To Fear a Painted Devil (4 page)

‘Pests?’

‘Wasps. We’ve got a nest.’

‘Have you? So have we.’ She looked up. Patrick was still there. ‘My husband—we want to get rid of them but we don’t know how.’

‘I’ve got some stuff. It’s called Vesprid. I tell you what. When I’ve done mine I’ll bring the tin round. There’s bags of it, enough to kill all the wasps in Nottinghamshire.’

‘But how kind!’

‘I’ll bring it round in the morning, shall I?’

Tamsin sighed. Now she would have to have this
wretched man in the way while she was preparing for the party.

‘Look, why don’t you come to a little do I’m having, a few friends in for drinks at about eight?’ He looked at her adoringly and his eyes reminded her of Queenie’s. ‘If you could come early we could do the wasps then. Bring a friend if you like.’

A party at Hallows! A party at the biggest house on Linchester. Putting on his maudlin widower’s voice, he said: ‘I haven’t been to a party since I lost my wife.’

‘Really?’ A chord had been struck. ‘His wife’s dead,’ Patrick had said, ‘and that’s why …’ What had she done? ‘I’m sorry but I don’t think I know your name.’

‘Carnaby. Edward Carnaby.’

He looked at her, smiling. She took her hand from the car door and pressed it against her breastbone, breathing like one who has run up a steep hill.

Trust Tamsin Selby to be talking to a man, Joan thought, as she came out of her gate, holding Cheryl by the hand.

‘Wave to your Daddy.’

The child was more interested in the man and the dog on The Green. Telling herself that she had meant to go that way in any case, Joan followed her reluctantly.

Patrick had never been one to waste words on the weather and other people’s health. His eyes, which had been fixed with a kind of calculating disgust on Edward Carnaby, now turned upon Joan, taking in the details of her limp cotton dress, her sunburned arms and the brown roots of her hair where the rinse was growing out.

‘Isn’t it
hot
?’ She was uncomfortable in his presence and felt the remark had been foolish. In fact, it
was no longer particularly hot. A faint breeze was stirring the waters of the pond, ruffling it to match the mackerel sky.

‘I don’t know why English people make a cult of grumbling about the weather,’ he said. He looked very Teutonic as he spoke and she remembered someone had told her he had spent his childhood in Germany and America She laughed awkwardly and made a grab for Cheryl’s hand. He had made it so clear he didn’t want to talk to her that she jumped and blushed when he called her back.

‘How’s business?’

‘Business?’ Of course he meant Denholm’s business, the factory. ‘All right, I suppose,’ she said, and then because ever since before tea there had been a vague, half-formed worry nagging at her mind, ‘Den says things have been a bit slack lately.’

‘We can’t all get Harwell contracts.’ He touched the trunk of a great oak and with a small smile looked up into its branches. ‘They don’t grow on trees. It’s a matter of work, my dear Joan, work and single-mindedness. Denholm will have to watch his step or I’ll be taking over one of these days.’

She said nothing. Malice quirked the corners of his thin mouth. She looked away from him and at the dog. Then she saw that he, too, was staring in the same direction.

‘Expansion is life,’ he said. ‘Give it a few months and then we’ll make things hum.’

Shivering a little, she drew back from him, feeling a sudden chill that seemed to come not from the scurrying wind but from the man himself.

‘We’re late, Cheryl. It’s past your bedtime.’

‘She can come with me,’ said Patrick, his curious smile broadening. ‘I’m going that way.’

The green Ford had moved away from the Hallows gate but Tamsin was still there, watching. As the man and child walked off towards the chalets, Joan suddenly thought she would go and speak to Tamsin, demand the explanation she knew Patrick would never give to her. But Tamsin, she saw, was in no mood for talking. Something or someone had upset her and she was retreating up the willow drive, her head bent and her hands clenched beneath her chin. Joan went home and put the children to bed. When she came downstairs Denholm was asleep. He looked so like Jeremy, his eyes lightly closed, his cheek pink and smooth against the bunched-up cushion, that she hadn’t the heart to wake him.

E
dward Carnaby kept on turning back and waving all the way down to the Manor gates. Tamsin stared after him, unable to smile in return. Her knees felt weak and she was afraid she might faint. When she reached the house she heard Queenie bark, a single staccato bark followed by a howl. The howls went on for a few seconds; then they stopped and all was silent. Tamsin knew what the howls meant. Patrick had tied up the dog to go into someone’s house.

She went upstairs and into the balcony room. In the faint bloom on the dressing-table Patrick had written with a precise finger: Dust this. She fell on the bed and lay face-downwards.

Half an hour had passed when she heard the footsteps and at first she thought they were Patrick’s. But whoever it was was coming alone. There was no accompanying
tip-tap of dog’s claws on stone. O God, she thought, I shall have to tell him. Otherwise Patrick might, there in front of everyone at the party.

The doors were unlocked. There was nothing to stop him coming in, but he didn’t. He knocked with the prearranged signal. What would he do when he knew it all? There was still a chance she could persuade Patrick. She put her fingers in her ears, willing him to go. He knocked again and it seemed to her that he must hear through glass and wood, stone walls and thick carpets, the beating of her heart.

At last he went away.

‘Damnation!’ she heard him say from beneath her as if he were looking through the lounge window. The footsteps hurried away down the avenue and out through the footpath on to the Nottingham road. The gate swung, failed to catch and flapped against the post, bang, swing, bang. Tamsin went into the room where the men had put the parcel. She broke her nails untying the string but she was crying too much to notice.

3

T
here are perhaps few things more galling to one’s
amour propre
than to act in a covert, clandestine way when no such discretion is necessary. Oliver Gage was a proud man and now, creeping round the Hallows paths, tapping signals on the glass doors, he felt that someone had made a fool of him.

‘Damnation!’ he said, this time under his breath.

She had obviously gone out with
him
. Pressure had been put on her. Well, so much the better if that meant she had been preparing the ground. He would make his intentions clear at the party.

He went out into The Circle and made the humiliating detour necessary before he could find his car that he had parked on the ride off the main road. When he entered Linchester for the second time that night it was by the Manor gates and he drove into his own garage drive with a sense of disgruntled virtue
and the shame he always felt when he returned to his house. Oliver lived in one of the largest houses on Linchester but it was too small for him. He hated it already. Every Friday night when he came up from his four days in London the sight of the house, magnified perhaps in his mind during his absence, sickened him and reminded him afresh of his misfortunes. For, as Oliver grew older, the sizes of his houses diminished. This was not due to a reversal in his financial life. One of the executives of a national daily, his income now topped the seven thousand mark, but only about a third of this found its way into Oliver’s pocket. The rest, never seen by him yet never forgotten, streamed away via an army of solicitors and bank managers and accountants into the laps of his two discarded wives.

When he had married Nancy—pretty, witty Nancy!—and built this, the smallest of his houses to date, he had forgotten for a few months the other pressures on his income. Was not love a Hercules, still climbing trees in the Hesperides? Now, a year later, he reflected that the gods were just and of his pleasant vices had made instruments to plague him.

He unlocked the door and dropped his keys on to the hall table between the Flamenco doll and the Cherry Herring bottle that Nancy by the addition of a shade stuck all over with hotel labels had converted into a lamp. In all his matrimonial career Oliver had never before given houseroom to such an object. He hated it but he felt that, in ensuring it was the first thing his eye fell on when he entered his home, providence was meting out to him a stern exquisite justice.

Nancy’s sewing machine could be heard faintly
from the lounge. The querulous whine of the motor fanned his ill-temper into rage. He pushed open the reeded glass door and went in. The room was tightly sealed and stifling, the windows all closed and the curtains drawn back in the way he loathed, carelessly, with no attention to the proper arrangement of their folds. Those curtains had cost him thirty pounds.

His wife—to himself and to one other Oliver occasionally referred to her as his present wife—lifted her foot from the pedal which controlled the motor and pushed damp hair back from a face on which sweat shone. Shreds of cotton and pieces of coloured fluff clung to her dress and littered the floor. There was even a piece of cotton dangling from her bracelet.

‘My Christ, it’s like an oven in here!’ Oliver flung back the french windows and scowled at Bernice Greenleaf who was walking coolly about the garden next-door, snipping the dead blossoms off an opulent Zephirine Drouhin. When she waved to him he changed the scowl into a rigid smirk. ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ he asked his wife.

She pulled a cobbled strip of black and red silk from under the needle. ‘I’m making a dress for Tamsin’s party.’

Oliver sat down heavily, catching his foot in one of the Numdah rugs. (‘If we have wood block flooring and rugs, darling,’ Nancy had said, ‘we’ll save pounds on carpeting.’)

‘This I cannot understand,’ Oliver said. ‘Did I or did I not give you a cheque for twenty pounds last Tuesday with express instructions to buy yourself a dress?’

‘Well …’

‘Did I or did I not? That’s all I ask. It’s a perfectly simple question.’

Nancy’s babyish,
gamine
face puckered. A curly face, he had called it once, tenderly, lovingly, touching with a teasing finger the tip-tilted nose, the bunchy cheeks, the fluffy fair eyebrows.

‘Well, darling, I had to have shoes, you see, and stockings. And there was the milk bill …’ Her voice faltered. ‘I saw this remnant and this pattern …’ She held an envelope towards him diffidently. Oliver glowered at the coloured picture of the improbably tall women in cylindrical cotton frocks. ‘It’ll be all right, won’t it?’

‘It will be quite ghastly,’ Oliver said coldly. ‘I shall be covered with shame. I shall be mortified. Tamsin always looks wonderful.’

As soon as the words were out he regretted them. Now was not the time. Nancy was going to cry. Her face swelled as if the skin itself was allergic to his anger.

‘Tamsin has a private income.’ The tears sprouted. ‘I only wanted to save you money. That’s all I think about, saving you money!’

‘Oh, don’t cry! I’m sorry, Nancy!’ She almost fell from her chair into his lap and he put his arms round her with the distaste that was part of his marital experience, the distaste that always came as love ebbed. Every bit of her was damp and clinging and unbearably hot.

‘I do want to economise, darling. I keep thinking of all that money going out month after month to Jean and Shirley. And what with both the boys at Bembridge …’ Oliver frowned. He disliked the reminder that he had been unable to afford to send the sons of his first marriage to Marlborough. ‘And Shirley always
so greedy, insisting on sending Jennifer to a private school when state education is so good these days.’

‘You know nothing at all about state education,’ Oliver said.

‘Oh, darling, why did you have to marry such unattractive women? Any other women would have got married again. Two such disastrous—well, tragic marriages. I lie awake at night thinking about the inroads on our income.’

She was off on a well-worn track, the Friday night special. Oliver let her talk, reaching to the mantelpiece for a cigarette from the box.