Authors: Ruth Rendell
It was quite a shock to be kissed
nicely
by a woman, though of course Celeste did it all the time. But this was different. Susannah very evidently took the purpose of his visit to be of condolence. Well, that was all right with him. He felt warm towards her and approving. Susannah might be sad and in mourning but it didn’t show. She was carefully and quite heavily made-up, which Guy thought proper for women, her thick wiry dark hair was teased into a fashionable sea-urchin shape, she wore black silk trousers with a chocolate-and-black-striped top and a lot of rather elegant silver jewellery of the chain-mail kind, including a wide glittering belt. What a pity Leonora couldn’t or wouldn’t learn from her example!
As he followed her into the living room, where he hadn’t been for nearly four years, he thought of the time when Leonora had lived here after leaving teacher-training college, and of calling to take her out and being given drinks by Anthony Chisholm. Well, it wasn’t so long ago … The first thing he saw, even before he saw Leonora, was a white card on the mantelpiece with a silver edge. A wedding invitation, it had to be, but he couldn’t read the print at this distance.
Leonora got up when he came in. His heart had already done its turning-over stuff, sending a beat up into his head. She looked horrible but what did he care?
She kissed him. There was no hugging and not much warmth, but then she hadn’t just lost her mother. (More’s the pity, thought Guy.) Janice, behind him, was going into some long tale about recognizing him and not recognizing him, then thinking he was an undertaker or a florist. Leonora wore black-and-white plastic earrings. Not a scrap of make-up, of course, and her hair looked greasy. She had green track-suit pants on and a black sweat-shirt, rusting with age and bad washing. Since knowing Newton, Guy thought, whatever dress sense she had once possessed had gone to pot. The fool probably told her he loved her for herself, not her appearance.
At any rate she didn’t ask him what he was doing there. He remembered in time to say something appropriate about Susannah’s mother.
“It was really thoughtful of you to come, Guy,” Leonora said, beaming. He thought her smile was surely fuller and freer than he had seen it for months. “We’ve had such a day. Some of those people are so insensitive. D’you know what the registrar said to poor Susannah? It was a woman, apparently they mostly are. Men won’t take the jobs, they’re too badly paid; it’s the old old story. She said, ‘Is this the first death you’ve ever registered?’ And when Susannah said it was, she said, ‘I don’t suppose it’ll be the last. Good morning.’ Can you imagine?”
Janice had departed to make a cup of tea, having had some whispered communication with Susannah. Leonora began explaining how her cousin was staying with Anthony and Susannah, her cousin’s husband would be coming over next week, and it was very sad for poor Janice, who had been particularly fond of Susannah’s mother and arrived too late to see her alive. No other family Guy had ever come across had been so closely interlocked as these Chisholms. Even those on the outer fringes of the root system, people not even related, were mad about each other. Leonora was giving the impression this Janice had come twelve thousand miles to be at the deathbed of an old woman, the mother of her aunt by marriage, whom she had probably only met once or twice in her whole life. How right he was not to underestimate the influences that worked on Leonora!
From where he sat he kept trying to see the mantelpiece and the card on it but Susannah insisted on remaining standing, and in front of the carefully preserved Georgian fireplace, leaning on the mantelshelf. He didn’t like to dodge his head about too obviously. Susannah had begun talking about the funeral.
“We find ourselves in a dilemma, Guy. We really don’t know what to do. Shall we ask his advice, Leonora? Perhaps a fresh mind, do you think?”
Leonora gave him another lovely smile. “We’ll see what he says.”
“Now my poor dear mother didn’t leave any instructions about—well, I mustn’t mind saying it bluntly—about whether she wanted to be buried or cremated. Of course most people are cremated these days, but cremation seems so … I nearly said ‘so final.’ as if death itself wasn’t final, but perhaps you know what I mean.”
“Oh, I know what you mean,” said Guy, craning his neck.
“And then it’s a question of where? All the nice London cemeteries are full and it means going right out into the sticks.
My mother lived in Earlsfield, but the churchyard there of course is out of the question and has been for about a century, I should think …”
Janice came in with the tea, which she placed on a table in such a way as to oblige Guy to turn his chair around, with its back to the fireplace. It was near enough to real drinking time for him not to want tea but he drank it, refusing a slice of the peaches and cream torte that fat little Janice should have known better than to tuck into. A plan was forming in his mind of managing to drive Leonora home—well, of getting her in his car, starting to drive her home and then persuading her not to go back but to have dinner with him.
Janice was telling an elaborate story—in the worst of taste, Guy thought—about the adventures of someone she knew scattering a loved one’s ashes from the Cobb in Lyme Regis. Susannah said that was a coincidence because she and Anthony were going for a short holiday in Lyme in a couple of weeks’ time. The doorbell called Janice away from further anecdote. Though repeatedly told by the others to sit down and do nothing, she seemed to have appointed herself a temporary au pair. To Guy’s great pleasure he and Leonora found themselves for a moment or two alone. The undertaker had arrived and Susannah was summoned downstairs.
“I do hope she’s made up her mind,” said Leonora. “She’ll have to tell him one way or another.”
“Have dinner with me, Leo.”
“Oh, I can’t, Guy. I’m awfully sorry, but I can’t.” Not “I never do” or “I have lunch with you on Saturdays,” not that any more. “I’m staying here and William’s coming over. We’re all going out for dinner so that poor Susannah doesn’t have to cook.”
There went his plan to drive her home … But, “I’m really sorry,” she said. “It would have been nice. Maeve told me you rang up this morning to ask after Robin. That was kind of you, I do appreciate it.”
He dared to reach across the sofa and take her hand. He
knew
she would snatch her hand away but she didn’t. She even let the fingers nestle softly in his and she turned on him a look of such sweetness, such compassion, that if Janice hadn’t come back at that moment he would have lost control of himself, he would have had to jump up and seize her in his arms. He did jump up, but only to go. There was little pleasure in being here with that fat gimlet-eyed one staring censoriously at him.
“Lunch on Saturday?” he said.
“Yes, Guy dear, of course. Where shall we go?”
“The Savoy,” he said. “We’ll go to the River Room at the Savoy.”
She didn’t protest. She was changing towards him, she was changing
back.
He kissed her goodbye, stood up, turned to face the fireplace and saw that the wedding card had gone. It had been there when he came in half an hour before and now it was gone.
Someone had quietly moved it so that he shouldn’t see.
H
e had known Leonora for quite a long time before he met her brother. One winter’s day, just before or just after Christmas, he went with Leonora into the living room of her parents’ house where a boy was standing by the window with a paper in his hand that he was reading. He must have heard them come in but he didn’t look round immediately, he read to the end of the page. There was something headmasterly in this behavior or even policemanlike, something deliberate and scornful, though the boy himself looked almost babyish. He was tall enough, a lot taller than his sister, but his face when he finally turned his head was that of a five-year-old, plump, innocent, with toddler’s skin and a rose-bud mouth. The voice that issued from those baby lips was therefore all the more amazing. Instead of shrill and lisping, it was deep and rich, it was
plummy,
with an accent that can only be acquired (Guy learned later from Leonora) by attendance at one of those schools within the Headmaster’s Conference.
“Is this your beau, Nora?”
Guy had heard the word before, but only on television. He would—then and now—have given a lot to have a voice like that. Leonora introduced him.
“Robin, this is Guy. Guy, this is my brother.”
Already, at the age of fifteen, Robin Chisholm was practising that teasing mockery that was such a feature of his unpleasant character. It wasn’t clever or amusing, it was just rude.
“Guy,” he said. He said it slowly and with a certain puzzlement. He said it again, thoughtfully, as if it were the name of someone he had known long ago but couldn’t quite place. “Guy. Yes—don’t you find it difficult being called that? I mean, if Nora hadn’t said, I’d have put you down as a Kevin, say, or a Barry. Yes, Barry would suit you.”
He looked like an innocent child, smiling, wide-eyed, his cheeks plump and rosy, defying the object of his insults to take offence. For they were insults, Guy was in no doubt about that. Leonora’s brother was implying that his name was far too upper-class for its possessor.
She defended him. “Oh, shut up. You’re in no position to mock people’s names. Robin may be all right now while you look like an infant but it’ll be no joke when you’re old.”
Even then, in a very unnatural way, Robin Chisholm was proud of looking younger than he was. Most people are at thirty but not at
fifteen,
for God’s sake. Guy, seeing him occasionally, not often but too often for his own comfort, thought he purposely cultivated the baby-face look. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see Robin with his thumb in his mouth. Well, he would have been surprised, he’d have run screaming from the room.
The Chisholms had sent their daughter to a state school and a prestigious university. Their son attended a public school with high fees but dropped out of the polytechnic he’d just squeezed into and went instead “into the city.” He was twenty-three when he started having those black-outs. They thought it was a tumour on the brain, then epilepsy. There turned out to be nothing wrong with him. Guy privately thought Robin had carefully planned and staged it all to extricate himself from the firm he was working for, an investment company that was plunged into a financial scandal of mammoth proportions a week or two after he entered hospital.
He was the sort of person the world would be better without. Someone else could see to his destruction, though, not Guy. It wasn’t he who had told Leonora about Con Mulvanney. Further to that, Guy, who, having failed to get hold of Danilo that evening, had been considering the matter for half the night, decided that her brother, of all those who surrounded her, probably influenced her the least. Of course she loved him, that went without saying—she said it often enough for all that, said it of far too many people, Guy thought—but Robin irritated her, she didn’t altogether approve of him.
All this made him dream of Robin. Robin was dead, pushed down all those flights of stairs in Portland Road, his bleeding body discovered by Maeve. This wasn’t at all a fantastic or irrational dream, and it therefore alarmed Guy all the more. He couldn’t phone St. Leonard’s Terrace before eight-thirty or Danilo before nine at the earliest. Making coffee for himself, he kept touching wood as he moved about the kitchen. It was an old habit of superstition he had believed long shed.
If you touched wood, the action fended off disaster. It kept away—what? Evil spirits? His grandmother, from whom he had learned wood-touching, not helping others to salt, not passing a knife to a friend, avoiding the divisions between paving stones, hadn’t specified the precise function of these acts. They just kept you safe. Funny he should think of her now when he hadn’t for years. Luckily, the kitchen, lavishly refitted in limed oak, was a paradise for wood-touchers.
A sleepy Danilo answered the Weybridge phone at ten past nine. Guy was nearly out of his mind because there had been no answer from St. Leonard’s Terrace in spite of his trying ten times between eight-thirty and now. He was sure Robin must be dead, and with his death Leonora lost forever, but he called Danilo’s hit man off just the same. Danilo took his change of heart with a show of ill temper but agreed to meet him for a drink at a club called The Black Spot at six. Certain now that he was too late, that Robin’s corpse was even at this moment being identified by Maeve in some mortuary, Guy nevertheless had another try at the Chelsea number.
Rather a strange thing happened. The phone was picked up but before anyone spoke into the mouthpiece Guy heard Robin’s voice bellowing from a distance.
“Answer the bloody thing, can you? I’m in the bath.”
Then accents like his grandmother’s, it must be the Irish cleaning woman, said, “Hallo, who’s speaking? Mr. Chisholm’s busy.”
Guy gasped with relief. He was on the point of saying, “Tell him to go back to bed and stay there,” but thought better of it.
The Black Spot was all bar and floor. There were no tables, nowhere to sit except on a stool up at the long black-and-silver counter. It was very dark, American-style. The first person Guy saw was Carlo sitting on a stool next to his father and drinking something dark and frothy from a brandy glass. It was probably Coke but the glass it was in made it look sophisticated, even sinister. Guy was rather surprised. Then he reflected that he would very much have liked to go into bars like this one when he was ten, only he never got the chance.
Carlo was wearing junior designer jeans and a black sweat-shirt with
BREAD-HEAD’S KID
printed on it in luminescent pink. He said, “Hi” to Guy and continued eating prawn fries out of an ashtray. Danilo was in caramel-coloured herringbone silk tweed, a suit with an enormous wide-shouldered jacket, and under it an open-necked crimson shirt.
“You’re not looking too good,” said Danilo.
Guy shrugged impatiently. That was what Danilo always said every time they met. “It’s the light in here, if you can call it light.” He asked the barman for a large vodka martini. “We can’t talk,” he said to Danilo, cocking a thumb in Carlo’s direction.