To Fear a Painted Devil (7 page)

There’s no need to get into a tiz. She said I could bring a friend. I don’t know about Cheryl, though.’

‘Mrs. Saxton’ll sit,’ Freda said eagerly. ‘She’s always offering.’ Seeing his face still doubtful, his eyes already returning to the French primer, she burst out miserably, Ted, I want to go to the party! I’ve got a right. I’ve got more right than you.’

Hysteria in Freda was something new. He closed the book.

‘What are you talking about?’ She was his twin and he could feel the pull of her mind, almost read her thoughts. A terrible unease visited him and he thought of the previous night, the woman’s eyes staring past him towards the pond, her sudden unexplained coldness when he had said who he was.

‘Freda!’

It all came out then and Edward listened, angry and afraid. The happy mood had gone sour on him.

5

S
trings of little coloured bulbs festooned the willow trees. As soon as it grew dusk they would be switched on to glow red, orange, green and cold blue against the dark foliage of the oaks in the Millers’ garden next door.

Tamsin had shut the food and drink in the dining room away from the wasps. Although she had only seen two throughout the whole day she closed the double windows to be on the safe side. The room was tidy, and apart from the food, bare. Functional, Patrick called it. Now, cleaned by him while Tamsin hovered helplessly in the background, it met even his exacting requirements.

‘It is, after all, a
dining
room, not a glory hole,’ he had remarked in a chill voice to the vacuum cleaner. To his wife be said nothing, but his look meant Please don’t interfere with my arrangements. When the tools
were put away and the dusters carefully washed, he had taken the dog to Sherwood Forest, smug, silent with his private joy.

It was too late not to bother with a show of loving obedience. Tamsin dressed, wishing she had something bright and gay, but all her clothes were subdued—to please Patrick. Then she went into the dining room and helped herself to whisky, pouring straight into a tumbler almost as if it was the last drink she would ever have. Nobody had wished her a happy birthday yet but she had had plenty of cards. Defiantly she took them from the sideboard drawer and arranged them on top of the radiator. There were about a dozen of them, facetious ones showing dishevelled housewives amid piles of crocks; conventional ones (a family of Dartmoor ponies); one whose picture had a secret significance, whose message meant something special to her and to its sender. It was unsigned but Tamsin knew who had sent it. She screwed it up quickly for the sight of it with its cool presumption only deepened her misery.

‘Many happy returns of the day, Tamsin,’ she said shakily, raising her glass. She sighed and the cards fluttered. Somehow she would have liked to break the glass, hurl it absurdly against Patrick’s white wall, because she had come to an end. A new life was beginning. The drink was a symbol of the old life and so was the dress she wore, silver-grey, clinging, expensive. She put the glass down carefully (her old habits died hard), looked at the cards and blinked to stop herself crying. For there should have been one more, bigger than the others, an austere costly card that said To My Wife.

Patrick was never late. He came back on the dot of
seven in time to bath and shave and leave the bathroom tidy, and by then she had washed her glass, returning it to its place in the sideboard. She heard the bathroom door close and the key turn in the lock. Patrick was careful about propriety.

Tamsin remained in the dining room for some minutes, feeling an almost suicidal despair. In an hour or so her guests would begin to arrive and they would expect her to be gay because she was young and rich and beautiful and because it was her birthday. If she could get out of the house for a few minutes she might feel better. With Queenie at her heels she took her trug and went down to where the currants grew in what had been the Manor kitchen gardens. The dog lay down in the sun and Tamsin began stripping the bushes of their ripe white fruit.

‘I will try to be gay,’ she said to herself, or perhaps to the dog, ‘for a little while.’

Edward and Freda came up to the front doors of Hallows at a quarter to eight and it was Edward who rang the bell. Freda, whose only reading matter was her weekly women’s magazine, had sometimes encountered the cliché ‘rooted to the spot’ and that was how she felt standing on the swept white stones, immobile, stiff with terror, a sick bile stirring between her stomach and her throat.

No one came to the door. Freda watched her brother enviously. Not for him the problem of what to do with one’s sticky and suddenly over-large hands that twitched and fretted as if seeking some resting place; he had the Vesprid in its brown paper bag to hold.

‘Better go round the back,’ he said truculently.

It was monastically quiet. The creak of the
wrought iron gate made Freda jump as Edward pushed it open. They walked round the side of the house and stopped when they came to the patio. The garden lay before them, waiting, expectant, but not as for a party. It was rather as if it had been prepared for the arrival of some photographer whose carefully angled shots would provide pictures for one of those very magazines. Freda had read a feature the previous week,
Ideal Homesteads in the New Britain
, and the illustrations had shown just such a garden, lawns ribbed in pale and dark green where the mower had crossed them, trees and shrubs whose leaves looked as if they had been individually dusted. At the other end of the patio someone had arranged tables and chairs, some of straw-coloured wicker, others of white-painted twisted metal. A small spark of pleasure and admiration broke across Freda’s fear, only to be extinguished almost at once by the sound of water gurgling down a drainpipe behind her ankles. A sign of life, of habitation.

The garden, the house, looked, she thought, as if it hadn’t been kept outside at all, as if it had been preserved up to this moment under glass. But she was unable to express this thought in words and instead said foolishly:

There isn’t anybody about. You must have got the wrong night.’

He scowled and she wondered again why he had come, what he was going to say or do. Was it simply kindness to her—for he was, as it were, her key to this house—Tamsin’s fascination or something more?

‘You won’t say anything, will you? You won’t say anything to show me up?’

‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I want to see how the land lies,
what sort of a mess you’ve got yourself into. I’m not promising anything, Free.’

Minutes passed, unchanging minutes in which the sleek garden swam before her eyes. Then something happened, something which caused the first crack to appear in Edward’s insecure courage.

From behind the willows came a sound familiar to Freda, a long drawn-out bay. Queenie. Edward jerked convulsively and dropped the Vesprid with a clang—a clang like the crack of doom as the dog bounded from a curtain of shrubs and stopped a yard from him. It was an ominous sound that came from her, a throb rather than an actual noise, and Edward seemed to grow smaller. He picked up the tin and held it in front of him, a ridiculous and wholly inadequate shield.

‘Oh, Queenie!’ Freda put out her hand. ‘It’s all right. It’s me.’

The dog advanced, wriggling now, to lick the outstretched fingers, when the gate opened and a tall fair man entered the garden. He was wearing a green shirt over slacks and Edward at once felt that his own sports jacket (Harris tweed knocked down to eighty nine and eleven) was unsuitable, an anachronism.

‘How do you do?’

He was carrying something that looked like a bottle wrapped in ancient yellowing newspaper, and a huge bunch of roses. The roses were perfect, each bud closed yet about to unfurl, and their stems had been shorn of thorns.

‘I don’t think we’ve met. My name’s Marvell.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Edward said. He transferred the Vesprid to his left arm and shook hands. ‘This is my sister, Miss Carnaby.’

‘Where is everyone?’

‘We don’t know,’ Freda said sullenly. Till you came we thought we’d got the wrong night.’

‘Oh, no, this is Tamsin’s birthday.’ He pushed Queenie down, smiled suddenly and waved. ‘There she is picking my currants, bless her! Will you excuse me?’

‘Well!’ Freda said. ‘If those are county manners you can keep them.’

She watched him stride off down the path and then she saw Patrick’s wife. Tamsin got to her feet like a silvery dryad arising from her natural habitat, ran up to Marvell and kissed him on the cheek. They came back together, Tamsin’s face buried in roses.

‘Josephine Bruce, that’s the gorgeous dark red one,’ Freda heard her say. ‘Virgo, snow-white; Super Star—Oh, lovely, lovely, vermilion! And the big peachy beauty—this one—is Peace. You see, Crispin, I
am
learning.’

She stepped on the greyish-gold stone of the patio and dropped the roses on to a wicker table. The Weimaraner romped over to her and placed her paws on the table’s plaited rim.

‘And look, lovely mead! You are sweet to me, Crispin.’

‘You look like one of those plushy calendars,’ Marvell said laughing. ‘The respectable kind you see in garages on the Motorway. All girl and dog and flowers and liquor, the good things of life.’

‘
Wein, Weib und Gesang
, as Patrick says.’ Tamsin’s voice was low and her face clouded.

Edward coughed.

‘Excuse me,’ he said.

‘O God, I’m so sorry.’ Marvell was crestfallen. ‘Tamsin dear, I’m keeping you from your guests.’

Afterwards, looking back, Freda thought Tamsin honestly hadn’t known who they were. And after all Edward’s stupid airs! Tamsin’s face had grown dull and almost ugly; her eyes, large and tawny, seemed to blank out. She stood looking at them still holding a rose against her paintless lips. At last she said:

‘I know! The man who goes to evening class.’

Freda wanted to go then, to slink back against the stone wall, slither between the house and the wattle fence and then run and run until she came to the chalets behind the elms. But Edward was holding her arm. He yanked her forward, exposing her to their gaze like a dealer with his single slave.

‘This is my sister. You said I could bring someone.’

Tamsin’s face hardened. It was exactly like one of those African art masks, Freda thought, the beautiful goddess one in the saloon bar of that roadhouse on the Southwell road. Freda knew she wasn’t going to shake hands.

‘Well, now you’re here you must have a drink. Masses of drink in the dining room. Where’s Patrick?’ She looked up to the open windows on the first floor. ‘Patrick!’

Edward thrust the Vesprid at her.

‘A present? How very sweet of you.’

She pulled the tin out of the bag and giggled. Freda thought she was hysterical—or drunk.

‘It’s not exactly a present,’ Edward said desperately. ‘You said to bring it. You said to come early. We could do the wasps.’

‘The wasps? Oh, but I’ve only seen one or two today. We won’t worry about wasps.’ She flung back the doors and Patrick must have been standing just within. He stepped out poised, smiling, smelling of
bath salts. ‘Here’s my husband. Do go and check the lights, darling.’ And she linked her arm into his, smiling brightly.

Freda could feel herself beginning to tremble. She knew her face had paled, then filled with burning blood. Her hand fumbled its way into Patrick’s, gaining life and strength as she felt the faint special pressure and the familiar cold touch of his ring. As it came to Edward’s turn her heart knocked, but the handshake passed off conventionally. Edward’s spirit was broken and he gazed at Patrick dumbly, half-hypnotised.

‘What’s this?’

Patrick picked up the Vesprid and looked at the label.

Freda couldn’t help admiring his aplomb, the coldly masterful way he shook off Tamsin’s hand.

‘Doesn’t it look horrible on my birthday table?’ Tamsin bundled the tin back into the paper and pushed it into Edward’s arms. She took his fingers in her own and curled them round the parcel. There. You look after it, sweetie, or pop it in a safe place. We don’t want it mingling with the drinks, do we?’