Emma Page - In Loving Memory

Carole ate her bacon and kidneys with relish. ‘I would have expected Kenneth to drive down immediately, as soon as Doctor Burnett phoned,’ she said. ‘He’s certainly taking his time.’

David shrugged. ‘Some business matter, some meeting he couldn’t postpone, apparently.’ Kenneth was doing well by all accounts. A busy man couldn’t just drop everything and jump into his car, however urgent the summons.

‘Then I don’t imagine he’ll be staying very long,’ Carole said soothingly. ‘If he’s as busy as all that.’

‘No, perhaps not.’ David crumbled his roll moodily. Long enough though, Kenneth would spare a day or two all right as soon as he got wind of the solicitor being sent for, a new will being drawn up. He pushed his cup forward. ‘More coffee, please.’

Carole lifted the silver pot. ‘I take it he’ll be staying at Whitegates?’

David jerked his head round. ‘Why yes, of course. Where else would he stay? Not here, surely?’ The two brothers had never got on well together, not even as small boys. There had always been the twin swords of jealousy and resentment between them.

‘Well, no, not here.’ It hadn’t even crossed her mind that Kenneth would think of staying at Tall Trees. It would have been too difficult, the atmosphere too charged with tensions, with all the long hostilities of boyhood and youth that might explode into the fierce quarrels of grown men. ‘But I thought perhaps one of the Hallborough hotels. It might be awkward up at Whitegates, a visitor, with illness in the house.’

David set down his cup with a tiny clatter. ‘Kenneth is hardly a visitor. And they can cope at Whitegates, there’s staff enough up there to cope with a dozen visitors.’ He picked up a fragment of his bread roll and smeared it with butter.

‘Mother always liked Kenneth best,’ he said abruptly, taking Carole by surprise. David hardly ever mentioned his mother to her. Dead these ten years or more, closing her eyes and letting herself drift out of life after a minor illness, her painted likeness still hanging in its great gilt frame over the fireplace in the entrance hall at Whitegates, the calm, disciplined, beautiful, unhappy face turned a little to one side, the wide thoughtful eyes looking back into the past, at the memory of pain.

‘Does it matter now?’ Carole asked sofly. ‘You’re both grown men.’ Almost middle-aged, she added in her mind. Surely swept by the maturing years to some point beyond childish jostlings for position?

‘Of course it matters,’ he said, astonished at her lack of perception. It would always matter, now when they were middle-aged, in thirty years’ time when they were old. The passage of time might erase many things but not that, never that. His mother’s eyes going first to Kenneth when the two boys came together into the room where she sat by the window, the tiny habitual difference in her tone when she spoke to her elder son, her first-born.

‘I’ve thought once or twice lately,’ Carole said, playing with a spoon, ‘that your father’s developed – I don’t know – some little oddnesses. He seems to be growing old quite suddenly.’ She raised her eyes to her husband. ‘I imagine he’ll get over this attack – and pretty quickly – but I wonder …’ She didn’t finish the sentence, but it finished itself in both their minds. I wonder just how long he will last? Will there be a second attack? A third and perhaps a final one? And before too long?

‘Oddnesses?’ David said sharply. ‘Exactly what kind of oddnesses?’

‘He’s got rather strange about money, for one thing.’

‘He was always careful about money.’ Not mean, but careful, everything accounted for, no waste, no pretentious lavishness. Solid comfort, good value in return for cash laid out – but never stingy.

‘I don’t mean that, I mean the way he’s taken to keeping a little hoard of money in his bedroom. He never used to.’

‘I didn’t know he was doing it now.’

Carole pleated a fold in the crisp damask of the table cloth, looking down idly at her fingers in their meaningless task.

‘Quite a lot of money, in notes.’ She smiled. ‘He has an old-fashioned cash-box. I saw it a few weeks ago, I called in to see him one morning, he was rather tired, he was having breakfast in bed.’ The first signs of advancing age, that. He’d have been appalled at the notion of breakfast in bed only a couple of years ago. ‘He was counting the money, fivers mostly.’ She looked up and smiled again. ‘Just like a miser in a storybook. He snapped the box shut as soon as I came in. He pushed it into the drawer of the bedside table, but I saw it all right.’ She stood up. ‘And the housekeeper was complaining to me that he’d taken to querying the domestic accounts in a way he never used to. Saying they were ordering too much milk. Silly little things like that.’

David got to his feet. ‘I shouldn’t think it’s of much consequence. An old man’s fancy. People do have funny notions when they get old. It’s only to be expected.’

‘Hardly a good idea, though,’ she said. ‘All that cash. With servants in and out of the room. And that secretary, Gina Thorson …’ She let the little implication lie there. A hundred pounds, forty pounds, even twenty or ten, might represent temptation to a girl like Gina Thorson.

Carole’s practised eye had assessed Gina and her possessions when the girl had first arrived at Whitegates, recognizing from harsh experience the signs of skimped means, the striving after an appearance of well-kept respectability, the cheap smart clothes, shoes and handbags designed to imitate leather.

David raised his eyebrows. ‘Gina’s all right. She wouldn’t take anything she wasn’t entitled to.’ He lost interest in Gina Thorson and what she might or might not feel herself entitled to. He let his mind slip back to its major preoccupation. ‘Do you think we should ask Kenneth to dinner this evening?’

She pondered the delicate question. Would Kenneth wish to dine with them? Would he prefer the quiet of a Hallborough hotel? Or to take a meal in solitary state at the long polished table in that great shadowy room at Whitegates? Or not a solitary meal perhaps, Gina Thorson might be there, smiling at him above the gleaming glasses and the glittering silver, leaving Dr Richard Knight to his own devices for once.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps we’d better leave the first move to Kenneth. See if he calls here to see us, if he’s willing to be friendly.’ She’d never met Kenneth. He hadn’t come to their wedding, although a formal invitation had been sent to him. He’d despatched a present with a printed card enclosed in the wrappings, a present that could be displayed with all the others, an expensive, carefully-chosen present, a set of handsome Venetian goblets. Family enmities need not be made plain to the prying eyes of outsiders.

‘If he’s willing to be friendly?’ David echoed. ‘I’m not sure I’m willing to be friendly with him.’ Packing his bags and slamming out like that, leaving David to cope with the family business as best he could. One didn’t forget things like that in a hurry. Nor the long hostilities of childhood, the twisted tangles of emotions. They weren’t to be dissolved all in a moment by a knock on the door, an impersonal smile, a ritual meal eaten together.

‘See how it goes,’ Carole said, willing as always to bend to the exigencies of the moment, ready to trim her sails as expediency demanded.

David glanced at his watch. ‘I must be going. I’ll just call in at Whitegates, see what kind of a night Father had. I don’t suppose he’ll want to see me at this hour. Then I’ll go on to the office.’ Rather a grand building in Hallborough these days, the main offices of Mallinson’s, a far cry from the single room in a back street fifty years ago. ‘I don’t know what time I’ll be home this evening, I’ll try not to be too late.’ Old men might weaken and grow ill but the business had to be kept running smoothly, Henry Mallinson would have been the first to acknowledge that.