Going Wrong (12 page)

“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 force 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.

Two nights later he was taking Leonora out. She was living with her father and stepmother in Bloomsbury.

Anthony Chisholm was nicer to him than any of the other people who were close to Leonora. Anthony and Susannah. She was nice to him as well. Of course she was only eight years older than he was, there was no feeling that here was another parent. Like an old-fashioned suitor, Guy called for Leonora in Lamb’s Conduit Street and took her home.

He got there early. He always got there early when he went to fetch Leonora. She was in the bath. Anthony, who was an architect, a partner in a city firm called Purdey Chisholm Hall, was not yet home from work. Susannah did PR for a cosmetics company and some toymakers and handled her accounts from home. She gave him a drink, said they had people coming and she was cooking something tricky—would he excuse her? The evening paper that Leonora had brought in with her was lying on the arm of the settee.

Guy drank his drink and read the front page. There was a bizarre story about a man in South London being stung to death by bees.

The man’s name was Cornelius “Con” Mulvanney, which meant nothing to Guy, who read the story, and then another about a tennis player’s divorce, and had started on one about a fire in Fulham, when Anthony came in.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

W
hen Guy phoned Leonora’s flat on the day after their lunch at Clarke’s, Rachel Lingard took the call.

“I’m afraid Leonora isn’t here.”

“Where is she then?”

“I’m not my sister’s keeper.”

“What?”

“We may not know what God said to Cain after he made the statement I paraphrased but I emphatically dissociate myself from that kind of involvement.”

She talked like that. She often did. He had long ago ceased to ask her what she was on about.

“She’s round at the ginger dwarf’s, I suppose. Okay, you needn’t answer that. I’ve got his number.”

There was no reply from Georgiana Street. He tried again an hour later and an hour after that and then every half-hour. He took Celeste out to dinner and then to a drinking club in Green Street called Greens. From there, at eleven, he again dialed William Newton’s number and again there was no answer. It wasn’t very late for him but he knew it was late for most people. There were either not in or Newton had a plug-in phone that made a ringing tone to the caller even if unplugged. Newton had unplugged his phone to make it impossible for Leonora to speak to him. Most likely, almost certainly, Leonora did not know this.

Next day he tried her at home. There was no reply. The phone was not answered throughout the evening and the phone in Georgiana Street was not answered. Just before ten he asked directory inquiries for the number of an M. Mandeville in Sanderstead Lane, South Croydon, obtained it and phoned Tessa.

When she heard who it was she said first of all that she had no idea where Leonora was. Leonora—she called her “my daughter”—was twenty-six and “her own woman.” Then she said, “You know it’s only right to tell you I think you must be a very seriously disturbed person. You ought to be having therapy. Though it may be too late for anything like that to do any good. Permanent damage was done long long ago.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I used to think of you as a criminal, but it’s more pity I feel now. I pity you, I really do. All that filth you took into your system over the years is bearing fruit now. You’re reaping the whirlwind.”