Читать книгу In the Event of My Death - Emma Page - Страница 6

CHAPTER 1

The rain had blown itself out in the night and Tuesday morning was fine, unusually mild for the first week in February.

In the spacious front bedroom of his substantial Edwardian dwelling in Oakfield Gardens, in one of the best residential suburbs of Brentworth, a thriving town of considerable size, James Milroy had slept soundly, as he did every night, from very soon after getting into bed. At six-thirty, as every weekday morning, the radio alarm on his bedside table sprang suddenly to life at the start of a news and current affairs programme.

James came awake, as always, on the instant. He threw back his covers and got out of bed, all his movements performed with his habitual minimum of noise. He gave his customary close attention to the recital of events and opinions, overnight market reports.

He was a tall, lean man of forty-nine, he looked fit and energetic. His hair was still thick and dark, he had kept his trim waistline; he could easily pass for ten years younger. He had a high forehead, a quiet face, shrewd and subtle, a penetrating gaze, a controlled manner. He looked very much what he was: a senior partner in a highly reputable firm of auditors and registrars, with its head office in Brentworth.

James had read law at the university, intending to make a career as a solicitor, but had later changed his mind, deciding instead to qualify as a chartered accountant. He had sprung from a background that was far from privileged and had made his way by dint of single-minded determination and unremitting hard work.

In the equally spacious front bedroom across the landing, the insistent trilling of her alarm clock finally roused James’s wife from a heavy, unrefreshing sleep; it was years since Esther had gone to bed without a sleeping pill.

She dragged herself out of bed to make a sketchy toilet before going down to cook breakfast for James. She was five years younger than her husband. She had married at eighteen in a flush of girlish romance; she had borne her first son before the year was out, her second, two years later. She had been very pretty as a girl, with a slender figure, delicate features, curly brown hair and a beautiful skin. Now she was thin and bony, with the look of a trapped bird. The curly brown hair had thinned and was showing threads of grey; the fine skin had developed a pervasive pattern of lines while she was still in her thirties. She appeared now a good ten years older than her husband.

Before she went downstairs, she drew back her curtains and opened wide the casement windows. The birds were astir, the sky was streaked with rose. She leaned out into the gentle air. To be away from it all, on her own, to be done with demands, routine, role-playing, to begin life all over again, in some far off, peaceful place, on her own terms this time – whatever those might prove to be. She drew a long sigh and turned from the window.

As she closed her bedroom door, James came out of his room on his way to the bathroom. She gave him a consciously bright greeting, adding in a rush, ‘It’s really quite warm this morning.’ He responded with detached courtesy. They might have been total strangers making conversation in a station waiting room.

Esther went on down to the kitchen and set about making her husband’s breakfast exactly as he liked it, as she had done throughout the twenty-six years of their marriage. She was an excellent cook, a punctilious housekeeper.

Upstairs, a little later, as James stood before the long mirror of his wardrobe, casting a final comprehensive glance over his reflection, he suddenly remembered the damp patch in the chimney breast in his wife’s bedroom, recently attended to by the local jobbing builder. He went across the landing to see how the repair had withstood the driving rain of yesterday evening.

It had stood up very well, not a sign of water coming through. As he turned to leave the room, he glanced about. He scarcely ever set foot in the room these days.

A couple of books on the bedside table caught his eye. He picked up the top book, looked at the cover, skimmed through the blurb. It was a best-selling blockbuster novel about a woman who left her cold-blooded, overbearing husband to branch out on her own, ending up, it seemed, with a succession of well-heeled lovers, spectacular business success, a sensational wardrobe and a lifestyle that whirled her continually about the globe.

As he picked up the second book, he saw beneath it a number of brightly-coloured travel brochures. His look sharpened. He set the book down again and picked up the brochures. They extolled the charms of distant islands, exotic lands. He glanced swiftly through them before replacing them exactly as he had found them.

He stood for some moments in thought, then he crossed the room to where framed family photographs were ranged on the chest of drawers. He selected one and stood gazing intently down at it: the formal wedding group of Esther’s brother, Matthew Dalton, five years her senior. James had been best man at the wedding, seventeen years ago. His own face looked back at him from the group, composed, faintly smiling, revealing nothing.

His eye travelled on and came to rest on the bride, Nina. Twenty-three years old on her wedding day, nine years younger than her bridegroom. Deliciously pretty, smiling confidently out at the camera.

Esther was there, as matron of honour, expensively dressed, without elegance, her youthful prettiness already fading, her expression anxious, her shoulders a little hunched.

He put the photograph back in its place and left the room. At seven-thirty on the dot, as every weekday morning, he went downstairs with a springy step. His breakfast was properly laid and served in the breakfast room opening off the kitchen, although there were only the two of them these days, now that both boys were grown up and gone. James would never have countenanced the slipshod eating of a meal at the kitchen table; things must be done with order and propriety. Esther joined him only in a cup of coffee, taken on the wing, as she fussed about between the two rooms.

James ate with a good appetite. He said not a word about the damp patch or his visit to his wife’s bedroom. He glanced through his newspaper as he ate. When Esther brought in the post he glanced through that too; there was nothing of any urgency.

Esther’s mail arose largely from her voluntary work for various charities, local and national; she concerned herself especially with the welfare of the elderly and the terminally ill.

‘Have you anything interesting on today?’ James asked casually as he proffered his cup for a refill.

‘I’m visiting one or two patients at the hospice,’ she told him. The Brentworth hospice was housed in large, rambling premises, soundly built, that had at one time been a private school. The hospice was long established, well supported locally; it had received a number of substantial legacies over the years and was in a strong financial position.

For some years now, Esther had given time to befriending individual patients. When death claimed one of their number she added another to her list. There had been a drive a year or two back to encourage the hospice volunteers to acquire some degree of nursing skills and a course had been arranged. Nina Dalton had been an enthusiastic advocate of the scheme and had persuaded Esther to enrol. Esther had dutifully attended every class and had just about scraped through to gain her certificate. Nina had been the star pupil.

‘Then I’ll be addressing envelopes later on for the Cannonbridge appeal,’ Esther continued. ‘I promised Nina I’d put in a couple of hours.’ Nina was a tireless worker for many good causes in the area. She had a good deal of professional expertise, having been a paid employee of a well-known charitable organization before her marriage. Esther greatly admired Nina; she would dearly have liked to achieve her confidence and elegance. She had even tried buying the same designer clothes but they never looked right on her, she couldn’t carry them off as her sister-in-law could.

The appeal currently occupying much of Nina’s attention was for a proposed new hospice over in Cannonbridge, a town somewhat smaller in size than Brentworth. Cannonbridge had only a small hospice, set up many years ago, at the start of the hospice movement, struggling along now in run-down and inconvenient premises.

A patient who had spent the final months of his life in the hospice last year, a well-to-do businessman with no surviving relatives, had made a new will shortly before he died, leaving his entire fortune to go towards the provision of a new, purpose-built hospice.

His proposal received enthusiastic local support and an appeal was set up to secure the rest of the finance. It wasn’t long before the project grew more ambitious. The hospice would now be larger than originally intended; it would, in certain circumstances, admit a proportion of patients from the rest of the county. The scope of the appeal widened and fundraising events were held in many towns and parishes. One such event was a buffet lunch, organized by a club James belonged to; the lunch would be held this coming Friday in a central hall in Brentworth.

James finished his breakfast and stood up from the table. ‘I’ll be eating out this evening,’ he said, as more often than not these days. Years ago, after the birth of her second child, Esther had begun to suffer from nervous trouble and had struggled against it ever since. James had early taken to entertaining clients and associates at a restaurant or one of his clubs, in order to save his wife trouble; he had never departed from the habit.

He gave her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek as he left; he always got to the office early. The forced lightness of Esther’s manner vanished as soon as he was gone, to be replaced by the inward looking expression, resentful and bitter, she now habitually wore when alone; it was beginning to show in her face in company these days more often than she realized.

She cleared the breakfast table, leaving everything tidy against the arrival of her daily help, a competent woman who had been with her for years. She went slowly up to her bedroom. The sky was now a soft blue, the morning sunny. Down in the garden there were drifts of snowdrops under the trees.

As she changed her housecoat for a towelling robe, she paused by the chest of drawers to look down at the photographs of her sons at various ages. She had been overjoyed when her first son was born. How proud and pleased James had been, how delighted her parents. What hopes she had entertained in that euphoric time that the birth of his first grandchild might bring her closer at last to her father. But that hadn’t come about. Nor had the birth of the second grandchild wrought the miracle either.

James had worked ever harder, pushing his way unflaggingly up the ladder; she saw less and less of him. She had made her life round her sons; that had got her along in a fashion. But as they grew older they clearly manifested themselves as their father’s sons, not hers – in looks, brains, interests, ambitions. They humoured her, patronized her, never sought her views on anything. Now they had grown up and gone. The elder was working for an international finance house and was currently spending twelve months in Tokyo; the younger was taking his master’s degree in business administration at Harvard.

She went along to the bathroom and ran her bath. Nina and Matthew had no children. Nina had made no bones about it: she didn’t want any. She had made that clear to Matthew from the start. Matthew, it seemed, hadn’t minded one way or the other and had cheerfully fallen in with her wishes. Esther had felt vaguely shocked and disapproving when Nina had first casually mentioned this – but look at the difference between her and Nina now. Nina leading a busy, extrovert life, happy and useful, totally absorbed in what she did, admired and welcomed everywhere, with a husband plainly devoted to her. Nina had kept her looks, her figure, had even improved on them since her marriage. And what of herself? What had she to show for twenty-six years of marriage and motherhood? A husband who addressed barely half a dozen sentences to her in the course of twenty-four hours, sons who condescended towards her. A personality, mouse-like enough to start out with but now so dimmed that she often felt invisible as she went through the motions of her routine existence. Much of the time she found her work for charity – the same work that gave Nina stimulus and satisfaction – little more than a tedious chore; on her worst days it served only to depress her still further.

She lay back in the water and raised one arm above her head. With her other hand she began her obsessive daily palpating of her breasts, always fearing to discover some tiny lump. Her mother had died of breast cancer at the age of forty-six, only two years older than herself at this moment. Esther had been fifteen when she first learned that her mother was ill, seventeen when she died. She and Matthew were both away at school or college in those years. Every holiday, when she came home, she would see the steady, remorseless decline. She had greatly loved her quiet, gentle mother; greatly grieved when she was gone.

One ray of hope she had permitted herself in all the heartrending sorrow: that it might bring her closer to her father. But that hadn’t come about.

She had minded a good deal when he had married again, three years later, although she had been married two years herself by then. She had tried hard not to mind his marriage, she didn’t want him to be lonely. The rational part of her understood and accepted the remarriage – but not the deeper, instinctive part.

She had never been close to her father. Bernard Dalton had been a reticent, undemonstrative man, a religious man of strong character and strict principles. Energetic and hard-working, devoting much of his time to building up the family business: printing, with a certain amount of specialist publishing. He did a good deal of charitable work, always endeavouring to put his principles into practice as a private citizen and in his business life.

Esther had always feared him, had always striven her utmost to please him. It was in an attempt to win his regard that she had first begun to work for charity.

But she had always been close to her brother. There had always been love between them, unalloyed and uncritical on her side, tolerant and understanding on Matthew’s. She had envied the seemingly easy way Matthew had been able as he grew up to shake himself free from the powerful governance of their father and strike out on his own, something she could never have dreamed of attempting herself.

It was through Matthew she had met James Milroy, a few months after the death of her mother. The two young men had been students together – not that they had ever been close friends, then or now; their temperaments were too different.

Esther had been very ready to fall in love; she saw marriage and motherhood as shining goals. She had been overjoyed when her father gave his blessing to the match. She had married before she was properly grown up, before she had tasted anything of life.

When she took her marriage vows she took them unequivocally, for life, in the certainty that James felt the same. They had both been brought up to shudder at the thought of divorce.

But she no longer shuddered at the thought. She yearned now to be done with her arid marriage. Time might be running out for her, as it had for her mother. If she was ever to gather the courage to make another life for herself she had better not leave it much longer.

What held her back? She could answer that in one word: money. She had none of her own, had never earned a single penny; she had no qualifications, no training. She had been dependent on others from the day she was born, she had always been accustomed to comfort and plenty; she quailed at the thought of having to set about earning her own living for the first time now.

She had received only a modest legacy on her father’s death, all dribbled away in the six years since then. The bulk of his estate had been left in trust for Grace, his second wife, fifteen years his junior; it wouldn’t be distributed till after her death.

She pulled out the plug and got to her feet. She reached for a towel and began to dry herself.

She had no legal grounds of any kind for divorcing James; she was certain he would never agree to a divorce by mutual consent. It suited him to have his home well run by a compliant wife, to present a façade of conventional domestic harmony to the circle in which he moved. If she simply took herself off she would be forced to wait five years to secure a divorce. She was equally certain James would contribute nothing to her support in those five years. He had a sharp legal brain, he would get the better of her in any contest she might try to set up.

There was nothing for it; she would have to look out for herself.