Family and Friends Page 2

  He would have been astounded to know that Arnold was also contemplating a mental vision of Mrs Fleming, only in Arnold’s mind she was smiling up at him from the other side of the counter in her trim establishment, offering him advice about a purchase. I could call in on the way home, Arnold thought with an agreeable flash of inspiration, I could buy something for Sarah’s birthday.

  He stole a glance at his watch. He could clear off in a few minutes, as soon as he’d locked up in Accounts; Mrs Fleming would be sure to stay open till half past five at least. She’d taken the shop over only a few weeks before, coming to Milbourne as a stranger, from some town on the east coast; she couldn’t afford just yet to close early during holiday seasons.

  ‘One other thing before you go,’ Owen said. ‘The date of the annual audit—’ He broke off as the phone rang sharply on his desk, he reached out and picked up the receiver.

  Arnold made a movement to go, leaving him to take the call in privacy but Yorke halted him with a raised hand. Arnold settled back again into his chair, expelling a little breath of resignation at the swift march of time towards the closing of Mrs Fleming’s shop.

  ‘Won’t be a moment,’ Yorke said softly above the shielded mouthpiece. ‘It’s Zena.’ He withdrew his hand and stared down at his desk with an impassive face, listening to his wife’s voice.

  ‘I expected you home long before this, I’ve been waiting for the tonic, you promised to call in for it. You know I’m not at all well . . .’ Owen closed his eyes for an instant, blocking off part of his mind against the familiar outpourings, recalling with guilty irritation that he had totally forgotten about the tonic.

  He gave a barely perceptible sigh. If Zena would only take herself in hand and behave with some modicum of common sense, if she would for once in her life follow Dr Gethin’s exasperated advice, cut down on the over-rich and fattening food, cut out the alcohol, stop dosing herself with useless patent medicines, make sure she got eight hours’ sleep at night and sufficient fresh air and exercise by day, she might not be able to cure entirely her largely self-inflicted diabetes and its attendant train of disabilities, but she would at least be able to control it, to bring it down to manageable proportions, she might even be able to dispense with the insulin injections.

  As it was, she was slipping further into invalidism. She had already ended up twice in the Milbourne hospital in a diabetic coma, the second time only last September.

  ‘You’ve had a pretty narrow escape this time,’ Gethin had told her with angry bluntness when she was sufficiently well again to be lectured. ‘You’ll indulge yourself once too often, my girl. If you go on as you are doing, there’ll be a coma one fine day that no one can pull you out of.’ He had brought Zena into the world and he still treated her as the spoiled child she had been when her parents were alive. As indeed she still was, Owen had thought, standing behind Dr Gethin with an expressionless face, listening to the warnings they both knew would be blandly ignored.

  ‘I could lie in my bed and die for all the notice you take of me,’ Zena said now over the phone, well into her customary recital of grievances. Owen passed a hand over his face. Could be she feels she’s no longer the focus of attention, Gethin had said to Owen more than once. A beautiful young woman like that, cherishing parents, a younger brother to trot about at her beck and call all through their sunny childhood. It isn’t easy, Gethin’s attitude implied, when the years take away youth and good looks. The parents go one by one . . . no children to absorb the energies, to engage the emotions . . . and Neil, the adoring young brother Zena had without effort dominated and overshadowed for so long, Neil had grown up in the end, had acquired a wife and daughter of his own to claim his affections.

  Gethin had given Owen a direct look. Only a husband left to her, Gethin’s glance had said. Can it be that she stage-manages this illness to throw a spotlight on herself once more, to give her back the centre of the well-loved boards? Might explain perhaps why she sometimes ‘forgot’ to take the injections, precipitating an occasional dramatic crisis, the need to be rushed into hospital.

  Owen had given the doctor look for look. You’ve been acquainted with her since the day of her birth, his eyes had answered, but you don’t know her. She doesn’t love me, she has never loved me, I realized years ago that she didn’t even love me when she stood beside me at the altar.

  What she did love, what she married me for, was the depth and intensity of the love I felt for her. She basked in the warmth of its fires, she felt herself important and secure in the fierce glow of a passion she thought would last all her days–but it never once occurred to her that there was any need to return it. It had survived countless thrusts and wounds, he remembered now with a savage resentment that took him by surprise.

  He gripped the receiver tightly, oblivious of Pierson motionless in his chair, no longer bothering to identify the substance of his wife’s complaints, plunged into the bitter past, assailed by the stabs and hurts of memories he had fancied decently interred and forgotten.

  It had been a long and painful time in dying, that old and powerful love, but it had died at last, completely and for ever, closing its eyes in the end against the renewal of intolerable suffering.

  ‘You could have asked Emily Bond to go out and get the tonic,’ he said suddenly into Zena’s fluent stream of words. ‘She’s still with you, isn’t she? You could send her out now if you’re so anxious to have it.’

  ‘Emily? She’s behind enough in her work as it is, without breaking off to go running errands in the town.’ Zena was deflected into an angry appraisal of the old charwoman’s shortcomings.

  She had worked for Zena right from the Yorkes’ wedding-day. In all the difficult times when domestic help had grown scarce and then almost unobtainable she had turned up faithfully, week in and week out. She might not have been the most skilled of workers but she had always been there. She was turned seventy now and old age had done nothing to improve her efficiency–but she was still there, and that, Owen thought, defensive on Emily’s behalf, was surely something.

  ‘I’ll be home shortly,’ he said abruptly, abandoning suddenly all further resistance. ‘I’ll bring the tonic with me, I won’t forget.’ He replaced the receiver and sat looking down at it for a few moments, his face set in lines of anger and frustration.

  ‘I’ll be locking up, then,’ Arnold said at last, confident that Yorke had forgotten all about the date of the audit which could surely now be left till Monday to discuss. He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘You’ll be wanting to get off home yourself.’ There was still time to call in at Mrs Fleming’s shop; the encounter would cast a glow over the whole evening, would extend its gentle radiance across the entire weekend.

  ‘Oh–yes. Right ho, then.’ Owen got to his feet, pulled back to the present. ‘If you let me know on Monday–about your sister, that you’ve briefed her.’ He had some elusive notion that there was something else he’d intended to mention, but he couldn’t recall it now. He raised his shoulders, letting it go till after the weekend. ‘I hope you find your father improved,’ he remembered to say as Pierson opened the door to make his escape.

  When the door closed again Owen crossed to the row of hooks on the wall by the window and jerked down his overcoat.

  He glanced at his watch–better get a move on, the shops would be closing soon and he didn’t relish the thought of Zena’s welcome if he arrived home without the precious tonic.

  But he didn’t immediately shrug his coat on. He stood looking out of the window at the descending twilight, at a couple of gaily chattering girls released from the typing pool to the pleasures of the weekend. To boyfriends and lovers, dates and parties, he thought with a startling wash of envy that held him motionless, his eyes fixed on the graceful girls with their lovely fluid movements.

  He watched them out of sight in the uncertain dusk. I’m not old, he thought, I could marry again, and the words dropped one by one into the depths of his mind with the slowness and finali
ty of a decision that has been a long and shadowy time in forming.

  He turned and stared at his unsmiling features in the mirror above the mantelpiece, seeing the face of a man in his prime. I could marry again, he repeated silently, and the moment seemed to illumine his future with a great shaft of glittering light. I could have children. He had always wanted children; he had neither comprehended nor forgiven Zena’s unwavering refusal even to countenance the idea. And now he saw that it was still not too late. A vast wave of joy swept through him, momentarily blinding him to the problem of Zena, who was scarcely likely to be reasonable about making way for a successor when she had been reasonable about little else.

  He saw himself holding a child by the hand, he saw other children laughing and calling from a summer garden. And the face that he saw smiling out at him from that flowering doorway was the gentle, pretty face of Linda Fleming.

  In the corridor outside his office a cleaner rattled a bucket down on to the floor and the sound brought him abruptly back to reality. He picked up a bunch of keys and moved swiftly round the room, locking up for the night. One or two calls to be made on the way home.

  Zena, he thought, there’s something I have to get for Zena . . . He stopped suddenly, frowning, remembering, looking down at his arrested hands for an endless moment. Then he straightened himself, raised his head and met his own intent gaze in the mirror.

  CHAPTER 2

  Arnold Pierson strode between the last of the shoppers, his mind as usual engaged on the convolutions of his own inner life which seemed a good deal more vivid than the shadowy figures moving past on the edge of his vision.

  In the middle of the High Street he was forced to step into the gutter with its crisp heaps of slatternly snow, to give passage to a couple of gossiping women pushing prams.

  The momentary interruption to his progress broke through his preoccupation. He glanced about him as he stepped back on to the pavement and saw that he was outside Underwood’s. He paused in front of the lighted windows. A couple of discreet stickers announced the sale due to begin on Monday morning. A girl knelt behind the plate glass with her back to him, pinning a ticket to the skilfully draped bodice of a dinner-gown in sage-green crêpe.

  No sign of his stepsister of course; Sarah’s exalted position as manageress had long ago removed her from any necessity to crouch before the public gaze and arrange in artistic folds the skirts of last season’s models. But she wouldn’t be barricaded away behind her office door, conducting the business by remote control; that was never Sarah’s way. She would be moving along the carpeted aisles, keeping a sharp eye on the manners and attitudes of her assistants, or taking up her position behind one of the mahogany-topped counters, to serve a valued customer.

  She would remain after the sign on the front door had been reversed to read Closed, dealing efficiently with the books, the orders, the monthly accounts; she would be the last person to leave the premises. Not even old Walter Pierson’s illness would cause her to go home so much as ten minutes early.

  For a good many years now she had employed a woman for a few hours every day to clean the house, wash the breakfast dishes and in general perform the bulk of the chores that Sarah herself in her younger days had somehow managed to attend to in addition to a full-time job. Over the past couple of weeks she had simply arranged for the woman to stay all day, looking after Walter as well as the house.

  Arnold put up a hand and ran a finger along his cheek, inclining his head and frowning down at the pavement, trying to visualize Sarah suddenly set free from the compulsion to open the front door at eight every morning, in fair weather and foul, and make her way to the warm, enclosed world of Underwood’s.

  She had worked hard all her life. Would she see retirement now as a long-yearned-for release? Or would she feel herself all at once grown old and useless, banished from the absorbing bustle of commerce to a suburban desert?

  Arnold shook his head slowly in bafflement. He simply didn’t know. Forty years since Sarah had followed her mother up the path into Walter Pierson’s house and Arnold still could never guess with any certainty how Sarah would feel or think about anything important. She never quarrelled with him but neither did she ever laugh or joke with him. If the two of them sat together in a room without talking, it wouldn’t be a companionable silence but the total deadness of a couple of switched-off radio sets.

  The kneeling girl put out a hand and steadied herself against a display stand. She turned her head to glance out at the last of the afternoon and her eyes met those of Arnold, unwaveringly fixed on her without seeing her, looking back down the long slope of years at some childish memory of Sarah jerking him along to school in the grey of winter and the blue of summer, on her way to work.

  The girl blinked, disconcerted and a little alarmed by the intent quality of that gaze, at once piercing and veiled. She drew her brows together in irritation at the queer fish staring in at her goldfish-bowl activities and then, suddenly recognizing the watcher in his dual identity of Miss Pierson’s brother and accountant at Underwood’s, did her best to transform her expression into one of professional friendliness.

  A whirling eddy of icy air stung the blood into Arnold’s cheeks, whisking him back from the gate of that far-off infant school to the yellow lights of the January evening, to the melancholy plateau of middle age and the abrupt recollection that if he was going to catch Mrs Fleming before closing-time, he had better get a move on. He turned from the window, totally unaware of the girl and her nod of recognition. His long strides took him in another minute or two to the top of the High Street, down a side turning, past another intersection, and into the quieter road that led to Linda Fleming’s establishment.

  It was still open, he saw as he approached. The lights shone out into the street and a woman who had been studying the window display walked without haste into the shop. Arnold halted in front of the polished panes adorned with a long streamer proclaiming a sale shortly to begin. Between the bright dresses and the trim coats he could see into the shop above the partition that reached only halfway up the back of the window.

  Linda Fleming’s pretty profile as she leaned forward, listening earnestly to her customer’s requirements. Her soft dark hair was taken up in a casual swirl on top of her neat head; he could see the gleam of a large tortoiseshell slide that held the tresses in position. Behind the opposite counter a young girl reached up to a shelf, restoring boxes of knitwear to an orderly appearance.

  Mrs Fleming pulled open a long drawer and took out a brilliant assortment of silk scarves, spreading them out before her one by one, lifting a corner to allow the shimmering material to drape into delicate folds. The customer assumed an expression of intense thoughtfulness. She’ll be there for four or five minutes yet, Arnold thought with a vast sense of relief. No need to walk inside just yet.

  He was seized with a powerful impulse to flee. That trim dark head with its puffs and curls, those finely-wrought features, that gentle smile, seemed all at once to represent danger, the terrifying possibility of intimate involvement on a deep and intolerably sensitive level with another human being. He glanced up the road, at the drifts of fog deepening about the street-lamps, and the path to safety seemed also to lead to a dull and deadly emptiness. He had a brief, bleak vision of the days ahead, with his father gone and Sarah sunk into apathetic retirement. He closed his eyes for an instant against that appalling picture, the two of them locked in a silent vacuum for ten, twenty, thirty years.

  He stared in again at Mrs Fleming, smiling and chatting to her customer, at her hands moving lightly between the patterned silks, and he saw those hands now as holding not only the threat of danger but the impossible notion of happiness.

  He drew a deep breath and began to search the window display with his eyes, looking for something he might buy for Sarah’s birthday. He had bought her Christmas present from Mrs Fleming, nerving himself to enter the little shop and strengthen the slender connection with the pretty new proprietress–he had m
et her for the first time at the factory, when she had called in to view the sample garments and place a small order.

  Owen Yorke had come across her at a social gathering of one of the trade federations of which he was a distinguished member. She had joined every organization that seemed to offer assistance; she was not very long widowed, inexperienced in business, a stranger to Milbourne, desperately anxious to make a success of her new venture. Owen Yorke had taken her under his wing, offered to advise her, invited her to take a look at his factory.

  And the only thing Arnold Pierson had been able to think of, having no factory to show her round, had been to buy Sarah’s Christmas present at Mrs Fleming’s shop. There had been several customers at the time, Linda had been able to give him no more than a few minutes’ half-abstracted attention. He had bought a handbag, careless of the fact that Sarah already had three or four handbags more than she would ever have occasion to use, and that her own shop held several drawers stuffed with handbags of every conceivable shape and material.

  Not that Sarah had expressed either irritation or exasperated amusement at the gift; she had in fact expressed nothing at all beyond the ritual words of thanks with which she had received presents all her life.

  In the whole of her existence no living soul had ever wrinkled an anxious brow over a Christmas or birthday offering for her. She had always been given–when she had been given anything at all–something chosen dutifully and swiftly, any pleasure or usefulness resulting from the occasion being entirely accidental. She invariably made her own annual purchases on the same obscure principles, having grown up with the conviction that this was the way the system operated between relatives and she had never had a sweetheart or indeed a close personal friend, male or female, to cause her to review the system in the fierce glow of love or affection.