Going Wrong by Ruth Rendell

joke.
    “I’ve managed to live for thirty years in reasonable contentment without shooting anything, Guy, and I expect I can go on in the same way for another thirty. A death-dealing banging about doesn’t appeal to me.”
    “A man should be able to handle a gun,” Guy said. “I belong to a rifle club. Of course we shoot at targets.”
    Newton slightly inclined his head, the way a bored person does who doesn’t really want to be rude but doesn’t care much either. Guy said, “The girls have been a long time.” Another nod from Newton. Guy didn’t know what made him think of it, but having thought of it, he felt an unexplainable surge of excitement. “Ever done any fencing?” he said.
    Now Newton turned to look him fully in the face. He looked right into Guy’s eyes. The smile was there again, very slight, somehow in the eyes and inside his head rather than in any movement of the lips. Guy saw that his eyes, which he would have remembered as greyish or fawnish out of Newton’s presence, were in fact a deep blue-grey, of that shade which is less like an animal’s than any other.
    He took a long time replying. Then he said, “At school.”
    “At school?”
    “And a bit later on. You belong to a fencing club, do you?”
    “Me? No, why should I?”
    Guy knew Newton must be getting at him, something he wasn’t going to put up with, and he was about to repeat his question when Leonora and Celeste came back. They both looked pleased with themselves, Guy thought. Leonora asked what they had been talking about and Newton said, grinning, that it had been about martial arts.
    They gave their orders, Leonora and Newton sticking to their decision to eat pasta, though Guy did his best to make Leonora change her mind. He didn’t care what Newton ate. That wasn’t quite true, as he would really have liked to see him eat something poisonous, something laced with cyanide perhaps, or infected with one of those fashionable germs, listeria or salmonella, and roll about the floor in front of the women, groaning and frothing at the mouth. He hated Newton and his grin and his cool clever eyes. He was talking more about fencing now, or rather about early prize-fighting, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when—before the days of bare-knuckle fighting—men attacked each other on public stages with blunted blades and often with “sharps.” Guy thought it an unsuitable subject at table and with women present.
    This then was an example of Newton’s vaunted “conversation.” Apparently he possessed a pair of sabres which, crossed, ornamented a wall in his flat in Camden Town. He was thinking of selling them; Leonora didn’t want them in their new home. Guy would have liked to know where they had in mind but wasn’t going to ask. Celeste asked.
    “I’m selling my flat. Leonora’s selling her share of their place to her friend, who owns half of it already.”
    “Rachel’s grandmother died and left her some money, so she’ll buy my half,” Leonora said. “We’re not in a hurry, anyway. I shall live at William’s place in the meantime.”
    Why did no one ever tell him these things? Why was he kept in the dark? It was a wonder that Rachel bothered to work at all, the way her rich relatives kept dying and leaving her slabs of wealth. His steak arrived, an enormous bloody wedge of it, which he fancied Newton was looking at in a mocking way, though when he raised his eyes he saw that the other man had his back to him and was saying something to Celeste. Guy was drinking rather a lot. No one wanted any more out of the second bottle of wine, so he finished it and began drinking shorts, dry martinis without ice, though it was so warm.
    Before the bill came Newton leaned towards him and said they would split it.
    “Absolutely not,” Guy said. “I invited you.”
    “Please, Guy,” Leonora said, “we’d much rather.”
    “I wouldn’t dream of it, I wouldn’t entertain it for a moment.”
    “Well, thanks for