Page 64 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
‘Angelique is a well-known stained-glass artist and she’s going to reopen and use the old workshop by the stable block,’ Carey said.
‘Angelique? Is that really your name?’ she asked rudely, staring at me. ‘It’s a bit weird.’
‘My mother used to love a series of novels with a heroine called Angelique, so that’s how I ended up with it.’
I was seriously thinking of having the explanation tattooed on my wrist, so I could just hold it up for people to read whenever I was asked.
‘Is she dead?’
‘Mum? No, alive, kicking, married to a millionaire and living in the Caribbean.’
Though of course, there was a chance that Mum could at this moment be dead drunk and out for the count on rum punch.
‘Really – a millionaire?Iwas all set to holiday on Branson’s Necker Island with my boyfriend a couple of years ago, because he was a well-known actor and he got invited, but then he dumped me just after I’d bought a whole load of sarongs and bikinis.’
‘How tragic,’ I commiserated. ‘Did you get your money back?’
Scanning my well-worn black jeans, Doc Marten boots and a Grateful Dead sweatshirt I’d bought at a car-boot sale, she said, ‘You don’t look like a millionaire’s daughter.’
‘I’m not.’
She glanced uncertainly at me through spider-leg eyelashes and gave up any further attempt to suss out what my relationship with Carey was.
There had been times when evenIhadn’t been too sure about that … or even what I wanted it to be.
I mean, when we’d bickered in front of Molly about that last year at college, it had made me remember how we’d briefly seemed to come even closer than ever before … until I caught him snogging a former girlfriend at a party and realized he hadn’t really changed his ways. And then, almost immediately, I’d met and fallen head over heels in love with Julian, so it was probably just as well.
The next time I’d seen Carey he was going out with the first in a new line of dazzling blonde beauties with velociraptor instincts wrapped up in pink fuzzy coatings.
But there was no denying he would always be special to me: take the way my heart had leaped at the sound of his voice when he’d turned up in the workshop to rescue me, and the feeling I had that I wanted to wrap myself around him and never let him go …
Vicky was obviously keen on working up to that position, for she’d moved her chair nearer to his and was now employing every flirtatious trick in the book and, what with all the fluttering, I was surprised her eyelashes hadn’t dropped off. If she’d had a fan, she’d probably have rapped him over the knuckles and told him he was very naughty.
‘Mum was upset all over again, when you told her she was going to lose her job and salary,’ Vicky told him. ‘Of course, since you’re putting Dad’s wages up, they won’t be that much worse off, only she’s so attached to that stupid old wing of the house, she seems to think it’s her life-work to look after it. She’s batty.’
If she’d cleaned everything else the way she did the panelling, I’d have suspected Ella was OCD, rather than batty, but I didn’t say so. I’d obviously been relegated to the back of the audience and Carey was occupying the Royal Box.
‘She seems to love polishing the panelling in the old wing and I don’t really mind if she carries on doing that, so long as she doesn’t wear it away,’ Carey said good-humouredly. ‘But I can’t afford to pay her that large salary any more, and what I save in the difference after increasing your Dad’s wages will go to pay the cleaning company for the extra hours they’ll put in to get the place up to scratch.’
‘Oh, well, I’ll tell her she can still haunt the old wing if she wants to, and that might cheer her up a bit,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t catch me in there on my own, because it reallyishaunted. When she lived at Mossby as a little girl the old nanny used to tell her stories about the ghosts. Lots of peoplediedthere.’
‘That goes for all old houses,’ I said. ‘And after all, Carey’s uncle died here only last year.’
‘He doesn’t seem to be haunting me, though,’ Carey said. ‘Or not yet. Maybe he will when he sees Mossby on telly and hordes of visitors swarming round the old wing.’
‘Is Mossby going to be on telly? Like in yourComplete CountryCottageseries?’ Vicky asked eagerly, so Carey gave her a short, edited description of our plans for a new series.
‘I’dloveto be in it,’ she sighed wistfully, and pointedly.
‘It’s not a film, it’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary,’ I said, but I could see she was already imagining herself into a starring role – maybe as chatelaine, if she could nudge me right out of the picture.
I thought we’d never get rid of her after that, until my eye caught Carey’s and he gave me a wink.
‘It’s getting late,’ he said, standing up and tipping his onions and garlic into the pan with the sauce. ‘Angel, if you put some water on to boil for the pasta, I’ll just run Vicky back home in the golf buggy: it’s so dark out there, we don’t want her breaking anything, do we?’
She went eagerly enough, probably assuming he wanted to get her on her own. And perhaps, despite that wink, he did, for even though I disliked her, I could see she had sex appeal – and a great technique.
I went and looked in the age-mottled mirror on the far wall and a small creature with a pointed face and mossy grey-green eyes under obliquely slanting dark brows looked back at me, like something slightly feral peeking out of the undergrowth.
