Gold Digger by Frances Fyfield Page A

his jacket, the only colour in the piece. A man in his prime without a care in the world, looking across at the painting of a lady at the other end. Raymond wondered if there was any theme in the Porteous collection, such as were all the portraits celebrations of youth andbeauty, or were the landscapes and interiors pieces of wish fulfilment, places where Thomas would have liked to have been? Had he been creating another, alternative world with his seemingly random eye and his voracious, acquisitive appetite for line and colour? Were these his alternative family, his dreams, to replace what he had either driven away or lost? And his father, the headmaster, before him? Raymond plodded on, thinking what a pedant he was, with his composite roles of lawyer and liaison, walked down the last set of stairs, lost. Whatever the theme was, he had certainly not collected as an investment: the theme, if there had ever been one, was blurred now. He had relied on Di’s eyes. And she might have killed him.
    She whisked him round like a tour guide and then they were back where they had been. Back in the snug room, with the comfortable nude, illuminated by the fire that granted a kind of benediction. Di produced food with the automatic efficiency of someone long practised in the art of the picnic and he forgot his reservations about that. Good bread, cheese, tangy green leaves. ‘You have to eat before you go,’ she said. He was surprised by the simple sophistication of it, not only because he had never supposed this faded town to provide anything of the kind, but also because he had assumed that she would be incapable of assembling it. Then he remembered triumphant Thomas, when he, Raymond, had advised him against the marriage.
She can cook, dear boy … doesn’t that persuade you of her immaculate taste? She has eyes, Ray, in the back of her head as well as the front. I’m a lucky man and I owe her my life.
A man either besotted or convinced.
    ‘So,’ Di said, pushing food in his direction rather than eating it herself, then lighting a cigar, which suited her, ‘how bad is it going to get?’
    She got up to rattle the fire, shoving on another log, sparking it back to longer life. The fire had been dead by the time she called the ambulance. It took hours for this fire to die. She had done nothing to revive or warm her wedded husband; she had let the fire go out. That would be remembered.
All she had to do was contaminate the food.
    He cleared his throat and reached forward for her to light his cigarette. There was nothing seductive about her action, but it was still intimate. She was all sharp angles, shrill, comforting, charming and graceless, all at the same time. Distracting.
    ‘Well,’ he said, more cheerfully than he felt, wishing she had more of a sense of the dangerous pathways ahead, wanting to spare her and yet wanting to shake her with his own sense of dread. ‘The house is beautiful and you should do what he wanted to do, to the letter. It would be helpful if you were the model of good behaviour in the meantime. A demure and grieving widow, perhaps. A connoisseur, leading a gentle life. That kind of thing. No loud noises.’
    She shook her head, smiling.
    ‘The inventory? Haven’t we forgotten to look in the basement?’
    She clapped a hand to her brow. ‘So we have, I forgot, but you know there’s nothing much in there. Too damp, too cold, too … this time of year. The sea comes through from underneath, you see, sometimes.’
    There were stone steps leading down from the heavy door inside the snug room. Raymond did not want to go but knew he must, for the sake of duty as well as curiosity. He hated the dark and longed for the light upstairs. She was fooling him, leaving this until last, but then again, maybe she wasn’t. The lights were fused, she said; she had taken a torch which sweptround the vaulted ceilings of what was once a wine cellar, with arched alcoves in glorious patterns of brick in pale, russet