Authors: Ruth Rendell
Guy said nothing. He just sat there and he looked away. He looked out of the windows onto his own pretty town garden with its round pond and the island in the middle. No bronze dolphin then, no Florentine furniture, the orange trees tiny in their Chinese vases, up against the wall blue and dark green junipers he had later had cut down to make way for the clematis. It was raining a little, the raindrops puncturing the surface of the pond. A single pink water-lily had been in bloom. He remembered everything.
“He wasn’t able to speak,” she said, in a cool, neutral sort of voice.
Did that mean he had told no one about the LSD?
“I know what you’re thinking. He didn’t tell anyone.”
“He’d told you.”
She laughed. “Oh, yes. That filth you gave him may show at post-mortem, I ought to know that but I don’t. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.” She looked slowly round the room. He knew, as if she had said it aloud, what was going through her mind. He’s got all this, ill-gotten gains, but not for long, on, no, not for long, all to be swept away, all lost. Fourteen years, thought Guy. “I told the police,” she said. “I told them everything I knew. I imagine they’ll come here. They said I shouldn’t try to see you, but I had to. I had to
confront
you. I’ll go now.”
“How was I supposed to know he was allergic to bees?” Guy said.
He would have liked to kill her but of course he didn’t touch her. She was crying when she left. Crying seemed to make her body smell worse. He wasn’t too keen on his neighbours’ seeing a weeping woman in flapping robes and with dirty bare feet leaving his house, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Less than an hour later the Drugs Squad arrived.
W
hat makes you love someone? Why can’t you choose, when you can choose almost everything else in life? If you’re rich, that is. You can choose what to do for a living, where to live, what kind of a house and car and clothes and entertainment to have. Why isn’t the person you love a matter of choice too?
Guy often asked that about himself and Leonora. Why was he in love with Leonora when he didn’t want to be, when it was so inconvenient, when it was so destructive and time-wasting? She looked beautiful to him but he knew she wasn’t all that good-looking, she didn’t dress well, she didn’t like any of the things he liked, and he disliked most of the things she liked. They hadn’t anything in common. She wasn’t interested in eating and drinking and expensive clothes, staying up all night, exotic places, fast cars, sunny beaches and going to the races. Sport meant nothing to her. She had never been skiing or on a yacht. Diamonds might be a girl’s best friend but not her sort of girl, and she campaigned against the fur trade.
She liked books and serious films, preferably made in Japan or Chile and with subtitles. She liked camping or hostel holidays with a backpack, health foods, fruit juice, Badoit and Ramlosa, cycling, fringe theatre, classical music, and “green” documentaries on BBC 2. He would make himself get to like all that if they were together again, but at the moment he hated it. He hated her clothes and the fact that she hardly ever wore make-up, wore it even less often since she had taken up with the ginger dwarf, never put varnish on her nails. Hairy legs would be the next thing, he sometimes thought.
But when he saw her coming towards him, coming into their Saturday restaurant, his heart moved. His heart turned a little sideways and beat hard as in shock. Every time that happened. Something inside his head, the skull itself perhaps, expanded with a kind of warmth, with a faint pain. But his body grew cold; if he did not exactly shiver, he felt the cold stroke him, running down his arms and sides, touching his heart. Every time.
And why? It was something about her, that was all he could say. Perhaps that was what it always was with love. Something about someone. A glance, a smile, a way of opening the eyes wide, a gurgle in the laugh, a movement of the shoulders, some little thing. That of course didn’t explain why the little thing could do so much. With him and Leonora it was her smile, the way she smiled, a curious tightness of her lips, which never stretched quite as far as you imagined they could, a kind of control in her smile. The teeth, of course, were perfect, small, white, and even. The only smile like hers he had ever seen had been Vivien Leigh’s in
Gone With the Wind.
Did her smile mean so much to him, madden him and pain and delight him, cause him to long for something he couldn’t define, not because it was controlled but because he knew it could break the bounds of control and be full and complete, but never would be for him?
Three days had passed without his speaking to her. On the fourth day, in Georgiana Street, she had answered the phone. They had been out a lot, she said, they hadn’t been at home much. William had been working. William had been working on a film about men who had to care for their disabled wives at home. What a thrilling subject! The viewing figures would really be something else! As if he cared where bloody William had been. He would have liked to kill William several times over.
“Where shall we have lunch?” he asked, and she said what about going back to that place in Kensington Park Road. So there he was, the first to arrive this time, sitting at the bar being served a vodka martini by the French boy who was the barman there. He had taken off his sunglasses, not wanting to be accused of looking like a mafioso.
Passing the mews where once she had lived had made him think of love and of her smile. It was August 19, exactly four weeks to go to her wedding day—well, to the date she called her wedding day. He wasn’t giving in as meekly as that. He wasn’t giving in at all. He had made himself not look at the spiral staircase, and he was just thinking he would have to look, he would have to turn round, when she touched him on the shoulder.
“Guy, you’re dreaming.”
The shiver went through him and his heart moved. He looked at her. She smiled at him and he told her what he had been thinking about her smile.
“It’s why I love you. It’s sort of the essence of why.”
“Suppose I had plastic surgery and the shape of my mouth was altered, would you stop loving me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I always have this feeling that you don’t smile properly for me, you don’t smile as much as you could. You
govern
your smile when you smile at me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Guy,” she said.
“What does Newton think about you having lunch with me on Saturdays? Does he hate it?”
“He understands,” she said.
They sat at their table. Leonora had an orange juice, he had a Campari and soda. She ordered a grapefruit-and-avocado cocktail and stuffed courgettes and he ordered escargots and then calves’ liver in a raspberry coulis. He thought about Newton’s “understanding.” Big of him to “understand,” the patronizing bastard.
“Someone started turning you against me when you were nineteen,” he said.
“Oh, nonsense. What nonsense.”
“Didn’t you like my house?”
“I loved it, it’s a beautiful house.”
“It’s better than your parents’ house was, isn’t it?”
“Much better, but I don’t see where all this is leading.”
“I want you to tell me something. I want you to tell me if there was anyone else between me and Newton.” A little humility would be in order, he thought. “I suppose I’ve no right to ask, but I hope you’ll tell me.”
“There was no one very serious,” she said.
He didn’t care for that, it caught him by the throat. “But there were other men between me and Newton?”
“Of course there were.”
“Who were they?”
Her eyes sparkled. He couldn’t tell if she was pleased or angry. She said crisply, “All right, if you insist. There was Robin’s friend that he was in partnership with, and two men at university, and, yes, now I come to think of it, there was someone I met at Robin’s twenty-fifth birthday party. Is that what you want to know?”
“Did you sleep with them?”
“That’s nothing to do with you, Guy, it’s not your business. You said you’d no right to ask and you haven’t.”
“You did then.” Having a heart attack must be like this, it would be the same kind of pain, clutching at his chest, bringing a kind of paralysis. “I just wonder what your father would say,” he burst out.
“You
what?”
“I said I wondered what your father would say to that. He’d be horrified. Any man would be about his daughter. Your father would very much have liked you to marry me. He would have liked me to be the one and only, I know he would, he’d die if he thought you’d been promiscuous.”
“I wasn’t promiscuous. Don’t be silly.”
“One man after another, what else is it? Why, anyway? What was wrong with me? Were they better-looking, richer? What had they got that I haven’t got? I was the one your father would have liked to give his daughter to.”
She started laughing. Then she shook her head.
“What’s so funny.”
“You are. You’re so old-fashioned. You think of yourself as a sort of trendy yuppie—well, you’ve yupped—young and trendy but in fact you’re really old-fashioned, and a sexist too. ‘I just wonder what your father would say.’ Really, Guy, you sound like someone of sixty. My father himself wouldn’t say a thing like that. And men don’t give their daughters in marriage any more, hadn’t you noticed?”
“Don’t deny your father has a lot of influence over you, Leonora.”
“That has nothing to do with it. I’m not denying it. I’m only saying we’ve come a long way since men chose husbands for their daughters.”
Hating the look on her face, her smile, he said morosely, “He changed towards me, your father.”
From that night forward, he thought. That evening when he came to take Leonora out and read the story about Con Mulvanney in the paper, that was the last time Anthony Chisholm pressed him to have another drink, smoked his cigarettes, treated him like an old friend. It was a few weeks before he saw him again and the change was marked. At the time he had thought Anthony preoccupied with business cares, worried about something, and after that evening months went by before they saw each other again. When they did he, Guy, was making his offer to “lend” Leonora the money for the flat, and Anthony, who had somehow been brought in on it, was stern and dismissive. The loan was not to be considered, he understood Leonora had already refused; just as long as Guy understood his offer was appreciated but must be utterly out of the question.
Guy ordered himself another Campari. He lit a cigarette while they waited for the food to come. “You never told me how you met Newton,” he said.
“Why would I? You never asked.”
“Well, how did you? Where did you?”
She gave him an odd sideways look, as well she might, considering what was coming. “In Lamb’s Conduit Street.”
“At your father’s? Come on, say what you mean, Leonora.”
“And you can come on, Guy. Who else do I know in Lamb’s Conduit Street? As a matter of fact, my father introduced us.”
“What? He what? You see! I am right. I’m not all those things you said, old-fashioned and sexist and whatever.
Your father introduced you to the man he wants you to marry.”
“
I
want to marry him, Guy. I am going to marry him. Anyway, it wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like then?”
“William was making this programme about architecture. It was sparked off by something Prince Charles said. He came to see Dad for a preliminary interview at home and I happened to be there.”
“When was this?”
“Don’t interrogate me, please, Guy. It was about two years ago. Well, it was July.”
“You weren’t living with them then. You’d been in your flat for over a year by then.”
“I didn’t say I was living with them. I said I met William at their place. It was Dad’s birthday. I called in with Dad’s birthday present and William was there.”
“That doesn’t explain how you started going out with him. Or did your father arrange it? Maybe he told Newton you’d got an undesirable boy-friend and he’d welcome someone more suitable. Maybe he gave him your phone number.”
“I gave him my phone number,” she said. “He asked me for it.”
How was it possible to be so angry with someone and still love her? How could you dislike almost everything about the way a person dressed and behaved and still love her? Love her better than anyone else in the world. Better than yourself.
“If you’re so—I think the word’s progressive. If you’re so progressive, why do you think of marrying him? Why don’t you go and live with him?”
“I am living with him now—more or less.”
Their food came. Leonora asked for some water, he for a bottle of red Graves. “Why marriage?” he said when the waitress had gone.
“To make a public commitment is the usual reason, isn’t it? Yes, I suppose that’s what we want to do. Commit ourselves to each other for life.”
“For
life.
You’re counting on this lasting for
life?”
“Why not? People used to take it as a matter of course that marriage would last for life. I hope ours will. I don’t know, I can’t tell, how can anyone tell? All we can do is try.”
She had taken a roll from the basket but wasn’t eating it. Her left hand lay on the table. He took hold of the wrist, held it loosely like someone feeling for a pulse, then tightened his grip.
“Do something for me.”
He thought she sighed. “What would that be, Guy?”
“Don’t get married. Wait. Wait a year. You’re young, he’s young—what’s a year? Live with him. I don’t mind that—well, I do but I can bear it. Live with him and see.”
She looked at him, shaking her head very slightly from side to side. “Let me go. You’re hurting me.” She pulled her hand away.
“Do that for me. It’s a small thing.”
“A small thing! To postpone my marriage because a friend, an ex-boy-friend, tells me to!”
“I’m more than that to you, Leo. I am the love of your life and you know it. If you refuse me I’ll stop you. I won’t let you get married. I have a right to forbid your marriage and I will.”
“Guy,” she said, “sometimes you say things to me which make me very seriously question your sanity.
I mean that.