Eden Falls Read Free Page B

the guests, Silas Whittam was waiting, a scowl darkening his handsome features. He held a fine gold fob in one hand and he shook it at them as Ruby and Maxwell approached.
    ‘Here de harbour shark to wish us good day,’ said Maxwell none too quietly, and Ruby laughed. It was this insolence, as much as their lateness, which now provoked their employer.
    ‘God damn it! You were due here thirty minutes ago and you have the brass neck to mutter and smirk at me.’
    They couldn’t deny it so they said nothing at all, and continued their measured pace up the path.
    ‘I should sack you here and now,’ Silas said. His face was hard with resentment. ‘I should send you packing, you useless, feckless, no-good pair. Thirty staff, and not a good one among you. Can you actually tell the time? Or do you just stroll along to work when the cock stops crowing or when the mango drops from the tree?’
    Maxwell whistled through his teeth and Ruby nodded slowly as if to say, I hear you and I see you, but I don’t heed you. He had built himself a great house but it didn’t make them slaves, and the plain fact was he needed them more than they needed him. A hundred and forty-six arrivals today, the Whittam liner due in at midday; without Ruby in the kitchen they’d all go hungry, and without Maxwell and Scotty they’d all be carrying their own valises. All of this she expressed with her eyes, cutting the boss a cold, bold look as she passed. Ruby Donaldson had a friendly word for almost everyone, but not for Silas Whittam, no. He was a waste of good breath.

Chapter 2
    ‘M ust the dogs be in the painting?’
    ‘Why? Can’t you paint dogs?’
    Eugene Stiller laid down his brush.
    ‘I can paint dogs, yes. But what I can paint and what I choose to paint are quite different matters.’
    ‘But Eugene,’ said Thea Hoyland, who knew the artist well and as a result had scant regard for either his professionalism or his personal dignity, ‘you don’t actually choose to paint anything, do you? You paint what you’re paid to paint. Or at least that’s what I understood.’
    She smiled at him to temper her rudeness, which was apparent even to her. He’d placed her on a cushioned window seat at such an angle that her face was on one side washed in natural light, and on the other almost wholly in shade. This, thought Eugene Stiller, was nicely symbolic, a representation of the good and bad in her, the sweet and the sour. It was how he entertained himself through the long hours of any commission: revealing, by the tilt of a chin or the glint of an eye, a facet of his sitter’s personality that other artists – perhaps less well tutored than he in the school of realism – would be unable to depict satisfactorily through the medium of oil on canvas. Selfishness, cruelty, kindness, avarice, loyalty: Eugene Stiller saw these traits as physical characteristics which, like a mole on the cheek or a missing finger, must be faithfully represented.
    ‘To a point,’ he said now, tartly. ‘Though I have been known to say no.’
    ‘But you won’t say no to my spaniels, I hope?’
    ‘Jittery creatures, spaniels.’
    ‘Well so am I, for that matter. If it’s jitteriness you object to, better paint that bowl of fruit over there.’
    Eugene laughed. He’d forgotten how relentlessly sassy Thea Hoyland was; or, at least, he remembered the sassiness, but had expected it to be replaced with something more mellow and soberly aristocratic now that she was – of all things – a countess. Eugene and Thea were friends of the type whose shared history was of more significance than their shared interests. For twelve consecutive years their respective parents had rented neighbouring beach houses on Long Island, and every summer vacation of their childhoods had been spent in enforced proximity to each other; they would bicker tirelessly on the sand as they toiled, summer after summer, on the same joint projects – a hole, a castle, a pool for a captive