Family and Friends Page 6

  ‘A-ah!’ she said aloud on a long note of satisfaction. All in all, it promised to be a very agreeable evening.

  Owen drove slowly through the misty streets towards the club. Not many folk about on this dismal evening. He let his mind slip back to its current preoccupation, trying to look at his total situation with the dispassionate eyes of an intelligent outsider. One of the many shrewd businessmen down at the club, for instance. He imagined himself confiding in such a man–not that he would be fool enough ever to indulge such an insane impulse. What would this sensible adviser suggest?

  Can’t quite see your problem, he might say with a lift of his eyebrows. Divorce your wife, marry again, start a family. Plenty of time left to you. Other men have done it; why can’t you? We live in less rigidly puritanical times, old boy; no one expects a fellow to live in misery these days; the laws are more humane, public opinion more enlightened.

  Owen halted his car at the traffic lights. It isn’t quite as simple as that, he told his shadowy listener. Zena would never agree to a divorce. She’s a vain woman, and vanity, injured pride, do more than anything else to keep one partner in a dying marriage clinging fiercely to an unwilling mate. If I left Zena, it would be five years before I would be free to marry again.

  Five years! He set the car in motion again. A pretty young woman like Linda Fleming was scarcely likely to be unmarried in five years’ time.

  There are other women in the world besides Mrs Fleming, said that insistent voice. Owen shook his head. He didn’t want the other women, he wanted Linda.

  And simply setting up house with her, living together without benefit of legal ceremony, was totally out of the question. It might be all right in London or some other great city but not in a place like Milbourne with its narrower, more censorious views. He couldn’t visualize himself even opening his mouth to mention such a scheme to Mrs Fleming.

  And I can’t uproot myself and move away, he thought with finality. My business is here, the new factory–it’s not possible to contemplate such a step.

  The factory–there you are! he said to the imaginary adviser. The new laws may be a fraction more humane, but they’re a good deal more stringent about the division of property. Everything I possess would be split down the middle, Zena would be entitled to half. And she would take a vicious pleasure in insisting on that half in cash. It would be the end of Underwood’s. He’d have to sell up in order to pay her.

  No possibility these days of raising such a massive loan; he’d been hard put to it to find enough borrowed capital for the new factory. And he could never repay the additional loan even if it could be raised. The interest alone would probably bankrupt him.

  He turned the car into the park beside the Independents’. Grossly unfair, this new ruling on property division, he thought with a surge of anger.

  Old Ralph Underwood had bequeathed his daughter the High Street business and half of his fairly substantial savings; the other half had gone to Neil. But it was Owen who had slaved night and day to develop the really quite modest business, who’d built the old factory after the war and would shortly see the new factory begin to take shape.

  What had Zena to do with all that expansion? She’d run the gown shop until she’d grown too idle even to go down there once a month. Left to herself, she would by now have been merely the owner of a failing, out-of-date business and she’d have frittered away her capital. True, she’d agreed years ago to let Owen raise a mortgage on the shop. And she’d put her money into the postwar factory readily enough in those friendlier years when their marriage was young.

  He switched off the car engine, not caring at this hostile moment to contemplate that happier time. She knew I was an ambitious and enterprising man, he told himself, dismissing sentimentality; she knew I’d put her money to good use, she was well aware when she was on to a good thing.

  For a harshly cynical moment he allowed himself to believe that that was why she’d married him, then he shook his head slowly, compelled in justice to admit it wasn’t true. But he refused to dwell on the complex motives that had led her to say Yes. It was all a long time ago; it no longer mattered very much. Whatever she had done for him in the past didn’t give her a moral claim now to half his assets, in spite of anything the law might say.

  He squared his shoulders and set his mouth in a grim line. Divorce might be a non-starter but there were surely other ways of resolving his difficulties; there must be other ways.

  He opened the car door and stepped out on to the asphalt. He stood looking up at the solid face of the club. In a short time he would be president, he would stand even higher in the opinion of Milbourne.

  He locked the car door and thrust the keys into his pocket. Perhaps after all it might be wiser to hang on to what he had got, consolidate his position, be thankful for what life had handed him instead of imperilling it all, put away fanciful notions as many another man had done.

  With a firm tread he walked towards the wide stone steps. A question of discipline, after all, control of the inner mind. And if the mutinous dog beneath would not always be quelled, if he stirred sometimes in the late evenings, raised his head in the bleak watches of the nights, there was always a remedy, there were always sleeping-pills.

  He smiled briefly to himself, raised his hand and pressed a forceful thumb on the doorbell.

  Twenty-five minutes past seven. Zena studied the face of the clock, reluctant to leave her satin bower and make her way towards the phone in the dressing room. A little yawn escaped her. If she left it much longer, Arnold might have gone off somewhere for the evening.

  Her gaze travelled a few inches and came to rest on the brandy bottle. Another five minutes. Seven-thirty was a nice round figure. She yawned again, more widely this time, leaned out and grasped the bottle by its neck.

  CHAPTER 4

  Supper was over in the Pierson household. Sarah sat upright in a straight-backed chair at one side of the sitting room fire, knitting assiduously a square of bright red wool. All over Africa sick natives huddled themselves under the comfort of patchwork blankets stitched together by Sarah over more than forty years. Or so she liked to think.

  At the other end of the little room, as far away as possible from the fireplace, her stepbrother lowered his newspaper an inch or two and stole a glance at her. He had told her at supper about the closing of the shop. She had said nothing, merely raising her eyes to give him a single veiled look and then continuing to serve the food while he did his best to soften the blow. He explained the wisdom of the decision, enlarged on the certainty of an earlier pension, pointed out the new leisure to be enjoyed.

  To all this she had made no reply. When his voice had finally ceased she flicked him a glance that seemed to hold sardonic amusement. Or a trace of quiet pleasure at the prospect before her? It was gone before he could read it. She had begun to talk about his father lying upstairs.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to be picking up. I’ll get the doctor to look in on him again.’ Of course, worried as she was–as they both were–about old Walter, she might not think retiring a year or two earlier a matter of any particular consequence. But he would just like to be sure. He shifted in his chair, nerving himself to raise the subject again.

  ‘You could take a holiday,’ he ventured. ‘A good long holiday.’ He couldn’t remember when she had last been away from the house for a single night. Arrangements could surely be made for himself and his father. ‘You’d enjoy that.’ He tried to picture her on her own in a seaside resort; all he could see was an image of her sitting straight-backed in a hotel lounge, fashioning rainbow coverlets for ailing Africans. Hardly a scene of compelling gaiety.

  She raised her head and held it in a listening attitude. A sound came from the room above. Arnold got to his feet.

  ‘I’ll go up and sit with Father.’ He abandoned all attempt to talk to Sarah and went slowly upstairs into the front bedroom.

  Walter was struggling to lift himself against the pillows. His face was flushed, his
look restless and bewildered. He frowned as Arnold bent over to assist him; trying to place him, to come out of his clutching dream.

  ‘Oh–it’s you.’ He passed a trembling hand over his face. ‘I thought I was back in France.’ Relief now in his voice. ‘A bit of a nightmare.’ He sank back for a moment into that grim memory. ‘We were going out after Cottrell. Yorke and myself. There was a bright moon.’ He let out a long shuddering breath. ‘We could hear him screaming.’

  ‘It’s all right, Father,’ Arnold said soothingly. He straightened the bedclothes. ‘It was only a dream.’ But he knew himself the clammy horror of such dreams when the present dropped away and there were only the helpless cries of men long dead.

  He crossed to the washbasin, moistened a flannel with cool water, came back to the bed and passed the cloth gently over his father’s face and hands.

  ‘You’ll feel better in a moment.’ He picked up a towel. ‘Would you like something to drink? I won’t leave you, I can give Sarah a shout, she’ll get something hot.’

  Walter shook his head. ‘Don’t bother Sarah. I’ll just have some of that.’ He gestured at the tray holding a glass and a tall jug of orange squash covered with a beaded muslin drape. He watched Arnold pour the drink.

  ‘Do you ever see anything of Cottrell’s son these days? David. He grew up a good lad. His father would have been proud of him.’

  ‘I see him now and again.’ Arnold held the glass while his father drank from it. ‘In the street sometimes. Just to nod to.’ He’d been at school with David Cottrell, they’d been called up together in the middle of the war, served in the same county regiment; they’d been taken prisoner together, had endured the scarring years in the same Japanese camp. And now they merely nodded to each other in the streets, at once linked and held apart by the long chain of shared experience.

  ‘You should ask him round some evening when he’s off duty,’ Walter said. ‘I’d like a chat with him.’ Cottrell had gone into the police after the war, a detective sergeant now, well thought of in the town.

  Arnold replaced the glass on the tray. ‘I’ll see if I can catch him one of these days.’ He hadn’t the slightest intention of asking Cottrell to the house. And by tomorrow Walter would have forgotten the request.

  Downstairs in the hall the phone rang sharply. ‘Sarah will take it.’ Walter put out a detaining hand as Arnold turned to go. ‘You stay and talk to me.’

  But Arnold eluded his grasp. As he reached the door he heard the receiver lifted and Sarah’s brisk voice.

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Yorke. I hope you’re feeling better?’ He drew his brows together, listening.

  ‘Who is it?’ Walter asked impatiently. ‘Sarah can deal with it.’

  ‘It’s Mrs Yorke.’ Arnold came slowly back towards the bed.

  ‘Then it’ll only be some business about the shop. Pull up a chair and sit down.’

  Arnold looked about for a chair, trying without success to catch at fragments of the conversation below.

  ‘I must confess I was a little surprised at the news about the shop,’ Sarah said into the phone. After her long years of service she might surely have expected to be told the decision with due ceremony by either Mr or Mrs Yorke instead of in this secondhand fashion through her stepbrother.

  ‘What news?’ Zena asked sharply.

  ‘That the shop is to close down, of course.’ Sarah maintained the deferential courtesy of her tone in spite of a thrust of impatience. She wished Mrs Yorke wouldn’t play her devious games.

  ‘It’s news to me,’ Zena said. ‘I’m certainly not thinking of closing the shop. Where did you get hold of such an idea?’

  ‘I don’t think there can be any doubt about it. Arnold told me this evening. Mr Yorke spoke to him this afternoon.’ She heard the intake of Zena’s breath.

  There was a brief silence at the other end of the line and then Zena spoke again in a lighter, more casual tone. ‘I’ll have a word with Owen about it later. Actually, I rang up to speak to your brother. Is he in?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll get him, he won’t be a moment.’ Sarah laid down the receiver.

  So I wasn’t mistaken, Zena thought, biting her lip. There is something going on. My shop–Owen has the nerve to talk about closing down my shop–and without a word to me. I have to learn about it from an underling! He stood there as calm as you like this evening, never uttered a syllable about it. She drummed her fingers on the table. Where was Arnold? He was certainly taking his time.

  ‘Mrs Yorke wants to speak to you.’ Sarah came into the bedroom, ready to take Arnold’s place while he was gone. Her tone was drily neutral, her eyes expressed nothing.

  For years she had been aware that Zena had some kind of hold over Arnold. She had speculated about it, resented it, failed to understand it. He had been sweet on Zena when he was a lad, of course, and there had been some kind of fusion between them for a short time after the war; she’d have had to be blind not to have seen it. But it certainly wasn’t affection that linked them now, she was sure of that. She had caught his look when her name was mentioned, the uneager way he moved whenever Zena’s imperious command summoned him to the phone.

  Arnold went reluctantly downstairs. In the hall he stared at the receiver with distaste before picking it up. Whatever Zena wanted of him, it wasn’t likely to add to his peace of mind.

  ‘Yes?’ He threw a great deal of meaning into that single word.

  ‘I want you to come over here.’ No question whether it might be agreeable or convenient. ‘Owen’s out. I’m by myself.’

  ‘I’m busy this evening.’ He always gave this initial jerk of resistance.

  ‘How is your father?’ she asked. ‘I thought I might look in on him one of these days. Have a little chat.’

  He closed his eyes, accepting the inevitable. ‘All right. I’ll come over later on.’ Zena had it in her power to darken old Walter’s last days. And Arnold knew with absolute certainty that she wouldn’t scruple to speak if it suited her.

  ‘No, not later on. Now, right away.’

  ‘Very well.’ He replaced the receiver without another word. At his sides his hands clenched and unclenched themselves. There was the laughing, dazzlingly pretty Zena of his youth, and there was this sour, dangerous woman with touched-up hair and a puffy face. At what point of time had one image overlaid the other? Even now they seemed to him totally distinct, as if she had been two separate women, the one who had gone away and the one who had bafflingly taken her place.

  ‘I’m going out,’ he called up the stairs. ‘I don’t think I’ll be very long.’ He snatched his coat from the stand and shrugged it on, flung open the door and let himself out into the misty lamplight of the empty street.

  A surge of melancholy rose inside him. He was forty-seven years old, no wife, no child, no house of his own, not even a spectacular success at his job. His mediocre qualifications had been laboriously acquired by sweating his way through an accountancy course at evening classes; it was highly unlikely that he could ever hope for a really good post.

  He pondered again the possibility of clearing out, making a fresh start in some other town. It seemed for a hopeful moment that it might be the answer. At one stroke he could turn his back on the past, stepping down from the train in that far-off place a completely different man. Outgoing, at ease, in command of his life.

  But there was never really a fresh start. Among the inescapable luggage one carried the burden of personality. And in that other town he would start without any kind of contact, he would be even more alone. He saw the bleak lodgings, himself confined every evening to a single room or wandering about streets that didn’t even call up, as the streets of Milbourne sometimes did, memories of a cherished childhood.

  He shook his head, relinquishing the notion of escape. As he turned into the narrow road leading to The Sycamores he fell back into an old habit of mind he employed whenever depression threatened to overwhelm him. It was a trick he had begun to practise in the prison camp; it had ke
pt him sane then and it had served him during all the years that followed. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but even when it failed, the effort involved at least took his attention for a brief spell from his blackest imaginings.

  What he did was to switch his brain into another gear, trying to alter the whole climate of his mind, looking back into his boyhood, attempting to think himself into the same attitude of carefree gaiety to life.

  He would look at the sky, the trees, the buildings, striving to see them as they had appeared to him then; he would watch a child skipping by and grasp at the notion that the time and place and weather that seemed so carelessly joyful to the child existed also at that very moment for himself.

  And click! sometimes the brief miracle happened and he could glance about him with hope and pleasure, feeling the bright air as inviting, the roads as beckoning, as forty years ago. As if he were constantly practising the memory of happiness so that if he were ever fortunate enough to encounter it again in reality he would remember and recognize it, clutch it to him before it slipped away for ever.

  By the time he turned the knob on the front door of The Sycamores he felt composed, almost cheerful.

  ‘Hello there!’ He sent an enquiring call soaring from the hallway. A moment later he heard Zena’s answering voice, and he went briskly, confidently up the stairs.

  In the comfortable sitting room of his small detached house in a quiet area of Milbourne, Neil Underwood sat at his bureau, shuffling a little pile of bills into a tidy square. He sighed; his face wore a baffled look. The exuberance of Christmas had faded now, leaving behind a wash of regret for the rash generosity that had sent him out so blithely to the silver-glittered shops.

  Rates, electricity, gas, coal; the record-player for his daughter. Once again he flicked through the accounts as if they might magically have diminished in the last three minutes. His glance came inescapably to rest on the biggest body-blow of the lot, the one he had so far managed to thrust into some merciful recess in his mind–the appalling, horrifying bill for Ruth’s fur coat.