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much.’
    ‘I’ll pay you …’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’d do it for the chance to look at your house. The whole village wants to know if it’s been transformed like on one of those TV makeover shows.’
    ‘The village,’ he grinned, ‘is going to be very disappointed.’
    Annie closed the shop early – Bartlemy had always encouraged her to keep whatever business hours she liked, but since Nathan became a weekly boarder she had tried to stick to ten till five – walked along the High Street and turned into the lane to Riverside House. The route ran between hedgerows that were brown and shrunken in their winter barrenness, with meadows on either side; Annie knew one was a conservation area because of the presence of a rare butterfly or orchid. The house lay beyond: she could see the pixy-hat roofs some way off. From the outside, it presented an image of rustic desirability, but when Michael admitted her, leading her through the hallway into what was clearly the main drawing room, she thought it looked curiously unlived-in. Thefurniture was too perfectly arranged, the rugs untrodden upon, everything clean, immaculate, untouched. ‘I don’t use this room much,’ Michael said, as though reading her mind. ‘My domain is in one tower, Rianna’s in the other. We meet occasionally in the bedroom.’ Annie assumed he was joking, but she wasn’t sure. She followed him down some steps and into the round chamber which was evidently his study. Units had been designed especially to fit the curve of the wall, and a wooden desk supported the latest in computer technology. ‘Here we are,’ said Michael. ‘Tea first, or work first?’
    ‘Work,’ said Annie.
    In the end, it took far longer than she had intended. ‘To me, this machine is just a glorified typewriter,’ Michael said, so she spent some time sorting out his files, teaching him to use search engines and surf the Internet. When they finished it was dark, and Michael declared it was too late for tea, offering her a drink instead, and a quick tour of the house, if she wanted. ‘So you can tell the village grapevine about all the redecorating we haven’t done.’ Even the master bedroom, Annie thought, looked unslept-in: Michael had a couch in the upper room of his ‘tower’. The bathroom boasted a circular bath almost the size of a swimming pool; there were several guest bedrooms though they never seemed to have guests; the kitchen had the latest kind of Aga but the microwave appeared to have seen more use. Except in Michael’s rooms there was luxury without personality, and a strange coldness, as if the whole house was an exhibit rather than a residence. Annie didn’t get to see inside Rianna’s tower: that was kept locked. ‘Rianna’s very intense about her privacy,’ Michael explained. ‘Even I don’t have a key.’
    ‘Bluebeard’s Chamber,’ Annie said before she could stop herself.
    ‘Stacked with the bodies of her ex-husbands?’ Michaellaughed. ‘There’s only been one, he’s a producer, I’ve met him. He’s about sixty now and married to a blonde of twenty-three.’
    ‘Sorry,’ Annie said. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude, or … or nosy.’
    ‘You weren’t,’ said Michael. ‘I suppose it does sound a bit odd, to people who don’t know Rianna. She’s – I expect you would call her temperamental. Personal space is very important to her. We have a wonderful cleaner, a Yugoslav émigré who comes over from Crowford, but Rianna won’t let her in there; she prefers to do the cleaning herself. Now, what would you like to drink? There’s whisky, gin, beer … whisky, more whisky.’
    ‘I’ll have a whisky,’ Annie said with a smile.
    They had their drinks in the sitting room above Michael’s study, containing the couch ‘for those short kips between periods of not working’, and a couple of worn leather armchairs. Its windows framed a view over the conservation area in one direction, and down to the river in the other. Since