In the Frame Read Online Free PDF Page A

business. If my firm was that rocky, I’d wind it up. It would be mad not to.’
    I sucked my teeth. ‘I suppose Frost asked if the stolen things were insured for more than their worth?’
    ‘Yes, he did. Several times.’
    ‘Not likely you’d tell him, even if they were.’
    ‘They weren’t, though.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Under-insured, if anything.’ He sighed. ‘God knows if they’ll pay up for the Munnings. I’d only arranged the insurance by telephone. I hadn’t actually sent the premium.’
    ‘It should be all right, if you can give them proof of purchase, and so on.’
    He shook his head listlessly. ‘All the papers to do with it were in the desk in the hall. The receipt from the gallery where I bought it, the letter of provenance, and the customs and excise receipt. All gone.’
    ‘Frost won’t like that.’
    ‘He doesn’t.’
    ‘Well… I hope you pointed out that you would hardly be buying expensive pictures and going on world trips if you were down to your last farthing.’
    ‘He said it might be
because
of buying expensive pictures and going on world trips that I might be down to my last farthing.’
    Frost had built a brick wall of suspicion for Donald to batter his head against. My cousin needed hauling away before he was punch drunk.
    ‘Have some spaghetti,’ I said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘It’s about all I can cook.’
    ‘Oh…’ He focused unclearly on the kitchen clock.It was half past four and long past feeding time according to my stomach.
    ‘If you like,’ he said.
    The police sent a car the following morning to fetch him to his ordeal in the office. He went lifelessly, having more or less made it clear over coffee that he wouldn’t defend himself.
    ‘Don, you must,’ I said. ‘The only way to deal with the situation is to be firm and reasonable, and decisive, and accurate. In fact, just your own self.’
    He smiled faintly. ‘You’d better go instead of me. I haven’t the energy. And what does it matter?’ His smile broke suddenly and the ravaging misery showed deeply like black water under cracked ice. ‘Without Regina… there’s no point making money.’
    ‘We’re not talking about making money, we’re talking about suspicion. If you don’t defend yourself, they’ll assume you can’t.’
    ‘I’m too tired. I can’t be bothered. They can think what they like.’
    ‘Don,’ I said seriously, ‘They’ll think what you let them.’
    ‘I don’t really care,’ he said dully: and that was the trouble. He really didn’t.
    He was gone all day. I spent it painting.
    Not the sad landscape. The sunroom seemed even greyer and colder that morning, and I had no mind any more to sink into melancholy. I left the half-finished canvas on the table there and removed myself and trappings to the source of warmth. Maybe the light wasn’t so good in the kitchen, but it was the only room in the house with the pulse of life.
    I painted Regina standing beside her cooker, with a wooden spoon in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. I painted the way she held her head back to smile,and I painted the smile, shiny-eyed and guileless and unmistakably happy. I painted the kitchen behind her as I literally saw it in front of my eyes, and I painted Regina herself from the clearest of inner visions. So easily did I see her that I looked up once or twice from her face on the canvas to say something to her, and was disconcerted to find only empty space. An extraordinary feeling of the real and unreal disturbingly tangled.
    I seldom ever worked for more than four hours at a stretch because for one thing the actual muscular control required was tiring, and for another the concentration always made me cold and hungry; so I knocked off at around lunch-time and dug out a tin of corned beef to eat with pickles on toast, and after that went for a walk, dodging the front-gate watchers by taking to the apple trees and wriggling through the hedge.
    I tramped aimlessly for a while round the scattered