Ladies From Hell Read Online Free Page A

by the end of the year, so we’re thinking about another car.”
    All right for some, sez I. I skimmed through the rest. There was a lot about the new commission; also Clancy had started on her Tytania. We’d all agreed the subject at the last annual gabfest, but Pre-Raphs being what they are nobody else had done anything about it yet. Jill and Barney Wellcome had visited from Devon, and there were some spicy fragments about Merriman and a Class A postcard in Cambridge. Am had got another piano grade and sent her love, but the best news was at the end. “I guess we’ll both be invading you next month,” Clancy had written. “Evan will be down in Soton drawing things on walls, and you know I like working in the Barn. If you can put up with us we might stop over till the Summerfest.” Which was very much OK by me.
    I took the stepladder through into the loungeand fetched a hammer and chisel. I was chipping happily away at the beam when George bowled in on a wave of pricey aftershave. His mood didn’t match the morning. “I hope you don’t think you’re going to make that blasted row all day,” was his opening shot. “You’ve got a living to earn.”
    Under the circumstances appertaining it was a quaint remark, but I let it pass. My heart was like the Lark Ascending; the last thing I wanted was an argument. “It’s only one today,” I said soothingly, “And it’s nearly done. Grit your teeth; just one last little bangy.” I climbed down and started sweeping the chippings. “There’s a letter for us by the way,” I said. “It’s on the table. I didn’t think you’d mind if I had a peek first, it’s from a lover.” Clancy isn’t my lover as a matter of fact; never has been, never will be. I think far too much of her. But I wasn’t going to let him in on all my little secrets.
    He looked a bit black. I thought he was going to make an issue of it but he didn’t. Instead he picked the letter up, glanced through it and marched off into his bedroom. He was only going to microfilm it for the files, he might just as well have done it on the spot; but he never did. Had his own brand of delicacy, did George.
    In the afternoon I took him sketching, to make up. A prunus sapling was in bloom, on the far side of the Estate. The blossom hung fragile and pinkish-white against a background of evergreens. You could spend the rest of your life painting a thing like that; not the flowers, the dark green space of air beyond them.
    The Controller turned up a couple of weeks later, well ahead of schedule. Jimmy the One was with me when he arrived, he spotted the black Alpha with the State pennants on its wings creaming its way up the drive. He pinched his fag out, blew through it and set off in pursuit at a fast Butler’s Lope, and I went looking for the Overseer.
    We’d only had a couple of days’ notice of the change of arrangements. It had sent George intoa frenzy, dashing forward and back to Town buying everything from Glen Morangie to
petits fours
. Since he was on his best behaviour he lugged me with him every time and it was all fairly sordid; I only hoped I’d get a sniff at one of the corks later on.
    When I found him he was still in a flat spin, though everything that could be done had been. We’d swept through and dusted—Lady A even lent us her Treasure for half a day—the Barn had been tidied to sterility and the Work in Progress was set out proudly down its length. I’d left Coventina on the easel and made her the centrepiece; I’d flanked her with the two other paintings I’d done of Am, the costume life and the one I was calling
Lolita 2000
. It had begun as a sort of
Zeitgeist
idea but it was really just Am, at her best and worst. I started it soon after I got George, he’d barged in while I was making the sketches. It gave him quite a turn; Am at fourteen, with her hair up and her knickers in a twist, lolling on the sofa like a cross between the Majas. She stuck her tongue out at him as well.