Going Wrong (3 page)

But she wouldn’t say that. She wouldn’t complain about him or say he was a bore. He made a shrewd guess that she wouldn’t mention to anyone that she had even seen him. Because the fact was that she really did love him. Would she meet him like that if she didn’t? Who would believe all that rubbish about conscience and trying to convince him they could be friends? If a woman spoke to a man on the phone every day and met that man once a week, it was because she loved him.

Guy paid off the taxi at the entrance to Scarsdale Mews. He had bought the house ten years before when he was nineteen, an unheard-of thing to do. But he had the money. It was just before the property boom that tripled the price of the house in as many years. The second-best part of London, he called it. He had bought the house because it was a mews cottage like the one her parents, at that time, still lived in. Only his was bigger, in a far more prestigious district. A peer, a famous novelist, and a TV chat-show star were among his neighbours. The first time he asked her to marry him was when he was twenty and she was seventeen and he took her home to this house of his and showed her the walled garden with the orange trees in Roman vases, the drawing-room that had old Lisbon tiles on the walls and a Gendje carpet. The house had the first Jacuzzi ever installed in London. He had an eighteenth-century four-poster bed and a Joshagan rug on the bedroom floor. It was better than anything her parents had. He took her to dinner at the Ecu de France where the waiters danced up to you showing you the food on big silver dishes, and then he took her home where he had Piper Heidsieck waiting on ice and wild strawberries.

“The Great Gatsby,”
she said.

It was the name of a book. She was always talking about books. The ring he had bought her was a large sapphire the size of the iris of her eyes. On her and for her he had spent the fortune he had amassed in his teens.

“No, I can’t, I’m only seventeen,” she said when he asked her to marry him.

“Okay, then later,” he said. “I’ll wait.”

He still had the ring. It was in the safe upstairs, along with a few other, less worthy, commodities. He wouldn’t despair of putting it on her finger one day. She must love him. If she didn’t love him, she would simply refuse to see him ever again. That was what people did, that was what he did with the girls who chased him. He let himself into his house, went straight through to the room she said he mustn’t call a lounge, but of course he did, what else, and poured himself a brandy. It reminded him, as beautiful cognac always did, of Linus Pinedo’s, which they had drunk in Kensal Green. Dazed with love and liquor, they had lain in each other’s arms in the long grass between the graves while butterflies floated above them on the warm summer air.

“I’ll love you all my life,” she said. “There can’t be anyone else for us, ever, Guy. Do you feel like that too?”

“You know I do.”

She loved him, she always had. Someone else had turned her against him. One of them. One or more had influenced her against him: William or Maeve or Rachel or Robin or the parents: Anthony her father and Tessa her mother. And they’d married again, the pair of them, which was why neither of them could any longer afford little mews houses in the second-(or, in their case, third- or fourth-) best part of London. Guy smiled. Now they were Anthony and Susannah, Tessa and Magnus.

They had turned her against him deliberately. It was part of a deliberate policy to force her into their mould and separate her from undesirable elements. Anthony the architect, her father, and Tessa with the metallic fingernails and lofty know-it-all voice, her mother. Pretty gentle Susannah, the amateur psychotherapist, her stepmother, and Magnus the solicitor, her stepfather, he of the skull face and manner of a hanging judge.

And the others on the fringe: Robin and Rachel and Maeve. They were in league against him, the seven against Guy Curran.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

W
hen she changed schools it was to Holland Park Comprehensive she went, his school. Her mother didn’t like her walking home alone on winter afternoons when it started getting dark at four, so to stop her mother coming for her in the car, Leonora said some “older friends” would go with her. The older friends were Guy himself and Linus and Danilo, just starting to be known to the local underworld as the Dream Traffic.

Her parents wouldn’t just have freaked out if they’d known, they’d probably have emigrated. As time went on, anyway, it was just Guy walking her home. Linus had got himself some O Levels and gone to a sixth-form college and Danilo was in trouble breaking into flats. The Dream Traffic had become a one-man show but going from strength to strength. One autumn afternoon he and she were sitting on a doorstep in Prince’s Square, not smoking or anything, just sharing a can of Coke and eating potato crisps, when her mother came by in her car. She was driving home up Hereford Road. He expected her to stop but she only waved to Leonora and went on.

“Keep your fingers crossed for me when I get home,” Leonora said.

“Why? What’ll happen?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe a big scene. Maybe I’ll get taken to and from school for a few weeks. God, I hope not, that’d be a real drag.”

“You reckon? I bet she does what it says in my gran’s woman’s magazine.” He spoke in a bright falsetto, “‘Don’t forbid your children to see their friends. Much better encourage them to invite their friends home. Then you can get to know them. Remember, most people respond well to a happy home atmosphere.’”

That made her laugh. He remembered every word of that conversation, every detail of place and time and, of course of her. She was wearing blue jeans with a white shirt and a dark blue sweat-shirt with a teddy bear on the front of it, a nice cuddly-looking blue denim jacket lined with sheepskin, brown leather boots, and a long stripy pink-and-blue-and-yellow scarf. Her hair was long then, really long, nearly down to her waist. She hadn’t got a hat on, it wasn’t yet cold enough for that, it was only October. She was thirteen.

That was when she had her ears pierced. He went with her to get it done. The things girls did to themselves that were different from what men did were what he liked, he liked the contrast. Even then he was imagining a future when he would buy her diamond earrings. Her mother had been furious, said it was “common” having it done so young. Leonora had begun wearing those fantastic earrings she still liked. The pair she had on while they were sitting on the steps were telephones with the receivers hanging on cords.

He remembered everything because that was the first time she told him she loved him. Nobody had ever told him that before, not even the eighteen-year-old (now twenty) whose sofa bed in a tiny bed-sitter he sometimes shared and whose car he drove. Why would they? Who would? Not his mother, certainly. Not even his grandmother, who had persuaded his mother to name him Guy because she said Guy Fawkes was the first Catholic to try and bomb the British government.

But when he said that in a squeaky voice about being invited to her home and the happy atmosphere, Leonora started laughing. She laughed and laughed and put her head down on her knees, shook her long, dark brown hair and shook the phone earrings, looked up at him and said, “Oh, Guy, I love you. I do love you.” And she put her arms round his neck and hugged him.

She liked him to say funny things or clever things, so he tried saying them as often as he could. It didn’t come easily but he tried. He was still trying. And she still laughed, though there was a note in her laughter that troubled him. It was surprise.

The interesting thing was that her mother did exactly as he had predicted and got her to invite him home. That was his first meeting with any of them, any of those people that surrounded her. Robin, her brother, wasn’t there. He was away at school, some toffee-nosed public school he went to.

At that time her mother must have been thirty-eight. She looked exactly like an older, harder version of Leonora: the same olive skin and page-boy face; the same dark hair, though hers was done in a sort of knot on the back of her head; the same dark blue eyes, but calculating and watchful. Guy noticed her nails. They were painted silver. They were very long and curving over at the top like claws but filed to points, and they looked like metal, like pieces of cutlery. Whenever he saw her after that, her nails were done a different kind of metal, gold, bronze, brass, or that silver again. Leonora didn’t introduce her mother to him. Why should she? Each knew who the other was, it couldn’t be anyone else. Just the same, the unanswerable remark was made.

“So this is Guy?”

It was raining. The little mews house was rather dark, with a few lamps lit, making pools of golden light in dim corners. Intense heat came off large gold-painted radiators. There was a polish smell of chemical lemons and lavender. Guy’s home was a dump, scarcely furnished. The furniture was tea chests and mattresses on the floor, a huge television set and stereo, Indian bedspreads pinned up to cover the windows. But he knew what was good, what he would have one day. He looked about him at the late-Victorian bits and pieces, the pink chaise longue, the Parker-Knoll armchairs and reproduction Georgian dining-table.

Leonora’s mother said, “Where do you live, Guy? Not far away, I suppose.”

He told her baldly, in the knowledge of her immediate comprehension. She would know at once that Attlee House was unlikely to be the name of a private mansion block. He could see her brain ticking, the wheels turning and slotting things into place, making contingency plans. Leonora was restive, bored with it all.

“Come on, Guy, we’ll go up to my room.”

A hand went out to Leonora’s arm and rested there, a long, pale brown hand with, it seemed to him, preternaturally long slender fingers, and the nails glittering like implements, like things designed for picking bruised or damaged bits out of food.

“No, Leonora, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“We shall be eating the minute Daddy comes in.”

They watched television, side by side on the pink chaise longue. She would have taken his hand, he could sense she wanted to, but he gave a tiny shake of his head, moved an inch or two from her. Daddy came in. He looked more like a handsome human teddy bear than any man Guy had seen before, fair and blunt-featured and stocky without being fat. He called Leonora’s mother Tessa, so Guy did too when he had to call her something. There wasn’t anyone he called Mr. and Mrs.; he never had and didn’t mean to start, he’d had endless trouble over it at school. “Tessa,” he said and she looked at him as if he’d called her a bitch or a whore or something. Those eyebrows that were Leonora’s—only the skin round them was old and brown and freckled—went up right into her hair.

“You flatter me, Guy,” she said, very sarcastic. “I didn’t realize we were on such intimate terms so early in our relationship.”

“Oh, shut up, Mummy, please,” Leonora said.

She took no notice. Guy could have sworn the old man—well, he was maybe forty—gave him the ghost of a wink. Tessa said, “I appreciate you must have a very warm, outgoing temperament, but if you don’t mind awfully, I’d prefer it to be Mrs. Chisholm for a while.”

He felt like saying that in that case she could call him Mr. Curran. But of course he didn’t. He said nothing, he called her nothing, he didn’t want Leonora kept away from him. They talked about drugs all through the meal, that is, the parents did. It sounded as if it was all rehearsed. They couldn’t know about him but they had made intelligent guesses. The father said dealing in drugs was a more despicable crime than murder or molesting children, and the mother said that, much as she hated the idea of taking life, in her opinion capital punishment should be introduced for pushers.

He was never asked back, but nor was Leonora forbidden to see him. No doubt, they knew this was something they were unable to enforce, short of moving away. Sometimes he saw Tessa doing her shopping, once coming out of the Gate Cinema. She was a very well-dressed woman, he would grant her that, and her figure was fantastic. She had those very thin long ankles that make other women’s legs look like carthorses’. But the lines were forming thick and fast on her face, there was a new, deeper one, each time he saw her. When he started taking Leonora about in a more or less official way, her accredited boy-friend, he was sometimes at the house without invitation. Then Tessa treated him with the utmost coldness or placed her little sharp barbs into his most tender places. It was as if she stuck those silver or copper or pewter daggers on the ends of her fingers into his eye sockets. He had to shut his eyes and bear it.

So he wasn’t training for anything then? How was his father?
Where
was his father? Did he think his mother would ever spare the time to come and see the Chisholms? He did realize, didn’t he, that once Leonora went to university he might not be able to see her for three years?

But soon after that they split up, she and Anthony Chis-holm, the little mews house was sold, and Leonora for a while was aghast, devastated by a divorce she had never foreseen. Her father had found another woman, her mother another man. Leonora confided in him that she hated them all, she never wanted to see her parents again, and he rejoiced in secret. Even then, young as he was, he understood the influence they had on her. Now that she wasn’t speaking to them, but longing to get away, find a place of her own, shake the dust of their thresholds off her feet, he knew she would come to him. He would have a house to take her to and they would be married. In him she should find mother and father as well as husband and lover.

She came round. The rift lasted no more than a few weeks, and suddenly they were all, so quickly, friends again, the two couples hob-nobbing, dining out in a foursome. Leonora was again talking about what Mummy said and Daddy did, and now too, incredibly, what Susannah thought and what Magnus advised. She called it civilized behaviour.

Guy accepted it, he had no choice. Besides, he had other things to think about and he told himself that, in spite of everything, he was sure of Leonora. One morning he realized he was a rich man. At eighteen he was much richer than the Chisholms would ever be.