Going Wrong (6 page)

The panorama opened in his mind. At that table there had been eleven people: Leonora herself at the head of it, with Anthony Chisholm sitting on her left and he. Guy, on her right. Leonora had been wearing a dark blue dress, plain, of some silken material, austere and rather too old for her. She looked beautiful, of course, that went without saying. She was wearing the necklace her father had given her, lapis in a silver setting from Georg Jensen, pretty but not expensive by Guy’s standards. Anthony was a good-looking man with a boyish face that would always have something of youth in it. Next to Anthony sat his own mother, an aged crone now dead, Leonora’s grandmother.

On his own right sat a cousin of Leonora’s called Janice, who had later got married and gone to Australia, and next to her Robin Chisholm, with Rachel Lingard on his right. Maeve was not in the picture in any sense at that time, Leonora hadn’t met her. Old Mrs. Chisholm was sitting next to Magnus Mandeville, and next to him was Susannah, Anthony’s wife. Susannah was a nice-looking woman, very slender with sleek dark hair, no more than thirty-three or four at the time, who, Leonora said, hardly ever wore skirts or dresses and was, in fact, on that evening wearing a black silk trouser suit. Janice’s fiancé, whose name Guy couldn’t remember, sat between Susannah and Tessa.

He let his mind’s eye rove round that table from guest to guest. The men’s suits had been unmemorable, vague greys, but he thought Robin had been wearing a pink tie. Robin favoured his father, was much fairer than Leonora, and, having Anthony’s boyish look, seemed absurdly younger than his twenty-four years. He was a swap jockey—that is, he had later become one. He swapped sums of money between potential borrowers, thus making dollars quickly available to clients in, say, Germany, and Deutsch marks to clients in Brazil. Guy suspected he was, in a respectable sort of way, just as dishonest and on the make as he himself had once been.

“You’d think he’d like me,” Guy had once said to Leonora. “I can’t understand why he doesn’t. We’re birds of a feather, aren’t we?”

“He’s a snob.”

“What does that mean, he doesn’t fancy my accent?”

“Let’s hope he grows out of it. He’s still at the stage of making snide jokes about people who haven’t been to public school. I’m sorry, Guy. I love Rob and I always will, but he’s the only reactionary member of my family. He’s a real old-fashioned Tory.”

“I can believe it,” he’d said, though politics didn’t interest him. He was an old-fashioned Tory himself if he was anything.

Tessa hated him because he was a so-called Philistine, her husband because he was or might have been a crook—had Robin turned Leonora against him because he came from the wrong background and spoke with the wrong kind of voice? Guy closed his eyes and went on seeing those eleven people, ten without Leonora. Tessa in a greenish-gold dress of some pleated silky stuff, a thin gold chain round her neck, her new wedding ring bright and shiny and her nails to match; Susannah in her black trousers and tailored jacket, the open-necked white silk shirt and chunky jet-and-amber beads; old Mrs. Chisholm in brown lace and pearls; Rachel, that ugly four-eyes, in a flowered cotton skirt with a dipping hem and a pink blouse probably from the British Home Stores. Janice, plump as Rachel, round-hipped, wearing fancy-rimmed glasses, pink plastic. The men. Himself and Leonora.

They ate avocados stuffed with prawns. Surprise, surprise. Not to say big deal. The next course was chicken done in an uninteresting way. Guy had read somewhere that chicken, if not the best-loved, is the most widely eaten protein food in the world. When they got to the profiteroles, Anthony had said to him, across Leonora, “So what’s with you career-wise these days, Guy?”

They knew he was rich. No one else had on a suit from Armani, cuff-links that were imperial jade set in 22-carat gold. And he was less than half Anthony Chisholm’s age. He answered the question, told them about the paintings, not mentioning his other sidelines, of course. They were all soon to go anyway. With the death of Con Mulvanney imminent, waiting to happen, as it were, in the unknown, unguessed-at future, the remnants of Dream Traffic were to be dissolved. The last of that trading Tessa and Anthony had hinted at with such opprobrium, such violence, the first time he met them, that was almost over.

Like a vulture Tessa had been at that dinner party, watching the others kill him and then swooping to pick his bones. First that remark about going on the streets and having a beat at King’s Cross, then a savage closing-in, a lecture to the assembled company about the demise of art and culture in the West (whatever that meant). And Leonora had listened, had later on no doubt been told more, and more …

He started the car and drove home.

Leonora had stopped living with her mother in the holidays and moved in with her father and stepmother. That was for the sake of being in central London. And to be near Rachel Lingard. If he was honest with himself, he had to admit that. Rachel’s mother had a flat in Cromer Street and Rachel was living there because her mother was dying of cancer. He had recognized Rachel as a menace from the beginning, the kind of person he didn’t want his girl-friend to know. Girls should be frivolous, they should be a bit silly sometimes, mad about shopping, passionate about clothes and perfume, always catching sight of themselves in mirrors, loving to be stared at and whistled at. They should be vain and petulant and with a tendency to be bitchy towards other women. Rachel was a feminist. She never wore make-up. She ate what she liked and grew fat. It was a principle with her to say she preferred the company of women to that of men. Her conversation was clever and to him often incomprehensible. Half the time he literally didn’t know what she was on about.

Now he wondered if it was through her that Leonora had met this William Newton. He looked the kind of person she would know. And he too had that quality Leonora seemed to prize so highly, the gift of gab. He had never seen the point of it, all those discussions, arguments, all that cleverness and wit. Why bother? It might have been necessary once when there was nothing else to do, no magazines, papers, videos, music, television, no places to go to and no electric light. The art of conversation was no more necessary now than the art of writing letters. That was the way he saw it.

The rift really began when Leonora changed her mind about going on holiday with him. He had never known why. He didn’t know why she seemed almost
shocked
when he suggested she move in with him. Her attitude was more what her mother’s might have been, not that of a girl of twenty-two. After all, they’d been going out together steadily for years. He loved her and she loved him and both knew they would be married one day.

“You’re not serious, Guy?”

“Isn’t it what people like us do? I’ve got a house all ready for you. It’s in a place you like. I presume you like
me
—well, love me. And I love you.”

“Who are these people like us?”

This was one of those “clever” remarks she was making more and more often. Picking him up on old sayings he used, expressions everyone said but which she called clichés. She had never used to do it. She had caught it off Rachel. And now she was going to share a bed-sit with Rachel.

“We thought of Fulham, because of me teaching there, a big room with a kitchen while we look round for a flat.”

Rachel’s mother was permanently in hospital now, she would never come out again. Leonora showed Guy the bed-sit, which was as horrible as Attlee House and much smaller. Fat Rachel, her round eyes magnified by the glasses she wore, saw his expression, whispered something to Leonora, and said like someone acting on the stage, “Prithee, why so pale? Will, when looking well can’t move her, looking ill prevail?”

Both girls went into gales of laughter, giggling the way he liked girls to giggle, but not when he was the butt of it. He understood the remark, bit of poetry, quotation, whatever it was, though Rachel might think he didn’t. It meant she wouldn’t like a miserable hangdog man, so he tried not to look offended but to laugh it off. Rachel’s mother died soon after that, which wiped the smile off Rachel’s face for a while. No doubt she was pleased to have property to sell, though, she was as greedy as the next girl for all her airs. She and Leonora started flat-hunting.

As soon as he heard they were applying for a mortgage—a huge one—he offered to lend Leonora the money. It wouldn’t, of course, really be a loan. It would be an outright gift. Secretly, in his heart, he planned this from the beginning, but of course he would let her think it was an interest-free loan.

Why did she have to bring her family and friends into everything? She was nearly twenty-three, for God’s sake. Why couldn’t she break away from that family? Because they wouldn’t let her. They clung to her and to each other like leeches. Her parents, who weren’t even married to each other any more, who were married to other people, nevertheless were always meeting, saw nearly as much of each other, it seemed to him, as when they had shared a home.

The night he made his offer she had been staying with Anthony and Susannah in Lamb’s Conduit Street.
Staying
with them, if you please, though she had a home of her own no more than five miles away. Rachel had gone up north to a reunion of people she called “alumnae,” which he thought sounded like bacteria, the kind of thing you picked up from eating supermarket pâté. Of course he hadn’t made his offer in anyone else’s presence. He and Leonora had been alone, having a quiet drink after the cinema.

“It’s very generous of you, Guy,” she had said, and he could tell she was moved. He thought she was going to cry.

“I won’t even notice it,” he said, which he shouldn’t have said, he knew at once he shouldn’t have.

“If only it was possible,” she said, and she took his hand.

They went back to her father’s. Anthony and Susannah were both there, and her uncle, Anthony’s brother Michael, who was something big in television, chairman of a TV company; and her brother Robin, he of the baby face and fair curls. And black heart, thought Guy.

He was embarrassed when she came out with it. He was also proud. After all, he had begun with nothing, less than nothing, and they had all been to universities, come from happy home backgrounds, known people with influence.

“I hope you told Guy anything like that was out of the question,” said Anthony.

You couldn’t get more patronizing than that. Patronizing and—what was the word Rachel was always using?—paternalistic.

Anthony had lost his nice-teddy-bear look. Guy had never seen him look the way he did then. Affronted. Shocked, really. As if Guy had insulted him instead of offering to lend his daughter forty thousand pounds.

The uncle, who was a bigger, older and somehow
furrier
version of Anthony, pursed up his lips and gave a thin little whistle. Robin said, “How to put a lady in your power in one easy lesson.”

The bastard. Guy had always hated him!

“I just wanted you all to know,” Leonora said, “because it was so very very kind of Guy.”
Was?
What did she mean,
was?
He had been half-sure up till then that she’d take it in spite of them all. But their influence was too strong for her. “It was a magnificent offer,” she said, “but of course I couldn’t dream of taking it.” And she looked so sad he longed to put his arms round her and kiss her better.

He hadn’t given up. He had pressed her to take the money in the weeks that followed. At about the same time she started making excuses for not going out with him; she was going out with him less and less. For years he had spoken to her every day, though it wasn’t easy phoning the room in Fulham where the phone was downstairs and shared by about eight people.

A kind of cold panic took hold of him when he felt she was separating herself from him, more even than when she had been away at college. Life wouldn’t be possible without her. Sometimes he had moments when there opened before him a cold vision of emptiness, a grey desert from which she had walked away and he was alone.

“What’s happened to us?” he said to her one day, when he had steeled himself to it. He was so afraid of her answer. Suppose she said, “I don’t love you any more?”

She didn’t. “Nothing’s happened. We’re still friends.”

“Leonora, we were more than friends. I love you. You love me. You’re my life.”

“I think we should see less of each other. We ought to see more of other people. This sort of monogamous situation we have isn’t very healthy when you’re young.”

Rachel’s expression. He could hear her uttering it.

“I must see you.”

It was a Saturday. They were having lunch together at a French restaurant in Charlotte Street. She hadn’t got into that vegetarian nonsense at that time. He could remember what she’d been wearing, a dark-blue-and-dark-green-striped cotton dress with a tan belt and tan pumps. In those days, three years ago, she still dressed quite nicely.

“I tell you what,” she had said, “I’ll always have lunch with you on Saturdays.”

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

I
t was a joke. That was how he took it at first. She could hardly have meant that. He could scarcely remember a time when he hadn’t been the man she went out with and she the woman he went out with. The girl with the furnished room and the car that he’d known before he met her was a dim memory, a phantom. Leonora couldn’t have meant they were only to see each other like people regularly having a business lunch.

Phoning her was very difficult; sometimes he got no answer, often another occupant of the house answered, promising to pass on a message but forgetting. Two days went by without his speaking to her and that declaration of hers, that statement of intent, became less real. He saw that she had been teasing him. How could he have been so silly as to be upset by it?

When he did manage to speak to her he asked her to come to the cinema with him the following night.

“Don’t you remember our arrangement?” she said.

He grew cold. “What arrangement?”

“I said I’d have lunch with you on Saturdays.”