Going Wrong by Ruth Rendell Page A

considering. “I do love you, Guy. I always have and I think I always will. It’s got a lot to do with what we were to each other when we were teenagers.”
    His heart seemed to take a little happy leap, to dance about inside his chest. He felt the blood mount into his face. He put out his hand to touch hers, which lay on the table.
    “But, Guy, we’ve nothing in common any more, we don’t like the same things. I hate what you do for a living. Looking back, I hate what you’ve done.”
    That made him laugh. “Oh, come on. How about you? I was only thinking the other day how brilliant you were at nicking stuff. D’you remember how we used to get rid of it all down the Portobello?”
    Her voice was very low. “You don’t know how ashamed I am of the things I did. They fill me with self-disgust when I think of them. But you still think they were all right, you think anything goes so long as you make money out of it.”
    Her hand was flat and limp under his. He withdrew his own and looked at it as if something had stung it and he was watching for the sting to swell. “I do nothing illegal any longer,” he said. “Nothing.” Not since the death of Con Mulvanney, he thought, but he didn’t say it aloud, she knew nothing of that, and please Christ, she never would.
    “It’s not just illegal things, it’s—well, unethical things. Oh, Guy, you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? That’s part of the trouble, we don’t speak the same language. Your sole aim in life is to make lots of money and live in luxury and have power and make more and more money. And anyway, you can’t wipe out the past just by saying you don’t do things any longer. Someone told me you’d actually once run a protection racket. Oh, Guy!”
    “Who told you?” he said, very cold.
    “Does it matter?”
    “Yes. I’d like to know.”
    “Well, then, it was Magnus.”
    He knew it! Hadn’t he guessed as much? “And?”
    “He was acting for a client, finding him a barrister, you know how they do, and this man was some sort of criminal and he mentioned your name in connection with a protection racket up in Kensal.”
    “And Magnus told you?”
    “He said it couldn’t be the same Guy Curran, but Mummy said it was and of course it was, I knew that.”
    “You listen to what these people say about me, don’t you, Leonora? You listen to all of them?”
    She said softly, “It wouldn’t make any difference what anyone said. We’re poles apart. We aren’t like each other.”
    He didn’t answer that. He said rather slowly and in a deliberate and calculated drawl, “I’ve got a beautiful girlfriend. Her name is Celeste. She is twenty-three and a model and she is very lovely. She stayed with me last night. She’s probably still at Scarsdale Mews waiting for me to come back.”
    For a single horrible instant he thought Leonora was going to smile and tell him how happy she was for him, how delighted. But a shadow had crossed her face. Her expression was fixed, the dark blue eyes steady, the lips compressed. She was jealous! He could see it, he couldn’t be mistaken.
    “Are you making it up?”
    “Sweetheart, if it wasn’t you that asked, I’d really resent that.” He was aware of echoing what she had said to him when he seemed incredulous about Newton. How close they were really! They read each other’s thoughts! “I’m supposed to be attractive to women,” he said, smiling at her. “Ring her up, go on, ask her. Go and call my house.”
    Someone, a woman, had once told him that we always feel jealousy over the loves of our past lovers. Even if we no longer care for them, even if we have a new lover, a true love that will be everlasting, we are still jealous. The pang of rejection is still there, for we are all insecure, all terrified of desertion, all longing to be the first and only, or if not the first, the last. But he forgot that now or didn’t think of it. She was jealous, his Leonora was jealous because he had