Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf by Ellis Peters Read Free Book Online

Tressider.
    By the time the bell rang to send him away, she had arrived at the present. Iris-circled, with half-transparent lids veined like snowdrops, her eyes remained closed for a moment after she was silent. The long lashes that lay on her cheeks were coloured like her hair, green-bronze-gold. When they rolled back from the wide stare that fastened unerringly on his face, the unveiled blue of her eyes was blinding.
    It was then that it happened to him, sharp and clean as a knife-thrust, so that for an hour afterwards he never felt the pain.
    ‘I’ll contact you,’ he said, ‘as soon as I have anything to report. It may be a few days, but I’ll ring you.’
    ‘Yes…’ She wanted to ask what was in his mind, whether he had got anything at all out of her self-examinings; but she refrained. She had said that she trusted him, and now it was in his hands. ‘I feel better,’ she said, offering him the one encouragement and commendation she had to give. ‘Since you came I haven’t lost any more weight. And I
sleep
now. I’m going to get well.’
    ‘Of course!’ he said.
    ‘And to put this right…’ She smiled at him, a grave, grateful, impersonal smile. The burden of her confidence sagged heavily on his heart, and deep within him, secretly and slowly, the mortal wound began to bleed.
     
    It was half-way through the evening before the numbness thawed away, and the injustice and indignity and rage and pain, the reasoned hopelessness and irrational hope, all hit him together.
    He was sitting over his notebook with a full ashtray at his elbow, methodically compiling lists of names and considering the significance of the periods into which her life fell. There was always more to be gained by sitting and thinking, and evaluating what was given, than by rushing about questioning people, and he had his starting point.
    ‘I’ve done something awful to
him
… killed
him
…’ ‘
He’s
here with me all the time,
he
never leaves me…’ ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if I could ever see
him
clearly…’ Where there’s no precise identification the masculine pronoun can embrace the feminine, too, of course. Maybe! But that was by no means the effect of the repeated ‘he’ in her mouth. She didn’t know even the sex of her enemy; no, but some spark of her subconscious knew, all right. All Lombard Street to a china orange, X was a man.
    What sort of man? Not a member of her family; those she bore with, visited occasionally, subsidised as a matter of course. Rice had suggested that there might have been some such hanger-on who chose the wrong moment, or the wrong approach, and started in her a spurt of distaste that caused her for once to lash out in rebellion against her role. But did any of them matter to her enough to make that probable? Francis thought not. And whoever provoked her into cruelty would have to matter to her pretty fundamentally.
    The more he thought about it, the more clearly did X put on the likeness of the one person who was so conspicuously absent from Maggie’s life. A face so rigidly excised from memory might well belong to the one man who wasn’t there.
    Plenty of men had loved Maggie, but not one of them, by her own account and the world’s, had Maggie ever loved. Never once had she mentioned the word ‘love.’ And that in itself was remarkable enough to arrest attention. Here was a gifted, beautiful woman, still defensively alone at approaching thirty-two. On the face of it that was the most mysterious thing about her. Why did she never marry? Because she was married to her art? Even so, why did she never, apparently, even consider taking husband or lover, never let any of the candidates get within arm’s-length of her? Take a step too near her, and she would take three away from you, and then keep retreating until she was out of sight. He had seen it for himself, and so, if he wasn’t mistaken, had Gilbert Rice. So what was wrong with her? What was the block that shut men out? The same