Going Wrong (11 page)

Why had Con Mulvanney come to him in the dream? If Guy had inherited little from that hopeless feckless mother of his, and derived less, he had at any rate brought with him, through the years and changes, some of her superstitions. To this day he would not walk under ladders. His broken-down push-chair had been made to take avoiding detours, often to the very real danger from passing cars to its dirty-faced infant occupant. He touched wood in times of anxiety, and threw salt over his left shoulder when some was spilt. Omens he trusted, while saying he didn’t believe in them. Premonitions he recognized in sudden vague apprehensions. The totally unexpected appearance of Con Mulvanney in his dream, something that had never happened before—he had never before dreamt of Mulvanney—was a clear omen. What else could it be?

He began to wonder if it was possible anyone had told Leonora about Con Mulvanney. On the face of it it seemed unlikely. Very few people knew. Of course hundreds, thousands knew who he was and what had happened to him, though no doubt most of them had now forgotten; but surely only he himself and that woman knew his own connection with Mulvanney’s death.

The police knew. Correction—the police had been
told.
It wasn’t the same thing. They had found nothing, they had probably in the end not believed her or knew it would be hopeless to prove it.

The woman had a name he would never forget, no one could forget; she was called Poppy Vasari. She had threatened to tell everyone she knew. But what would be the point in naming him to people as the supplier of LSD to Mulvanney when his name would mean nothing? To the police … now, that was another story.

But suppose she had carried out her threat and talked of it to friends and acquaintances, given some sort of description of him? “A handsome dark man, very young.” He had been only twenty-five at the time. Or, “Very well-off, the way these people are, living in one of those pretty houses in a mews in South Ken.” Those details would be enough to arouse the suspicions of anyone who knew him only slightly. Robin Chisholm, say, or Rachel Lingard. Suppose they had then asked his name? Poppy Vasari would tell them, of course she would. She had nothing to lose.

And they would have told Leonora.

No surer way could have been found to put her off him. Four years ago. That was about the time she began radically to change towards him, to change her mind about that holiday, to turn down his invitations, to
wean
herself gradually away from him, to refuse his offer of money to buy that flat. And once she was in the flat, to cease altogether to go out with him in the evenings, to cease kissing him (except in the way she kissed Maeve, on both cheeks), sending others to answer the phone when he rang, gradually achieving the present situation of daily phone calls and lunch on Saturdays.

At ten he dialled Newton’s number. Leonora answered.

There was a pause, a silence, when she heard who it was, then she spoke cheerfully as if she was really pleased, asking him how he was, saying how much they had enjoyed the previous evening and meeting Celeste.

“Where would you like to have lunch on Saturday?” he said.

“Anywhere you like, Guy. Clarke’s if that’s what you’d like. After all, we’ve only got four more.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

S
ome of the people who worked there called it a factory, Guy had been told, but to him it was always the studio. It was at Northolt, in Yeading Lane. Guy usually drove out there every couple of weeks to see how things progressed. His other enterprises, the travel agency and the club in Noel Street, got on perfectly well without his presence, and if he went to the club sometimes that was because he enjoyed it.

Tessa, the fine arts graduate, had called the studio a sweat-shop, though of course she had never seen it. This was in any case a manifest lie, as the people Guy called his work-force painted in clean, light, airy surroundings, with plenty of space, did not work particularly long hours, and were reasonably well paid. He could have paid them more because the paintings were selling better than he had ever imagined they would, but as it was they earned more than they would have by teaching, more, for instance, than Leonora did. Instead he was seriously thinking of starting a second studio to cope with the demand.

No one seemed to mind him looking over their shoulders while they worked. No doubt that was because, as he frankly told them, he knew nothing about art but admired what they did. He paused and watched a very talented young Indian girl who had been at St. Martin’s School of Art painting in the tears on the cheeks of the weeping boy. It was wonderful to see the skill with which she did this. How wet the tears looked! Like real drops of water, as if someone had lightly splashed the painted face. And surely she had managed to make the child look sweeter than usual and sadder. Guy could almost identify with him, recalling distant days of deprivation in Attlee House.

What Tessa, and to a lesser extent Leonora, meant by saying that what was done here was morally and—there was some other word, yes, “aesthetically”—wrong, remained a perpetual mystery to him. It was true that his artists had a basic pattern or guide to follow, that there were affinities here, though remote ones, with painting by numbers. But was that very different,
any
different, from what had gone in the studios of those Old Masters? Guy remembered his feeling of triumph when, on holiday in Florence, he had found out from a guide how people such as Michelangelo had workshops like his, with young painters in them learning their craft, copying the master’s pictures, filling in backgrounds, working regular hours and working to order. Leonora had laughed when he told her this and said it wasn’t the same thing, though she had not explained how it differed.

And it wasn’t as if these people’s original work were any good. The girl he watched putting the finishing touches to
King and Queen of the Beasts
had actually once shown him one of her own paintings. He had said, “Very nice,” but it was terrible, just lines of sludge with something that might have been eyes peering out. In the house in Scarsdale Mews he had a Kandinski that was the nearest thing to it he had ever seen, but at least the Kandinski was in bright colours and very big and complex, which accounted, no doubt, for the very high price he had had to pay for it.

He had coffee with his artists and one of them asked him if he had any paintings from the studio on walls of his house. He said he had, though this wasn’t true and made him wonder obscurely why he hadn’t. There was another sale that day in South London, in Clapham this time, and he had thoughts of dropping in and buying a painting like an ordinary member of the public.

Guy drove south and crossed the river by Kew Bridge. This was a mistake as he didn’t know this part of London at all well and got lost. By now he had given up all ideas of buying a painting, he could much more easily have one sent to his home, and was even wondering if he would get to Clapham Common before the sale was over. Somehow he had managed to get himself and the Jaguar south of Wimbledon Park and he must make his way northwards.

If asked, he would have said he had never been in this neighbourhood before. The commons of South London were confusing, there were so many of them, but this certainly wasn’t Clapham Common, perhaps Tooting or Tooting Bec. A sign here pointed to Clapham, Battersea, Central London, and he found himself in a big thoroughfare that seemed vaguely familiar. It was Balham, that was where it was, this was Bedford Hill and in that pub, that great Victorian mansion of a pub, he had on that fateful night been accosted by Con Mulvanney.

“Have you got any shit?”

The question, ugly, ridiculous, meaningless but having a special meaning to those in the know, remained in his memory, the words reverberating there like so many plucked strings, while much of the rest of what had happened that evening had faded. He hadn’t replied, of course, he had pretended ignorance, disgust even, had turned his back, but the man had been insistent, had returned to the attack, now rephrasing his question, now simply saying.

“Have you got
anything?”

Guy drove on up to Clapham Common, where the sale was being held at the Broxash Hotel. One last space remained in the hotel car-park. He walked about looking at the paintings with a glass of Rioja in his hand. He had sometimes asked himself what he should have done to escape Con Mulvanney on that night, to give him the slip, but he hadn’t then known that giving him the slip was important. He had understood only that Mulvanney did not know his name, and that seemed to him all that mattered. Come to that, although he thought of him
in the context of that time
as Con Mulvanney, he had not then known his name either, had not known it until
the
man was dead, or even, in a curious way, until sometime after that.

The woman who was presiding over the sale, an untidy dark woman in a black dress, reminded him faintly of Poppy Vasari. She wasn’t really like Poppy Vasari, who had been thinner and wilder-looking and dirtier. Guy was no longer used to dirty people, to men and women who seldom washed their clothes and hardly ever bathed, and they disgusted him. Perhaps it had something to do with there having been rather a lot of such people around in his childhood. The woman selling his pictures and taking orders was probably quite clean, the ingrained dirt in her fingers the result of gardening, the dandruff on her black shawl collar due to mischance. He noted that, unlike in Coulsdon, the painting of the noble lion standing on the rocks with his couching mate beside him was me best seller here, and then he left.

This must have been the way the taxi took him home that night from the pub in Bedford Hill—over Battersea Bridge, up Gunter Grove, Finborough Road, or perhaps up Beaufort Street and into the Boltons. Could you go that way? Would the traffic system permit it? It had been late and very dark. Too dark to see or at any rate to notice the little dark red 2CV following the cab.

Guy never went to pubs. He only went to this one because it was a party, and anyway he didn’t know it was a pub till he got there. Robert Joseph, the man he was going into partnership with in the travel agency, was celebrating his fortieth birthday. He had described the pub to Guy as an hotel.

Sensibly, he had come late. The pub had an extension till half past midnight and Guy didn’t get there till nearly eleven. A female impersonator, very old and hideous, in black sequins and yellow feathers, was capering about on the stage and singing a song of such incredible obscenity that Guy could hardly believe he was hearing those words in that sequence. A youngish man standing at the bar ventured a mild protest and was immediately, almost before finishing his sentence, frogmarched by two heavies to one of the doors and put outside. The doors were closed and locked. Guy decided to drink a lot in order to make things bearable.

Bob Joseph, by this time, was drunk but not too drunk to notice Guy was there, to throw an arm round his shoulders and call him his best pal. A group arrived on the stage and began singing old Beatles songs. Guy had another vodka martini and another. It was then that Con Mulvanney, whose name he didn’t know, came up to him and asked his question.

“Have you got any shit?”

He meant hashish. Guy had seldom dealt in hashish. He had at one time been involved in an enterprise supplying Black Nepal, but later was interested only in cocaine and the best marijuana, usually Santa Marta Gold. In any case, not since he was a young boy had he actually purveyed the stuff himself, handled it. He was altogether loftier than that. At the time Con Mulvanney came up to him with his question it was almost exclusively cocaine in which he was dealing, though giving some thought to the possibility of this new thing called crack, which was smoked.

This time, in reply to the question, “Have you got anything?” he said, “I don’t know what you mean. Go away, please.”

“I know you have. I was told about you and that you’d be in here tonight. You were described to me.”

That made Guy feel very odd and very vulnerable. Afterwards he wondered why he hadn’t asked who had said he would be in there, who had described him. But he didn’t ask. He said, “You’re mistaking me for someone else.”

The man who was Con Mulvanney didn’t persist. At least, not then. He was a thin, slight man, neither short nor tall, with narrow shoulders and a slight stoop, who looked unwell, who looked a generally rather unhealthy person. His face was long and pale, and the lips and chin were like a woman’s, as if they could never grow hair. The hair of his head was longish, wispy, no-colour or the colour of dust. His eyes were a light greyish-brown and they shifted away from Guy’s when he tried to meet them.

Guy walked away from him and started a conversation with Bob Joseph, and then, after Joseph had moved away into another group, with some neighbours of his, a man and a woman who lived near him in Chingford or Chigwell or wherever. The encounter with Con Mulvanney, whose name he didn’t then know, sent him in quest of another drink. When he had had two more vodka martinis he thought he had had enough—of drink and these people and the awful place—and anyway it was gone midnight. He didn’t call a taxi but walked out into the street and one came obediently along. As it moved off, a dark red 2CV moved off behind it.

Guy didn’t see the 2CV again all the way. He didn’t look out of the back of the taxi. When they got to Scarsdale Mews and he was paying the cab driver, he saw a small car moving away from the end of the street. That is, he thought afterwards that he remembered seeing a small car at that point. He remembered that on the following evening, when, just as he was leaving to go out to dinner somewhere, Con Mulvanney appeared on his doorstep.

The doorbell rang and Guy thought it was the taxi he had ordered. At the sight of him, Con Mulvanney said facetiously “Mr. X, I presume?”

“Yes, you do presume,” Guy said. “I’ve nothing for you. Would you go, please?”

“Look, can I explain what it is I want?”

“You have. Now go.”

“I haven’t actually,” said Con Mulvanney, and then he said, “You can call me Mr. Y.”