Read Last Act of All for Free Online

plastic sign proclaiming ‘The Four Feathers’ on a concrete front with aluminium frame doors and windows. There was a post office and a shop, with its owner’s name on an orange and yellow advertisement sign.
    There was a decent Norman church, and a square about a town cross with a couple of pretty houses, but Neville drove on, humming contentedly, and bore left up a slight incline.
    Then, on the right, there was an old wall, broken down by tree-roots and badly maintained, and at last, at the top of the sort of rise that passed for a hill in this uncompromisingly flat countryside, was a house.
    ‘ There you are, Nella! Radnesfield House.’ Neville spoke with pride of possession, as if it were his already.
    In a different situation, she would have burst out laughing. It was late Victorian yellow brick and red tile, after the Lego-land school of architecture. Nightmare patterns of hideous complication defaced the frontage, and a wooden trellis, apparently constructed by a giant with a fretsaw and a lurid imagination, was improbably grafted on to it, the wood rotted in places and the paint peeling. It was so revolting that it was comic, but she was, after all, going to have to live in this place.
    ‘ Neville,’ she said faintly, ‘it’s unspeakable.’
    He roared with satisfied laughter. ‘Isn’t it? Didn’t I say so? It really is the pits, the purest sample of the worst sort of Victorian vulgarity. I love it! And that, on top of the village! None of your rubbishy, tourist-trap, picture-postcard places, just a real, unspoiled, ancient English village. This guy has simply got to sell. It fits me like a glove.’
    It wasn’t Neville it fitted, of course. It fitted ‘Badman’ Harry Bradman, as if it were a new concept — the designer village.
    *
    It was three years since their marriage had become this weird ménage a trois , with the sinister shadow of Harry lurking like a paid heavy on the fringes of every conversation. Helena never knew when he would move stage centre, but she had no difficulty in recognizing him once he appeared, hard, bullying and blustering, as if Neville were using his alter ego as a suit of armour which became more impenetrable daily.
    She recognized her own complicity. Harry had been spawned long ago in Neville’s wretched childhood, but she had nurtured the monster by her own weakness in giving way to Neville’s demands. It was a form of self-indulgence, because it had always been easier to sacrifice her own satisfaction than to combat Neville’s selfishness.
    The groundwork had been laid long before by Helena’s father, Simon Groves, a joyless, self-styled Man of God, who filled the West Country vicarage with an atmosphere of sour, unloving disapproval of every blithe and youthful impulse his only child displayed. Her mother, gently-bred, weak and pretty, had died when the girl was twelve.
    As Helena bloomed in adolescence to something of a beauty, she lived in terror of his icy rages. When she rebelled, taking a scholarship to the drama college which her father, his eyes bulging with rigidly-controlled fury, stigmatized a sink of iniquity, she turned her back on him for ever. She knew now that he was dead; she had not seen him since the day she left home.
    At college she was studious, quiet, and possessed of the real dramatic talent which often lies in violently repressed natures. It appeared to her then incredible that Neville Fielding, with his glamorous looks and wild reputation should look twice at her.
    Initially, though, it had worked surprisingly well. Perhaps he had wanted to prove he could melt the Snow Queen, but it was her helplessly maternal response to the wicked little boy in his character that made her indispensable to him. Neville, sunny side up, was funny and charming, with a demonstrative warmth which did, indeed, melt her heart, and when he behaved badly, absolution from her seemed almost a psychological necessity. She sometimes thought his was a schizophrenic