Arthritis is a brute. It makes one so vulnerable. If I were a less cynical woman, I would say Sarah has the gift of healing, though, frankfy, I'm inclined to think anyone would have been an improvement on that old fool, Hendry. He was lazy, of course, and didn't bother to keep up his reading. Sarah tells me there have been huge advances in the field which he obviously knew nothing about. I am rather inclined to sue, if not on my own behalf, then on Joanna's. Clearly, it was he who set her on the path to addiction.
Sarah asked me today how I was, and I answered with a line from
King Lear
: "I grow; I prosper. Now, gods, stand up for bastards." She quite naturally assumed I was referring to myself, laughed good-naturedfy and said: "A bitch, possibly, Mathilda, but never a bastard. There's only one bastard I know, and that's Jack." I asked her what he had done to deserve such an appellation. "He takes my love for granted," she said, "and offers his to anyone who's foolish enough to flatter him."
How very flawed are human relationships. This is not a Jack I recognize. He guards his love as jealously as he guards his art. The truth, I think, is that Sarah perceives both herself and him "through a glass darkly." She believes he strays, but only, I suspect, because she insists on using his effect on women as a criterion by which to judge him. His passions frighten her because they exist outside her control, and she is less adept than she thinks she is at seeing where he directs them.
I adore the man. He encourages me to "dare damnation," for what is life if it is not a rebellion against death .
*6*
Violet Orloff stood motionless in the kitchen of Wing Cottage, listening to the row that had broken out in the hall of Cedar House. She had the guilty look of an eavesdropper, torn between going and staying, but, unlike most eavesdroppers, she was free of the fear of discovery, and curiosity won out. She took a glass from the dishwasher, placed the rim against the wall, then pressed her ear to the base. The voices drew closer immediately. Perhaps it was a mercy she couldn't see herself. There was something indecent and furtive about the way she bent to listen, and her face wore the same expression that a Peeping Tom might wear as he peers through a window to see a woman in the nude. Excited. Leering. Expectant.
"...think I don't know what you do in London? You're a fucking whore, and Granny knew it, too. It's your bloody fault all this, and now you're planning to whore him, I suppose, to cut me out."
"Don't you dare speak to me like that. I've a damn good mind to wash my hands of you. Do you think I care tuppence whether you get to university or not?"
"That's you every time. Jealousy, jealousy, fucking jealousy! You can't stand me doing anything you didn't do."
"I'm warning you, Ruth, I won't listen to this."
"Why not? Because it's true, and the truth hurts?" The girl's voice was tearful. "Why can't you behave like a mother sometimes? Granny was more of a mother than you are. All you've ever done is hate me. I didn't ask to be born, did I?"
"That's childish."
"You hate me because my father loved me."
"Don't be absurd."
"It's true. Granny told me. She said Steven used to moon over me, calling me his angel, and you used to fly into a temper. She said if you and Steven had got a divorce, then Steven wouldn't be dead."
Joanna's voice was icy. "And you believed her, of course, because it's what you wanted to hear. You're your grandmother all over again, Ruth. I thought there'd be an end of it once she was dead but I couldn't have been more wrong, could I? You've inherited every drop of poison that was in her."
"Oh, that's great! Walk away, just like you always do. When are you going to face up to a problem, Mother, instead of pretending it doesn't exist? Granny always said that was your one true accomplishment, to brush every unpleasantness under the carpet, and then carry on as if nothing had happened. For Christ's sake"-her voice rose to a shout-"you heard the detective." She must have caught her mother's attention because her tone dropped again. "The police think Granny was murdered. So what am I supposed to tell them?"
"The truth."
Ruth gave a wild laugh. "Fine. So I tell them what you spend your money on, do I? I tell them Granny and Dr. Hendry thought you were so bloody mad they were thinking of having you committed? Jesus"-her voice broke-"I suppose I might just as well be really honest and tell them how you tried to kill me. Or do I keep quiet because if I don't we won't have a hope in hell's chance of putting in a counter-claim for the money?
"You're not allowed to benefit from the murder of your mother, you know."
The silence went on for so long that Violet Orloff began to wonder if they had moved to another part of the house.
"It's entirely up to you, Ruth. I've no compunction at all about saying you were here the day your grandmother died. You shouldn't have stolen her earrings, you stupid little bitch. Or, for that matter, every other damn thing your sticky little fingers couldn't resist. You knew her as well as I did. Did you really think she wouldn't notice?" Joanna's voice grated with sarcasm. "She made a list and left it in her bedside drawer. If I hadn't destroyed it you'd be under arrest by now. You're making no secret of your panic over this idiotic will, so the police will have no trouble believing that if you were desperate enough to steal from your grandmother, you were probably desperate enough to murder her as well. So I suggest we both keep our mouths shut, don't you?"
A door was slammed so forcefully that Violet felt the vibrations in her kitchen.
Jack perched on his stool and rubbed his unshaven jaw, squinting at the policeman through half-closed lids. Satanic, thought DS Cooper, suited him well. He was very dark with glittering eyes in a hawklike face, but there were too many laughter-lines for a Dracula. If this man was a devil, he was a merry one. He reminded Cooper of an unrepentant Irish recidivist he had arrested on innumerable occasions over a period of twenty years. There was the same "take-me-as-I-am" expression, a look of such startling challenge that people who had it were impossible to ignore. He wondered with sudden curiosity if the same expression had looked out of Mathilda Gillespie's eyes. He hadn't noticed it on the video, but then the camera invariably lied. If it didn't, no one would tolerate having their picture taken. "I'll do it," said Jack abruptly.
The policeman frowned. "Do what, Mr. Blakeney?"
"Paint you and your wife for two thousand pounds, but I'll string you up from a lamp-post if you tell anyone what you're paying." He stretched his arms towards the ceiling, easing the muscles of his back. "I'd say two thousand from you is worth ten thousand any day from the likes of Mathilda. Perhaps a sliding scale isn't such a bad idea, after all. It should be the dent in the sitter's pocket that sets the value on the painting, not my arbitrary pricing of my worth." He raised sardonic eyebrows. "What right have I to deprive impoverished vicars and policemen of things of beauty? You'd agree with that, wouldn't you, Sarah?"
She shook her head at him. "Why do you always have to be so offensive?"
"The man likes my work, so I'm offering him a subsidized portrait of himself and the wife in blues, purples, greens and golds. What's offensive about that? I'd call it a compliment." He eyed Cooper with amusement. "Purples represent your libido, by the way. The deeper they are, the randier you are, but it's how I see you, remember, not how you see yourself. Your wife might have her illusions shattered if I paint you in deep purple and her in pale lilac."