Trial by Fire by Frances Fyfield Read Free Book Online Page A

London and get crushed and dirty in Oxford Street. Lovely, if I had the energy. I could stay here and pick daisies, worry a bit, sit in the jungle at The Crown, and pray above all that I never have a lawnmowing husband and that Christine does. No, I shall not wash the car, since the children would like it less, or clean out the garage, because of the starlings' nest, nor shall I deadhead these tidy roses; let them rot. I'll go and have a meaningless conversation instead or paint a picture.
    Helen could paint. Charming scenes that tended to become caricatures with captions as well as faces. When words failed, she would grab pen and paper in her urgency to explain.

    'Listen, it's like this' — gesturing with one hand as diagram or illustration emerged from the pen in the other, on a napkin, a tablecloth, best linen not immune, on the back of a brief or an envelope. In a lecture hall as a student or waiting in court, she would create a litter of doodles, noses, eyes, hairlines, and winks, summoning up for Bailey a presence on paper. 'Listen, will you? He looked a bit like this, as I told you,' producing a likeness of sorts with all the salient and funny features first. 'He had a nose like this,' or an animal face, catlike, doglike, snakelike, or blank, or a face resembling a car, or three lines that caught some angle of the features.
    Às for you,' she said, 'you look like this on first acquaintance; you really do,' she told him, drawing three straight lines in a notebook at the head of a blank page, the lowest of the lines leading into a vertical line for a definite nose, a wide, curling questioning line for a mouth, and a short vertical stab for a cleft in the chin, forming at last a downward-pointing T
    to incorporate a strong and stubborn jaw. It suggested everything. A face full of hairline traces like overcooked porcelain: an infinite capacity for change within definite limits.
    He had fingered this face, found the grooves she had displayed with her eyes away from them, laughed in disbelief and a tiny tinge of embarrassment to see himself depicted with such careless accuracy. 'Better than Identikit,' he said.
    Òh, I hope so,' said Helen. 'I know you better than some witness who might have seen you robbing a bank.'
    Ànd the other people you sketch?'
    `Them too, I expect. Surely I have a better recollection than anyone who is not being horrified at the time.'
    Ànd Edward Jaskowski, Stanislaus, your clients, your guilty ones, all those you have sent to some kind of prison — can you draw them?'
    `No,' she said firmly, snapping closed her notebook, 'not unless I must. Which is never at all, I think, unless they come and ask me.' Then she would draw more; he would try to copy. They would end as usual, entwined and absorbed in easy laughter.
    So far these pictorial observations with pen and ink had provided little apart from relief from the frustration of words, with which she was unduly skilled. The most constructive relief was found on a day like this in a spare room, attempting to construct something with a hope of beauty. Helen painted and sketched on a day like this to rid her mind of everything else. Frowning, she quickly sketched the face of Antony Sumner. Widely spaced eyes, a long, sad nose, high forehead, full mouth and a slightly receding chin.
    A soft face, miscast and starving Labrador retriever, made strong by affection, a touch of stubbornness around the eyes, a temper. The exercise of bringing into focus that scarcely familiar face encountered only once in the High Street reassured her. Petulant, argumentative, clumsy with emotion, capable of eruption but only suddenly. Quite incapable, she decided, of the sustained rage and stupidity that were prerequisites in a true man of violence.
    She threw down her pen in the top room of the house, drew instead in her mind's eye the garden of her basement in London, full of overblown flowers, cat in the long grass of the lawn, animals instead of city sounds, some child