To Fear a Painted Devil (18 page)

‘And that was all?’

‘That was all, or nearly all. I tipped the currants into a bowl and walked back with her, carrying the empty trug. All the way back she was utterly silent and at the gate I left her.’

‘Did you see anyone?’

‘No one. It was all so extraordinary, like a dream. But the most extraordinary thing was when I saw her the day after Patrick died, the next day. I didn’t want to go, Max, but I felt that I should. She was as cold as ice. Not miserable, you understand; the impression she gave was of happiness and freedom. She might never have come to see me the night before. Then, when she came back, I met her out with Queenie in Long Lane. She waved to me and said Hallo. I asked her how she was and she said fine. I’m selling up and leaving as soon as I can. It was as casual as if we’d never been more than acquaintances.’

‘Peculiar,’ Greenleaf said.

‘I don’t mind telling you,’ Marvell said with a smile, ‘it was a hell of a relief.’

13

T
wo days later Marvell began extracting honey. Greenleaf’s jar would be ready for him in the afternoon, he told the doctor, if he cared to come along and collect it. But at half-past three Greenleaf was still sitting in his deckchair under the shade of the cedar tree. Bernice had gone out and he was half-asleep. Each time he nodded off, snatches of dreams crept up on him, bright pictures rather than actual episodes. But they were not pleasant images and they mirrored a subconscious of which he had been unaware. Worst of all was the hideous cameo of Tamsin’s painting that spiralled and enlarged, twisted and distorted until the head on the plate became Patrick’s. He jolted out of sleep to a shrill insistent ringing. Consciousness, reality, came back as with the familiar feel of the canvas, the cool springy grass, he sought tranquillity. Almost in the past days he had found
peace of mind. Was it all there still below the surface, a whirlpool of fear and doubt and indecision? The ringing continued and he was suddenly aware that this was not a sound within his head, but the peal of a real bell, the telephone bell.

Reminding himself that he was supposed to be on call, he hastened into the morning room. It was Edward Carnaby.

‘I thought I wasn’t going to get you,’ he said reproachfully. ‘It’s my Cheryl, my daughter. A wasp got her on the lip, Doctor. Her and Freda, they were having a bit of a picnic on The Green and this wasp was on a piece of cake …’

‘Her lip?’ From Patrick, Greenleaf’s thoughts travelled back to the dead miner. ‘Not inside her mouth?’

‘Well, sort of. Inside her lip. She’s scared stiff. Mind you, Freda’s had something to do with that. They’re both sobbing their hearts out.’

‘All right, I’ll come.’

‘I thought we’d seen the last of those wasps,’ he said as he walked into the Carnaby lounge. Of course it was the only living room they had but it seemed strange to him to cover the entire centre of the carpet with what looked like a dismantled internal combustion engine spread on sheets of newspaper.

‘You’ll have to excuse the mess,’ Carnaby said, blackening his fingers in his haste to remove obstacles from the doctor’s path. ‘I borrowed it from the class. I can’t seem to …’

‘Never mind all that!’ Freda was on the sofa, squeezing the child in a vice-like hug against her fussy starched blouse. Greenleaf picked his way over to her, stepping gingerly across coils and wheels. He thought he had seldom seen anyone look so tense.
Her mouth was set as if she was grinding her teeth and the tears poured down her cheeks. ‘Tell me quickly, Doctor, is she going to die?’

Cheryl struggled and began to howl.

‘Of course she isn’t going to die.’ Greenleaf said roughly while Carnaby fumbled at his feet with bits of metal.

‘She is, she is! You’re just saying that. You’ll take her to the hospital and we’ll never see her again.’

He was surprised at so much emotion for she had never seemed to care for the child. Patrick’s death must have left a real wound into which a new-found maternal love might pour. Patrick, always back to Patrick … He looked quickly at Carnaby, wondering when the report would come from the analyst, before saying sharply to Freda:

‘If you can’t control yourself, Miss Carnaby, you’d better go outside.’

She gulped.

‘Let’s have a look at it, Cheryl.’ He prised Freda off her and gently eased the handkerchief from her mouth. The lower lip was bulging into a grotesque hillock and it reminded the doctor of pictures he had seen of duck-billed women. He wiped her eyes. ‘You’re going to have a funny face for a day or two.’

The child tried to smile. She edged away from her aunt and pushed tendrils of hair from her big characterful eyes, eyes that she must surely have inherited from her mother.

‘Mr. Selby had wasp stings,’ she said and darted a precocious glance at Freda ‘I heard Daddy talking about it when they got back from that party. I was awake. I never sleep when I have a sitter.’ Her lip wobbled. ‘It was that Mrs. Staxton. She said wasps
were ever so dangerous and she was scared of them, so Daddy said he’d got some stuff and she could take the tin. And she did, she took it home with her and a jolly good thing, because wasps
are
dangerous.’ Greenleaf sighed with silent relief. The analyst’s report could hardly matter now. Cheryl’s voice rose into fresh panic. ‘Mr. Selby
died
. Aunty Free said I might die.’

Greenleaf felt in his pocket for a sixpence.

‘There’s an ice-cream man by The Green,’ he said. ‘You’ll catch him if you hurry. You get a lolly.’ Carnaby looked at him, a foolish smile curling his mouth uneasily as if at some inconsequential joke. ‘It’ll be good for your lip.’

Freda watched her go with tragic eyes. She evidently thought Greenleaf had got rid of Cheryl in order to impart confidential information as to her probable fate. She looked affronted when he said instead:

‘Patrick Selby did not die of wasp stings. I thought you had more sense, Miss Carnaby. To talk of dying to a child of eight! What’s the matter with you?’

‘Everybody knows Patrick didn’t die of heart failure,’ she said stubbornly.

Greenleaf let it pass. Her bosom quivered. The fallen tears had left round transparent blotches on the thin blouse through which frilly fussy straps and bits of underclothes showed.

‘He must have died of the stings,’ she insisted, ‘and he only had four.’

‘Five, but it doesn’t matter. Cheryl …’

‘He didn’t. He only had four. I was sitting with him and I could see.’

Greenleaf said impatiently:

‘I should give that a rest, Miss Carnaby.’

Carnaby who had remained silent, ineffectually picking up things that might be ratchets or gaskets, suddenly said rather aggressively, ‘Well, it’s a matter of accuracy, isn’t it, Doctor? It so happens Selby had four stings. I was in the bathroom and I saw the wasps get him. Unless you’re counting the one he had a couple of days before.’

‘One on his face,’ Freda said, ‘two on his left arm and one inside his right arm. I thought Cheryl—well, it might have taken her the same way, mightn’t it?’ The sob that caught her throat came out ludicrously like a hiccup. ‘She’s all I’ve got now,’ she said. ‘Patrick—I could have given him children. He wanted children. I’ll never get married now, never, never!’

Carnaby hustled the doctor out into the hall, kicking the door shut behind him. Recalling what Bernice had said, Greenleaf wondered whether Freda’s renewed cries were caused by true grief or the possible damage to the paintwork. Then, as he stood, murmuring assurances to Carnaby, the penny dropped. Not the whole penny, but a fraction of it, a farthing perhaps.

‘She’ll be all right,’ he said mechanically. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’ The worry was all his now.

Then he went, almost running.

Back at Shalom his deck-chair awaited him. He sat down, conscious that on his way round The Circle he had passed Sheila Macdonald and Paul Gaveston without even a smile or a wave. They had been shadows compared with the reality of his thoughts. Before his eyes he could again see Patrick’s body in the bed at Hallows that Sunday morning, the thin freckled arms spread across the sheet, sleeves pushed
back for coolness. And on the yellowish mottled skin red swellings. One sting on the face, two on the left arm, one on the right arm in the cubital fossa—and a fifth. There
had
been a fifth, about six inches below. Not the old sting; that had been just a scar, a purplish lump with a scab where Patrick had scratched it. The Carnabys could be wrong. Both wrong? They couldn’t both be mistaken. Why should they lie? He, Greenleaf, hadn’t bothered to count the stings on the previous night and when he had visited Patrick in bed the blue cotton sleeves had covered both arms down to the wrists. Tamsin had been uninterested, the others embarrassed. But Carnaby had watched the wasps attack, he had been there in the line of fire, staring from the bathroom window, and Freda had sat at Patrick’s feet, holding his hand. Of all the guests at the party they were in the best position to know. But at the same time he knew he wasn’t wrong.
Five
stings, one on the face, two on the left arm …

‘Hot enough for you?’ It was a high-pitched irritating voice and Greenleaf didn’t have to look up to know it was Nancy Gage.

‘Hallo.’

‘Oh, don’t get up,’ she said as he began to rise. ‘I’ll excuse you. Much too hot to be polite. You men, I really pity you. Always having to bob up and down like jack-in-the-boxes.’

‘I’m afraid Bernice has taken the boys into Nottingham.’

‘Never mind. Actually I came to see you. Don’t get me a chair. I’ll sit on the grass.’ She did so quite gracefully, spreading her pink cotton skirts about her like an open parasol. The renewal of love, strained and contrived though that renewal might be, was
gradually restoring her beauty. It was as if she was a wilting pink and gold rose into whose leaves and stems nourishment was climbing by a slow capillary. ‘What I really came for was the name of that man who put up your summer house. We’re rather spreading our wings—I don’t know if Bernice told you—having an extension to our humble domain, and Mr. Glide—well, he is a bit steep, isn’t he?’

‘He’s in the phone book, Swan’s the name. J. B. Swan.’

‘Lovely. What a wonderful memory! What do you think? As I was coming across The Green I met that funny little Carnaby girl with an enormous lump in her lip. I asked her what it was and she said a wasp sting. She was sucking one of those filthy lollies. I ask you, the last thing! I said, now you run straight home to Mummy—I forgot she hasn’t got a Mummy, just an Auntie and what an Auntie!—and get her to put bicarbonate of soda on it.’

‘Not much use, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, you doctors and your anti-biotics. I’m a great believer in the old-fashioned remedies.’ She spoke with a middle-aged complacency and Greenleaf thought he knew exactly what she would be like in fifteen years’ time, stout, an encyclopaedia of outworn and inaccurate advice, the very prototype of an old wife spinning old wives’ tales. ‘If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a dozen times, Patrick would be alive today if Tamsin had only used bi-carb.’ As an after-thought she exclaimed in an advertising catch phrase, ‘and so reasonably priced!’

Momentarily Greenleaf closed his eyes. He opened them suddenly as she went on:

‘As soon as we got back from that ghastly party I
said to Oliver, you pop straight back to Hallows with some bi-carb. He hung it out a bit. Waiting for you to go, I’m afraid. Aren’t we crafty? Anyway, he trotted across with his little packet …’ It was an absurd description of the movement of that graceful, saturnine man, but Greenleaf was too interested to notice. ‘… but Tamsin must have gone to bed. She’d forgotten to lock the back door because he tried it, but that Queenie was shut up in the kitchen and she wouldn’t let him in. He went round the back and all the food was still out there and Tamsin had left her presents on the birthday table, the chocolates and that bag and Crispin’s flowers. She must have been terribly upset to leave it all like that. He hung about for five minutes and then he came home.’

‘I expect she was tired,’ Greenleaf said, his thoughts racing. So that was the answer to what he had been calling in his mind the Great White Packet Mystery. Simply Oliver Gage taking bi-carbonate of soda to his mistress’s husband. And probably, he thought vulgarly, hoping for a little more love on the side. No wonder he waited for me to go.