To Fear a Painted Devil Read online

  ‘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

  Five 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.

  And that was what people meant now when they talked about Linchester. They meant The Green with the pond where swans glided between lily leaves as big as dinner plates; The Circle which was a smart name for the road that ran around The Green; the Cotswold farmhouse and the mock-Tudor lodge, the Greenleafs’ place that might have been prefabricated in Hampstead Garden Suburb and flown complete into Nottinghamshire, the Selbys’ glass box and Glide’s own suntrap bungalow. They pointed from the tops of buses on the Nottingham road at the Gavestons’ pocket-sized grange, the Gages’ Queen Anne and the Smith-King place that had started off as a house and now was just a breeding box. They criticised the chalets, those poor relations and their occupants, the Saxtons, the Macdonalds and the Carnabys.

  The two men in the British Railways lorry lived in Newark and they had never been to Linchester before. Now, on the calmest, most beautiful evening of the summer, they saw it at its best. Yet it was not the loveliness of the place that impressed them, the elegant sweep of The Circle, the stone pineapples on the pillars at the Manor gates, nor the trees, elms, oaks and sycamores, that gave each house its expensive privacy, but the houses themselves and their opulence.

  Over-awed and at the same time suspicious, they drove between the pillars and into The Circle itself, looking for a house called Hallows.

  The lorry rumbled along the road, making ruts in the melting tar and sending white spar chips flying, past the three mistakes, past Shaldom, The Laurels, Linchester Lodge.

  ‘That’s the one I’d fancy,’ said the driver, pointing to the Cotswold farmhouse with a hint of Swiss chalet in its jade-coloured balconies. ‘If my pools come up.’ His mate was silent, consumed with envy and with scorn.

  ‘Keep your eyes open, Reg. It’s gone knocking-off time.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said his mate, throwing his cigarette end into the Gavestons’ rhododendrons, ‘I haven’t got X-ray eyes. It’s half a mile up to them front doors, and what with the trees.’

  ‘Now, I’d have them down. Keep out the light, they do. And I’d do something about that empty bit in the middle. You could put up a couple of nice bungalows where that pond is. Here we are. Hallows. I don’t know what I brought you for. I could have done better on my tod.’

  But he was glad of Reg’s help when it came to unloading the parcel. It was heavy and, according to the label, fragile. Something like a door it was or a big mirror. He could just feel a frame thing through the corrugated cardboard.

  They humped it up the drive between two rows of young willows until they came to the paved court in front of the house.

  Hallows was beautiful—by most people’s standards. Reg and the driver found it on the dull side compared with its ornate neighbours. This house was plain and rectangular, built of York stone and pale unpolished wood; there were no gables and no chimneys, no shutters and not a single pane of stained glass. The windows were huge, backed with white venetian blinds, and the front doors were swing affairs of glass set in steel.

  ‘Are you looking for me?’ The voice, delicate, vague, unmistakably upper-class, came from above their heads. The driver looked up to a long undecorated balcony and saw a woman leaning over the rails.

  ‘British Railways, lady.’

  ‘Too dreadful!’ Tamsin Selby said. ‘I’d forgotten all about it.’

  It was true, she had. The delivery of this parcel had been planned in a sprightly, almost malicious mood, very different from her present one. But it had taken so long in coming, so much had happened. She disappeared through the balcony windows back into the bedroom.

  ‘How the rich live,’ Reg said to the driver. ‘Forgotten, my foot!’

  Tamsin came out to them breathlessly. At all costs it must be got in and, if possible, hidden, before Patrick came home. She tried to take it from them but the weight was too much for her. The men watched her efforts with a kind of triumph.

  ‘Would you be terribly sweet,’ Tamsin said, ‘and carry it upstairs for me?’

  ‘Now, look,’ the driver began, ‘it’s heavy …’

  She took two half-crowns from the bag she had snatched up in the hall.

  ‘Can’t leave it here, can we?’ Reg was grinning reluctantly.

  ‘So kind,’ said Tamsin. She led the way and they followed her, carrying the parcel gingerly to avoid scraping the dove-grey hessian on the hall walls, the paint on the curled iron baluster rails.

  ‘In here, I think.’

  The room was too beautiful for them. Poverty, never admitted, scarcely felt before, scummed their hands with ineluctable dirt. They looked away from the velvet curtains, the dressing-table glass ringed with light bulbs, the half-open door that showed a glimpse of a shower cabinet and tiles hand-painted with fishes, and down at their own feet.

  ‘Could you put it on one of the beds?’

  They lowered it on to the nearer of the cream silk counterpanes, avoiding the bed by the window where the turned-back coverlet revealed a lemon lace nightgown folded between frilled nylon pillow and frilled nylon sheet.

  ‘Thank you so much. It won’t be in the way here.’

  She didn’t even bother to smooth the silk where a corner of the parcel had ruffled it, but signed her name quickly and hustled them out of the house. After they had gone she closed the spare bedroom door and sighed deeply. Patrick would be home any minute now and she had meant to use those spare moments checking on everything, making sure she looked her best.

  She went into the bedroom with the balcony and looked at herself in the glass. That was all right, just the way Patrick liked her to loo
k, the way he had liked her to look once … The sun—she had spent most of the day in the sun—had done wonders for her dark honey hair. No make-up. To have put on lipstick would have been to spoil the image she liked to create, the facsimile of a smooth teak-coloured mask, straight nose, carved lips, cheekbones that were arched polished planes.

  Her hair hung quite straight on to her brown shoulders. Even for him she refused to cut it short and have it set. The dress—that was all right at any rate. Patrick hated bright colours and this one was black and white. Plain as it was, she knew there might be something too casual about it, too suggestive of a uniform for emancipated women. O God, she thought, making a face at her own image and wishing for the first time in her life that it could be transmuted into the reflection of a brisk blonde Hausfrau.

  Downstairs the table was already laid for dinner: two place mats of blue linen—he had made her give up using the big damask cloths—black Prinknash plates, a long basket of French bread, Riesling dewed from the refrigerator. Tamsin gasped aloud when she saw that she had forgotten to throw away the vaseful of grasses. She grabbed them, scattering brown reeds, and rushed to the kitchen. The dog now, had she fed the dog?

  ‘Queenie!’

  How many times in the past months had he scolded her for failing to feed the dog on the dot of five? How many times had he snapped at her for wasting her days dreaming in the garden and the fields, learning country lore from Crispin Marvell, when she should have been at home keeping up with the Gages and the Gavestons.

  But she must have done it and, in her panic, forgotten all about it. The plate of congealing horsemeat and biscuit meal was still on the floor, untouched by the dog. Flies buzzed over it and a single wasp crawled across a chunk of fat.

  ‘Queenie!’

  The bitch appeared silently from the garden door, sniffed at the food and looked enquiringly at Tamsin with mournful eyes. She is the only thing that we have together now, Tamsin thought, the only thing that we both love, Kreuznacht Konigin, that we both call Queenie. She dropped to her knees and in her loneliness she put her arms round Queenie’s neck, feeling the suede-smooth skin against her own cheek. Queenie’s tail flapped and she nuzzled against Tamsin’s ear.

  Of the two female creatures desirous of pleasing Patrick it was the dog who heard him first. She stiffened and the swinging lethargic tail began to wag excitedly, banging against the cooker door and making a noise like a gong.

  ‘Master,’ Tamsin said. ‘Go, find him!’

  The Weimaraner stretched her lean body, cocked her head and stood for a moment poised, much as her ancestors had done listening for the huntsman’s command in the woods of Thuringia a century ago. The heavy garage door rumbled and fell with a faint clang. Queenie was away, across the patio, leaping for the iron gate that shut off the drive.

  Tamsin followed, her heart pounding.

  He came in slowly, not looking at her, silent, his attention given solely to the dog. When he had fondled Queenie, his hands drawing down the length of her body, he looked up and saw his wife.

  Tamsin had so much to say, so many endearments remembered from the days when it was necessary to say nothing. No words came. She stood there, looking at him, her hands kneading the black and white stuff of her dress. Swinging the ignition key, Patrick pushed past her, shied at a wasp that dived against his face, and went into the house.

  ‘She hasn’t eaten her dinner,’ were the first words that he spoke to her. He hated dirt, disorder, matter in the wrong place. ‘It’s all over flies.’

  Tamsin picked up the plate and dropped the contents into the waste disposal unit. Meat juice rubbed off on to her fingers. Patrick looked pointedly at her hand, turned and went upstairs. She ran the tap, rinsed her fingers. It seemed an age since he had gone—the wine, would it get too warm? Ought she to put it back in the fridge? She waited, the sweat seeping into her dress. Presently she switched on the fan.

  At last he came in wearing terylene slacks and a tee shirt of pale striped cotton, and he looked handsome if you admired men with ash-blond hair and freckles so dense that they looked like tan.

  ‘I thought you’d like melon,’ she said. ‘It’s canteloupe.’

  Suspiciously Patrick skimmed away the melting golden sugar.

  ‘Not honey, is it? You know I hate honey.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t.’ She paused timidly. ‘Darling,’ she said.

  He made his way silently through chicken salad, potato sticks, fruit salad (all good hygienic food from tins and packets and deep freezers), eating sparingly, absent-mindedly. The fan whirred and Queenie lay beneath it, paws spread, tongue extended.

  ‘I’ve got everything for the party,’ Tamsin said.

  ‘Party?’

  ‘Tomorrow. It’s my birthday. You hadn’t forgotten?’

  ‘No, it slipped my mind, that’s all.’

  Had it also slipped his mind to get a present?

  ‘There’s heaps to do,’ she said brightly. ‘The lights to put up, and we’ve got to move the furniture in the—’ Now it was more than ever important to pick the right word, ‘—the lounge in case it rains. And—Oh, Patrick, could you do something about the wasps? I’m sure there’s a nest somewhere.’ She remembered belatedly and reached for his hand. The fingers lay inert in hers, the big red swelling showing at the base of his thumb. ‘Too frightful for you. How’s it been today?’

  ‘The sting? Oh, all right. It’s going down.’

  ‘Could you possibly try to get rid of them? They’ll ruin the party.’

  He pushed away his plate and his half-finished glass of wine.

  ‘Not tonight. I’m going out.’

  She had begun to tremble and when she spoke her voice shook.

  ‘There’s so much to do. Please don’t go, darling. I need you.’

  Patrick laughed. She didn’t look at him but sat staring at her plate moving the viscous yellow juice about with her spoon.

  ‘I am going out. I have to take the dog, don’t I?’

  ‘I’ll take the dog.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said icily. ‘I can manage.’ He touched the venetian blind and glanced at the faint patina of dust on his fingertips. ‘If you’re bored there are things here which could do with some attention.’

  ‘Patrick.’ Her face had paled and there were goose pimples on her arms. ‘About what you said last night—you’ve got to change your mind. You’ve got to forget all about it.’ With a great effort she pushed three words from stiff lips: ‘I love you.’

  She might not have spoken. He walked into the kitchen and took the leash from the broom cupboard.

  ‘Queenie!’

  From deep sleep the Weimaraner galvanised into impassioned life. Patrick fastened the steel clip to her collar and led her out through the french windows.

  Tamsin sat among the ruins of her meal. Presently she began to cry silently, the tears splashing into the wine glass she held in her cupped hands. Her mouth was dry and she drank. I am drinking my own sorrow, she thought. Five minutes, ten minutes passed. Then she went to the front door and out into the willow avenue. The sky was clear, azure above, violet and apricot on the horizon, thronged with wheeling swallows.

  She stopped at the end of the drive and leaned on the gate. Patrick hadn’t gone far. She could see him standing with his back to her on The Green staring down at the waters of the pond. The dog had tried, unsuccessfully as always, to intimidate the three white swans. Now she had given up and was following a squirrel trail, pausing at the foot of each tree and peering up into the branches. Patrick was waiting for something, whiling away his time. For what?

  As she watched him, a pale green Ford swung into view from behind the elms. That funny little salesman fellow from the chalets, she thought, on his way to his evening class. She hoped he’d pass on with a wave but he didn’t. He stopped. Few men passed Tamsin Selby without a second glance.

  ‘Hot enough for you?’

  ‘I like it,’ Tamsin said. What was his name? Only on
e chalet dweller was known to her by name. ‘I love the sun.’

  ‘Ah well, it suits you. I can see that.’

  Conversation would have to be made. She opened the gate and went over to the car. He mistook her action and opened the door.

  ‘Can I give you a lift? I’m going to the village.’

  ‘No. No, thanks.’ Tamsin almost laughed. ‘I’m not going out. Just enjoying the evening.’

  His face fell.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, stalling, trying to keep her with him long enough for the neighbours to see him talking to the beautiful Mrs. Selby, ‘as a matter of fact I’m playing truant. Supposed to be doing a little job of exterminating pests.’

  ‘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.