Going Wrong by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

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