To Fear a Painted Devil Read Free

her smooth brown face and was gone.
    ‘I’m so dreadfully sorry.’ She smiled without showing her teeth. ‘Please don’t be cross, Denholm. She’s very gentle.’
    Denholm grinned foolishly. The Selbys, both of them, always made him feel a fool. It was the contrast, perhaps, between their immaculate garden and his own cluttered playground; their pale hand-stitched clothes and what he called his ‘togs’; their affluence and his need.
    ‘It put the wind up the youngsters,’ he said gruffly.
    ‘Come on, Queenie!’ The long brown arm rose languidlyin an elegant parabola At once the dog leaped, clearing the hedge with two inches to spare. ‘I hope we’ll see you tomorrow, Denholm?’
    ‘You can count on us. Never miss a good booze–up.’ He was embarrassed and he went in quickly. But Cheryl lingered, staring over the hedge with curious intelligent eyes and wondering why the lady who was so unlike Auntie Free had fallen to her knees under the willow tree and flung her arms round the dog’s creamy sable neck.

2
    F ive years before when Nottinghamshire people talked about Linchester they meant the Manor and the park. If they were county they remembered garden parties, if not, coach trips to a Palladian house where you paid half-a-crown to look at a lot of valuable but boring china while the children rolled down the ha-ha. But all that came to an end when old Marvell died. One day, it seemed, the Manor was there, the next there were just the bulldozers Henry Glide brought over from the city and a great cloud of dust floating above the trees, grey and pancake-shaped, as if someone had exploded a small atom bomb.
    Nobody would live there, they said, forgetting that commuting was the fashion even in the provinces. Henry himself had his doubts and he had put up three chalet bungalows before he realised he might be on to a better thing if he forgot all about retiredfarmers and concentrated on Nottingham company directors. Fortunately, but by the merest chance, the three mistakes were almost hidden by a screen of elms. He nearly lost his head and built big houses with small gardens all over the estate, but he had a cautious look at the Marvell contract and saw that there was an embargo on too much tree-felling. His wife thought he was getting senile when he said he was only going to put up eight more houses, eight beautiful architect-designed houses around a broad green plot with a pond in the middle.
    And that was what people meant now when they talked about Linchester. They meant The Green with the pond where swans glided between lily leaves as big as dinner plates; The Circle which was a smart name for the road that ran around The Green; the Cotswold farmhouse and the mock-Tudor lodge, the Greenleafs’ place that might have been prefabricated in Hampstead Garden Suburb and flown complete into Nottinghamshire, the Selbys’ glass box and Glide’s own suntrap bungalow. They pointed from the tops of buses on the Nottingham road at the Gavestons’ pocket-sized grange, the Gages’ Queen Anne and the Smith-King place that had started off as a house and now was just a breeding box. They criticised the chalets, those poor relations and their occupants, the Saxtons, the Macdonalds and the Carnabys.
    The two men in the British Railways lorry lived in Newark and they had never been to Linchester before. Now, on the calmest, most beautiful evening of the summer, they saw it at its best. Yet it was not the loveliness of the place that impressed them, the elegant sweep of The Circle, the stone pineapples on thepillars at the Manor gates, nor the trees, elms, oaks and sycamores, that gave each house its expensive privacy, but the houses themselves and their opulence.
    Over-awed and at the same time suspicious, they drove between the pillars and into The Circle itself, looking for a house called Hallows.
    The lorry rumbled along the road, making ruts in the melting tar and sending white spar chips flying, past the three mistakes,