by Ruth Rendell
They were both speaking in necessarily low voices. Not that their table companions took any notice of them. Leonora was also wearing the summer Saturday uniform of jeans, T-shirt, and white running shoes. Her jeans were blue denim, her T-shirt blue, white, and mauve stripes. She had a mauve headband on between her fringe and the rest of her hair. Guy thought she looked lovely in spite of what she wore, but for all that he would have liked to see her in a dress when she came out to lunch with him. The first thing he had looked for he had not found, to his great relief. The absence on her finger of an engagement ring helped give rise to his remark.
She said in a pleasant, even tone, “If it had been entirely up to William and me, no, I don’t think we’d have bothered to announce it. I don’t think, come to that, we’d have ‘got engaged.’ My parents wanted it, and so did his. It’s a small thing to do to give so much pleasure, don’t you think?”
“I see.” He laughed a little. “I know you always do what your parents want.”
She didn’t deny it. “Why did you call it rubbish, Guy? I told you I was in love with William.”
“I’d call that rubbish too.” He finished the first of his glasses of wine. Leonora was drinking apple juice, looking at him over the top of her glass in what he interpreted as a sulky way. He changed the subject. “You never told me Maeve was going about with your brother.”
“I suppose I didn’t think you’d be interested.”
“Everything even remotely connected with you interests me, Leo, you ought to know that. I saw them in the park. They were walking along ahead of me. Have you been with them before you met me?”
“What, just now, d’you mean? Of course I haven’t, Guy. Why would I? They don’t want to spend their Saturdays with me.”
“Where does he live now?”
“Now he lives in Chelsea, he’s just moved. I think he’d like Maeve to move in with him, and perhaps she will when I’ve gone.”
He let that pass. The girls were leaving. The table was littered with their debris, but at least, for the time being, it was left to him and Leonora. He leaned a little towards her.
“You haven’t really changed in your feelings towards me, have you? You feel the same as you always have, but you think, or you’ve been persuaded, that being involved with me wouldn’t be wise, wouldn’t be a good thing for you. That’s it, isn’t it?”
She spoke carefully, considering. “I do love you, Guy. I always have and I think I always will. It’s got a lot to do with what we were to each other when we were teenagers.”
His heart seemed to take a little happy leap, to dance about inside his chest. He felt the blood mount into his face. He put out his hand to touch hers, which lay on the table.
“But, Guy, we’ve nothing in common any more, we don’t like the same things. I hate what you do for a living. Looking back, I hate what you’ve done.”
That made him laugh. “Oh, come on. How about you? I was only thinking the other day how brilliant you were at nicking stuff. D’you remember how we used to get rid of it all down the Portobello?”
Her voice was very low. “You don’t know how ashamed I am of the things I did. They fill me with self-disgust when I think of them. But you still think they were all right, you think anything goes so long as you make money out of it.”
Her hand was flat and limp under his. He withdrew his own and looked at it as if something had stung it and he was watching for the sting to swell. “I do nothing illegal any longer,” he said. “Nothing.” Not since the death of Con Mulvanney, he thought, but he didn’t say it aloud, she knew nothing of that, and please Christ, she never would.
“It’s not just illegal things, it’s—well, unethical things. Oh, Guy, you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? That’s part of the trouble, we don’t speak the same language. Your sole aim in life is to make lots of money and live in luxury and have power and make more and more money. And anyway, you can’t wipe out the past just by saying you don’t do things any longer. Someone told me you’d actually once run a protection racket. Oh, Guy!”
“Who told you?” he said, very cold.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. I’d like to know.”
“Well, then, it was Magnus.”
He knew it! Hadn’t he guessed as much? “And?”
“He was acting for a client, finding him a barrister, you know how they do, and this man was some sort of criminal and he mentioned your name in connection with a protection racket up in Kensal.”
“And Magnus told you?”
“He said it couldn’t be the same Guy Curran, but Mummy said it was and of course it was, I knew that.”
“You listen to what these people say about me, don’t you, Leonora? You listen to all of them?”
She said softly, “It wouldn’t make any difference what anyone said. We’re poles apart. We aren’t like each other.”
He didn’t answer that. He said rather slowly and in a deliberate and calculated drawl, “I’ve got a beautiful girlfriend. Her name is Celeste. She is twenty-three and a model and she is very lovely. She stayed with me last night. She’s probably still at Scarsdale Mews waiting for me to come back.”
For a single horrible instant he thought Leonora was going to smile and tell him how happy she was for him, how delighted. But a shadow had crossed her face. Her expression was fixed, the dark blue eyes steady, the lips compressed. She was jealous! He could see it, he couldn’t be mistaken.
“Are you making it up?”
“Sweetheart, if it wasn’t you that asked, I’d really resent that.” He was aware of echoing what she had said to him when he seemed incredulous about Newton. How close they were really! They read each other’s thoughts! “I’m supposed to be attractive to women,” he said, smiling at her. “Ring her up, go on, ask her. Go and call my house.”
Someone, a woman, had once told him that we always feel jealousy over the loves of our past lovers. Even if we no longer care for them, even if we have a new lover, a true love that will be everlasting, we are still jealous. The pang of rejection is still there, for we are all insecure, all terrified of desertion, all longing to be the first and only, or if not the first, the last. But he forgot that now or didn’t think of it. She was jealous, his Leonora was jealous because he had another woman.
“I’m very happy for you, Guy,” she said. “I hope it goes really well. I’m very pleased.” A thought struck her. “But, Guy, would she mind about you meeting me like this? She does know? I mean, perhaps we ought to stop if she’s likely to mind.”
“Of course she doesn’t mind,” he said impatiently. And then, “If you’ve finished, shall we go? Shall we go somewhere else, even if it’s only sitting on the grass in Soho Square?”
He knew she’d refuse but she didn’t. “All right, just for half an hour.”
He wondered what would happen if he tried to take her hand. Better not risk it. They walked along side by side. The clouds had gone and the sky become a hot, hard blue. He found himself suddenly thinking of a holiday they had planned to take together at this time four years ago. They were going to one of the less-frequented Greek islands and he had seen it, without of course discussing this with her, as the venue for resuming their sexual relationship. The sea was called wine-dark down there and the nights were warm. They were going to stay in a wonderful kind of hotel where all the rooms were little grass-roofed huts and each had its own private path down to the silver beach. She would return to him there, physically return to his arms, and soon after they came back they would be married, the job she was going to take and the bed-sit she was going to share with Rachel forgotten.
She had called it off less than two weeks beforehand. It was because he was paying, she said. It was no good, she couldn’t pay her share, she couldn’t afford to, and she couldn’t let him pay for her, so they had to call it off. Even now, remembering it was deeply painful. In his philosophy a woman acknowledged a man’s love and her love for him by letting him pay for things
. The bargain between them consisted in a kind of loving sale, though it didn’t sound pleasant put that way.
He glanced at her Egyptian profile, the firm mouth and chin, the rather severe nose, the dark curtain of hair that hung two inches across her cheek. Her head was bowed as if she was deep in thought,
“You’re not going away on holiday this year, are you?” he said, thinking of being deprived of his Saturdays, of maybe missing two or three of his Saturdays.
“Not exactly on holiday,” she said. “I mean, we’ll be going away later.”
His heart leaden, sinking. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“I’ve been putting off telling you, Guy. But things are different now you’ve told me about Celeste. I’m getting married on September the sixteenth, and we’ll be going away after that on our honeymoon.”
CHAPTER SIX
It was five weeks away.
The wedding would be at Kensington Register Office, the usual routine ceremony, with Maeve and Robin as witnesses. They weren’t religious. On the evening of the wedding day Leonora’s father and his wife were giving a party for them. Anthony and Susannah Chisholm lived in London, not in the Notting Hill Mews but in a flat on two floors of an early-nineteenth-century house in Lamb’s Conduit Street that had belonged to Susannah and her first husband. William Newton’s father and mother lived in Hong Kong and wouldn’t come for the wedding because they would be in England for Christmas, but his sister and brother-in-law would be there.
She told him all about it.
“It’s not him, though, is it? You wouldn’t have me if he was dead, for instance, would you? It’s something else.”
“He won’t be dead, Guy. Why should he? He’s a healthy man of thirty.”
“If I thought it was him, I’d like to kill him. I’d like to fight him, challenge him to a duel and kill him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Can he handle a gun? No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know about him. He’s just an excuse, anyway. Any man but me. I’d like to know why, Leonora. I’d like to know what happened to turn you against me.”
This conversation took place not in Soho Square but on the following Saturday in a restaurant which, for once, she had allowed him to choose. It was in that part of Netting Hill called Hillgate Village, on the southern side of the Bayswater Road. Leonora was wearing a dress. It was a hot day and the dress was short and made of some clinging diaphanous fabric, white with misty pink and mauve flowers and a plain mauve belt or sash. She had white stockings on and flat pink shoes. On the coat rack at the entrance to the restaurant she had hung up her hat of fine white straw with lilac ribbons. After lunch she was going to the wedding of a friend of William Newton’s, mention of which had given rise to talk of her own.
Guy wished she would always dress like that. He ached with desire for her. He heard his own voice cross-examining her and he hated himself for the bullying tone, the reiterated questions, but he had to know. She gave him an injured, sullen look. She wouldn’t have a dessert, cheese, or coffee, in case she was late. Pressed, she said nothing had happened to turn her against him. No, it wasn’t his offering to buy her a flat that had done it, nothing had “done it,” it had been a gradual process that began in her late teens. She had grown out of him and wished he would grow out of her.
“You were jealous when I told you about Celeste,” he said. “I could see it in your eyes. That means you really love me still.”
“That’s nonsense, Guy.”
“If you marry him while you love me you’ll be committing a crime against yourself and me.”
She laughed at him. He thought her very cruel but understood it was a defence. If she hadn’t laughed she would have burst out crying. It was a hard, unwomanly sound, that laughter, more pain in it than amusement.
She went away to William Newton’s relative’s wedding after that and left him sitting at the table drinking brandy.
Maeve and Robin, Anthony and Susannah, Tessa and Magnus, Rachel Lingard—one of them or one set of them had done this. But done what? Convinced her that he was entirely unsuitable so that, bowing to their coercion, she had thrown herself into the arms of the first man who came along. They had probably brought the man along themselves, found him and vetted him and introduced him to Leonora.
He phoned her as usual on Sunday, on Monday and Tuesday. He refused to admit the possibility that she would actually get married on September 16, but if anything so impossible and wicked did happen, just if, he intended to go on phoning her every day. Sometimes he imagined still doing it when they were old and she was a grey grandmother and he an aged millionaire, single but with many beautiful unloved mistresses. But it wouldn’t happen because one day, if not this year or next year, the year after or the year after that, she would marry him. Out of his path he would clear those who stood between them. Rachel answered the phone on Sunday, Maeve on Monday and Tuesday.
Rachel said, “I’ll fetch her,” followed by a heavy theatrical sigh and a remark that made him grind his teeth: “She guessed who it would be. She had the sort of premonition psychic people have just before a road accident.”
Maeve said when he asked to speak to Leonora, “Must you?”
He was furious. “What the fuck d’you mean, ‘must I’? What affair is it of yours?”
“Don’t speak to me like that, please. You won’t get to talk to Leonora by using obscene language.”
“Oh, won’t I? I’ll keep ringing this fucking number till I do. And by the way, thanks very much for ignoring me in the park last week. Charming manners you and your boy-friend have.”
“I never saw you in the park, last week or any other time.”
She went away and Leonora came on the line. Next day Rachel answered the phone again and said there was such a thing as having Telecom change the number, did he know that? He didn’t reply.
“Alexander Graham Bell’s got a lot to answer for,” said Rachel.
She really hated him, there was venom in her voice. It was extraordinary the way these women, Tessa, Rachel, Maeve, thought they were being loyal to Leonora by putting her against him, when in fact the best possible thing they could do for Leonora was encourage her to marry him and thus ensure for herself, apart from the love and romance aspect, a future free from financial worry and a life of happiness and luxury.
Guy never stayed at home in the evenings. What would he do there? He hadn’t made a fortune in order to sit in his house eating take-away and watching videos. Susannah Chisholm, who had always been nicer to him than any of the rest of that lot, had once told a story of someone she had met in New York who said that since he came to live in Manhattan he had never once eaten his dinner at home. The other people there had laughed and wondered at this and been amazed, but Guy, though he didn’t say so, had wondered what all the fuss was about as he, since he came to Scarsdale Mews, had never eaten dinner at home either. Going out in the evening meant drinking out, eating out, and then going on to a club for more drinking out.
He seldom went to a theatre but occasionally to the cinema, to please Celeste. Having flatly refused to consider Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown at the Lumiere, he had consented to go to Paris by Night at the Curzon West End.
They had been to the six fifty-five showing because both preferred to eat afterwards and it was only nine o’clock when they came out. Guy had booked a table at a restaurant he particularly liked in Stratton Street, where Leonora would never have allowed him to take her for lunch. It was a warm, airless evening after another hot day. Celeste was wearing a dress of white cotton broderie anglaise, short and tight but not obviously so because she was so slender. She had white sandals on with straps of alternating white and gilded leather, white and green bracelets on both arms, and each separate tiny plait of her hair, at least fifty of these, ended in a gold-pointed tip. Guy wore a linen suit in a very light greyish-beige with a bitter-chocolate-coloured open-necked shirt, a belt of plaited grey leather, and white running shoes with a gr
ey leather trim. He had thought, some hours before, that they made a handsome couple, but this was simply an opinion, it gave him no particular pleasure.
As they were coming out of the cinema he saw Leonora and William Newton leaving ahead of them. Although he had spoken to Leonora that afternoon, he still felt at the sight of her those extraordinary and characteristic sensations, which were even stronger when on very rare occasions he came upon her by chance. His heart seemed to stand still, then to beat not faster but somehow more loudly. Those people who surrounded him and her, a considerable crowd of people, mostly young or youngish, who until he saw her had seemed attractive and colourful, some of them very well worth looking at, now faded to faceless shadows, the dead perhaps, or extras in an old monochrome film. Only he and she existed in the world.
This sensation lasted a few moments. By the time the crowd had faces again, he and Celeste, she and Newton were all out on the pavement. Leonora turned her head and looked straight at him. She was pleased to see him, he could tell she was. She was smiling her lovely, carefully governed smile and, taking hold of Newton’s sleeve, drawing him over in their direction.
“Guy,” she said, “you didn’t say you were going to the cinema.”
“Nor did you. This is Celeste. Celeste, Leonora.” He wasn’t going to utter Newton’s name.
“This is William.”
Loving her so much, he could admit to himself that she looked awful. A couple of hippies left over from the sixties they might have been, Newton in a pair of khaki cotton loons from Dirty Dick’s and a T-shirt that must have been pale blue before it was put through the cold wash with a lot of navy and red garments about a hundred times. Her dress was one of Laura Ashley’s less successful lines, bought no doubt in a sale three or four years ago, a now-faded or washed-out navy-and-white viscose print with elasticated waist and too-long short sleeves, a hem that came halfway down her awful scuffed red leather boots. Guy was pleased. A woman who would dress like that to go out with a man couldn’t care much about him.
