Emma Page - In Loving Memory

‘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.