Going Wrong Read Online Free PDF

the kitchen with Maeve. I don’t want you to think I’ve been complaining about you. It’s all in her head really. I’m afraid she’s got a very negative attitude towards you, she always has had.”
    “So long as you don’t take any notice, my sweetheart,” he said.
    She didn’t tell him not to call her that. “It’s hard not to take any notice of one’s own mother, especially if you’re as close as we are.”
    The chill touched the back of his neck again. So the woman exerted a real influence. Leonora listened to the woman. Why did she want to be close to a person like that? Because she was her mother? He hadn’t seen his mother for seven years, let alone been close to her. It was something he couldn’t understand, this family unity, but he understood the results of it.
    He listened to Leonora’s voice, which was as pleasurable as actually taking in the content of what she said. They talked for a while. She was going out for lunch somewhere on the river with her mother, stepfather, and brother, and, for some reason, Maeve, and meeting up with the ginger dwarf later on. The last week of the primary school she taught at started next day, then the long summer holidays.
    “I’ll phone you tomorrow,” he said.
    Her tone throughout had been very sweet and affectionate. If the evil influence or influences that put her against him were removed, the love she had once felt for him would return. He corrected himself. “Felt for him,” not “once felt for him.” It could never die, only be submerged. Someone had told her, was probably constantly telling her, that the ginger dwarf would be a more secure bet than he, a safe life partner, more suitable. That same person was poisoning her mind against him personally, calling him a crook.
    It was interesting to speculate, or would be interesting if it weren’t so vital to his happiness, how things would change if Tessa Chisholm—or whatever she was called now—Mandeville?—were simply removed from the scene. He poured himself a Campari and orange juice with plenty of ice and walked out into the walled garden. A wonderful summer they were having, sunny and warm every day. His orange trees in the blue-and-white Chinese jars had fruit on them, green still but turning, a lemony bloom on their cheeks.
    The garden furniture came from Florence, bronze-coloured wrought iron, and on an island in the little round pond was a bronze dolphin. Clematis climbed the walls, Nelly Moser and Ville de Lyon, pale pink and deep pink, against the dark shiny mantle of ivy. Leonora hadn’t been to his house for ages. She had been coming, he now remembered, the previous summer and had phoned to say she couldn’t because her mother was ill. Tessa again. He didn’t for a moment believe she had really been ill. The woman was a strong as a horse. She ate like a horse too, for all that she was so thin. He imagined her now in the garden of some hotel in Richmond, eating at a table under a striped umbrella, guzzling avocado and roast duck and God knew what, those long thin gilt-tipped fingers busy with knife and fork.
    It was more than possible that she had introduced Leonora to this William Newton. She was the sort of woman who would find a prospective husband for her daughter and bring them together. But he mustn’t think like that. He wouldn’t even put it into thought-words, the idea of Leonora marrying anyone but him. Tessa would. Tessa would be doing it all the time.
    He had long ago lost touch with Linus, but Danilo he still knew. Danilo wouldn’t hesitate. A couple of grand was all it would take and Tessa Mandeville would be quietly removed from this life without Danilo’s having sight or sound of it, his hands clean, knowing neither the time nor the place of her death. He, Guy, wasn’t serious, of course. But why not be serious? Why make a joke of everything, treading so lightly with dancing steps on the surface of things? Why not confront the situation fair and square, confront