Going Wrong (31 page)

Guy lifted his eyes, which felt heavy, as if full of unshedable tears. His eyes felt swollen. He looked at Magnus. Through the fine soft learner pocket of his jacket he could feel the uncompromising shape of the gun. But it was distanced from him, it was as if he lacked the strength not only to use it but even to lift it out of its hiding place. The numbness that comes with shock wasn’t unknown to him, but it was a long time since he had felt it. “Forgive me,” she had said on the phone yesterday morning. He understood now why she had said it. “Forgive me.” Her voice had been thick and unsteady as his eyes were now, full of tears. “Forgive me for the lies they’ve made me tell you, for deceiving you, for this ultimate terrible lie that I will meet you tomorrow and be with you forever.”

Tessa had been speaking. Words, sentences, whole paragraphs had flowed out of her unheard by him. He picked up a word or two here and there: “cream silk,” “yellow roses,” “white gold.” He turned to her. Again the feeling he had was unfamiliar, a sense of agony that people are capable of such refined and calculated cruelty.

“I don’t want to hear about that,” he said, and his voice was stronger. In a curious way it was a new voice, hard, clipped, stiff with contempt. I have died, he thought, and been born again differently, with a new voice, a new set of values. “I don’t want to hear about that.” Anger was beginning to return, and that was the same, the same old anger. “Don’t give me that rubbish, what she wore, the fucking flowers, don’t give me that shit.”

“And don’t speak to my wife like that!”

“Are you going to stop me?” He felt the gun again. Magnus made a pettish sound, a “pshah!” sound, and Guy knew he was afraid. He could have laughed if laughter had been something he were capable of. But his head felt heavy, his eyelids were heavy. “Whose idea was this?” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” Tessa sounded very sarcastic, all superiority and Lady Muck, the short-lived pity vanished.

“I asked you whose idea it was, to con me into thinking Leonora was getting married a week later than she was. It wasn’t her idea, was it? She didn’t think that up.”

“What does it matter whose idea it was? I can’t remember whose idea it was. It wasn’t mine. I wish it had been, I wish I’d thought of something so—well, so simple and so effective.

Let me tell you, my daughter may not have thought of it herself, but she was extremely happy to go along with it. She jumped at the chance.”

“She was corrupted.” he said. “All of you, you corrupted her.”

“If getting someone away from a person who’s frightening them to death is corrupting them, then long live corruption.”

“Leonora wasn’t frightened of me. She loved me. She asked me to forgive her.” Guy turned to Magnus and said, “I will have that drink, after all.”

Tessa burst into laughter. “You’re incorrigible, aren’t you? You’ve got the devil’s own nerve.” She mocked his tone, “‘I will have that drink, after all.’ You’re not a friend of ours, you know. You’re not a friend of this family. You forced your way into it God knows how many years ago and we’ve been trying to get rid of you ever since. You never seemed to understand:
You’ve no place among us, you’re not our kind of person.
To be perfectly frank, no matter how much money you’ve made, you don’t belong in our class. Basically, you’re still an Irish yob, a street toughie. It’d be an insult to the working class to say you’re working class, you’re not, you’re an erk from a slum and you always were.”

There was a tap on his shoulder and he looked up to see Magnus’s death’s head above him, a glass of something held out in the papery, slightly tremulous hand. He hadn’t been asked what he wanted. Something Magnus thought suitable (or something he’d got most of or didn’t himself like) had been brought. Medicine. A remedy for shock. In fact, it was whisky, slightly diluted with water. The taste of it brought Guy the faint nausea whisky always did, then the beginnings of a surge of energy.

“The absurd thing,” Tessa was saying, “is that you ever supposed my daughter might marry you, might be
allowed
to marry you.”

“She’s of age, Tessa,” said Magnus, legal as ever. “No doubt she could make her own choice about that. She
had
made her own choice, in point of fact.”

“No, she hadn’t,” Guy said. “Not in point of anything. Others made it for her, and that’s the real point. Your wife was right when she said that about not being allowed. You lot, you Chisholms and whatever else you are, you didn’t allow her to do what she wanted.”

“What utter nonsense! I honestly wish I’d made a tape recording of the things my daughter said. I honestly do. The number of times I asked her why she bothered with you and she said seeing you was the only possible way. She played along for the sake of peace, for the sake of being free to do what she liked for the rest of the week, that’s what she did.”

“If only she’d seen the perfectly reasonable step of applying for an injunction as feasible …”

“Well, she didn’t, Magnus. She didn’t want to, I quote, ‘hurt his feelings.’ She was always far too soft-hearted for her own comfort. Unlike our guest here, she put others first. She would have done anything to avoid hurting him. But it doesn’t matter now, it’s all in the past, it’s over. She’s married. And when she and William come back from—er, Samos, they’re going straight up north. They won’t be coming back to London. And if you imagine I’m telling you my daughter’s new address, you must be even more mad, disturbed, whatever they call it, than I thought.”

Guy felt for his cigarettes. They were in the pocket that the gun wasn’t in. He put one in his mouth and lit it, watching her. She reacted predictably.

“I don’t allow smoking in this house.”

“Too bad,” he said. “If you want me to put it out you’ll have to do it by force. D’you want to have a go? You or him?”

“It’s outrageous,” she said.

“You shouldn’t make rules like that if you can’t enforce them.”

“Magnus,” she said, “make him put that cigarette out.”

Magnus’s reply was to produce an ashtray, which he set at Guy’s elbow. Guy said, “Your ex-husband got Newton that job through his brother. Leonora as good as told me that. He introduced Newton to her and then he pulled all the strings he could to get him a job in the north.”

Tessa began to pantomime coughing. She covered her mouth, shivered a little. “That may be. I know nothing about that. I haven’t seen Michael Chisholm for years.” She put out a hand to her husband. “I think I’ll have a drink too, darling. I notice you didn’t ask me. Gin and ginger ale, and why don’t you have one too? Since,” she added, “we’re apparently saddled with a protracted discussion about his—well, what would you call it? Paranoia?”

“Frankly, Curran,” said Magnus, “don’t you think it’s time you left? My wife’s told you a great deal more than you could reasonably have expected in the circumstances.”

“I’m not going yet. I want to know whose idea it was to set me up.”

Tessa said in a bored voice, “I’m not sure if I follow you. How were you ‘set up’?”

“Deceived, then. I was led to believe the wedding was next Saturday.” Guy hesitated, rephrased it. “No, I was led to believe there would be no wedding.”
I love you, I’ll come to you, anything you say.
He remembered her kiss on the night when his arm was wounded, and he touched his arm, touched the silky stuff of the scarf. If I sob when I start speaking, he thought, I will kill them both. “Who,” he said, and his voice was steady, “put her up to that? Who made her tell me the wedding was on the sixteenth and then made me think the wedding was off? Who was it?”

“I told you, I don’t know.” Tessa took the glass her husband held out to her. She held it up as if for a toast, was going to say something, but thought better of it and drank. “It doesn’t matter who it was, we all approved.”

“She shouldn’t have told him untruths,” Magnus said unexpectedly. “I mean, if he’s right about her saying she told him she wasn’t marrying William, she really shouldn’t have done that.”

“What?
Whose side are you on, pray? Let me tell you, she was entirely justified in telling him anything. Anything. And if you say another word about an injunction I shall scream.”

Magnus took no notice. The creases on his face ironed themselves out a little, like screwed-up paper smoothed by painstaking fingers. He was smiling. He said, “I recall perfectly whose idea it was. I was quite taken aback. It seemed so—well, audacious.”

His wife made an impatient gesture with her hand. “It’s quite unimportant who thought of it. The thing is that it worked and all that miserable business in the past
is
the past.” She began staring hard at Guy, looking into his eyes, into both his eyes. He could tell she wasn’t in the least afraid of him, and he wondered at that. She was observing him quite coolly, even clinically, like a state torturer she would ask him briskly if he had anything to say before she started with the thumb-screw, but she didn’t. “That’s it then,” she said, “all out in the open. And now I think you should go.”

“Oh, I’m going. I don’t want to stay here. Why would I? Guy stubbed out his cigarette but left it smoking a little. He looked at Magnus. “Okay, whose idea was it?”

“Idea? You mean, who thought of that business of the wedding date? There ought to be a name for the relationship. I ought to be able to say something like my ‘stepwife,’ but that wouldn’t quite do, would it? I’m simply obliged to call her by her name—that is, Mrs. Chisholm, Susannah Chisholm.”

The man enjoyed saying all that, Guy thought disgustedly. He enjoyed spitting out all that pedantic rubbish. Then he realized what the man had said. “Susannah thought of it?”

“We were at some family gathering. Very civilized. It couldn’t have happened when I was young, ex-husbands and ex-wives all matey together. But it’s very pleasant, I’m not complaining. Mrs. Chisholm—that is, Susannah—came out with it. It certainly appealed to my wife, didn’t it, darling?”

“Yes, it did. Of course it did. I was thrilled.” Tessa, who had said she couldn’t remember, now seemed to have acquired total recall. “I was tremendously grateful to Susannah. I was only too happy to help work out the details. I played my part in it, don’t you remember? I’m sure you remember my coming round to that house of yours and making a point of telling you the wedding was on the sixteenth. If I’d had my way, you’d have been sent an
official invitation for the sixteenth.”

Her husband nodded. He nodded and nodded like one of those wobble-headed dogs drivers have in the rear windows of cars. “Leonora didn’t care for it, though. Wouldn’t do it at first. She said it was wrong, but I said to her, ‘There’s nothing illegal in telling a white lie.’”

“I don’t remember that, Magnus. I think you dreamt that up.” She coughed again, reached over, and with a shudder ground out Guy’s cigarette end. “It was wonderful for Leonora, it took away all her worries.”

“Needs must when the devil drives,” said Magnus, his eyes gleaming, leaving little doubt as to whom he meant by the devil.

Guy got up, patting his pocket where the gun was. Tessa’s eyes followed his hand. The telephone was beside her on a low table, within easy reach. He had no sword to cut the wires. With his wounded arm, he lacked the strength to pull them out of the wall. He wouldn’t have wanted to anyway, but he put his hand into his pocket and felt the smooth cold metal.

“Where have they gone?”

“Where have who gone?” Tessa had got up too.

“Anthony and Susannah. They’ve gone away on holiday.” Or was that a lie too, put about by the sister? “I was told they were away.”

“Only for a few days. I wouldn’t dream of telling you where. It’s been quite bad enough our having to put up with this interrogation, but I took that on myself. I volunteered. I said to send you here and I’d be the one to face you. That was to save the others. I felt it was the least I could do, so you can be sure I’m not going to drop poor Anthony and Susannah into it at this stage. Anyway, they can’t tell you any more than I’ve told you.”

He felt the gun and thought again of killing them. If he did that, he would spoil his chances of finding Anthony and Susannah. He took his hand out of his pocket. Breaking the place up, even kicking the vases of flowers over, would spoil his chances of finding Anthony and Susannah. Magnus Mandeville was the kind of man who wouldn’t hesitate before getting on to the police. He was probably on to the police about something or other every couple of days. Guy looked from one to the other of them and then he looked away, sickened.

He thought, she is married. While I waited for her in that restaurant, at the very moment set for our meeting, she was getting married. I tried to make those phone calls, I went from house to house, I saw myself as her rescuer. All the time I was doing that, she was at a party, her own wedding party. She was drinking champagne and laughing and being congratulated. The flowers in this room had been in that room, she had probably smelt them, touched them, perhaps even carried some of them as a bouquet.

He walked out of the room and across the hall, opened the front door, slammed it and walked down the long path to the gate.

They were watching him, he knew that, but he didn’t look back. They had won, all of them. Tessa and Magnus, Rachel, Maeve and Robin, Anthony’s brother and Susannah’s sister, Anthony and Susannah. They had done what they had set out to do four years before. It had taken four years to accomplish it, but they had done it, and the instigators, the leaders of the plot, were Anthony and Susannah.

He sat in the Jaguar. He switched on the engine and saw the digits on the clock light up: eight fifty-two. All these things had happened, his life changed, he himself changed, and it was still only ten to nine. It wasn’t believable, so he looked at his watch. Ten to nine. He drove a little way and parked the car again. He parked simply because there was a space at the kerb and no yellow line. The cigarette he lit was so comforting it nearly made him cry. How could he have considered giving up smoking? He would never give it up.

When his head cleared and he could think again he would remember where Anthony and Susannah had gone. Susannah had
told
him where they were going. She had told him that day when he called in at Lamb’s Conduit Street. He had forgotten, but it would come back. On the other hand, he could phone the sister. What was her name? Laura Stow. He could phone Laura Stow. It was only ten to nine—well, five past now. He could be home by a quarter to ten. That wasn’t too late to phone someone. He wouldn’t be himself on the phone, he would think of some tale—an urgent message for Anthony, a package to be delivered express …