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nature, with a black side which intermittently forced its way to the top.
    That, of course, was Harry, though it was only the television series that taught Helena his name.
    It had not, she acknowledged, been easy for Neville. A profile born out of its time, he was Ivor Novello in an age which prefers its heroes short, bald or bespectacled. She had never lacked the early offers which might have led to real success, but faced with the physical brutality his envy engendered she denied her talent and got herself pregnant.
    His career was a progression of small television parts, competently enough performed, but never yielding an income adequate for the standard of living he so desperately desired, as proof of success.
    It was, paradoxically, his failures which brought success in the end. The harsh, disappointed lines about the chiselled mouth, the self-indulgence that pouched the deep-set blue eyes and blurred the classic line of the jaw were perfection for beautiful, wicked Harry Bradman.
    ‘ “Badman” Bradman, the villain you love to hate,’ trumpeted the publicity machine. He appeared on Sunday evening television, scheduled against a favourite chat show, and Chris Dyer, producer and director, was a sharp operator. On to the framework of a soap opera, he had grafted an episodic series, relying shrewdly on the Baudelaire principle that evil and ugliness, glamorized, have a powerful attraction.
    ‘ He’s Rhett Butler, without the fundamental decency. Or Dorian Gray. Find me Dorian Gray at the precise moment when the face starts to crumble,’ Dyer told his casting manager, and in Neville Fielding, pushing forty, with his aura of fallen-angel seediness, they found him.
    So Harry had rescued him from a thousand petty indignities — the betrayed husband in the last scene, the cigar-smoker in the commercial — and installed him at last on the throne of fame to which he had always pretended.
    Helena was well aware that living the part is an occupational hazard for any actor in a long-term role, and as the series ran and the part became more tailored to Neville’s personality, the division between other and self became, at times, not altogether clear in his mind.
    Initially, he had talked of Harry as an amusing, attractive villain, a clever creation; of late, he had started finding excuses for Harry’s fictional delinquencies, the sort of excuses he was inclined to produce for himself when he was in the wrong.
    Her attitude to his success was ambivalent. Harry was, if not their bread and butter, certainly their jam, and even, as time went on, their caviar. Not only that, but, like most people, a happy, successful Neville was a great deal easier to live with than a morose, frustrated one.
    But Neville’s character had always had warmth; the nastiest thing about Harry was that he was cold, as her father had been cold, and she found herself increasingly anxious about the intrusion of Harry into their everyday life.
    It was certainly Harry who had chosen Radnesfield. Helena recognized immediately his degenerate taste.
    *
    From the taciturn host of the Four Feathers Neville, on his previous visit, had prised a grudging history of the owners of Radnesfield House. The Radleys, who went back to sixteenth-century graves in the churchyard — and, by tradition, well beyond that — were on the way out. An accident with a shotgun to the elder son who had just inherited had incurred a double set of death duties; the younger son, a bachelor in his forties, living alone since the death of his mother two years before, was considered to be presiding over the family’s dying throes.
    Indeed, when Edward Radley greeted them, he seemed almost faded, as if ancient blood in him were starting to thin. There was a quality of stillness about him, and the long planes of his face were oddly unlined, as though untouched by the events of his forty years. Helena had seen that face before, on figures in East Anglian cathedrals, the knights in medieval