Read Online Gently in the Sun by Alan Hunter - Free Book Online Page A

brush moving – times when you were only dabbing around on the palette. But you tell me there was nothing in it – what was up?Wouldn’t she let you? Kept you sitting there looking and being a good boy?’
    ‘But honestly, I tell you …’
    ‘Pretended you were too young?’
    ‘Believe me, you’ve got it wrong! It wasn’t like that at all.’
    Gently shrugged, shuffled the sketches and slipped them back into the satchel. Simmonds was all but wringing his hands in his efforts to convey his good faith.
    ‘You’ve got to see – she was friendly. I haven’t got a lot of friends! At home it was impossible. I did the only thing I could. Now, for over a year … can’t you see what I mean? Other people don’t understand me … she … since my mother died …’
    ‘You were fond of your mother, were you?’
    ‘ She understood me!’
    ‘How old was she when she died?’
    ‘People thought she was my sister.’
    ‘And that’s why these drawings?’
    ‘… drawings?’ He flushed hotly. ‘It’s not that – you can’t get it straight! – though perhaps, in a way …’
    ‘Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it?’
    Gently slid in the canvas after the sketches. For a moment, as he buckled the straps, his eye dwelt strangely on the artist. Below them now the Bel-Air youngsters were ragging and rolling in the sand; the motor sailer was out of sight, the Swedish vessel replaced by a tanker. The sun, at long last, was taking definite steps westward.
    ‘I’ll keep these for the moment – they’ll be taken care of. In the morning I’ll want a fresh statement. Is that understood?’
    ‘If you like I’ll write it out.’
    ‘It wont be necessary. Just make certain there’s nothing else that you forgot to tell Inspector Dyson.’
    He left Simmonds standing helplessly with new expostulations on his lips. Coming towards them with an eager step he could see the reporter of the Echo . And by the net store, though well out of earshot, the owner of the Keep Going had his eye on them.
    Except possibly up in the marrams, there was nowhere private at Hiverton.

CHAPTER FIVE
    F OR A GOOD hour past he had been wandering about the village, staring at everything and gaping at everybody: why, he would have been perplexed to answer. One hadn’t to go far to see the whole of Hiverton. It was huddled together like a misplaced hill village. On one side was the sea, on the other stony fields. From a little distance it had the appearance of a watchful, red-brick citadel.
    He had plodded along the terraces which formed the northerly ramparts, turning deliberately from one to another until he had covered every yard. Here jerry-building had flourished in the years between the wars. The houses were sullenly ugly, needed plaster, needed paint. They were served by unmade-up roads. The yards behind them were small and slummy. In front they had patches of scuffed grass or anaemic flower beds edged with bottles. The paths to them, almost without exception, were of trodden earth, cinder, and cockleshells.
    And the people who lived in these places? At the thought he had hunched his shoulders. Yet somethingabout them had struck him, difficult though it was to put it into words. He had met them coming out, seen them trudging up to their doors; here one had passed a civil word, there one plucked a curtain to stare at him. But in total, what was the impression? It was escaping him, for the moment. Unconsciously, intuitively , he had made a judgement, which later would reappear in the guise of inspiration.
    Now he was standing at the crossways, at the physical heart of the village. Three other shops besides the Beach Stores each faced the irregular plain. A butcher’s – wasn’t that the place where Simmonds had bought his sausages? – a baker’s which dabbled in groceries, and a grocer who dabbled in bread. In fact, all the elements of a satisfying focal centre, helped out by the bus turnround, a chapel, and the post office. Then why did it