Going Wrong (25 page)

Celeste didn’t maintain her silence. She was speaking again, talking about the room, the view they would have in the morning. But the confidence that had existed between them, the wonderful way that, though he didn’t love her, he had been able to say anything and everything to her, they had been able to share each other’s minds, that had gone.

It was lost, he had killed it, it would never come again. What did it matter? He thought, as he lay in the twin bed a yard away from Celeste’s, that he would be bound anyway to lose her once he and Leonora were together again.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

Y
ou didn’t phone me yesterday.”

“Darling, I’m so sorry. Were you worried? I haven’t upset you, have I?” Guy was so happy that she minded his not phoning her that he couldn’t keep the note of excited joy out of his voice. “I couldn’t get to a phone. It just wasn’t possible. Will you forgive me?”

“Oh, it doesn’t
matter,
it’s not that. I only meant it was odd. It was so unlike you.”

She must have waited in for his call. His heart sang. His head felt tumultuous, as if someone inside it were doing an energetic dance. “You stayed in, waiting for the phone to ring? Oh, Leo.”

“I happened to stay in. I’d nothing to go out for.”

Ah, yes. A likely story. He almost laughed aloud. “Leo, will you tell me something? It’s about what we talked about on Saturday. I don’t know why I didn’t ask you then. You said you knew all about—well, Con Mulvanney. Do you remember?”

“Who?”

“The man who died of bee-stings. You said you knew all about him, you’d heard about that and it was a long time ago. It was exactly four years ago, as a matter of fact.”

“Yes,” she said, “it would be about that. I was still living with Daddy and Susannah. It was before I moved into that room in Fulham with Rachel.”

“Leo, who told you about it? It was Rachel told you, wasn’t it?”

“Rachel?”

It was so clear in his mind, he began to tell her the story as he understood it. “Con Mulvanney lived in South London, in Balham, and so did this woman who was with him when he died. She was some sort of social worker and Rachel’s a social worker in South London, so you can see how she came to tell her. She said she’d tell everyone …”

“Guy,” she interrupted him, “what are you talking about? Do you know what you’re talking about? Because I don’t. It was Susannah who told me,
Susannah.”

The name exploded in his ears.
Susannah,
whom he had thought of as his friend, the woman who, of all Leonora’s family and friends, had been kindest to him—it was she who had betrayed him and alienated his love. He should have thought of it before. Why had he been such a fool?

“Of course.” He heard himself stammering. “Susannah’s mother lived in Earlsfield, which is east Wandsworth, which is next to Balham, she was in hospital there.”

“Guy, I honestly don’t know what you mean. It wasn’t like that, Susannah’s mother never came into it. I suppose I’d better tell you, though I promised myself I never would.”

“Tell me what?” He touched the wooden frame of the French windows and held on.

“A woman wrote to Susannah—well, she wrote to Susannah and my father, I mean to Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Chisholm. I was there when the letter came. I suppose she thought they were my parents, I mean that Susannah was my mother. She wrote warning them off you, for my sake, I mean. Look,

Guy, what is this? What does it matter? I’ve told you it didn’t make any difference. I have to go, we’ve been talking for half an hour.”

“Please don’t go, Leo, please don’t ring off. This is terribly important to me, I have to know. Who wrote to your parents?”

“To Daddy and Susannah,” she said. He could hear a growing impatience in her voice. “Well, I’ll tell you quickly and then I must go. I’ve told you it made no difference to the way I felt about you and you must believe that. This woman’s name was Vasari, I’ve always remembered because it’s the same as the man who wrote about the lives of the artists.” He didn’t know what she meant, he was lost. “Vasari,” she said, “Polly or something. She wrote to them to tell them they shouldn’t let me marry you. My God, I was twenty-two years old. They were to stop me marrying you because you were a social menace and you’d given drugs to her boy-friend. It was something like that. Susannah opened the letter because it was addressed to both of them and Daddy had gone to work.”

“And she told you just like that?”

“I was there when she opened the letter. Of course she showed it to me. Look, phone me later if you want to, but I do have to go now, this minute.”

He said he would phone her at seven. She said goodbye quickly and put the phone down. He sighed. Clarifying the mysteries of the past and the present only led to further complications. Of course it was easy to see how Poppy Vasari had found out about his association with Leonora and found out, too, who Leonora was. In those days they were often together, he was always calling at Lamb’s Conduit Street. She would have followed him, read the name by the bell-push on the door. How that vindictive woman must have enjoyed writing the letter that would ruin his life!

And Susannah, that treacherous woman, that snake in the grass … Surely a nice person with any idea of loyalty would have thrown that letter away in disgust after reading the first line. The sort of woman he had thought Susannah was wouldn’t have believed a word of it. the last thing she would have done was show it, and show it immediately, to the girl it was intended to caution. The hypocrisy of it made him indignant. It wouldn’t have been so bad coming from Tessa, who had never pretended to like him, who had never concealed her hatred. He remembered Susannah’s kindly proffered advice, her Judas kisses.

He phoned Leonora again at seven. It was Newton he expected to hear and he braced himself for the man’s exasperated, superior-sounding voice—after all, he was going to have to spend tomorrow evening with him—but Leonora answered the phone.

“Can he hear what you’re saying?” he asked her.

“If you mean William, he’s not here. He’s been in Manchester all day and he’s not back.”

“Will he be back by tomorrow evening?”

“Yes, of course. He’ll be back tonight, any minute now, I should think.”

“Leonora, tell me about the letter Poppy Vasari wrote to Susannah.”

“Oh dear, I wish you’d forget it. I wish I’d never told you. You’re making far too much of it. Poppy—is that her name?—Vasari wrote to Daddy and Susannah and told them you made your living by selling dangerous drugs. I think she called them Class-A drugs. She said you’d given a hallucinogenic tablet—those were the words she used—to this Mulvanney man and he’d gone crazy and stuck his head in a beehive. Well, that part had been in the papers. There was a photocopy in with the letter of an account of the inquest from a newspaper. Susannah showed it to me—well, I was sort of reading it over her shoulder. She said she didn’t think she’d even tell Daddy. She was quite upset.”

“What did you say to her?”

“As a matter of fact, I said I thought it was probably libel putting things like that in a letter.”

“Did she tell your father?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask and he never said. She told Magnus.”

“She did what?”

“Guy, please don’t get in a state. She told Magnus because he’s a solicitor. She rang him up at his office and asked him what one ought to do about letters like that. She meant should she tell the police, I think.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Guy. “Christ.”

“Anyway, you needn’t worry because he said the best thing to do with it was burn it. I suppose he thought it was a poison-pen letter, though it was in fact signed.”

“No doubt old Skull-face told your mother.”

“Possibly. Well, yes, I expect he did. My mother and I never discussed it. I wish you wouldn’t call Magnus that. Susannah and I talked about it quite a bit. She’s very understanding, you know. I told her we all smoked grass in those days and she said she had too, and I said I expect you
had
dealt in drugs when you were younger. It was the background you came from and the people you associated with—you didn’t mind my saying that, did you, Guy?”

“I don’t mind anything you say,” he said.

“All Susannah said was that it might have mattered if I was seriously thinking of marrying you but I wasn’t.”

“She said that?”

“There isn’t any point in going over and over it.
It
made no difference to the way I felt.
Guy, you
know
how I feel, I’ve told you often enough. Listen, I can hear William coming in. We’ll see you tomorrow night, right?”

“I’ll phone you first thing in the morning.”

“No, don’t do that. I shan’t be here. I’ll see you about seven-thirty tomorrow.”

He was going out to dinner with Bob Joseph and a man who was chairman of a Spanish hotel chain. They were meeting at a restaurant in Chelsea not far from the one where he had dined on the evening he had seen the street person who might have been Linus. Guy walked down to the Old Brompton Road. What had Leonora meant, she wouldn’t be there “first thing in the morning”? She was there now. Where could she possibly be going? Then he realized. Tomorrow would be September 6 and very likely the first day of her school term. The children would be returning to school tomorrow. She would be going to work.

But, wait a minute. That was a bit odd, going back to school as a teacher when you intended to get married less than two weeks later and take a fortnight off. Teachers never did that. Teachers were expected to get married and go on honeymoons in the long school holidays. But of course, it meant only one thing: she wasn’t getting married, she had never really intended to get married. It was all a fantasy. Was it perhaps designed to make him jealous? If so, it had certainly succeeded. He smiled to himself. Women, he thought, were like that.

He turned out of the Earl’s Court Road and began looking for Linus. In a doorway, though not the doorway of the health-food shop, a man lay asleep, curled up in the foetal position, his face and head covered by a newspaper. Guy thought it was the same man but he couldn’t be sure. Nor could he bring himself to wake the man. The realization he had come to about Leonora and her fake or dream wedding made him feel so happy and buoyant that his interest in Linus was temporarily weakened. There was nothing anyway that he could do about it. To lift up the newspaper and look at the sleeping man’s face seemed to him an outrageous act, a piece of insensitive impertinence. This evidently was Linus’s beat. He would find him again.

A taxi came and he got into it. He thought of Susannah with hatred, picturing her in that flat in her smart black trousers and top. She was leaning over the banisters and smiling. He followed this welcoming presence into the living room. The white card with the silver border was on the mantelpiece. It was probably an invitation to someone else’s wedding. Yes, that would be it. It was an invitation to another couple’s wedding, the ceremony had already taken place, and because the card was now therefore useless, Janice had picked it up and thrown it out as she went to make tea. This explanation satisfied him completely.

Flowers, chocolates, wine—or a real present? He had never seen her eat chocolates. She was a health foodie. Flowers had to be put in water, which would mean her going away and leaving him with Newton. A real present could only be jewellery for her, earrings, for instance, and he sensed this would somehow be out of place, over the top, ostentatious. After all, unimportant as William Newton might be, a mere, stooge or puppet set up by Anthony and Susannah, it was his home, he still no doubt thought of Leonora as engaged to him, even as due to marry him on Saturday week. Guy didn’t think he could give Leonora a pair of earrings worth, say, three hundred pounds, in Newton’s presence.

He settled for champagne. A single bottle of Piper Heidsieck. Should he wear a suit? He couldn’t imagine Newton even possessing a suit. Maybe designer jeans and a sweater would be best. It wasn’t going to be warm. Guy realized he was as nervous and uneasy about the evening ahead as if he had never dined out in his life. Would there be other people there? If only he could phone her. There was an idea in his mind of finally winning her away from Newton on this evening, carrying her off under his nose, a happy victim of kidnap, bringing her home here forever.

A night’s sleep had cooled his anger. He no longer felt he hated Susannah. He blamed her, he never wanted to see her again, if he had met her in the street he would have passed her by with head averted, but his hatred had gone. After all, she had failed. In spite of her vindictive motives, she hadn’t succeeded in turning Leonora against him. Leonora herself said it had made no difference. Susannah had interfered inexcusably in his life, but her interference no longer mattered, had never mattered, it was simply of no account.

Yet his discovery altered the situation. Rachel, designated Chuck’s victim, was very obviously not guilty. Rachel had never spoken to or even heard of Poppy Vasari, Rachel had never been told about his activities as a dealer, so Rachel did not merit death. But Guy, not usually cowardly, balked at saying so to Danilo. Having changed his mind about Robin Chisholm and been roughly handled by Danilo on account of it, he hesitated to ring Danilo up and say he had been wrong about Rachel too.

It wasn’t as if he could even say, “Forget Rachel Lingard, Susannah Chisholm is the one.” Susannah
wasn’t
the one, he didn’t want Susannah killed, he just never wanted to speak to her again. Dressing for the dinner party ahead, deciding finally—the sun having come out—on a pair of white linen trousers and a black silk shirt with white-and-cream-patterned V-necked silk pullover, Guy came to the conclusion that there was no need, at least at present, to tell Danilo anything. Rachel, after all, was out of the country, safe in some Spanish resort. Chuck probably knew this, or knew she had gone away, and would do nothing until she returned on September 15.

Just before he left, he poured himself a stiff brandy, then another. He needed it and there might not be much on offer in Georgiana Street. The taxi waited while he went into the wine shop and bought the champagne. He was going to be early. He got the driver to set him down in Mornington Crescent and began to walk the rest of the way, cradling the heavy bottle that was wrapped up in mauve tissue paper. It was still only twenty past seven when he got there. The houses here had scrubby front gardens, tiny plots of brown grass and dusty bushes. Steps went up to the front door and there was a deep basement. In the front garden of the house where Newton lived was planted a pole with an estate agent’s board attached to it on which was printed:
ONE-BEDROOM LUXURY FLAT
and
SOLD, SUBJECT TO CONTRACT
.