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CHAPTER 3

‘Emily!’ Zena Yorke flung a shout towards the door that stood open between her large bedroom and the long narrow bathroom constructed seventy years ago from a slice chopped off the end of the adjoining dressing room and her husband’s room beyond it.

‘Yes?’ Emily Bond screeched back. She no longer bothered to tack a deferential ‘Madam’ or even ‘Mrs Yorke’ on to her utterances and it was many a long day since she had troubled to interrupt a task in order to trot obediently at Zena’s call and put her head round the door of whatever room the summons had issued from. If Mrs Yorke didn’t like it, Mrs Yorke could blooming well lump it.

Plenty of women in Milbourne only too eager to find a charlady–and to pay better money than Mrs Yorke. Sweeter-tempered women, too. Emily rubbed vigorously at the mirrored front of the medicine cupboard, lost for a moment in a comforting fantasy of those other idealized housewives smiling gratefully at her, proffering steaming beakers of cream-laden coffee.

‘I can see a huge cobweb over the wardrobe,’ Zena yelled from the downy nest of her double bed with its richly-quilted coverlet of rose-pink satin. She ran her eyes over the rest of the room, alerted now for further evidence of slapdash work. She heaved herself up with an effort, scanning the crevices and corners, lighting with a glance of triumph on a curl of grey fluff under the washbasin.

‘You’ll have to do in here before you go. You were supposed to clean this room out yesterday.’ Her voice cracked on a high note. She reached angrily over to the bedside cabinet and snatched a king-size cigarette from a carved wooden box, flicked impatiently at her lighter and flung herself back against the heaped-up pillows.

She closed her eyes, temporarily exhausted by the bellowing, tempted for the hundredth time in a month to give old Emily the sack, but recollecting for the hundredth time that it might be impossible to replace her. The domestic agency in Milbourne had adopted a very wary note in recent years when she had rung up to demand assistance.

There had been a time when they had willingly answered her appeals, supplying her with a stream of helpers, living-in maids, living-out maids, foreign girls, local dailies. None of them had stayed longer than a couple of months. And word had got about among the small band of daily women. Times were growing a good deal less hard and there was no longer any reason for a competent domestic to put up with bouts of bad temper–and wages that were less than handsome.

Throughout the long procession of female feet in and out of the Yorke household, only Emily Bond had remained a constant. Not, Zena reminded herself sharply, that it was any reason actually to spoil the woman.

‘Do you hear me?’ she cried, revived by the cigarette, bored again, in need of the stimulus of a heated exchange. ‘This room’s filthy!’

Mrs Bond insinuated a duster among the bottles and boxes in the cupboard. If your bedroom’s filthy, she said in her mind, pleased with a certain lofty note in her imagined tone, that’s on account of your spending half your days lying about in it pretending to be poorly when there’s nothing wrong with you that a good dose of salts and a month’s starvation wouldn’t cure.

‘It’ll have to wait over,’ she called. ‘I should have been gone to Mrs Fleming’s the best part of an hour ago. I’m off as soon as I’ve done in here.’ She picked up a small brown bottle and studied the label. Sleeping-pills. Mr Yorke’s sleeping-pills. Mrs Yorke bawled at her again but she closed her mind and let the sound bounce off her eardrums.

‘I hear you,’ she said calmly, not having the remotest idea what her highness was on about this time but adding from force of professional habit, ‘I’ve only got one pair of hands,’ a remark she had usefully employed thousands of times in the last fifty-five years.

She put the bottle back on the shelf and gave a final righteous flick of her cloth along the ranks of medicines, scattering the greater part of the dust she had removed a few minutes before. She clicked the cupboard shut.

‘That’ll have to do you for today,’ she said firmly, making her way back into Mrs Yorke’s bedroom and standing for a moment in the doorway like a general surveying the scene of a recent battle.

‘I’m off now.’ She unfastened her apron to show she meant business. ‘Got to look in at Mrs Fleming’s.’

Zena’s restless attention, diverted from cobwebs and fluff, alighted on the notion of Linda Fleming. She had never met the woman, having no reason to go poking her nose into every little upstart draper’s shop in Milbourne but it was in her nature to keep tabs on people, to docket and file away scraps of information.

Her self-indulgent habits had gradually trimmed away the keen edges of her once active existence but her mind still darted about like a ferret, reduced now to nibbling at other more purposeful lives. And she had been connected with the trade since the day she was born; she could hardly escape a stir of curiosity about the newcomer.

‘Quite young, I think you said?’ She stubbed out her cigarette absent-mindedly; she had smoked barely a quarter of it.

‘Who?’ Emily halted, baffled, on her way to the door. ‘Oh, you mean Mrs Fleming. Not much over thirty, I’d say. Pretty too.’

‘Does she go out a lot? Has she got many friends? Men friends, that is,’ Zena added in case Emily missed the point. ‘Is the shop doing well?’

‘It’s early days yet, she hasn’t been in the town but five minutes.’ Emily considered Mrs Fleming’s possibilities, a good-looking young widow building up a smart little business. ‘Give her time. They’ll be round her like flies round a honeypot.’ She shook her head at the grasping ways of men, always looking out for a comfortable berth.

‘Where did she come from?’ Zena asked. ‘And what happened to her husband?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know what happened to him,’ Emily said crossly. ‘He’s dead, that’s all I know. I’m off,’ she added abruptly and banged her way out of the room. At the head of the stairs she paused for breath. I’m getting old, she told herself in ritual lamentation. All this rush and bustle is a bit too much for me these days. I’m going to have to slacken off a bit, start taking it easy.

She went heavy-footed down into the hall and along to the kitchen quarters to find her coat. Then she cocked a questioning ear towards the stairs. All serene. From the bread-bin she took, as she always did, the stale rolls and ends of loaves. ‘Just a few crumbs for me birds,’ she said aloud, righteously. A body had to love something and birds were a good deal more satisfactory than most human beings.

She eased open the door of the fridge and smiled with pleasure at the contents. One or two little odds and ends of food and drink left over from the festive season that would slip nicely into her hold-all and never a soul the wiser.

Outside the back door she heard a plaintive mew. ‘All right, me beauty, Emily’s coming,’ she said soothingly. She poured a saucer of milk and took it out, setting it down by the step; the cat pushed its head against her fingers. ‘Go on,’ she said urgently, ‘get that inside you, and quick about it.’ The cat rubbed against her legs, so pleased at a friendly contact that in spite of its hunger it couldn’t at once give attention to the milk. ‘You’ll lose me me job,’ Emily said with affectionate fierceness. ‘Get a move on.’

At last the cat crouched over the saucer, purring loudly. A lean black stray, an abandoned pet most likely; some people had no heart. Mrs Yorke had caught her feeding it only the other day, couldn’t abide cats, Mrs Yorke, always a bad sign, Emily had observed that more than once in her long life. ‘Don’t encourage that filthy beast!’ Mrs Yorke had cried, ever so nasty. ‘If you want a cat, why don’t you keep one yourself?’ As if she hadn’t explained a thousand times why she couldn’t keep a cat. On account of her birds, it stood to reason. You could keep a cat or you could feed wild birds, you couldn’t do both, any fool would know that.

‘Finished, have you, me lovely?’ She stooped and retrieved the saucer. ‘Go on, scarper.’ With her foot she gently pushed the stray back from the door, went inside and washed the saucer, put it away. ‘Now then,’ she said briskly. ‘Better get going if I’m going to get me bus.’

As soon as Emily was safely out of the room Zena heaved herself half-way out of her nest and fumbled about under the bed like a sea-lion baffled by a new trick. Her fingers encountered the squared edges of a box. She smiled in triumph and hauled herself up again, clutching at her booty.

She tore away the Cellophane wrapping, snatched off the lid and sat upright with her hands clasped, gazing down with anticipation at the elegant rows of petit-fours. But there was no time to sit and gloat; at any moment her husband’s car might sweep into the drive. She began to stuff the sweetmeats into her mouth, giving herself barely time to taste them, but experiencing all the same the intense pleasure of satisfying an overpowering greed.

In four minutes’ flat she had put paid to most of the top layer. She raised her head and glanced at the clock on the mantelshelf. Not quite half past six. No sign of Owen yet. Surely now she had time for just one quick sip?

Yes! Of course she had! She stuffed the box back under the bed and tried to contort herself into a position in which she could wrench open the door of the bedside cabinet. She groaned and tugged but it was impossible; she was compelled at last actually to flop out from between the sheets on to the carpet and in a cross-legged posture she sank a tot of neat brandy. By the time she had drained her glass for the second time she had ceased to bother about Owen’s car.

A terrible sense of sorrow and the harsh injustice of life welled up inside her. Some sentinel fragment of her brain insisted that it was never meant to be like this–how had Daddy’s little golden-haired princess come to be slouched on the floor of Daddy and Mummy’s bedroom, fat and ailing and unlovely, a little drunk and more than a little nauseated?

She silenced the disturbing voice in the only way she knew–she filled her glass again and lifted it to her lips. But she couldn’t finish the drink. After a few sips she began to feel so unwell that fright restored her temporarily to sobriety. She levered herself up and went over to the basin, where she emptied the glass into the sink and ran a tap to wash away the traces.

She splashed her face with cold water and dabbed it partly dry. Ah! That was better! She got back across the room and pushed the brandy bottle into a corner of the cabinet.

Twenty minutes to seven and Owen still not home. Brandy-inspired anger began to mount in her brain. I could die here all alone, she thought with savage resentment, and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Resentment suddenly gave way to near-panic as this habitual expression of self-pity all at once translated itself into a terrifying possibility. I could actually die! The words leapt before her eyes in characters of fire. I am ill! Desperately ill! It isn’t just a game I’ve been playing.

Up to this moment she’d always cherished the illusion that she could stop whenever she chose, pull herself together, like a child saying, ‘I’m going to be good now, for ever and ever,’ as if the debilitating years could be dissolved in a single flash of resolution and she could wake up next morning slender and beautiful, radiantly healthy and gloriously young again.

For one piercing moment she saw the skeleton face of reality rise up from the pit. She shut her eyes tight, forcing the image away, down, out of perception and consciousness. She slid back, lying full-length on the satin spread, and dropped at once into a doze that lasted barely a minute.

When she opened her eyes again she had the impression that she had been asleep for a long time. The brandy had resumed its interrupted work; she felt relaxed and dulled. The terror had vanished, leaving behind only a hazy notion that she ought to ring her doctor. She raised herself up and went with a kind of floating motion into the dressing room that linked–or, more accurately, separated–her room from that of her husband’s.

The phone stood on a small table at the other side of the room. She wove her way towards it, sat down and dialled the number. The engaged signal sounded in her ear. Not at all put out, she replaced the receiver and leaned back in her chair, ready to try again in a couple of minutes. It never occurred to her to wonder whether fifteen minutes before the start of evening surgery might not be an ideal time to phone a busy doctor.

Owen Yorke turned his large black saloon car into the narrow road–little more than a lane, really–that led to the secluded house where he lived with Zena. He had never been able to think of The Sycamores as home although he had inhabited it for half of his fifty years.

His speed dropped until he was barely keeping the car in motion. He hadn’t consciously slackened the pressure of his foot on the accelerator, it was just that he was finding it more and more difficult every evening to propel himself towards the house at all.

A couple of weeks back his eye had fallen on a paragraph in the paper, some man who’d been missing from home for more than a month, a prosperous professional man with a family life that seemed ordinary enough; he’d turned up, unkempt, half-starving, in a bleak little mining town in the north, hundreds of miles away from his comfortable base. Discovered by a policeman late at night, sitting all alone on a stone bench outside the post office in the middle of a snowstorm. He hadn’t been able to offer any explanation.

The item had stuck in Owen’s mind. It was the kind of trivial news story which didn’t merit a follow-up. One never knew how it ended or indeed, why it had begun. The thought of that man would spring into Owen’s brain quite often now as he opened the door of his car in the evenings and a prickle of fear was beginning to accompany the thought.

All his life he had relied on the exercise of his will to channel his energies and discipline his emotions and desires so that the whole of his conscious effort kept him unswervingly directed towards the goal he saw so clearly.

Status, wealth, respectability; he could put not a pinpoint between them in order of importance. He had never for a single moment questioned the validity of his ambitions and he still wasn’t questioning them.

What troubled him now, what caused the tingle of apprehension to run across his mind in the middle of everyday routine activities was a horrid suspicion that his will was no longer absolute master of his personality. He felt as if he had for fifty years been damming behind a massive barrier deep and powerful forces of whose existence he had been totally unaware.

And now the barrier was beginning to crack; he sensed the underground currents seeping through. As he drove out of the car park at the end of each busy and purposeful day he would be seized for an instant by a nightmare panic that the whole structure of his identity might suddenly and uncontrollably topple, that he might vanish from the familiar environs of Milbourne, materializing inexplicably weeks later on a bench in an alien blizzard.

The long driveway of The Sycamores appeared before him. The car made its way over the gravel at little more than walking pace. I must take some decisive step, he thought, summoning to his aid his ancient ally of resolution. Two courses lay before him. He could either plough on along his chosen path, crushing down the minutest sign of internal conflict–or he could stand back and let the defences crumble, look calmly and courageously at what was left when the torrents subsided, begin to build all over again from scratch an edifice he could not at this moment even begin to imagine.

He was astonished to find, now that he actually dared to examine the notion of violent upheaval, that it was exhilaration and not terror that ran through him. He got out of the car and stood looking up at the house. Then he shook away his train of thought. Some other time, he told himself, when there is peace and leisure, I’ll work it all out another day. He gave his determined attention to the matter of the rest of the evening.

The car–no need to put it away in the garage, he’d be running up to the Independents’ again later on. He’d called in at the club once already after leaving the office, looking for a member with whom he had business dealings. But the man wasn’t there, wouldn’t be in for an hour or two.

He became aware that it was bitingly cold out here in the driveway but he still lingered under the arching trees. The house was well named; the sycamores had multiplied themselves in the hundred years since the grounds had first been laid out, great spreading branches reaching in places to a height of sixty or eighty feet.

He took a step or two backwards and stared up at the grey walls built of stone from a local quarry, the long windows with light escaping from between heavy curtains. Zena was never one to go round economically switching off lamps. He pictured her up there in the best bedroom, lying back against the embroidered pillows, looking up at the ceiling, waiting for him.

What a brooding, gloomy-looking place it was–and how imposing it had seemed to him when he had been despatched here on some errand from the shop in his apprentice days. He and Zena had begun their married life in a modern bungalow; they had moved to The Sycamores a year or two after Ralph Underwood’s death, when the war was over and it became possible once more to think of heating and running a place of this size.

Something more cheerful, he thought suddenly. A new house perhaps–or if an old one, then something from a more elegant time, Georgian or Queen Anne. And a more open kind of garden without all these overpowering trees. He didn’t allow his mind to circle round the question of who was going to share the Georgian mansion with him or if indeed he was going to share it with anyone at all.

A sharp gust of wind blew chilly air against his cheeks. I’d better get a move on if I don’t want to stand out here all night, he told himself. The notion brought with it a nasty reminder of the post-office bench under the whirling snow, sending him rapidly up the steps and in through the front door, closing it behind him with a momentary sense of relief, a return to normality.

He hung up his coat, stamped his feet to restore the circulation. He could do with a holiday, that was all it was; a few days away somewhere pleasant and he’d be as right as rain. Something about the New Year, for all its frantic jollity, that inspired a feeling of depression and futility; he’d seen its effects in other men. Almost cheerful again, he mounted the stairs, already fixing a smile across his face. Zena was probably feeling much better now after her rest. They had spent last evening–and a considerable stretch of the early morning–at a dinner-dance in the largest hotel in Milbourne. Zena had overdone things a trifle, eating and drinking rather more than was strictly good for her. But it was only natural, really; she was after all entitled to deal with the midwinter glooms in her own way.

He flung open the bedroom door and levelled his smile at the bed; his face had by now assumed a certain masklike quality which might have appeared quite startling if there had been anyone to see it.

The bed was empty, the covers flung back in a disorderly heap. Through the open door of the dressing room he heard Zena’s voice, high-pitched, argumentative. His smile abandoned him but he kept on, round the foot of the bed, through the door, pausing on the threshold.

Zena was sitting hunched in a chair, talking fiercely into the phone; she was wrapped in a fleecy dressing gown of pale blue wool. Her eyes flicked over him without a sign of recognition.

‘I’m back,’ he said. She made no reply. He felt disembodied, unreal, a figment of his own imagination–the real man perhaps even now looking up from a stone seat into the questioning face of a policeman.

He turned and caught sight of his face, pale and ghostly, dark hollows where there should have been eyes, in the mirror on the opposite wall. He dropped his gaze, appalled at the sight of such blank futility, bafflingly at odds with his habitual image of himself as a jovial, successful man.

He saw the bright flash of a pair of scissors lying on the shelf below the mirror; he was seized suddenly with a wild and powerful impulse to stride forward and pick them up, raise them aloft and drive them down with force into that flaccid flesh under the pale blue wool.

He closed his eyes in terror that he might actually take a step forward; he felt the barriers begin to slip and crumble in his mind; he exerted all his strength and beat back at the invading tide. It began to recede, it slipped away, a little more and it was gone. He drew a long sighing breath and opened his eyes. Quite himself again now. Stupid to stay up so late. Not enough sleep, that was his trouble. But he kept his eyes well away from the steely brilliance of the scissors.

‘I’ll just have a quick wash,’ he said lightly. Zena gave no indication that she had heard. He went back into the bedroom and through the bathroom door. As he ran the taps he became aware of a weight in his jacket pocket. Ah–the tonic. Zena would be wanting that. He turned off the taps and stood looking down at the bottle in its neat white wrapping.

‘If you could just say exactly what it is that’s the matter with you, Mrs Yorke,’ the receptionist said yet again, striving for the right tone of professional firmness. New to the job, acting as a temporary relief, the regular girl being away with flu. ‘Then I’ll slip in and have a word with Dr Gethin.’

‘You’re not by any chance a qualified doctor?’ Zena threw in acidly. ‘No? Then I can’t see how describing my symptoms to you can be of the slightest use.’ Quite enjoying herself now; nothing she found more enlivening than a good brisk exchange. She felt energetic, free from the effects of the brandy.

‘You go along and tell Dr Gethin I want to speak to him. I’m very ill, I suffer from diabetes. Dr Gethin knows all about my case, he knows how serious it is, he’s been my doctor ever since I was born. He’ll want to come out and see me.’

She doesn’t sound very ill, the girl thought uncertainly, she sounds full of life. But one never knew—

‘Oh, very well, then,’ she said abruptly as Mrs Yorke embarked on a fresh onslaught. ‘Hold the line, please.’ She left her desk and went across the passage to Dr Gethin’s door.

‘I’m terribly sorry to disturb you.’ She put her face a few apologetic inches into the room. ‘But it’s a Mrs Yorke. She insists on speaking to you. I can’t make her see reason.’

Gethin looked up from the paperwork he was trying to deal with before the first wave of patients engulfed him.

‘Mrs Yorke?’ He took off his reading-glasses and rubbed his eyes. He looked unutterably weary–and the rest of the evening still to be got through. ‘If you can make Zena Yorke see reason, you’ll be the first person who’s ever succeeded.’ He let out an irritable breath. ‘New Year’s Day. I have a very good notion what’s wrong with her. Overindulgence. Simply won’t make any attempt to diet.’

He sighed again, loudly. Disease and natural disasters, he thought–with the accumulated anger of a lifetime spent in combating the follies of mankind–the only things we ought to have to battle with; all the rest is wished upon us by ourselves or our fellows.

‘What shall I tell her?’ the girl asked timidly. ‘She’s blocking the phone for other calls.’

‘Tell her to go to hell.’ He saw the girl’s anxious look. ‘No, wait a minute.’ He’d have to do something about the woman. She was after all the wife of Owen Yorke, shortly to be made president of Gethin’s club. And Gethin had served in the first war with Owen’s father, they’d lied about their ages, both of them, been through two years of fire and mud before the Armistice. One didn’t forget those things, old and soured though one had become. He stood up.

‘I’ll speak to her.’ He went out of the room, tall and spare, a little stooped now, his hair silvery white.

‘Ah! Dr Gethin!’ Zena said in triumph as soon as he spoke. ‘I told that silly girl—’

‘I employ no silly girls,’ he said. ‘Though I have some remarkably silly patients. Have you had your injections regularly? Yes or no? Don’t bother to play games.’

‘Yes. Well, most of the time. But I’m sure they don’t do me any good. I feel so dreadful—’

‘You’ll feel even more dreadful if you keep on as you’re doing. Where’s Owen? Is he in? Let me speak to him. Go on,’ he added as she broke in. ‘Get him. I’ve got patients waiting to see me.’ He drummed his fingers on the table, glanced at his watch, did his best to control the irritation which had become habitual with him. ‘Oh, there you are, Owen. Anything really wrong with Zena? Or just looking for notice as usual?’

‘I’m sorry she bothered you,’ Owen said. ‘It isn’t really anything. She overdid things last night, New Year’s Eve, you know how it is.’

‘Make sure she keeps on with the insulin. I’ll try to look in on her tomorrow, talk some sense into her. You’ll be burying her one of these fine days if she doesn’t mend her ways.’ He rang off abruptly, nodded to the girl and went back to his room.

Happily married himself until his wife had died twenty years ago, he hated to see a decent fellow like Yorke caught up in the destructive toils of a wretched union like that.

Balance and discipline, he repeated in his mind, the twin essentials for the control of diabetes. Zena was conspicuously lacking in both qualities. It wasn’t medical assistance she required, it was miracles.

Self-pity, self-dramatization, boredom–what drugs could be prescribed for those? A woman at a kind of malicious loose end in life, he found it impossible to feel a shred of sympathy for her. He stretched out a hand and pressed a bell on his desk. When the door opened to admit his first patient he saw with a feeling of relief and pleasure that it was one of his elderly arthritics, someone suffering from an identifiable complaint that could be eased and made tolerable.

‘Good evening,’ he said gently. ‘And how are we today?’

‘There’s plenty of cold stuff in the fridge.’ Zena settled herself back in bed. ‘You can open a tin of soup if you want something hot. I think I’ll go down later and watch television.’ She picked up the glass Owen had set down on the table. ‘Do you know what’s on?’

‘I haven’t the remotest idea.’ He stood watching her take a long drink. ‘I’m going down to the club. I’ll get a bite to eat there.’

She pulled a face. ‘Oh–this is bitter. They must have changed the formula. I’m sure it didn’t taste like this last time.’ But she drained the glass, feeling the tonic doing her good, much better than old Gethin’s mixtures. Her mind registered what Owen had said. ‘You mean you’re going out again, leaving me here all by myself?’

She gave him a searching glance, actually seeing him for the first time that evening. Something decidedly odd about his expression, a fixed, strained look. She had a sense of a good deal going on in his mind, things she couldn’t get at and drag out into the open. I do believe he’s up to something, she thought, experiencing in successive flashes anger, resentment, curiosity and finally a sharp pleasure at having a whole new area of interest to poke about and pry into. She almost smiled at him.

‘You won’t be by yourself,’ Owen said. He was pleased to find he could look at her now without emotion of any sort. A couple of seconds more and he succeeded into shifting his mind into the correct gear, achieving the mood of detached pity that allowed him to live with her at all. ‘You said this morning that your brother would be coming in.’

‘That won’t be till later on. In the meantime—’

‘There’s plenty to occupy you.’ He jerked his head at the radio, the pile of magazines and novels. ‘Or you could get some sleep before Neil comes. Will Ruth be coming too?’ No point in asking if Jane would also be tagging along; a pretty girl of seventeen would have better things to do on New Year’s Day than trot dutifully beside her father to visit an egotistic aunt.

Zena pouted. ‘I don’t suppose so. Ruth’s never liked me.’ Her brother’s second wife, many years younger than Zena, slender, well-dressed, strikingly beautiful, conducting a successful career in addition to running a comfortable home.

Ruth Underwood had been prepared on her marriage, almost a year ago, to make a genuine effort to get on with her difficult sister-in-law. But it was scarcely to be expected that Zena could welcome into the family a newcomer whose entire mode of life threw her own shortcomings into even greater prominence. And Owen whole-heartedly liked and admired Ruth, which was enough in itself to make Zena detest her.

‘I’ll be off then.’ It did cross Owen’s mind that he ought to tell Zena about his decision to close the High Street shop. She would have to be told sooner or later–she was joint owner with him of the whole business enterprise that still traded under her father’s name of Underwood. And she could be relied on to make a fuss about the closure whether she secretly considered it wise or not, simply in order to demonstrate that she still legally controlled half the purse-strings.

‘Leave the front door on the latch for Neil,’ Zena said.

I could mention the shop now, Owen thought, then I could cut and run for it; give her time to come off the boil before I get back.

‘This room is like a pigsty,’ Zena said suddenly, realizing how it would appear to her brother with his liking for more orderly ways. ‘Emily Bond is the limit these days. I told her to clean up in here, but would she? Oh no, she had to go running off to her Mrs Fleming’s.’

A warm glow of pleasure spread through Owen’s frame. I’ll call in on Linda Fleming after I’ve been to the club, he decided, I can speak to her about jobbing off the leftover stock.

No wish now to embark on the tedious chore of breaking the news about the shop. He felt again the exhilarating sense that in a very short time everything might be entirely different. He went from the room at a rush, only just remembering in the doorway to turn and raise a hand in a gesture of farewell.

Zena threw back the bedclothes. There was nothing for it, she’d have to make some show of tidying the room herself. She still cared what Neil thought about her. He had worshipped her all during their carefree childhood, given her admiring affection throughout their youth. She felt that he still loved her, that he was probably the only person alive who could look at her and see the lovely Zena Underwood; his image of her had been too deeply engraved too long ago to be altered by anything as trivial as the passage of time.

She shuffled her feet into fluffy mules. As she straightened herself to begin her task she frowned, recalling the strangeness of Owen’s manner, his preoccupation, his casual attitude towards her health. She moved slowly about the room, picking up garments, closing drawers and cupboards. It was only in the last few weeks that she’d really noticed the change in him. Had anything happened to spark off that change? Had any new factor appeared in his life? She was by now quite certain that he was up to something.

Abstractedly she rearranged the heap of magazines and books. I could do a great deal worse than have him followed, she thought. A nice little job for Arnold Pierson. She drew a long breath, savouring the notion. It was so exactly the kind of thing she most keenly relished, killing, as it undoubtedly would, half a dozen birds with one skilfully-aimed stone.

It would arm her with information about Owen’s carryings-on, allow her to jerk the string that bound Arnold to her, gratify her taste for deviousness and intrigue, keep boredom at bay–and all without the necessity so much as to set foot outside her own bedroom.

Yes, she would do it, her mind was made up. She glanced at the clock. Seven-fifteen. Arnold would be home from work by now, he would probably be eating his supper. Phone him, say, in twenty or thirty minutes, catch him before he had a chance to go out again, he would be here and gone long before Neil’s arrival. And he would just be in nice time to get down to the Independents’ to keep an unobtrusive eye on Owen’s car.

What especially delighted her about the scheme was the deep revulsion she knew it would inspire in Arnold–and his total inability to do anything but fall in with her commands.

Her movements grew quite brisk; she finished tidying the room in another few minutes. Then she spent a little time on improving her own appearance, discarding the woollen dressing gown for an elaborate affair of silk and tulle, a flattering shade of turquoise that did what it could for her and drew a discreet veil or two over the rest.

She switched on the radio as she made up her face and attended to her hair. Gay, inspiriting music burst into the room; she smiled at her face in the glass, feeling well and lively, better than she’d felt for quite some time.

A few liberal sprayings of expensive perfume and she was ready for the fray. A little remaking of the bed, a plumping-up of the pillows. And that was about it. She looked at the clock and decided to give it a few more minutes. Just enough time for some slight refreshment.

She knelt down and plunged a hand under the quilted drapes. Still the whole of the second layer of petit-fours. Before she climbed back into bed she opened the cabinet and took out the brandy bottle. One–or perhaps two–plenty of time before Arnold actually got here.

She poured out a generous measure, settled herself comfortably into her nest and lifted the lid from the box of confectionery. The radio began to play a tune from the old days, carrying her back twenty or thirty years to the golden time before everything turned sour.

‘A-ah!’ she said aloud on a long note of satisfaction. All in all, it promised to be a very agreeable evening.

Owen drove slowly through the misty streets towards the club. Not many folk about on this dismal evening. He let his mind slip back to its current preoccupation, trying to look at his total situation with the dispassionate eyes of an intelligent outsider. One of the many shrewd businessmen down at the club, for instance. He imagined himself confiding in such a man–not that he would be fool enough ever to indulge such an insane impulse. What would this sensible adviser suggest?

Can’t quite see your problem, he might say with a lift of his eyebrows. Divorce your wife, marry again, start a family. Plenty of time left to you. Other men have done it; why can’t you? We live in less rigidly puritanical times, old boy; no one expects a fellow to live in misery these days; the laws are more humane, public opinion more enlightened.

Owen halted his car at the traffic lights. It isn’t quite as simple as that, he told his shadowy listener. Zena would never agree to a divorce. She’s a vain woman, and vanity, injured pride, do more than anything else to keep one partner in a dying marriage clinging fiercely to an unwilling mate. If I left Zena, it would be five years before I would be free to marry again.

Five years! He set the car in motion again. A pretty young woman like Linda Fleming was scarcely likely to be unmarried in five years’ time.

There are other women in the world besides Mrs Fleming, said that insistent voice. Owen shook his head. He didn’t want the other women, he wanted Linda.

And simply setting up house with her, living together without benefit of legal ceremony, was totally out of the question. It might be all right in London or some other great city but not in a place like Milbourne with its narrower, more censorious views. He couldn’t visualize himself even opening his mouth to mention such a scheme to Mrs Fleming.

And I can’t uproot myself and move away, he thought with finality. My business is here, the new factory–it’s not possible to contemplate such a step.

The factory–there you are! he said to the imaginary adviser. The new laws may be a fraction more humane, but they’re a good deal more stringent about the division of property. Everything I possess would be split down the middle, Zena would be entitled to half. And she would take a vicious pleasure in insisting on that half in cash. It would be the end of Underwood’s. He’d have to sell up in order to pay her.

No possibility these days of raising such a massive loan; he’d been hard put to it to find enough borrowed capital for the new factory. And he could never repay the additional loan even if it could be raised. The interest alone would probably bankrupt him.

He turned the car into the park beside the Independents’. Grossly unfair, this new ruling on property division, he thought with a surge of anger.

Old Ralph Underwood had bequeathed his daughter the High Street business and half of his fairly substantial savings; the other half had gone to Neil. But it was Owen who had slaved night and day to develop the really quite modest business, who’d built the old factory after the war and would shortly see the new factory begin to take shape.

What had Zena to do with all that expansion? She’d run the gown shop until she’d grown too idle even to go down there once a month. Left to herself, she would by now have been merely the owner of a failing, out-of-date business and she’d have frittered away her capital. True, she’d agreed years ago to let Owen raise a mortgage on the shop. And she’d put her money into the postwar factory readily enough in those friendlier years when their marriage was young.

He switched off the car engine, not caring at this hostile moment to contemplate that happier time. She knew I was an ambitious and enterprising man, he told himself, dismissing sentimentality; she knew I’d put her money to good use, she was well aware when she was on to a good thing.

For a harshly cynical moment he allowed himself to believe that that was why she’d married him, then he shook his head slowly, compelled in justice to admit it wasn’t true. But he refused to dwell on the complex motives that had led her to say Yes. It was all a long time ago; it no longer mattered very much. Whatever she had done for him in the past didn’t give her a moral claim now to half his assets, in spite of anything the law might say.

He squared his shoulders and set his mouth in a grim line. Divorce might be a non-starter but there were surely other ways of resolving his difficulties; there must be other ways.

He opened the car door and stepped out on to the asphalt. He stood looking up at the solid face of the club. In a short time he would be president, he would stand even higher in the opinion of Milbourne.

He locked the car door and thrust the keys into his pocket. Perhaps after all it might be wiser to hang on to what he had got, consolidate his position, be thankful for what life had handed him instead of imperilling it all, put away fanciful notions as many another man had done.

With a firm tread he walked towards the wide stone steps. A question of discipline, after all, control of the inner mind. And if the mutinous dog beneath would not always be quelled, if he stirred sometimes in the late evenings, raised his head in the bleak watches of the nights, there was always a remedy, there were always sleeping-pills.

He smiled briefly to himself, raised his hand and pressed a forceful thumb on the doorbell.

Twenty-five minutes past seven. Zena studied the face of the clock, reluctant to leave her satin bower and make her way towards the phone in the dressing room. A little yawn escaped her. If she left it much longer, Arnold might have gone off somewhere for the evening.

Her gaze travelled a few inches and came to rest on the brandy bottle. Another five minutes. Seven-thirty was a nice round figure. She yawned again, more widely this time, leaned out and grasped the bottle by its neck.