Authors: Ruth Rendell
“I
am
you. I am Guy and he’s me.”
If Tessa weren’t there, that love would return. Unhindered, it would become once more what it had been. If there were no one there to tell evil stories about him. call him low-class and criminal, insult his intelligence, Leonora would be him and he her. Still, the idea of harming Tessa seemed grotesque. In all his career he had never really harmed anyone. When Danilo came back after his stay in a Borstal institution they had run a very lucrative protection racket up in Kensal and once they’d had to rough up a publican a bit to show him they meant business, but the man only got a few bruises and a black eye. Of course there was the final showdown with Dream Traffic, and there was Con Mulvanney’s death. But that had been no one’s fault, certainly not his, it was what might be called an occupational hazard.
He refused to think about Con now. All he ever allowed himself to think of in that connection was that it had marked the end of his dealing. He had had a good run, had made a fortune, escaped from Attlee House and all its associations. His hands were clean and so was his record.
It would do no harm to ask Danilo to have dinner with him and there sound him out on the question of hit men, how to go about it and what it would cost. Not that he cared about the cost.
W
hen there was a sale of his paintings in a country pub or some other suitable outlet, Guy would sometimes go and see how it went. On these occasions it wasn’t his habit to let it be known who he was. He liked to see customers’ reactions and was seldom willing to take his agents’ word or the sales figures. It was best to see for himself whether the current favourite was
Man’s Best Friend,
say, or
Carry on, Kittens
or
Lady from Thailand.
This week one of the sales was at a pub in Coulsdon that was nearer to a country club. It was a fine day, and the traffic was never terrible in August. Everyone was away. Guy went down in the Jaguar. It was champagne-coloured, though called “beige satin,” with cream leather upholstery and an air-conditioning system so good that on really stifling London days he was sometimes tempted to go into the garage and sit in the Jaguar with the engine running to get the benefit of its cool breezes. “You’ll kill yourself if you do that,” Celeste said when he told her and there was some sense in what she said.
The pub was called the Horseless Carriage, which was a made-up name if ever he heard one. There were more flowers on the front of it in window-boxes than at the Chelsea show. Two large yellow posters outside advertised the sale of “original oil paintings, 7—70, all prices, each one unique hand-work.” He didn’t wince for himself but only when he thought of Tessa Mandeville’s reaction. He kept thinking of her. He couldn’t get the bloody woman out of his mind.
The sale was in a large room at the back that had double doors opening onto a terrace and a rather shabby garden where the lawn had become a dust bowl and no one had deadheaded the roses. A lot of people were there already, in the sale-room and out on the bald grass. There was one glass of red or white wine for everybody who came. After that you bought your own. Two girls were taking the orders. He didn’t know them, had never seen them before, but he could see from the growing lists on their clipboards that the orders were coming in thick and fast.
And why not? They
were
original paintings, and each one
was
painted by an artist working individually. The results were a lot more pleasing than ninety-nine per cent of what you saw along the Bayswater Road on Sunday mornings. They were harmless and pretty, their subjects innocent—children and baby animals, young girls, country cottages, or views of the sea. When he considered some of the pictures he had seen that were supposed to be so good—war and slaughter of men and horses, for instance—that he had once seen on an outing with Leonora to Blenheim Palace, or lopsided vases and deformed apples, paintings in that Guggenheim place in Venice of naked women in birds’ feathers and furs…. He was open-minded enough, God knew, but they had disgusted him. It was madness for Tessa Mandeville to call his paintings “junk,” and what was her other word? “Obscene.” Those others were truly obscene.
He walked round, studying each one. Even at this late stage he liked to make sure there were minute differences between each copy of the same painting, slight variations in the curls on the weeping boy’s head, for example. Tears glistened on the round pink cheeks, but in some versions there were three tears on the left cheek and in others four.
Lady from Thailand
was again proving the top seller. It was the custom of his agents to attach red stickers to paintings that had been sold—“as at a real private view,” he had been told was Tessa Mandeville’s comment. What was unreal about his sales no one had specified.
All four copies of
Lady from Thailand
were sold, and they were up in the seventy-pound range. He asked one of the girls if she was taking orders for that particular painting and she said she was, she had already taken twelve, it was the most popular. Guy could understand why. The girl in the painting was very young, fifteen or sixteen, and very innocent-looking. But she was sexy too, with full, gleaming lips and big, shining doe eyes, and the gold-embroidered bodice she wore parted to show, between its braiding and the gold-and-jewelled necklaces she wore, the tops of her smooth young breasts. She seemed to gaze back into the eyes of the viewer with a look that was winsome yet pleading, shy yet provocative.
Somewhere the original of that girl must exist, for all the paintings were based on photographs. Literally and actually based on photographs which, printed in a pale over-exposed version onto plasterboard, were imported by Guy in quantity from Taiwan. They were then painted over according to a prescribed method by his workers at the factory in Isleworth.
When Guy, explaining his new business to members of Leonora’s family, had said that many of his employees would be art-school graduates, Tessa Mandeville had actually shuddered and said that made things worse.
“They’re glad of the work, I can tell you,” he had said.
“They’d do better to go on the streets,” said Tessa. “Better get themselves a beat outside King’s Cross Station.”
What did she know about it? She had always had someone to keep her and give her a house to live in and money to save the whales and stop the acid rain and a studio where she could mess about with her paints. She didn’t have a clue what it meant to need a job. He would have liked to say that but he couldn’t because he had to keep on selling himself to those people, present himself as worthy to pay court to Leonora. The funny thing was—if such things were funny—that he had come along there, to some hotel it was where they were celebrating Leonora’s birthday and the end of her teacher-training, with the aim in view of getting himself in good with them all by indicating his abandonment of a life of fringe-crime and explaining his new career as a respectable businessman.
As he looked at the paintings, the Thai girl and the weeping boy,
The Old Millstream
and the twin Persian kittens, he reflected that that particular evening had marked another watershed in the decline of his relationship with Leonora. It was true that by that time she had ceased altogether to sleep with him, but though that had naturally bothered him, it was not his major concern. She had once told him she thought it a bad idea for a girl to be on the pill for more than, say, four years at a stretch. While she was studying for her degree she would be afraid of becoming pregnant. He would, of course, have married her like a shot whenever she wanted it, chance would have been a wonderful thing, but nevertheless he understood she wanted to complete her studies. Then she had been away so much, and though he had phoned her every day, they hadn’t met for months on end. You expected difficulties—awkwardnesses, coldnesses—in those circumstances.
But she had still loved him then. She had still loved him publicly and openly. Hadn’t she seen to it on that July evening four years ago that he was seated next to her, he on one side and her father on the other? Robin was right down the table, stuck with the horrible Rachel. Later on Leonora had danced with him. She had said to take no notice of what Tessa said. But she, Leonora, had taken notice next day or the next. “Philistine” was one of Tessa’s favourite words, but that was the least of what she would have called him. Crook, thug, low-life—he could imagine. Leonora listened to Tessa, was “close” to Tessa.
Guy helped himself to his permitted glass of wine from the tray. It was Rioja, red and rough. He felt a sudden desire to see Tessa, as one sometimes does wish to see an enemy, to see her perhaps without being seen. The wish is to see the enemy in misfortune, in defeat. Has she changed? Was she grey? She was about fifty now, a solicitor’s wife, living in a suburb; busy, it appeared, with good works. Living, he realized, in a suburb very close to where he now was.
He walked through to the saloon bar. A girl of about twenty-five sitting on a bar-stool alone eyed him. Guy was used to women looking at him and it gave him a certain pleasure even though he seldom responded. He asked for a dry martini and wondered what they would come up with, a glass of warm French vermouth as likely as not. When it came it was passable, at least it had gin in it and a piece of ice. He allowed himself for a moment to imagine that the girl was Leonora and she was with him. In a moment they were going to have lunch and sit long over the table afterwards with their drinks, talking about the past and the future and their love. Then they might drive down to the coast and walk on a beach in the cool evening. They would stay in the best hotel, in the bridal suite. Oddly enough, it was not the idea of making love to her that was paramount. Of course he wanted that, he was full of desire for her, but it was not the most important thing, it was only a part of the whole. What was the most important thing? Being with her, being
her
and she being him. “I
am
Guy …”—to hear her say that again!
He had another drink and a dried-up smoked-salmon sandwich and then he got back into the Jaguar and drove to Sanderstead Lane. Number 17 was not at all as he had imagined but half of a pair of rambling old houses, three floors high, with imposing windows framed in stone and pillared porches, which had obviously been there for a hundred years or more, long before all the rest were built. The front garden was as long as the back gardens of other houses. White-painted furniture was grouped under a spreading cedar tree.
Guy was long past the stage of hoping to impress Tessa Mandeville with his wealth and success—she never was impressed or she pretended not to be—so he was anxious not to be detected as the driver of the golden Jaguar. But there was no one to detect him, no Tessa obligingly leaning out of a window to show him the grey in her hair and her latest wrinkle, no Magnus Mandeville taking a day off from soliciting to potter about in the garden, hollow-eyed skeleton in a skin that he was.
Like a lawyer in some Dickens serial on TV. That was how Guy had thought of him when they met at that party. He had wondered what there was to attract a woman about a stooping skinny man with a little wisp of grey hair on top of a parchment-covered skull. His money perhaps. Knowing Tessa, that would be it. Magnus had a neck like the gizzard that came in a plastic bag inside a frozen chicken. His voice was high-pitched and chilly, and extravagantly, affectedly, dauntingly, Old Etonian. You could imagine him playing the part of the judge with a white wig on, sending some poor devil to be hanged by the neck until he was dead.
Guy drove half the length of Sanderstead Lane and back again. He turned down a side road and saw that a lane between high hedges ran along the backs of the houses. Their gardens had gates into it. He returned to the main road. Number 15, next door to and adjoining Tessa’s, looked empty. There were no curtains at the windows and an estate agent’s “For Sale” board was planted in the overgrown front garden.
In the old days, if this had been his area of Kensal and Tessa Mandeville had been running a business and had defaulted on her fees to him for keeping the place intact and not broken apart, he’d have got in there (or someone working for him would have) and either had her roughed up a bit or the fittings made to look less like they’d just come from the Ideal Home Exhibition. Midday would have been the best time, when there weren’t many of her neighbours at home, but not on a Tuesday, a Wednesday, or a Thursday. Entry by that lane at the back, the chances were the door into it was never locked, even if it could be locked, then try the back door. If it wouldn’t open, knock, and when she came no games, no posing as a salesman, a market researcher or whatever, but the swift hand closing her mouth, her two hands held hard behind her. Quick march with her into the middle of the house, silence while what had to be done was done.
Fantasies—or were they? He began the drive home. Tonight he was giving Danilo dinner. There came quite suddenly into that part of his mind that made pictures, that ran videos, a sight of Magnus Mandeville eyeing him at that birthday party. Looking at him above the straight tops of his half-glasses as a judge might look at the scum in the dock, puzzled, inquiring, shrewd, astonished, unrelenting. Magnus possibly had influence with Leonora. He was a lawyer, for God’s sake. Suppose he had had some inkling of his, Guy’s, activities, which were then still on the edge or over the edge of what was legal; would he have warned Leonora?
Guy drew into the side of the road and parked the car. These small cameos were expanding into a picture, a panorama or group photograph, of that table on the evening of July 25. He couldn’t concentrate on the road. He had to stop. Where had it been, that dinner? Not a very distinguished place, not a great restaurant or famous hotel, not the kind of place he would want to celebrate some important event in
his
daughter’s life. But Guy could hardly bear to think of any possible daughter or possible son of his. It was too painful. He had had thoughts of this before and it seemed to tear open a wound somewhere inside him, it made him bleed. If he could know, actually
know,
that sometime he and Leonora would have children together, he thought he would die of happiness.