To Fear a Painted Devil (2 page)

‘Thanks,’ Edward said shortly, taking the penny change.

‘The instructions are enclosed.’

Linda Gaveston lifted her shoulders slightly and slipped between the waving strips in the way she had seen a night club girl insinuate herself through a bead curtain on television.

‘There goes a nut,’ she said to Waller when Edward had gone. ‘He lives near us.’

‘Really?’ Like all the shopkeepers in Chantflower village Waller had a great respect for Linchester. Money flowed from it as from a spring of sweet water. ‘Not quite what one has been led to expect.’ He watched Edward get into his salesman’s car, its back seat full of cardboard boxes. ‘It takes all sorts,’ he said.

O
n that hot afternoon Freda Carnaby was the only Linchester housewife who was really working and she was not a wife at all. She was cleaning windows in the single living room of Edward’s chalet partly because it was a good excuse for watching the cars coming round The Circle. Linchester business men kept short hours and the man she was looking for might be early. He would wave, even perhaps stop and renew his promise to see her later, and he would notice afresh how efficient she was, how womanly. Moreover he would see that she could look smart and pretty not only in the evenings but also with a wash leather in her hand.

Considering who she was looking for it was ironic
that the first car to appear was Tamsin Selby’s. Even if you didn’t see the number plate (SIN 1-A) you would know it was Tamsin’s Mini because, although it was new, its black body and white roof were already marked with raindrops and with dust, and the back seat was full of leaves and twigs, rubbish from the fields. Freda pursed her lips in happy disapproval. If you had money and you bought nice things (what that monogram of a number plate must have cost!) you ought to take care of them.

Dr. Greenleaf’s car followed fast on her tail. It was time, Freda considered, that he bought a new one. A doctor, she had read in one of her magazines, was nowadays the most respected member of a community, and therefore had appearances to keep up. She smiled and bobbed her head. She thought the doctor’s kindly grin meant he was grateful to her for being so healthy and not taking up his surgery time.

By the time Joan Smith-King arrived with her shooting brake full of the Linchester children she had fetched from school, Freda had finished the window.

‘All delivered in plain vans,’ Joan said cheerfully, ‘Den says I ought to have a C licence.’

‘Can I go to tea with Peter?’ Cheryl called. ‘Can I, Auntie Free? Please.’

‘If you’re sure she’s no trouble,’ Freda said. Cheryl might be only a salesman’s daughter, but she had nice manners. She, Freda, had seen to that. But going out to tea was a nuisance. Now Cheryl would come rushing in at seven just when Freda wanted to be relaxed and ready with coffee cups on the best traycloth, paper napkins and sherry in a decanter.

‘Ghastly these wasps.’ Joan looked up at the chalet roof where the wasps were dribbling out from under
the eaves. ‘Tamsin said Patrick got a nasty sting on his hand.’

‘Did he?’ Freda took her eyes from Joan’s face and stared innocently at the hedge. ‘Don’t be late,’ she said to Cheryl. Joan moved off, one hand on her wheel, the other pulling Jeremy off Peter, shoving her daughter Susan into Cheryl’s lap. The baby in its carry-cot on the front seat began to cry. Freda went round the back and into the spotless kitchen.

She was re-doing her face from the little
cache
of cosmetics she kept in a drawer when she heard Edward’s car draw up on the drive. The front door slammed.

‘Free?’

She bustled into the lounge. Edward was already at the record-player, starting up The Hall of the Mountain King.

‘You might have shut the gates,’ she said from the window, but she didn’t press the point. A wife could expect small services, not a sister. A sister was only a housekeeper, a nanny to Edward’s motherless daughter. Still … she cheered up. A couple of years and she might have a child of her own.

‘How long till tea?’

‘Five thirty sharp,’ said Freda ‘I’m sure I never keep you waiting for your meals, Ted.’

‘Only it’s car maintenance at seven.’

Edward went to a different class each night. French on Mondays and Thursdays, accountancy on Tuesdays, carpentry on Wednesdays, car maintenance on Fridays. Freda approved his industry. It was a way, she supposed, of forgetting the wife who had lived just long enough to put the curtains up in the
new house and who had died before the first installment was due on the mortgage.

‘What are you going to do?’

She shrugged. He was her brother, but he was also her twin and as jealous of her time as a husband might be.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I wonder if you haven’t got a secret boy-friend who pops in when I’m out of the way.’

Had there been talk, gossip? Well, why not? Only a few days now and everyone would know. Edward would know. Funny but it made her shiver to think of it.

He turned the record over and straightened up. Solveig’s Song, music for a cold climate, roared into the stuffy room. The pure voice pleased Freda, reminding her of large uncluttered rooms she had so far seen only from the outside as she passed with her shopping baskets. On the whole, she thought, she would like to live there. She wouldn’t be squeamish. He loves me, she thought, not thinking of Edward. A long shudder of pain and anxious happiness travelled down from her shoulders and along her thighs to her feet in their tight pointed shoes.

‘I wouldn’t like that, Free,’ he said. ‘You’re best off here with me.’

‘We shall have to see what time brings forth, shan’t we?’ she said, staring through the diamond panes at Linchester, at ten more houses that encircled a green plot. How nice, how stimulating it would be next year to see it all from a different angle. When she turned round Edward was beside her, flicking his fingers in front of her face to break up the myopic stare.

‘Don’t,’ she said. Hurt, he sat down and opened his homework book,
An Outline of Monetary Economics
.
Freda went upstairs to lacquer her hair, straighten her stocking seams and spray a little more Fresh Mist under her arms.

D
enholm Smith-King was used to performing small and, for that matter, large services for his wife. With five children he could hardly do otherwise. He was already at home when she arrived back, making what he called euphemistically ‘a cup of tea.’ In the Smith-King household this meant slicing and buttering a whole large loaf and carving up a couple of pound cakes.

‘You’re early,’ she said.

‘Not much doing.’ He greeted Cheryl vaguely as if he was uncertain whether or not she was one of his own children. ‘Things are a bit slack so I hied me to the bosom of my family.’

‘Slack?’ She found a tablecloth and spread it on what had once been a fine unblemished sheet of teak. ‘I don’t like the sound of that, Den. I’m always meaning to talk to you about the business.…’

‘Did you find anyone to sit in with the mob tomorrow night?’ he asked, adroitly changing the subject.

‘Linda Gaveston said she’d come, I asked her when I was in Waller’s.’ Joan found the piece of pasteboard from the mêlée on the mantelpiece and read its message aloud: ‘Tamsin and Patrick Selby At Home, Saturday, July 4th, eight p.m. Of course I know how affected Tamsin is, but At Home’s going a bit far.’

‘I reckon you can go as far as you like,’ said Denholm, ‘when you’ve got a private income and no kids.’

‘It’s only a birthday party. She’s twenty-seven tomorrow.’

Denholm sat down heavily, a reluctant paterfamilias at the head of his table. ‘Twenty-seven? I wouldn’t have put her at a day over twenty.’

‘Oh, don’t be so silly, Den. They’ve been married for years.’ She had been piqued by his admiration of another woman, but now she looked at him tenderly over their children’s heads. ‘Fancy being married for years to Patrick Selby!’

‘I daresay it’s all a matter of taste, old girl.’

‘I don’t know what it is,’ Joan said, ‘but he frightens me. I get the shivers every time I see him walking past here with that great German dog of his.’ She wiped the baby’s chin and sighed. ‘It came in the garden again this morning. Tamsin was most apologetic. I’ll grant her that. She’s a nice enough girl in her way, only she always seems only half awake.’

‘Pity they haven’t got any kids,’ Denholm said wistfully. Uncertain as to whether he was wishing children on to the Selbys from genuine regret for their childlessness or from motives of revenge, Joan gave him a sharp look.

‘They’re first cousins, you know.’

‘Ah,’ said Denholm, ‘brought up together. One of those boy and girl things, was it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said his wife. ‘He’s not likely to confide in anyone and she’s far too much of the little girl lost.’

When tea was over the children drifted into the garden. Joan handed her husband a tea towel and began to wash up. Jeremy’s scream made them both jump and before it had died away Denholm, who knew what it meant, was out on the lawn brandishing the stick he kept in the storm porch for this purpose.

Only Cheryl had not backed away. The other children clung to Denholm as he advanced between the swing and the sandpit.

‘Get out of it, you great brute!’

The Weimaraner looked at him courteously but with a kind of mild disdain. There was nothing savage about her but nothing endearing either. She was too autocratic, too highly-bred for that. Haunch-deep in marigolds, she was standing in the middle of Denholm’s herbaceous border and now, as he shouted at her again, she flicked out a raspberry pink tongue and delicately snapped off a larkspur blossom.

Cheryl caught at Denholm’s hand. ‘She’s a nice dog, really she is. She often comes to our house.’

Her words meant nothing to Denholm but he dropped the stick. Insensitive as he was, he could hardly beat the dog in the presence of the woman who had appeared so suddenly and so silently on the lawn next door.

‘Queenie often comes to our house,’ Cheryl said again.

Tamsin Selby had heard. A spasm of pain crossed her smooth brown face and was gone.

‘I’m so dreadfully sorry.’ She smiled without showing her teeth. ‘Please don’t be cross, Denholm. She’s very gentle.’

Denholm grinned foolishly. The Selbys, both of them, always made him feel a fool. It was the contrast, perhaps, between their immaculate garden and his own cluttered playground; their pale hand-stitched clothes and what he called his ‘togs’; their affluence and his need.

‘It put the wind up the youngsters,’ he said gruffly.

‘Come on, Queenie!’ The long brown arm rose languidly
in an elegant parabola At once the dog leaped, clearing the hedge with two inches to spare. ‘I hope we’ll see you tomorrow, Denholm?’

‘You can count on us. Never miss a good booze–up.’ He was embarrassed and he went in quickly. But Cheryl lingered, staring over the hedge with curious intelligent eyes and wondering why the lady who was so unlike Auntie Free had fallen to her knees under the willow tree and flung her arms round the dog’s creamy sable neck.

2

F
ive years before when Nottinghamshire people talked about Linchester they meant the Manor and the park. If they were county they remembered garden parties, if not, coach trips to a Palladian house where you paid half-a-crown to look at a lot of valuable but boring china while the children rolled down the ha-ha. But all that came to an end when old Marvell died. One day, it seemed, the Manor was there, the next there were just the bulldozers Henry Glide brought over from the city and a great cloud of dust floating above the trees, grey and pancake-shaped, as if someone had exploded a small atom bomb.

Nobody would live there, they said, forgetting that commuting was the fashion even in the provinces. Henry himself had his doubts and he had put up three chalet bungalows before he realised he might be on to a better thing if he forgot all about retired
farmers and concentrated on Nottingham company directors. Fortunately, but by the merest chance, the three mistakes were almost hidden by a screen of elms. He nearly lost his head and built big houses with small gardens all over the estate, but he had a cautious look at the Marvell contract and saw that there was an embargo on too much tree-felling. His wife thought he was getting senile when he said he was only going to put up eight more houses, eight beautiful architect-designed houses around a broad green plot with a pond in the middle.