To Fear a Painted Devil Read Online Free PDF

‘It’ll be all right, won’t it?’
    ‘It will be quite ghastly,’ Oliver said coldly. ‘I shall be covered with shame. I shall be mortified. Tamsin always looks wonderful.’
    As soon as the words were out he regretted them. Now was not the time. Nancy was going to cry. Her face swelled as if the skin itself was allergic to his anger.
    ‘Tamsin has a private income.’ The tears sprouted. ‘I only wanted to save you money. That’s all I think about, saving you money!’
    ‘Oh, don’t cry! I’m sorry, Nancy!’ She almost fell from her chair into his lap and he put his arms round her with the distaste that was part of his marital experience, the distaste that always came as love ebbed. Every bit of her was damp and clinging and unbearably hot.
    ‘I do want to economise, darling. I keep thinking of all that money going out month after month to Jean and Shirley. And what with both the boys at Bembridge …’ Oliver frowned. He disliked the reminder that he had been unable to afford to send the sons of his first marriage to Marlborough. ‘And Shirley alwaysso greedy, insisting on sending Jennifer to a private school when state education is so good these days.’
    ‘You know nothing at all about state education,’ Oliver said.
    ‘Oh, darling, why did you have to marry such unattractive women? Any other women would have got married again. Two such disastrous—well, tragic marriages. I lie awake at night thinking about the inroads on our income.’
    She was off on a well-worn track, the Friday night special. Oliver let her talk, reaching to the mantelpiece for a cigarette from the box.
    ‘And I haven’t got anything exciting for your dinner,’ she finished on a note of near-triumph.
    ‘We’ll go out to eat, then.’
    ‘You know we can’t afford it. Besides I’ve got to finish this filthy dress.’ She struggled from his lap back to the sewing machine.
    ‘This,’ said Oliver, ‘is the end.’ Nancy, already involved once more in fitting a huge sleeve into a tiny armhole, ignored him. She was not to know that it was with these words that Oliver had terminated each of his previous marriages. For him, too, they sounded dreadfully like the mere echoes of happy finalities. Must Nancy be his till death parted them? More securely than any devout Catholic, any puritan idealist, he had thought himself until recently, bound to his wife. Hercules had climbed his last tree. Unless—unless things would work out and he could get a wife with money of her own, a beautiful, well-dowered wife …
    He stepped across the rugs, those small and far from luxuriant oases in the big desert of polished floor, and poured himself a carefully-measured drink.Then he sat down and gazed at their reflections, his and Nancy’s, in the glass on the opposite wall. Her remarks as to the unattractiveness of his former wives had seemed to denigrate his own taste and perhaps even his own personal appearance. But now, as he looked at himself, he felt their injustice. Anyone coming in, any stranger would, he thought bitterly, have taken Nancy for the cleaning woman doing a bit of overtime sewing, her hair separated into rough hanks, her face greasy with heat and effort. But as for him, with his smooth dark head, the sharply cut yet sensitive features, the long hands that held the blood-red glass … the truth of it was that he was wasted in these provincial, incongruous surroundings.
    Nancy got up, shook her hair, and began to pull her dress over head. She was simply going to try on the limp half-finished thing but Oliver was no fool and he could tell from the way she moved slowly, coquettishly, that there was also intention to tempt him.
    ‘If you must strip in the living room you might pull the curtains,’ he said.
    He got up and put his hand to the cords that worked the pulley, first the french windows, then at the long Georgian sashes at the front of the house. The silk folds moved to meet each other but not before, through the strip