Going Wrong Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    He had phoned her every day for years. That kind of statement is never quite true. How could it be? He had tried to phone her every day. Most days he reached her. It was a kind of challenge for him or a quest, a labour of love.
    When she was at university she said she didn’t like his daily phone calls, they embarrassed her. He never took that very seriously. In her holidays he phoned her at Tessa’s or at Anthony’s, wherever she happened to be living. She went on to teacher-training college and he tried to phone her every day at the students’ hall of residence. Quite often he didn’t reach her but he persisted. He phoned her when she went to live with Anthony and Susannah and when she moved into that room with Rachel Lingard and when she got the flat with Rachel and Maeve Kirkland.
    Usually someone else answered the phone. He didn’t know why that was. When she was at her father’s, Anthony or Susannah would answer, and now at the flat it was likely to be Rachel or Maeve. It was a good many years since she had lived with her mother, and he hadn’t heard Tessa’s voice since the Portland Road house-warming party. But he recognized it as soon as he heard it. It was Tessa who answered when he phoned Leonora’s flat on the day after their lunch in the wine bar.
    A languid, “Hallo?” Tessa was either languid or sharp, these moods alternating.
    He said tersely, “Leonora, please.”
    “Who is that?” As if she didn’t know.
    “It’s Guy Curran, Tessa.” He drew a long breath. “And how are you after all this time?”
    It was as if she had two taps inside her head. From one came a drawling, sluggish trickle, from the other a swift-splashing flow. She turned on the flood tap.
    “I’m glad to get a chance to speak to you. Leonora is simply too kind and sweet to say what has to be said. Another girl would have got the police on to you by now. At least. Do you realize it would be quite possible for her to go to a judge in chambers and get an injunction forbidding you to pursue her?”
    He didn’t say anything. He held the receiver at arm’s length, grubbed about for a cigarette. The voice chattered angrily out of the receiver. He held it in the hollow between chin and shoulder, lit his cigarette.
    “I know you’re still there,” he heard her say. “I can hear you breathing. You’re like one of those heavy breathers and just as sinister. That’s the horrible thing, you’re sinister, you’re a kind of gangster. It’s appalling that my daughter should be associated with someone like you—these awful phone calls, day after day, this Saturday lunch thing, like a kind of endurance test. I don’t understand it, it’s beyond me, unless you’ve hypnotized her in some way.”
    The only course might be to put the phone down and try later. He was thinking that when he heard Leonora say, “Come on, Mother, give it to me.” She had stopped calling the woman “Mummy” at any rate. “I’m sorry about that, Guy,” she said. “My mother’s gone out into