COPYRIGHT

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 1970 by Collins Crime

Copyright © Emma Page 1970

Emma Page asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780008175962

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780008175979

Version [2016-02-18]

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

About the Author

By Emma Page

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

TWO O’CLOCK in the morning. A silent hour, the time of darkness, of the first deep sleep. A stirring in the tall thick branches of the great trees standing sentinel at the rear of Whitegates, the sudden melancholy screech of a night-owl, a rustling of fieldmice in the thick carpet of old leaves.

In the bedroom next door to old Mr Mallinson’s room, Mrs Parkes woke with a start, coming at once to full consciousness from long years of training and habit. She put out a hand and pressed the switch at the base of the bedside lamp, glanced at the little clock, screwing her eyes up against the light.

She turned her head in the direction of Mr Mallinson’s room, remaining rigid, listening.

The sound of confused movement, Mr Mallinson’s voice calling her name … ‘Mrs Parkes! Mrs Parkes!’ A window being flung open.

‘It’s all right! I’m coming!’ She snatched at a dressing-gown, shrugged it on and drew the cord tightly round her waist.

‘It’s all right,’ she said again with professional reassurance, opening the connecting door and going through into the old man’s room. ‘I’m here, don’t worry.’ He was standing in his pyjamas, leaning out of the window, drawing great gasping breaths of air.

‘What is it?’ She put a hand on his shoulder. He remained where he was, struggling for breath, unable to speak.

A whisper of footsteps in the corridor, a low double knock at the door. The handle turned and Gina Thorson put her face round the door. She looked anxiously at Mrs Parkes.

‘I heard you get up. Is there anything I can do?’ Her young, pretty face looked frightened, her eyes asked a question of Mrs Parkes … What’s the matter? Is he having some kind of attack? Is he very ill?

‘Run down and ring Doctor Burnett.’ Mrs Parkes took a dressing-gown from behind the door and draped it round the old man’s shoulders. He seemed unaware of her action. He was clutching at his chest now, breathing as deeply as he could, striving to conserve strength, to fight, to hang on. ‘Tell him I think it’s Mr Mallinson’s heart. Ask him to come over right away. I’ll stay here.’

Gina closed the door and ran silently and swiftly along the corridor, down the long curving flight of stairs into the hall, switching on lights as she went. She dialled the number rapidly, stood listening to the brr … brr … willing Doctor Burnett to wake up, to pick up the receiver beside his bed.

At the fourth ring the phone was lifted from its hook.

‘Rockley 47, Doctor Knight speaking.’ Richard’s half-awake tones. In spite of her anxiety Gina gave a little involuntary smile.

‘Oh, Richard, Gina here—’

‘Gina!’ His voice sounded suddenly alert, sharply concerned. ‘What’s the matter? Are you—’

‘It’s not me, I’m all right, it’s old Mr Mallinson. Mrs Parkes thinks he’s having a heart attack of some kind. He’s standing by the window, gasping for breath. You’d better come over at once.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Though Mrs Parkes said to get Doctor Burnett. Do you think you’d better wake him? Mr Mallinson might prefer—’ A difficult man, Mr Mallinson, a friend of Dr Burnett’s since they were boys together in Rockley; he might not be at all pleased to be fobbed off with Dr Burnett’s young partner, scarcely more than a lad in Mr Mallinson’s eyes, competent enough no doubt, but a lad all the same, no experience, no maturity, no judgment.

‘Burnett’s only just got to bed,’ Richard said. ‘Out on a case till midnight. Maternity.’ The partnership served a number of far-flung villages, a good sound practice, nothing showy but prosperous enough, well thought of in the countryside. ‘I’ll come over myself. I’ll be with you in five minutes. Keep him absolutely quiet, don’t give him anything, anything at all.’ He replaced the receiver and sprang out of bed, knocking over the small upright chair that held his suit neatly folded for the night.

‘Damn!’ He picked up the chair and began to struggle into his clothes, listening for a sound from Burnett’s room farther along the passage.

He heard the door open, Burnett’s measured tread coming towards him. He flung open his own door and stuck his head out.

‘Terribly sorry to wake you, I knocked over a chair. I’m off to Whitegates, Henry Mallinson’s having a heart attack, the nurse thinks. I can cope. You can get back to bed.’

‘Nonsense!’ Dr Burnett’s tone disposed of argument. ‘He’s my patient, I’ll go. You can go down and get the car out for me. I’ll be dressed by the time you get her started. Then you can go back to bed, you can take my surgery in the morning for me. I daresay I’ll be some time up at Whitegates.’

He went back to his room and without apparent haste but yet with swift, effectively-controlled movements he was dressed, and neatly dressed at that, in three minutes flat.

Before he left the room he paused for a moment with his fingers on the handle and glanced back at a photograph on the mantelpiece. A heavy old-fashioned silver frame. A young woman smiling out at the camera, a tall young man standing beside her with one arm round her waist.

He switched off the light, went quietly downstairs and out into the driveway where Richard Knight had the car drawn up with the engine running.

Thirty minutes later Dr Burnett drew the bedclothes over Henry Mallinson’s chest.

‘You’ll be all right now,’ he said. ‘You’ll be asleep in a few minutes. I’ll look in again around lunchtime.’ He suppressed a small unprofessional yawn. Before the lunch hour raced to meet him there was the surgery in a neighbouring village, the round of visits to be got through, the never-ending paperwork to be tackled – and it was already almost three o’clock. He sighed and picked up his bag. With luck he might manage four or five hours’ sleep. Retirement beckoned him once again with a smiling siren face … but in retirement a man might rust, might grow old, might die from nothing more deadly than simple boredom, from the unnatural emptiness that might descend like a lethal mist on a life suddenly released from the pressures of crowded days.

Henry Mallinson opened his eyes. His face looked peaceful now, pale and weary but free from distress.

‘Thank you, Edgar.’ He gave a fragmentary smile. ‘I’m glad you didn’t send young Knight. Old friends are best when you’re ill. It’s a comfort to have you near me.’ His eyes contemplated for an instant the possibility of death, of the vital forces within him being extinguished silently, without his knowledge, in the dreaming hours of some approaching dawn.

‘I’d like to see Kenneth,’ he said, raising his eyes to Dr Burnett. ‘Fix it for me, will you, Edgar?’

‘Yes, I’ll see to that. Where is he? Do you know his address?’ Kenneth Mallinson had quarrelled with his father years ago over the running of the family business, the chain of garages and motor-sales establishments Henry Mallinson had built up single-handed, starting out as a lad of fourteen tinkering with bicycles.

‘He’s up north. Gina will give you the address, it’s in the files.’ Mallinson’s voice broke suddenly. ‘Get him to come, Edgar. I’d like to …’ The voice tailed away. He can’t say, I’d like to make my peace with him, Edgar Burnett thought. Even now, with the notion of death scarring his consciousness, pride and obstinacy clip off the end of the sentence.

‘I’ll speak to him myself, I’ll phone him first thing in the morning. Don’t worry, Henry, leave it to me.’ Would Kenneth come? Every inch his father’s son, as proud and obstinate as the old man – and as gifted too? Had he made a success of the long years on his own? Dr Burnett didn’t know, Kenneth’s name hadn’t been mentioned between the two old friends since the day Mallinson’s elder son had flung a few clothes into a suitcase and banged the door of Whitegates behind him.

‘He’s done well for himself, from what I hear,’ Mallinson said, answering the unspoken question. He would have his sources of information of course, he would have kept track of what his son was doing over the long hostile years. Perhaps he loved his first-born in his own stiff-necked way.

Mallinson’s lids began to droop, the injection was taking effect. With an effort he jerked his eyes open again.

‘Have a glass of whisky before you go,’ he said haltingly. His lips turned up in a weary smile. ‘It’ll get you off to sleep again. Can’t be an easy life, a doctor’s.’ His face relaxed into a kind of peace. ‘I wouldn’t offer the whisky to everyone. My own special brand.’

Dr Burnett glanced at the decanter and the glasses standing beside it on a silver tray set on top of a chest of drawers against the wall.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I think I will.’ There was no sound from the bed. He stood looking down at Henry Mallinson for a long moment. The old man’s breathing was deeper now, more regular, he would sleep till well into the morning.

Burnett crossed to the chest and poured himself a tot of whisky, savouring the fine amber spirit with the relish of a connoisseur.

When he let himself quietly out into the passage he saw the nurse, Mrs Parkes, standing a few yards away, talking in whispered tones to Gina Thorson, Mallinson’s secretary. They were both in their dressing-gowns. They stopped talking when they caught sight of him, they looked towards him with their faces full of questioning. He gave them a reassuring nod and smile.

‘He’ll be all right now,’ he said in a low voice, gesturing them farther along the corridor, out of earshot of Mallinson’s drugged slumbers. ‘I’ve given him an injection, he’ll sleep for several hours. It was only a mild attack, no need to get him into hospital, he’ll be all right if he’s sensible, if he takes care. He may complain of a little indigestion when he wakes up, but it’s of no consequence.’

‘Was it a coronary?’ Gina ventured, stumbling over the frightening word.

He gave her a shrewd glance. ‘A kind of coronary. A ‘silent’ coronary, we call it. No pain, you see, just the extreme shortness of breath.’

He spent a few minutes giving nursing instructions to Mrs Parkes. A sensible woman, Mrs Parkes, able to cope with emergencies. Dr Burnett had recommended her to Henry Mallinson himself several months earlier when a severe bout of influenza had confined the old man to bed for some weeks. Mallinson had developed an unemotional attachment to the nurse, had come to depend on her more than he cared to admit, had resisted the notion of her going when he had finally recovered his strength after the influenza.

There were many little tasks she could perform about the great old house, he’d convinced himself, she was useful to the housekeeper, useful to Gina Thorson, his secretary, he was well able to afford her salary, there was no reason why he should deprive himself of the comfort of a trained nurse about the establishment, at his age one never knew … And so she had stayed on, glad enough of the comfortable post, the handsome salary. A widow with one son, a steady young fellow living down south, married with a couple of small children.

‘How’s the family?’ Dr Burnett asked Mrs Parkes when she had indicated that she understood his instructions about his patient. ‘All well, I hope?’

He didn’t miss the little flicker of unhappiness that moved across her face.

‘Very well, thank you.’ She allowed the conversation to rest there, not inviting further questions. Burnett turned to the secretary.

‘I shall need the address and phone number of Mr Mallinson’s elder son, Kenneth,’ he said. ‘Could you look it up for me now, while I’m here? I promised Mr Mallinson I’d get in touch with Kenneth first thing in the morning and I won’t be looking in here again till lunchtime.’

‘Certainly, Dr Burnett.’ Pleasant and efficient as always, Gina Thorson smiled at the doctor and gestured along the passage towards the ground floor. ‘If you’d like to come down into the office, I’ll look it up in the files. I know we’ve got the address there. I’ll write it down for you.’

Mrs Parkes stood for a few moments watching the two of them walking away towards the flight of stairs, then she tiptoed along the corridor and stood listening outside Mr Mallinson’s door. No sound from within. She turned the handle with great gentleness and put her head round the door. The bedside lamp was still on, it shed a mellow glow over the peaceful features of the old man, deeply asleep now, breathing easily and naturally. Satisfied, she closed the door and went back to her own room.

It was no good, she knew she wouldn’t be able to go to sleep now for an hour or more. She switched on the electric fire and took a letter from her little bureau. She gave a deep sigh, opening the letter and reading it yet again, knowing by heart what it said … ‘We’ve talked it over a great deal recently,’ her son had written, ‘and we’ve finally decided our best opportunity lies in Australia. Without any capital the most I could hope for in this country is a position as a farm manager or a bailiff. It’ll be a terrible wrench of course. If there was any possibility of getting a farm of our own here we’d much prefer to stay, even if it was only a smallholding to start with, but even that takes more capital nowadays than we’d ever be likely to raise. I’ve written off for the emigration forms. It will all take some time but we hope to be on our way next year. Once you’ve made up your mind about a thing, there isn’t much point in hanging about.…’

Mrs Parkes sighed again, staring down at the glowing bars of the fire. Just a few thousand pounds, that was all that was needed to keep her son and his family within reach, a few thousand pounds between herself and the long years of loneliness, the gap bridged by air-letters, a solitary trip scrimped and saved for, a reunion with grandchildren grown into suntanned strangers. A few thousand pounds, so little when you said the words aloud, so impossibly large a sum to a widowed nurse with only her monthly pay-cheque … only the expectation of what a grateful patient might see fit to leave her.

Mrs Parkes sat up suddenly and pulled her dressing-gown more tightly around her. She turned her head in the direction of old Mr Mallinson’s room, held herself rigid while a multitude of thoughts ran through her brain. ‘Stay with me,’ the old man had said a few months ago. ‘I won’t forget you.’ She had paid little attention at the time. It had suited her to stay on, not to have to bother about looking for a new post, not to have to begin all over again the weary business of adapting herself to the ways of a strange household. In a few weeks, she’d thought, in a couple of months at most, Mr Mallinson will be himself again, he won’t need me any more, he’ll summon me one morning and say, ‘You’ve been very kind, Mrs Parkes, I’m very grateful, but I don’t really feel I can detain you here any longer.…’ In the meantime she’d been pleased to be able to take things easily for a while.

‘You look after me and I’ll look after you,’ Mr Mallinson had said. She’d thought little of it, they were all grateful when pain and misery swept over them, they didn’t always find it convenient to remember when health and strength flowed back.

And now Mr Mallinson was ill again. Just how serious was it? ‘Only a mild attack,’ Dr Burnett had said. ‘We must see he takes things easily from now on.’ But Mr Mallinson was an old man. Health and strength might flow back but never again with the strong spate of youth, never again in the full surge of virile manhood.

Perhaps he had meant what he’d said, perhaps he’d added a codicil to his will. She stood up and began to pace about the room.

She could easily find out. A methodical man, Mr Mallinson, there’d be a copy of his will downstairs in the office safe. Gina Thorson could be spoken to, a word at the right time and she could study the contents of the will.

Mrs Parkes paused in her progress and bit her lip in fierce thought. It might be best though to say nothing to Gina, it might be best to consult the will without Gina’s knowledge. She wasn’t all that fond of the girl, it might be better not to be under any kind of obligation to her. She resumed her silent pacing. Yes, she must think of some way of getting hold of the keys of the safe. Not much difficulty there. Next time Gina was out on one of her dates with young Dr Knight, Mrs Parkes could take the keys and open the safe at her leisure. Late in the evening, perhaps, when the rest of the household was at rest, when Gina and young Dr Knight were holding hands in some secluded moonlit spot, that would be the time.

She sat down abruptly by the fire and looked at the letter again. ‘On our way next year,’ her son had written. Just suppose old Mr Mallinson had added a codicil to his will, just suppose gratitude had prompted him to translate promise into reality, exactly how long might he be expected to last? Several years? Or only a year or two? … Or was it only a matter of months? … Of weeks? … Or even days? …

‘I’ll look after you.’ In terms of hard cash how much might that mean? Five hundred pounds? She shook her head sharply, dismissing the idea of such skinfllint generosity. A wealthy man, Mr Mallinson, a self-made wealthy man who’d come up the hard way. Not one of your soup-and-red-flannel-for-the-poor aristocrats, imagining a few hundred pounds spelled unimaginable luxury to an employee. He was a man who knew the value of money and what it might represent in terms of ease of mind and security. A few thousand at least. She stood up again. Her face wore a brighter, less anxious air. Yes, a few thousand at the very least, that was what he’d meant, surely, that was what he must have meant. And Mr Mallinson was a man of his word. Even after only a few months she was aware of that. A man who said a thing and meant it, a man who would carry out a promise.

Dr Burnett let himself into his house with the efficient noiselessness born of years of taking night calls. He stood in the dimly-lit hall for a moment, listening. No sound from any of the rooms. Richard Knight had gone back to bed again then, was in all probability by now sound asleep. And it took a lot to wake the housekeeper.

Upstairs in his bedroom Dr Burnett sat wearily down on a chair and bent to unlace his shoes. Then he took from his pocket the sheet of paper on which Gina Thorson had written the address. He yawned widely. As soon as he woke in the morning he must ring Kenneth Mallinson and explain matters. He propped the paper against the alarm clock to remind him.

He stood up and removed his jacket. The other son, David – and David’s wife, Carole – I suppose Mrs Parkes will get on to them in the morning, he thought. David Mallinson lived on the outskirts of Rockley village in a fine old Georgian house. He had run the family business – under the close supervision of his father – ever since his elder brother had walked out. Not a man to quarrel with his father, David Mallinson, not a man in the least likely ever to quarrel with his bread and butter. Dr Burnett hung his neatly-folded clothes over the back of a chair. David and Carole would be up at Whitegates as soon as they heard the news, bearing bunches of flowers, wearing suitably agitated faces. ‘Such a pleasant, uncomplicated, refreshing girl,’ old Mallinson had said a year ago when David had brought home the girl he wanted to marry.

Dr Burnett gave a little worldly-wise smile. Carole Mallinson had proved herself a most attentive daughter-in-law to the old man. Simple and refreshing she might appear to the casual eye, Dr Burnett thought, winding his watch, but she had her head screwed on the right way. Just the wife for David Mallinson, two of a kind.

He went over to the mantelpiece and stood looking at the framed photograph, the young woman smiling out from the circle of the young man’s arm. He stooped and touched the glass with a finger, then he crossed over to the bed, took a pair of pyjamas from behind a pillow, yawning again. With any luck he’d be sound asleep inside ten minutes, like young Knight a couple of doors away. But unlike young Knight, he wouldn’t be dreaming about Gina Thorson.

In her room at Whitegates, a few yards along the corridor from Mrs Parkes, Gina Thorson lay on her bed with her hands linked behind her head. Mr Mallinson was going to be all right, Dr Burnett had said so. She frowned into the darkness. It was very awkward, the old man’s illness coming just at this moment. She had planned to ask him for a rise in salary in the morning, she had worked it all out in her mind, intending to ask him as soon as she’d finished the daily letters. He was always in a good mood at that time of day, feeling alert, in control of the many facets of his life.

But it was out of the question now to ask for a rise. She would probably be allowed to see him only about the most urgent letters concerning the firm – and she might be told to refer those to David Mallinson, not to bother the old man for the present. She could scarcely go barging into the sickroom to demand more money for her services, skilled as they were.

And I need the money, she thought, I need quite a lot of money right away. Richard Knight had asked her to go down to Hampshire to meet his parents. Well-to-do people, Richard’s parents, she must make a good impression on them. When she left their house at the end of her visit there was a very good chance that she would be wearing Richard’s engagement ring.

Gina sat up in bed and switched on the bedside lamp. I simply must have some new clothes, she thought, swinging her feet over the edge of the bed. Expensive, well-cut country clothes.

She crossed over to the wardrobe and flung open the door, reviewing the contents for the umpteenth time, shaking her head at them in rejection. Pretty enough clothes, smart enough, but cheap, all she’d been able to afford so far, a girl on her own, without parents, without a family, without background. They’d passed muster up till now. With a slim young figure like Gina’s you could get away with cheaply fashionable clothes for a time, but they wouldn’t deceive the practised, assessing eyes of Richard’s parents.

She closed the wardrobe door and climbed back into bed, sitting upright with her knees hunched under the blankets. A suède coat, three-quarter length, a skirt in fine tweed, a cashmere sweater – she knew exactly what she would buy if she had the money, she’d searched the windows of the more exclusive stores in Hallborough until she’d found what she wanted.

Mr Mallinson will be all right, Dr Burnett had said. But how soon would he be well again? A week? Two weeks? What was the earliest possible moment at which she could reasonably broach the subject of a rise?

She drew a long breath and flung herself back on the pillows. Was there any other way she could get hold of the money? Borrow it perhaps? From whom? Mrs Parkes? Even as she formed the notion she shook her head, dismissing it. Mrs Parkes would have nothing to lend and if she had there was her own family to play fairy godmother to. She was hardly likely to part with her hard-earned savings to help her employer’s secretary to lash out on expensive new clothes. And it wasn’t even as if Mrs Parkes liked her very much … her manner was always polite, but nothing more.…

A hundred and seventy-five pounds, Mrs Parkes calculated yet again, drifting drowsily towards sleep. That’s all I’ve got to show for the best part of a lifetime of hard work, one hundred and seventy-five pounds, not counting the change in my bag. That wouldn’t go very far in setting her son up in a little farm of his own. She smiled grimly behind her closed lids; her thoughts began to swirl and dissolve, her muscles began to slacken. I must be up early in the morning, she told herself, I must see to the old man … something nice to eat … something easy to digest … he won’t be awake for breakfast … but he might take a little lunch … I’ll go down to the gardener’s cottage and see if there are any tender young vegetables … any tempting fruit … Mrs Parkes slipped into a dream where she was walking up the path to the gardener’s cottage, raising her hand, lifting the brass knocker …

CHAPTER 2

AT SIX-THIRTY the alarm clock pealed its shrill summons in the front bedroom of the gardener’s cottage. Ada Foster came awake with a start, blinking at the new day without much expectation that it would differ very greatly from all the days that had preceded it. She sat up and rubbed her eyes.

‘Half-six, George! Time to get up!’ She gave a ritual thrust at her husband’s shoulder.

‘What’s that? Time to get up?’ George Foster rose protesting from the trough of sleep, ‘Make us a cup of tea, there’s a good lass.’ His fingers reached out, scrabbling for the packet of cigarettes on the little table.

Ada was already thrusting her feet into ancient felt slippers.

‘All right then. But don’t go dropping off again. I’ll put the sausages on.’ She jerked an old fawn dressing-gown from behind the door and went along the passage, calling, ‘Norman! Half-past six! Do you hear me, Norman? Time to get up!’

There was a muffled groan from the second bedroom.

‘O.K., Mum, I’m awake.’

‘Mind you stay awake, then. Don’t want to be late for work.’ Ada went slop-footed down to the kitchen and filled the kettle at the sink.

Norman Foster sat up in bed without any very marked enthusiasm. His first thought, as always these days, was for his pride and treasure, the darling of his heart, his motorbike, standing slim and powerful, silent and waiting, in the shed outside the back door. The thought brought with it a wash of anxiety that clouded his face now whenever the vision of his darling rose before his eyes – how long before she was snatched away from him for ever by the implacable forces of hire-purchase regulations?

‘Three days late with your instalment,’ the boss had said to him only yesterday. ‘You’ve only had the bike four months and already you’re falling behind. Won’t do, Norman, my lad. Either pay up or hand the bike back.’

‘I’ll have the money by the end of the week, honest I will.’ It was Norman’s birthday in three days’ time and on the evening of his birthday his godfather, old Mr Mallinson up at the big house, unfailingly summoned Norman to receive his present. Between the ages of five and twelve the present had been a pound note, from his thirteenth birthday it had been two pound notes. In three days Norman would be eighteen. Surely, he thought with fierce expectation, surely this time he’ll make it three – or even – exhilarating notion! five! At the idea Norman closed his eyes for a second in ecstasy. Five whole pound notes, crisp and new! Or one single imposing fiver perhaps, virgin from the bank!

He opened his eyes and sprang out of bed with renewed hope. Even with three pounds he could pay the instalment, with five he could put some aside for next month’s inexorable deadline.

Melancholy clutched at him again. Even five pounds wouldn’t last very long. There would be the month after next, the month after that, the whole inescapable procession stretching out for another year and a half, till the day when he could burnish his darling with polish and chrome cleaner in the blissful knowledge that she was his for ever.

He fumbled about on the floor, looking for his shoes and socks. Eighteen months! How on earth was he going to manage the instalments all that time? On an apprentice’s wages in a Hallborough garage he couldn’t put much by.

‘A motorbike?’ his father had said, frowning. ‘You’ll never be able to pay for it!’

‘I will, Dad! Honest, I will!’ he’d cried. ‘I’ll save every penny. And if I don’t have a bike, how am I going to get to work? They’re stopping the seven o’clock bus.’

‘You could ride a push-bike,’ his father had said. ‘Like I did at your age.’

But Norman had produced a scrap of paper covered with figures. ‘Look, Dad, this is what I earn and this is what I have to pay out. Go on, read it, you’ll see I’ve worked it all out. I can manage the instalments, it’s all down there.’

‘Go on, George,’ his mother had said, seeing the look of pleading in the eyes of her only child. ‘Let him have the bike. It’ll be handy for getting to work.’

‘Don’t go coming to me for help, then, if you fall behind with the payments.’ His father had shot him a keen look. ‘If you can’t pay for it it goes back and no arguments. Is that clear?’ It had been clear all right, it was clear now, crystal clear. Pay up or else, the harsh law of the adult world. He threw a fleeting backward glance at the gentler world of childhood, at the cowboy outfit and the toy train that were handed over once and for all, all yours, nothing more to pay. He went along to the bathroom with a sigh for those easy, irresponsible, bountiful days.

And then the smell of frying sausages floated up to his nostrils. He smiled. A world that contained sizzling brown pork sausages wasn’t after all such a dismal world. The high spirits of youth rose up inside him. He snatched at his toothbrush and anointed the bristles with a ribbon of white paste. Just suppose old Mallinson regarded eighteen as a landmark, suppose he made it not three, not five, but ten pounds! It was possible. Eighteen was really quite an important birthday when you came to think about it. Yes, it was more than possible, it was actually quite probable. By the time he was scrubbing at his face with a flannel foaming with soap he was quite certain the old man would make it a tenner. He splashed vigorously at his glowing cheeks with cold water, reached blindly for the towel and began to whistle.

Ada Foster speared the glistening sausages on to the expectant plates held out before her.

‘Get those inside you!’ she commanded. Footsteps ground along the gravel path. ‘Who’s that? At this hour?’ She thumped the frying-pan back on to the stove and flung open the kitchen door a couple of seconds after the double rat-tat assaulted her ears.

One of the young maids from the big house faced her in the doorway. ‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,’ the girl said importantly, delaying the moment of revelation, savouring her position as messenger. ‘It’s the old gentleman—’

‘Mr Mallinson?’ Ada cried, flinging the door wide, gesturing the girl inside. ‘He’s never dead!’

‘Well, no, not exactly.’ The girl looked a little put out, her tidings now appearing diminished, less weighty in their impact. Ada Foster might have the manners to wait without interrupting till a person had had their say. ‘But he was took bad in the night. Heart it was, Mrs Parkes said. She had to call old Doctor Burnett out, two o’clock in the morning.’ The lateness of the hour lent a certain impressiveness to her tale. ‘Thought I’d pop in and let you know.’ She glanced about the kitchen, registering the pork sausages, the brown teapot, with practised eyes. ‘Thought you’d like to know.’

‘Just how bad is he?’ George Foster pushed away his plate and stood up. ‘Does Doctor Burnett think he’ll get over it?’ A flood of anxious thoughts whirled through his brain. If the old man died Whitegates might be sold. Hardly likely young Master David and his wife would want to live in that great mansion of a place, not when they’d got their own house so nicely furnished and all. George saw himself all in a matter of weeks, days even, thrown out of work, given notice to quit the cottage.

‘A mild attack,’ the girl said, a little grudgingly, cheated of high drama. ‘Got to take things easy, Mrs Parkes said. Doctor’s looking in again at lunchtime.’ Not that she wished the old man any harm, far from it. A good employer, Mr Mallinson, strict mind you, but he paid a good wage and provided a good home and what more could a girl ask?

But it would have been interesting all the same to have knocked at the cottage door with a tear-swollen face, to bring news that would have shattered the easy peace of the sausage-savoury kitchen. It would have been nice just for once to have been able to say something that the listeners would remember for ever.

‘A cup of tea,’ Mrs Foster offered, picking up the earthenware pot. The maid shook her head.

‘No thanks, I have to be getting back.’ She nodded in the direction of the big house, indicating vague and onerous duties awaiting her. ‘There’ll be a lot to do today.’ She turned and stepped out on to the gravel path.

Norman sat at the table picking at his sausages now with a merely mechanical show of appetite, not listening to the animated interchange taking place between his parents. Just my luck, he was thinking, just my rotten luck! There would be no summons now on Thursday evening, no present would be formally handed over, there would be no tenner, no fiver, not even a single pound note. Disaster loomed before him, utter and total disaster, not a single ray of hope anywhere in the universe.

He lifted his head and threw a swift glance at his parents. Neither of them paid him the slightest attention.

‘Not easy to get another job at my age,’ his father said heavily.

‘I’ll be off now,’ Norman mumbled.

‘Don’t you go starting to worry about it now, George,’ Ada Foster said, her voice habitually soothing in times of crisis, although her eyes were anxious.

Norman pushed his chair back quietly and let himself out into the fresh morning. He went over to the shed and unlocked the door. For a long moment he stood gazing down at his beloved gleaming dully in the light shining from the kitchen window. Then he moved over and gave her a pat, rubbing his fingers over the silk-smooth metal. His eyes were full of tears.

Gina Thorson stood at the foot of the staircase with a small sheaf of papers in her hand. The sound of a door opening and closing in the first-floor corridor – Dr Burnett’s visit must be over then. She could hear voices now, low voices, Dr Burnett talking to Mrs Parkes. Then the doctor’s footsteps, brisk but quiet, moving along the corridor.

He came into view. Gina smiled at him.

‘Good morning, Dr Burnett. How is Mr Mallinson?’

‘Very much better this morning. Really surprisingly well.’ He gave a little astonished shake of his head. ‘Of course there’s to be no work or excitement for the present, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he isn’t up and about again in a week or two.’

Gina glanced down at the papers in her hand. ‘There are some letters here he ought to deal with. I can see to most of the mail myself, a lot of it is pretty well routine, but these – would it be all right if I slipped into his room for a couple of minutes? I’d make it as brief as possible.’

Dr Burnett shook his head. ‘Surely David Mallinson can deal with these queries?’

Gina looked faintly disconcerted. ‘Yes, I suppose he could.’ She raised her eyes to the doctor. ‘Though old Mr Mallinson does like to keep the reins in his own hands.’

Burnett smiled. ‘I’m afraid he’s going to have to learn to let go of the reins. It happens to us all in the end. You take your queries to David, my dear, he’s very efficient, there won’t be much he can’t handle.’

Gina sighed. ‘Very well.’ She detached one letter from the sheaf. ‘There is this one, though. It’s a little more – personal – than the others. I don’t mean that it’s a private letter, but it is really for the attention of Mr Mallinson and not his son.’ She held it out. ‘Perhaps you’d better read it. I’m sure you know all about what’s in it. It seems everybody does, it was in all the papers, I believe, though of course it happened long before I came here.’

Burnett frowned and took the letter. He ran his eyes over the closely-written sheet, turned it over to glance at the signature, then turned it back again and read it with care.

‘I see,’ he said as he took it in. ‘From the widow of that man.’ He clicked his tongue against his teeth, recalling the case. Not a very savoury affair. Victor Stallard, employed in the Accounts department at Mallinson’s, accused of embezzlement – quite a sizeable sum involved, several thousands of pounds. A tall, quiet, bespectacled man with a wife and a baby son, he’d protested his innocence throughout his trial but the evidence had been there. Seven years he’d got and lucky to get off so lightly, old Mallinson had said loudly at the time. Stallard couldn’t have altogether shared this view of his sentence, six weeks later he’d hanged himself in his cell.

All this had happened some years ago, the widow and the baby son had dropped away out of sight. No provision had been made for them by Mallinson’s, for after all why should they? ‘‘Stallard must have put the money away somewhere safe,’ Henry Mallinson had said. ‘She’ll have plenty of cash, my cash. I wish her joy of it.’

And then a couple of weeks ago a senior accountant at Mallinson’s, struck down in the road as he was coming out of a pub after his usual late-evening drink, a jovial, well-liked man, highly-respected in the firm, had opened his eyes in the hospital ward where he lay dying from appalling injuries, had asked for Matron to be summoned, had made a statement, cleared his conscience before his eyes closed again for ever. He’d taken the money and let Stallard carry the blame. Stallard had known nothing whatever about the embezzlement, he had been completely innocent.

The papers had got hold of it of course. Reporters had come hanging round Whitegates, trying to get old Mallinson to talk, there had been persistent phone calls but he would answer none of them, would say nothing, wouldn’t even discuss the matter with Dr Burnett when he’d tried to raise it. And now – this letter from Stallard’s widow.

‘She intends to see him then.’ Burnett raised his eyes from the letter. ‘Hardly surprising.’ He glanced down at the address, some village on the east coast. ‘She must have had a hard time of it, with a child to rear.’ There hadn’t been any money hidden away of course, there had been no pension, nothing. How had she managed? He shook his head. ‘A nasty business all round.’ He didn’t like the tone of the letter. It made no specific demands, only the fierce, long-pent-up outpourings of a woman who had suffered a very great deal, who had forgotten nothing and was prepared to forgive nothing.

‘I imagine she wants money,’ Gina Thorson said. ‘I don’t know what the legal position is but I would think she’d be entitled to a good deal of money.’

‘She never once mentions compensation,’ Burnett said. Could the woman conceivably want something else? The restoration of the good name of her dead husband, that of course. But what besides? Revenge?

He handed the letter back to Gina. ‘I fancy some provision could be made out of court, for her and the child. But Mr Mallinson must not on any account be bothered by this just now. David must see to it, he must answer the letter, explain that his father is ill. He can make an appointment to see the woman, he can get on to the lawyers, he can settle everything. If it is necessary for his father to sign any papers, they can wait over for a week or two. After all these years another week or two isn’t going to make all that difference to Mrs Stallard.’

‘David Mallinson and his wife came round first thing this morning,’ Gina said. ‘As soon as Mrs Parkes phoned them. They were very anxious to see old Mr Mallinson, but she wouldn’t allow it, said you told her he had to be kept very quiet.’

Dr Burnett nodded. ‘Yes, she told me about it. She was quite right. In any case he was sound asleep this morning, they couldn’t have spoken to him. I shall be looking in again this evening, they can see him for a minute or two after my visit, if everything continues to go smoothly.’

Gina gave a little smile. ‘Mrs Mallinson brought a huge bunch of flowers. At seven o’clock in the morning.’

A trace of answering amusement looked out from the doctor’s eyes. ‘I fancy Carole Mallinson would always be able to lay her hand on a suitable bunch of flowers whenever the occasion demanded.’

His manner changed abruptly. ‘Was there anything else you wanted to see Mr Mallinson about?’ He had the notion that there was something else, something personal perhaps.

Gina slid him a little considering glance. Then she made a small movement of dismissal with her hand. ‘There was something, but it isn’t very important. It can wait.’

‘I’ll look in again this evening.’ Burnett moved towards the front door. He turned his head and gave her a quizzical smile. ‘Shall I give Richard Knight your love?’

Gina felt a blush rise to her cheeks. ‘No need for that,’ she said lightly. ‘I’ll be seeing him myself this afternoon. He said he’d look in for a cup of tea.’

A damp misty evening in London, a thin depressing drizzle filming over the tall windows of the studio flat right at the top of the house. Not at all a gay evening, no help from the weather to raise despondent spirits.

Tim Jefford gathered up the unpaid bills into an untidy pile and dropped them on top of a battered desk against the wall. He crossed to the window and stood looking out at the dismal evening, rubbing his unshaven chin, wondering just what he was going to do with himself.

He drew the long curtains together with a savage gesture, shutting out the evening. He turned to face the appalling clutter of the room. Painting materials everywhere, brushes thrust into jars, squeezed-out tubes of paint, a couple of half-finished canvases propped up on easels, other canvases stacked against the walls, dozens of them, unsold, unwanted. Paint-stained cushions tumbled in a heap along an ancient divan, one end supported on a pile of broken-backed books, pieces of brilliant-hued material thrown in a jumble on the floor. He ran his fingers through his hair.

‘Not much to show for eight years’ work,’ he said aloud, wryly.

In the corner of the room a Siamese cat uncurled itself from a nest of rags, stood up, arched its back, yawned widely and picked its way towards him. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his old jacket, searching for cigarettes, finding only an empty packet and another containing a squashed-out stub. He flung them away in disgust, stooped and picked up the cat which was rubbing itself against his leg. He stroked the silky fur.

‘Do you want something to eat, Princess? So do I. I’d better go out and see what I can find.’ He deposited the cat without ceremony on the heap of cushions, snatched an old fawn raincoat from behind the door and slammed out without bothering to switch off the lights.

Twenty minutes later he came banging into the house again. On the first floor Hilda Browning jerked her hands from the typewriter, waiting for the rush of feet going up the stairs, the studio door being flung open, being crashed to again. She shrugged her shoulders and smiled. One day middle age would descend on Tim Jefford, one day he might actually walk up a flight of stairs, might enter and leave a room without making the walls shudder.… But not for a good many years yet. She smiled again, gathered together her wandering thoughts and returned to the long hard slog of her novel.

‘Food, Princess!’ Tim ripped apart the sides of the brown-paper bag and spilled the contents out on to the table. First, the tin of catfood. Princess had already begun her low anticipatory growl. Tim rummaged about in a drawer, found the tin-opener and carved the top of the tin into ragged edges. He thrust a spoon into the tin and scooped out the meat on to a plate.

‘Here you are, Princess, get stuck into that! Feast on the nourishing liver and gravy!’ Princess crouched on the floor like a devotee at prayer and began to wolf the food, managing at the same time to keep up an ecstatic purr.

Tim opened a new packet of cigarettes and surveyed the rest of his purchases. A greaseproof packet of sliced ham, a waxed carton of potato salad, a crusty French loaf, a packet of butter, a squashy bag of ripe foreign cheese and a small jar of instant coffee.

‘A feast, Princess,’ he said, jangling the few coins left in his pocket. He looked down at the cat single-mindedly disposing of the chunks of liver. ‘Make the most of it,’ he said on a wry note. ‘It may be the last you’ll get for some time.’

He went slowly over to the sink and ran water into the battered kettle, set it on the stove and lit the gas. He sighed and glanced at the top of the bureau, at the pile of bills. He plunged his hand into his pocket and drew out the meagre handful of coins, running his eye over them, calculating. Nine shillings and fourpence-ha’penny.

He crossed to the desk, unlocked the bottom drawer, thrust his hand under the jumble of papers, books, tubes of paint, and pulled out a metal cashbox. He lifted the lid and stared down at the folded notes. No need to count them, he knew how much there was. His last reserve, absolutely his last-ditch reserve. Twenty-five pounds, folded away two years ago during a brief surge of prosperity when he had actually sold three canvases in the same month. He lifted his eyes to the wall and grinned. He’d thought then that things had really begun to move his way, he’d thought hard times would never return. It was only the memory of months and years of near-starvation that had made him press the notes into the box, a permanent insurance, never needing to be touched, a gesture of remembrance towards the chaotic, rumbustious past, a salute to old times that would never come again.

But the wave of good fortune had subsided into a ripple, had died away at last. He was lucky now if he sold three canvases in a year, let alone in a month.

‘I’m at the watershed, Princess,’ he said. The cat gave her entire attention to cleaning the tin plate of all traces of gravy. Her tongue made a tiny rasping sound against the metal.

‘Do I start on my last-ditch reserve?’ Tim asked the cat. ‘Or do I stop now? Make a bonfire of the lot of it?’ He threw a look of fond contempt at the paintings, the easels, the heaps of brilliant rags. ‘Spend the money on some clothes? Go out and get a job?’ He saw himself serving in a shop, clattering a luggage trolley along a railway platform, washing up in the cavernous kitchens of some vast hotel.

‘I’m not getting any younger, Princess,’ he said sadly. ‘And that’s an indisputable fact.’ Princess gave the plate one last appreciative dab with her tongue and then retired to the cushions to deal with her fur.

The kettle spouted steam towards the ceiling. Tim laid the cash-box tenderly down on the desk and went over to the stove. Hunger stirred sharply inside him again. He made the coffee, sat down at the table and tore open the packet of ham. Half-way through his meal he remembered the evening paper thrust into the pocket of his raincoat. He glanced idly at the headlines. Student unrest, somebody robbed, a controversial speech by a junior Minister.

He scooped up the odorous cheese on to a hunk of bread, turned the page and sat up suddenly, letting the piece of bread drop from his fingers on to the brown paper bag.

Carole! By all that was holy! Carole Stewart, staring out at him from a wedding group! Men in morning dress, tall broad imposing-looking men with an air of solid wealth. Slender women in silk suits and airy hats of puffed organza, fragile girls in drifting high-waisted dresses. The bridegroom no longer in the first gay flush of youth – thirty, thirty-five perhaps – a good-looking man with a figure already bidding good-bye to slimness, an air of well-founded prosperity, of mellow country houses, a London flat with a good address.

‘Carole Stewart,’ he said aloud with a note of brooding. So this was what had become of her! He’d often wondered. There had been a good many girls in the last eight years. Tall and short, plump and slender, dark and fair, never any shortage of companions to share the sardines and the rough red wine. He could hardly remember their names, their faces, their taste in cigarettes.

But he remembered Carole. Oh yes, he remembered Carole Stewart all right. When she had swept up her belongings into a fibre suitcase, tired of hand-to-mouth living, the unruly disorder of the studio, when she’d grabbed her coat and stormed down the stairs after their final and most spectacular row, he’d wandered the streets for days, looking for her in coffee-bars, in lodging-houses, among the open-air stalls of the street markets. But he’d looked without success.

‘I’m getting out!’ she’d cried. ‘I’m going to make something of my life, I’m going to know where next week’s rent and tomorrow’s meals are coming from! You can stay here and rot, Tim Jefford, but I’m pulling out while there’s still time!’

He jerked his thoughts back from that tempestuous evening two years ago and began to read the paragraphs under the wedding-group. Some old man, Henry Mallinson, some well-heeled tycoon with a string of garages defacing the broad acres of England, had suffered some kind of heart attack. There he was, on the left of the group, at the wedding twelve months ago of his younger son, David, to Miss Carole Stewart.

Tim raised his head. So she’d embarked on a new life after all, a good life, the life of country houses unshakeably reared on a foundation of petrol pumps and motor-sales. He dropped his eyes again, seeking the address.

Whitegates, a good name for a house, a reassuring name with its implications of rolling parklands, of sinewy sons of the soil bedding out plants in the herbaceous borders.

He drank the last of his cooling coffee at a single gulp and stood up. He paced about the cluttered studio, assessing the information and its possibilities.

‘You’ve done well for yourself, Carole old girl,’ he said with affectionate admiration. Might there not be a little to spare for an old and intimate friend, might there not be a little handout – or not such a little handout – a good fat handout, in memory of old times?

He flung himself down on the sofa and screwed up his eyes in concentrated thought. Mallinson – he’d heard of the old man, he’d seen bits about him in the paper now and then. Gave money to charities, didn’t he? Fulminated sometimes about the decline in moral standards, loudly and publicly regretted the disappearance of the old virtues. Tim examined the photograph again with care, searching the lines of Henry Mallinson’s face for clues to his character.

A hard face, the face of a man with strong and rigid views, a man who would stand no nonsense, a man who liked his own way and was accustomed to getting it. A man who would lend his presence to the wedding of his younger son only if that son had seen fit to marry a girl his father approved of, a girl who would do credit to the family name.

A heart attack. Mild enough, apparently, but Mallinson was an old man, the attack might be the first of many, death might be raising the first beckoning finger. There was a large fortune to be disposed of, there would be a will, there would be the sharing out of property, of huge and glittering assets.

Tim stood up again, feeling excitement, exhilaration beginning to flow through his limbs. This was precisely the moment to pay a visit to dear Carole, exactly the moment at which she would most earnestly desire the long shadows of the past to dissolve and vanish for ever, so beautifully and rightly the moment at which she would be prepared to dip her pale and pretty hand into her well-padded wallet and pay tribute to an old and well-loved friend.

He pulled open the bottom drawer of the bureau and took out a bunch of letters secured with an elastic band. Carole’s letters, written during one of their stormy separations, kept out of sentiment. He slipped off the elastic band and drew a letter from its envelope, running his eyes over the pages with satisfaction. She’d let herself go in the letters, hadn’t minced matters. Not at all the kind of letters a tycoon’s daughter-in-law would care to see produced in her elegant drawing-room.

He began to hum a little tune. All he needed now was a cover-story, a good excuse for a visit to Rockley.

The final lines of the newspaper story gave him his cue. Among his many and varied interests Mallinson apparently numbered a passion for old coins. His collection was among the finest in the country, he had made a particular speciality of Roman coins. Tim grinned with pleasure at his own ingenuity.

One good rarity, surely he could lay hold of one decent Roman coin with twenty-five pounds? One flawless specimen and he was in business as a dealer. He frowned suddenly, biting his lip in agitated thought.

He’d need money for the train-fare, money to stay somewhere near Whitegates for a day or two – the village pub perhaps? Money for some presentable clothes. How much would be left when he’d bought that coin? He hadn’t the faintest idea how much it would cost, whether anything at all would be left, whether in fact the whole twenty-five pounds might not even be enough to buy the coin, let alone leave anything over for the other expenses.

He banged his palms together. He could dispense with the notion of buying a train ticket, he could thumb a lift as he’d done countless times before. He could borrow a respectable suit from one of his cronies, beg a suitcase from another. That left only the money for the pub. How long would he need to stay in the village – what was the name? Rockley, that was it. They wouldn’t be likely to charge much in a place like that. Bed and breakfast, he could get by on that. He’d made do with one meal a day before now, with no meals a day often enough. You could stoke yourself up on a good pub breakfast with enough calories to keep you going all day.

He looked round the room, his eyes searching for saleable goods, for anything that might fetch a few shillings. The transistor radio – he could do without that. If his gamble came off he could buy himself a dozen radios. The easels, they’d fetch a bob or two. And of course the coin might only cost a few pounds, he might not have to sell anything at all.

Too late to do anything tonight. Frustration stabbed at him but he brushed it aside. First thing in the morning he’d be down at the shops looking for his coin, then he’d have to make a round of his mates to collect the clothes and the suitcase. The afternoon should see him on the way to Rockley. But no – why spend tomorrow evening in the Rockley pub, paying out good money when the day would be already nearly over, useless to him? Sleep the night here in the studio, start out the following day at the crack of dawn, thumbing a lift from the early lorries, get to Rockley before the morning was well advanced, that would leave him the rest of the day to pay his calls. With any luck he might finish his business before the day was out, might not need to spend a single penny on a night’s lodging.

The Siamese cat sprang down from the sofa and rubbed herself against his leg. He glanced down at her, stooped and picked her up, burying his cheek in the soft fur.

‘Can’t let you starve while I’m gone, Princess,’ he said. ‘When I get back there may be salmon and cream for you, but in the meantime—’

In the meantime there was Hilda Browning, tap-tapping at her hopeless novel on the floor below.

‘Come on, Princess!’ He went rapidly from the room, down to Hilda Browning’s door and rapped loudly.

‘Open up, Hilda! It’s me, Tim!’

The typewriter keys rattled to a halt. Footsteps inside the room, the door flung open and Hilda Browning smiling at him with sudden renewed hope.

‘Tim! It’s been ages—’ Ages since he’d banged on her door, ages since their brief flare of affection had fizzled out into darkness. ‘Come in!’ She threw the door wide open.

‘I have to go away for a day or two,’ he said, stepping inside. ‘On a matter of business. Would you do me a favour?’ He threw her his most winning smile with the charm turned full on. ‘Look after Princess for me while I’m gone? I’m leaving the day after tomorrow, very early. I’ll make it up to you when I get back.’ He kept his smile going at full beam. But Hilda didn’t even pause to consider the matter.

‘Of course I will!’ she cried. ‘I’d be glad to, you know that! Bring Princess down tomorrow evening. She’ll be quite at home here.’ She ought to be, Hilda thought with a fleeting thrust of nostalgia, she spent most of her time down here a few months ago. She stretched out a hand and stroked the cat’s fur. ‘I’ll take very good care of her.’

Tim began to edge his way back towards the open door.

‘I knew I could rely on you,’ he said, allowing his face to glow with gratitude. ‘Thanks, Hilda, I won’t forget.’ He let his eyes send out a beam of promise. ‘I think I’ll have something to celebrate when I get back. You can help me to celebrate.’

Another minute or two of rather fatiguing encouragement and radiant goodwill and he was able to make his escape back to the studio. He dropped Princess on the sofa, picked up the newspaper and with great care tore out the half-page to be folded away safely in his pocket. He dropped a kiss on the demurely smiling features of Carole Stewart, now Carole Mallinson of happy memory.

‘Get out the champagne, Carole, my love!’ he said. ‘Old Tim’s riding into town!’

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.

CHAPTER 4

‘I HAVE TIME for a quick cup of coffee,’ Richard Knight said, smiling at Gina. He would never do more than smile at her in front of the maid who had answered his ring at the door and who was still hovering in the hall, giving the secretary an enquiring glance. The servants at Whitegates were by now all quite certain that romance was brewing between Miss Thorson and Dr Burnett’s young partner. They viewed the developing situation without envy, with interest and pleasure. A pleasant young woman, Gina Thorson, one who had seen hard times somewhere, not a girl to give herself airs with the domestic staff – not like Mr David’s wife up at Tall Trees, who fancied herself more than somewhat in spite of the fact that she had apparently sprung from nowhere at exactly the right moment to catch Mr David and marry him.

‘Could we have some coffee, please?’ Gina smiled at the maid, making an ally of her, as was her way. ‘Dr Knight hasn’t much time.’

‘Certainly, Miss Right away.’ The girl disappeared in the direction of the kitchen quarters.

‘I’m just off on my rounds,’ Richard said. He slid an arm round Gina’s waist and dropped a light kiss on her cheek. She was aware as always of a slight distance between them. Until his ring was actually on her finger he would always treat her with a trace of reserve and formality. ‘How’s the old man?’ he asked, walking up to the great fireplace and looking down at the logs burning in the grate.

Gina followed him. ‘He seems to be doing very well. He’s getting restless, I suppose that’s a good sign.’ Richard gave a little nod. ‘Doctor Burnett was in earlier this morning, Mr Mallinson was pestering him to let him get up.’

Richard raised his head. ‘And is he going to let him?’

‘Yes, for a very short time this afternoon, Mrs Parkes said. Just to sit in a chair in his room. I don’t suppose that will satisfy him for long, though.’

The maid came in with the tray of coffee. Gina began to pour it out. ‘Kenneth Mallinson is here,’ she said. ‘Did you know?’

‘I knew he’d been sent for, I didn’t know whether or not he’d arrived.’

Gina handed him a cup. ‘He got here about ten minutes ago. I didn’t see him, Mrs Parkes told me he was here.’ She inclined her head towards the curving stairs. ‘He’s up there now, with his father. Doctor Burnett said he could have visitors, provided they didn’t stay too long or excite him in any way.’

Richard stirred his coffee thoughtfully. ‘I should have thought seeing his elder son again, after all these years, might be rather distressing. I don’t know that I would have allowed it at such an early stage.’

‘Oh but you see, Mr Mallinson particularly wanted to see him, he asked Doctor Burnett to send for him as soon as he was taken ill. It would have upset him far more if the visit hadn’t been allowed.’

Richard began to drink his coffee. ‘Yes, I suppose so. In any case Burnett knows what he’s doing. He’s a very sound man and of course he knows everyone here for miles around, knows all the family ins and outs, the feuds and alliances. It all helps when you’re trying to do what’s best for a patient.’

‘Has he always practised here?’ Gina asked. ‘I would have imagined a clever doctor like that would have been tempted away to a city, or a big hospital somewhere.’ She knew that Richard himself was only putting in a year or two with Dr Burnett, his sights were set on broader horizons, Rockley would not hold him for ever.

‘He was born here,’ Richard said. ‘He’s a man who sends down deep roots, a man with strong loyalties. But he did leave Rockley, he spent the greater part of his working life up north, in an industrial area of Yorkshire, I thought you knew that.’

Gina laid down her cup and stared at him in surprise. ‘No, I had no idea. I thought he’d always practised here. I had the impression – from the servants, I suppose – that he’d been here for years and years. Mr Mallinson always treats him as if they’ve known each other all their lives.’

‘They have, in a way. They were boys together in Rockley. Poor boys, both of them. Whitegates was owned by a county family then. Henry Mallinson’s father was a groom and Dr Burnett’s father was the gardener here at Whitegates. He was born in that cottage where the Fosters live now. They were bright lads, both of them. Mallinson came up the hard way, using his brains and hands to build up the business, Burnett read books and won scholarships. He came back here to practise after he qualified. Then, when he was about thirty or thirty-five, he went off to Yorkshire and didn’t come back till about ten years ago. I suppose he found he was growing old, thought he’d like to end his days where he was born. Not an uncommon wish.’

‘Did he never marry?’ Gina spoke the words with a trace of hesitation, hoping that Richard wouldn’t think she was sending out a feeler of any kind. Marriage had never been mentioned between them, but she knew that he had considered it, that during their visit to his home he would make up his mind.

Richard shook his head. ‘No, not so far as I know. He certainly never mentions a wife and I’ve never heard that he married. Rather surprising really, when I come to think about it. A wife is very useful to a doctor, most doctors marry. And Burnett, in particular, I would have thought he was the type to fall in love deeply and permanently.’ He laid down his cup. ‘By the way, Gina, I haven’t pressed you, but are you coming with me? Next month, when I go home? I’d like you to meet my parents, I’d like it very much.’ He gave her a level, direct, unsmiling look. ‘It’s important to me.’

She felt her heart give a sharp leap. ‘I’d like to, Richard, I’d be very pleased to. It’s only—’ She broke off and bit her lip.

‘Only what? What silly notion have you got into your head?’

It was utterly impossible for her to open her mouth and mention such a ridiculous trifle as her clothes. A man would never understand, and particularly a man like Richard. He would brush the words aside with impatience. But it does matter, Gina thought, it matters a lot to make the right impression. With the right clothes, I’d feel at ease, adequate, able to hold my own, however grand his parents are.

‘They mightn’t like me,’ she heard herself say, and was instantly depressed at the stupidity, the childishness of the remark. ‘I’m no one,’ she said, plunging even deeper into foolishness. She abandoned all pretence and let the words come out in a rush. ‘I’ve no family, no background. Your parents are well-to-do, they live in a big house, they’d wonder why on earth you bothered to bring home a girl like me.’ It was out, she’d said it. She closed her eyes for an instant in despair.

A moment later she was astounded to hear Richard laugh. A deep amused laugh, echoing round the hall. She jerked her eyes open.

‘You silly child!’ He bent down and put his arms round her, kissed her lightly and firmly on the mouth.

‘You’re someone very special, to me,’ he said, suddenly serious again, looking down into her eyes. ‘Don’t ever let me hear you talk such nonsense again. My parents will love you – as I do.’

‘Oh, Richard—’ Upstairs she heard a door open and close. She pulled back from his arms and glanced nervously towards the stairs.

‘It’s all right,’ he said in a low voice. ‘There’s no need to act like a startled fawn.’ But his manner resumed its customary trace of formality. ‘I take it you’ll be coming with me, then? If your objections are nothing more serious than that?’

She drew a deep breath. ‘All right, I’ll come.’

He patted her hand. ‘Good girl, I knew you’d see sense.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Now I really must be off or my patients’ relatives will all be ringing the surgery to find out where I’ve got to.’

She went with him to the door. ‘I’ll phone you,’ he said. ‘This evening or tomorrow, it depends how I’m fixed. We’ll go out and have a meal together as soon as I can manage a couple of hours off.’ He brushed her cheek with his lips and was gone.

Gina closed the door and stood with her back to it, her hands clasped together. I will go, she thought, and I’ll be a credit to him. I’ll get the suède coat and the skirt and the sweater. Shoes, bag and gloves. I’ll get them all. Somehow. I’ll look poised, elegant, suitable. I won’t let Richard down. She unclasped her hands, stood up very straight and looked up at the stairs towards the corridor beyond, towards the room behind whose door old Mr Mallinson lay.

‘Doing very well indeed,’ Kenneth Mallinson said. ‘Still plenty of room for expansion of course.’ He gave a little smile. ‘We’re not in the same class as you, not by a long chalk, but our balance sheet is pretty healthy.’

Henry Mallinson put the tips of his fingers together. ‘No, I don’t suppose you are in the same class as me. Took me fifty years to build the firm up. And things were different then. More opportunity for a young man with vision. Not so many rules and regulations, taxation wasn’t so crippling.’ He looked back into the past for an instant with pleasure, remembering the old days, the struggles, the triumphs, the near-disasters. He gave a little smiling sigh, wishing it was all to do again, that he could turn back the clock and start the whole long battle all over again.

‘There isn’t a thing I’d do differently,’ he said suddenly, following his own train of thought. ‘Not a thing.’ He’d enjoyed every moment of it, the difficulties and conflicts, perhaps those most of all.

‘Nothing?’ Kenneth asked in an altered tone. He wasn’t thinking of the business, he was thinking of his mother, of her spirit bruised and crushed over the long years of marriage to a man whose first and only thought was for the firm he had reared with so much toil and sweat. He was thinking of his own quarrel with his father and the years of silence. ‘Nothing at all?’

Henry Mallinson raised his eyes. ‘Not a thing,’ he said. ‘I’d do it all again exactly as before.’

Kenneth stood up and walked over to the window. He stood looking down at the sweep of lawn, at Foster kneeling by a bed, patting the earth around a plant. One learns nothing from the past, he thought, one learns nothing from one’s mistakes, we are all bounded inexorably by the limitations of our own natures. Myself as well as other men. He felt suddenly and acutely depressed.

‘You’re quite settled up north, then?’ his father’s voice asked. He didn’t add, ‘Not thinking of getting married one of these days?’ It wouldn’t have occurred to him to ask. A confirmed bachelor, his elder son, he would retreat year by year further into his shell, growing more solitary, more self-sufficient. Any grandchildren Henry Mallinson might hope for must be looked for elsewhere. The firm would not be carried on, nurtured and served by any descendants of Kenneth’s. ‘You’ve given up all notion of coming back here?’ He didn’t say, ‘Of coming home.’ Whitegates was no longer home to Kenneth, hadn’t been home to him since the day he’d followed his mother to Rockley churchyard where she lay at last in peace, beyond unhappiness, beyond the possibility of pain.

Kenneth turned from the window. ‘I don’t know,’ he said with an air of lightness. ‘I haven’t totally ceased to consider it.’ His own business concern might go bust in a matter of days. He had to keep the door open, he might be very glad indeed to creep back to Rockley and make a niche for himself in the family business. But what kind of a niche would it be? Would David even contemplate relinquishing command? He gave a fractional shake of his head at the notion. No, David would not contemplate it. He would take very great pleasure in assigning his elder brother to some inferior position, in issuing orders and waiting for them to be carried out.

I couldn’t do it, Kenneth thought. But reality stared back at him implacably. He might have to do it, there might be no other conceivable course.

‘There’s always room for a little more capital in a growing concern,’ he said, smiling at his father. ‘I don’t have to tell you that. Do you fancy a sound investment? I could offer you very good terms.’ He smiled again, a shade less cheerfully. ‘Seeing it’s one of the family.’

His father gave him a long shrewd look. What was it about his elder son that had always irritated him? Why had he been content to turn his affairs over to David, without resentment, without perpetual fault-finding and interference, when he had been totally unable to leave Kenneth alone for one single day to run the firm as he thought best? He didn’t know, and he would never know now, it was by many a long year too late to find out.

‘I wasn’t altogether fair to you in the past,’ he said slowly. He saw Kenneth’s eyes jerk open at such an acknowledgment.

That’s how he sees me, Henry thought, a man who could never admit to a mistake. But we change when death looks us in the face, not by very much perhaps, but we change all the same.

‘There was never enough time,’ Henry said without regret. ‘Never enough time to look at every aspect of living.’ An apology of sorts. As much as he could ever bring himself to utter. It would have to do.

Kenneth looked down at his father. It crossed his mind for an instant that he could reach down and touch his father’s hand, pale and oddly fragile-looking, the fingers extended against the coverlet. But he remembered his mother lying there in Rockley churchyard and the impulse passed.

‘I’d like to put a little money into your business,’ his father said. He gave a brief smile. ‘I’d like to diversify my interests. What figure did you have in mind?’

Kenneth drew a deep breath. ‘Twenty-five thousand,’ he said without emotion. Might as well allow a margin. ‘Thirty if you prefer. It can all be gone into.’

‘I’ll speak to my solicitor. He can look into it. How long will you be staying?’

Kenneth took a pace or two about the room. Impossible to stand still now when relief flowed violently through his limbs.

‘As long as you wish. My junior partner is a very sound man, he can carry on till I get back.’ I’ll phone him the moment I get to the pub, he thought. I’ll tell him it’s all right about the loan, he can turn that job down now. With immense difficulty he restrained himself from laughing aloud, so great was his sense of release.

‘A few days then,’ his father said. ‘I know what business is, you can’t stay here for ever.’ He flung him a glance that held a trace of appeal. ‘You’ll be down again, I imagine. Before very long.’

‘Oh yes, I’ll be down again. It isn’t all that long a run in the car.’ Strange to contemplate the notion of being on visiting terms at Whitegates. He’d have to put things on to some kind of acceptable footing with David and his wife. Matters would have to be handled very delicately there.

‘My solicitor can draw up a new will while he’s about it,’ Henry Mallinson said, almost off-hand. ‘The present one cuts you out, I imagine you realized that?’

Kenneth inclined his head. ‘Yes, I realized that.’

‘You’re my elder son,’ his father said. ‘No getting away from that.’ At the end of life the ties of blood assumed immense importance, a significance he hadn’t altogether bargained for. ‘No getting away from that,’ he said again, heavily, and closed his eyes. ‘I’m tired now, I think I’d better rest. I’m old, Kenneth, really old.’ He opened his eyes, wearily. ‘I never thought it would happen to me. The years go by. You know it happens to other people. But you never imagine it will happen to you.’

Even now Kenneth couldn’t bring himself to take his father’s hand. Later perhaps, in a day or two, before he left Rockley. But not just yet. He couldn’t stretch out a hand and destroy the past all in a moment. Not just yet.

‘I’ll go then,’ he said, moving towards the door. ‘Is there anything you want?’

Henry closed his eyes. His face looked peaceful, infinitely weary. ‘Send Mrs Parkes along. I’ll get her to see about the solicitor. Later on today perhaps. Might as well strike while the iron’s hot.’ While there’s still time, he added in his mind, time to put things right, in some measure at least. ‘You’ll be staying here?’ His eyes came open again, slowly. ‘In the house?’

Kenneth shook his head. ‘No, I’ll get a room at the pub. It’ll be less bother for the servants.’

‘Just as you wish.’ So he isn’t ready to forgive yet, Henry thought, not altogether with surprise. The Mallinson blood ran in Kenneth’s veins and no Mallinson forgave easily, at the first sign of an outstretched hand. He heard the door close quietly. He raised a hand to his face and found to his astonishment that his lids were moist with tears.

Kenneth walked slowly towards the stairs with his mind in a tumult of conflicting thoughts and emotions. The wave of relief which had washed over him in the bedroom was subsiding now. It isn’t going to be as simple as it seemed in that first moment, he thought. Father is no fool about money and the solicitor is even less of a fool – if that is possible. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty thousand pounds, that kind of money wasn’t going to be invested without searching enquiries and the most casual enquiry would elicit the fact that Kenneth’s business was standing on the very edge of bankruptcy. Oh yes, with a good lump sum of capital he was absolutely confident that he could set the firm on its feet again, that it would go forward soundly and smoothly. But to convince his father of that – and his father’s solicitor? Another matter altogether.

He put a hand on the banister, staring down at his feet moving one after the other, a single step at a time, reluctant now to carry him towards that phone. Just what was he going to tell his partner?

There is the new will, some insistent part of his mind said clearly. Drawn up today, signed tomorrow, in all probability. The whole family fortune split down the middle between himself and David. Father looked tired and old, he thought, striving to suppress pity, he looked like a man who could not last many months, many weeks – or even many days.

His fingers gripped the rail tightly. If his father were to die quite soon, inside a week, say, there need be no investigation about a loan. He could either shore up the firm with another loan from the bank till his father’s estate was paid out, or he could simply let the firm go bust, sit back and wait for probate, secure in the knowledge that he need never again lift a finger unless he wanted to. And his father had looked so weary, so ill …

Nonsense! said another part of his mind, loud and distinct, he isn’t very ill at all. He suffered only a mild spasm of some kind, he has an iron constitution, he isn’t all that old as age goes nowadays, he’ll be up and about in a day or two, quite capable of poring over accounts, of recognizing rocky finances when he studies a balance sheet.

Kenneth raised his shoulders in perplexity. I’m really no better off now than when I spoke to my partner this morning, he thought with a stab of hopelessness. He felt all at once acutely angry, obscurely cheated. A way out had seemed to open up before his feet and then to close again, vanishing into the mist. There is no way, he told himself and then paused for a moment, feeling the banister smooth and slippery beneath his hand. There is one way, he thought … if I dared to take it …

Downstairs at the front door, a sudden sharp ring at the bell. Kenneth jerked himself out of his calculations, allowed his face to resume its normal expression and walked quickly down the remaining stairs.

A maid crossed the hall and opened the front door. A few moments later she admitted a man in a dark overcoat, a white-haired man carrying a bag in one hand, his hat in the other.

‘Doctor Burnett! How are you? It’s been a long time.’ Kenneth walked swiftly across the wide spaces of the parquet floor with his hand held out.

‘You got here then,’ Burnett said, giving him a rapid, assessing look. ‘Have you seen your father?’

‘Yes, I’ve just left him. He seems to be coming along very nicely. He’s a little tired at the moment – we had a rather long talk, but he wasn’t distressed in any way. I don’t think he’s expecting you.’

‘No, but I was passing on my way home for lunch. I’ve some new tablets, I’d like him to try them, I think they might be useful.’

They had moved together into the centre of the spacious hall. A chilly room, in spite of the logs burning in the grate. Always a chilly room, Kenneth remembered, even when I was a lad it struck cold into my bones, even in the height of summer. He glanced at Burnett and saw that his eyes were resting on the gilt-framed portrait over the fireplace. Kenneth looked up at his mother, at her calm, sad, disciplined face turned a little to one side, her hands folded together in resignation on the dark blue silk of her skirt.

He had a sudden impulse to speak of her to someone, to this doctor perhaps, standing beside him. He wanted to pluck her back for a moment from that shadowy land in which, impossibly, she could no longer experience sadness or resignation, pain or heartbreak.

‘You never knew her, did you?’ he said in a low voice. Dr Burnett had left Rockley for some teeming grimy city in the north before Henry Mallinson brought home his bride. ‘You came back to Rockley after she …’ He found himself totally unable to utter the bleak finality of that word, died.

‘A beautiful face,’ Burnett said in a voice with overtones that Kenneth couldn’t quite identify. ‘In spite of the unhappiness, a face of great beauty.’

So you see it too, Kenneth thought, it isn’t just to my eyes, the eyes of love and knowledge, that her unhappiness still speaks from the careful oils. It is clear after all these years to a stranger who never knew her, never saw her.

‘You didn’t come to the wedding?’ he asked suddenly, surprisingly. They had been boyhood friends, the doctor and his father, one would have expected him to leave that grimy city and take a train south to stand beside his old friend on that special day.

Burnett shook his head. ‘I couldn’t get away, I was single-handed at the time.’ His voice remembered the driving work of those days, the brief hours of sleep, the endless, appalling fatigue. ‘It was a hard life.’ He gave a little sigh and returned to the present with a movement of his shoulders.

‘You’ll be staying here?’ he asked. ‘For a few days, I imagine?’

‘For a few days at least. But not in the house. I’m going along to the Swan now to get a room. I don’t imagine there’ll be any difficulty.’ Never more than two or three guests at a time in the Swan, for what was there to attract a horde of visitors to a little village like this? ‘I thought I’d spare the servants here the trouble—’

‘I could give you lunch,’ Burnett said. ‘If you’d care to wait till I’ve seen your father. It won’t be anything very fancy but it might be better than the Swan.’ Hardly noted for its fine cuisine, the village pub. He was surprised at Kenneth wanting to stay there. Plenty of servants at Whitegates. What else were they paid for but to look after the family? All those bedrooms, half of them never used from one year’s end to another nowadays.

‘It’s very kind of you, but I think I’ll go along right away and see about booking a room. And I’ve some business matters to attend to.’ Kenneth smiled a little. ‘You know how it is. I’ve left my junior partner in charge, he isn’t quite as experienced as I am. One has to keep in touch.’

Burnett turned towards the stairs. ‘I’ll be seeing you again, of course. We’ll both be in and out of Whitegates. Perhaps we can take a meal together another time.’

‘Father is all right?’ Kenneth asked suddenly. ‘I mean he is going to—’

‘To recover?’ The doctor gave him a shrewd look. ‘I see no reason why not. He isn’t all that old.’ He smiled. ‘That is to say, he’s exactly the same age as I am. I suppose to you that seems a very great age indeed but here in the country—’ he spread the fingers of one hand – ‘it’s no very great age as they reckon things here. I think you can set your mind at rest.’

At rest, Kenneth thought, letting himself out of the front door a few moments later. A strange word to express the present state of his mind. Behind him the door opened and the maid came running out.

‘Oh – Mr Kenneth – aren’t you going to stay for lunch? Cook is expecting you – and your room, it’s all ready for you!’

Kenneth turned. ‘No, I’m not staying in the house. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you thought I was. I’m staying at the Swan.’ The girl looked disappointed. They would welcome a visitor or two, he saw suddenly. It must be dull for the staff in the half-empty house. He gestured towards his car drawn up a few yards away. ‘I’m taking my things along there now. I’ll be back, of course.’ He gave her a cheerful smile. ‘I’ll be popping in and out all the time.’

As he headed the car towards the tall iron gates he saw a girl walking along the little path leading through the shrubbery. She raised a hand to part the overhanging branches and stepped fully into view. He slowed the car for a moment and their eyes met. He inclined his head briefly in acknowledgment and let the car glide forward again.

A pretty girl, an extremely pretty girl, pale shining hair and wide blue eyes. A slender figure, a diffident, vulnerable-looking face. His mind flicked rapidly through a catalogue of the residents and neighbours of Whitegates, striving to place her. A face too delicate and sensitive to belong to a servant, the clothes a little too tailored for a village girl.

As he drove out through the gates he remembered all at once that his father had said something about a secretary. That would be it, his father’s secretary. He considered the notion with a trace of surprise. There had been secretaries before, middle-aged women or older, lean and sinewy women, thickset, comfortable-looking women, but never one like this, never one with graceful limbs and palely-gleaming hair.

The pub came into sight. He put up a hand to his mouth and yawned, all at once extremely tired. It had been a long morning, full of surprises.

‘Very well then,’ Dr Burnett said. ‘Lunch now, a light lunch of course. Light meals only for the present. There must be no strain on the digestion. Then a nap. Afterwards, if you still feel like it, and only if you feel like it, you can sit up for half an hour this afternoon. Put on a dressing-gown and sit in that chair—’ He indicated a large upholstered chair near the window. ‘See that you’re warm, it’s most important to keep warm. Then back to bed again. And no further attempts to get up till I’ve seen you again, seen how you are. If everything goes well, we’ll think about letting you take a walk along the corridor tomorrow.’

‘Get along with you, you old fraud,’ Henry Mallinson said, grinning at him. ‘Who do you think you’re impressing with all this professional mumbo-jumbo? I’m as fit now as I was before this happened, just a little tired, that’s all. I’ll be as right as rain in a few days. I’ll see you into your grave before me. I’ll be the one who buys the wreath, not you, and well you know it.’

‘You can’t brush old age away by refusing to acknowledge it,’ Burnett said, unwilling to return the grin. ‘You’re not one of your own cars, you know, you can’t have a rebore, a new carburettor, a new engine. There’s to be no more driving on the brake and the accelerator for you from now on, you’ve got to get down to a slow steady speed.’

Henry acknowledged temporary defeat. ‘Oh, all right. Have it your own way. I’ll sit in my dressing-gown like a sick child in a nursery. Am I allowed comics? Or would the excitement prove too much for me?’

‘I have some new tablets here,’ Burnett said, ignoring the tedious humour. ‘I’d like you to try them. Some quite promising reports of them.’ He dug into his bag and produced a white cardboard drum. He removed the lid and tilted the drum forward under Henry’s gaze. ‘Tiny, as you see, no difficulty about swallowing them. One with a drink of water three times a day.’

‘What are they?’ Henry asked suspiciously. Didn’t like tablets, didn’t hold with any kind of drugs, pumping alien chemicals into perfectly good blood, unnatural, potentially dangerous.

‘You wouldn’t understand the name if I told you, you wouldn’t even be able to pronounce it. Just do as you’re told for once and take them for a few days. We’ll see how you get on with them, then we’ll think about continuing them or changing over to something else.’

‘I’m not a guinea-pig,’ Henry said without much hope. ‘You can carry out your experiments elsewhere, somewhere where they’ll be appreciated.’

Burnett opened the bedroom door and thrust his head out into the corridor.

‘Mrs Parkes! Could you come here, please?’

The nurse came out at once from her own room next door where she had been awaiting just such a summons. She came briskly into the room in her clean crisp uniform.

‘Yes, Dr Burnett?’ She slid a glance at the old man propped up against the pillows. He looked less tired now, stimulated by his exchange with the doctor.

‘Mr Mallinson may sit up for a short time when he has had an afternoon nap.’ The doctor repeated his instructions about care and warmth, about the dosage of the tablets.

‘And you are to remember particularly, both of you, that the tablets are on no account to be taken with alcohol.’

‘Alcohol?’ Henry frowned. ‘Do you mean I can’t have a glass of whisky?’ One of the few pleasures left to me, his aggrieved tone implied, I am to be robbed of that as well. Is there no limit to these infernal restrictions?

‘I didn’t say that.’ Burnett’s voice grew a trifle impatient. ‘I said the tablets were on no account to be taken with alcohol. If you must have a glass of whisky – ’ and his tone conceded that in all probability Henry must – ‘then you must dispense with the tablet. That is, if you insist, for instance, on a glass of whisky before you go to sleep, then you are on no account to take a tablet later than, say, four o’clock in the afternoon. The effect on the system will have ceased by the time you drink your whisky.’

‘Is he still to take the three tablets a day?’ Mrs Parkes was a little puzzled.

‘Yes.’ Dr Burnett sighed. He strove to make his meaning clear, as if to inattentive children. ‘One tablet on waking in the morning, one at noon, and the last at four o’clock. If by any chance either of you forgets and the last tablet is administered later, say at five or six, then there is to be no whisky on that evening. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Perfectly, thank you.’ Mrs Parkes was just the tiniest bit put out, not altogether caring for the doctor’s tone. After all, he had been rather confusing at first. ‘I’ll see Mr Mallinson takes the tablets at the correct time, in the correct dosage, and never with alcohol. I’ll make myself responsible for remembering.’

Nice going, Henry thought, allowing himself to fling a cheerfully defiant grin at old Burnett. Getting to be a bit of a dictator in his old age, ordering patients about as if they were babies, wouldn’t do him any harm at all to be put in his place for once. And by a nurse at that.

Burnett’s old cheeks showed a faint trace of heightened colour. He stooped to close his bag. ‘I’ll be looking in again,’ he said. ‘I can’t say exactly when. I don’t imagine it makes a great deal of difference to you.’

‘No difference at all,’ Henry said airily. ‘I feel a great deal better for your visit, I must admit. By the way,’ he added, slipping in the information with an air of casualness, ‘I’m having my solicitor call in later this afternoon. One or two things to discuss.’ He flicked his eyes upwards at Burnett. ‘A change of will among them.’ Mrs Parkes’s head came sharply round.

‘Is that all right, Doctor Burnett?’ she asked with a touch of anxiety. The first she’d heard of any summons to the solicitor, any change of will.

Dr Burnett considered the matter. ‘I suppose so,’ he said reluctantly. Henry was clearly going to see the solicitor whether it was all right with his doctor or not, not much use in uttering an ineffectual veto. ‘Don’t overdo it, though. Make it as short as possible.’ Of course, the reconciliation with Kenneth – and now a change of will, Kenneth being put back into the will. For how much? The lot? Or half? Mm, might be stirring up a nest of trouble there with his brother David.

‘I rely on you not to let the visit drag on too long,’ Burnett said to Mrs Parkes. But he knew that a sick man would rest more easily after his will was made, when his mind was at peace.

And it was only right that Kenneth should have his share. Cutting him out like that, the elder son, most unjust. Wouldn’t do to take a chance, delay matters, might end up with old Henry dying without the will being changed, Kenneth deprived of his inheritance. A tricky thing, the heart, one could never tell. Mallinson’s heart might be good for another ten years, might flicker out all in an instant. That’s the thing to remember about the heart, Burnett repeated in his mind, no one can ever be sure, no one can ever tell.

Mrs Parkes walked with the doctor to the head of the stairs. ‘You can safely leave Mr Mallinson to me,’ she said with firm confidence. ‘I won’t allow him to do too much.’

She watched Burnett walk away down the stairs and through the hall. She stood where she was for a minute or two. No one about, the hall and corridor deserted. She put a hand into the pocket of her uniform dress and drew out a much-creased envelope, pulled out her son’s letter and glanced at it yet again, not needing to, knowing the contents by heart, but unable to restrain herself.

‘If there was any possibility of getting a farm of our own here …’ She raised her eyes from the letter and stared at the wall. Kenneth Mallinson come home, the will to be changed. What of her own legacy now? Might it be swept away in the general redistribution of the estate? Might her claim on Mr Mallinson’s generosity be forgotten? And she had convinced herself by now that the legacy actually existed, that it was a very good sum indeed. She dropped her eyes to the letter.

‘Once you’ve made up your mind about a thing,’ her son had written, ‘there isn’t much point in hanging about.…’

‘Mrs Parkes!’ The old man’s voice calling from his room.

‘Coming!’ She thrust the letter and the envelope together into her pocket, cleared her face of the traces of emotion and went briskly back to the bedroom.

‘I want my lunch, Mrs Parkes! Have you forgotten my lunch?’

‘No, of course not!’ She smiled at him. ‘I’ll bring it up right away. I was just seeing Dr Burnett off.’

‘And tell Gina to bring up a couple of trays of my coins after lunch.’ He grinned like a mischievous boy. ‘Burnett didn’t say anything about not looking at my coins. The two trays from the first drawer of the left-hand cabinet, tell Gina. Have you got that?’

‘Yes, I’ll tell her.’ She went quietly from the room.

Henry lay back against his pillows with a contented air. He hoped there was something a trifle more substantial for lunch than the miserable couple of spoonfuls he’d been allowed for breakfast. Still, there were the coins to handle afterwards. Quite some time since he’d run his fingers over the carefully-cleaned surfaces. There were one or two little compensations to be enjoyed from illness after all.

CHAPTER 5

‘HALLBOROUGH?’ the lorry driver said.

‘A village near Hallborough, actually. It’s called Rockley. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it. I hadn’t myself till a couple of days ago.’

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