by Ruth Rendell
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 ot
her 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.”
CHAPTER FOUR
It 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.”
“You can’t be serious, Leonora.”
She was serious. She’d see him on Saturday. Where would he like to have lunch?
That was long before he began asking himself what the reason for it could be. He hadn’t even considered it could have had something to do with his offer of a loan or with his ways of making a living, still less with Con Mulvanney. By then the Con Mulvanney affair was six, seven months in the past. He told himself that she was upset about the move, the problems she and Rachel had been having in getting contracts signed, exchanged, a completion date decided on. In a month or two. when they had moved into the flat in Portland Road, things would be different. She would come back to him.
Some might say she had never gone away. He began telling himself she hadn’t. He saw her regularly, there was no one else for her and no one serious for him, no one that counted. He phoned her every day, much easier now she had a home of her own and her own phone. They had lunch on Saturdays. Every day he heard her voice and once a week he saw her. There were couples he knew who didn’t see each other as often as that. If you told anyone you saw your girl-friend once a week and phoned her every day, they would say you were going steady. He reassured himself in this fashion, he comforted himself.
But a man can’t be expected to live celibate and there were other girls. Naturally, there were. There wouldn’t have been if she hadn’t withheld herself. Give him the chance and he would be the most constant lover, the most faithful of husbands. He never told her about the girls, she didn’t ask, and he didn’t ask her if there were other men. But he had taken it for granted that though he had to have a girl-friend, he was a man; she didn’t have to have a boy-friend. She could live without sex.
“A fine example of the double standard,” said Rachel, speaking of another couple they knew.
It wasn’t quite like that. He made this compromise because he couldn’t face a starker reality. He convinced himself there was no starker reality. This was reality: that she wasn’t very highly sexed; for companionship she preferred the company of women. But she loved him—why else would she talk to him every day and have lunch with him every Saturday?
One day, he had thought, things will change. She’s enjoying her freedom, she likes supporting herself, doing her job, trying to run a household on a shoestring, putting those absurd principles of hers into practice. But one day the novelty will have worn off. She’ll want to get married, all women want to get married, and it was him she’d marry. In a way it was as if they were engaged, betrothed since childhood, the way some of those Asian people were. These days a girl wanted to prove herself, show she could be as self-reliant as a man, before doing what all women do, settling down with a man. He even said as much one Saturday when, after lunch, he went back to the new flat with Leonora.
The stairs they had to climb were incredible. He wouldn’t have believed so many London flats were without lifts. Rachel was there in one of her typical designer outfits of ancient skirt from a Monsoon sale (probably the first-ever Monsoon sale) and grey Oxfam jumper. He looked at their house-plants and their posters, their Reject Shop crockery and the sofa they’d bought off a pavement in the Shepherds Bush Road, and after a while he’d made that remark about women proving themselves.
“You’re a Victorian, you know, Guy,” said Rachel. “The last one. You ought to be in a museum. The Natural History Museum, d’you think, Leonora? Or the V and A?”
“No, you’ve got me wrong,” he said, trying to keep his temper, catching sight in a fly-spotted mirror of his young handsome face, his thin athletic figure—a Victorian! “You’ve misunderstood. I believe women are equal to men. I know women need to have careers and their own money and a job to go back to after they’re married. I know what women want.”
They screamed with laughter. They clutched each other. Rachel said something about Freud. He still didn’t know what he’d said that was wrong or funny. After a while it didn’t bother him much because it was Rachel who’d made the remark, not Leonora. And he laughed at Leonora over Saturday lunch when she reproved him for saying Rachel’s trouble was sour grapes.
He was passing through a long phase of knowing she’d come round to marrying him one day. The possibility of her meeting someone else never really occurred to him. Or rather, with a chill like the first frost on the air of autumn, the possibility would occur and he would phone her to reassure himself. Not to explain his feelings, for they were only feelings, never as strong as suspicions, but to listen to her voice and attempt to detect in it some change. And on Saturday he would watch her and listen to the inflexions of her voice, on the watch for some subtle alteration. She was always the same, wasn’t she?
She talked as she always did about the old times, about their youth, and then about her family and her girl-friends, what they’d been doing and saying. None of it interested him, but he liked to hear her talk. It was funny really what she’d said about this William Newton’s conversation when she hadn’t really much conversation herself. There was never a word from her about TV or music or the latest West End hit or fashion or sport. He tried to imagine the content of this fabulous conversation she had with Newton, but imagination failed him.
It was now a week since he had seen her with Newton. He was on the other side of Kensington High Street, crowded traffic-laden Kensington High Street, walking in the direction of Church Street, and they had been on the other side hand in hand. His Leonora and a skinny red-haired fellow, not much taller than she was.
Hand in hand. He had felt a rush of blood to his head, felt his face grow red as if he were embarrassed, as if he were ashamed. Passionately, he hadn’t wanted them to see him, and they hadn’t. Afterwards, having a drink at home, he had thought of it as one of the worst shocks of his life, comparable to the one he had received on the day when that woman came to his house and told him about Con Mulvanney.
“You aren’t looking too good,” said Danilo.
“I’m perfectly okay.”
For a moment Guy felt affronted. In his new Ungaro jacket and thin Perry Ellis sweater he had been pleased with his appearance. It wasn’t his habit to spend much time in front of the mirror, a quick glance was enough to convey the desired impression of deep tan, sepia brush of shadow on the hard jaw-line, white teeth, a lick of black hair. And the hard, muscular, yet thin, body shape. But that glimpse
, caught as he left the house ten minutes before, had shown him something else, something tired and worn perhaps, something haggard.
“I’ve been under a bit of pressure,” he said. “My migraine’s been coming back.”
“You want to eat feverfew.”
“What the hell is feverfew?”
“God knows. I read about it in one of Tanya’s papers. She’s into all this alternative stuff. Seriously, though, you don’t look too good.”
They were in a restaurant in that expensive region round the back of Sloane Square. Danilo was a short spare leonine-faced man with a big head and yellowish-brown eyes like an animal’s, a fierce small carnivore. Though he was no more than five feet four, some inches shorter than William Newton, and had longish springy sandy hair, Guy would never have called him a ginger dwarf. Danilo wore a very casual but very expensive suit of nearly black seersucker with the jacket sleeves rolled up to show the blue silk lining. He had on a blue shirt with fine dark green stripes but no tie. His two rings were of white gold, one set with a round boss of lapis, the other a square block of jade. A few years back, when it was still possible. Danilo had carried on a very profitable business importing imperial jade from China. That was where Guy’s cuff-links had come from. Danilo was not Spanish or of South American origin and his given name was really Daniel, but there had been no less than five Daniels in his class at primary school, so he had rechristened himself. As well as an importer of various illegal substances, Danilo was a one-remove murderer. Or so Guy believed.
The only area in which Danilo wasn’t macho was drink. He had a spritzer in a tall glass. Guy drank more than he ate. He tended to do that, though he ate as well, a fine thick strip of Scottish fillet steak, brought to the table whole, charred outside, blue in, divided into two for them with one dextrous stroke of the knife.
Danilo talked about the villa in Granada he had sold and the house he had bought in the Wye Valley, a Welsh castle with thirty acres, which he intended to furnish with the contents of a Swedish baroque manor-house. There was an order prohibiting the removal of any of these tables and chairs and pictures from Sweden, but Danilo was fixing things to get around that. He wasn’t a particularly self-centred man, and if he was callous, he was not hard-hearted to his friends. This invitation had not been extended for him to talk about himself.
