To Fear a Painted Devil

by Ruth Rendell

‘I came earlier,’ he said. ‘I had something to ask you. It doesn’t matter now.’

  Marvell smiled, stretched and sat up.

  ‘I went to tell Glide he could have the land,’ he said. ‘You can take your honey, if you like. It’s ready.’

  Greenleaf would never eat honey again as long as he lived. He began to feel sick, but not afraid, not at all afraid. His eyes met Marvell’s and because he couldn’t bear to look into the light blue ones, steady, mocking, unfathomably sad, he took off his glasses and began polishing them against his lapel.

  ‘You know, don’t you? Yes, I can see that you know.’

  Hazily, myopically, Greenleaf felt for the chair and sat down on the edge of it. The wooden arms felt cold.

  ‘Why?’ he asked. His voice sounded terribly loud until he realised that they had been speaking in whispers. ‘Why, Crispin?’ And the Christian name, so long withheld, came naturally.

  ‘Money? Yes, of course, money. It’s the only real temptation, Max. Love, beauty, power, they are the obverse side of the coin that is money.’

  From his dark corner Greenleaf said: ‘She wouldn’t have had any if Patrick had divorced her. That was the condition in the will.’ The man’s surprise was real but unlike Tamsin, he didn’t laugh. ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know.’

  ‘Then …?’

  ‘I wanted more. Can’t you see, Max? That place, that glass palace.… With the money from that and his money and her money, what couldn’t I have done here?’ He spread his arms wide as if he would take the whole room, the whole house in his embrace. ‘Tell me—I’m curious to know—what did she want from me?’

  ‘Money.’

  He sighed.

  ‘I thought I would know love,’ he said. ‘But, of course, I do see. That kind of sale is a woman’s privilege. May I tell you about it?’

  Greenleaf nodded.

  ‘Shall we have some light?’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose you would feel that way. I think that like Alice I had better begin at the beginning, go on till I get to the end, and then stop.’

  What sort of a man was this that could talk of children’s books on the edge of the abyss?

  ‘As you like.’

  ‘When Glide told me about the house I thought I had come to the end of my world. The bright day is done and we are for the dark.’ He paused for a moment and rubbed his eyes. ‘Max, I told you the truth and nothing but the truth, but I didn’t tell you the whole truth. You know that?’

  ‘You told me one lie.’

  ‘Just one. We’ll leave that for the moment. I said I’d begin at the beginning but I don’t know where the beginning was. Perhaps it was last year when Tamsin was helping me extract the honey. She said Patrick didn’t like it. He was afraid of bees and everything associated with them, but he’d only been stung once. That was when he was a little boy at their grandmother’s house. He’d been frightened by a picture of a girl holding a man’s head on a plate and he’d run into the conservatory. A bee stung him on his hand.’

  ‘Yes, she told me.’

  ‘Max, she didn’t know why the doctor had been sent for. She thought it was because Patrick was a spoiled brat She didn’t know why the doctor had given him an injection, had stayed for hours. But at the time I was reading a book about allergies. I was interested because of that damned hay fever. When she’d gone I looked up bee stings and I found why the doctor had stayed and what kind of an injection Patrick had had. He must have been allergic to bee stings. I didn’t say anything to Tamsin. I don’t know why not. Perhaps, even then … I don’t know, Max.’

  ‘Some people grow up out of allergies,’ Greenleaf said.

  ‘I know that too. But if it didn’t come off, who would know?’

  ‘It did come off.’

  Marvell went on as if he hadn’t spoken.

  ‘It wasn’t premeditated. Or, if it was, the meditation only took a few minutes. It began with the picture. I don’t know this part—I’m only guessing—but I think that when Tamsin was offered the picture things were all right between her and Patrick, as right as they ever were. Of course she knew he’d hated it when he was a child but she thought he’d grown out of that.’

  ‘When it arrived,’ Greenleaf said slowly, ‘she must have been trying to patch things up between them. He might think she’d sent for it to annoy him, so she had it put in her room, a room he never went into.’

  ‘I saw it—and, Max, I told them about it in all innocence!’

  ‘Tamsin was past caring then.’

  He must be kind, not a policeman, not an inquisitor.

  ‘Go on,’ he said gently.

  ‘It was only when Patrick reacted the way he did that I remembered the bee sting. The temptation, Max! I was sick with temptation. I don’t know how I got down those stairs.’

  ‘I remember,’ Greenleaf said. ‘I remember what you said. Something about the eye of childhood fearing a painted devil. I thought it was just another quotation.’

  Marvell smiled a tight bitter smile.

  ‘It is. Macbeth. It doesn’t mean that in the text. It doesn’t mean that Macbeth was looking with a child’s memory, but only in a childish way. I suppose it was my subconscious that gave it that meaning. I knew that Patrick feared it because of what had happened when he was a child. Then the wasps got him. Even then I couldn’t see my opportunity. I wasn’t sure of Tamsin. I’d never made love to her. For all I knew I was just an old pedagogue to her, a domestic science teacher. At midnight she came into my orchard.’

  ‘But she wasn’t carrying that straw bag,’ Greenleaf said quickly. ‘It wasn’t at all her style. Besides, when Oliver Gage came round with the bi-carb Tamsin was out but the bag was on the birthday table.’

  Marvell got up and, crossing to the window, opened the casement. ‘My one lie,’ he said. Greenleaf watched him drawing in great breaths of the dark blue air. ‘Will you be in a draught?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I felt—I felt suddenly as if I was going to faint.’ From shock? From fear? Greenleaf wondered with dismay if for months now Marvell hadn’t been getting enough to eat. ‘I’ll close it now.’ He shifted with precise fingers the long wisps of Tradescantia. ‘I’d like the lamp. You don’t mind?’ When Greenleaf shook his head, he said urgently, ‘Darkness—darkness is a kind of poverty.’

  When the lamp was lit Marvell put his hands round it. They had the opacity age brings and the thought came to Greenleaf that had his son’s hands covered that incandescence the light would have seeped through them as through red panes.

  ‘It all happened as I’ve told you,’ Marvell went on, ‘except that I didn’t say no to Tamsin. I told her I’d walk back with her but that I’d left my jacket in the orchard. I went down to the shed to get my gloves and my veil and a little box with a mesh lid. Someone had once sent it to me with a queen bee in it.

  ‘When we got to Hallows I went in with her. She’d told me you’d given Patrick a sedative and we both knew I was going to stay with her. We didn’t say it but we knew. She didn’t want to look at Patrick and she went to take a shower. While she was in the bathroom and I could hear the water running I went into Patrick’s room. I still wasn’t sure the sting wouldn’t wake him.

  ‘There was a big pincushion on the dressing-table. I took a pin and stuck it very lightly into him. He didn’t stir.’

  Greenleaf felt a deathly cold creep upon him, a chill that culminated in a tremendous galvanic shudder.

  ‘Then I put the bee on his arm and I—I teased it, Max, till it stung him.’ He slid his hands down the lamp until they lay flat and fan-spread on the table. ‘I can’t tell you how I hated doing it. I know it’s sentimental, but the bees were my friends. They’d worked for me faithfully and every year I took their honey away from them, all their treasure. They’d fed me—sometimes I didn’t have anything but bread and honey to eat for days on end. Now I was forcing one of them to ki
ll itself for my sake. It plunged its sting into those disgusting freckles.… My God, Max, it was horrible to see it trying to fly and then keeling over. Horrible!’

  Greenleaf started to speak. He checked himself and crouched in his chair. They were not on the same wavelength, a country G.P. and this naturalist who could kill a man and mourn the death of an insect.

  Marvell smiled grimly. ‘I had to stay after that. I had to stay and see she didn’t go into that room. She hated Patrick but I don’t think she would have stood by and let him die.’ He stood up straight and in the half-dark he was young again. ‘I made love to Tamsin under the eyes of Herod’s niece.’ His shoulders bowed as if to receive age like a cloak. ‘At the time I thought it a pretty conceit. I should have remembered, Max, that they might both understand the desires of old men. I thought it was love.’

  He sat on the table edge and swung his legs.

  ‘I left at four. She was asleep and Patrick was dead. I checked. The dog came upstairs and I shut her in with Tamsin.

  ‘Perhaps I was vain, Max, perhaps I thought I had a kind of droit de seigneur, perhaps I’m just old-fashioned. You see, I thought that still meant something to a woman, that she would have to marry me. When she made it plain she didn’t want me, I felt—My God! She’d wanted me before, but I’m fifty and she’s twenty-seven. I thought …’

  ‘Crispin, I do see.’ It was more horrible than Greenleaf had thought it could be. He hadn’t anticipated this grubbing into the roots of another man’s manhood. ‘Please don’t. I never wanted to …’

  ‘But it was only money, always money.’ He laughed harshly but quite sanely into Greenleaf’s face. ‘It’s all better now, all better. I am Antony still!’

  ‘But why?’ Greenleaf asked again. ‘Why tell me so much?’ He felt angry, but his anger was a tiny spark in the fire of his other emotions: amazement, pity and a kind of grief. ‘You led me into this. You made me suspect.’ He spread his hands, then gripped the chair arms.

  Marvell said calmly: ‘Naturally, I intended to get away with it at first.’ His face was a gentle blank. He might have been describing to the doctor his methods of pruning a fruit tree. ‘But when I knew that I had killed Patrick in vain, for nothing, I wanted—I suppose I wanted to salvage something from the waste. They say criminals are vain.’ With a kind of wonder he said: ‘I am a criminal. My God, I hadn’t thought of it like that before. I don’t think it was that sort of vanity. All the moves in the game, they seemed like a puzzle. I thought a doctor and only a doctor could solve it. That’s why I picked on you, Max.’

  He made a little half-sketched movement towards Greenleaf as if he was going to touch him. Then he withdrew his hand.

  ‘I meant to try to get you interested. Then Nancy started it all off for me. I’ve always thought hatred was such an uncivilised thing, but I really hated Tamsin. When you suspected her I thought, to hell with Tamsin!’ He raised his eyebrows and he smiled. ‘If it had come to it, perhaps … I don’t think I could have let her suffer for what I did.’

  ‘Didn’t you think what it would mean if I found out?’

  Marvell moved to the fireplace and taking a match from the box on the mantelpiece struck it and dropped it among charred sheets of the manuscript. A single spiraling flame rose and illuminated his face.

  ‘Max,’ he said, ‘I had nothing to hope for. I’ve had a fine life, a good life. You know, I’ve always thought that was the true end of man, tilling the soil, husbanding the fruits of the soil, making wonderful things from a jar of honey, a basket of rose petals. In the evenings I wrote about the things of the past, I talked to people who remembered like me the days before taxes and death duties took away almost everything that made life for people like me a kind of—a kind of golden dream. Oh, I know it was a dream. I wasn’t a particularly useful member of society but I wasn’t a drag on society either. Just a drone watching the workers and waiting for the summer to end. My summer ended when Glide told me about this house. That’s what I meant when I said the bright day was done and I was for the dark.’ As the flame died he turned from the fireplace and clasping his hands behind his back looked down at Greenleaf.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ the doctor said. It was the phrase of despair, the sentence desperate people used to him from the other side of the consulting room table.

  Marvell said practically: ‘There’s only one thing you can do, isn’t there? You can’t be a party to a felony. You’re not a priest hearing confession.’

  ‘I wish,’ Greenleaf said, a world of bitterness making his voice uneven, ‘I wish I’d kept to it when I said I didn’t want to hear.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have made you.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ He jumped up and they faced each other in the circle of yellow light. ‘Stop playing God with me!’

  ‘Max, it’s all over. I’ll have a wash, I’ll put some things in a bag. Then we’ll go to the police together.’ As the doctor’s face clouded he said quickly, ‘You can stay with me if you like.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you. Not here though. In the garden. I’m not a policeman.’ How many times had he said that in the past weeks? Or had he in fact said it only to himself in a repetitive refrain that irritated his days and curled itself around his sleep?

  Marvell hesitated. Something leaped into his eyes but all he said was: ‘Max … forgive me?’ Then when the doctor said nothing he picked up the lamp and carried it before him into the passage.

  The garden was a paradise of sweet scents. At first Greenleaf was too bemused, too stunned for thoughts. He moved across the grass watching his own shadow going before him, black on the silvered grass. The great trees shivered and an owl flying high crossed the dappled face of the moon.

  In the house behind him he could see the lamplight through a single window, the bathroom window. The rest of Marvell’s home was as dark and as still as if Glide had already bought it, as if it was waiting with a kind of squat resignation the coming of the men with the bulldozers. A year would elapse perhaps, only six months if the weather held Then another house would arise, the mock-Tudor phoenix of some Nottingharn business man, on the ashes of the cottages Andreas Quercus had made when George I held court in London.

  The light was still on. No shadow moved across it. I must leave him in peace, Greenleaf thought, for a few more minutes. He has lived alone, loving loneliness, and he may never be alone again.

  Avoiding the orchard where the bees were, he walked in a circle around the lawn until he came once more to the back door. He went in slowly, feeling his way in the dark. His fingers touched the uneven walls, crept across the plates, the framed lithographs. At the bathroom door he stopped and listened. No sound came. Suddenly as he stood, looking down at the strip of light between door and floor, he thought of another house, another bathroom where Tamsin had showered her slim brown body while her lover gave to Patrick the sting that was his own individual brand of death.

  He paced the narrow passage, sickness churning his belly and rising into his throat. When he could stand it no more he called, ‘Crispin!’ The silence was driving him into a panic. ‘Crispin! Crispin!’ He banged on the heavy old door with hands so numb and nerveless that they seemed no part of his tense body.

  In a film or play he would have put his shoulder to that door and it would have yielded like cardboard, but he knew without trying how impossible it was for him to attempt to shift this two-inch thick chunk of oak. Instead he groped his way back, wondering what that noise was that pumped and throbbed in the darkness. When he reached the open air he realised that it was the beating of his own heart.

  He had to make himself look through that lighted window, pulling his hands from his eyes as a man pulls back curtains on to an unwelcome day. The glass was old and twisted, the light poor but good enough to show him what he was afraid to see.

  The bath was full of blood.

  No, it couldn’t be—not all blood. There must be water, gallons of water, but it looked like blood, thin, scarlet and immobil
e. Marvell’s face rested above the water line—the blood line—and the withdrawing of life had also withdrawn age and the lines of age. So had the head looked on Salome’s silver platter.

  Greenleaf heard someone sob. He almost looked round. Then he knew that it was he who had sobbed. He took off his jacket, struggling with it as a man struggles with clothes in a dream, and wrapped it around his fist and his arm. The window broke noisily. Greenleaf unlatched the casement and squeezed it over the sill.

  Marvell was dead but warm and limp. He lifted the slack arms and saw first the slashes on the wrists, then the cut-throat razor lying beneath the translucent red water. Greenleaf knew no history but there came to him as he held the dead hands the memory of a lecture by the professor of Forensic Medicine. The Romans, he had said, took death in this way, letting out life into warm water. What had Marvell said? ‘I am Antony still’ and ‘Max, forgive me.’

  Greenleaf touched nothing more although he would have liked to drain the bath and cover the body. He unlocked the door, carrying the lamp with him, and left Marvell in the darkness he had chosen.

  Half-way across the living room he stopped and on an impulse unhooked from the walls the olive-coloured plate with the twig and the apple. As it slid into his pocket he felt with fingers that had palpated human scars the bruise on the underside of the glazed fruit.

  The wood with its insinuating branches was not for him to-night. He blew out the lamp and went home by Long Lane.

  On Linchester the houses were still lit, the Gages’ noisy with gramophone music, the Gavestons’ glowing, its windows crossed and re-crossed by moving shadows. As he came to Shalom a taxi passed him, women waved, and Walter Miller’s face, brown as a conker, grinned at him from under a pink straw hat. Home to Linchester, home to autumn, home to the biggest sensation they had ever known.…

  Bernice opened the door before he could get his key out.

  ‘Darling, you’re ill! What’s happened?’ she cried and she put her arms round him, holding him close.

  ‘Give me a kiss,’ he said, and when she had done so he lifted her arms from his neck and placed them gently at her sides. ‘I’ll tell you all about it,’ he said, ‘but not now. Now I have to telephone.’