Going Wrong Read Free Page B

all this stuff and let you insult my father and mother and my friends and—and William. And there’s another reason. It’s because I hope—well, I hoped —I’d make you see sense; I hoped I’d convince you it was hopeless—sorry about all those hopes—and you’d come to see there wasn’t a joint future for you and me. I had this idea I’d convince you we could be friends and that’s how it’d have been by this time, you agreeing to be my friend—well, our friend, William’s and mine. Does that explain it now?”
    “Quite a speech,” he said.
    “It was as short as I could make it and still say what I meant.”
    “Leonora,” he said, “who’s turned you against me?” It was a new idea. It came to him as a revelation might, enlightenment vouchsafed to a faithful believer. Her face, guilty, wary, on guard, showed him he was right. “I can see it all now. It’s one of them, isn’t it? One of them’s turned you against me. I won’t do for them, I don’t match up to their idea of what’s good for you. That’s it, isn’t it?”
    “I’m grown-up, Guy. I make up my own mind.”
    “You wouldn’t deny you’re a close family, would you? You wouldn’t deny they’ve got a lot of influence on you.” She couldn’t deny it, she said nothing. “I bet they’re over the moon about this William, I bet he’s first favourite with the lot of them.”
    She said carefully, “They like him, yes.” She got up, touched his hand with hers, giving him a look he couldn’t understand. “I’ll see you next Saturday.”
    “We’ll speak first. I’ll phone you tomorrow.”
    She said in an even cheerful tone, “Yes, you will, won’t you?”
    He walked off one way and she the other. Once she was out of sight he hailed a taxi. He thought of asking the taxi driver to go to the house in Portland Road where her flat was, go there and thrash the whole thing out with her, maybe with William there as well. He was sure William would be there, waiting for her, listening sympathetically while she complained about lunch and him and what a bore it all was, and then giving her the benefit of his brilliant conversation.
    But she wouldn’t say that. She wouldn’t complain about him or say he was a bore. He made a shrewd guess that she wouldn’t mention to anyone that she had even seen him. Because the fact was that she really did love him. Would she meet him like that if she didn’t? Who would believe all that rubbish about conscience and trying to convince him they could be friends? If a woman spoke to a man on the phone every day and met that man once a week, it was because she loved him.
    Guy paid off the taxi at the entrance to Scarsdale Mews. He had bought the house ten years before when he was nineteen, an unheard-of thing to do. But he had the money. It was just before the property boom that tripled the price of the house in as many years. The second-best part of London, he called it. He had bought the house because it was a mews cottage like the one her parents, at that time, still lived in. Only his was bigger, in a far more prestigious district. A peer, a famous novelist, and a TV chat-show star were among his neighbours. The first time he asked her to marry him was when he was twenty and she was seventeen and he took her home to this house of his and showed her the walled garden with the orange trees in Roman vases, the drawing-room that had old Lisbon tiles on the walls and a Gendje carpet. The house had the first Jacuzzi ever installed in London. He had an eighteenth-century four-poster bed and a Joshagan rug on the bedroom floor. It was better than anything her parents had. He took her to dinner at the Ecu de France where the waiters danced up to you showing you the food on big silver dishes, and then he took her home where he had Piper Heidsieck waiting on ice and wild strawberries.
    “The Great Gatsby,” she said.
    It was the name of a book. She was always talking about books. The ring he had bought her