The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [29]
It was all very childish, and I was amused at how she avoided me until Peter brought us together again. “Did Marianne tell you Jess Derbyshire’s been helping her settle in?” he asked, steering her towards me with a hand in the small of her back. “Jess has built a hoist so that Marianne can access the Internet via her mobile.”
I watched Madeleine’s expression close at the mention of Jess. “It’s fairly ramshackle,” I said. “We’ve discovered a signal near the ceiling in the back bedroom that allows me to operate my laptop underneath it. But it’s not ideal, and I wondered if you’d have any objections to my installing broadband. It’s available through the Barton Regis exchange and it would make life a lot easier. I’ve asked the agent and he says he can’t see a problem as long as I pay for it. I’ll happily leave the ADSL modem behind when I go.”
Peter placed a teasing hand on my shoulder. “It’s no good talking gobbledy-gook to Madeleine. She still uses a quill and parchment. It’s a little box,” he explained to her, “that separates voices from online connection…means you can use the phone at the same time as the computer. If Marianne’s prepared to pay for it then my advice is to give her the go-ahead immediately.” He laughed. “It’ll make that old ruin of yours more attractive to the next tenant, and it won’t cost you a thing.”
Madeleine’s smile would have frozen the balls off a brass monkey, but it wasn’t directed at Peter. It was directed at me. I had a strong sense that it was his hand on my shoulder that offended her, and not what he said.
I WAS SURPRISED, therefore, when she came to Barton House, full of smiles, the next morning. “I realized last night that I never gave you an answer to the broadband question,” she said gaily, as I opened the front door. “Goodness! Is the key working properly now? Mummy only ever used the bolts because the lock was so stiff.” She walked past me into the hall. “I paid a man to grease it but he didn’t think it would last.”
I shut the door behind her. “Jess lent me some WD-40. I give it a spray every day which seems to be doing the trick.” I gestured towards the sitting-room. “Would you like to go in here? Perhaps you’d rather be in the kitchen?”
“I don’t mind,” she said, looking around to see if I’d made any changes. I saw her eyes flicker towards the piece of wallpaper that had peeled away from its Blu-Tack and was now, courtesy of Jess, firmly reattached with paste. “Mummy was always very pukka about entertaining guests in the drawing-room. She thought it was non-U to expect her friends to put up with dirty crockery and vegetable peelings. Did you manage to light the Aga all right?”
“Jess did.”
Madeleine’s mouth thinned immediately. “I expect she made a song and dance of it.”
“No.” I opened the door to the sitting-room. “Shall we go in here?”
Despite its size and sunny aspect, the room was too dreary to qualify as a drawing-room, and I hadn’t been into it since my first day. Jess had told me it used to be full of antiques until Madeleine replaced them with junk from a second-hand furniture shop.
The carpet, a threadbare plush pile in muted pink, showed multiple evidence of dog accidents from when Lily had mastiffs of her own. According to Jess, she’d never exercised them enough, and had covered the marks with Persian rugs. Now packed away in storage, they were probably going mouldy, if the musty smell of damp in the room was any indication of their state when they were removed. The walls were worse. They hadn’t been decorated in years and the plaster was flaking above the skirting boards and beneath the coving round the ceiling. Irregular patches showed where Lily’s paintings had been.
In an effort to distract the eye, Madeleine had hung two of her husband’s originals and three Jack Vettriano prints on the inside walls—The Singing Butler, Billy Boys and Dance Me to the End of Love—but all you could see of the prints was the sunlight reflecting on their glass. I couldn’t understand why she’d put them there as Vettriano’s film-noir style sat very uncomfortably