Going Wrong by Ruth Rendell Page B

another woman.
    “I’m very happy for you, Guy,” she said. “I hope it goes really well. I’m very pleased.” A thought struck her. “But, Guy, would she mind about you meeting me like this? She does know? I mean, perhaps we ought to stop if she’s likely to mind.”
    “Of course she doesn’t mind,” he said impatiently. And then, “If you’ve finished, shall we go? Shall we go somewhere else, even if it’s only sitting on the grass in Soho Square?”
    He knew she’d refuse but she didn’t. “All right, just for half an hour.”
    He wondered what would happen if he tried to take her hand. Better not risk it. They walked along side by side. The clouds had gone and the sky become a hot, hard blue. He found himself suddenly thinking of a holiday they had planned to take together at this time four years ago. They were going to one of the less-frequented Greek islands and he had seen it, without of course discussing this with her, as the venue for resuming their sexual relationship. The sea was called wine-dark down there and the nights were warm. They were going to stay in a wonderful kind of hotel where all the rooms were little grass-roofed huts and each had its own private path down to the silver beach. She would return to him there, physically return to his arms, and soon after they came back they would be married, the job she was going to take and the bed-sit she was going to share with Rachel forgotten.
    She had called it off less than two weeks beforehand. It was because he was paying, she said. It was no good, she couldn’t pay her share, she couldn’t afford to, and she couldn’t let him pay for her, so they had to call it off. Even now, remembering it was deeply painful. In his philosophy a woman acknowledged a man’s love and her love for him by letting him pay for things. The bargain between them consisted in a kind of loving sale, though it didn’t sound pleasant put that way.
    He glanced at her Egyptian profile, the firm mouth and chin, the rather severe nose, the dark curtain of hair that hung two inches across her cheek. Her head was bowed as if she was deep in thought,
    “You’re not going away on holiday this year, are you?” he said, thinking of being deprived of his Saturdays, of maybe missing two or three of his Saturdays.
    “Not exactly on holiday,” she said. “I mean, we’ll be going away later.”
    His heart leaden, sinking. “Who’s ‘we’?”
    “I’ve been putting off telling you, Guy. But things are different now you’ve told me about Celeste. I’m getting married on September the sixteenth, and we’ll be going away after that on our honeymoon.”

C HAPTER S IX
    I t was five weeks away.
    The wedding would be at Kensington Register Office, the usual routine ceremony, with Maeve and Robin as witnesses. They weren’t religious. On the evening of the wedding day Leonora’s father and his wife were giving a party for them. Anthony and Susannah Chisholm lived in London, not in the Notting Hill Mews but in a flat on two floors of an early-nineteenth-century house in Lamb’s Conduit Street that had belonged to Susannah and her first husband. William Newton’s father and mother lived in Hong Kong and wouldn’t come for the wedding because they would be in England for Christmas, but his sister and brother-in-law would be there.
    She told him all about it.
    “It’s not him, though, is it? You wouldn’t have me if he was dead, for instance, would you? It’s something else.”
    “He won’t be dead, Guy. Why should he? He’s a healthy man of thirty.”
    “If I thought it was him, I’d like to kill him. I’d like to fight him, challenge him to a duel and kill him.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous.”
    “Can he handle a gun? No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know about him. He’s just an excuse, anyway. Any man but me. I’d like to know why, Leonora. I’d like to know what happened to turn you against me.”
    This conversation took place not in Soho Square but