The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [25]
“How full is it at the moment?”
“Up to the top. It should last a good three to four months.”
“Do I have to close the valve if I want to turn off the Aga?”
“You’ll have cold baths if you do,” she warned. “There’s no immersion heater in this place. It means the kitchen’s fairly unbearable in the summer but the Aga’s the only way to heat the water. The house is pretty antiquated. There’s no central heating and no boiler, and if you’re cold at night you have to light a fire.” She indicated a wood store to the left of the outhouse. “You’ll find the number for the log supplier on the tank under the oil company.”
I think Jess was disappointed that I took all this in my stride, but it wasn’t so different from the way I’d grown up in Zimbabwe. Wood was our primary fuel rather than oil, but we didn’t have central heating, and hot water had been at a premium until a day’s sunshine had heated the tank on the roof. Our cook, Gamada, had coaxed wonderful meals out of the wood-burning stove, and, having learnt from her, I’d never been comfortable with electric ovens that offered more touch controls than the flight deck of the Concorde.
I was a great deal less complacent about the single telephone point in the kitchen. “That can’t be right,” I said when Jess showed me the wall-mounted contraption beside the fridge. “There must be phones somewhere else. What happens if I’m at the other end of the house and need to call someone?”
“It’s cordless. You carry it with you.”
“Won’t the battery run down?”
“Not if you hook it up at the end of the day and recharge it overnight.”
“I can’t sleep without a phone beside my bed.”
She shrugged. “Then you’ll have to buy an extension cable,” she told me. “There are places in Dorchester that sell them, but you’ll need several if you want to operate a phone upstairs. I think thirty metres is the longest DIY cable they make but, at a rough guess, it’s a good hundred metres to the main bedroom. You’ll have to link them in series…which means adaptors…plus another handset, of course.”
“Is it a broadband connection?” I asked, dry-mouthed with anxiety as I wondered how I was going to be able to work. “Can I access the Internet and make phone calls at the same time?”
“No.”
“Then what am I going to do? Normally I’d be able to use my mobile as well as a landline.”
“You should have gone for a modern house. Didn’t the agent tell you what this one was going to be like? Send you any details?”
“A few. I didn’t read them.”
I must have looked and sounded deeply inept because she said scathingly: “Christ! Why the hell do people like you come to Dorset? You’re frightened of dogs, you can’t live without a phone—” she broke off abruptly. “It’s not the end of the world. I presume you have a laptop because I didn’t see a computer in the car?” I nodded. “What sort of mobile do you have? Do you have an Internet contract with your server?”
“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not going to work without a signal, is it?”
“How do you connect? By cable or Bluetooth?”
“Bluetooth.”
“OK. That gives you a range of ten metres between the two devices. All you have to do is raise the mobile high enough—” she broke off abruptly in face of my scepticism. “Forget it. I’ll do it myself. Just give me your bloody phone and bring your laptop upstairs.”
She refused to speak for the next half hour because I hadn’t shown enough enthusiasm for groping around the attic every time I wanted to send an email. I squatted on the landing beside a loft ladder, with my laptop beside me, listening to her stomping