To Fear a Painted Devil (21 page)

‘What’s so funny?’

She no longer cared what he might think or say.

‘It’s mad, it’s ridiculous! He spent the night here, you know, the night Patrick died. He spent it with me. I was so scared when you made me sit on the bed in the back bedroom. I felt you must sense that—that I hadn’t been alone. Oh, Max, Max, don’t you see how crazy it is?’ He stared, his hurt suspicion melting, for he saw that she was laughing at herself. ‘I wanted to marry him for his money,’ she said, ‘and he wanted to marry me for mine, and the mad thing is we hadn’t either of us got a bean!’

16

S
he walked with him to the gate. He shook hands with her and impulsively—because he was ashamed of the thoughts he had harboured—kissed her cheek.

‘Can I go tomorrow? Will it be all right, Max?’ She spoke to him as if he
were
a policeman or a Home Office official. In denying the possibility of accidental death she had declared, if not in words, that Patrick had been murdered. But Greenleaf knew she hadn’t realised it yet. Sometime it would reach her, surfacing on to her mind through that rich, jumbled subconscious, and then perhaps it would register no more strongly than the memory of a sharp word or an unfriendly face. By then she might be driving away on the road that led—where? To another terse young company director who would be fascinated for a time
by witchlike innocence? Greenleaf wondered as he drew his lips from her powderless cheek.

‘Good-bye, Tamsin,’ he said.

When he came to the Linchester Manor gates he looked back and waved. She stood in the twilight, one hand upraised, the other on the dog’s neck. Then she turned, moving behind the willows, and he saw her no more.

H
e entered Marvell’s garden by way of the orchard gate. The bees were still active and he gave the hives a wide berth. It occurred to him that Marvell might still be out but if this were so he would wait—if necessary all night.

By now it was growing dark. A bat brushed his face and wheeled away. For a second he saw it silhouetted against the jade-coloured sky like a tiny pterodactyl. He came to the closed lattice and looked in. No lamps were lit but the china still showed dim gleams from the last of the light. At first he thought the room must be empty. The stillness about the whole place was uncanny. Nothing moved. Then he saw between the wing and the arm of a chair that had its back to the window a sliver of white sleeve and he knew Marvell must be sitting there.

He knocked at the back door. No footsteps, no sound of creaking or the movement of castors across the floor. The door wasn’t locked. He unlatched it, passed the honey-laden table and walked into the living room. Marvell wasn’t asleep. He lay back in his chair, his hands folded loosely in his lap, staring at the opposite wall. In the grate—the absurd pretty grate that shone like black silver—was a pile of
charred paper. Greenleaf knew without having to ask that Marvell had been burning his manuscript.

‘I came earlier,’ he said. ‘I had something to ask you. It doesn’t matter now.’

Marvell smiled, stretched and sat up.

‘I went to tell Glide he could have the land,’ he said. ‘You can take your honey, if you like. It’s ready.’

Greenleaf would never eat honey again as long as he lived. He began to feel sick, but not afraid, not at all afraid. His eyes met Marvell’s and because he couldn’t bear to look into the light blue ones, steady, mocking, unfathomably sad, he took off his glasses and began polishing them against his lapel.

‘You know, don’t you? Yes, I can see that you know.’

Hazily, myopically, Greenleaf felt for the chair and sat down on the edge of it. The wooden arms felt cold.

‘Why?’ he asked. His voice sounded terribly loud until he realised that they had been speaking in whispers. ‘Why, Crispin?’ And the Christian name, so long withheld, came naturally.

‘Money? Yes, of course, money. It’s the only real temptation, Max. Love, beauty, power, they are the obverse side of the coin that is money.’

From his dark corner Greenleaf said: ‘She wouldn’t have had any if Patrick had divorced her. That was the condition in the will.’ The man’s surprise was real but unlike Tamsin, he didn’t laugh. ‘You didn’t know?’

‘No, I didn’t know.’

‘Then …?’

‘I wanted more. Can’t you see, Max? That place, that glass palace.… With the money from that and his money and her money, what couldn’t I have done here?’ He spread his arms wide as if he would take
the whole room, the whole house in his embrace. ‘Tell me—I’m curious to know—what did she want from me?’

‘Money.’

He sighed.

‘I thought I would know love,’ he said. ‘But, of course, I do see. That kind of sale is a woman’s privilege. May I tell you about it?’

Greenleaf nodded.

‘Shall we have some light?’

‘I’d rather not,’ the doctor said.

‘Yes, I suppose you would feel that way. I think that like Alice I had better begin at the beginning, go on till I get to the end, and then stop.’

What sort of a man was this that could talk of children’s books on the edge of the abyss?

‘As you like.’

‘When Glide told me about the house I thought I had come to the end of my world. The bright day is done and we are for the dark.’ He paused for a moment and rubbed his eyes. ‘Max, I told you the truth and nothing but the truth, but I didn’t tell you the whole truth. You know that?’

‘You told me one lie.’

‘Just one. We’ll leave that for the moment. I said I’d begin at the beginning but I don’t know where the beginning was. Perhaps it was last year when Tamsin was helping me extract the honey. She said Patrick didn’t like it. He was afraid of bees and everything associated with them, but he’d only been stung once. That was when he was a little boy at their grandmother’s house. He’d been frightened by a picture of a girl holding a man’s head on a plate and he’d run into the conservatory. A bee stung him on his hand.’

‘Yes, she told me.’

‘Max, she didn’t know why the doctor had been sent for. She thought it was because Patrick was a spoiled brat She didn’t know why the doctor had given him an injection, had stayed for hours. But at the time I was reading a book about allergies. I was interested because of that damned hay fever. When she’d gone I looked up bee stings and I found why the doctor had stayed and what kind of an injection Patrick had had. He must have been allergic to bee stings. I didn’t say anything to Tamsin. I don’t know why not. Perhaps, even then … I don’t know, Max.’

‘Some people grow up out of allergies,’ Greenleaf said.

‘I know that too. But if it didn’t come off, who would know?’

‘It did come off.’

Marvell went on as if he hadn’t spoken.

‘It wasn’t premeditated. Or, if it was, the meditation only took a few minutes. It began with the picture. I don’t know this part—I’m only guessing—but I think that when Tamsin was offered the picture things were all right between her and Patrick, as right as they ever were. Of course she knew he’d hated it when he was a child but she thought he’d grown out of that.’

‘When it arrived,’ Greenleaf said slowly, ‘she must have been trying to patch things up between them. He might think she’d sent for it to annoy him, so she had it put in her room, a room he never went into.’

‘I saw it—and, Max, I told them about it in all innocence!’

‘Tamsin was past caring then.’

He must be kind, not a policeman, not an inquisitor.

‘Go on,’ he said gently.

‘It was only when Patrick reacted the way he did that I remembered the bee sting. The temptation, Max! I was sick with temptation. I don’t know how I got down those stairs.’

‘I remember,’ Greenleaf said. ‘I remember what you said. Something about the eye of childhood fearing a painted devil. I thought it was just another quotation.’

Marvell smiled a tight bitter smile.

‘It is. Macbeth. It doesn’t mean that in the text. It doesn’t mean that Macbeth was looking with a child’s memory, but only in a childish way. I suppose it was my subconscious that gave it that meaning. I knew that Patrick feared it because of what had happened when he
was
a child. Then the wasps got him. Even then I couldn’t see my opportunity. I wasn’t sure of Tamsin. I’d never made love to her. For all I knew I was just an old pedagogue to her, a domestic science teacher. At midnight she came into my orchard.’

‘But she wasn’t carrying that straw bag,’ Greenleaf said quickly. ‘It wasn’t at all her style. Besides, when Oliver Gage came round with the bi-carb Tamsin was out but the bag was on the birthday table.’

Marvell got up and, crossing to the window, opened the casement. ‘My one lie,’ he said. Greenleaf watched him drawing in great breaths of the dark blue air. ‘Will you be in a draught?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I felt—I felt suddenly as if I was going to faint.’ From shock? From fear? Greenleaf wondered with dismay if for months now Marvell hadn’t been getting
enough to eat. ‘I’ll close it now.’ He shifted with precise fingers the long wisps of Tradescantia. ‘I’d like the lamp. You don’t mind?’ When Greenleaf shook his head, he said urgently, ‘Darkness—darkness is a kind of poverty.’

When the lamp was lit Marvell put his hands round it. They had the opacity age brings and the thought came to Greenleaf that had his son’s hands covered that incandescence the light would have seeped through them as through red panes.

‘It all happened as I’ve told you,’ Marvell went on, ‘except that I didn’t say no to Tamsin. I told her I’d walk back with her but that I’d left my jacket in the orchard. I went down to the shed to get my gloves and my veil and a little box with a mesh lid. Someone had once sent it to me with a queen bee in it.

‘When we got to Hallows I went in with her. She’d told me you’d given Patrick a sedative and we both knew I was going to stay with her. We didn’t say it but we knew. She didn’t want to look at Patrick and she went to take a shower. While she was in the bathroom and I could hear the water running I went into Patrick’s room. I still wasn’t sure the sting wouldn’t wake him.

‘There was a big pincushion on the dressing-table. I took a pin and stuck it very lightly into him. He didn’t stir.’

Greenleaf felt a deathly cold creep upon him, a chill that culminated in a tremendous galvanic shudder.

‘Then I put the bee on his arm and I—I teased it, Max, till it stung him.’ He slid his hands down the lamp until they lay flat and fan-spread on the table. ‘I can’t tell you how I hated doing it. I know it’s sentimental,
but the bees were my friends. They’d worked for me faithfully and every year I took their honey away from them, all their treasure. They’d fed me—sometimes I didn’t have anything but bread and honey to eat for days on end. Now I was forcing one of them to kill itself for my sake. It plunged its sting into those disgusting freckles.… My God, Max, it was horrible to see it trying to fly and then keeling over. Horrible!’

Greenleaf started to speak. He checked himself and crouched in his chair. They were not on the same wavelength, a country G.P. and this naturalist who could kill a man and mourn the death of an insect.

Marvell smiled grimly. ‘I had to stay after that. I had to stay and see she didn’t go into that room. She hated Patrick but I don’t think she would have stood by and let him die.’ He stood up straight and in the half-dark he was young again. ‘I made love to Tamsin under the eyes of Herod’s niece.’ His shoulders bowed as if to receive age like a cloak. ‘At the time I thought it a pretty conceit. I should have remembered, Max, that they might both understand the desires of old men. I thought it was love.’

He sat on the table edge and swung his legs.

‘I left at four. She was asleep and Patrick was dead. I checked. The dog came upstairs and I shut her in with Tamsin.

‘Perhaps I was vain, Max, perhaps I thought I had a kind of
droit de seigneur
, perhaps I’m just old-fashioned. You see, I thought that still meant something to a woman, that she would have to marry me. When she made it plain she didn’t want me, I felt—My God! She’d wanted me before, but I’m fifty and she’s twenty-seven. I thought …’

‘Crispin, I
do
see.’ It was more horrible than Greenleaf had thought it could be. He hadn’t anticipated this grubbing into the roots of another man’s manhood. ‘Please don’t. I never wanted to …’