to say straight off: people always wonder, but they don’t like to ask.’
He took my coat and hung it carefully on a mahogany stand, then ushered me into a small, square, chintzy sitting room that would have been very pleasant had it not been rendered into a hideous Christmas grotto. Festoons of paper chains and Chinese lanterns hung from the ceiling, swags of fake greenery lined the mantelpiece and the tops of all the pictures, and there were snowglobes and porcelain-faced Santas on every flat surface.
In the bow window, fairy lights twinkled among so many baubles on the small fake fir tree that the balding branches drooped wearily under the strain.
Observing my stunned expression with some satisfaction he said, ‘Jolly good, isn’t it? We like to do things properly in Little Mumming.’ Then he suddenly bellowed, ‘Tilda! She’s here!’
‘Coming!’ answered a high, brittle voice and with a loud rattling noise a tiny woman pushed a large hostess trolley through a swinging door from what was presumably the kitchen.
‘My wife, Tilda,’ Noël Martland said. ‘This is Holly Brown, m’dear.’
‘So I should suppose, unless you’ve taken to entertaining strange young women,’ she said tartly, eyeing me from faded but still sharp blue eyes. Though age had withered her, it had not prevented her from applying a bold coating of turquoise eye shadow to her lids and a generous slick of foundation, powder and glossy scarlet lipstick. Under the white frilly apron she was wearing a peach satin blouse with huge dolman sleeves that finished in tight cuffs at the wrists, and a matching Crimplene pinafore dress. Her matchstick-thin legs in filmy loose stockings ended in pointed shoes with very high stiletto heels. I felt glad she had the trolley to hang onto.
‘The agency said you were coming on your own, though really a couple would have been better. But I suppose we’re lucky to get anyone at such short notice, over Christmas,’ she said, eyeing me critically.
‘I am sure you will cope splendidly!’ declared her husband.
‘That remains to be seen, Noël,’ she snapped back. ‘Miss or Mrs?’ she suddenly demanded, with a glance at my naked left hand.
‘Mrs,’ I said, ‘I’m a widow. I do a lot of cooking, so I’ve never been much of a one for rings.’
‘A widow? Tough luck,’ she said, taking the covers off a couple of dishes to reveal plates of pinwheel sandwiches and butterfly sponge cakes.
‘You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble,’ I protested. ‘I really wasn’t expecting to be fed, just to pick up the keys!’
‘I didn’t – we always have an early lunch anyway, so I made extra. My housekeeper has gone home for Christmas as usual, but I do most of the cooking in any case – it’s nothing to me. I was a TV chef, you know, in the early days. If I’d known the exact time of your arrival, I could have whipped up a soufflé.’
‘This looks lovely,’ I said, taking a sandwich. ‘Were you a TV cook like Fanny Craddock, then?’
Her face darkened alarmingly and it didn’t need Noël’s appalled expression and shake of the head to inform me that I had made a faux pas.
‘Don’t mention That Woman to me,’ she snapped. ‘She was nothing but a brass-faced amateur!’
‘Sorry,’ I said quickly.
‘I was Tilda Thompson in those days – and much more photogenic than she ever was, all slap and false eyelashes.’
This seemed to me to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but I made a vague noise of agreement.
‘Coffee?’ Noël chipped in brightly, pouring me a cup with a slightly trembling hand.
‘Thank you.’ Having tasted the sandwich I was eager to accept anything that might wash the flavour away … whatever it was.
‘Did you call Jessica?’ Tilda Martland asked her husband.
‘On my way to the door, m’dear. But perhaps I had better call again.’
Upstairs a door slammed and footsteps thundered down the stairs like a herd of inebriated rhinos.
‘No need,’ she said dryly.
Jess was a tall, skinny, dark-haired girl of about twelve or thirteen (not quite as tall as I had been at that age, but even skinnier), dressed entirely in black, from glasses frame to shoes. Anyone less like a Jessica I never saw. She certainly stood out against the chintzy, ornament-laden and over-bedecked sitting room.
‘This is our granddaughter, Jessica,’ Noël Martland said.
‘Jess, Grandpa,’ she corrected, in a long-suffering way.
He smiled at her affectionately. ‘Jess, this is Mrs Brown who is going to look after Old Place until your Uncle Jude gets back.’
‘Please do all call me Holly,’ I suggested.
‘Then you must call us Tilda and Noël.’
Jess eyed me curiously, in that slightly-shifty adolescent way that generally denotes nothing much except acute self-consciousness. ‘I’m only here on my own because my parents are in Antarctica. But now my great-uncle’s dead and Jude’s gone off somewhere, we can’t stay at Old Place over Christmas and New Year like we usually do. It’s a drag.’
‘Jess’s parents are studying pelicans,’ Tilda said, unveiling another plate of tiny sandwiches, this time cut into teddy bear shapes.
‘Penguins,’ corrected Jess. ‘Emperor penguins. And how old do you think I am, Granny?’
‘Going by your manners, six.’
‘Ha, ha,’ said Jess, but she took a teddy bear sandwich and, after lifting up the top to examine the innocuous-looking ham filling, ate it.
‘It’s such a pity that Mo and Jim had to go off suddenly like that, isn’t it?’ Noël said. ‘But it couldn’t be helped. I only hope you don’t find it too lonely up there – there is a cleaner twice a week, but the couple who used to look after my brother, the Jacksons, retired and my nephew looks after himself when he’s home.’
‘That cleaning girl is a slut: I don’t think she ever does more than whisk a duster about for half an hour and then drink tea and read magazines,’ Tilda said. ‘But I expect you will soon have everything shipshape again, Holly.’
‘I’ll certainly make sure the areas of the house I use are kept neat and tidy, ’ I said pointedly, because it was a common misconception that home-sitters would also spring-clean and do all kinds of other little jobs around the house and garden and I often found it as well to make the real position clear from the outset. ‘I’m here simply to make sure the house is safe and to look after the animals. I believe there are a dog and a horse?’
‘Lady – she was my great-aunt’s horse, so she’s ancient,’ Jess said. ‘Me and Grandpa went up in the golf buggy yesterday afternoon and again this morning and I filled her water bucket and haynet, but I couldn’t get too close because I’m allergic to horses. I sneeze.’
‘That’s a pity,’ I said sincerely, because I could have done with a knowledgeable, horse-mad child.
‘Yes, but I’m all right with dogs as long as I don’t brush them, so I took Merlin out for a run.’
‘That’s something,’ I agreed, assuming Merlin to be the dog I’d been told about.
‘We left Lady in for the day, with the top of the stable door open, in case you were late arriving – it goes dark so early at this time of year,’ Noël said, ‘and you wouldn’t want to be bringing her in from the paddock in the dark, before you’ve got your bearings.’
‘No indeed,’ I said gratefully.
‘Jude sets great store by her, because she was his