I don’t know if this is the time to float a new issue. You’d do better to wait for an upturn in the economy.’
‘I’ve not entirely decided yet,’ he said. ‘But if I do decide to go public then perhaps you can advise me.’
‘Of course. It’s exactly our line of work.’
He said no more about it and the conversation drifted to other topics. Soon thereafter we went to bed.
Next morning after breakfast – cooked by Gillian – I declined Penny’s invitation to go riding with her, the horse being an animal I despise and distrust. So instead we walked where she would have ridden and went over a forested hill along a broad ride, and descended the other side into a sheltered valley where we lunched in a pub on bread, cheese, pickles and beer, and where Penny demonstrated her skill at playing darts with the locals. Then back to the house where we lazed away the rest of the sunny day on the lawn.
I left the house that evening armed with an invitation to return the following weekend, not from Penny but from Ashton. ‘Do you play croquet?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t.’
He smiled. ‘Come next weekend and I’ll show you how. I’ll have Benson set up the hoops during the week.’
So it was that I drove back to London well contented.
I have given the events of that first weekend in some detail in order to convey the atmosphere of the place and the family. Ashton, the minor industrialist, richer than others of his type because he ran his own show; Gillian, his younger daughter, content to be dutifully domestic and to act as hostess and surrogate wife without the sex bit; and Penny the bright elder daughter, carving out a career in science. And she was bright; it was only casually that weekend I learned she was an MD although she didn’t practise.
And there was the money. The Rolls, the Jensen and the Aston Martin in the garages, the sleek-bodied horses, the manicured lawns, the furnishings of that beautiful house – all these reeked of money and the good life. Not that I envied Ashton – I have a bit of money myself although not in the same class. I mention it only as a fact because it was there.
The only incongruity in the whole scene was Benson, the general factotum, who did not look like anyone’s idea of a servant in a rich household. Rather, he looked like a retired pugilist and an unsuccessful one at that. His nose had been broken more than once in my judgement, and his ears were swollen with battering. Also he had a scar on his right cheek. He would have made a good heavy in a Hammer film. His voice clashed unexpectedly with his appearance, being soft and with an educated accent better than Ashton’s own. I didn’t know what to make of him at all.
Something big was apparently happening in Penny’s line of work that week, and she rang to say she would be in the laboratory all Friday night, and would I pick her up on Saturday morning to take her home. When she got into the car outside University College she looked very tired, with dark smudges under her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Malcolm,’ she said. ‘This won’t be much of a weekend for you. I’m going to bed as soon as I get home.’
I was sorry, too, because this was the weekend I intended to ask her to marry me. However, this wasn’t the time, so I grinned and said, ‘I’m not coming to see you – I’m coming for the croquet.’ Not that I knew much about it – just the bit from Alice and an association with vicars and maiden ladies.
Penny smiled, and said, ‘I don’t suppose I should tell you this, but Daddy says he can measure a man by the way he plays croquet.’
I said, ‘What were you doing all night?’
‘Working hard.’
‘Doing what? Is it a state secret?’
‘No secret. We transferred genetic material from a virus to a bacterium.’
‘Sounds finicky,’ I remarked. ‘With success, I hope.’
‘We won’t know until we test the resulting strain. We should know something in a couple of weeks; this stuff breeds fast. We hope it will breed true.’
What I knew about genetics could be measured with an eye-dropper. I said curiously, ‘What good does all this do?’
‘Cancer research,’ she said shortly, and laid her head back, closing her eyes. I left her alone after that.
When we got to the house she went to bed immediately. Other than that the weekend was much the same as before. Until the end, that is – then it changed for the worse. I played tennis with Ashton, then swam in the pool, and we had lunch on the lawn in the shade of a chestnut tree, just the three of us, Ashton, Gillian and me. Penny was still asleep.
After lunch I was introduced to the intricacies of match-play croquet and, by God, there was a vicar! Croquet, I found, is not a game for the faint-hearted, and the way the Reverend Hawthorne played made Machiavelli look like a Boy Scout. Fortunately he was on my side, but all his tortuous plotting was of no avail against Gillian and Ashton. Gillian played a surprisingly vicious game. Towards the end, when I discovered it’s not a game for gentlemen, I quite enjoyed it.
Penny came down for afternoon tea, refreshed and more animated than she had been, and from then on the weekend took its normal course. Put down baldly on paper, as I have done here, such a life may be considered pointless and boring, but it wasn’t really; it was a relief from the stresses of the working week.
Apparently Ashton did not get even that relief because after tea he retired to his study, pleading that he had to attend to paperwork. I commented that Penny had complained of the same problem, and he agreed that putting unnecessary words on paper was the besetting sin of the twentieth century. As he walked away I reflected that Ashton could not have got where he was by idling his time away playing tennis and croquet.
And so the weekend drifted by until it was nearly time for me to leave. It was a pleasant summer Sunday evening. Gillian had gone to church but was expected back at any moment; she was the religious member of the family – neither Ashton nor Penny showed any interest in received religion. Ashton, Penny and I were sitting in lawn chairs arguing a particularly knotty point in scientific ethics which had arisen out of an article in the morning newspaper. Rather, it was Penny and her father doing the arguing; I was contemplating how to get her alone so I could propose to her. Somehow we had never been alone that weekend.
Penny was becoming a little heated when we heard a piercing scream and then another. The three of us froze, Penny in mid-sentence, and Ashton said sharply, ‘What the devil was that?’
A third scream came. It was nearer this time and seemed to be coming from the other side of the house. By this time we were on our feet and moving, but then Gillian came into sight, stumbling around the corner of the house, her hands to her face. She screamed again, a bubbling, wordless screech, and collapsed on the lawn.
Ashton got to her first. He bent over her and tried to pull her hands from her face, but Gillian resisted him with all her strength. ‘What’s the matter?’ he yelled, but all he got was a shuddering moan.
Penny said quickly, ‘Let me,’ and gently pulled him away. She bent over Gillian who was now lying on her side curled in a foetal position, her hands still at her face with the fingers extended like claws. The screams had stopped and were replaced by an extended moaning, and once she said, ‘My eyes! Oh, my eyes!’
Penny forced her hand to Gillian’s face and touched it with
