Читать книгу In Loving Memory - Emma Page - Страница 7

CHAPTER 3

BREAKFAST TIME at Tall Trees. Fragrant coffee in a silver pot, hot rolls in a napkin-lined basket, delicate whorls of creamy butter in a crystal dish. The uniformed maid lifted the cover from the platter of bacon and kidneys. She left the room, closing the door behind her with well-trained noiselessness.

‘I don’t want any of that.’ David Mallinson frowned at the succulent kidneys. ‘I’m not very hungry.’ He took a roll and broke it in two. ‘I didn’t sleep very well.’

‘I slept like a log.’ Carole Mallinson had acquired that knack in the grim days, when she’d been Carole Stewart, she’d learned that sleeplessness didn’t help. Whatever disasters the morning might see fit to bring, it was better to meet them rested and refreshed. It was just a trick, really, you closed your eyes and switched off – pouf! like a bright light being extinguished, you sank down, down into the pit of unconsciousness where there was no yesterday and no tomorrow, no ambitions, no memories, no hopes, no fears.

‘I thought Father looked surprisingly well yesterday evening,’ she said. ‘I think he’ll start getting up for a little while in a day or two. He can’t bear staying in bed.’ She had started calling Henry Mallinson Father as soon as the wedding-ring was safely on her finger. No father of her own, it gave her a feeling of security, of background, to use the name. And the old man liked it, she knew that. Such a pleasant, unspoiled girl, his son’s wife – she was aware of the regard in which he held her – so refreshingly unsophisticated and uncalculating in this day and age.

David glanced at the small French clock on the mantelshelf.

‘Kenneth will be arriving some time this morning.’ It wasn’t anxiety for his father’s health that creased David’s brow into deep lines. The old man had the constitution of an ox, it would take more than a heart spasm to finish him off or even keep him out of action for more than a day or two. It was the thought of his elder brother walking up the curving staircase at Whitegates that took away his appetite, the prodigal son come home again – to what? To the fatted calf, reconciliation, the old man’s will changed, his fortune sliced in two instead of being delivered whole into the hands of his younger son, the one who had faithfully stayed at home, who had run the business, had taken care in the whole of thirty-eight years of living, never once to cross swords with his father, knowing even in childhood on which side of his bread the butter lay?

Carole ate her bacon and kidneys with relish. ‘I would have expected Kenneth to drive down immediately, as soon as Doctor Burnett phoned,’ she said. ‘He’s certainly taking his time.’

David shrugged. ‘Some business matter, some meeting he couldn’t postpone, apparently.’ Kenneth was doing well by all accounts. A busy man couldn’t just drop everything and jump into his car, however urgent the summons.

‘Then I don’t imagine he’ll be staying very long,’ Carole said soothingly. ‘If he’s as busy as all that.’

‘No, perhaps not.’ David crumbled his roll moodily. Long enough though, Kenneth would spare a day or two all right as soon as he got wind of the solicitor being sent for, a new will being drawn up. He pushed his cup forward. ‘More coffee, please.’

Carole lifted the silver pot. ‘I take it he’ll be staying at Whitegates?’

David jerked his head round. ‘Why yes, of course. Where else would he stay? Not here, surely?’ The two brothers had never got on well together, not even as small boys. There had always been the twin swords of jealousy and resentment between them.

‘Well, no, not here.’ It hadn’t even crossed her mind that Kenneth would think of staying at Tall Trees. It would have been too difficult, the atmosphere too charged with tensions, with all the long hostilities of boyhood and youth that might explode into the fierce quarrels of grown men. ‘But I thought perhaps one of the Hallborough hotels. It might be awkward up at Whitegates, a visitor, with illness in the house.’

David set down his cup with a tiny clatter. ‘Kenneth is hardly a visitor. And they can cope at Whitegates, there’s staff enough up there to cope with a dozen visitors.’ He picked up a fragment of his bread roll and smeared it with butter.

‘Mother always liked Kenneth best,’ he said abruptly, taking Carole by surprise. David hardly ever mentioned his mother to her. Dead these ten years or more, closing her eyes and letting herself drift out of life after a minor illness, her painted likeness still hanging in its great gilt frame over the fireplace in the entrance hall at Whitegates, the calm, disciplined, beautiful, unhappy face turned a little to one side, the wide thoughtful eyes looking back into the past, at the memory of pain.

‘Does it matter now?’ Carole asked sofly. ‘You’re both grown men.’ Almost middle-aged, she added in her mind. Surely swept by the maturing years to some point beyond childish jostlings for position?

‘Of course it matters,’ he said, astonished at her lack of perception. It would always matter, now when they were middle-aged, in thirty years’ time when they were old. The passage of time might erase many things but not that, never that. His mother’s eyes going first to Kenneth when the two boys came together into the room where she sat by the window, the tiny habitual difference in her tone when she spoke to her elder son, her first-born.

‘I’ve thought once or twice lately,’ Carole said, playing with a spoon, ‘that your father’s developed – I don’t know – some little oddnesses. He seems to be growing old quite suddenly.’ She raised her eyes to her husband. ‘I imagine he’ll get over this attack – and pretty quickly – but I wonder …’ She didn’t finish the sentence, but it finished itself in both their minds. I wonder just how long he will last? Will there be a second attack? A third and perhaps a final one? And before too long?

‘Oddnesses?’ David said sharply. ‘Exactly what kind of oddnesses?’

‘He’s got rather strange about money, for one thing.’

‘He was always careful about money.’ Not mean, but careful, everything accounted for, no waste, no pretentious lavishness. Solid comfort, good value in return for cash laid out – but never stingy.

‘I don’t mean that, I mean the way he’s taken to keeping a little hoard of money in his bedroom. He never used to.’

‘I didn’t know he was doing it now.’

Carole pleated a fold in the crisp damask of the table cloth, looking down idly at her fingers in their meaningless task.

‘Quite a lot of money, in notes.’ She smiled. ‘He has an old-fashioned cash-box. I saw it a few weeks ago, I called in to see him one morning, he was rather tired, he was having breakfast in bed.’ The first signs of advancing age, that. He’d have been appalled at the notion of breakfast in bed only a couple of years ago. ‘He was counting the money, fivers mostly.’ She looked up and smiled again. ‘Just like a miser in a storybook. He snapped the box shut as soon as I came in. He pushed it into the drawer of the bedside table, but I saw it all right.’ She stood up. ‘And the housekeeper was complaining to me that he’d taken to querying the domestic accounts in a way he never used to. Saying they were ordering too much milk. Silly little things like that.’

David got to his feet. ‘I shouldn’t think it’s of much consequence. An old man’s fancy. People do have funny notions when they get old. It’s only to be expected.’

‘Hardly a good idea, though,’ she said. ‘All that cash. With servants in and out of the room. And that secretary, Gina Thorson …’ She let the little implication lie there. A hundred pounds, forty pounds, even twenty or ten, might represent temptation to a girl like Gina Thorson.

Carole’s practised eye had assessed Gina and her possessions when the girl had first arrived at Whitegates, recognizing from harsh experience the signs of skimped means, the striving after an appearance of well-kept respectability, the cheap smart clothes, shoes and handbags designed to imitate leather.

David raised his eyebrows. ‘Gina’s all right. She wouldn’t take anything she wasn’t entitled to.’ He lost interest in Gina Thorson and what she might or might not feel herself entitled to. He let his mind slip back to its major preoccupation. ‘Do you think we should ask Kenneth to dinner this evening?’

She pondered the delicate question. Would Kenneth wish to dine with them? Would he prefer the quiet of a Hallborough hotel? Or to take a meal in solitary state at the long polished table in that great shadowy room at Whitegates? Or not a solitary meal perhaps, Gina Thorson might be there, smiling at him above the gleaming glasses and the glittering silver, leaving Dr Richard Knight to his own devices for once.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps we’d better leave the first move to Kenneth. See if he calls here to see us, if he’s willing to be friendly.’ She’d never met Kenneth. He hadn’t come to their wedding, although a formal invitation had been sent to him. He’d despatched a present with a printed card enclosed in the wrappings, a present that could be displayed with all the others, an expensive, carefully-chosen present, a set of handsome Venetian goblets. Family enmities need not be made plain to the prying eyes of outsiders.

‘If he’s willing to be friendly?’ David echoed. ‘I’m not sure I’m willing to be friendly with him.’ Packing his bags and slamming out like that, leaving David to cope with the family business as best he could. One didn’t forget things like that in a hurry. Nor the long hostilities of childhood, the twisted tangles of emotions. They weren’t to be dissolved all in a moment by a knock on the door, an impersonal smile, a ritual meal eaten together.

‘See how it goes,’ Carole said, willing as always to bend to the exigencies of the moment, ready to trim her sails as expediency demanded.

David glanced at his watch. ‘I must be going. I’ll just call in at Whitegates, see what kind of a night Father had. I don’t suppose he’ll want to see me at this hour. Then I’ll go on to the office.’ Rather a grand building in Hallborough these days, the main offices of Mallinson’s, a far cry from the single room in a back street fifty years ago. ‘I don’t know what time I’ll be home this evening, I’ll try not to be too late.’ Old men might weaken and grow ill but the business had to be kept running smoothly, Henry Mallinson would have been the first to acknowledge that.

‘Suppose Kenneth calls here before you get back?’

‘You’ll just have to play it by ear.’ He could trust Carole to do that. She would handle the situation as well as he could himself, better actually, if he were to be honest. She had an instinctive knack of saying the right thing at the right time.

‘I’m leaving in five minutes,’ Kenneth Mallinson said into the phone. ‘I spent a couple of hours last night going into the figures.’ Up till four o’clock in the morning, staring at the wretched figures, if the truth were told, but one didn’t need to tell one’s junior partner everything. ‘And I’ve decided to hang on for a little while longer, I think I may be able to raise some more capital.’

‘Just how long is a little while?’ The junior partner knew better than to ask Kenneth Mallinson exactly where he proposed trying to raise twenty thousand pounds. If the information weren’t volunteered in that first moment, a direct question wasn’t going to elicit it.

‘Two or three weeks, less perhaps. I can let you know in a day or two.’

When he gets back from Rockley, the junior partner thought, after he sees his ailing father. Was he proposing to approach the old man for a loan? Hoping for a death-bed reconciliation? Something of that kind? He might pull it off of course. One never knew with families. It might be possible.

‘About that job I’ve been offered,’ he said. ‘They’ll want an answer in a few days.’ All things being equal, the junior partner would much prefer to stay on in business with Kenneth Mallinson. But if the firm was on the verge of bankruptcy he’d be glad of the job. Quite a good opening really.

‘I’ll let you know,’ Kenneth said. ‘You can stall them for a day or two.’

‘What do you want me to do while you’re away?’ the junior partner asked. ‘Go round to the bank and try to talk the manager into giving us more time?’

‘Yes.’ Quite good at that, the junior partner, better than Kenneth Mallinson, who found it hard to go cap in hand to any man. ‘Tell him I’ll be in touch with him in a day or two.’

‘Right you are. I hope you find your father on the road to recovery.’ Though was that what his senior partner wanted? Would it not in many ways be more convenient if he found his father on the point of death? With just enough remaining strength to put his signature to a cheque, to summon his solicitor to draw up a new will?

‘I don’t think he’s all that ill,’ Kenneth said. ‘From what Doctor Burnett told me. You can phone me at the local pub, Rockley village that is, the Swan, if you need to get in touch with me urgently.’

‘You’re not staying at the house then?’ Surprise in the junior partner’s tone.

‘No, they won’t want to be bothered with extra work just now. It’ll be more convenient for them if I get a room at the pub.’

And more convenient for you as well, the other man thought, smiling wryly to himself. No one to overhear your phone calls, no one to realize just how rocky our finances are at this moment.

‘Have a good journey,’ he said, and replaced the receiver.

A few minutes later Kenneth Mallinson picked up his overnight bag and let himself out of the flat. No wife to smile a farewell on the threshold. He had never felt the impulse to marry. The deep channels of his emotions had always been directed towards his mother, the youthful energies of his affections had spent themselves in trying to ease the silent unhappiness of her existence, to make up to her in some tiny measure for the huge error of her marriage to Henry Mallinson, a man whose cold strong nature could not even begin to comprehend how a woman with a warm and loving nature might shrivel and wither from simple lack of the caressing hand of love.

It had taken Kenneth years to recover from his mother’s death – if he had ever truly recovered. He had come in the end to accept the fact that she was gone, that things hadn’t after all come right for her, that she had died at last from nothing more complicated than a broken heart. By the time he had contrived to construct a shield of armour around his inner turmoils, he was approaching forty and as far as marriage was concerned it was already too late.

He eased the car out on to the main road and pointed it towards the south, towards Rockley and Whitegates. I suppose I’ll have to see David, he thought, staring out through the windscreen. And that wife of his, Carole.

He had seen the photographs in the newspapers, the pretty, fair-haired girl standing demurely smiling beside her new husband. Father would like a daughter-in-law like that, he thought, a quiet, compliant girl, one who would fall in with his wishes, play her part in the Mallinson scheme of things, provide him in due course with grandchildren to carry on the family business long after he was dead and gone.

The early-morning traffic began to thicken. As he drove through the outskirts of a town he saw the first sleepy shopkeepers beginning to raise the blinds, to attack the windows with wash-leathers and buckets of water.

‘Thirty pounds!’ Tim Jefford stared at the proprietor of the tiny shop with horrified disbelief. ‘Thirty pounds for one miserable coin!’

‘Guineas,’ said the proprietor smoothly. ‘Thirty guineas. You won’t do better elsewhere. Fine condition and a rarity of course. You’d be hard put to it to find another like it in the whole of London.’ He didn’t waste time addressing the wild-looking young man as Sir. Hardly likely that a fellow like that, greasy jeans and a shirt very little acquainted with the wash, would spend thirty guineas on a Roman coin. He yawned delicately into his hand.

‘Twenty-five pounds,’ Tim said desperately. ‘Not a penny more.’ No use in buying anything cheaper, the coin had to be a rarity if it was to serve any purpose at all.

The shop-keeper flicked up his eyes with new interest.

‘Twenty-seven pounds ten,’ he said briskly.

‘Twenty-five,’ Tim repeated, regretting now that he hadn’t started bidding at twenty. ‘I’ve only got twenty-five.’

‘Twenty-five it is,’ the shop-keeper said at once, recognizing the truth when he heard it. The fellow thrust his hand into the pocket of his jeans and drew out a fistful of notes, a scattering of coins. When he had counted out the money there were only the coins left on the counter, a few shillings at most. Paint-stains on the long fingers with their grimy nails. A sudden access of sentimentality took the shopkeeper by surprise, carrying him back all at once to the far-off days of his own youth, to his stall in the street market, his poverty-stricken cronies for ever dabbing at canvases with oils, for ever tapping out their immortal novels on ancient typewriters, hacking in unquenchable optimism at great lumps of stone.

‘You can have it for twenty-two pounds ten,’ he said abruptly, astounded at his own folly. The fellow looked as if he hadn’t eaten three good meals a day since he’d left home, whenever that might have been.

Tim snatched back the two pounds ten before the shopkeeper could change his mind.

‘Thanks,’ he said with a grin. ‘You’ve saved my life. Could you put the coin in a box? Something impressive-looking?’

The man nodded and groped on the shelf behind him, restraining himself with difficulty from enquiring why his customer should be willing to spend every pound he had on a coin of a long-dead empire.

And now for the public library, Tim thought, standing on the pavement again. A book about coins, two or three books perhaps. He’d have to study them on the way to Rockley, pore over them in his room at the pub, if he was going to be able to make any kind of showing with old Mallinson.

He walked along the busy street, whistling. A dark grey suit – he knew a lad who still had a dark grey suit, hadn’t yet parted with it for a few pounds to a second-hand shop. And he knew where he could borrow a couple of near-white shirts. And a decent suitcase. Pyjamas, he remembered suddenly. Better have a pair of pyjamas. He frowned and ceased his whistling. He’d better try and lay hands on a dressing-gown too.

He glanced down at his shabby shoes. A dead giveaway those shoes. He let out a long breath of dismay. Things were getting a trifle more complicated than he’d bargained for. Who on earth did he know with a newish pair of shoes? And a second pair to wear while he lent Tim the newish ones? One of his friends might know some college kid, some lad still with the remnants of his parent-bestowed wardrobe. He couldn’t afford to be too fussy about the size.

His face took on a grim expression as he turned into the public library, envisaging the long agony of the next few days with his tortured feet squeezed into size seven or slopping awkwardly around in number tens.

Life isn’t merely a battlefield, he thought, going up to the crowded shelves. It’s a ruddy massacre.