Emma Page - In Loving Memory

‘My solicitor can draw up a new will while he’s about it,’ Henry Mallinson said, almost off-hand. ‘The present one cuts you out, I imagine you realized that?’

Kenneth inclined his head. ‘Yes, I realized that.’

‘You’re my elder son,’ his father said. ‘No getting away from that.’ At the end of life the ties of blood assumed immense importance, a significance he hadn’t altogether bargained for. ‘No getting away from that,’ he said again, heavily, and closed his eyes. ‘I’m tired now, I think I’d better rest. I’m old, Kenneth, really old.’ He opened his eyes, wearily. ‘I never thought it would happen to me. The years go by. You know it happens to other people. But you never imagine it will happen to you.’

Even now Kenneth couldn’t bring himself to take his father’s hand. Later perhaps, in a day or two, before he left Rockley. But not just yet. He couldn’t stretch out a hand and destroy the past all in a moment. Not just yet.

‘I’ll go then,’ he said, moving towards the door. ‘Is there anything you want?’

Henry closed his eyes. His face looked peaceful, infinitely weary. ‘Send Mrs Parkes along. I’ll get her to see about the solicitor. Later on today perhaps. Might as well strike while the iron’s hot.’ While there’s still time, he added in his mind, time to put things right, in some measure at least. ‘You’ll be staying here?’ His eyes came open again, slowly. ‘In the house?’

Kenneth shook his head. ‘No, I’ll get a room at the pub. It’ll be less bother for the servants.’

‘Just as you wish.’ So he isn’t ready to forgive yet, Henry thought, not altogether with surprise. The Mallinson blood ran in Kenneth’s veins and no Mallinson forgave easily, at the first sign of an outstretched hand. He heard the door close quietly. He raised a hand to his face and found to his astonishment that his lids were moist with tears.

Kenneth walked slowly towards the stairs with his mind in a tumult of conflicting thoughts and emotions. The wave of relief which had washed over him in the bedroom was subsiding now. It isn’t going to be as simple as it seemed in that first moment, he thought. Father is no fool about money and the solicitor is even less of a fool – if that is possible. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty thousand pounds, that kind of money wasn’t going to be invested without searching enquiries and the most casual enquiry would elicit the fact that Kenneth’s business was standing on the very edge of bankruptcy. Oh yes, with a good lump sum of capital he was absolutely confident that he could set the firm on its feet again, that it would go forward soundly and smoothly. But to convince his father of that – and his father’s solicitor? Another matter altogether.

He put a hand on the banister, staring down at his feet moving one after the other, a single step at a time, reluctant now to carry him towards that phone. Just what was he going to tell his partner?

There is the new will, some insistent part of his mind said clearly. Drawn up today, signed tomorrow, in all probability. The whole family fortune split down the middle between himself and David. Father looked tired and old, he thought, striving to suppress pity, he looked like a man who could not last many months, many weeks – or even many days.

His fingers gripped the rail tightly. If his father were to die quite soon, inside a week, say, there need be no investigation about a loan. He could either shore up the firm with another loan from the bank till his father’s estate was paid out, or he could simply let the firm go bust, sit back and wait for probate, secure in the knowledge that he need never again lift a finger unless he wanted to. And his father had looked so weary, so ill …

Nonsense! said another part of his mind, loud and distinct, he isn’t very ill at all. He suffered only a mild spasm of some kind, he has an iron constitution, he isn’t all that old as age goes nowadays, he’ll be up and about in a day or two, quite capable of poring over accounts, of recognizing rocky finances when he studies a balance sheet.

Kenneth raised his shoulders in perplexity. I’m really no better off now than when I spoke to my partner this morning, he thought with a stab of hopelessness. He felt all at once acutely angry, obscurely cheated. A way out had seemed to open up before his feet and then to close again, vanishing into the mist. There is no way, he told himself and then paused for a moment, feeling the banister smooth and slippery beneath his hand. There is one way, he thought … if I dared to take it …

Downstairs at the front door, a sudden sharp ring at the bell. Kenneth jerked himself out of his calculations, allowed his face to resume its normal expression and walked quickly down the remaining stairs.

A maid crossed the hall and opened the front door. A few moments later she admitted a man in a dark overcoat, a white-haired man carrying a bag in one hand, his hat in the other.

‘Doctor Burnett! How are you? It’s been a long time.’ Kenneth walked swiftly across the wide spaces of the parquet floor with his hand held out.

‘You got here then,’ Burnett said, giving him a rapid, assessing look. ‘Have you seen your father?’

‘Yes, I’ve just left him. He seems to be coming along very nicely. He’s a little tired at the moment – we had a rather long talk, but he wasn’t distressed in any way. I don’t think he’s expecting you.’

‘No, but I was passing on my way home for lunch. I’ve some new tablets, I’d like him to try them, I think they might be useful.’

They had moved together into the centre of the spacious hall. A chilly room, in spite of the logs burning in the grate. Always a chilly room, Kenneth remembered, even when I was a lad it struck cold into my bones, even in the height of summer. He glanced at Burnett and saw that his eyes were resting on the gilt-framed portrait over the fireplace. Kenneth looked up at his mother, at her calm, sad, disciplined face turned a little to one side, her hands folded together in resignation on the dark blue silk of her skirt.

He had a sudden impulse to speak of her to someone, to this doctor perhaps, standing beside him. He wanted to pluck her back for a moment from that shadowy land in which, impossibly, she could no longer experience sadness or resignation, pain or heartbreak.

‘You never knew her, did you?’ he said in a low voice. Dr Burnett had left Rockley for some teeming grimy city in the north before Henry Mallinson brought home his bride. ‘You came back to Rockley after she …’ He found himself totally unable to utter the bleak finality of that word, died.

‘A beautiful face,’ Burnett said in a voice with overtones that Kenneth couldn’t quite identify. ‘In spite of the unhappiness, a face of great beauty.’

So you see it too, Kenneth thought, it isn’t just to my eyes, the eyes of love and knowledge, that her unhappiness still speaks from the careful oils. It is clear after all these years to a stranger who never knew her, never saw her.

‘You didn’t come to the wedding?’ he asked suddenly, surprisingly. They had been boyhood friends, the doctor and his father, one would have expected him to leave that grimy city and take a train south to stand beside his old friend on that special day.

Burnett shook his head. ‘I couldn’t get away, I was single-handed at the time.’ His voice remembered the driving work of those days, the brief hours of sleep, the endless, appalling fatigue. ‘It was a hard life.’ He gave a little sigh and returned to the present with a movement of his shoulders.

‘You’ll be staying here?’ he asked. ‘For a few days, I imagine?’

‘For a few days at least. But not in the house. I’m going along to the Swan now to get a room. I don’t imagine there’ll be any difficulty.’ Never more than two or three guests at a time in the Swan, for what was there to attract a horde of visitors to a little village like this? ‘I thought I’d spare the servants here the trouble—’