Read Online Gently With the Painters by Alan Hunter - Free Book Online

to withdraw it?’
    Mallows made a comical face at him. ‘Come off it, my dear fellow, and let’s discuss it like fellow mortals. I’m the chairman of that group, which means that I do a lot of talking. It’s my business to open the proceedings, to keep them civil and to wind them up. And that, I assure you, is not a sinecure – if you think it is, you know little about painters.
    ‘They’re like a lot of bear-cats thrown together in a pit. I sometimes think that lion tamers have a softer job than I have. As a result, I don’t have much time to tabulate arrivals and departures – when it’s getting to half past ten, I’m busy trying to break them up. I know that Shoreby went for his bus and that Allstanley took his exit promptly; but if he says that someone left ahead of him, well, I wouldn’t like to call him a liar.’
    Gently nodded without enthusiasm, his eye on one of the fish pictures. Behind them, in the afternoon sunlight, people moved leisurely against a background of flowers.
    ‘What can you tell me about this Allstanley?’
    ‘He’s picked up with wire. Which I think is a pity.’
    ‘About his character, I mean.’
    ‘Apart from that, I know nothing against him. He’s just on forty and about my height – a lot of great men are five feet seven. He’s a teacher and lives and works at Walford – that’s a village some seven or eight miles out of town. He used to sculpt in beech before he got the wire bug. He’s been with us now … oh, four or five years.’
    ‘One of your bear-cats, is he?’
    ‘Good heavens no. He’s one of the quiet ones. Being a sculptor, perhaps, he feels aloof from the squalid mob.’
    ‘A married man?’
    ‘No. He runs a car, as I said. You can’t have it all ways when you’re merely a teacher.’
    ‘Was he a friend of Mrs Johnson’s?’
    ‘Ah, now we come to the kernel …! But we all had an eye on that lady, you know. She was a very popular member, a species of uncrowned royalty; and if it comes to that, I’ve taken her out to lunch myself.’
    ‘But he was a friend, was he?’
    ‘All right. He was.’
    ‘Something more than a friend?’
    ‘No, laddie. Just friendly.’
    ‘On lunching terms, for instance?’
    Mallows winked at him broadly. ‘Even here, it isn’t sinful to take a lady into Lyons.’
    It was a gentle rebuke, and Gently acknowledged it with a shrug. Mallows wasn’t going to be edged into tendentious guesses. Instead of trying further, Gently switched to
    Baxter and Aymas, listening absently and with few questions as Mallows described them to him.
    ‘Baxter is fortyish too, a lean fellow with an Adam’s apple. He’s principally a commercial artist and works in the art department of Hallman’s. He whiffs at a silly little pipe and has a wicked tongue when he likes – actually, he’s quite a good man. He’s got a natural flair for poster colour.
    ‘Aymas is younger than him, and quite a different brand of coffee. An angry young man, you’d probably call him, though you could substitute “ignorant” for “angry”. He looks like, and is, a farm worker who has taught himself to paint. He’s one of my principal bear-cats and I’m perpetually having to sit on him.
    ‘Baxter is married and has three children, Aymas would like to be thought a Don Juan. He was as thick as anyone with Shirley – she’d got the refinement he admired, you understand. But I doubt if it went any further. Shirley was amused but she wasn’t attracted. As for Aymas, he was satisfied to be thought her favourite – he basked, you might say, in her reflected culture. Incidentally, I left him arguing the toss in the cellar.’
    ‘That brings me to another thing I wanted to ask you.’
    Gently, at long last, had seen enough of the Wimbush fishes. They were curiously bloated and heavy-looking creatures, and though distinguished in detail, still depressingly alike.
    ‘The meeting itself – can’t you tell me something about that?’
    ‘Tell you what, my