Penny Jordan - Lingering Shadows

IT HAD been Davina’s father who had been responsible for Davina’s meeting Gregory.

Gregory had come to work for Carey’s as their technical salesman and her father had invited him to one of the dinners he occasionally gave for certain members of his staff.

Davina had been busy in the kitchen when everyone arrived. These dinners were always something of an ordeal for her. Her father was a perfectionist and Davina dreaded his disapproval if everything was not as he wished it to be.

She had spent virtually all week preparing for this dinner, shopping, cleaning, polishing the silver, washing, starching and then ironing the table linen. And picking flowers from the garden and then arranging them. Her father would never countenance wasting money on buying flowers.

He personally selected the menus he wished Davina to serve, and they were always complicated. Her father was a fussy eater, preferring small, delicately cooked dishes, but on these occasions he liked to impress with lavish cordon bleu meals.

Sticky and uncomfortable from the heat of the kitchen, praying frantically that she had correctly judged the timing and that the hot soufflé her father had insisted on for the first course would not deflate before everyone was seated, Davina heard the kitchen door open. Expecting to see her father walk in to tell her that she could serve the soufflé, she was astonished to see instead a very good-looking young man.

He smiled at her, a warm flashing smile that showed the whiteness of his teeth. His skin was tanned; his brown hair shone. He was tall and lean, and there was a warmth in his brown eyes as he smiled at her that made her face burn even more hotly than the heat from the kitchen.

‘Hello, I’m Gregory James,’ he said to her, introducing himself and holding out his hand.

Automatically Davina extended hers and only just stopped herself from gasping out loud at the frisson of sensation that struck her as he slowly curled his fingers around hers and shook her hand.

No one had ever affected her like this before. In her naïveté her skin flushed darker, her whole body trembling as she succumbed to his sexual magnetism.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ Gregory told her smoothly as he released her hand.

For a moment Davina felt confused. There was something about the tone in which he delivered the apology that jarred on her, some falseness, some instinctive awareness of a mockery of her, as though he intended the words to have a double meaning, as though he was laughing at her for her reaction to him, but these feelings were so vague and unformed that they had vanished before she could really grasp them, leaving her to stammer a few incoherent words, while Gregory continued, ‘Your father was on his way to tell you that everyone is ready to eat, and I asked if I might deliver the message for him. And to see if there was anything I could do to help.’

To help? Davina gave him an unguarded startled look. Her father believed that it was a woman’s place to be subservient in every way to the males in the household, and the thought of any man offering her any kind of domestic help was a concept with which Davina was completely unfamiliar.

‘Thank you, but there’s really no need,’ she began breathlessly, but he stopped her, looking at her until she could no longer meet the intensity of his gaze as he said slowly,

‘Oh, yes, there is. There is every need. I’ve been wanting to meet you, Davina.’

He … this wonderful, good-looking man, had been wanting to meet her ? She shook her head dizzily, wondering if she had fallen asleep and was having a dream, but no, it was real. He was real. She was so flustered that she could barely even breathe, never mind think of moving, and Gregory, watching her, allowed himself a small inner smile of satisfaction. Good. She was obviously as naïve and dumb as he had heard. He had met her. Now the rest should be easy.

Brought up by a widowed mother who had died while he was in his first year at university, Gregory had always bitterly resented the good fortune of others, a good fortune which had been denied to him. His mother was poor. He was clever and good-looking, but he learned early in life that that did not compensate for lack of wealth. Wealth was power, and power was what Gregory wanted. He had learned young to smile and say nothing when others taunted him or drew attention to his second-hand school uniform and the poverty of his possessions. His time would come. He would make sure that it came.

It was while he was at university that he realised how hard it was going to be for him to achieve his ambition. The best jobs, and with them the money and the power he craved, would not be offered to someone like him. They would go to others, youths with far fewer qualifications than he possessed, far less worthwhile degrees, but they had something more important than intelligence: they had family; they had position and power.

It had been a chance conversation he had overheard between two fellow graduates which had told him the path he must take through life. Both of them were unaware of his presence, and were discussing a third, absent friend.

‘You know, his sister’s getting married in June. He was telling me about it last week. She’s in the club. His family are furious. Apparently she’s been going around with some working-class type, who obviously knew which side his bread was buttered on. Now she’s pregnant, the family have no option but to let them marry, and they’ll have to support them, find him some sort of decent job. They’re furious about the whole thing, but, of course, they’re putting a brave face on it.’

‘Nice work if you can get it,’ the other man commented wryly. ‘Marrying a rich girl.’

Marrying a rich girl. Gregory mulled the thought over in his mind, letting it lie fallow for a short time before finally allowing it to take root.

The problem was that he did not know any rich girls. He knew girls … plenty of them. He was a good-looking young man who had grown up in an environment where teenagers had begun experimenting with sex well under the legal age limit, and he had learned early the basic mechanics of sex. To those over the years he had added a variety of refinements which so far had ensured him as much success as he needed or wanted with the opposite sex.

When he wished he could be ingratiatingly charming and well mannered, surface attributes that went no more than skin-deep, as those of his sexual partners who had not immediately taken the hint that he was tired of them had very quickly found out.

Gregory had no real warmth about him, no real kindness; as far as he was concerned, they were weaknesses he could not afford.

A rich wife. He bided his time. The doors to the homes of his fellow graduates, or at least those who could have introduced him to the lifestyle he craved, remained firmly closed to him. He got a job and then another, and finally a third with Carey’s.

He had chosen Carey’s out of three possible employers because he had learned from eavesdropping on a casual conversation while waiting to be interviewed that the man who owned Carey’s had only one child, an unmarried daughter.

Gregory had become very adept over the years at listening to other people’s conversations. He had discovered it was an extremely profitable way of learning things.