Free Going Wrong by Ruth Rendell Page A

Forty-five minutes with the weights, then the steam room, cold shower, thirty lengths of the pool. He decided to miss breakfast, though he could have had a healthy one at the Juice ’n’ Grains Bar. The scales showed him he had put on two pounds. So much for Danilo’s comments on the state of his health.
    It was still only eleven. If he had thought of it he could have gone to the rifle range in the King’s Road and put in an hour’s practice, but he hadn’t thought of it and he only liked using his own guns. He was suddenly most unwilling to go back to Scarsdale Mews. Celeste would still be there. Celeste would very likely still be in bed and would put out her arms to him. Most things that his situation with Celeste and Leonora brought him he could take, though wincing, but not passing straight from one to the other, even though Celeste knew and Leonora wouldn’t care.
    Oh, but wouldn’t she? It occurred to him that he had never actually, in so many words, told Leonora that Celeste was his lover, that she frequently slept with him the night before he came for his lunch date, that she loved him and often swore she would love him forever. Perhaps he should try telling her. The idea that Leonora might be jealous made him feel dizzy, he had to sit down on a seat in the park.
    Today their lunch date was at Cranks, the original one in Soho. Nothing but love would have induced Guy to go there. Of course he had never been to Cranks but he was aware that it was a vegetarian restaurant and for all he knew alcohol-free. Having decided not to go home first, simply to leave Celeste (not by any means for the first time) to take herself off and perhaps phone him later, he began to walk vaguely in the direction of Hyde Park Corner. He would perhaps pick up a taxi in Park Lane or even walk all the way.
    The sky was a soft, delicate blue, overspread with a fine network of tiny clouds that did nothing to hinder the passage of the sun’s rays. The sun was warm, delightful, but not hot. There was no breeze or sharpness in the air. The lawns to the left of him which bordered the Serpentine were this morning the abode of waterfowl: ducks with russet-coloured heads and black-and-white ducks with long necks; barnacle geese and pink-footed geese, red-wattled Muscovies and mallards with green satin crowns. A little way ahead of him, at the point where Rotten Row comes very close to the waterside, a girl and a man were feeding the ducks from a bag of bread cubes, or the girl was feeding them while the man stood aside, watching her and polishing a pair of sun-glasses with a tissue. Guy slackened his pace. The girl screwed up the paper bag and put it in her pocket, having looked in vain for a litter basket. She and her companion began to walk away. They were on Rotten Row itself, some twenty or thirty yards ahead of him, and evidently going in the same direction. Guy had recognized them as Maeve Kirkland and Robin Chisholm.
    At first he felt simple astonishment that they knew each other. But nothing, of course, could be more likely. Robin was Leonora’s brother and a “close” brother, Maeve one of her flatmates for the past three years. They were not holding hands or walking particularly close together, they were not walking as Leonora and the ginger dwarf had been. There was no indication that they were lovers or even close friends.
    Guy didn’t want to be seen by them. He let them get farther and farther ahead of him. If one of them turned round he would simply cut across the grass onto the South Carriage Drive. He wondered where they were going and what they were talking about. Both were wearing T-shirts, Maeve’s a shocking purplish-pink, Robin’s white. In spite of her name, Maeve was not Irish. She was a big statuesque blonde, Valkyrie-like, a good inch taller than Robin, who was himself nearly six feet. Ten years ago women still minded being taller than their men (or the men minded), and if they could have been transported a decade