The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [28]
Despite the photograph on the landing at Barton House, I had no idea who she was until we were introduced. Indeed, I’m sure I assumed she was Peter’s girlfriend, because she tucked her hand through his elbow as soon as she arrived and allowed him to lead her about the garden. His guests were genuinely pleased to see her. There was a lot of hugging and kissing, and cries of “How are you?” and I was slightly taken aback to discover this was Lily’s daughter.
“Your landlady,” Peter said with a wink. “If you have any complaints, now’s the time to make them.”
I’d been doing rather well up until then—with only the odd flicker of anxiety when I heard a male voice behind me—but I felt a definite lurch of the heart as I shook Madeleine’s hand. If Jess was to be believed, she was a callous bitch who had driven her mother into penury and then neglected her. My personal view was that Jess’s unaccountable hatred clouded her thinking, but the doubt was there, and Madeleine read it in my face.
Her immediate response was contrition. “Oh dear! Is the house awful? Aren’t you happy?”
What could I do, other than reassure her? “No,” I protested. “It’s beautiful…just what I wanted.”
There was nothing artificial about the smile that lit her face. She removed her hand from Peter’s elbow and tucked it into mine. “It is beautiful, isn’t it? I adored growing up there. Peter tells me you’re writing a book. What’s it about? Is it a novel?”
“No,” I said cautiously. “It’s non-fiction…a book on psychology…not very exciting, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, I’m sure it is. My mother would have been so interested. She loved reading.”
I opened my mouth to dampen her enthusiasm but she was already talking about something else. I don’t remember what it was now, a reference to Daphne du Maurier, I expect—“an old friend of Mummy’s”—whom she trotted out to new acquaintances as a close family connection. This seemed a little unlikely to me, as there was a considerable age difference between the novelist and Lily, and du Maurier had been dead for fifteen years, but Madeleine brushed such details aside. In the world she inhabited, meeting a person fleetingly at a party amounted to friendship.
She dropped names for effect in the same way that her mother was said to have done. I began to understand this when I commented on the paintings at Barton House and learnt that Nathaniel Harrison was her husband. It made sense of Jess’s remark that Madeleine had acquired the collection by sleeping with the man who owned them—even if “married to the artist” would have been more illuminating—but it led to a definite withdrawal on Madeleine’s part.
She spoke of Nathaniel as if he were up with greats, and to cement the impression she quoted David Hockney, suggesting he was a close acquaintance and a great admirer of her husband’s work. To listen to her, Hockney was a regular visitor to Nathaniel’s studio and always singing his praises to critics and dealers. I was genuinely interested, not just in how they knew Hockney, but in why he would champion an artist whose style and approach to painting were so different from his own.
“I didn’t realize he spent so much time in England,” I said. “I thought he was permanently based in America now.”
Madeleine smiled. “He comes when he can.”
“So how did you meet him?”
“The painting world’s a small one,” she said rather coolly, looking for someone else to speak to. “Nathaniel’s invited to all the openings.”
I should have left it there. Instead I asked her which other contemporary artists she and her husband knew. Lucian Freud? Damien Hirst? Tracey Emin? And where did her husband fit into the Brit art scene? Had Saatchi bought any of his work? She continued to smile but it fell far short of her eyes, and I knew I’d overstepped some invisible line in etiquette. I was supposed to revere the absent Nathaniel, not demonstrate knowledge of other artists or question Nathaniel’s close