Going Wrong (17 page)

“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 Portland 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 give 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.”

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.