Going Wrong Read Online Free PDF Page B

the undoubted fact that Tessa Mandeville stood between him and his life’s happiness, kept him from his love?
    With his glass in his hand, looking at its contents, the most beautiful drink in the world, the ravishing colour of an orange-pink rose, Guy lay back in his bronze chair and remembered. Long ago, nine years ago, when he first came here. They had been here in his garden and she had said, looking into his eyes, “I am you, Guy. Just as much as I’m Leonora, I’m Guy.”
    She had meant they were so close that she was he and he was she. And then, very soon, all too soon, Tessa Mandeville had come between them. Killing Tessa would be too good for her.
    She had married a man called Magnus Mandeville. Absurd name but not one you would forget. He was a solicitor, had in fact been the solicitor she had gone to when she and Anthony Chisholm were seeking a divorce. No wonder she knew so much about going to judges in chambers and applying for injunctions.
    The Mandevilles had gone to live in some suburb on the outer extremities of south London, or perhaps Magnus had lived there before. Tessa had never worked, or not since the birth of Robin, who was two years older than Leonora, and he remembered Leonora saying she had got married as soon as she left college, which was when she was twenty-one. It was art school she had been at and she was supposed to know all about art. This had been important in his relationship with Leonora, or important in altering his relationship with Leonora.
    When he looked back he could see that there had been a definite precise point when Leonora had changed towards him. Or, rather, when she had ceased to show him a devoted, uncritical love. Someone had put her off him, he knew that quite clearly. It had happened when he was twenty-two and she was nineteen. Then it was, when she came home from college for the long summer vacation, that she had seemed to stop wanting to touch him. In that August, which he had looked forward to desperately all summer, she kept finding excuses for not being alone with him, she had begun gently to extricate herself from his embrace.
    The strongest possibility was that Tessa had found out he had been Leonora’s lover and indicated her violent disapproval. He had never thought of that before. Having that set-to with Tessa on the phone had wonderfully cleared his mind. The more he thought of it, the more apparent it became that it was Tessa who had been the prime mover against him.
    He phoned Leonora as soon as he thought she would be home from school. This time it was Rachel who answered. Leonora had met Rachel at university and they had been friends ever since. Guy didn’t like the sort of girls who were overweight and hyperintellectual, who wore steel-rimmed glasses, took no interest in their appearance, and whose greatest ambition was to end up as head of Friends of the Earth.
    “Off sick, are you?” he said. “You’ll never make it to the top that way.”
    “I have a client here with me,” she said. “It happened to be more convenient.”
    He knew what she meant by a “client.” “Some child abuser, I suppose?”
    “How did you guess? Leonora isn’t back yet. I shan’t be here to tell her you rang but she’ll know. Surprise day will be when you don’t ring.”
    Leonora came in before she put the phone down. “What’s she got against me?” he said. “What have I ever done to her, the bilious bitch?”
    “Perhaps you’re not very nice to her either, Guy.”
    “Have you had a good day?” he said. “Are you very tired? Will you have dinner with me?”
    “Of course I won’t. I never have dinner with you. I have lunch with you on Saturdays.”
    “Leo,” he said. Sometimes he called her Leo, and in the same tone as he sometimes called her sweetheart. “Leo, your mother doesn’t go out to work, does she?”
    He understood that she was so surprised at getting an ordinary question from him instead of a plea to love him that she answered without