by Ruth Rendell
“How’s Celeste, then? That still on?”
Guy lifted his shoulders. Any mention of Celeste always embarrassed him.
“The works of art—keeping you in the style to which you’re accustomed?”
“I haven’t got any money worries, Dan,” said Guy. “That’s not a problem. You and I, that’ll never be a problem with us, right?” They had once said to each other, years ago, that a man was only half a man if he couldn’t make himself rich.
“Then it has to be little Miss Leo.”
Guy wouldn’t have allowed anyone else to call Leonora “little Miss Leo” but he minded Danilo’s doing it less than he would some other people. Danilo loved her too, in a more brotherly way, of course, and he hadn’t seen her for years, but he still retained for her that tender regard which is born out of a nostalgia for old wild times. She had been more skilful at nicking stuff off Boots’s counters than any male companion of theirs. Once, in a single swoop, she had pocketed an electric toothbrush, a hair dryer, and a set of heated rollers. Thinking of that reminded Guy of another companion of theirs and helped him put off the moment.
“You ever hear from Linus?”
Danilo laughed. “That one, he came to a bad end. Well, I would reckon, I don’t know. Someone told me he went to Malaysia and they hung him for having a little bit of weed on him.”
“You believe that?”
“No, I don’t believe most of what I’m told. What’s with Leonora then? Come on, you’re going to tell me, you might as well come out with it. She getting married, is that it?”
It was unpleasantly near the bone. He said stoutly. “She won’t do that. Well, not unless it’s to me. I want to ask you, Dan, I mean, if I want to …” Guy looked round. There was no one within earshot, but he lowered his voice, “… get someone out of the way, could you—well, fix things?”
The irises of the yellow eyes didn’t change but the pupils did. They seemed to elongate, becoming black stems instead of spots. Danilo touched a red tongue to his thin lower lip.
“The boy-friend?” he said.
Guy was taken aback. “How d’you know there’s a boyfriend?”
“There’s always a boy-friend. You want him wasted?”
Again Guy made that impatient gesture with his shoulders. “I don’t think so. I don’t know.” He saw that table in the hotel again, planted Maeve there instead of old Mrs. Chisholm, put William Newton in the place of Janice and her fiancé. “There’s someone poisoning her mind against me, Dan, but I don’t know who. I don’t know which one. I thought I did. If I knew, I’d … I just don’t know.”
“It can be done,” Danilo said calmly. “For a friend I could get a nice neat job for three grand.”
“And ten nice neat jobs for thirty grand? I can’t have a massacre, can I? I can’t blast the lot of them off the face of the earth. Dan, I know there’s just one of them that’s turning her against me, one or at the most two, one or two she wants to please and be in good with. They’ve told her every lie they can fabricate about me.”
“The fiancé it’ll be.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. Christ, if I only knew. I’m all sorts of a fool, Dan. I’ve brought you here for bloody nothing. I don’t know who to name to you. I’ve brought you here for nothing.”
“The steak was magic,” said Danilo. “I’ll break my rule and have a small Chivas Regal.”
Guy said, “Dan, why did you say that? Why did you say that about Newton?”
“What did I say?”
“You called him ‘the fiancé.’”
“You must have said.”
“I didn’t. I said she wasn’t, she wouldn’t. I mean, this Newton, he exists, of course he does, but he’s just a chap takes her about, he’s no more to her than Celeste is to me.”
Danilo gave him a hard look, penetrating but not unkind. “Okay, I remember now. Tanya told me. She saw it in some paper. Yesterday or the day before. She said to have a look at this and wasn’t it the Leonora Chisholm I know. It said the usual stuff about the engagement being announced and the marriage shortly to take place. Leonora Chisholm and William Newton. That’s how I know the guy’s name, it must be, you never told me. That’s why I thought it was him you wanted disappeared.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Guy’s bed was a four-poster, japanned, with canopy in the Chinese style, made by the firm of William Linnell in 1753. Gilded flying dragons seemed just to have alighted on the curving scarlet horns of its pagoda-like top. Its curtains were of yellow silk. There was one very much like it in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The bedroom walls were covered with a Shiki silk paper. There was no carpet on the wood-block floor but Chinese pillar rugs with dragons and animal masks and cloud motifs.
At eight-thirty on Saturday morning Guy was in his four-poster bed with Celeste Seton. She was still asleep but he was awake, contemplating the making of coffee, eating some small light thing, as yet undecided on, and then going for an hour or two to his health club. Guy looked at Celeste’s exquisite face on the pillow, like a precious delicate bronze, and thought how beautiful she was but avoided otherwise thinking about her. As soon as he thought about her he was filled with guilt. The idea that he loved one woman and used another for sexual purposes was shameful and abhorrent to him.
Of course it was not quite like that, it was not like that. He had never been anything but honest with Celeste. She knew he was in love with Leonora, or he had told her he was, he had been quite open. It was not his fault if she persisted in taking it in the wrong way.
“I don’t mind, sweet Guy, why would I mind? I know I’m not your first, I’d be mad to expect it. You’re not mine, are you?”
He let that pass. “I’m in love with Leonora, I love her. I can’t imagine life without her. I’d marry her tomorrow if I could.”
She had smiled at him. “Yeah, sure. You have lunch with her on Saturdays, you’re with her an hour and a half. I guess I can stand that. If that’s the competition, I can take it.”
Her father came from Trinidad, where the people have East Indian blood. Her mother was from Gibraltar. She had a perfect Caucasian face that happened to be the colour of teak and a body like an Egyptian girl on a vase painting. She was a model. Her hair was a dark russet brown, immensely thick, and grew naturally in deep long waves, like Dorothy Lamour’s in some South Seas movie of the thirties.
When Guy took her about, men turned to look at her. He could swear that once, walking behind her down the staircase at Blake’s, he had heard a man growl at the sight of her. On the other hand, when he was out with Leonora—or had been out with her, for now it happened very seldom—no one looked at her. Of course it was true that men on scaffolds and men down road holes whistled at her, she was young and her legs were lovely and she was attractive. But the traffic wouldn’t stop for her, no one would stop for her and stare. The odd thing was that this made no difference to him. The seething, positively palpitating admiration Celeste received and the indifference that greeted Leonora’s appearance had not the least effect. He sometimes thought he would be rather relieved if Celeste said goodbye, it had been nice but she’d met someone else.
He reproached himself. It was horrible, it was unfair. But what could he do? He hadn’t asked Celeste to chase him, he didn’t invite her to be there waiting for him when he got home. He hadn’t even given her a key. She had pinched his spare one and had another cut. She was in love with him as he was in love with Leonora, and that, as he put it to himself, screwed him up. But it wasn’t as bad for her as it was for him. At least he didn’t refuse her, he didn’t show her the door, or have the lock changed or tell her to go to hell. He didn’t restrict their meetings to lunch on Saturdays. He was nice to her. He slept with her, though he often thought rather sadly that he could, if necessary, have done without that, and he told himself he should have ignored his body, obeyed his mind and heart, and, like some knight waiting for his lady, have remained chaste.
She didn’t drink coffee.
He made tea and put the cup on the bed table beside her, touched her shoulder lightly, said, “Cup of tea, love.”
Her eyes half-open, she said what she always said to him when she woke. “Hi, sweet Guy, love you.”
She took a long time waking, especially if it happened to be a Saturday, if she happened to have come round on a Friday night and be there on Saturday morning. He wondered sometimes, feeling his own wound, if she avoided waking on those mornings because Saturday was his lunch-with-Leonora day, if she needed to postpone consciousness for as long as possible and awareness of what the day would bring. Perhaps it wasn’t like that, though, perhaps he was only projecting his own feelings onto her, judging her by himself. There is something very low in trying to gauge the emotions of someone in love with oneself when one is far from being in love with that person, and Guy knew it.
He walked up to his macho health club called Gladiators in Gloucester Road. Forty-five minutes with the weights, then the steam room, cold shower, thirty lengths of the pool. He decided to miss breakfast, though he could have had a healthy one at the Juice ’n’ Grains Bar. The scales showed him he had put on two pounds. So much for Danilo’s comments on the state of his health.
It was still only eleven. If he had thought of it he could have gone to the rifle range in the King’s Road and put in an hour’s practice, but he hadn’t thought of it and he only liked using his own guns. He was suddenly most unwilling to go back to Scarsdale Mews. Celeste would still be there. Celeste would very likely still be in bed and would put out her arms to him. Most things that his situation with Celeste and Leonora brought him he could take, though wincing, but not passing straight from one to the other, even though Celeste knew and Leonora wouldn’t care.
Oh, but wouldn’t she? It occurred to him that he had never actually, in so many words, told Leonora that Celeste was his lover, that she frequently slept with him the night before he came for his lunch date, that she loved him and often swore she would love him forever. Perhaps he should try telling her. The idea that Leonora might be jealous made him feel dizzy, he had to sit down on a seat in the park.
Today their lunch date was at Cranks, the original one in Soho. Nothing but love would have induced Guy to go there. Of course he had never been to Cranks but he was aware that it was a vegetarian restaurant and for all he knew alcohol-free. Having decided not to go home first, simply to leave Celeste (not by any means for the first time) to take herself off and perhaps phone him later, he began to walk vaguely in the direction of Hyde Park Corner. He would perhaps pick up a taxi in Park Lane or even walk all the way.
The sky was a soft, delicate blue, overspread with a fine network of tiny clouds that did nothing to hinder the passage of the sun’s rays. The sun was warm, delightful, but not hot. There was no breeze or sharpness in the air. The lawns to the left of him which bordered the Serpentine were this morning the abode of waterfowl: ducks with russet-coloured heads and black-and-white ducks with long necks; barnacle geese and pink-footed geese, red-wattled Muscovies and mallards with green satin crowns. A little way ahead of him, at the point where Rotten Row comes very close to the waterside, a girl and a man were feeding the ducks from a bag of bread cubes, or the girl was feeding them while the man stood aside, watching her and polishing a pair of sun-glasses with a tissue. Guy slackened his pace. The girl screwed up the paper bag and put it in her pocket, having looked in vain for a litter basket. She and her companion began to walk away. They were on Rotten Row itself, some twenty or thirty yards ahead of him, and evidently going in the same direction. Guy had recognized them as Maeve Kirkland and Robin Chisholm.
At first he felt simple astonishment that they knew each other. But nothing, of course, could be more likely. Robin was Leonora’s brother and a “close” brother, Maeve one of her flatmates for the past three years. They were not holding hands or walking particularly close together, they were not walking as Leonora and the ginger dwarf had been. There was no indication that they were lovers or even close friends.
Guy didn’t want to be seen by them. He let them get farther and farther ahead of him. If one of them turned round he would simply cut across the grass onto the South Carriage Drive. He wondered where they were going and what they were talking about. Both were wearing T-shirts, Maeve’s a shocking purplish-pink, Robin’s white. In spite of her name, Maeve was not Irish. She was a big statuesque blonde, Valkyrie-like, a good inch taller than Robin, who was himself nearly six feet. Ten years ago women still minded being taller than their men (or the men minded), and if they could have been transported a decade back in time, Maeve would have worn flat shoes and even rounded her shoulders. Now she had high heels on that looked uncomfortable with her short denim skirt, but perhaps were not. In them she towered above Robin.
Maeve was not one of Leonora’s childhood or school or college friends. She and Rachel met her when they advertised for a third girl to share the flat, which in the end was far more expensive than had at first appeared. They were aghast at what the monthly repayments on the mortgage turned out to be, but instead of accepting a further offer of help from him, they abandoned the idea of having two bedrooms and a living room, made the flat into what were virtually three bed-sits and advertised for a lodger. Maeve was the successful applicant. Mysteriously to Guy, both girls liked Maeve, who became a friend and frequent fellow-guest at those dinner parties in the flat, family lunch parties and other outings-in-a-crowd of which Leonora seemed so fond.
Guy found her bossy and noisy and far too tall. As much as Rachel, though in a different way, she took it on herself to dictate to him what his relationship with Leonora ought to be That amounted, in her eyes, to no relationship at all. She was less subtle about it than Rachel and less obscure. And she was ruder. There was an expression his grandmother had used that he thought would apply to Maeve: fishwife.
Perhaps Robin and Maeve had been going out together for years. Leonora had said nothing but he feared there were many things in her life of which Leonora told him nothing. He watched them ahead of him, walking more slowly now towards Hyde Park Corner, and then suddenly—or it seemed sudden to Guy, who was electrified by it—Robin raised his right arm and put it around Maeve’s shoulders. Almost simultaneously, as if she feared someone behind her might see and disapprove, or as if she sensed his presence, Maeve turned her head and looked in his direction.
He knew she would wave. She might not like him, he was sure she didn’t like him, but they knew each other, had frequently sat at the same table, constantly spoke on the phone when he rang Leonora and she happened to answer. He began to lift his arm to make the gesture that was obligatory in response to hers. She stared hard and turned away. She didn’t wave. Guy felt disproportionately shocked and angry. He felt outraged. Maeve and Robin had their heads close together now, they were talking, it seemed in whispers, though why they had need to whisper there in the open, with no one within fifty yards of them, was a mystery. They were talking about him. That was very plain. It was only natural to wonder not only what they were saying but what they had already said and said to Leonora.
The two heads were so close together that their hair, copious in each case, though Maeve’s was longer and fairer, seemed to combine in a bright golden-brown shining sun-suffused mass like a large silky flower. And now, moved to a need for greater closeness due no doubt to Robin’s agreeing with the malicious slanders she was uttering, Maeve passed her arm round his waist. They were entwined, had become Siamese twins joined at the hip. He imagined those slanders—fabrications of what he did for a living, inventions about his private life. Robin, who might well frequent the same night-spots as he did, could easily have seen him with Celeste. They would relay all this to Leonora. And Leonora was far more likely to listen to and be swayed by what her own contemporaries said than by people thirty years her senior.
He would be. He imagined the relative effect on him of Danilo’s advice or caution and that of Danilo’s father, a crafty old man who ran a betting shop. He would take te
n times more notice of Danilo. And he would take ten times more notice of the counsel of Celeste than that of, say, his own mother if they ever again encountered each other.
The couple ahead turned off Rotten Row onto the path to Serpentine Road and the Achilles Statue. Maeve didn’t turn her head again. For all he knew, they might be going to meet Leonora for a pre-lunch drink somewhere, they might be on their way to fill her up with warnings so that by the time he and she met at one, she would be well-armed against him and on her guard. He had surely been wrong to lay all the blame for Leonora’s change of heart—or outward change—at Tessa’s door. Others were just as much to blame, or more so. Maeve and Robin were even more powerful enemies.
It was still early. Guy retraced his steps a little way, walked through into Knightsbridge by the Albert Gate, and stood looking into Lucienne Phillips’ window at the clothes that would have all looked wonderful on Celeste and at one short-skirted dark blue satin dress that might have been designed for Leonora.
“I suppose you had that rubbish put in the paper to please your family,” Guy said.
He and Leonora were in Cranks, which was very crowded. They were not even able to get a table to themselves. As it was, they sat pressed up against the wall while four very young girls dominated the table, giggling loudly, tasting each other’s food and talking about office rivalries. Guy had already reproached Leonora for suggesting they come here. It was a very long time since he had been in a self-service restaurant. He had had to queue up for his food, which was quiche and salad, the least offensively vegetarian on offer. At any rate he had managed to get a glass—in fact, three glasses—of wine.
