The Devil`s Feather (9 page)

“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 about the attic before she came down the steps and repeated the exercise in the bedrooms. After a while she started shifting furniture around, angrily banging and scraping it across the floors. She sounded like an adolescent in a sulk and I’d have asked her to go if I hadn’t been so desperate for Internet contact.

She finally emerged from a bedroom at the end of the landing. “OK, I’ve got a signal. Do you want to try for the connection?”

It was a Heath Robinson set-up—a stepped pyramid built out of a dressing-table, a chest of drawers and some chairs—but it worked. It meant crouching under the ceiling to make the link but, once established, I was able to operate the computer at floor level.

“The signal’s stronger in the attic,” said Jess, “but it’ll mean climbing up there every time the battery runs down or you want to log off. I didn’t think you’d want to do that…and you’d probably get lost, anyway. It’s not very obvious which room you’re above.”

“How can I thank you?” I asked her warmly. “Perhaps you’d like a glass of wine or a beer? I have both in the car.”

She showed immediate disapproval. “I don’t drink.” And neither should you, was the firm rebuke that I took from her expression. She was even more disapproving when I lit a cigarette as we went back downstairs. “That’s about the worst thing you can do. If you get bronchitis on top of a panic attack, you’ll really be struggling.”

Delayed maturity and pointy-hat puritanism made a lethal combination, I thought, wondering if she’d cast me as dissolute Edwina from
Absolutely Fabulous
with herself as Saffy, the high-minded daughter. I was tempted to make a joke about it, but suspected that television was a focus of disapproval as well. I had no sense that there was room for fun in Jess’s life or, if there was, that it was the sort of fun anyone else would recognize.

Before she left, I asked her how I could contact her. “Why would you want to?” she asked.

For help…
“To thank you.”

“There’s no need. I’ll take it as read.”

I decided to be honest. “I don’t know who to call if something goes wrong,” I said with a tentative smile. “I doubt the agent could have lit the Aga.”

She smiled rather grudgingly in return. “My number’s in the book under J. Derbyshire, Barton Farm. I suppose you want help with the extension cables for the landline?”

I nodded.

“I’ll be here at eight-thirty.”

T
HIS WAS THE PATTERN
of the days that followed. Jess would make a reluctant offer of help, come the next morning to fulfil it, say very little before going away again, then return in the evening to point out something else she could do for me. On a few occasions I said I could manage myself, but she didn’t take the hint. Peter described me as her new pet—not a bad description, because she regularly brought me food from the farm—but her constant intrusions and bossy attitude began to annoy me.

It’s not as if I got to know her well. We had none of the conversations that two women in their thirties would normally have. She used silence as a weapon—either because she had total insight into the reaction it inspired, or none at all. It allowed her to dictate every social gathering—and by that I mean her and me, as I never saw her in a larger group except on the rare occasions when Peter dropped in—because the choice was to join in her silences or trot out a vacuous monologue. Neither of which made for a comfortable atmosphere.

It was difficult to decide how conscious this behaviour was. Sometimes I thought she was highly manipulative; other times I saw her as a victim, isolated and alienated by circumstance. Peter, who knew her as well as anyone, compared her to a feral cat—selfsufficient and unpredictable, with sharp claws. It was a fanciful analogy, but fairly accurate, since the goal of Winterbourne Barton appeared to be to “tame” her. Nonconformists may be the bread-and-butter of the media, and loved by the chattering classes, but they’re singled out for criticism in small communities.

Over time I heard Jess described as everything from an “animal rights activist” to a “predatory lesbian”—even “having an extra chromosome” because of her flat features and wide-spaced eyes. The Down syndrome charge was clearly nonsense, but I was less sure about the animal rights and lesbian tags. She was at her most animated when I asked her about the birds and wildlife in the valley, always able to identify animals from my descriptions and occasionally waxing lyrical on their habitats and behaviour. I also wondered if her twice-daily visits were a form of courtship. To avoid wasting her time, I made it abundantly clear that I was heterosexual, but she was as indifferent to that as she was to hints about leaving me alone.

After a couple of weeks, I was close to locking the doors, hiding the Mini in the garage and pretending to be out. I’d learnt by this time that I’d been singled out for special favours, since she never visited anyone else, not even Peter, and I began to wonder if Lily had found her as oppressive as I did. One or two people suggested that Jess’s attachment was to Barton House, but I couldn’t see it myself. I thought Peter’s suggestion that she saw me as a wounded bird was a more likely explanation. In her strangely detached way, she appeared to be monitoring me for signs of renewed anxiety.

Surprisingly, I didn’t show any. Not at the beginning, at least. For some reason, I slept better alone in that echoing old house than I had in my parents’ flat. I shouldn’t have done. I should have jumped at every shadow. At night the wisteria tapped on the window-panes and the moon silhouetted finger-like tendrils against the curtains. Downstairs, the numerous French windows invited anyone to break in while I slept.

My way of dealing with that threat was to leave the internal doors open and keep a powerful torch beside my bed. The beauty of Barton House was that every bedroom had a dressing-room with its own door to the landing, which meant I had a second exit if a prowler came along the corridor. It also had two staircases, one at the front and one at the back leading down to the scullery. This gave me confidence that I could outwit any intruder. I sprayed Jess’s WD40 into every external lock on the ground floor, and embraced the doors and windows as escape routes rather than entry points.

Nevertheless, it was Winterbourne Valley that was the real healer. The contrast between the noise and chaos of Baghdad and these peaceful fields of ripening corn and yellow rapeseed couldn’t have been greater. Passing cars were few and far between and people even scarcer. From the upstairs windows I could see all the way to the village in one direction and to the Ridgeway—a fold of land behind Dorset’s coastline—in the other. This gave me a sense of security for, even though the hedgerows and darkness would screen a trespasser, those same concealments would hide me.

J
ESS WAS A DEDICATED CONSERVATIONIST.
Apart from her hostility to social change, she farmed her land in much the same way as her ancestors had done by scrupulously rotating her crops, rationing pesticides, stocking rare breeds and protecting the wild species on her property by conserving their natural habitats. When I asked her once what her favourite novel was, she said it was
The Secret Garden
by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was a rare piece of irony—she knew I’d identify her immediately with the difficult, unloved orphan of the story—but the landscape of the hidden wilderness was certainly one she liked to inhabit.

By contrast, Madeleine liked her landscapes populated. She was at her best in company, where her easy charm and practised manner made her a popular guest. Peter described her as the typical product of an expensive girls’ boarding-school, well-spoken, well-mannered and not overburdened with brains.

I thought her extraordinarily attractive the first time I met her. She had the sweet face and cut-glass English accent of the elegant British movie stars of the forties and fifties, like Greer Garson in
Mrs. Miniver
or Virginia McKenna in
Carve Her Name with Pride.
It was the second Sunday of my tenancy. Peter had asked me along to meet some of my new neighbours over drinks in his garden. It was very casual, about twenty people, and Madeleine arrived late. I believe she came uninvited, as Peter hadn’t mentioned her beforehand.

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.”