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  She closed the machine and switched it on, then she sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. Monday, she thought, inhaling deeply, on Monday they’ll announce the new appointments. Energy flooded through her; there was nothing she relished better than challenge, exciting change.

  A senior executive had suffered a crippling heart attack early in December. There’d been temporary re-arrangements to tide them over the busy Christmas season; she’d been doing a job and a half herself for the last few weeks. She had no idea who the new man would be, he might be someone moved up from another branch or one of the Milbourne staff. She didn’t much care who he was; it was the post of his assistant she had her eye on.

  She stared down at the smoke rising from her cigarette, pondering again the coming reshuffle, the combinations and permutations it might give rise to. However she juggled the names and personalities in her mind, it always ended with the same result. No one in the department was better equipped for the assistant’s job than herself.

  She pushed back the chair and walked over to the whirring machine, she stood watching the jets of water rise and fall. They were certain to appoint her to the post, they must appoint her. It was surely totally out of the question that even for a single moment would they seriously consider promoting Anthea Gibbs.

  ‘Never!’ she said aloud on a derisory note. Anthea was turned forty, a watershed of an age in a firm that prided itself on the early singling out of talent; promotion must surely already have passed her by. Not that Anthea would see it. It would be another three or four years before she would finally swallow the unpalatable fact. Conscientious, hard-working, entirely competent at her own level. But a narrow, blinkered mind, not a spark of creative energy, no vision, no fire.

  Ruth drew a little breath of satisfaction as if the matter had now been settled beyond dispute. She felt too stimulated, too restless to go into the sitting room and stare at the television set. Coffee–she’d make herself some more. From a shelf she took down the percolator, discharging some of her thrusting energy in performing the routine actions with unnecessary force.

  Promotion would mean quite a bit more money–though this thought sprang to her mind as very much a secondary consideration. She would definitely buy herself a car; it was ludicrous for a woman in her position to be dependent on buses and taxis. Or the convenience of her husband.

  Her brow wrinkled into a frown. Odd the way Neil always nudged aside her suggestion of a second car. It could hardly be the money involved, he was if anything too generous in lavishing gifts on her. It was almost as if–she took out the notion and looked at it, not altogether liking its appearance at close quarters–as if he felt that a car would give her too much independence.

  A tiny light glowed on the percolator, indicating that the coffee was ready; she poured out a cup and sat down again at the table, idly stirring the spoon in the steaming liquid. Another thought edged its way into her mind. Neil wasn’t going to be all that pleased about a hefty increase in her salary, whatever she decided to spend it on. Nor was he likely to be wildly enthusiastic at her promotion.

  With a shrug of her shoulders she abandoned that unprofitable line of thought; she’d have to deal with those consequences when they arose.

  But the car–that was a more agreeable subject. She began to picture it in her mind. Nothing large or showy, a trim workmanlike runabout. It would be pleasant to have a car of her own again. She’d had a rather nice little foreign vehicle when she’d started out in the Liverpool branch but she’d had to get rid of it after her move to London. A car made life too complicated in London, what with the difficulties in parking, the nervous strain of all that traffic.

  For a long moment she looked back at her time in London–and her reasons for leaving so abruptly. Anywhere, she’d decidedly suddenly and finally that sunny morning fourteen months ago, scanning the internal news-sheet lying on her desk with its list of vacancies in other branches–anywhere as long as it was far enough away from London. Anywhere had turned out to be Milbourne. And Neil. She’d met him a fortnight after she’d stepped down from the train; three months later she’d married him.

  She closed her eyes against those London days, letting memory drain away in a long sigh, then she sat up briskly and raised the coffee cup to her lips.

  ‘You surely can’t mean you’ve run through the whole lot?’ Zena linked her hands behind her head and leaned comfortably back against the pillows. There was no sharp concern in the look she gave her brother. He’d been reared as she was, with a healthy regard for money. The burst of folly–for so she chose to regard it–that had precipitated him into a hasty second marriage had certainly given rise to some wild spending but she couldn’t for a moment believe he had made any really serious inroads into his capital.

  Neil had been eighteen at the end of the war; in the years of his adolescence and young manhood there had been little encouragement or even opportunity for extravagance. Too young for active service, he had in due course been called up for a period of peacetime conscription. Afterwards he’d gone to London, begun his career in local government, married and settled down, returning to Milbourne when Jane was a child of ten.

  Muriel had always seemed a careful, thrifty, undemanding wife; they had lived unshowily. Certainly he had never enjoyed a very handsome salary but Zena was sure they had always lived within it. Like many people with plenty of money and a strong taste for indulging their own extravagances while at the same time keeping a tight hand on the purse as far as other folk were concerned, Zena harboured the comfortable belief that less privileged citizens could and should manage very well on what they had.

  ‘No, of course I don’t mean anything of the sort.’ Neil gave an easy little laugh. ‘I’d scarcely be such a fool. It’s just that I had rather a lot of expense over Christmas.’ He contrived to make it sound as if the expense had been forced on him by some outside agency over which he had no control. ‘You know what the stock market’s like at this time of year.’ A touch of flattery here towards herself as a shrewd judge of financial affairs. ‘Not the best time for selling.’ He smiled at her, the affectionate younger-brother smile that self-interest as well as habit had kept in practice. ‘I thought perhaps you might be able to help me out.’ Appealing to the old protective instinct of an elder sister. ‘Just temporarily of course.’ Establishing the correct attitude of retrenchment, the conscientious will to repay–without being inconveniently exact about the time or method of repayment.

  ‘No.’ Zena didn’t bother to dress up her refusal. Neil had been little more than a boy when old Ralph died; he had had no interest in the gown-shop, he had been well satisfied to get his share of the inheritance in hard cash without any responsibility for running the business. He might very well envy the way in which her own capital had been put to work so that she now had a half-share in the whole Underwood enterprise, but his envy was no concern of hers.

  She put up a hand to her mouth and gave a little yawn. ‘You can borrow the money from Ruth. She must have a very good salary.’ She saw the tiny instinctive shake of his head. ‘And I dare say she’ll have a better one very soon.’ She knew about the illness and retirement of the senior executive at British Foods; it was no secret that there would be a reshuffle. ‘I don’t suppose she’ll find her looks any hindrance to promotion.’

  ‘Any promotion Ruth gets will be due to her ability and nothing else,’ Neil said coldly. He wished fervently that he could be certain of that. ‘And in any case I don’t believe she’s expecting promotion. She hasn’t said anything about it.’ But what if she was moved up? What if her salary was to take a leap beyond his? He didn’t in the least care for the notion.

  ‘You’re besotted about her,’ Zena said with contempt. ‘That fur coat must have cost a pretty penny.’ She had managed to get through the better part of the festive season without voicing an acid remark about the coat–or at least, not to Neil; she had said plenty about it to Owen. Now she no longer bothered to restrain her tongue. ‘And
then you come along here and expect me to hand over the money to pay for it.’ She laughed aloud. ‘It really is a bit much.’

  Neil frowned. He drew a long breath in order to stop himself from blurting out a savage reply. It was as much as he could do not to spring to his feet and slam out of the room.

  But he simply couldn’t afford to quarrel with Zena. There had never been any outright discussion of the terms of her will but with casual hints and oblique references she had always led him to believe that a large share–or even perhaps the whole–of her interest in Underwood’s would be left to him. She had no children and her husband looked all set to make a fortune on his own account. Neil believed she had a strong family feeling which would incline her to keep Underwood money where it belonged. And he had always taken care to see that Jane stayed on good terms with her aunt. He was only four years younger than Zena but she was in poor health and took no real care of herself; it certainly wouldn’t pay him to create an open rift.

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve taken it like this.’ His voice held a note of mild surprise. He couldn’t quite think what to say next so he said nothing.’

  ‘What poor Muriel would have thought, I can’t imagine.’ Zena was by now enjoying herself. Whatever poor Muriel might have thought she wouldn’t have been likely to disclose to her sister-in-law; there had never been much fondness between them, though it sometimes suited Zena now to talk as if they had been intimate friends. ‘She couldn’t rest in her grave if she could see the presents you’ve showered on that woman.’

  Neil closed his mind to the sound of her voice running on. There had been moments in the last few months when he had himself fallen into the habit of remembering his first wife rather differently from the way she had actually been in life. ‘Muriel would never have said that,’ he would think after Ruth had uttered some casual remark that had wounded him. ‘Muriel would have been kinder . . . or more careful . . . or more loving . . .’ He had caught Jane in the same trick. ‘Mother wouldn’t have minded,’ he’d heard her say more than once to her stepmother.

  On Christmas Eve he’d driven to the cemetery as he’d done in all the five years since Muriel’s death. He’d arranged the yellow and white chrysanthemums in the stone vase and stood looking down at the carved lettering of the inscription. It had struck him all at once with the force of revelation that if she could have walked in again through her own front door she would have found him changed from the man who had been her husband, her daughter grown into a tall stranger, even the furnishings and decorations of her home totally altered.

  He had felt a terrible compassion for the loneliness and bewilderment of that imagined ghost. When he turned away from her grave it was as if at that moment she had at last ceased to exist. He had never since been tempted to compare her fancied behaviour with that of Ruth’s.

  Almost with a feeling of relief he switched his mind back from that bleak vision to the complicated present.

  ‘. . . and without even a word to me,’ Zena was saying in a sharply hostile tone. ‘My own shop, the foundation of the whole business.’

  ‘Would you like me to make some coffee?’ Neil asked abruptly. He had already had the pleasure of listening to the saga about the closing of the dress-shop. ‘And something to eat, if you want? Sandwiches or biscuits?’ There was no point now in hanging about any longer at The Sycamores; he clearly wasn’t going to get any money. But he felt reluctant to drive back home just yet. In his own house there would be no escape from pressing thoughts of unpaid bills, from the whirlpool of emotions centring on the lovely figure of his second wife sitting opposite him in an easy chair.

  ‘Oh yes, do! That would be nice.’ Zena was pleased at the attention. ‘As a matter of fact I am rather hungry. Turkey for the sandwiches, I think, there’s plenty in the fridge. And some chocolate cake, in the blue tin.’ Greed took her by the throat again. ‘You could warm up a few mince pies. Switch the oven on high, they won’t take long.’

  Neil felt his stomach revolt at the mention of all that rich food. But he could do with a good strong draught of black coffee. He stood up.

  ‘Ought you to eat all that kind of stuff?’ he asked suddenly, belatedly remembering that she was supposed to diet. ‘Surely Dr Gethin doesn’t allow you—’

  ‘What does Dr Gethin know?’ She pulled a face. ‘Silly old fool. He’d like me to starve to death, I suppose.’

  ‘Why don’t you change your doctor then, if you’ve got no confidence in him?’ Impatience edged his voice. How on earth did Owen put up with her irritating ways?

  ‘But I’ve always had Dr Gethin!’ She was astonished at the suggestion.

  You know perfectly well no other doctor would tolerate your nonsense for a single minute, Neil thought, looking down at her without pity. She likes things to stay as they are, as they have always been, he saw with clarity; even if they are muddled and senseless and disastrous, they are better in her eyes than the threatening face of change.

  ‘But you do at least take your injections?’ He would have liked to lean forward and take her by the shoulders, give her a good shake.

  ‘Of course I do!’ She grinned, a naughty little-girl grin. ‘Well, most of the time. When I remember.’ She threw some of her old teasing charm into her look. Good God, he thought with exasperated disbelief, it’s all a kind of childish game to her. Here she is, in middle age, still expecting to be coaxed and wheedled, to be praised and laughingly reproved by everyone round her. Only now it isn’t dolls and party dresses she’s dealing with, it’s serious, fundamental matters like good health, like life and death.

  He went down the stairs and into the kitchen, switched on the oven, found the coffee and set about preparing a tray. How monstrously unjust his father had been in virtually excluding him from the family business. He might have been a very wealthy man at this moment if old Ralph had been fairer in his dispositions. Of course he had expressed himself as satisfied at the time. He had been a boy, little more than a child really; how could he have been expected to know where his best interests lay?

  All the rancours and resentments of childhood, all the suppressed envies of the long years in which he had played second fiddle to his elder sister, gathered inside him into a single dark and driving force. As if, having in the last year discovered to his humiliation and astonishment that he was a man capable of violent jealousy, he saw now no reason to repress any longer the old hostilities and aggressions he had learned forty years ago to push down below the level of conscious thought.

  He trimmed the sandwiches, taking a perverse pleasure in setting out the food elegantly. In addition to the chocolate gâteau oozing with cream he cut a large wedge from the ornate Christmas cake. If Zena wanted her fatal carbohydrates, then by heaven she should have them.

  He opened the oven door and laid a testing finger on a mince-pie. Not quite hot enough. He closed the door and stood waiting. His mind, stimulated, liberated, ranged without resentment over its fixed points of obsession. He conjured up a tormenting picture of the board of directors at British Food scanning names on a short list, pencils pausing at the name of Ruth Underwood, appreciative smiles exchanged, eyes mellowing into pleasure.

  He clasped his hands, thrusting the palms fiercely against each other. How very swiftly Ruth had agreed to marry him, a mere three months or so after they had met. A beautiful young woman like that, the whole world to choose from, a good career before her–why him? He had never really understood it. At the time it had seemed like a miracle, a dream fantasy sprung to breathing life, he had closed his eyes to doubts and questions, grasping eagerly at what was so bewilderingly offered.

  There had been another man, he had known that, had expected nothing else where such a lovely creature was concerned. He had believed he had accepted the fact like a tolerant man of the world, he had never probed, never again referred to the subject. Ruth hadn’t been very forthcoming. She had merely sketched in a few details lightly, soon after their first meeting. A married man, no question of a divorc
e–no explanation offered why this was so–an affair that had drifted on into dissatisfaction on her part, terminating abruptly when she decided to cut her losses.

  It was all over and done with, he had told himself. No reason ever to dwell on it. Ruth never showed signs of regret, no melancholy might-have-beens looked from her sea-green eyes. She never mentioned his name.

  Neil jerked his head to one side. He had never known the man’s name, she had never told him. Or wait now–she had, surely, used his first name, that evening when she had told him about the affair, sitting over dinner in the country club.

  R–he was almost sure it began with R. Robert . . . Richard . . . He saw her there, opposite him, looking down at the tablecloth, he could hear her low tones . . . No, he had it now, it definitely began with M! He blinked his eyes open, clapped his hands in triumph. M! That was it!

  With a curious compound of elation and misery he stored away the initial like a weapon he might need to produce at some crucial moment. The full name would come to him in a day or two, he was certain of that. It gave him a sense of power, almost of comfort, to know he would have it lying there ready for use.

  He switched off the oven, snatched up a thick cloth and took out the dish of mince pies. The tray was so large and heavy that it took him all his time to carry it upstairs but he battled on without pausing for breath.

  ‘Here we are!’ he cried gaily as he kicked open the bedroom door. ‘A regular dormitory feast!’

  ‘Mm, it looks good!’ Zena laughed back at him. ‘A sandwich to start with, I think.’ Fellow-conspirators, locked together for a brief delusive time in the sunny-surfaced world of their never-quite-forgotten childhood.

  Neil handed the plate of sandwiches, set a cup of coffee richly laced with cream within easy reach of her, stooped and put a hand round her shoulders, dropped a kiss on her hair.

  ‘Happy New Year, Zena!’ He gave her plump shoulders an affectionate squeeze.