To Fear a Painted Devil by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

below Linchester they were cutting the hay. He could hear the baler, that and the sound of the bees. Otherwise all was still.
    ‘All right for some people.’
    Marvell turned his head and grinned. Max Greenleaf often came up about this time after his morning calls.
    ‘Come and sit down.’
    ‘It’s good to get away from the wasps.’ Greenleaf looked at the lichen on the bench, then down at his dark suit. He sat down gingerly.
    ‘There always were a lot of wasps in Linchester,’ Marvell said. ‘I remember them in the old days. Thousands of damned wasps whenever Mamma gave a garden party.’ Greenleaf looked at him suspiciously. An Austrian Jew, he could never escape his conviction that the English landed gentry and the Corinthian aristocracy came out of the same mould. Marvell called it his serfs to the wolves syndrome. ‘The wasps are conservative, you see. They haven’t got used to the idea that the old house had been gone five years and a lot of company directors’ Georgian gone up in its place. They’re still on the hunt for Mamma’s brandy snaps. Come inside and have adrink.’ He smiled at Greenleaf and said in a teasing voice, ‘I opened a bottle of mead this morning.’
    ‘I’d rather have a whiskey and soda.’
    Greenleaf followed him to the house, knocking his head as he always did on the plaque above the front door that said: 1722. Andreas Quercus Fecit. Marvell’s reasons for living there were beyond his understanding. The countryside, the flowers, horticulture, agriculture, Marvell’s own brand of viticulture, meant nothing to him. He had come to the village to share his brother-in-law’s prosperous practice. If you asked him why he lived in Linchester he would answer that it was for the air or that he was obliged to live within a mile or two of his surgery. Modem conveniences, a house that differed inside not at all from a town house, diluted and almost banished those drawbacks. To invite those disadvantages, positively to court them in the form of cesspools, muddy lanes and insectivora as his host did, made Marvell a curio, an object of psychological speculation.
    These mysteries of country life reminded him afresh of the cloud on his morning.
    ‘I’ve just lost a patient,’ he said. Marvell, pouring whiskey, heard the Austrian accent coming through, a sign that the doctor was disturbed. ‘Not my fault, but still …’
    ‘What happened?’ Marvell drew the curtains, excluding all but a narrow shaft of sunlight that ran across the black oak floor and up Andreas Quercus’s squat wall.
    ‘One of the men from Coffley mine. A wasp got on his sandwich and he ate the thing. So what does he do? He goes back to work and the next thing I’mcalled out because he’s choking to death. Asphyxiated before I got there.’
    ‘Could you have done anything?’
    ‘If I’d got there soon enough. The throat closes with the swelling, you see.’ Changing the subject, he said: ‘You’ve been writing. How’s it coming on?’
    ‘Not so bad. I did my china this morning and it distracted me.’ He unhooked the apple plate from the wall and handed it to the doctor. ‘Nice?’
    Greenleaf took it wonderingly in short thick fingers. ‘What’s the good of a thing like this? You can’t put food on it, can you?’ Without aesthetic sense, he probed everything for its use, its material function. The plate was quite useless. Distastefully he imagined eating from it the food he liked best, chopped herring, cucumbers in brine, cabbage salad with caraway seeds. Bits would get wedged under the apple leaves.
    ‘Its purpose is purely decorative,’ Marvell laughed. ‘Which reminds me, will you be at Tamsin’s party?’
    ‘If I don’t get called out.’
    ‘She sent me a card. Rather grand. Tamsin always does these things well.’ Marvell stretched himself full-length in the armchair. The movement was youthful and the light dim. Greenleaf was seldom deceived about people’s ages. He put Marvell’s at between