To Fear a Painted Devil

the sleeping and the dead

Are but as pictures: ’tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil

M
ACBETH

P
ROLOGUE

H
e was nine. It was his first morning in England and he began to wonder if all English houses were like this one, large yet with small rooms, full of things that no one could use: armless statues, vases with lids to them, curtains as immovably draped as one of his mother’s evening gowns.

They had arrived the night before and he had passed through the hall wrapped in a blanket and carried in his father’s arms. He remembered only the great front door, a heavy wooden door with a picture of a tree on it in coloured glass. They had left him to sleep as long as he would and someone had brought breakfast for him on a tray. Now as he descended the stairs, crossing the half-landing which a bronze soldier guarded with his lance, he saw the hall below him and his steps faltered.

It was a fine morning but the room looked as
rooms do at twilight, dim and still. Instead of being papered the walls were hung with embroideries stretched on frames, and between them curtains that covered—what? Windows? Doors? It seemed to him that they covered things people were not supposed to see. There was a single mirror with a wooden frame and this frame, of carved and polished red wood, looked as if it had grown branches of its own, for strips of wood shaped into leaves and twigs twined across the glass.

Within this mirror he could see not himself but an open door reflected and beyond it the beginning of the garden. The door stood wide and he went through it, seeking the garden where he knew the sun must be shining. Then he saw the picture. He stood quite still and he stared at it.

It was a painting of a lady in an old-fashioned dress of striped silk, bright blue and gold, with a little gold cap on her head. She was holding a silver plate and in the plate was the head of a man.

He knew it must be a very good painting because the artist had made it look so real. Nothing was left out, not even the blood in the plate and the white tube things in the man’s neck where it had been cut from his body.

The lady wasn’t looking at the thing in the plate but at him. She was smiling and there was a strange expression on her face, dreamy, triumphant, replete. He had never seen such a look in anyone’s eyes before but suddenly he knew with an intuition that had in it something of an
a priori
knowledge, that grown-ups sometimes looked at each other like that and that they did so out of the sight of children.

He tore his eyes from the picture and put his hand
up to his mouth to stop them hearing his scream. Then he rushed blindly away, making for the glass place that separated this room from the garden.

He stumbled at the step and put out his hand to save himself. It touched something cool and soft but only for a moment. The coolness and softness were succeeded by a terrible burning pain that seemed to smite him exactly like the shock he had had from his mother’s electric iron.

Away in the garden someone laughed. He screamed and screamed and screamed until he heard doors banging, feet flying, the women coming to him from the kitchen.

1

‘P
russic acid?’ The chemist was startled. He had been a member of the Pharmaceutical Society for ten years and this was the first time anyone had made such a request to him. Not that he would grant it. He was a responsible citizen, almost—in his own estimation—a doctor. ‘Cyanide of Potassium?’ He looked severely at the small man in the suit that was too dark and too thick for a hot day. ‘What d’you want that for?’

Edward Carnaby, for his part, was affronted. Mr. Waller was only a chemist, a pharmacist really, not a proper chemist who worked in a laboratory. Everyone knew that doctors poked their noses into one’s affairs, trying to find out things that were no business of theirs, but not chemists. You asked for what you wanted—razor blades or shaving cream or a camera film—and the chemist gave it to you. He wrapped it
up and you paid for it. When all was said and done, Waller was only a shopkeeper.

‘I want it for killing wasps. I’ve got a wasp nest on the wall of my house under the roof.’

He fidgeted uneasily under Waller’s accusing gaze. The fan on the ceiling, instead of cooling the shop, was only blowing the hot air about.

‘May I have your name, please?’

‘What for? I don’t have to have a prescription for it, do I?’

Waller ignored the sarcasm. Responsible professional men must not allow themselves to be ruffled by cheap cracks.

‘What gave you the idea of cyanide?’ As he spoke the curtain of coloured plastic strips that hung across the entrance to the dispensary parted and Linda Gaveston came out in her pink overall. Her appearance angered Edward, partly because she looked so cool, partly because he felt that a girl whose parents lived on Linchester had no business to be working as an assistant in a chemist’s shop. She smiled at him vaguely. Edward snapped:

‘If you must know, I read about it in a gardening book.’

Plausible, Waller thought.

‘Rather an old-fashioned book, surely? These days we get rid of wasps by using a reliable vespicide.’ He paused, allowing the unfamiliar word to sink in. ‘One that is harmless to warm-blooded …’

‘All right,’ Edward interrupted him. He wasn’t going to make a scene in front of one of those snooty Gavestons. ‘Why didn’t you say so before? I’ll take it. What’s it called?’

‘Vesprid.’ Waller shot him a last baleful look and
turned round, but the girl—showing off, Edward thought—was already holding the tin towards him. ‘Two and eleven.’