Читать книгу Lingering Shadows - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 8

‘I’M SORRY, Saul, but I’d forgotten when we arranged for you to have the children this weekend that we were going to stay with the Holmeses. Tom adores it down there. He and Charles Holmes are such good friends——’

‘And Josey?’ Saul interrupted his ex-wife grimly. ‘Does she adore it too?’

It was pointless losing his temper with Karen. He knew that, but he could feel the emotion surging through him, battering down his self-control, demanding an outlet. What was happening to him? He had always been so sure of his self-control, of his ability to hide his real emotions, especially when they were unwanted ones.

‘Saul, please. Don’t be difficult about this. Josey’s got her own friends. Her own life. She’s growing up.’

And the last thing she wanted to do was to spend time with him, Saul recognised as he heard Karen out in acid silence. It was hard to remember now that they had once been married, that they had once shared all the intimacies of a married relationship, and sometimes it was even harder to recall why they had married, to recall the emotions he had once felt.

He was drained of those emotions now, incapable almost of experiencing them, even in retrospect. Increasingly he felt as though he had somehow lost pace with the rest of the human race, as though he was isolated from it, living in a void, a vacuum, where nothing existed other than his own unfamiliar, terrifying doubts.

‘Why don’t we arrange for them to come to you next weekend?’ Karen was saying.

‘I’m afraid next weekend is out,’ Saul told her. ‘I’m leaving for Cheshire next week.’

‘You’re going to see Christie?’

He could hear the astonishment in Karen’s voice and just in time stopped himself from correcting her and telling her that he was going to Cheshire on business.

His body suddenly felt cold with shock at the thought of how easily he might have made such a self-betraying mistake. It showed how much his concentration was slipping … his control. The purpose of his visit to Cheshire was supposed to be confidential—not that Karen was likely to realise its significance if he had told her that he was going there on business, but that wasn’t the point.

He ended his phone call without asking Karen if he could speak with either of his children, not because he hadn’t wanted to, but because he had recognised that neither of them was likely to want to speak to him. His fault and not theirs. As a father he hadn’t been much of a success, had he? He hadn’t been ‘there’ for them.

Not like his own father. He had been there for him. He had always been there for him; through his childhood, through his young adulthood, and even after his death Saul had felt his presence, had been comforted by the knowledge that he was fulfilling his father’s dreams for him, but just recently that closeness he had always felt had somehow slipped away from him. That inner conviction he had always had that in fulfilling his father’s ambitions for him he was also fulfilling his own dreams had somehow become lost to him.

He and his father had always been so close. It was a closeness that Christie had resented and rebelled against.

He smiled wryly as he thought about his sister. She had always been a rebel and in some ways she still was. She was unorthodox, idealistic, tough, gritty, and so determinedly independent that he wasn’t surprised she had never married.

She was also a marvellous mother. A much better mother than he was a father. He admired the way she had brought Cathy up herself, just as he admired the way she had doggedly pursued her chosen career and qualified as a GP.

Cathy had been born soon after she’d qualified, and even now, over twelve years later, he still had no idea exactly who his niece’s father was, only that he’d been married and had wanted nothing to do with his child—or its mother.

He dialled her number, smiling as he heard the familiar huskily abrupt sound of her voice.

‘You want to come and stay? Well, yes, of course you can, but why? What’s wrong?’ she demanded with sisterly candour.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Saul told her. ‘It’s just that I’ve got some business to attend to there and I thought …’

‘You’d save money on hotel bills by staying with me. Since when, Saul?’ she scoffed. ‘More like you’re involved in something underhand and machiavellian for that precious boss of yours. I know you. There’s no way you’d voluntarily give up the luxury and comfort of staying somewhere like the Grosvenor for the chaos of my place unless you had some ulterior motive.’

‘Unless of course I just happened to want to see you and Cathy,’ Saul told her grimly.

Her comment had caught a raw spot, rubbed against an inflamed patch of his conscience, but even as he became aware of it he was aware also of his inability to control or conceal his reaction to it.

‘OK … OK …’ he heard Christie saying wryly. ‘Of course you can stay, Saul. As a matter of fact,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘you could be the answer to my prayers. I’m due to attend a conference at the end of next week. Cathy was going to stay with a schoolfriend, but the whole family’s gone down with mumps and I can’t inflict her on them as well.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of your extending your visit until after the conference, is there?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ Saul told her. He had only intended to spend a couple of days in Cheshire, but there was no reason why he shouldn’t stay a little while longer. The thought of putting some distance between himself and Sir Alex was one that appealed to him.

Alex was trying to manipulate him, to threaten him into submission. ‘Get me what I want or else’ had been implicit in his comments, and what the hell did he care about the damage he was about to inflict on the company he wanted to acquire?

Come to think of it, why should he care? Saul asked himself ten minutes later when he had finished speaking to Christie. He hadn’t minded in the past, had he?

At least not until Alex had wanted to take over and dismantle Dan Harper’s family company. Then he had minded.

He moved irritably from his desk to the fireplace. He had bought this apartment after the break-up of his marriage in what had then been an unfashionable part of London. The Georgian house was four storeys high and his apartment occupied the entire second floor. It was too large for a single man, but when he had bought it he had had the children in mind. The apartment had three good-sized bedrooms, each with its own bathroom.

He grimaced to himself. He could probably count quite easily on the fingers of both hands the number of times Josey and Tom had stayed with him for any period longer than one night, especially recently. Recently their visits had become even more spasmodic. Josey in particular seemed to be showing increased antagonism towards him.

Beside his bed he had a photograph of them, next to the one of his father.

His father. Why was it that, when he thought of his father these days, as well as all the love and the positive emotions he had always felt for him he now felt anxiety, a fear almost that somehow he was letting his father’s dreams for him slip away from him?

His father’s dreams for him. Wasn’t that the crux of the problem, of the doubts, the anxiety, the increasing awareness possessing him that his whole life had narrowed down to a tunnel which had become a trap, and that in continuing down that tunnel he was going against his own instincts, his own desires? Wasn’t that partially why there was so much antagonism between him and Alex? Wasn’t it true that somewhere deep inside him an unwanted voice was beginning to question what exactly it was he wanted out of life, whether the ambitions he was pursuing so relentlessly were really what he wanted?

And didn’t his thoughts always come back to this … this ongoing and increasingly stressful battle inside him to force himself to fulfil the tacit promises he had made his father?

For as long as he could remember, Saul had known that as his father’s son it was his duty to succeed and do well in life.

His earliest memories of conversations with his father were of the tight, painful feeling he got inside his stomach when his father told him how much he regretted wasting his own opportunities, how hard it was to bring up a family on his modest income and how, if he was wise, Saul would not do as he had done and ignore the importance of becoming a success.

Saul had hated those conversations. They had left him feeling sore inside and afraid. He loved his father and he was proud of him, and he hated knowing that somehow his father was not proud of himself; that in some way he felt as though he were a failure.

And yet, when Saul looked for an explanation as to why his father should feel this, he could not find it. He was loved by his family, especially Saul himself. His parents had lots of friends; there always seemed to be people dropping in; the large kitchen was always full of warmth and laughter, and, if his mother frowned sometimes and sighed anxiously when he tore his jeans, she still hugged and kissed him and told him he mustn’t worry when he asked her if it was true that they were poor.

Saul had not understood then why his father worried so much about money. It seemed to Saul that there could be no better place to live than here in their small, cosy, well-filled house with its untidy garden; that there could be no better feeling than the one he got when he came home from school to find his mother waiting for him in the kitchen with a smile and a warm hug. In fact, if it had not been for the fact that his father was so often worried and unhappy, Saul would have thought their family was very lucky indeed. But he knew that he must be wrong, because his father was not happy, his father was always urging him not to make the mistakes he had made, and that confused and worried him, because he loved his father and he wanted him to be happy.

It worried Saul a great deal that a man like his father, whom everyone liked and many people loved, a man who was part of a family where there was such warmth and laughter, should be so unhappy, and it made him feel guilty and anxious because he could not always understand what it was that made his father like that.

Saul knew that his father did not talk to Christie the way he did to him. Girls, it seemed to Saul, did not have to worry about things like ‘doing well’. Girls were allowed to be happy and not to have to think about things like that. Saul loved his sister, but he understood as he listened to his father that it was his duty as a male to take care of the females and to protect them, and most of all to make sure that he earned enough money to look after them properly.

Saul’s father had had his chances, Saul knew that, because he had often told Saul so, but he had not made the most of them. Saul must not repeat his mistakes. Saul must work very hard at school. There was no money in the family for him to inherit, no family influence to secure a safe future for him. He would have to succeed by his own endeavours.

The year Saul came third in the class in the end-of-term examinations his mother praised him but cautioned him to remember that there were other things, other gifts, other virtues that were just as important as being clever.

His father, on the other hand, told him that only the very best, the very cleverest children were given the chance to make the most of their lives, and Saul sensed that somehow he had let his father down. That being third was somehow not good enough.

The next year he was first. His father praised him, but still Saul felt empty inside. And not just empty, but lonely as well. He thought about all the football matches he had missed … all the times he had stayed in to work when his friends were out having fun, and he told himself again that he was wrong to feel that doing well and being a success had not made him feel happy in the way that his father had told him they would.

By the time he was ready to sit his GCEs Saul had dismissed those earlier childish feelings of doubt and pain. He was almost a man now, and he had absorbed his father’s teaching so well that he no longer questioned how he felt. Feelings were for girls, anyway. He had more important matters to concern him.

Saul was going to do well. Everyone said so, and Saul could see how proud and pleased that made his father. He was going to be accepted for Oxford if he did as well in his exams as his teachers felt he could. He knew already what subjects he would read, and that he would leave Oxford to go to America to spend some time in Harvard, getting his master’s.

After that the world, the commercial world, at any rate, would be his oyster. He would have the kind of qualifications that would make firms eager to employ him.

Saul saw his way ahead very clearly. A man with no money behind him and no family influence had to work, and work hard, to achieve … to make something of his life, and he intended to do just that … he had to do that … didn’t he? His family, his father, were relying on him to do so.

When he was seventeen Saul fell in love. He was a handsome boy, tall, taller than his father, with strong bones and powerful muscles; looking after the garden had become his job, and all those winters spent digging over vegetable beds and all those summers pushing the old-fashioned non-electric mower had built up his muscles and weather-hardened his flesh.

The combination of his thick dark hair and pale blue eyes with their rimming of thick black lashes had already had a devastating effect on many of his sister’s friends, but Saul had remained impervious to their flirtatious giggles and wide-eyed admiration.

Angelica, though, was different. In addition to looking after his parents’ garden, Saul earned himself some much needed pocket-money by working in other people’s gardens as well.

Angelica’s parents’ was one of these gardens.

Angelica’s parents were a very well-to-do couple. Gordon Howard was away a great deal of the time on business. Amy Howard was a small, fragile-looking blonde woman with a vague manner. To Saul she always looked somehow as though she was about to burst into tears. Whenever he went to work there she appeared in the garden with glasses of fruit juice, tinkling with ice, and more often than not Saul could smell alcohol on her breath. He didn’t like her very much. She was so very different from his own mother and yet in some way he felt sorry for her, and he had the same feeling in the pit of his stomach when she talked to him as he had had all those years ago, when his father had talked to him about his missed chances.

These days, though, Saul didn’t allow himself to dwell on those kinds of feelings. He blocked them off, denying them. They were not male, and they were not going to be a part of his life. He was going to be successful and do well. He was not going to have any doubts … any regrets. When he married, his wife would never have that sad, despairing look in her eyes that he sometimes saw in his mother’s.

The Howards had one child, Angelica. Saul had heard about Angelica from her mother, who, it seemed to him, appeared to adopt a very odd attitude to her daughter, one moment praising her to the skies, referring to her in such terms of glowing perfection that Saul frowned, secretly despising this wonder child, and then at other times complaining petulantly that Angelica did not love her, that she never spent any time with her, choosing to spend her holidays with her friends and their families.

Angelica was a year older than Saul. After leaving boarding-school, she had gone to an exclusive private college in Oxford, where apparently she was perfecting her languages and taking a very advanced secretarial course.

The half-term before Saul was due to sit his A levels Angelica came home.

Amy Howard was away in Miami, visiting friends. Gordon Howard was also away, on one of his business trips. Saul had gone round to the house to do the spring pruning and to dig over the formal beds which Gordon Howard had religiously filled with annuals every late spring, their precise colour patterns somehow reinforcing Saul’s awareness of the rigidity of the Howard home and the remoteness from one another of the people who lived there.

He had been working for a couple of hours before he realised that there was someone in the house, and he wouldn’t have realised it then if he hadn’t happened to turn his head and glance towards its windows just as the curtains at one of them were swished back.

The girl who stood in the window was definitely not Amy Howard. She had long dark hair that tumbled down on to her naked shoulders, and Saul felt his throat go dry with shock, and his muscles tense with something that was very definitely something else, as she stood there, stretching the suppleness of her body, apparently uncaring that he could see her.

Female nudity wasn’t completely unfamiliar to him; he had a sister, after all, and there were magazines freely available to anyone who chose to look at them, depicting the female anatomy in far more explicit detail than anything he could see now as he stood motionless, staring up at the girl moving her body as languorously as a lazy cat, her stretching movement lifting her breasts so that he could see how firm they were, how narrow her ribcage, how softly rounded her hips, how fascinatingly erotic and enticing the small patch of hair between her thighs, how long and supple her legs.

As he stood transfixed, staring at her, he knew he should look away, but he simply could not move. A raw, scorching heat seemed to spread through his body, a sharp, pulsing ache that made his face burn with embarrassment and confused his mind.

He had made forays into exploring the technicalities of sex, of course, and had thought himself well aware of what did and what did not turn him on, but this girl, with her wild, gypsyish mane of hair, her strong, lithe body, her apparent indifference to her nudity and to his observation of it, excited his senses in a way that wasn’t solely sexual.

He wanted to take hold of her, to run his hands over her skin, to close his eyes and absorb its silky texture, to breathe in the scent of her, to stroke her with his tongue, to …

He groaned out loud, aware that he was almost shivering with the intensity of what he was feeling. He closed his eyes, trying to blot out her image, trying to deny his need to reach out to her, to touch her face, to explore its delicacy, to see if the full smoothness of her lips felt as soft and silken as it looked. They reminded him of the petals of a poppy, vulnerable, rich, drawing the eye and enticing the touch, but all too easily bruised if treated too roughly.

He gave another deep shudder, his body racked by the physical torment of his desire, by the emotional impact of his reaction to her. He felt somehow awed, and humbled, his mind a jumble of conflicting sensations and needs. He had an unfamiliar urge to throw himself at her feet, to tell her she was the most perfect, the most beautiful human being he had ever seen. He wanted to hold her, to cherish her, to tell her how much she moved him and in how many ways, and he wanted also to crush her body beneath his own, to enter her and possess her and hear her cry out with the same elemental, savage urge that pulsed through him.

That he should feel this way made him both elated and ashamed.

Saul’s father was a very moral man, and, despite what Saul had observed happening in the world around him, a part of him retained his father’s earliest teachings: that women were to be cherished and revered, protected and treated with tenderness and care. It confused him now that he should experience both that tenderness and at the same time an alien and very sharp physical desire that he could only translate in his own mind as somehow pagan and dangerous.

When he opened his eyes, trying dizzily to clear his mind, she had gone. The curtains were still drawn back, fluttering slightly in the breeze.

She had, he realised, opened the window. Had she seen him … watching her? A dark red tide of guilt and embarrassment burned his skin. He turned to his work, resolutely keeping his back to the house.

Half an hour passed, longer, but he still could not relax, his muscles taut and stressed.

He heard the back door open but he dared not turn round. The grass muffled the sound of her approach, but he still knew that she was there, even before he heard the slow seduction of her voice saying, ‘Hi. You must be Saul. I’m Angelica.’

He had to turn round. He couldn’t ignore her. She was tall, but nowhere near his own height. Her body was now clothed in jeans and a dark grey baggy sweater with a neckline that left her collarbone exposed and with it the graceful, delicate curve of her shoulder and throat.

She was close enough for him to catch her scent. He could feel the heat searing his body, the ache of wanting. She smiled at him, perfectly composed, perfectly at ease.

She had long, slanting hazel eyes … cat’s eyes, and close to her mouth was just as full, just as enticing as it had seemed at a distance. Her skin was matt and smooth, her nails, when she lifted her hand to push the tumble of her hair off her face, free of lacquer and yet somehow glossy and attractive.

He had a shocking second’s vision of them lying against his skin, digging into it, the kind of vision he had never had in his life, and with the heat of embarrassment that poured through his body came a sharp sense of surprise that he who had never experienced such a thing should know so clearly and so unequivocally how it would feel to have the fierce rake of her nails against his flesh, the passionate twisting of her body beneath his own.

‘I’m just having a drink. Want one?’

The casual words focused his attention on reality, although he couldn’t quite bring himself to look directly into her eyes, just in case she was laughing at him. Instead he looked round as though somehow expecting to see the usual glass of juice materialising out of thin air. He was thirsty, he recognised, his throat raw and dry. He nodded, still unable to trust his voice.

‘Come on, then.’ She turned back towards the house, plainly expecting him to follow her.

He dug the spade into the earth and did so.

He had been inside the house before on many occasions, but this time it felt different … almost as though in some way he was trespassing … or walking into danger. He felt the hairs on his arms lift as he paused on the threshold of the kitchen to remove his boots.

His socks were old heavy-duty ones he wore when he was working. There was a hole in one toe and he blushed furiously as he saw it. He couldn’t imagine her ever wearing anything with holes in it … ever looking less than the picture of immaculate perfection she presented now. When his sister wore jeans they looked like jeans. On this girl … And that sweater …

He felt himself go hot as into his mind slipped a mental image of his tugging it down over her shoulder to expose her flesh to the exploration of his mouth. He imagined her winding her arms around his neck, pressing herself up against him, making small excited noises of pleasure in his ear.

‘Coffee do, or would you prefer something stronger? Always supposing you’re old enough to drink it.’

Her words brought him back to reality. He swung round and then flushed as he saw the way she was looking at him. ‘Coffee will do fine,’ he told her thickly.

He watched, fascinated, as she lit herself a cigarette. He had never been able to understand why anyone should want to poison themselves with nicotine, but now, watching as she perched on the edge of the kitchen table, supporting her weight with one slender hand, arching her back so that her breasts were clearly outlined beneath her sweater, he suddenly wished that he too was a smoker; that he could go up to her and lean close to her as he lit his cigarette from hers.

‘Coffee’s over there,’ she told him, gesturing towards the filter machine but not making any attempt to help him. ‘Help yourself.’

He moved awkwardly across the kitchen, conscious of his mud-stained jeans, his holey socks, the sweat drying on his body in the warmth of the room.

‘Not much to say for yourself, have you?’ she commented mockingly. ‘Will you be working here all week?’

He nodded, his body tensing as he saw the way her nipples were pushing against the wool of her sweater.

Feverishly febrile images tormented his senses. Mentally he pictured her naked body as he had seen it earlier. Beneath her sweater she was naked now. He knew it. He ached to go over to her, to reach out and touch her, not in lust but with all the aching emotion, all the weakening need, all the unexpected reverence for the perfection of her body that he could feel tormenting him, sweeping aside all that he had previously thought he believed about sex.

Within three days they were lovers. Angelica was the one who initiated their intimacy, laughing at his hesitancy, his shyness and his inexperience, and then suddenly heart-stoppingly ceasing to laugh at him when she touched his naked body, stroking it with her fingertips, and then with her soft open mouth, doing to him unimaginable, unbearable things that made him forget his inexperience and his hesitancy as he took hold of her and possessed her, making her cry out with sharp pleasure.

By the end of the week it was as though he had known her all his life, as though she had always been a part of him. Each time, he tried to find some new way to please her, to show her how much he loved her.

She had no inhibitions, knew no boundaries, and if at first he was semi-shocked by her lack of hesitation or shyness, that shock quickly disappeared under the expert ministrations of her hands and her mouth.

One afternoon when it was unexpectedly mild she insisted on making love outside, in the wild, overgrown section of the garden out of sight of the house.

Afterwards she smiled languorously, showing her teeth like a stalking cat as she whispered to him, ‘Mm … very D.H. Lawrence, but I think I prefer doing it inside, and there are still some things we haven’t tried.’

As he held her close, wanting to prolong the intimacy they were sharing, she leaned towards him, telling him explicitly what she would like to do.

It still had the power to shock him, this almost aggressive sexuality she possessed, but he was too besotted with her to question why he should want to recoil from any evidence that this was not her first experience of sexual pleasure. He knew that she was twelve months older than he was, but he was tall and well built and could easily have passed for a youth of nineteen or twenty rather than one of seventeen.

He had been disconcerted to discover that her favourite place for making love was her father’s study. At first he had felt uncomfortable, inhibited, being there, but his desire for her and the way she touched and aroused him quickly subdued those feelings.

She had a game she liked to enact with him, a fantasy, which she played out in the study. She was, she told him, his secretary, and he was to summon her into the room and then order her to make love to him. For this fantasy she would dress up in a neatly formal little suit, but under it she would be completely naked, or sometimes she would simply wear stockings. On other occasions she was the one who was the aggressor, sitting on the desk in front of him, peeling off her clothes, stroking her hands over her own skin but forbidding him to touch her until she said that he might.

Often by the time she finally allowed him to touch her he was so aroused that he could do little other than give in to his need to possess her, so quickly that afterwards he felt cheated almost, aching for an opportunity to show her how much he loved her, to touch her with tenderness and love, to spend as long as he could savouring every aspect of her and his love for her before that final act of possession.

Sometimes when he left her he experienced the same feeling he had as a child when his father had told him about the importance of success; an empty, hollow feeling as though something wasn’t quite right … as though there was something absent … missing.

He had ten days with her before she told him she was going back to college.

‘I’ll write to you,’ she promised, and foolishly he believed her. Even more foolishly he spent so much time aching for her, yearning for her, that he failed two out of his four A levels and had to resit them.

His father’s disappointment was the hardest to bear, the feeling of having let him down, of having allowed himself to forget his main goal, and because of that he set up barriers to protect himself from making the same mistake a second time. Emotions, he warned himself, must never be allowed to take priority over ambition. He had seen what could happen when they did. He had almost ruined his entire future, and for what? A girl who had not even written him one letter, a girl who, he saw with retrospect, had simply been using him … who had never been emotionally involved with him in the way he had been with her.

To punish himself for his weakness he concentrated exclusively on his work, studying so far into the night that his mother protested. His father shook his head and said that sometimes in order to succeed sacrifices had to be made; that he was young and could afford to miss out on a few hours’ sleep … that he wished he had Saul’s chances … that, given his life again …

Saul escaped to his own room, unable to bear the look of pain and sadness he knew would be in his mother’s eyes.

This time he passed his A levels with exceptionally high grades. He had learned an extremely valuable lesson, and all the time he was at Oxford he took care to avoid getting himself into any kind of situation that would make him emotionally vulnerable.

He dated girls, even slept with one or two of them, but he always made it clear that, while physically he found them desirable, that was all he wanted, and all he had to offer.

He got the reputation of being remote and unemotional. ‘Clever as hell,’ was the way one girl described him, ‘cold as Siberia and so sexy that just looking at him makes you ache inside.’

When Saul heard this description he smiled grimly to himself. He was a lot wiser now than he had been at seventeen, and a lot less naïve. He knew a come-on when he heard one, but he wasn’t going to respond. His finals lay ahead of him, and after that, hopefully, a year at Harvard. And this time he wasn’t going to forget all the important things he had learned from his father; this time he wasn’t going to make the mistake of allowing his emotions to get in the way of his ambitions.

The phone rang. Saul frowned as he picked up the receiver.

‘Ah, Saul. Glad I was able to catch you in.’

His frown intensified as he recognised Sir Alex’s voice. It was like the man that he should feel no need to introduce himself; that he should assume autocratically that he needed no introduction.

‘I was half expecting you’d be on your way to Cheshire by now.’

Subtlety, at least when it came to people rather than business, had never been Sir Alex’s strong point, Saul reflected. His tools of persuasion veered more towards the verbal bludgeoning and threatening school than the delicate hint.

‘You haven’t forgotten our discussion, have you?’ Sir Alex queried sharply when Saul made no response. ‘Or are you suffering another crisis of conscience?’

‘I shall be leaving for Cheshire once I’ve tied up some loose ends here,’ Saul told him coolly.

There weren’t really any loose ends for him to tie up. He knew already as much as he was going to know about Carey’s without being on the spot to do some far more in-depth research, but he could feel himself bristling inwardly at Alex’s bullying tone. The older man’s manner was beginning to jar on him. There were many things about him that Saul genuinely liked and admired, but he had never been more conscious of how little he wanted to be like him.

And yet for years he had worked patiently towards that one goal: to take over from Sir Alex when he retired. To take over from him, but not to be him.

On Sir Alex’s desk was a photograph of his daughter, taken when she graduated from Cambridge. Sir Alex had not been there for her graduation. He had been away on business. He and his wife had divorced over twenty years ago, and as far as Saul knew Sir Alex’s contact with his daughter was now limited to the exchange of cards at Christmas. Was that what he wanted? Was that the kind of relationship he wanted with his children?

For the first time behind the slightly hectoring tone of his employer’s voice Saul was suddenly aware of, if not exactly a loneliness, then certainly an aloneness. Two men, both of them, in the eyes of the world, successful and to be envied, but take away their work and what was there really in their lives?

For quite a long time after his conversation with Sir Alex was over he sat motionlessly where he was.

Beside him on his desk was the small file containing the basic facts about Carey Chemicals. He picked it up, flipping it open as he started to read.

He read quickly, pausing only a handful of times, once when he read how the company had originally come into being, a second time when he read of Gregory James’s heavy losses on the money markets, and a third time when he read that the company was now in the hands of his widow, the founder’s granddaughter, Davina James.

She would want to sell. She would have to. There was no other option open to her. The business was on the verge of bankruptcy. Saul suspected he knew the kind of woman she would be. The investigating agents Sir Alex had employed had been thorough. There were no details of Gregory James’s many affairs, just a couple of paragraphs stating that his unfaithfulness was a constant and ongoing situation and that it would seem that his wife must have been aware of it.

Saul thought he knew the type. He had met enough of them over the years; elegant, brittle, too thin, too tense and too expensively dressed, they reminded him of fragile china ornaments. You always had the feeling that if they were asked to participate in anything real they would crack and fall apart.

Some of them turned to sex as a means of solace for the uninterest of their husbands, some of them turned to drink, some to good works, but none of them, it seemed to Saul, seemed prepared to take the simple step of freeing themselves from the humiliation and destruction of their marriages by divorcing their husbands. Wealth, position, appearances, it seemed, were always more important than pride, self-respect or self-worth.

He had once made the mistake of saying as much to Christie and she had turned on him immediately, challenging him to put himself in their shoes, to be what life and circumstances had forced them to be.

He winced a little as he remembered her anger, her vehemence about the fact that so many members of her sex were taught almost from birth to accept second best, to put others first, to give instead of to take. Many of them were held in those marriages by their children, she had told him fiercely.

But Davina James did not have any children. He frowned as he lifted the last sheet of paper from the file and saw the photographs pinned neatly behind it.

There were several of Carey Chemicals, showing the run-down state of the buildings and how totally ill equipped it was to compete with even the poorest of its competitors. Without that all-important heart-drug patent which had been revised over the years to create a second patent it would have disappeared decades ago.

There was another photograph. He stiffened as he saw the name written on the back: ‘Davina James’.

He turned it over.

She was nothing like what he had imagined. The file quoted her date of birth, so he knew that she was thirty-seven years old, but in this photograph she looked younger and vulnerable in a way that made his body tense with rejection.

There was none of the glossy sophistication that he had expected about her. She was dressed in jeans and what looked like a man’s shirt, one hand lifted to push a strand of soft fair hair out of her eyes. She was wearing gardening gloves and there was a smear of dirt along one cheekbone, a fork in the ground at her feet. Her skin, free of make-up, looked clear and soft, and without even realising what he was doing Saul suddenly discovered that his thumb was touching her face.

But it wasn’t the living warmth of a woman’s flesh he could feel, just the hard glossy texture of the print.

He withdrew his hand as though the print had scorched him.