by Ruth Rendell
Guy felt himself flush up to his eyes. “I don’t suppose even you made that up.”
“Tolstoy did.”
“I congratulate you on your memory. Did you learn it on purpose to come out with it today? Or is it one of the things he says in his marvellous conversation?”
“It’s a piece I like,” she said. “It’s appropriate for lots of the terrible things that people do to other people today. I don’t like any of the things you do for a living, Guy, but that’s only part of it.”
“Are you going to tell me the rest?”
Her melon came and his prawns. He asked for a bottle of Macon-Lugny. He was a long way from an alcoholic but he liked to drink every day, to drink quite a lot, an aperitif and wine at lunch-time, two or three gins before dinner, and a bottle of wine with dinner. If the person he was with wanted to share another bottle or two in the evening, that was all right with him. Even for Leonora he wasn’t going to pretend he didn’t like a drink or deny himself the cigarette he would have after his steak.
“You never have actually told me, you know. You’ve said why you fancy the ginger dwarf but never quite why you don’t fancy me. Any more, that is. You did once. Fancy me. I mean.”
“I was fifteen, Guy. It was eleven years ago.”
“Nevertheless. I was your first, and a woman always loves her first best.”
“Antiquated sexist rubbish, that is. And I must tell you, if you call William a ginger dwarf, I shall get up and go.”
“I’m not going to sit here and be insulted,” he jeered in a cockney char voice.
“As you say. I’m glad you said it; saved me the trouble.”
He was silent, too angry to speak. As was often the case at these meetings of theirs, he became too angry or too unhappy to eat, in spite of the hunger he had felt a few minutes before. He would drink instead and end up reeling out of the place, red in the face. But he wasn’t red yet. He could see himself in the black glass panel opposite, next to the still of Cary Grant in Notorious, a very handsome man with strong classical features, a noble forehead, fine dark eyes, a lock of dark hair falling casually over his tanned brow. He put Cary Grant in the shade. His looks paradoxically made him angrier. It was as if he had everything already—looks, money, success, charm, youth—so what was there left for him to acquire, what was there he could find to sway her when everything was inadequate?
“I don’t want a sweet,” she said. “Just coffee.”
“I’ll just have coffee too. D’you mind if I smoke?”
“You always do smoke,” she said.
“I wouldn’t if you minded.”
“Of course I don’t mind, Guy. You don’t have to ask with me. Don’t you think I know you by now?”
“I shall have a brandy.”
“Go ahead. Guy, I wish we didn’t quarrel. We’re friends, aren’t we? I’d like us to be friends always, if that’s possible.”
They had been through that before. I fell in love with him. The words buzzed in his ears. He said, “How’s Maeve? How’re Maeve and Rachel and Robin and Mummy and Daddy?”
He knew he should have said, “Your mother and father,” and he wished it didn’t give him pleasure to see her small wince when he referred to her parents like that. But he went on, he compounded it, he couldn’t help himself, “And their appendages,” he said, “Step-mommy and Step-daddy, how are they? Still in love? Still making mature second marriages now they’re old enough to know their own bloody minds?”
She got up. He held her wrist. “Don’t go. Please don’t go, Leonora. I’m sorry. I’m desperately sorry, please forgive me. I go mad, you know. When you’re as unhappy as I am, you go mad, you don’t care what you say, you’ll say anything.”
She prized his fingers off her wrist. She did it very gently. “Why are you such a fool, Guy Curran?”
“Sit down again. Have your coffee. I love you.”
“I know that,” she said. “Believe me, I don’t doubt that. You’ll never hear me say I don’t think you love me. I know you do. I wish you didn’t. God, I wish you didn’t. If you realized what a hassle it is for me, how it blights my life, the way you go on and on, the way you never leave me alone, I wonder if you’d—well, if you’d give up, Guy?”
“I’ll never give up.”
“You’ll have to one day.”
“I won’t. You see, I know it isn’t true, all that. You say you fell in love with what’s-his-name, but it’s infatuation, it’s a passing phase. I know you really love me. You’d hate me to leave you alone. You love me.”
“I’ve said I do. In a way. It’s just that …”
“Have lunch with me next Saturday,” he said.
“I always have lunch with you on Saturdays.”
“And I’ll phone you tomorrow.”
“I know,” she said. “I know you will. I know you’ll phone me every day and have lunch with me every Saturday. It’s like being sure Christmas will come round.”
“Absolutely,” he said, raising his brandy glass to her, sipping it, then drinking it as he might wine. “I’m as reliable as Christmas and as—what’s the word?—inexorable. And I’ll tell you something. You wouldn’t come if you didn’t really love me. The ginge—this William, you’re not in love with him, you’re infatuated. It’s me you love.”
“I’m fond of you.”
“Why do you keep on seeing me then?”
“Guy, be sensible. I only do it now because—well, I needn’t go into that.”
“Yes, you need go into that. Why do you ‘only do it now because’?”
“All right, you asked for it. Because I know how you feel, or I try to know how you feel. I want to be kind, I don’t want to be rotten. I did make promises and whatever to you when we were kids. No person in their right mind would call those promises binding, but just the same. Oh God, Guy, you’re on my conscience, don’t you see? That’s why I have lunch with you on Saturdays. That’s why I listen to all this stuff and let you insult my father and mother and my friends and—and William. And there’s another reason. It’s because I hope—well, I hoped—I’d make you see sense; I hoped I’d convince you it was hopeless—sorry about all those hopes—and you’d come to see there wasn’t a joint future for you and me. I had this idea I’d convince you we could be friends and that’s how it’d have been by this time, you agreeing to be my friend—well, our friend, William’s and mine. Does that explain it now?”
“Quite a speech,” he said.
“It was as short as I could make it and still say what I meant.”
“Leonora,” he said, “who’s turned you against me?” It was a new idea. It came to him as a revelation might, enlightenment vouchsafed to a faithful believer. Her face, guilty, wary, on guard, showed him he was right. “I can see it all now. It’s one of them, isn’t it? One of them’s turned you against me. I won’t do for them, I don’t match up to their idea of what’s good for you. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“I’m grown-up, Guy. I make up my own mind.”
“You wouldn’t deny you’re a close family, would you? You wouldn’t deny they’ve got a lot of influence on you.” She couldn’t deny it, she said nothing. “I bet they’re over the moon about this William, I bet he’s first favourite with the lot of them.”
She said carefully, “They like him, yes.” She got up, touched his hand with hers, giving him a look he couldn’t understand. “I’ll see you next Saturday.”
“We’ll speak first. I’ll phone you tomorrow.”
She said in an even cheerful tone, “Yes, you will, won’t you?”
He walked off one way and she the other. Once she was out of sight he hailed a taxi. He thought of asking the taxi driver to go to the house in Portland Road where her flat was, go there and thrash the whole thing out with her, maybe with William there as well. He was sure William would be there, waiting for her, listening sympathetically while she complained about lunch and him and what a bore it all was, and then giving her the benefit of his brilliant co
nversation.
But she wouldn’t say that. She wouldn’t complain about him or say he was a bore. He made a shrewd guess that she wouldn’t mention to anyone that she had even seen him. Because the fact was that she really did love him. Would she meet him like that if she didn’t? Who would believe all that rubbish about conscience and trying to convince him they could be friends? If a woman spoke to a man on the phone every day and met that man once a week, it was because she loved him.
Guy paid off the taxi at the entrance to Scarsdale Mews. He had bought the house ten years before when he was nineteen, an unheard-of thing to do. But he had the money. It was just before the property boom that tripled the price of the house in as many years. The second-best part of London, he called it. He had bought the house because it was a mews cottage like the one her parents, at that time, still lived in. Only his was bigger, in a far more prestigious district. A peer, a famous novelist, and a TV chat-show star were among his neighbours. The first time he asked her to marry him was when he was twenty and she was seventeen and he took her home to this house of his and showed her the walled garden with the orange trees in Roman vases, the drawing-room that had old Lisbon tiles on the walls and a Gendje carpet. The house had the first Jacuzzi ever installed in London. He had an eighteenth-century four-poster bed and a Joshagan rug on the bedroom floor. It was better than anything her parents had. He took her to dinner at the Ecu de France where the waiters danced up to you showing you the food on big silver dishes, and then he took her home where he had Piper Heidsieck waiting on ice and wild strawberries.
“The Great Gatsby,” she said.
It was the name of a book. She was always talking about books. The ring he had bought her was a large sapphire the size of the iris of her eyes. On her and for her he had spent the fortune he had amassed in his teens.
“No, I can’t, I’m only seventeen,” she said when he asked her to marry him.
“Okay, then later,” he said. “I’ll wait.”
He still had the ring. It was in the safe upstairs, along with a few other, less worthy, commodities. He wouldn’t despair of putting it on her finger one day. She must love him. If she didn’t love him, she would simply refuse to see him ever again. That was what people did, that was what he did with the girls who chased him. He let himself into his house, went straight through to the room she said he mustn’t call a lounge, but of course he did, what else, and poured himself a brandy. It reminded him, as beautiful cognac always did, of Linus Pinedo’s, which they had drunk in Kensal Green. Dazed with love and liquor, they had lain in each other’s arms in the long grass between the graves while butterflies floated above them on the warm summer air.
“I’ll love you all my life,” she said. “There can’t be anyone else for us, ever, Guy. Do you feel like that too?”
“You know I do.”
She loved him, she always had. Someone else had turned her against him. One of them. One or more had influenced her against him: William or Maeve or Rachel or Robin or the parents: Anthony her father and Tessa her mother. And they’d married again, the pair of them, which was why neither of them could any longer afford little mews houses in the second-(or, in their case, third- or fourth-) best part of London. Guy smiled. Now they were Anthony and Susannah, Tessa and Magnus.
They had turned her against him deliberately. It was part of a deliberate policy to force her into their mould and separate her from undesirable elements. Anthony the architect, her father, and Tessa with the metallic fingernails and lofty know-it-all voice, her mother. Pretty gentle Susannah, the amateur psychotherapist, her stepmother, and Magnus the solicitor, her stepfather, he of the skull face and manner of a hanging judge.
And the others on the fringe: Robin and Rachel and Maeve. They were in league against him, the seven against Guy Curran.
CHAPTER TWO
When she changed schools it was to Holland Park Comprehensive she went, his school. Her mother didn’t like her walking home alone on winter afternoons when it started getting dark at four, so to stop her mother coming for her in the car, Leonora said some “older friends” would go with her. The older friends were Guy himself and Linus and Danilo, just starting to be known to the local underworld as the Dream Traffic.
Her parents wouldn’t just have freaked out if they’d known, they’d probably have emigrated. As time went on, anyway, it was just Guy walking her home. Linus had got himself some O Levels and gone to a sixth-form college and Danilo was in trouble breaking into flats. The Dream Traffic had become a one-man show but going from strength to strength. One autumn afternoon he and she were sitting on a doorstep in Prince’s Square, not smoking or anything, just sharing a can of Coke and eating potato crisps, when her mother came by in her car. She was driving home up Hereford Road. He expected her to stop but she only waved to Leonora and went on.
“Keep your fingers crossed for me when I get home,” Leonora said.
“Why? What’ll happen?”
“I don’t know exactly. Maybe a big scene. Maybe I’ll get taken to and from school for a few weeks. God, I hope not, that’d be a real drag.”
“You reckon? I bet she does what it says in my gran’s woman’s magazine.” He spoke in a bright falsetto, “‘Don’t forbid your children to see their friends. Much better encourage them to invite their friends home. Then you can get to know them. Remember, most people respond well to a happy home atmosphere.’”
That made her laugh. He remembered every word of that conversation, every detail of place and time and, of course of her. She was wearing blue jeans with a white shirt and a dark blue sweat-shirt with a teddy bear on the front of it, a nice cuddly-looking blue denim jacket lined with sheepskin, brown leather boots, and a long stripy pink-and-blue-and-yellow scarf. Her hair was long then, really long, nearly down to her waist. She hadn’t got a hat on, it wasn’t yet cold enough for that, it was only October. She was thirteen.
That was when she had her ears pierced. He went with her to get it done. The things girls did to themselves that were different from what men did were what he liked, he liked the contrast. Even then he was imagining a future when he would buy her diamond earrings. Her mother had been furious, said it was “common” having it done so young. Leonora had begun wearing those fantastic earrings she still liked. The pair she had on while they were sitting on the steps were telephones with the receivers hanging on cords.
He remembered everything because that was the first time she told him she loved him. Nobody had ever told him that before, not even the eighteen-year-old (now twenty) whose sofa bed in a tiny bed-sitter he sometimes shared and whose car he drove. Why would they? Who would? Not his mother, certainly. Not even his grandmother, who had persuaded his mother to name him Guy because she said Guy Fawkes was the first Catholic to try and bomb the British government.
But when he said that in a squeaky voice about being invited to her home and the happy atmosphere, Leonora started laughing. She laughed and laughed and put her head down on her knees, shook her long, dark brown hair and shook the phone earrings, looked up at him and said, “Oh, Guy, I love you. I do love you.” And she put her arms round his neck and hugged him.
She liked him to say funny things or clever things, so he tried saying them as often as he could. It didn’t come easily but he tried. He was still trying. And she still laughed, though there was a note in her laughter that troubled him. It was surprise.
The interesting thing was that her mother did exactly as he had predicted and got her to invite him home. That was his first meeting with any of them, any of those people that surrounded her. Robin, her brother, wasn’t there. He was away at school, some toffee-nosed public school he went to.
At that time her mother must have been thirty-eight. She looked exactly like an older, harder version of Leonora: the same olive skin and page-boy face; the same dark hair, though hers was done in a sort of knot on the back of her head; the same dark blue eyes, but calculating and watchful. Guy noticed her nails. They were painted silver
. They were very long and curving over at the top like claws but filed to points, and they looked like metal, like pieces of cutlery. Whenever he saw her after that, her nails were done a different kind of metal, gold, bronze, brass, or that silver again. Leonora didn’t introduce her mother to him. Why should she? Each knew who the other was, it couldn’t be anyone else. Just the same, the unanswerable remark was made.
“So this is Guy?”
It was raining. The little mews house was rather dark, with a few lamps lit, making pools of golden light in dim corners. Intense heat came off large gold-painted radiators. There was a polish smell of chemical lemons and lavender. Guy’s home was a dump, scarcely furnished. The furniture was tea chests and mattresses on the floor, a huge television set and stereo, Indian bedspreads pinned up to cover the windows. But he knew what was good, what he would have one day. He looked about him at the late-Victorian bits and pieces, the pink chaise longue, the Parker-Knoll armchairs and reproduction Georgian dining-table.
Leonora’s mother said, “Where do you live, Guy? Not far away, I suppose.”
He told her baldly, in the knowledge of her immediate comprehension. She would know at once that Attlee House was unlikely to be the name of a private mansion block. He could see her brain ticking, the wheels turning and slotting things into place, making contingency plans. Leonora was restive, bored with it all.
“Come on, Guy, we’ll go up to my room.”
A hand went out to Leonora’s arm and rested there, a long, pale brown hand with, it seemed to him, preternaturally long slender fingers, and the nails glittering like implements, like things designed for picking bruised or damaged bits out of food.
“No, Leonora, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“We shall be eating the minute Daddy comes in.”
They watched television, side by side on the pink chaise longue. She would have taken his hand, he could sense she wanted to, but he gave a tiny shake of his head, moved an inch or two from her. Daddy came in. He looked more like a handsome human teddy bear than any man Guy had seen before, fair and blunt-featured and stocky without being fat. He called Leonora’s mother Tessa, so Guy did too when he had to call her something. There wasn’t anyone he called Mr. and Mrs.; he never had and didn’t mean to start, he’d had endless trouble over it at school. “Tessa,” he said and she looked at him as if he’d called her a bitch or a whore or something. Those eyebrows that were Leonora’s—only the skin round them was old and brown and freckled—went up right into her hair.
