To Fear a Painted Devil (17 page)

Trying not to smile at the ludicrous phrase, Bernice found herself saying once more that it was lovely.

‘He’s been as nice as pie about it and he’s all over me. He hasn’t been so lovey-dovey for months. Aren’t men the end?’

I really ought to thank Tamsin properly for the clothes, Bernice thought after they had both gone. But she felt reluctant to go. Hardly anyone had set eyes on Tamsin since her return. She had become like a sleeping beauty shut up in her glass castle, or like a lurking witch. Bernice couldn’t make up her mind whether Tamsin was really bad or whether the
gossip had created in her own fancy an unreal Tamsin, a false clever poisoner. Anyway, she must go and be polite.

As she hurried across The Green she encountered Peter sitting on his barrow.

‘I went to collect my shilling,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t find
her
.’ He picked up a flat stone and concentrated on sending it skimming across the water. ‘The dog’s there, though.’

He threw this piece of information out quite casually but Bernice remembered what Max had told her and detected a current of fear.

‘I’m on my way over now,’ she said. ‘Come with me if you like.’

Queenie was indeed there so Tamsin must be too. As she put out her hand to the dog’s soft mouth Bernice had a strange feeling that something ought to click. When Tamsin went out without the dog she always shut her in the kitchen. The Weimaraner had been bred as a sentinel as well as a hunter. What was it Max said last night about Tamsin visiting Crispin Marvell? She stopped and pondered. Tamsin’s voice from above broke into her reverie.

‘Come on in. I was in the bath.’

Peter slunk past the dog.

‘Go into the dining room. I won’t be a minute.’

Bernice pushed open the double doors and Peter went in first. The dining room door was ajar. Peter went obediently ahead but Bernice waited in the hall. The last thing she wanted was to stay and talk.

She expected Peter to sit down and wait for his wages but he didn’t. He stopped and stared at something. She could see nothing inside the room but the child’s figure in profile, still as a statue. Then he
came out of the room again, backing from whatever it was like someone leaving the presence of royalty. He looked at her and she saw that his face was white but stoical.

‘Ughugh,’ he said.

At once she knew what he had seen. Surely nothing else Tamsin possessed could summon that squeamish pallor even in a child of ten. She closed the door firmly and turned round. A gasp escaped her before she could control it. Tamsin was behind her, awfully near, clean and gleaming as a wax doll in her pink and white dressing gown. Suddenly Bernice felt terribly frightened. Tamsin had come so silently, the child was silent and now all the doors were closed.

‘What’s the matter with him?’

If he had been her own child Bernice would have put her arms around him and pressed his grubby cheek against her face. But she could give him no physical comfort. He was too old to hug and too young for explanations.

She felt her voice quiver and jerk as she said, ‘I think he saw that picture of yours.’

‘Too uncanny,’ said Tamsin. She looked at Peter as if she were seeing not him but another child staring out through his eyes. ‘Patrick was just about your age when he first saw it, but he wasn’t tough like you. He ran away and then
it
happened. The fuss and bother—you can’t imagine.’

Bernice was just going to ask what had happened when Peter said sullenly, ‘Can I have my shilling?’

‘Oh, of course you can. It’s there, all ready for you on the table.’

The moment of revelation had passed. Tamsin evidently
thought Bernice had come to give Peter moral support, for she opened the door to show them both out.

‘I only came to thank you for the things.’

‘So glad they’re useful. And now I must chase you both away. I’ve got people coming to look over the house.’

E
dith was the first person on Linchester to find out that Hallows was sold and she got it from the gardener the Gavestons shared with Tamsin. As soon as he had told her, over mid-morning tea in the utility room, she slipped out to pass the news on to Mrs. Glide. Henry, after all, ought to be pleased that his handiwork found favour in the sight of buyers. On her way back she met Marvell returning from the shops with his sparse groceries in a string bag.

‘Only yesterday, it was,’ she said, ‘and they made an offer on the spot. These
nouveaux riches
they buy and sell houses like you or Paul might job in and out on the stock market.’

Marvell pursed his lips gravely.

‘Now when we were young a house
was
a house. One’s grandfather had lived in it and in the fulness of time one’s grandson would live in it too.’ She ended with sublime insensitivity, ‘It was
there
, like the Rock of Ages.’

He smiled, murmured something, his mind working furiously. So Tamsin was leaving soon, escaping … When Edith had left him he walked slowly across The Green towards Shalom. He tried the front door and the back. Both were locked. The Greenleafs
were townspeople, fearful of burglars, cautious people who yet declared their absence with fastened bolts and conspicuously closed windows. Marvell scribbled a note on the grocer’s chit and left it on the back doorstep weighted down with a stone.

Greenleaf found it when he came in at one.

‘Can you drop in this afternoon?’ he read. ‘I’ve something to tell you. C.M.’

He suppressed a sigh. Tamsin would soon be gone and with her departure surely the rumours would cease. In a fortnights’ time he would be off on holiday and when he came back Nancy would be too preoccupied with plans for the baby, Freda too tranquilised by drugs to bother about the vanished Selbys. And yet, he thought as he began to eat the cold lunch Bernice had left him, Marvell might want him for something quite different. In the past he had often been summoned to have an emergency injection of piriton when Marvell was almost numbed and blinded by hay fever. Without a telephone, Marvell was obliged to call or leave a note. It was even possible that he wanted to show the doctor his manuscript, perhaps finished at last ‘I’ve something to tell you …’ Patrick. He could only mean Patrick. Probably another undetectable poison theory. Well, it was a way of passing his free afternoon.

As he washed his plate and stuck it in the rack to drain, he thought with the small grain of superiority he allowed himself, that when people spoke of the rewards of a medical vocation they ignored this one: the pleasure of shooting the layman’s theories down in flames.

O
n the wooden bench by the back door Marvell sat reading a recipe for ratafia. It was an old recipe, part of a collection his mother had made while still chatelaine of Linchester, and it had been handed down to her, mother to daughter, from a long line of forebears. Brandy, peach kernels, sugar, honey, orange flower water … He had no peaches, or the money to buy them. The recipe said five hundred kernels and, basking in the warm soft sunlight, he imagined with some delight the preliminary labour to the making of ratafia: the consumption of those five hundred ripe peaches.

Presently he got up and began to walk around the house, touching the bricks, themselves peach-coloured. When he came to the side wall where Henry Glide had discovered the fissure, the terrible sign that the whole building was beginning to subside, he closed his eyes and saw only a red mist filled with whirling objects. Then, because he refused to deny facts and deceive himself, he forced his fingers to seek the crack as a man, fearful of cancer yet resolute, compels his hand to probe the swelling in his body.

He jumped when Greenleaf coughed behind him.

‘Penny for your thoughts.’

‘They’re worth more than that,’ Marvell said lightly. ‘To be precise a thousand pounds.’

Greenleaf looked at him inquiringly.

‘That,’ said Marvell, ‘is the price Glide is prepared to pay me for this land.’

‘You’re selling? But this place—I thought you were
so fond of it.’ Greenleaf described with splayed fingers a wide arc that embraced the squat yet elegant house, the shaven lawn, the orchard and the hawthorn hedge over which honeysuckle climbed, a parasite more lovely than its prey. All this meant little to the doctor but by a terrific effort of empathy he had learned its value to his friend. Even he who could scarcely tell a lily from a rose, felt that here the air smelled more sweetly and the sun’s heat was moderated to a mellow beneficence. ‘The house. It’s so old. It’s quaint.’ He added helplessly, ‘People like that sort of thing. They’d want to buy it.’

Marvell shook his head. He was still holding the recipe book and slowly the thought formed in his mind: I will make some ratafia, just a very small quantity, to take away and to remind me.…

Aloud he said to Greenleaf: ‘It’s falling down. The council says it’s not safe to live in. I’ve had Glide here to look at it and all he said was he’d give me a thousand for the land.’

‘How long have you known?’

‘Oh, about a month now. A thousand’s good going, you know. When the Marvells had Andreas Quercus—he was really called Andrew Oakes or something—when they had him build this place for four old persons of the parish of Chantflower, they didn’t care that you could only get to it down a muddy lane and the old persons were too grateful to care.’

With what he felt to be tremendous inadequacy, Greenleaf said: ‘I’m sorry. Where will you live?’ So many questions leapt to his mind, Have you any money? What will you live on? He couldn’t dream of asking them. The proximity of Linchester made poverty a more than usually shameful thing.

‘I suppose I can get a room somewhere. I can teach. I shall have my thousand pounds. You’d be surprised what a long time I can live on a thousand pounds.’ He laughed dryly and Greenleaf, seeing him in the light of this new knowledge, noticed how gaunt he was. This, then, was why Marvell had sent for him, to unburden his soul. I wonder, he thought, if I could rake up a bit, just to tide him over and have the place made water-tight. But Marvell’s next words temporarily banished all thoughts of a loan.

‘I saw Edith this morning,’ he said, ‘as I was coming back from the village. She said Tamsin had sold the house. Some people came and made her an offer.’

‘Then she’ll soon be gone,’ said Greenleaf, relieved.

‘And since perhaps neither of us will ever see her again I think I can tell you why she came to see me on the night Patrick died.’

H
e could see her now as she had come up through the orchard, swinging her basket, all pale in the moonlight with her mist-coloured dress, and paler still when she came within the radiance of his lamp. To his fanciful imagination the currants had seemed like beads of white jade veined with crimson. For all her affected speech, the superlatives that came from her lips so often that they lost their meaning and their force, her face had always been a mask, a shield deliberately maintained to hide intellectual cunning or perhaps a chance trick of nature concealing only vacuity.

‘I think she is really very clever,’ he said to Greenleaf.

He had put his head out of the window and called
to her, then gone into the garden and asked after Patrick.

‘Oh, Patrick—he spoiled my lovely party. Maddening creature.’

‘You shouldn’t have come all this way alone. I would have come up tomorrow.’

‘Crispin darling, how should I know what you do here in your enchanted cottage? You might have wanted to make your wine tonight at some special witching hour.’

‘I’ll walk back with you.’

But she had unlatched the door already and pulled him after her into the little damp kitchen. The scent of the night came in with her and as for a moment she stood beside him, very close with her face uplifted, he could smell the rich perfume she wore, Nuit de Beltane, exotic, alien to an English garden. This essence with its hint of witchcraft enhanced the atmosphere of magic unreality.

‘So we sat down,’ he said, shaking his shoulders as if to shed a memory. ‘We sat a long way from each other but the lamp was between us and you know what oil lamps are. They seem to enclose you in a little snug circle. For a while we talked the usual trivia. Then, quite suddenly, she began to talk about us.’

‘You and herself?’

‘Yes. She said what a lot we had in common, how we both loved country things. She said there had always been a kind of bond between us. Max, I felt very uneasy.’

‘And then?’

‘I want you to understand how curiously intimate the whole situation was, the darkness around us, the
circle of light. After a while she got up and sat beside me on the footstool. She took my hand and said she supposed I realised she hadn’t been happy with Patrick for a long time. She’s got one of those thick skins that can’t blush, but I felt the blush was there.’

‘Everyone can blush,’ said the doctor.

‘Well, be that as it may, she went on to tell me she knew why I came to the house so often. I didn’t say a word. It was horribly awkward. She kept hold of my hand and she said she’d only realised how I felt when I brought her the mead and roses. Max, believe me, they were just presents for a pretty woman from a man who can’t afford scent or jewellery.’

‘I believe you.’

‘Suddenly she said very abruptly: “Patrick’s leaving me. He wants a divorce. In a year I’ll be free, Crispin.” It was a blunt proposal of marriage.’ Marvell went on quickly: ‘I don’t want marriage. For one thing I can’t afford it. Everybody thinks I’m comfortably off, but the fact is most of the money my father got for Linchester went in death duties. What was left was divided between my brother, my sister and myself and my share went on buying the almshouses. The family had sold them long ago. But I couldn’t tell Tamsin all that. I felt she might offer me her own money.’

‘That mysterious private income,’ Greenleaf said.

‘Not mysterious. It amounts to about fifty thousand pounds—the capital, that is—but Tamsin can’t touch that. It’s invested in oil or something and she has the income for life. I believe it would pass to her children, if she ever had any children. So, you see, I couldn’t talk about money to her. Instead I said I was too old for her. I’m fifty, Max. She has a lot of natural dignity,
but I thought she was going to cry. I don’t mind telling you, it was the most embarrassing experience of my life. I suppose I was weak. I said quite truthfully that she was the most beautiful and most exciting woman I knew. Then I said, “Wait till the year is up. I’ll come and see if you’ve changed your mind.” But she only laughed. She got up and stood outside the lamplight and said quite coolly, “Patrick will probably name Oliver Gage. I’ve been having an affair with him. Did you know?” I realised she was telling me I’d be taking Gage’s leavings.’