Going Wrong

by Ruth Rendell

  He had coffee with his artists and one of them asked him if he had any paintings from the studio on walls of his house. He said he had, though this wasn’t true and made him wonder obscurely why he hadn’t. There was another sale that day in South London, in Clapham this time, and he had thoughts of dropping in and buying a painting like an ordinary member of the public.

  Guy drove south and crossed the river by Kew Bridge. This was a mistake as he didn’t know this part of London at all well and got lost. By now he had given up all ideas of buying a painting, he could much more easily have one sent to his home, and was even wondering if he would get to Clapham Common before the sale was over. Somehow he had managed to get himself and the Jaguar south of Wimbledon Park and he must make his way northwards.

  If asked, he would have said he had never been in this neighbourhood before. The commons of South London were confusing, there were so many of them, but this certainly wasn’t Clapham Common, perhaps Tooting or Tooting Bec. A sign here pointed to Clapham, Battersea, Central London, and he found himself in a big thoroughfare that seemed vaguely familiar. It was Balham, that was where it was, this was Bedford Hill and in that pub, that great Victorian mansion of a pub, he had on that fateful night been accosted by Con Mulvanney.

  “Have you got any shit?”

  The question, ugly, ridiculous, meaningless but having a special meaning to those in the know, remained in his memory, the words reverberating there like so many plucked strings, while much of the rest of what had happened that evening had faded. He hadn’t replied, of course, he had pretended ignorance, disgust even, had turned his back, but the man had been insistent, had returned to the attack, now rephrasing his question, now simply saying.

  “Have you got anything?”

  Guy drove on up to Clapham Common, where the sale was being held at the Broxash Hotel. One last space remained in the hotel car-park. He walked about looking at the paintings with a glass of Rioja in his hand. He had sometimes asked himself what he should have done to escape Con Mulvanney on that night, to give him the slip, but he hadn’t then known that giving him the slip was important. He had understood only that Mulvanney did not know his name, and that seemed to him all that mattered. Come to that, although he thought of him in the context of that time as Con Mulvanney, he had not then known his name either, had not known it until the man was dead, or even, in a curious way, until sometime after that.

  The woman who was presiding over the sale, an untidy dark woman in a black dress, reminded him faintly of Poppy Vasari. She wasn’t really like Poppy Vasari, who had been thinner and wilder-looking and dirtier. Guy was no longer used to dirty people, to men and women who seldom washed their clothes and hardly ever bathed, and they disgusted him. Perhaps it had something to do with there having been rather a lot of such people around in his childhood. The woman selling his pictures and taking orders was probably quite clean, the ingrained dirt in her fingers the result of gardening, the dandruff on her black shawl collar due to mischance. He noted that, unlike in Coulsdon, the painting of the noble lion standing on the rocks with his couching mate beside him was me best seller here, and then he left.

  This must have been the way the taxi took him home that night from the pub in Bedford Hill—over Battersea Bridge, up Gunter Grove, Finborough Road, or perhaps up Beaufort Street and into the Boltons. Could you go that way? Would the traffic system permit it? It had been late and very dark. Too dark to see or at any rate to notice the little dark red 2CV following the cab.

  Guy never went to pubs. He only went to this one because it was a party, and anyway he didn’t know it was a pub till he got there. Robert Joseph, the man he was going into partnership with in the travel agency, was celebrating his fortieth birthday. He had described the pub to Guy as an hotel.

  Sensibly, he had come late. The pub had an extension till half past midnight and Guy didn’t get there till nearly eleven. A female impersonator, very old and hideous, in black sequins and yellow feathers, was capering about on the stage and singing a song of such incredible obscenity that Guy could hardly believe he was hearing those words in that sequence. A youngish man standing at the bar ventured a mild protest and was immediately, almost before finishing his sentence, frogmarched by two heavies to one of the doors and put outside. The doors were closed and locked. Guy decided to drink a lot in order to make things bearable.

  Bob Joseph, by this time, was drunk but not too drunk to notice Guy was there, to throw an arm round his shoulders and call him his best pal. A group arrived on the stage and began singing old Beatles songs. Guy had another vodka martini and another. It was then that Con Mulvanney, whose name he didn’t know, came up to him and asked his question.

  “Have you got any shit?”

  He meant hashish. Guy had seldom dealt in hashish. He had at one time been involved in an enterprise supplying Black Nepal, but later was interested only in cocaine and the best marijuana, usually Santa Marta Gold. In any case, not since he was a young boy had he actually purveyed the stuff himself, handled it. He was altogether loftier than that. At the time Con Mulvanney came up to him with his question it was almost exclusively cocaine in which he was dealing, though giving some thought to the possibility of this new thing called crack, which was smoked.

  This time, in reply to the question, “Have you got anything?” he said, “I don’t know what you mean. Go away, please.”

  “I know you have. I was told about you and that you’d be in here tonight. You were described to me.”

  That made Guy feel very odd and very vulnerable. Afterwards he wondered why he hadn’t asked who had said he would be in there, who had described him. But he didn’t ask. He said, “You’re mistaking me for someone else.”

  The man who was Con Mulvanney didn’t persist. At least, not then. He was a thin, slight man, neither short nor tall, with narrow shoulders and a slight stoop, who looked unwell, who looked a generally rather unhealthy person. His face was long and pale, and the lips and chin were like a woman’s, as if they could never grow hair. The hair of his head was longish, wispy, no-colour or the colour of dust. His eyes were a light greyish-brown and they shifted away from Guy’s when he tried to meet them.

  Guy walked away from him and started a conversation with Bob Joseph, and then, after Joseph had moved away into another group, with some neighbours of his, a man and a woman who lived near him in Chingford or Chigwell or wherever. The encounter with Con Mulvanney, whose name he didn’t then know, sent him in quest of another drink. When he had had two more vodka martinis he thought he had had enough—of drink and these people and the awful place—and anyway it was gone midnight. He didn’t call a taxi but walked out into the street and one came obediently along. As it moved off, a dark red 2CV moved off behind it.

  Guy didn’t see the 2CV again all the way. He didn’t look out of the back of the taxi. When they got to Scarsdale Mews and he was paying the cab driver, he saw a small car moving away from the end of the street. That is, he thought afterwards that he remembered seeing a small car at that point. He remembered that on the following evening, when, just as he was leaving to go out to dinner somewhere, Con Mulvanney appeared on his doorstep.

  The doorbell rang and Guy thought it was the taxi he had ordered. At the sight of him, Con Mulvanney said facetiously “Mr. X, I presume?”

  “Yes, you do presume,” Guy said. “I’ve nothing for you. Would you go, please?”

  “Look, can I explain what it is I want?”

  “You have. Now go.”

  “I haven’t actually,” said Con Mulvanney, and then he said, “You can call me Mr. Y.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Guy said. “Please go away. I’ve nothing for you. I am just going out.” The doorstep and the hall floor were on the same level, without further steps, and Con Mulvanney, or “Mr. Y,” the absurd name but the only one Guy then knew to call him by, had got himself onto the doormat and one foot on the hall carpet. “I didn’t invite you in. I don’t want you in my house. If you forc
e me to, I’ll put you out.”

  “I want a hallucinogen,” Mr. Y said, lowering his voice. “Whatever sort there’s available. I know nothing of these things. You must know. I’ll pay the market price. Don’t they call it the street value? I’ll pay that.”

  Guy said, “I haven’t got anything like that.”

  He was beginning to think Mr. Y was a policeman. The man didn’t look like any policeman Guy had ever seen, but of course they wouldn’t use a man who looked like a policeman, they would use someone who looked like Mr. Y. The front door was still open and now Guy’s taxi arrived. The driver got out and Guy called to him to wait a minute. He shut the front door. He said to Mr. Y that he would meet him later, he would meet him at ten—but where? Nowhere was safe. There were just some places safer than others. Mr. Y said that when he hadn’t got his car he used the Northern Line and how about Embankment Station? Guy said the middle of Hungerford Bridge at ten o’clock.

  He didn’t go. Of course he didn’t. He had no intention of going. But he thought about it all through dinner and afterwards. He saw himself standing in the middle of Hungerford Bridge, that cold, exposed, dark foot-bridge, where someone had told him murders frequently took place, meeting Mr. Y, and then, as he returned to the Embankment end, two men stepping up to him out of the shadows. Returning home an hour or so after the time he had set for the meeting, he wouldn’t have been surprised to find Mr. Y waiting for him, but there was no one. It was not until the following day that Mr. Y came back, this time in the dark red 2CV.

  Guy pretended not to see him. He put the Jaguar in the garage, entered the house from the inside. The doorbell rang. Guy let it ring. He had a small quantity of marijuana in the house, some capsules of Durophet, and a little LSD. He could open the door to Mr. Y, give him the grass, close the door on him and forget him. That might be the best way. The doorbell rang again, insistently, in a prolonged way. Guy went upstairs and looked out of his bedroom windows. There were no cars in the street at this end except the 2CV, no one who could conceivably be watching the house unless they were planted in the houses opposite, which Guy realized was extremely unlikely. He opened the safe in which Leonora’s sapphire engagement ring was in its box alongside the various drugs. He took the marijuana out, locked the safe and went down to the front door as the bell began ringing again.

  Mr. Y said, “I don’t want what you’ve got there. It’s a hallucinogen I want.”

  “You what?”

  “Mescaline maybe or psilocybin. That magic-mushroom stuff. I didn’t really want cannabis resin. It was just that someone told me if I asked for it and called it shit you’d know I was serious.”

  A policeman who could be that naive, in that way, could sound like that, would have to be a genius. To the Drugs Squad he would be worth his weight in gold—worth more than his weight in the best Colombian gold. He had to be genuine. Guy said, “All right, you’d better come in. I don’t want to know your name.”

  “I don’t want to know yours.”

  Why had he done that? Why had he invited Mr. Y in? Because, if Mr. Y didn’t know his name, he plainly knew him as a dealer, knew where he lived, could avenge himself for rejection by giving this information to the Drugs Squad. Of course, by that time, Guy would see to it that the house in Scarsdale Mews was totally clean, but that was not the point.

  He didn’t want the police there. If the police came once, he knew he would have to give up dealing, he would have seen the writing on the wall.

  Up until then he had been spotless, a citizen of the same irreproachable respectability as any of his neighbours, and he must keep clean. A single blot and it would all be over. He reminded himself of something that he kept ever before him, that always hovered a little below the thin top skin of his consciousness: The maximum penalty under the Misuse of Drugs Act for possession of Class A drugs with intent to supply is fourteen years imprisonment.

  Mr. Y came into the house but showed no desire to go farther than the hall. He sat down in one of the Georges Jacob side chairs. He said, “You didn’t come last night. I waited a long time. I went in the end because I was afraid of missing my last train.”

  “What exactly is it you want?”

  Guy had not, until that point, thought of Mr. Y as mad. Odd, naïve, eccentric, peculiar, up to something, perhaps, but not mad. What the man said next radically altered this opinion.

  “I must tell you that I am a reincarnation of Saint Francis of Assisi.”

  Guy just stared. He said nothing.

  “You know who I mean? You’ve heard of Saint Francis?”

  Guy made an impatient gesture. He said, “I asked you what you wanted.”

  “The proof is in my hands.” Mr. Y held out his hands, palms uppermost. They were not very clean. “You can see the stigmata very well today.”

  “The what?”

  “Saint Francis—and therefore I—was the first man to exhibit on his own body the wounds inflicted on Christ at his crucifixion. There is no real dispute about this. The claims of Saint Paul the Apostle and Saint Angelo del Paz can in no way be allowed. In the case of Saint Francis and therefore myself, all the marks are present: the nails on hands and feet, the spear wound in the side, and the marks of the crown of thorns.”

  His tone had become pedantic, professorial, and rather shrill. Guy could see no marks on his hands except those of ingrained dirt, and when Mr. Y lined his hands and smoothed back his wispy dust-coloured fringe, saw nothing on his forehead either.

  “All right, but what has all that to do with me?”

  Mr. Y began to talk in a very rambling way about all nature being the mirror of God and about the new Franciscan rule of life that he would formulate. It had something to do with the only hope for mankind being in a return to communion with God through a new reverence for nature.

  “But I can’t do this unless I can get into my own inner space.”

  That was something Guy understood. Years ago, when he was a young teenager, he had heard someone who had used a psychedelic drug say he had “got lost in my own inner space,” a phrase which at the time he had found disquieting.

  “I haven’t got any mescaline,” he said. “I’ve no peyote or anything like that.”

  But up in the safe he had some lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD-25, which he would quite like to be rid of, out of his house and his life. It was in tablet form.

  In those days he had been seeing a lot of Leonora. She was coming to the end of her teacher-training course at a college in South London. She had no other boy-friend, he was sure of that, but they did not make love, they had not made love for years. He told her that he wanted her, that he longed for them to be lovers again. She didn’t exactly say they would be but she didn’t say no. Once even, he thought he remembered, she had smiled and said “one day.” That, of course, meant “one night.” Their earliest experiences notwithstanding, those cemetery idylls, she wouldn’t go to bed in the afternoons, or at any time but night-time, come to that. It was her excuse. She was at college, her room was not private, there would be difficulties; staying overnight at his house wasn’t possible.

  That was the time when she was saying she had no real home any more. Though a bedroom was religiously kept as hers at Tessa’s house in Sanderstead Lane and another at Anthony’s flat in Lamb’s Conduit Street, it was not “the same.” In any case she couldn’t possibly take him there. Not for the night. It would be awkward, it would be embarrassing. But they went out together. They went to the cinema, they went out for meals, for walks, they spoke often on the phone. Though there was no love-making, he was her boy-friend and she was his girl-friend. They had arranged to go on holiday together and then, he told himself, the long period of chastity imposed by Leonora would be ended.

  While she had been at university, there had been long separations. Sometimes he hadn’t seen her for a whole term. She hadn’t asked him what he did for a living but he knew that the time would come when she would and he must be prepared. It was in a large part due to
the presence of Leonora in his life that he had acquired a share in the club, then become sole owner, embarked on the travel-agency business, started the paintings enterprise. He couldn’t have told her he lived by dealing. He had to tell her lies and make them into truths. Eventually, when they were lovers again, when marriage was coming, the dealing would have to be altogether given up.

  Four years ago, all of it had happened almost exactly four years ago. Mr. Y, who was Con Mulvanney, had sat in his hall on the Georges Jacob chair, on one of the last days of July, perhaps the very last day—after that party, anyway—talking about Saint Francis of Assisi and how to get into one’s inner space. And he, Guy, to shut him up and get rid of him, had given him the acid he had in the safe. Given him, not sold him, though he couldn’t remember now why he had shown this unusual generosity. Panic, probably, an overwhelming wish to get Mr. Y out of his house.

  Guy himself had never used LSD. He had never used anything but marijuana very occasionally and cocaine twice.

  Because he was afraid of snakes, the commonest of phobias, he had never dared experiment with LSD in case he had a “bad trip” and “saw” snakes. Besides, acid, so popular during the late sixties and early seventies, the hippie phenomenon, had gone out of fashion in his own teen-age years and was only recently coming back. But he knew enough about it to give Mr. Y a routine warning. “Have you ever used it?”

  Mr. Y said no. “I know the risk is you can get confronted with too much reality too quickly.”

  “Never mind that. Just have someone there when you do it. Don’t be left alone. You want to come back from that inner space, not get left in there.”

  No money passed. Guy told himself that this was good, though he really knew it made no difference. When Mr. Y departed in the dark red 2CV he experienced an enormous relief, a great sense of lightness. He went back upstairs to put the marijuana back in the safe with the amphetamines and then to lock the safe. For some reason, simple caution perhaps or one of those superstitious feelings, one of those premonitions, he didn’t do this. It went against the grain, he might regret it, but just the same, he took the drugs into the guest bathroom and flushed them down the lavatory. In the light of what happened, it was just as well.