Going Wrong (30 page)

They still weren’t answering. They were still letting the phone ring. Guy cut himself more bread, poured some vodka. He dialled in vain Sanderstead Lane, Georgiana Street, and—out of devilment, as he told himself—Lamb’s Conduit Street. Laura Stow answered. She sounded nervous. He laughed in a sinister way and she slammed the phone down. By now he was feeling enormously better. To say he felt fighting fit, in spite of his arm, wouldn’t be an exaggeration. A challenge had been made to him. It was as if they had thrown down a glove in front of him and dared him to fight them all.

He was suddenly involved in a savage fairy story or cloak-and-dagger adventure. The beautiful princess had been imprisoned in a tower by her cruel father and stepmother. Marry the ginger dwarf or stay there forever! But her rescuer was coming, in his armour and with his weapons, if not on a white horse, in a golden car.

He went back upstairs and took out of the wardrobe the new handsome jacket in battleship-grey calfskin he had bought from Beltrami in Florence last May. He changed his shoes for grey leather half-boots. Reluctantly he took off the sling, but he hardly needed it any more. There was no reason why he shouldn’t wear the scarf wound round his neck.

In the third bedroom, one of the two at the back that looked onto the back of houses in Abingdon Villas, he went to the bureau that stood against the rear wall between the windows. From the top drawer he took the heavy .45 Colt that had been in his possession since he was seventeen but which he had never used.

Danilo had got that gun for him. It was while he was protecting the shopkeepers of Kensal. He had let it be known discreetly that he would like to possess a real gun instead of the convincing-looking replica he carried about with him. Danilo brought it into the pub in Artesian Road one night, showed it to him in the men’s, and by the time Danilo had pulled the flush, Guy had paid cash for it and the ammunition that came with it. Leonora had seen it and called it a ghastly weapon. He saw what she meant.

He hadn’t a holster for it. That had seemed unnecessary. He put it on the passenger seat of the Jaguar with his leather jacket on top of it.

The evening was growing cold. It was already dusk. For the first time for months he was using the car heater. He lit a cigarette. It took no more than ten minutes to reach St. Leonard’s Terrace. Guy couldn’t remember if he had actually ever been in this street before but now he was here he was impressed. Robin was evidently doing better for himself than the rest of that family with their shabby duplexes in Bloomsbury and their suburban villas. The flat was in an elegant but substantial house, its architecture classical, with a noble dark blue front door set under a portico whose domed roof was supported by Corinthian columns. Guy wouldn’t have minded living there himself.

The framed card above the bell was printed
MS. M. KIRKLAND
,
R. H. CHISHOLM
. Verv formal. The flat he thought must be theirs had a huge bow window. He had put on his jacket and stuck the gun in the right-hand pocket, which was luckily large. No one replied on the entry-phone when he rang the bell. Guy tried again and then once more. He was coming down the shallow steps when he saw Robin and Maeve approaching from the end of the street.

They were arm in arm, closer than that, somehow intertwined, her head turning onto his shoulder, and they were in high spirits, laughing, squeezing each other. But more remarkable to Guy was the way they were dressed. Gone were the jeans and twin sweat-shirts, gone the socks and running shoes. Maeve was in a pale pink silk suit, very low-cut, the neckline plunging in a deep V, the puffed sleeves ballooning from padded shoulders, the skirt very full and very short. It revealed her long legs in white lace stockings from half-way up the thighs. Her shoes were pink and high-heeled and in her left hand she carried a white cart-wheel hat covered in pink roses.

Robin wore a pale beige suit, probably wild silk. His tie had obviously just been removed. The tail of it, bronze-and-cream-patterned silk, protruded from his jacket pocket. When they saw Guy they stopped, looked at each other, and burst out laughing. More rehearsing had been going on, he thought. They began to walk towards him, smiling broadly.

Guy said, “Where is she?”

This had the effect of almost doubling Maeve up. She crowed with laughter, she clutched at Robin, gasping. They were both very much the worse for drink. Robin giggled foolishly.

“Tell me where she is, please.”

Guy could feel the gun in his pocket, heavy, cold, weighing down his jacket on the right side. He rested his hand on it through the leather.

“I know you’ve hidden her. You’ve no business to do that. This is a free country. You can’t keep people prisoner against their will.”

They made their way up the steps to the front door. Robin had his key out. They were still laughing. Maeve actually had tears on her face. Guy could see Robin smiling at her indulgently, amused in spite of himself by her amusement, trying in vain to achieve a straight face. He let out a final, apparently irrepressible, burst of shrill laughter, the neigh of a sluttish horse, got his key into the lock, said to Maeve, “Go in, go in, for God’s sake. You’re making me worse. Every time I look at you it starts me off.”

Guy was very cold. The adventure story he had been living in for the past half-hour began to dissolve, to melt and flow away. They were real people in a real street and this was reality. He would have liked to take out the gun and shoot them both, there on the steps. He would have loved to do that. If he did, he thought, he would never see Leonora again. That stopped him—that and the fact the gun wasn’t loaded.

“Where is she?” he said again.

Robin, who had stopped laughing now Maeve was inside the house, said like a little boy, “You’ll have to ask Mummy.”

“I’ll
what?”

Growing up suddenly, Robin drawled, “That’s what we agreed on. If you turned up, I mean. We decided my mother was the one to tell you. Right?”

He went into the house and shut the door.

By the time Guy crossed the river it was dark. He chainsmoked as he drove. A drink was what he would have loved, but the drink must wait. He had his leather jacket on with the .45 Colt in the pocket and Leonora’s scarf wound round his neck. It smelt very slightly of her scent.

At the northern end of Sanderstead Lane he stopped, parked the car and loaded his gun. The street lamps were alight, smoky yellow globes, some half-burned in the thick dark foliage of the trees with which this long street was lined. The surface of the roadway gleamed. No cars were parked along it. All the houses had garages. No one was about, no dog walkers, no girls walking quickly and fearfully on their way to an evening date. A car passed, then another. The place was silent, still, and colder than inner London.

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.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

T
he 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.”