To Fear a Painted Devil Read Online Free PDF Page A

entered Linchester for the second time that night it was by the Manor gates and he drove into his own garage drive with a sense of disgruntled virtueand the shame he always felt when he returned to his house. Oliver lived in one of the largest houses on Linchester but it was too small for him. He hated it already. Every Friday night when he came up from his four days in London the sight of the house, magnified perhaps in his mind during his absence, sickened him and reminded him afresh of his misfortunes. For, as Oliver grew older, the sizes of his houses diminished. This was not due to a reversal in his financial life. One of the executives of a national daily, his income now topped the seven thousand mark, but only about a third of this found its way into Oliver’s pocket. The rest, never seen by him yet never forgotten, streamed away via an army of solicitors and bank managers and accountants into the laps of his two discarded wives.
    When he had married Nancy—pretty, witty Nancy!—and built this, the smallest of his houses to date, he had forgotten for a few months the other pressures on his income. Was not love a Hercules, still climbing trees in the Hesperides? Now, a year later, he reflected that the gods were just and of his pleasant vices had made instruments to plague him.
    He unlocked the door and dropped his keys on to the hall table between the Flamenco doll and the Cherry Herring bottle that Nancy by the addition of a shade stuck all over with hotel labels had converted into a lamp. In all his matrimonial career Oliver had never before given houseroom to such an object. He hated it but he felt that, in ensuring it was the first thing his eye fell on when he entered his home, providence was meting out to him a stern exquisite justice.
    Nancy’s sewing machine could be heard faintlyfrom the lounge. The querulous whine of the motor fanned his ill-temper into rage. He pushed open the reeded glass door and went in. The room was tightly sealed and stifling, the windows all closed and the curtains drawn back in the way he loathed, carelessly, with no attention to the proper arrangement of their folds. Those curtains had cost him thirty pounds.
    His wife—to himself and to one other Oliver occasionally referred to her as his present wife—lifted her foot from the pedal which controlled the motor and pushed damp hair back from a face on which sweat shone. Shreds of cotton and pieces of coloured fluff clung to her dress and littered the floor. There was even a piece of cotton dangling from her bracelet.
    ‘My Christ, it’s like an oven in here!’ Oliver flung back the french windows and scowled at Bernice Greenleaf who was walking coolly about the garden next-door, snipping the dead blossoms off an opulent Zephirine Drouhin. When she waved to him he changed the scowl into a rigid smirk. ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ he asked his wife.
    She pulled a cobbled strip of black and red silk from under the needle. ‘I’m making a dress for Tamsin’s party.’
    Oliver sat down heavily, catching his foot in one of the Numdah rugs. (‘If we have wood block flooring and rugs, darling,’ Nancy had said, ‘we’ll save pounds on carpeting.’)
    ‘This I cannot understand,’ Oliver said. ‘Did I or did I not give you a cheque for twenty pounds last Tuesday with express instructions to buy yourself a dress?’
    ‘Well …’
    ‘Did I or did I not? That’s all I ask. It’s a perfectly simple question.’
    Nancy’s babyish,
gamine
face puckered. A curly face, he had called it once, tenderly, lovingly, touching with a teasing finger the tip-tilted nose, the bunchy cheeks, the fluffy fair eyebrows.
    ‘Well, darling, I had to have shoes, you see, and stockings. And there was the milk bill …’ Her voice faltered. ‘I saw this remnant and this pattern …’ She held an envelope towards him diffidently. Oliver glowered at the coloured picture of the improbably tall women in cylindrical cotton frocks.