Patience Kirby’s fault; she had pushed him to the limit. But she had wasted her time. He was going to forget everything she had said about his mother, you didn’t wipe out a lifetime of rejection by simply turning up and asking for forgiveness after twenty-five years. Patience Kirby wasn’t getting through his defences a second time. He would see to that. He hoped never to set eyes on the girl again.
CHAPTER TWO
AS HE left the office shortly afterwards James told Miss Roper to find out how Patience Kirby had got up to his floor and make sure it did not happen again.
‘She should never have got past the receptionist, let alone into a lift. Check which receptionist was working this morning, and which security guard was on duty by the lifts. That girl could have been a terrorist or a bank robber! Security has obviously become very lax. I want them to have a surprise security exercise tomorrow. Let’s see how alert the team really is!’
‘Yes, sir.’ Miss Roper sounded meek enough but James knew her very well; she rarely called him sir, and when she did it was always a sign of suppressed rage over something that had upset her. He could see that her normally placid brown eyes were smouldering, glinting with red. Miss Roper was angry with him; she hadn’t approved of the way he’d dealt with Patience Kirby. She didn’t understand how he felt. Miss Roper’s mother hadn’t left her when she was ten years old.
‘Don’t look at me like that!’ he crossly said, then turned away and stamped off to the lift feeling ill-treated and sorry for himself.
His chauffeur, Barny King, always drove him during the day so that James did not have to hunt for a parking space. Barny would drop him wherever he wanted to go, then drive off back to Regent’s Park, have his own lunch with his wife, Enid, in the kitchen of James’s house, and when James summoned him by telephone drive back to pick him up again.
He would be waiting outside now; he was always punctual. You could rely on Barny and he wouldn’t dream of implying criticism. Only women thought they had a God-given right to sit in judgement on other people. Men were far more reasonable and tolerant.
James did not use the same lift as all the other bank employees; he had an express lift which shot you straight down to the ground floor or the underground car park without stopping on any of the other seventeen floors. His father had installed it not long before he died because he’d feared being buttonholed with complaints or requests for a rise by employees using the opportunity of being in the same lift.
Emerging on the marble-tiled ground floor, James paused to glance around in case Patience Kirby was hanging about, but he didn’t see her. There were crowds going in and out of the other lifts, walking to the revolving doors which led to the busy city street, taking the escalator upwards. But no Patience.
What a name for a little hothead like her! Her parents must have seen that red hair and expected her to have a temper to match, surely! The name must have been their warped idea of a joke.
As he walked across the foyer James admired the decor, as he always did; he had chosen the design of the long, high, wide plate glass wall along one side, admitting as much light as possible, the marble-tiled floors and the glass-walled escalator which slowly ascended through hanging vines and rubber plants which were of a tropical height now and kept on climbing. The original bank had been a far darker place, with fewer, smaller windows and no plants at all, just ancient, creaky, over-fussy furniture.
As a child he had not enjoyed his visits; he had thought the place gloomy and alarming, and had not looked forward to working there, as he knew his father would insist he did when he was old enough.
Looking back down the long tunnel of those years, he couldn’t remember what he would have liked to do instead. Drive a train, maybe? Or be an explorer? He certainly had not wanted to work in a bank. It was his destiny, his father had told him. Doom would have been a more accurate word.
When his father died, four years ago, James’s first act as managing director and chairman had been to begin making changes to the structure of the bank in an effort to create a more pleasant working environment for the staff and customers. The work had cost millions, but every time he looked around the light-filled reception area, the glass and greenery, he was satisfied that it had been well worth it.
The dark and gloomy building he remembered from his childhood had been buried for ever in his memory.
He hurried out through the revolving doors and across the pavement to where his chauffeur was holding open the door of the white Daimler. James shot into the back and gave a sigh of relief as Barny closed the door on him and walked round to get behind the wheel.
‘Lock the doors!’ James ordered, and with a glance of surprise Barny obeyed.
‘Something wrong, Mr James?’
‘No, just taking precautions,’ James enigmatically said, deciding not to mention Patience Kirby’s visit.
A man in his mid-fifties, with iron-grey hair sliding back from his forehead, leaving his scalp shiny and smooth, Barny King had been working for the Ormond family for years. He had driven James to boarding school, aged ten, with a set, pale face and very cold hands, had ferried him and all his luggage to Cambridge when he went off to university, trying to look thirty when he was actually only eighteen, and he had driven old Mr Ormond back and forth to the City from the exquisite house in Regent’s Park, where Barny and his wife had a private apartment over the garage.
Barny and Enid were an important part of James’s life, as important to him as Miss Roper but even closer because they had known him as a child and been kind to him when he needed kindness, comforting when he was lonely. When he remembered his childhood from the age of ten he remembered Barny and Enid, rarely his father. They had almost been parents to him; he had happy memories of sitting in the kitchen with them eating buttered crumpets and home-made jam sandwiches, neither of which were permitted on the table if he ate with his father.
James stared out of the window as they drove off. Patience Kirby must have given up and gone away. He suddenly remembered those tiny, soft warm hands clutching at him and felt a strange stab of undefined feeling in his chest.
Angry with himself, he frowned, pushed the memory of her away, got the financial report out of his briefcase and began skimming it through again. He wanted all the details fresh in his mind when he met Charles.
Traffic along Piccadilly was as heavy as usual, but Barny fought his way through to drop James at the side entrance of the Ritz.
‘I’ll ring for you in a couple of hours,’ James told him, getting out.
He found Charles in the Palm Court, drinking a champagne cocktail. Waving cheerfully, Charles summoned the waiter to bring another for James.
‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’
James looked blank. ‘Is it? I hadn’t noticed.’
Charles roared with laughter. ‘All work and no play, Jimmy.’
He had always called him Jimmy, indifferent to the fact that James hated it. James sipped his cocktail and studied the menu, choosing in the end to have rocket and anchovy salad sprinkled with grated parmesan followed by a Dover sole with asparagus and new potatoes.
‘Grilled, served off the bone,’ he instructed, and the head waiter nodded.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Sometimes
