Going Wrong Read Free

melon with prosciutto without the prosciutto, followed by pasta. He had gambas and tournedos Rossini. He made an effort to speak, to say anything, and succeeded only in sounding like some scolding chaperon. “I wish you’d have a decent meal for once. I wish you’d have something expensive.”
    He could tell she was relieved he had changed the subject, or she thought he had. The truth was he couldn’t bear to go on talking about it. The words hurt. Her words stayed in his ears, pressing and drumming: I fell in love with him.
    “As it is,” she said, “I don’t like you paying. I don’t belong in a world where men pay for women’s food just as a matter of course.”
    “Don’t be absurd. It’s not a question of sex, it’s a question of me earning about fifty times what you do.” He shouldn’t have said it, he knew that as soon as he had. It was a fault with him, which he recognized, to be unable to resist expressing pride in his success as a self-made man. The frown was back on her face, drawing together those winged eyebrows. He began to feel angry as well as miserable. That was the trouble; when they were together, on these rare occasions, always in the glare of noon, always in public, he was unable to keep his temper.
    “I know you hate what I do for a living,” he said, staring at the two frown lines, the steady blue eyes. “It’s because you don’t understand. You don’t know the world we live in. You’re an intellectual and you think everyone’s got your taste and knows what’s good and what isn’t. It’s something you can’t understand, that ordinary people just want ordinary pretty things in their homes, things they can look at and—well, identify with if you like, things that aren’t pretentious or phony.”
    “‘His position towards the religion he was upholding was the same as that of a poultry keeper towards the carrion he feeds his fowls on: carrion is very disgusting but fowls like it and eat it, therefore it is right to feed fowls on carrion.’”
    Guy felt himself flush up to his eyes. “I don’t suppose even you made that up.”
    “Tolstoy did.”
    “I congratulate you on your memory. Did you learn it on purpose to come out with it today? Or is it one of the things he says in his marvellous conversation?”
    “It’s a piece I like,” she said. “It’s appropriate for lots of the terrible things that people do to other people today. I don’t like any of the things you do for a living, Guy, but that’s only part of it.”
    “Are you going to tell me the rest?”
    Her melon came and his prawns. He asked for a bottle of Macon-Lugny. He was a long way from an alcoholic but he liked to drink every day, to drink quite a lot, an aperitif and wine at lunch-time, two or three gins before dinner, and a bottle of wine with dinner. If the person he was with wanted to share another bottle or two in the evening, that was all right with him. Even for Leonora he wasn’t going to pretend he didn’t like a drink or deny himself the cigarette he would have after his steak.
    “You never have actually told me, you know. You’ve said why you fancy the ginger dwarf but never quite why you don’t fancy me. Any more, that is. You did once. Fancy me. I mean.”
    “I was fifteen, Guy. It was eleven years ago.”
    “Nevertheless. I was your first, and a woman always loves her first best.”
    “Antiquated sexist rubbish, that is. And I must tell you, if you call William a ginger dwarf, I shall get up and go.”
    “I’m not going to sit here and be insulted,” he jeered in a cockney char voice.
    “As you say. I’m glad you said it; saved me the trouble.”
    He was silent, too angry to speak. As was often the case at these meetings of theirs, he became too angry or too unhappy to eat, in spite of the hunger he had felt a few minutes before. He would drink instead and end up reeling out of the place, red in the face. But he wasn’t red yet. He could see himself in the black glass panel