It didn’t seem to affect Nile, who gestured into the murky darkness and said, ‘There’s a stable block over there, partly turned into offices where Ted and Geeta run the family business. Did you see the sign on the way in?’
‘Pondlife?’ I asked. ‘Aquarium supplies? Garden ponds?’
The wet grey misty curtains opportunely parted at that moment to allow a slightly sickly moon to briefly reveal a large pond in a hollow below the house, equipped with a hut and jetty. Everything glistened and it looked a little surreal.
‘More that kind of thing,’ Nile said.
‘Right. Not your average plastic garden liner with a fake heron standing at the edge, then.’
‘Not really. I’ll explain at dinner,’ he promised, hauling out my suitcase and refusing to let it go when I tried to take it from him. I’m fivefeet nine inches and I can carry my own luggage, but I only just managed to grab my overnight bag before he got that, too.
‘Come on,’ he said, as a small, plump figure appeared in the open doorway. ‘Here’s Sheila, wondering where we’ve got to.’
Nile’s mother drew us into the hall, closing the outer door behind us, and then shook my hand with a square, firm grip.
‘There you are! Welcome to Oldstone,’ she said warmly. She was blue-eyed and with pale golden hair, so totally unlike Nile that he must have got his darker colouring from his father’s side of the family.
‘Thank you for letting me stay at such short notice,’ I said.
‘Not at all: we’re delighted to have you here and dinner’s nearly ready. All my guests eat with the family, so I’ll show you to your room and then you can follow your nose down to the kitchen when you’re ready.’
Nile had already vanished through one of the doors with my case and it was waiting for me in my room when we got there. Since we hadn’t passed him on the stairs, I don’t know where he went after that. Perhaps he flew out of the window like a giant bat?
Or maybe I’ve watched too many old Dracula movies.
It was just as well that there was nothing of the Victorian Gothic about the room, for it had been remodelled in a modern and slightly incongruous Scandinavian style, with light wooden furniture and the walls and paintwork in shades of white, warm cream and a soft greyish-blue.
‘I know it’s all too modern for a Victorian room,’ said Sheila, with whom I’d been on first-name terms before we were halfway up the stairs. ‘But the roof had leaked and brought the ceiling down, so everything was spoiled and we had to start again. I already had this furniture from our previous house.’
‘I like it,’ I told her, and she beamed.
‘I canseethe dark antique furniture goes with the age of the house, but here and in my own bedroom I decided to have things the way I like them, instead.’
‘I think Nile said you were Norwegian?’ I ventured.
‘Only a quarter – a grandmother,’ she said. ‘But I often spent my summer holidays there, as a child.’
She opened a door in one wall to reveal a bathroom. ‘It’s what theycall a Jack and Jill bathroom, with a door to the bedroom on the other side too,’ she explained. ‘But there are no other guests, so you have it to yourself. Now, I’ll leave you to unpack and settle in, but come down in about an hour for dinner, or earlier if you’re ready.’
She bestowed another naturally warm smile on me, so that I felt my last reluctance at the prospect of being marooned out at Oldstone melt entirely away. Nile might be insufferably overbearing and bossy, but it had worked out all right this time.
Even the cheerful Scandi-style ambience was just right because, given my overactive imagination, anything antique would have conjured up not only vampires, but Cathy’s hand tapping at the window to come in, just when I was falling asleep.
I hung up my clothes, which were getting perma-creased from never being unpacked, then washed and tidied up in the bathroom, which was an austere but pristine black and white tiled apartment. There was a shower attachment over the claw-legged bath, and though the radiator was barely lukewarm to the touch, the towels were huge and fluffy.
I changed into a clean pair of jeans, a long green shirt and my favourite pair of Minnetonka beaded moccasins, then went down the stairs I’d come up. This time I noticed a door on the landing that must lead into the rest of the house, so maybe Nile hadn’t flown out of the window, after all.
As Sheila had suggested, I followed my nose through dimly lit passages booby-trapped with random steps up and down, until I reached the kitchen.
The door was ajar, and warmth, light and a cheerful babble of conversation spilled out, so that I paused for a moment feeling rather shy, before entering.
The large room was brightly lit after the dim passages and seemed very full of people. Nile was facing me, sitting at the head of a long table and holding a lively dark-eyed infant upright, while it flexed its knees and bounced up and down, as if revving for take-off. When he looked up and caught my eye, his expression was still amused and tender, which was quite a revelation …
A slender woman with a long plait of hair hanging like a black silktassel down the back of her deep pink salwar kameez was laying out soup plates.
‘Here’s Alice,’ said Sheila, turning from the large Aga range with a dripping ladle in one hand. The Labrador, obviously used to these moments, caught the soupy drops before they touched the floor.
‘Alice, this is my lovely daughter-in-law, Geeta,’ she said, indicating the woman laying the table, ‘that’s my son Teddy, and Nile’s holding their baby, Casper …’