In the Frame Read Online Free PDF Page B

I made progress with both the paintings. The sad landscape was no longer sad but merely Octoberish, with three horses standing around in a field, one of them eating grass. Pictures of this sort, easy to live with and passably expert, were my bread and butter. They sold quite well, and I normally churned oneoff the production line every ten days or so, knowing that they were all technique and no soul.
    The portrait of Regina, though, was the best work I’d done for months. She laughed out of the canvas, alive and glowing, and to me at least seemed vividly herself. Pictures often changed as one worked on them, and day by day the emphasis in my mind had shifted, so that the kitchen background was growing darker and less distinct and Regina herself more luminous. One could still see she was cooking, but it was the girl who was important, not the act. In the end I had painted the kitchen, which was still there, as an impression, and the girl, who was not, as the reality.
    I hid that picture in my suitcase whenever I wasn’t working on it. I didn’t want Donald to come face to face with it unawares.
    Early Wednesday evening he came shakily down to the kitchen in his dressing-gown, trying to smile and pick up the pieces. He sat at the table, drinking the Scotch I had that day imported, and watching while I cleaned my brushes and tidied the palette.
    ‘You’re always so neat,’ he said.
    ‘Paint’s expensive.’
    He waved a limp hand at the horse picture which stood drying on the easel. ‘How much does it cost, to paint that?’
    ‘In raw materials, about ten quid. In heat, light, rates, rent, food, Scotch and general wear and tear on the nervous system, about the amount I’d earn in a week if I chucked it in and went back to selling houses.’
    ‘Quite a lot, then,’ he said seriously.
    I grinned. ‘I don’t regret it.’
    ‘No. I see that.’
    I finished the brushes by washing them in soap and water under the tap, pinching them into shape, andstanding them upright in ajar to dry. Good brushes were at least as costly as paint.
    ‘After the digging into the company accounts,’ Donald said abruptly, ‘they took me along to the police station and tried to prove that I had actually killed her myself.’
    ‘I don’t believe it!’
    ‘They’d worked out that I could have got home at lunch time and done it. They said there was time.’
    I picked up the Scotch from the table and poured a decent sized shot into a tumbler. Added ice.
    ‘They must be crazy,’ I said.
    ‘There was another man, besides Frost. A Superintendent. I think his name was Wall. A thin man, with fierce eyes. He never seemed to blink. Just stared and said over and over that I’d killed her because she’d come back and found me supervising the burglary.’
    ‘For God’s sake!’ I said disgustedly. ‘And anyway, she didn’t leave the flower shop until half past two.’
    ‘The girl in the flower shop now says she doesn’t know to the minute when Regina left. Only that it was soon after lunch. And I didn’t get back from the pub until nearly three. I went to lunch late. I was hung up with a client all morning…’ He stopped, gripping his tumbler as if it were a support to hold on to. ‘I can’t tell you… how awful it was.’
    The mild understatement seemed somehow to make things worse.
    ‘They said,’ he added, ‘that eighty per cent of murdered married women are killed by their husbands.’
    That statement had Frost stamped all over it.
    ‘They let me come home, in the end, but I don’t think…’ His voice shook. He swallowed, visibly trying to keep tight control on his hard-won calm. ‘I don’t think they’ve finished.’
    It was five days since he’d walked in and found Reginadead. When I thought of the mental hammerings he’d taken on top, the punishing assault on his emotional reserves, where common humanity would have suggested kindness and consoling help, it seemed marvellous that he had remained as sane as he