Trisha Ashley - Twelve Days of Christmas

She ushered me briskly through a series of dark-oak-panelled rooms with polished wooden floors. Some had elaborate white-stuccoed ceilings, but they all looked dusty, dull and neglected. There was a small morning room with a TV, a long dining room sporting a spectacular, if incongruous, Venetian mirror over the hearth, and a well-stocked library with a snooker table in the middle of it.

She paused at the door next to it. ‘Jude uses this room to work in and he locks it when he’s away.’ She sniffed. ‘You’d think he didn’t trust me.’

He probably didn’t, though actually I’d found that there were quite often one or two mysterious locked rooms in houses I was looking after: Bluebeard’s chambers, as Laura had suggested, though their secrets were probably only of the mundane kind.

But this room revealed its secrets, for the top of the door was glazed — perhaps it had been the land agent’s office, or something like that. It held a tilting draughtsman’s table, a large wooden easel and several tables bearing a silting of objects, including jars of pencils, brushes and lots of small models, presumably of sculptures. It was hard to make out what they were from that distance. There was also what looked like one of those hideaway computer workstations — but if so, then it must be dial-up, because there was no broadband here and, given the apparent unreliability of the phone lines, being able to connect with the internet must be a matter of luck. But that was okay — Ellen was the only person who ever emailed me much, with details of jobs.

‘There’s never been anything of value to lock away in Old Place anyway,’ Sharon was saying scathingly, though I noticed a wistful look on her face like a child at a sweetshop window. ‘Though Jude’s that famous now, they’re saying that even his little drawings of horses for those weird sculptures of his can fetch hundreds of pounds.’ She nodded through the glass door. ‘And he just crumples them up and tosses them in that waste-paper basket!’

‘Well, that’s up to him, isn’t it? Presumably he wasn’t happy with them.’

‘You’d think he’d leave the basket for me to empty, but no, he takes them outside and puts them in the garden incinerator!’ She obviously bitterly regretted this potential source of income going up in flames.

‘That does seem a little excessive,’ I agreed, amused.

Apart from a couple of china and linen cupboards, the only other door from the passage was to a little garden hall with French doors leading outside. The trug of garden tools on the bench looked as if they hadn’t been touched for half a century and were waiting for Sleeping Beauty to wake up, don the worn leather gauntlets, and start briskly hacking back the brambles.

‘Is that a walled garden out there?’ I asked, peering through the gathering gloom.

‘Yes, though no-one bothers with most of it since Mrs Martland died. .’ She screwed up her face in recollection. ‘That would be ten years ago now, thereabouts.’

‘Is there a gardener?’

‘An old bloke called Henry comes and grows vegetables in part of it, though he’s supposed to have retired. He lives down in Little Mumming, in the almshouses — those three funny little cottages near the bridge.’

‘Oh yes, I noticed those. Victorian Gothic.’

‘I wouldn’t know, I hate old houses,’ she said, which I could tell by the state of this one.

There was a little cloakroom off the hall, with a splendid Victorian blue and white porcelain toilet depicting Windsor Castle inside the bowl, and I was just thinking that peeing on one of the Queen’s residences must always have seemed a little lese-majesty when Sharon said impatiently, ‘Come on: I need to get off home,’ and gave me a dig in the back.

We went upstairs by a grander flight of stairs than that in the sitting room, with a stairlift folded back against the wall.

‘That was put in for Jude’s dad,’ she said, hurrying me past a lot of not very good family portraits of fair, soulful women and dark, watchful men, when I would have lingered. ‘Six bedrooms if you count the old nursery and the little room off it, plus there’s two more in the staff wing.’

She opened and closed doors, allowing me tantalising glimpses of faded grandeur, including one four-poster bed. The nursery, up a further stair, was lovely, with a white-painted wooden bed with a heart cut out in the headboard, a scrap-screen and a big rocking horse.

‘There are more rooms on this floor, but they’re shut up and not used any more. The heating doesn’t go up that far.’

‘Oh yes, I noticed there were radiators — all mod cons! I’m impressed.’

‘I wouldn’t get excited, it never gets hot enough to do more than keep the chill off the place.’ She clattered back down the stairs and hared off along the landing. ‘Two bathrooms, though Jude’s had an en suite shower put into his bedroom since he inherited.’

‘That isn’t bad for a house of this size,’ I said. ‘There’s the downstairs cloakroom, too.’

‘And a little bathroom in the staff wing, where you’re sleeping. This is the family wing, of course — your room’s in the other, where the old couple who used to look after the place lived.’

Evidently house-sitters ranked with servants in Jude Martland’s eyes — but so long as I was warm and comfortable, I didn’t mind where my room was.

The bedrooms either opened off the corridor, or the oakfloored balcony, where I stopped to gaze down at the huge sitting room, which looked like a stage set awaiting the entrance of the actors for an Agatha Christie dénouement, until Sharon began to rattle her turquoise nails against the banister in an impatient tattoo.

Once through the door into the other wing the décor turned utilitarian and the bathroom was very basic and ancient, though with an electric shower above the clawfooted bath. The bedroom that was to be mine was plain, comfortable — and clean. I expect Mo and Jim did that as soon as they arrived.

As if she could read my thoughts, Sharon said, ‘Mo and Jim changed the bed ready for you, but they hadn’t time to wash the sheets, so you’ll find them in the utility room, I expect. I don’t do washing.’

I was tempted to ask her exactly what she did do, but managed to repress it: it was none of my business.

We went down the backstairs to the kitchen, a very large room with an electric cooker as well as a huge Aga, a big scrubbed pine table in the middle, a couple of easy chairs and a wicker dog basket. This looked like the place where the owner did most of his living — it was certainly warmer than the rest of the house.

‘The Aga’s oil-fired — the tank’s in one of the outhouses — and it runs the central heating, but you don’t have to cook with it because there’s a perfectly good stove over there.’

‘Oh, I like using an Aga,’ I said, and she gave me another of her ‘you’re barking mad’ looks, then glanced at her watch.

‘Come on. Through here there’s the utility, larder, cloakroom, scullery, cellar. .’

She flung open a door to reveal two enormous white chest freezers. ‘The nearest one’s full of Mo and Jim’s food and so are the cupboards, fridge and larder.’

‘Yes, they said they were leaving it for me, which was kind of them.’

She closed it again and led me on. ‘That’s the cellar door and there’s firewood down there as well as the boiler. This by the back door is sort of a tackroom, it’s got feed and harness and stuff in it for the horse.’

Something had been puzzling me. ‘Right — but where’s the dog?’

‘In the yard, I don’t want him under my feet when I’m cleaning, do I?’

‘Isn’t it a bit cold out there?’ I asked and she gave me a look before wrenching the back door open. A large and venerable grey lurcher, who had been huddled on the step, got up and walked in stiffly, sniffed at me politely, and then plodded past in the direction of the kitchen.