himself with those good manners, Meacham thought as he looked round for his garden broom, I dare say he’d run the risk of breaking out, letting fly perhaps with a really nasty show of temper, could even go berserk, that type. Meacham had seen a thing or two in his time. Watch out for the disciplined man when the discipline wears thin; he’d learned that lesson the hard way.
‘I do hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday,’ Godfrey said pleasantly, at the same time removing himself by another couple of paces from the two women in order not to have to shake hands at the moment of farewell. He looked down at his watch. ‘I must ask you to excuse me, I have an appointment.’
Meacham swept the débris into a heap, listening with keen interest to the final exchanges, observing with an appreciative movement of his head the skilful way in which Barratt avoided touching either lady by the hand. Not that any man in his senses would want to, Meacham thought as he transferred the heap to the barrow. He sent a shrewdly assessing glance after the two women who were now walking back to the house. Not much joy to be had there, not from either of them. The daughter he might perhaps, at a pinch, have gone as far in the old days as, well, running his eye over her, sizing her up, not likely to have gone any farther than that. But the old girl – he shook his head and allowed a soundless whistle to escape his lips – he’d have known better than to tangle with the likes of her, even for a single moment. Not even in his palmy days. He sent a smiling sigh towards the past. Not even in his prime.
Godfrey walked rapidly away down the drive. Only three or four weeks ago he had told himself that he might not have to endure for very much longer the presence in his house of a succession of total strangers. And now – he drew a long appalled breath at the notion – it might be years before he could finally close the door on that motley horde.
He halted for a moment, brought all at once face to face with a thought that had been bobbing about somewhere in the recesses of his brain and now sprang out to confront him with chill reality . . . It is no longer a question of tolerating or not tolerating holidaymakers at Oakfield. If the Official Receiver walks in through the gates of Osmond’s, the unimportant little firm of Barratt’s will slide into bankruptcy a week or two later without the attentions of whirring television cameras or crackling microphones. A couple of paragraphs in the Chilford Gazette, a few lines in the trade section advertising the machinery to be disposed of for what it would fetch. And the forthcoming auctions page displaying a photograph of Oakfield, details and measurements relentlessly listed below.
He came out on to the road and turned right, in the direction of Miss Tillard’s bungalow, away from the centre of the village. The soft air strayed against his cheek, bringing with it the scent of the sea.
It had been Elinor Tillard’s idea in the first place, he remembered suddenly, that they should take paying guests at Oakfield. She had thrown the words half-jokingly into a tea-time conversation not very long after the lawyers had finished winding up old Mr Barratt’s estate. There had been the death duties of course – Godfrey had expected that – but what he hadn’t expected was the leanness of his father’s bank balance and share holdings.
Looking back on it now, he could see that his father simply hadn’t been much of a businessman. In his youth he had followed the family tradition of spending some years in the Army, then he had lived a pleasant enough life in the village where he had been born, withdrawing to some extent from local society after the death of his wife, becoming increasingly absorbed as the years went by in purely private interests and hobbies. He hadn’t been a shrewd investor and time had eroded much of the fair-sized fortune he had inherited.
Not that I seem to be turning out a financial wizard myself, Godfrey thought ruefully. But he couldn’t see, even now, that he had behaved foolishly four years ago when he had decided to sink what remained of his father’s capital in a run-down firm that could with diligence and shrewdness be restored to prosperity.
He’d gone to Tillard and King’s, the Chilford estate agents – his father-in-law, now dead, had been a partner in the firm; he’d listened to their advice, furrowed his brow over the lists of properties and settled at last on this little woodworking business. The owner had been in poor health and had recently suffered a heart attack which had left him with no alternative to retirement. The price was very reasonable and Godfrey had always had a liking for the sounds and smells of workshops littered with curling wood-shavings, ever since his first attempts at carpentry in his schooldays.
The concern had appeared fundamentally sound. Housebuilding looked a very healthy growth industry. He had been confident of success – too confident, he could see that now clearly enough – and he had moved little by little, like many another inexperienced man, into the vulnerable position in which the greater part of his production depended on a single outlet. He let out a groan as he contemplated the extent of his folly.
‘It will take a little time before we’re really on our feet,’ he had said cheerfully over the teacups four years ago.
‘Meanwhile—’ Pauline had said, with a questioning glance that spoke of school fees, domestic help, repairs and rates.
‘Meanwhile,’ Aunt Elinor had echoed smilingly, ‘you could take in summer visitors. You’re only half a mile from a good beach, you’ve plenty of room, it would give Pauline something to think about while the boys are away at school, it would help to pay the expenses of Oakfield.’ Neither of the women had suggested that he should sell Oakfield, perhaps because they were well aware his ears would be closed to the idea. The family solicitor had raised the matter once, without conviction, knowing his man. ‘I am bound to say,’ he had observed, looking blandly into Godfrey’s eyes, ‘that the best advice I can offer you is to put Oakfield on the market and move into a smaller house.’ Godfrey hadn’t troubled to reply. He had merely shaken his head, once, decisively, and that was the end of that.
But Aunt Elinor’s joking remark had lingered in his mind, had imperceptibly turned at length into decision. ‘Only for a year or two,’ he’d said to Pauline, ‘just until we’re on a firmer footing.’ Characteristically he had informed her of his decision without even making a show of consulting her. It wasn’t that he had a bulldozing temperament or harboured outdated theories about women’s place in the scheme of things, he was simply following instinctively the pattern his father had laid down. Godfrey’s mother had died when he was a child, so long ago that he had no memory of her; he had been an only child, more or less brought up by Bessie Forrest – Bessie Meacham as she was now, of course. There had been no one to question his father’s edicts and Godfrey had grown up under the impression, which it had never seriously occurred to him to question, that a household arbitrarily ruled by one man represented a perfectly normal and in no way undesirable state of affairs.
Pauline was seven years younger than her husband. At the time of her marriage she had been overwhelmed by a sense of her astounding good luck, and she had been brought up in a home where the mother was gentle and compliant, the father ruled the roost and there were no sons to challenge this arrangement. The early part of Pauline’s married life had been spent in a military environment in which it seemed quite natural for men to issue orders. If she had ever felt resentment after their return to civilian life, if she had come to wish to be treated as a partner rather than as an uncritical subordinate, she never actually got as far as opening her mouth and saying
Godfrey turned a bend in the road and glanced up at the top of the next rise, to where Miss Tillard’s bungalow stood over on the left with a narrow belt of trees to the rear but unscreened in front, looking out over the wide countryside, down towards the village of Westerhill a mile or so away.
A small green car was parked beside the house. Nightingale’s car. The doctor was standing on the verandah with his bag in his hand, talking
