in that lower world. He remembered rejections, he remembered, with something that was more like panic man pain, that it was now six years since they had made love.

  The houses in this part of London are old, early rather than late nineteenth century. Their brickwork is a dark greyish-brown, their doorways and windows are long and narrow, their roofs invisible. Very little green was to be seen except distant tree-tops showing like vegetation in a walled garden. Susannah had window-boxes that contained, instead of the usual geraniums, small-leaved ivies and plants with yellow-grey
fluffy foliage. Guy rang the bell, preparing himself, as he always had to, for his first sight of Leonora.

  The door was answered by a woman he recognized but couldn’t immediately place. She seemed to be having the same difficulties identifying him.

  “Guy Quran,” he said.

  “Oh, yes. I’m Janice. We met at Nora’s birthday party.”

  He hated the diminutive that was allowed to her family but not to him. The woman who had used it he now remembered as the cousin who had been going to Australia to get married. She was rather plump with a pale moon face, prominent eyes, and a great deal of long mousy hair worn in a French plait. Guy particularly disapproved of Indian cotton dresses (cheap, badly cut, and shapeless), and she of course had one on, tan-coloured with black hieroglyphs and white bits. Her hips were round and the effect in his opinion was of someone going to a fancy dress party as a granary loaf.

  “I thought you were an undertaker, actually,” she now said. “Susannah’s expecting an undertaker. You know her mother died?”

  “Yes. Someone told me. Can I come in?”

  Janice admitted him grudgingly. He felt she was looking him up and down as if he was committing some awful social faux pas. “She’s just lost her mother. I mean, mostly people write or phone.”

  “It’s Leonora I’ve come to see,” he said impatiently.

  But at that moment Susannah herself put her head over the banisters. The living room was on the upper floor of the flat, the bedrooms on the lower. Susannah didn’t react towards him as did all the other women close to Leonora—including this indignant Australian—in an aggressive or judgemental way. She called out to him and said how nice of him it was to have come. Obviously she hadn’t heard his remark to Janice. When he got to the top of the stairs she came up to him and, putting her arms round him, kissed him in an almost motherly way, though she wasn’t anywhere near old enough to be his mother.

  It was quite a shock to be kissed nicely by a woman, though of course Celeste did it all the time. But this was different. Susannah very evidently took the purpose of his visit to be of condolence. Well, that was all right with him. He felt warm towards her and approving. Susannah might be sad and in mourning but it didn’t show. She was carefully and quite heavily made-up, which Guy thought proper for women, her thick wiry dark hair was teased into a fashionable sea-urchin shape, she wore black silk trousers with a chocolate-and-black-striped top and a lot of rather elegant silver jewellery of the chain-mail kind, including a wide glittering belt. What a pity Leonora couldn’t or wouldn’t learn from her example!

  As he followed her into the living room, where he hadn’t been for nearly four years, he thought of the time when Leonora had lived here after leaving teacher-training college, and of calling to take her out and being given drinks by Anthony Chisholm. Well, it wasn’t so long ago … The first thing he saw, even before he saw Leonora, was a white card on the mantelpiece with a silver edge. A wedding invitation, it had to be, but he couldn’t read the print at this distance.

  Leonora got up when he came in. His heart had already done its turning-over stuff, sending a beat up into his head. She looked horrible but what did he care?

  She kissed him. There was no hugging and not much warmth, but then she hadn’t just lost her mother. (More’s the pity, thought Guy.) Janice, behind him, was going into some long tale about recognizing him and not recognizing him, then thinking he was an undertaker or a florist. Leonora wore black-and-white plastic earrings. Not a scrap of make-up, of course, and her hair looked greasy. She had green track-suit pants on and a black sweat-shirt, rusting with age and bad washing. Since knowing Newton, Guy thought, whatever dress sense she had once possessed had gone to pot. The fool probably told her he loved her for herself, not her appearance.

  At any rate she didn’t ask him what he was doing there. He remembered in time to say something appropriate about Susannah’s mother.

  “It was really thoughtful of you to come, Guy,” Leonora said, beaming. He thought her smile was surely fuller and freer than he had seen it for months. “We’ve had such a day. Some of those people are so insensitive. D’you know what the registrar said to poor Susannah? It was a woman, apparently they mostly are. Men won’t take the jobs, they’re too badly paid; it’s the old old story. She said, ‘Is this the first death you’ve ever registered?’ And when Susannah said it was, she said, ‘I don’t suppose it’ll be the last. Good morning.’ Can you imagine?”

  Janice had departed to make a cup of tea, having had some whispered communication with Susannah. Leonora began explaining how her cousin was staying with Anthony and Susannah, her cousin’s husband would be coming over next week, and it was very sad for poor Janice, who had been particularly fond of Susannah’s mother and arrived too late to see her alive. No other family Guy had ever come across had been so closely interlocked as these Chisholms. Even those on the outer fringes of the root system, people not even related, were mad about each other. Leonora was giving the impression this Janice had come twelve thousand miles to be at the deathbed of an old woman, the mother of her aunt by marriage, whom she had probably only met once or twice in her whole life. How right he was not to underestimate the influences that worked on Leonora!

  From where he sat he kept trying to see the mantelpiece and the card on it but Susannah insisted on remaining standing, and in front of the carefully preserved Georgian fireplace, leaning on the mantelshelf. He didn’t like to dodge his head about too obviously. Susannah had begun talking about the funeral.

  “We find ourselves in a dilemma, Guy. We really don’t know what to do. Shall we ask his advice, Leonora? Perhaps a fresh mind, do you think?”

  Leonora gave him another lovely smile. “We’ll see what he says.”

  “Now my poor dear mother didn’t leave any instructions about—well, I mustn’t mind saying it bluntly—about whether she wanted to be buried or cremated. Of course most people are cremated these days, but cremation seems so … I nearly said ‘so final.’ as if death itself wasn’t final, but perhaps you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I know what you mean,” said Guy, craning his neck.

  “And then it’s a question of where? All the nice London cemeteries are full and it means going right out into the sticks.

  My mother lived in Earlsfield, but the churchyard there of course is out of the question and has been for about a century, I should think …”

  Janice came in with the tea, which she placed on a table in such a way as to oblige Guy to turn his chair around, with its back to the fireplace. It was near enough to real drinking time for him not to want tea but he drank it, refusing a slice of the peaches and cream torte that fat little Janice should have known better than to tuck into. A plan was forming in his mind of managing to drive Leonora home—well, of getting her in his car, starting to drive her home and then persuading her not to go back but to have dinner with him.

  Janice was telling an elaborate story—in the worst of taste, Guy thought—about the adventures of someone she knew scattering a loved one’s ashes from the Cobb in Lyme Regis. Susannah said that was a coincidence because she and Anthony were going for a short holiday in Lyme in a couple of weeks’ time. The doorbell called Janice away from further anecdote. Though repeatedly told by the others to sit down and do nothing, she seemed to have appointed herself a temporary au pair. To Guy’s great pleasure he and Leonora found themselves for a moment or two alone. The undertaker had arrived and Susannah was summoned downstairs.

  “I do hope she’s made up her mind,” said Leonora. “She’ll have to tell him one way or another.”

  “Have dinner with me, Leo.”

  “Oh, I can’t, Guy. I’m awfully sorry, but I can’t.” Not “I never do” or “I have lunch with you on Saturdays,” not that any more. “I’m staying here and William’s coming over. We’re all going out for dinner so that poor Susannah doesn’t have to cook.”

  There went his plan to drive her home … But, “I’m really sorry,” she said. “I
t would have been nice. Maeve told me you rang up this morning to ask after Robin. That was kind of you, I do appreciate it.”

  He dared to reach across the sofa and take her hand. He knew she would snatch her hand away but she didn’t. She even let the fingers nestle softly in his and she turned on him a look of such sweetness, such compassion, that if Janice hadn’t come back at that moment he would have lost control of himself, he would have had to jump up and seize her in his arms. He did jump up, but only to go. There was little pleasure in being here with that fat gimlet-eyed one staring censoriously at him.

  “Lunch on Saturday?” he said.

  “Yes, Guy dear, of course. Where shall we go?”

  “The Savoy,” he said. “We’ll go to the River Room at the Savoy.”

  She didn’t protest. She was changing towards him, she was changing back. He kissed her goodbye, stood up, turned to face the fireplace and saw that the wedding card had gone. It had been there when he came in half an hour before and now it was gone.

  Someone had quietly moved it so that he shouldn’t see.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  He had known Leonora for quite a long time before he met her brother. One winter’s day, just before or just after Christmas, he went with Leonora into the living room of her parents’ house where a boy was standing by the window with a paper in his hand that he was reading. He must have heard them come in but he didn’t look round immediately, he read to the end of the page. There was something headmasterly in this behavior or even policemanlike, something deliberate and scornful, though the boy himself looked almost babyish. He was tall enough, a lot taller than his sister, but his face when he finally turned his head was that of a five-year-old, plump, innocent, with toddler’s skin and a rose-bud mouth. The voice that issued from those baby lips was therefore all the more amazing. Instead of shrill and lisping, it was deep and rich, it was plummy, with an accent that can only be acquired (Guy learned later from Leonora) by attendance at one of those schools within the Headmaster’s Conference.