Read Ellis Peters - George Felse 10 - The Knocker On Death's Door for Free Online

pairs of hostile female eyes; he stooped and kissed his mother’s grey and fallen cheek, and warmed her face for a moment into genuine life.
    “Hullo, Mother! Here’s Dinah, I promised I’d bring her to see you, didn’t I?” He reached for Dinah’s other hand as his mother put up an emaciated claw and allowed her bony fingers to be clasped for a moment in Dinah’s short-nailed, well-scrubbed, capable hand. It was like holding a dead bird, starved in the winter cold. Two rings, old-fashioned ones, but those were surely real rubies in them… and that long string of beads dangling into her lap to complete the elongated effect of every line of her body was neither of glass nor cultures, but pearls. Of course, she’d been from the branch of the family with some money left, until she married Robert senior, and he got his hands on most of it and sent it flying like skittles… I am a right
bitch
, thought Dinah, shocked behind her dutiful smile. I should blame her for walking round me with her hackles up, what else do I deserve? And penitence gave her a surge of positive benevolence. She wondered if she dared kiss… No, there was no invitation being signalled. On the contrary, the released hand was flexing inflexible fingers delicately under the edge of the dun-coloured lace stole, as if the clasp had bruised them.
    “So kind of you to give up an evening to a dull old woman like me, Miss Cressett. Do sit down…” She gestured vaguely towards a velvet hassock that would have installed Dinah at her feet, but Hugh was splendidly blind, and whisked up a comfortable leather chair close to his mother’s, to establish them as equals. Dinah gave him a lightning glance that would have liked to turn into a wink, and sat down with as little display of leg as she could manage. Appeasement was not in her nature, but whenever she looked at poor Hugh she had pacific thoughts.
    “Perhaps you would care for a glass of something? I don’t drink myself, but perhaps a sherry…?”
    “I brought a case of Traminer,” said Hugh unexpectedly, “we can try it with dinner if it suits. I was in town, and had to wait all day for my job, so I went shopping, and got hold of a real bargain. It’s Jugoslav, but it’s as good as most that comes out of Alsace. I know, I’ve tried it! Come and help me fetch it in, Rob, it’s in the boot of the car.”
    If it really was, Dinah thought with deep interest, then he’d popped it in there before he even came into the house. Indeed he must have dropped it off inside the yard before he delivered the respray job across in Greenfields, and installed it ready for delivery on his return. Her attention was caught in a new and grave way. If Hugh was as keyed up as all that, scheming with cases of wine and worrying about the impression she was going to make on his mother (not to mention the impression his mother was probably going to make on her!) then there was really nothing else for it, he
must
be in love. And she thought, calmed, assuaged and flattered, having someone like Hugh that much in love is a good reason for being in love with him. She had always wondered. Now she began to feel certain.
    Robert—how silent he was, did he never have anything to say in this household?—brought her a glass of sherry. She looked up in his face as she accepted it; such a middle-aged face, and he was only thirty-five, after all. Bleached, brownish hair, straight as pen-feathers, cropped close; not a badly shaped head at all, but so defeated, so inanimate. Tired eyes,, darker brown, so withdrawn that there was no knowing whether they were indifferent to her, or simply burdened past caring. He almost never spoke, but his voice was low, pleasantly pitched and sad; yet distantly disapproving, too. He was not on her side. Beware of the gentle people who do not rant, but nevertheless are not amenable to anyone’s wiles. In his way he was as rigid as his mother.
    And that, as Dinah discovered when they were left alone