by Ruth Rendell
He drove on to the Mandevilles’ house. There it lay at the back of its long front garden and it was ablaze with light. There were lights on in the bedrooms as well as downstairs, but Guy had no sense that the house was full of people, that, for instance, a party might be in progress. The house looked all the more incongruous because the one next to it, the unoccupied one joined on to it, was in total darkness. Not another car was in sight. No shadow moved against the light behind the drawn but transparent curtains. Yet he had the feeling that he was expected, they were waiting for him.
No doubt Robin had phoned his mother and she was prepared. She and Magnus were prepared. Perhaps she had also roped in a bodyguard. He felt the gun in his pocket, patted it like a patrolman in a film. The iron gate clanging shut made a loud clear ringing sound in the quiet. He began to walk up the path. The lighted house seemed to be looking at him.
He wasn’t to have the chance of getting all the way there, of ringing the bell or using that lion’s-head knocker. When he was half-way there, when he had just passed the point of no return, Tessa Mandeville opened the front door. She stood looking at him, silent, unsmiling, apparently unafraid.
“Where is she?”
Maeve had said that would be on his tombstone. Maybe. Perhaps it would be the last thing he ever said, his dying words. He didn’t care. It was all he wanted to say. He repeated it. “Where is she?”
“You can come in,” Tessa said. Her tone was remote. She seldom used his Christian name, she hardly ever had. “Come in, please. We may as well get it over.”
Magnus was behind her. Tessa was as elaborately dressed as Maeve had been, in a copper-coloured close-fitting dress with a scroll pattern at neck and hem in bronze and gold beads. Her wrinkled neck with the prominent tendons was hidden under ropes of amber beads. But Magnus was in a pair of old serge trousers and a grey jersey, as if stripped for action. For all that, he had the transparent, fragile look of a grasshopper.
They went into an airless, over-furnished living-room. It was intensely hot. Two huge vases held bouquets of flowers that were wilting in the heat.
“You’d better sit down.”
“I prefer to stand,” Guy said.
“Just as you like. You asked me where Leonora is.” Tessa looked at her watch in an over-acted ponderous way. She raised her eyes to his. “As of this moment I imagine they’re twenty thousand feet over northern France. Leonora got married at one o’clock today.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The flowers in the two vases seemed to be wilting visibly. They were pale, exotic, full-petalled. Guy could see they were wedding flowers, formerly bouquets or table decorations. His head swam. Although he had said he wouldn’t sit down, he did so. The scent from the flowers was sweet and stale, there was something obscene about it. It was like perfume on an unwashed body.
Tessa said, “That’s my daughter’s scarf you’re wearing!”
“She gave it to me.”
He was aware that his voice sounded weak, barely under control. He cleared his throat and said it again. “She gave it to me.”
“I suppose you’ve come here for an explanation.”
Tessa had seated herself opposite him on a sofa whose chintz cover was patterned with flowers curiously like those in the vases, pale pinkish, whitish, pallid lilac, and peach-coloured blown roses. She was a little, sharply cut figure, sitting upright with her hands clasped about her knees. Because of the bright brown of her dress and the gloss on the material, her dark hair shiny and her skin walnut colour, she looked as if cast in metal or carved from wood. Her eyes were very bright, sparkling with satisfaction, with triumph. Guy had taken too hard a knock, been too bludgeoned by it, to stand up to her and fight. His energy had gone and he could feel pressure inside his head. A chill, in spite of the heat of the room, drew his skin into goose-flesh. Hovering nervously, with a kind of ghoulishness, Magnus must have seen this, for he said hastily, “Would you like a drink?”
Guy shook his head. Later on he wondered if this was the first time in his life he had refused an offered drink. He summoned from somewhere a voice that approximated to his normal voice. “Is that where you all were? At her wedding?”
“That’s right,” said Tessa. “You’ve got it right first time. She was married at one, then we had lunch.” She was unable to keep herself from smiling, though he could see she tried. Her lips twitched and she sat up very straight. “We’ve been partying ever since. It was a lovely wedding, everyone said so. We saw them off on their way to Heathrow and Robin tied a shoe to the back of the taxi! He’s so naughty, there’s no stopping him. I’m sure you’ll want to know where Leonora and William have gone. Greek islands—Samos, actually.”
He didn’t believe her. It was to Samos that Leonora had been going with him. Tessa’s eyes flickered when she told the lie. He understood she wouldn’t dare tell him where they had really gone. He said desperately, though he hated showing them how terribly he had been hurt, how wounded almost to death.
“She said she was getting married on the sixteenth. She told me over and over it was the sixteenth, you said it was.”
Even as he spoke he understood about that wedding invitation on the mantelpiece in Lamb’s Conduit Street. It had been to Leonora’s wedding, Janice and her husband were no doubt the invitees. The true date of the wedding would have been on it, the ninth, one week earlier than they had deceived him into believing. They had rushed to remove it. If he had seen it, the whole plan would have been spoiled.
“Why did she tell me the sixteenth?”
Tessa was smiling now, an arch smile with her eyebrows up. He had never seen her look like that before.
“Why did she say she’d meet me for lunch as usual today?”
The rest of the promises she had made he couldn’t bear to utter. Tessa’s face had relaxed a little. He sensed, with a kind of shame, that his feeble voice had touched her, that she, savagely triumphant though she was, had begun to pity him.
“You have to try putting yourself in our position. Try to think of others for once. My daughter was very seriously worried that if you knew the date of her wedding, you’d go to it and make trouble. I mean, she knows you. We all know you. We know what you’re capable of. Look what happened last week when you got drunk and started fighting William. With swords. I mean, it’s unbelievable. Fighting someone with swords in this day and age. You’re capable of going to a wedding and breaking the place up. You might have forced your way in and shouted to the registrar to stop it—anything. You might have done anything. My daughter has been afraid of you for literally years. She’s been living in a nightmare of terror about what you’d do next.”
By a subtle rearrangement of hope and inhibition, Leonora had become “my daughter.” Guy sensed Tessa would never again refer to her by her name when speaking to him.
Magnus said in his mild, dry way, “That is why, if my advice had been taken, we would have sought legal means to prevent you from annoying my stepdaughter. No doubt, it would have been an unpleasant step to take initially, but in the long term it would have saved a great deal of trouble and distress.”
Guy lifted his eyes, which felt heavy, as if full of unshedable tears. His eyes felt swollen. He looked at Magnus. Through the fine soft learner pocket of his jacket he could feel the uncompromising shape of the gun. But it was distanced from him, it was as if he lacked the strength not only to use it but even to lift it out of its hiding place. The numbness that comes with shock wasn’t unknown to him, but it was a long time since he had felt it. “Forgive me,” she had said on the phone yesterday morning. He understood now why she had said it. “Forgive me.” Her voice had been thick and unsteady as his eyes were now, full of tears. “Forgive me for the lies they’ve made me tell you, for deceiving you, for this ultimate terrible lie that I will meet you tomorrow and be with you forever.”
Tessa had been speaking. Words, sentences, whole paragraphs had flowed out of her unheard by him. He picked up a word or two here and there: “cream
silk,” “yellow roses,” “white gold.” He turned to her. Again the feeling he had was unfamiliar, a sense of agony that people are capable of such refined and calculated cruelty.
“I don’t want to hear about that,” he said, and his voice was stronger. In a curious way it was a new voice, hard, clipped, stiff with contempt. I have died, he thought, and been born again differently, with a new voice, a new set of values. “I don’t want to hear about that.” Anger was beginning to return, and that was the same, the same old anger. “Don’t give me that rubbish, what she wore, the fucking flowers, don’t give me that shit.”
“And don’t speak to my wife like that!”
“Are you going to stop me?” He felt the gun again. Magnus made a pettish sound, a “pshah!” sound, and Guy knew he was afraid. He could have laughed if laughter had been something he were capable of. But his head felt heavy, his eyelids were heavy. “Whose idea was this?” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” Tessa sounded very sarcastic, all superiority and Lady Muck, the short-lived pity vanished.
“I asked you whose idea it was, to con me into thinking Leonora was getting married a week later than she was. It wasn’t her idea, was it? She didn’t think that up.”
“What does it matter whose idea it was? I can’t remember whose idea it was. It wasn’t mine. I wish it had been, I wish I’d thought of something so—well, so simple and so effective.
Let me tell you, my daughter may not have thought of it herself, but she was extremely happy to go along with it. She jumped at the chance.”
“She was corrupted.” he said. “All of you, you corrupted her.”
“If getting someone away from a person who’s frightening them to death is corrupting them, then long live corruption.”
“Leonora wasn’t frightened of me. She loved me. She asked me to forgive her.” Guy turned to Magnus and said, “I will have that drink, after all.”
Tessa burst into laughter. “You’re incorrigible, aren’t you? You’ve got the devil’s own nerve.” She mocked his tone, “‘I will have that drink, after all.’ You’re not a friend of ours, you know. You’re not a friend of this family. You forced your way into it God knows how many years ago and we’ve been trying to get rid of you ever since. You never seemed to understand: You’ve no place among us, you’re not our kind of person. To be perfectly frank, no matter how much money you’ve made, you don’t belong in our class. Basically, you’re still an Irish yob, a street toughie. It’d be an insult to the working class to say you’re working class, you’re not, you’re an erk from a slum and you always were.”
There was a tap on his shoulder and he looked up to see Magnus’s death’s head above him, a glass of something held out in the papery, slightly tremulous hand. He hadn’t been asked what he wanted. Something Magnus thought suitable (or something he’d got most of or didn’t himself like) had been brought. Medicine. A remedy for shock. In fact, it was whisky, slightly diluted with water. The taste of it brought Guy the faint nausea whisky always did, then the beginnings of a surge of energy.
“The absurd thing,” Tessa was saying, “is that you ever supposed my daughter might marry you, might be allowed to marry you.”
“She’s of age, Tessa,” said Magnus, legal as ever. “No doubt she could make her own choice about that. She had made her own choice, in point of fact.”
“No, she hadn’t,” Guy said. “Not in point of anything. Others made it for her, and that’s the real point. Your wife was right when she said that about not being allowed. You lot, you Chisholms and whatever else you are, you didn’t allow her to do what she wanted.”
“What utter nonsense! I honestly wish I’d made a tape recording of the things my daughter said. I honestly do. The number of times I asked her why she bothered with you and she said seeing you was the only possible way. She played along for the sake of peace, for the sake of being free to do what she liked for the rest of the week, that’s what she did.”
“If only she’d seen the perfectly reasonable step of applying for an injunction as feasible …”
“Well, she didn’t, Magnus. She didn’t want to, I quote, ‘hurt his feelings.’ She was always far too soft-hearted for her own comfort. Unlike our guest here, she put others first. She would have done anything to avoid hurting him. But it doesn’t matter now, it’s all in the past, it’s over. She’s married. And when she and William come back from—er, Samos, they’re going straight up north. They won’t be coming back to London. And if you imagine I’m telling you my daughter’s new address, you must be even more mad, disturbed, whatever they call it, than I thought.”
Guy felt for his cigarettes. They were in the pocket that the gun wasn’t in. He put one in his mouth and lit it, watching her. She reacted predictably.
“I don’t allow smoking in this house.”
“Too bad,” he said. “If you want me to put it out you’ll have to do it by force. D’you want to have a go? You or him?”
“It’s outrageous,” she said.
“You shouldn’t make rules like that if you can’t enforce them.”
“Magnus,” she said, “make him put that cigarette out.”
Magnus’s reply was to produce an ashtray, which he set at Guy’s elbow. Guy said, “Your ex-husband got Newton that job through his brother. Leonora as good as told me that. He introduced Newton to her and then he pulled all the strings he could to get him a job in the north.”
Tessa began to pantomime coughing. She covered her mouth, shivered a little. “That may be. I know nothing about that. I haven’t seen Michael Chisholm for years.” She put out a hand to her husband. “I think I’ll have a drink too, darling. I notice you didn’t ask me. Gin and ginger ale, and why don’t you have one too? Since,” she added, “we’re apparently saddled with a protracted discussion about his—well, what would you call it? Paranoia?”
“Frankly, Curran,” said Magnus, “don’t you think it’s time you left? My wife’s told you a great deal more than you could reasonably have expected in the circumstances.”
“I’m not going yet. I want to know whose idea it was to set me up.”
Tessa said in a bored voice, “I’m not sure if I follow you. How were you ‘set up’?”
“Deceived, then. I was led to believe the wedding was next Saturday.” Guy hesitated, rephrased it. “No, I was led to believe there would be no wedding.” I love you, I’ll come to you, anything you say. He remembered her kiss on the night when his arm was wounded, and he touched his arm, touched the silky stuff of the scarf. If I sob when I start speaking, he thought, I will kill them both. “Who,” he said, and his voice was steady, “put her up to that? Who made her tell me the wedding was on the sixteenth and then made me think the wedding was off? Who was it?”
“I told you, I don’t know.” Tessa took the glass her husband held out to her. She held it up as if for a toast, was going to say something, but thought better of it and drank. “It doesn’t matter who it was, we all approved.”
“She shouldn’t have told him untruths,” Magnus said unexpectedly. “I mean, if he’s right about her saying she told him she wasn’t marrying William, she really shouldn’t have done that.”
“What? Whose side are you on, pray? Let me tell you, she was entirely justified in telling him anything. Anything. And if you say another word about an injunction I shall scream.”
Magnus took no notice. The creases on his face ironed themselves out a little, like screwed-up paper smoothed by painstaking fingers. He was smiling. He said, “I recall perfectly whose idea it was. I was quite taken aback. It seemed so—well, audacious.”
His wife made an impatient gesture with her hand. “It’s quite unimportant who thought of it. The thing is that it worked and all that miserable business in the past is the past.” She began staring hard at Guy, looking into his eyes, into both his eyes. He could tell she wasn’t in the least afraid of him, and he wondered at that. She was observing him quite coolly, even clinically, like a state torturer
she would ask him briskly if he had anything to say before she started with the thumb-screw, but she didn’t. “That’s it then,” she said, “all out in the open. And now I think you should go.”
“Oh, I’m going. I don’t want to stay here. Why would I? Guy stubbed out his cigarette but left it smoking a little. He looked at Magnus. “Okay, whose idea was it?”
“Idea? You mean, who thought of that business of the wedding date? There ought to be a name for the relationship. I ought to be able to say something like my ‘stepwife,’ but that wouldn’t quite do, would it? I’m simply obliged to call her by her name—that is, Mrs. Chisholm, Susannah Chisholm.”
The man enjoyed saying all that, Guy thought disgustedly. He enjoyed spitting out all that pedantic rubbish. Then he realized what the man had said. “Susannah thought of it?”
“We were at some family gathering. Very civilized. It couldn’t have happened when I was young, ex-husbands and ex-wives all matey together. But it’s very pleasant, I’m not complaining. Mrs. Chisholm—that is, Susannah—came out with it. It certainly appealed to my wife, didn’t it, darling?”
“Yes, it did. Of course it did. I was thrilled.” Tessa, who had said she couldn’t remember, now seemed to have acquired total recall. “I was tremendously grateful to Susannah. I was only too happy to help work out the details. I played my part in it, don’t you remember? I’m sure you remember my coming round to that house of yours and making a point of telling you the wedding was on the sixteenth. If I’d had my way, you’d have been sent an official invitation for the sixteenth.”
Her husband nodded. He nodded and nodded like one of those wobble-headed dogs drivers have in the rear windows of cars. “Leonora didn’t care for it, though. Wouldn’t do it at first. She said it was wrong, but I said to her, ‘There’s nothing illegal in telling a white lie.’”