busy stroking his hand and saying: There, there! Do you know?”
“I’m not sure. But I should think it would automatically go to the next-of-kin, unless there’s some express veto on that in the will itself.” He didn’t know how much of this he could take, and still remember that he was a police officer, here on business. He wished he could think that she was doing it to him on purpose, to repay her own injuries, or out of bravado, to put them out of her mind, but he knew she wasn’t. She was evading being questioned, but she asked her own questions because she wanted to know the answers.
“Good!” she said with a sigh of satisfaction. “Then at any rate Leslie and Jean won’t have to worry any more, they’ll be loaded. I suppose I ought to make a will, too.”
George opened his mouth to answer her, and couldn’t get out a word. She looked up, her isolation penetrated for a moment by the quality of his shocked silence, and searching for the reason in her own words, came up with the wrong answer.
“It’s all right,” she said quickly and kindly. “I didn’t mean it like that. I know! Even if the worst comes to the worst, it isn’t capital murder.”
CHAPTER X.
“THERE SHE is,” said Leslie, stepping back from the table. “The Joyful Woman in person. I took your advice and fetched her back from Cranmer’s yesterday. What do you think of her?”
If George had told the simple truth in answer to that it would have had to be: Not much! Propped against the wall to catch the light from the window, what there was of it on this dull Sunday morning, the wooden panel looked singularly unimpressive, its flesh-tints a sallow fawn-colour, its richer shades weathered and dirtied into mere variations on tobacco-brown. Not very big for an inn sign, about twenty by eighteen inches, and even within that measure the figure was not so bold as it could have been. Against a flat ground that might once have been deep green or blue but was now grained with resinous brown varnishes coat after coat, the woman was shown almost to the waist. At the base of the panel her hands were crossed under little maidenly breasts, swathed in a badly- painted muslin fichu. Her shoulders beneath the folds of muslin were braced back, her neck was long, and in its present incarnation shapeless, and inclined forward like a leaning flower-stem to balance the backward tilt of the head. In half-face, looking to the right, she raised her large bland forehead to the light and laughed; and in spite of the crudity of the flat masses of which she was built, and the want of moulding in the face, there was no doubt that this was the laughter of delight and not of amusement; she wasn’t sharing it with an audience, it belonged to herself alone. Joyful was the just word for her.
“I know nothing about painting,” said George truthfully, and taking care not to sound complacent about it. “Frankly, it’s pretty ugly, isn’t it? And a queer mixture. That frill round her neck, and those mounds of hair like wings, and the corkscrew curls at the sides, all look like touches of early Victorian realism. But her pose isn’t Victorian, or realistic. More sort of hieratic, if I’m making any sense?”
“You’re making quite remarkable sense. Which is it you find ugly, the mass or the detail?”
“The detail, I suppose. The mass balances, I mean the shape of her on the panel. The masses of paint are clumsy, but I suppose that’s from years of overpainting by amateurs every time it got shabby.”
“You know,” said Leslie appreciatively, “you’d better be careful, or you’re going to turn into an art critic.” He had quite forgotten, in his excitement over this unimposing work of art, that his relationship with George had hitherto been one of mutual suspicion and potential antagonism. “That’s exactly what’s happened to her, and been happening for probably a couple of centuries. Every time she needed brightening up, some ham-fisted member of the family took a brush and some primary colours and simply filled in the various bits of her solidly, line to line, like a mosaic. And every now and again one of the artists got carried away and started putting in twiddly bits like the corkscrew curls, which, as you so justly remarked, don’t belong. I’m betting they don’t go below a couple of coats at all. But the shape, the way she fills the panel and stands poised, and leaves these rather beautiful forms round her, that’s there from the beginning, and that’s good. And I want her out of that coffin. I want to see what she was like once, before she went into the licensed trade, because I’m pretty sure there was a before. She hasn’t always been an inn sign.”
Jean, pausing for a moment on her way out to the landing kitchenette, stared intently at the laughing woman, and bit thoughtfully at the handle of the fork she was holding in her hand. “You know, she kind of reminds me of something, only I can never think what. Do you think she always laughed?”
“Yes, I think so, it’s in the tilt of the head. But with luck we shall see, some day. I’m taking her to the chap who runs the university gallery this afternoon,” explained Leslie contentedly. “I telephoned him yesterday, Brandon Lucas, I find I used to know his son at Oxford, so that broke the ice nicely, and he said yes, she sounded very interesting, and he’d like to have a look at her.”
“Did you have any trouble getting it back from Cranmer?” asked George.
“No, no trouble. He wasn’t very keen on parting, but I suppose he’d hardly be likely to commit himself to too urgent an interest, after your inquiries.”
“Did he make you an offer?”
“Yes,” said Leslie.
“How high did he go?”
Too late George felt the slight chill of constraint that had suddenly lowered the temperature in the room, and the tension that charged the air between husband and wife. He shouldn’t have asked; money was something that had shadowed the whole of their short married life, the want of it, the injustice of its withdrawal, the indignity of stooping to ask for it.
“Six hundred pounds,” said Jean, distinctly and bitterly, and made for the door.
Leslie’s ringers pinched out his cigarette, suddenly trembling. “You didn’t want to touch it when Dad offered five hundred,” he said indignantly. “You said I did right to turn that down. What’s so different about this offer?”
“It’s a hundred more,” she said flatly and coldly, “and it doesn’t come from your father. It’s straight money from a dealer, and it wouldn’t burn me, and the things I could buy with it wouldn’t be poisoned.”
So that was it. When the offer was pushed up to so tempting a figure she had wanted him to take it. Perfectly logical and understandable. She was a breeding tigress, she wanted to line a nest for her young; not at any price, but at any price that didn’t maim her pride. If her confidence in Leslie had been still unshaken she would have accepted his estimate of their best course, and gone along with him loyally, but that one disastrous move of his had ended the honeymoon once for all. Now he had to prove himself, he would never be taken on trust again, and his every act was to be scrutinised and judged mercilessly, not because she was greedy for herself, but because she was insatiable for her child. Looking round the shabby, congested room that was their home, George couldn’t blame her for preferring to clutch at certain benefits to-day rather than speculate on riches tomorrow.
“And if I’d taken it, and then the thing had turned out to be worth ten times as much, you’d never have let me
