Death and the Decorator
(Fethering Mystery #21)
by Simon Brett
To Donald,
who must have painted
every square centimetre of Frith House,
inside and out
ONE
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ said Carole Seddon testily. ‘You’re not going to tell me that colours have emotions?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ came the even reply from Jude. ‘Colours do not have emotions. They prompt emotions.’
‘Huh,’ said Carole.
It was a response Jude had heard many times before. And entirely predictable. Jude privately berated herself for the ease with which she kept putting herself into contention with her neighbour. Carole Seddon could be very prickly and there were whole acres of subject matter which were best avoided. The trouble was, though, that if Jude never ventured into areas that might spark scepticism from Carole, they’d never have anything to talk about. And they were, in their own idiosyncratic way, very close.
The topic which had engendered the ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ and the ‘Huh’ in this instance was decoration. Jude, seated over coffee in the antiseptic magnolia-walled kitchen of her neighbour’s house, High Tor, had casually mentioned that she was about to have her sitting room painted.
There were few subjects she could raise that didn’t prompt suspicion in her neighbour. Jude had long since ceased to mention anything about her emotional or romantic life. The fact that she had two marriages and a number of affairs behind her had, from their first meeting, engendered competitive jealousy in Carole. Her own arid marriage to – and subsequent divorce from – David had left her feeling bruised and unlovely. And her one foray into relationships since had been unlikely and, in retrospect, ill-advised.
So, the arrival next door, some years before, of a woman who seemed at ease with herself and wielded a measurable magnetism for men, had set Carole’s self-disparagement machine into instant overdrive. She felt convinced that Jude’s tally of lovers far exceeded the number that she could possibly have crammed into her fifty-odd years of life.
As a result, whenever possible, Jude kept off the subject of men.
She also tried to keep off the subject of her working life. She was a healer. And the word had only to be spoken to prompt gales of scepticism from the direction of High Tor. It was Carole Seddon’s view that anything that couldn’t be treated on the NHS didn’t deserve treating. That alternative and complementary ther-apies were ‘mumbo-jumbo’. And that mental illness was all in the mind.
‘So, colours can heal, can they?’ asked Carole.
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Some people’s cancers can be healed by a dab of emulsion? Is that it?’
‘You know full well it isn’t. But the right choice of colours can contribute to a healing environment.’
Carole restrained herself from giving vent to another ‘Huh.’ Instead, she asked, ‘Why suddenly now?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Why do you suddenly want to redecorate Woodside Cottage now?’
‘Why not now?’
‘I don’t know. But since you moved to Fethering, Jude, you’ve seemed quite happy living in a state of …’ She hesitated. Jude wondered whether her neighbour was on the brink of ‘chaos’ or ‘squalor’, before Carole continued, more graciously, ‘to have the house the way you like it.’
‘Oh, I’ve just been thinking it needed doing for a while.’
‘I see.’ It was a tacit acknowledgement that she wasn’t going to get any more information, but Jude knew the real, unspoken question was about money. Carole was eternally intrigued about what her friend lived on. Surely it wasn’t from healing – there couldn’t be a living in that, could there? Where did Jude’s income derive from? Was it, Carole’s suspicious mind speculated, payments from still-besotted former lovers?
Jude had no intention of revealing that what had enabled the employment of a decorator was an unexpected legacy from one of her former clients. An old woman, whom she had treated over the years for panic attacks, had bequeathed a grateful couple of thousand to ‘Jude, my healer and friend, with love.’
Carole returned to the scab she’d been scratching earlier. ‘So, what is this about colours prompting emotions?’
‘There is a view,’ Jude replied, ‘that certain colours encourage certain moods.’
‘Whose view?’ came the sharp response.
‘How far do you want me to go back?’ asked Jude wearily. ‘According to some authorities, chromotherapy originated with the Egyptian god Thoth.’
‘“Authorities”?’ Carole echoed cynically. ‘By that I suppose you mean New Age birdbrains?’
Jude hadn’t the energy to get into another of these circuitous arguments.
But, needless to say, Carole wasn’t finished. She selected another word to repeat with the same dismissive intonation. ‘“Chromotherapy”? Giving something a medical-sounding name doesn’t stop it from being mumbo-jumbo, you know.’
Jude looked at her watch. It had a large round face and was threaded onto a colourful ribbon tied around her wrist. ‘I have to go,’ she said abruptly. ‘Someone coming to see me.’
‘Patient?’ asked Carole.
‘As you know, I prefer to use the word “client”,’ said Jude, for the umpteenth time.
‘So, is it a client or …?’
Jude was amused by the absent words. ‘… or another of your lovers?’ But, however much she thought that, Carole would never say it.
‘Someone I’m mentoring,’ Jude said as she rose from the table.
‘“Mentoring”? Nobody had mentors when I was growing up.’
‘I think people did, Carole, but they probably called them something else. “Teachers”? “Tutors”? “Apprentice-masters”, possibly?’
That got another ‘Huh’. Then, ‘By the way, who’re you getting to do your decorating?’
‘Pete. Have you heard of him?’
‘Oh yes. Everyone in Fethering knows Pete.’
Jude waited for the critical remark that followed the mention of most local names.
But it didn’t come. Instead, Carole said, ‘Apparently, he’s very efficient, Pete. Nobody has a bad word to say about Pete.’
‘Good.’ By now, Jude was at High Tor’s front door. When she opened it, she felt the icy blast of February in Fethering.
‘When it comes to colours for walls,’ Carole called after her, ‘you can do a lot worse than magnolia.’
There is nothing so beguiling as enthusiasm, particularly in the young. Jude had felt that the moment she met Brandie Neville. It was at a Complementary Health Conference in Bristol. Jude had been on a panel discussing the subject: ‘How to Convince Sceptics that Healing Works’. She had taken on the assignment with some reluctance. She didn’t really like talking about her work. Though she never doubted its efficacy, discussing healing in public seemed somehow threatening, a risk to its fragile mystery. But the organizer of the event, a therapist friend called Chrissie, had convinced her that unpersuaded members of the audience might be won round by her good sense and straight talking. (And Jude’s argument that there were unlikely to be many ‘unpersuaded members of the audience’ attending a Complementary Health Conference was given very short shrift.)
It was after the end of the discussion that Brandie Neville introduced herself. She was small and dainty, there was something almost fairylike about her. Her voice was small and dainty, nearly childish, too.
And very tentative. Nervous, even. It was clearly costing her something to approach a stranger.
‘I so enjoyed what you said in the discussion, Jude. It is all right to call you “Jude”, is it?’