Authors: Ruth Rendell
Guy said to Danilo, “I didn’t know you knew him.”
“I used to know him just like you did. Not so well, maybe, till lately. He swapped some pesetas for me. I sold my villa and it was a question of getting the funds out. I should have asked little Miss Leo, eh? Is that what’s going through your mind? Little Miss Leo and the fiance?”
“Not at all,” Guy said stiffly. “How did you run across him again?”
“I wonder why you ask. Still, my life is an open book between friends. It was a chance meeting. Tanya’s sister had a flat in the same block as him by Clapham Common. That’s her talking to him, the strawberry blond one.”
“In
Clapham?
He lives in Chelsea.”
“This was three or four years ago,” said Danilo. “Why are you so interested all of a sudden? Oh, I begin to see. You aren’t putting a contract out on him, I hope. He’s valuable to me. Where shall I find another swap jockey with a baby face and no scruples? Look at him, he looks about twelve.”
Guy fetched himself another drink. What he would have liked to do was walk up to Robin Chisholm and throw the drink in his face, see what happened. He had never thrown a drink in anyone’s face, but the idea of doing this was suddenly very attractive. It was as if this was something he had to do before he died. The evening was no longer very warm. For the first time in his life Guy thought that nights are never warm in this country—well, maybe one a year might be warm. Then he walked up to Robin, who was still with Danilo’s strawberry-blond sister-in-law, and, by now, an elderly man someone had said was a dress designer.
“Hallo, how are
you?”
He said it in that transatlantic manner that places all the stress on the “you” and runs the words together in a meaningless way. It was deliberate, unaccompanied by a smile.
Robin chose to answer this rhetorical question literally, which made the strawberry blond laugh. “Oh, I’m marvellous, never been better.” He gave Guy a purposely vacuous grin, looking like one of the “big boys” in
Just William.
“Maeve not here?”
This occasioned an offensive pantomine search. Robin looked to either side of him, stretching out his neck and peering round the back of the dress designer. His eyebrows rose, he immediately became short-sighted, baffled, looked at the ground, pursed his lips in a silent whistle. “She doesn’t seem to be,” he said at last. “No, I’d say not.” He had assumed, for the evening only perhaps, for Guy only perhaps, a hearty, ingenuous manner. “I say, is that awfully pretty girl with you?”
It was a mistake to ask which one but Guy asked it.
“The coloured one with the Rastafarian hair.”
Guy threw his drink in Robin’s face.
Danilo’s sister-in-law screamed. The dress designer shouted, “For heaven’s sake!” Robin shook himself, spat, tossed back his hair, and leaped for Guy with arms extended, like a cat fighting. The whole party was silenced, was staring, movement suspended, adrenaline rising. Guy’s fist shot out and caught Robin not where it was meant to, on his jaw, but against his right collarbone. Almost immediately Robin’s flailing hands made contact with Guy’s face, the longish nails extended, tigerlike. Guy struck again as people began to intervene. Someone seized him from behind as someone else grabbed Robin by the shoulders, but not before he had slammed his fist into Robin’s left eye.
They were both gasping, snorting really.
“Stop it, cut it out,” someone was saying.
“Are you crazy?”
“This is
my
party.”
“What in God’s name is going on here?”
“I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“Yes, he threw his drink at him, right in his face.”
“He’s a shit,” Guy said. “He’s the biggest shit in London.”
“And you’re a criminal psychopath and murderer,” said Robin, holding one hand over his eyes. “Why don’t you fuck off back to the slum you came from?”
Celeste drove them home. Guy sat beside her, nursing his bleeding face. He had been scratched on his right cheek, the right side of his upper lip, the left side of his chin, and on his neck.
“I shall probably get blood-poisoning. God knows what filthy bacteria a shit like that carries; listeria, hepatitis B, it could be anything.”
“Silly Guy,” said Celeste. “You’re so silly. You can go to the doctor tomorrow. He’ll never believe it was a fellow did it—you can say I did it, right?”
He didn’t love her but he loved the way she talked, that accent. Rastafarian, that shit would call it. Tomorrow was “tomorr-
oh
” and doctor “d’ctah.”
“Celeste, I want to tell you something.”
It was dark inside the Jaguar. Darkness helped. He lit a cigarette. He would rather have died than tell Leonora about Con Mulvanney, but he was going to tell Celeste and tell her without many qualms, with hardly any inhibition. Was that because he didn’t really care what she thought of him, whereas what Leonora thought of him was all-important? Was it because if she said as a result of what he told her that she no longer wanted to know him, he would be indifferent? Or something else altogether—that Celeste knew him for what he was and loved the man she knew, the real man; he had no need to pretend with her. Leonora, on the other hand, for all their long and close association, didn’t really know him and he didn’t want her to know him, he wanted her to keep her illusions about him.
“Go ahead, then,” said Celeste.
He told her, he didn’t conceal anything. It all came out—his doubt, his trepidation, his cowardice, his later awareness that someone had passed it on to Leonora. Rachel Lingard, he had thought it must be, but at the party he understood it wasn’t. It was Robin Chisholm. At the time Robin had been living in Clapham, only half a mile away from Poppy Vasari.
“And that’s why you threw your drink at him?”
The real reason had been because of Robin’s racist remark directed at Celeste, but he wasn’t going to say this. It might hurt her, besides showing him in a ridiculous chivalrous light. “More or less, yes.”
“Guy, sweetheart, you are a bit crazy, do you know that? You are a bit obsessed with this thing about Leonora. Do you even know if someone told her? Have you asked her? No, because that would tell her the truth if she doesn’t know it already. Don’t you see this is all in your head, and your head is very strange these days, Guy, let me tell you.”
“She changed towards me. Within two weeks of what happened to Con Mulvanney, she changed. She wouldn’t go on holiday with me.”
“She didn’t want you to pay. She wouldn’t go because of the strings attached, right? That was the only way she changed. Okay, so I’m not like that. A man want to pay for me, he can, he’s welcome, I’m happy. If he want me to do things he want and I don’t want and he come on strong, then I throw him out the window. I have not been going to T’ai Chi classes for five years for nothing, I can tell you.”
Guy laughed in spite of himself. He glanced out of the car window but he knew where they were without looking. This was Balham Hill, and over there to the left was Clapham Common. Con Mulvanney country. He had a sensation as of it crossed with a million invisible wires, a network of transmission, each carrying whispers of his crimes and his culpability. Robin Chisholm’s voice spoke to him again:
Psychopathic criminal and murderer.
How could Leonora’s brother have known that those were the words to use unless he had been told the facts?
Celeste was driving them across the river by Battersea Bridge. “Sweet Guy,” she said, “I don’t want to hurt you.” He smiled to himself. That made two of them, each not wanting to hurt the other. “But, Guy, isn’t it most likely she changed because she was realizing you’d nothing to share any more? You’re not the same kind of people. Even I can tell and I’ve only seen her once. Okay, so I’m biased, I’m jealous; it’s true, I am. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the truth. She woke up, she got to understand.”
“At that precise moment? That would make it the biggest coincidence of all time.”
“Well, maybe it would, if you were lovers right up till then, if you were living together or sort of living together, like us, I mean, if you’d promised things and were going to make it permanent. Then it would be really strange. If it was
me
it would be really strange. But was it like that, Guy?”
He said nothing. He shrugged. It was she who didn’t understand. The streets were dark but shiny with yellow light, the brassy light from lamps, a cold summer night, the cold small hours of a summer morning. The scratches on his face felt sore. He told her to leave the car in the street, not to put it away. A cat crouching on the opposite wall gave him a long inscrutable look from its light-filled, almost pupil-less yellow eyes. Perhaps it was a connoisseur of scratches. If people asked he would tell them he had been clawed by his neighbour’s cat.
This was a night when he would have preferred not to have Celeste with him. It would be unthinkable to send her home. Poor thing, he thought, poor fellow-sufferer. And then anger filled him, anger against Rachel Lingard and those Chisholms, all the Chisholms. His fists clenched. Celeste went ahead of him upstairs, but not jauntily, not with any air of part-possession of the house, more as if she expected him to call her back, even send her away.
She sat on the Linnell bed, picking the gold tips off her plaits. “Guy,” she said, “sweet Guy, was it just marijuana you dealt in, and maybe a bit of acid?”
How he would have seized this lifeline if Leonora had asked him! There was no point in prevaricating with Celeste. He didn’t have to impress her. It wouldn’t be true to say he didn’t care what she thought of him, rather that he believed in her unqualified forgiveness. “The hard stuff too,” he said. “Everything.”
“Opium?”
“Heroin, yes. Heroin’s opium, isn’t it?”
How absurd that, after all these years and the fortune he had made, he still didn’t quite know. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to know. She nodded, watching him.
“People don’t come to any harm from the stuff itself,” he said. “It’s the related things—dirty needles, infection, unrestricted use. And it’s no worse than being addicted to drink, only alcohol’s socially acceptable. And as for dealers, you might as well condemn a wine merchant.”
“I’ve a friend whose grandfather was Kurdish,” she said. “He was an
aga.”
She must have seen his incredulous smile starting. “No, that’s not only a Swedish stove, it’s a kind of feudal lord in parts of Turkey. They all grow poppies there, they make base morphine. It’s what you do in that place, that part of Asia. It’s funny what you say about the man and the bees because that’s what they once did, kept bees, but now the smugglers pack the hives full of the drug.
“Her mother’s family is very big. They have four laboratories processing morphine in the villages near Van. Her grandfather sent the young men away to learn the chemistry and two of her uncles got caught in Iran and executed. Thousands of smugglers and chemists get executed in Iran all the time.”
“Why do they do it then?” he said hollowly.
“Poverty.”
The word fell with a hollow sound. Poverty was a condition he had once known well, but the word itself was seldom heard in this house.
“You could say it’s not all bad then, not if it creates employment.”
She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “They don’t use it themselves. No way. And there’s no other work, not even in the fields. They don’t have a choice about what they do. You can earn six thousand pounds taking a kilo of heroin to Istanbul, and much more per kilo if you’re a chemist.”
He had never heard her talk like this before, that serious tone, that articulate, almost authoritative manner replacing her usual lazy simple speech. It was more the way Leonora and her friends might talk.
“I expect it’s much the same in South America,” she said. “You may not die through using it, though you do, thousands do, but you sure do die getting it to the users.” She said in a voice he’d never heard from her before, hard and clear and aimed straight at his guilt, his soft sensitivities: “Shame on you, Guy, shame on you.”
He wasn’t angry, he felt rather sick. It came to him that he had drunk a great deal, but the effects were only now becoming apparent. Not able to see very clearly, suffering a slight duplication of vision, he looked at the cuts on his face in the bathroom mirror—the deep scratch across his upper lip that would probably scar, the scorings on his throat. What kind of a man would scratch another man? Now that Guy thought of it, he remembered Robin had always worn his nails rather long, another unpleasant habit.
Celeste had got into bed and was lying with her arms over her head and her face in the pillow. He lay beside her, reached for the switch and turned out the light. The sudden darkness moved his memory. The last time they had had lunch together, he and Leonora, last Saturday, she had confessed to him she had been out with a friend of Robin’s. Someone Robin had been in partnership with was one of the men between him, Guy, and William Newton. And there had been another man she had met at a party given by Robin. It wouldn’t be going too far to say Robin had hated him so much that he had thrown one man after another in his sister’s way. He had practically pimped for her. Guy heard himself make a sound, a kind of groan.
Celeste heard him too. She put her arms round him and held him close.
S
omething Guy hadn’t thought of on that night was that Leonora might be angry with him because he had given her brother a black eye. That he had done so he was certain. Robin Chisholm would have more explaining-away to do than he had. Guy’s doctor had looked at the scratches and not believed the story of the cat. He had scarcely believed the true story of a fight with another man but he gave Guy an anti-tetanus injection.
Leonora was in Georgiana Street. He reached her there in the afternoon. Yes, she knew all about the fight; Robin had told Maeve on the phone that morning and Maeve had told her and then Robin himself had told her. Guy wasn’t surprised. It just confirmed what he already knew of the closeness of that family and the influence each one of them exerted over the others. Robin was telling everyone how Guy had sprung upon him “like a madman” for no apparent reason, only he privately knew that the reason was his absurd obsession with Robin’s sister.