Going Wrong by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page B

evening wearing a black silk trouser suit. Janice’s fiancé, whose name Guy couldn’t remember, sat between Susannah and Tessa.
    He let his mind’s eye rove round that table from guest to guest. The men’s suits had been unmemorable, vague greys, but he thought Robin had been wearing a pink tie. Robin favoured his father, was much fairer than Leonora, and, having Anthony’s boyish look, seemed absurdly younger than his twenty-four years. He was a swap jockey—that is, he had later become one. He swapped sums of money between potential borrowers, thus making dollars quickly available to clients in, say, Germany, and Deutsch marks to clients in Brazil. Guy suspected he was, in a respectable sort of way, just as dishonest and on the make as he himself had once been.
    “You’d think he’d like me,” Guy had once said to Leonora. “I can’t understand why he doesn’t. We’re birds of a feather, aren’t we?”
    “He’s a snob.”
    “What does that mean, he doesn’t fancy my accent?”
    “Let’s hope he grows out of it. He’s still at the stage of making snide jokes about people who haven’t been to public school. I’m sorry, Guy. I love Rob and I always will, but he’s the only reactionary member of my family. He’s a real old-fashioned Tory.”
    “I can believe it,” he’d said, though politics didn’t interest him. He was an old-fashioned Tory himself if he was anything.
    Tessa hated him because he was a so-called Philistine, her husband because he was or might have been a crook—had Robin turned Leonora against him because he came from the wrong background and spoke with the wrong kind of voice? Guy closed his eyes and went on seeing those eleven people, ten without Leonora. Tessa in a greenish-gold dress of some pleated silky stuff, a thin gold chain round her neck, her new wedding ring bright and shiny and her nails to match; Susannah in her black trousers and tailored jacket, the open-necked white silk shirt and chunky jet-and-amber beads; old Mrs. Chisholm in brown lace and pearls; Rachel, that ugly four-eyes, in a flowered cotton skirt with a dipping hem and a pink blouse probably from the British Home Stores. Janice, plump as Rachel, round-hipped, wearing fancy-rimmed glasses, pink plastic. The men. Himself and Leonora.
    They ate avocados stuffed with prawns. Surprise, surprise. Not to say big deal. The next course was chicken done in an uninteresting way. Guy had read somewhere that chicken, if not the best-loved, is the most widely eaten protein food in the world. When they got to the profiteroles, Anthony had said to him, across Leonora, “So what’s with you career-wise these days, Guy?”
    They knew he was rich. No one else had on a suit from Armani, cuff-links that were imperial jade set in 22-carat gold. And he was less than half Anthony Chisholm’s age. He answered the question, told them about the paintings, not mentioning his other sidelines, of course. They were all soon to go anyway. With the death of Con Mulvanney imminent, waiting to happen, as it were, in the unknown, unguessed-at future, the remnants of Dream Traffic were to be dissolved. The last of that trading Tessa and Anthony had hinted at with such opprobrium, such violence, the first time he met them, that was almost over.
    Like a vulture Tessa had been at that dinner party, watching the others kill him and then swooping to pick his bones. First that remark about going on the streets and having a beat at King’s Cross, then a savage closing-in, a lecture to the assembled company about the demise of art and culture in the West (whatever that meant). And Leonora had listened, had later on no doubt been told more, and more …
    He started the car and drove home.
    Leonora had stopped living with her mother in the holidays and moved in with her father and stepmother. That was for the sake of being in central London. And to be near Rachel Lingard. If he was honest with himself, he had to admit that. Rachel’s mother had