I do know,’ Miss Jordan said with force. ‘One does not marry by accident.’
The connecting door opened wide and Gerald Foster came into the room.
‘I think I’ve got everything,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ll be off in a few minutes.’ He advanced towards the bed, smiling at his wife.
He was a little above average height, with a spare figure and narrow shoulders. He was six years younger than Vera but looked considerably older than his age, not because of any greying or fading but from the many lines on his face. His habitual expression was of reflection and calculation, of devoting sustained and intense thought to the complicated business of living.
He had never really looked young, not even as a lad, he had always looked like a serious adult temporarily inhabiting the skin and flesh of a child – a boy – a youth.
Eight years ago when he and Vera got married, with Vera at thirty-two briefly restored by the stimulus of the event to the pretty flush of youth, and Gerald at twenty-six looking even more solemn and unsmiling under the weight of his new responsibilities, anyone would have taken Vera for the younger of the pair. Now they seemed much of an age, somewhere in the vague stretches of middle life.
‘I’ll phone you about nine o’clock this evening,’ Gerald said. ‘Just to see that everything’s all right.’ He patted his wife’s hand with an affectionate smile.
Miss Jordan turned from the bedside and made to leave the room discreetly, but Vera raised a hand to halt her.
‘There’s no need to go rushing off,’ she said. ‘You can clear away these things.’
Miss Jordan gave a little nod and busied herself gathering up the toilet articles while contriving with professional ease to efface herself from the presence of the married couple and whatever private conversation they might be about to engage in.
‘I’ll try not to be late back tomorrow,’ Gerald said. ‘With luck I should be here by seven or eight.’
He was off on a business trip to Lowesmoor, a large town some seventy miles away. He had worked as a clerk for Vera’s father, had been highly thought of by that shrewd gentleman. After Murdoch’s death Gerald had taken charge of the business; he had gone in for a programme of systematic expansion and made a considerable success of it.
‘I wish you didn’t have to go away,’ Vera said with a pout that had ceased to be girlishly attractive a good ten years ago but which she mistakenly retained in her armoury. ‘You know I hate it here on my own.’
‘I go away as little as I can,’ Gerald said with an air of great reasonableness. ‘Hardly ever for more than one night and never more than twice in a month.’ He smiled. ‘You don’t want me to neglect the business, do you?’
‘All this expansion,’ Vera said mutinously. ‘I can’t see it’s necessary. I’m sure Daddy would have thought it risky.’
He gave her a humouring smile. ‘I never take unnecessary risks, my dear, you know that.’
She wasn’t to be won over so easily. ‘Daddy didn’t find it necessary to keep going away. He hardly ever went away on business.’
She led a very shut-in life. She had no close women friends, no relatives, scarcely any visitors. She had been very close to her father, had been desolated by his death, had tried to replace him with Gerald, not altogether with the success for which she strove and was still striving.
He stooped and kissed her cheek. ‘I’ll get my things,’ he said, ‘then I must be off.’ As he turned towards the connecting door he added mildly, ‘Times have changed a good deal since your father’s day. The business is very different now.’
Indeed it was. Duncan Murdoch had been the grandson of a Scottish crofter. His father had left the croft as a young man and gone south, to England, in search of lusher pastures. He worked for some years as a clerk, living with the utmost frugality, saving every penny. He laid out this little capital by way of small weekly loans to workmates spent up before pay-day.
Eventually he left paid employment and started a thrift and credit-voucher business of his own. The little enterprise prospered. He never overreached himself, was content with a modest success.
His son Duncan worked as his assistant, inheriting the business on his father’s death. He broadened its scope to include hire purchase and various other kinds of minor financial transactions. He kept it all on a very sound and stable footing; indeed, his temperament and upbringing made him excessively cautious. He was never gifted with imagination or business vision.
On his death the business passed to Vera, his only child. She would have been incapable of running it on her own and was greatly relieved when Gerald Foster – at that time her father’s clerk – agreed to take over the running.
Six months later they were married and became joint owners, joint partners in the enterprise. In actual practice this meant that Gerald continued to run the business and at regular intervals placed a sheaf of papers before his wife for her signature.
Duncan Murdoch had kept a lot of good capital locked up, earning its safe little percentage, risking nothing, producing nothing. Gerald Foster knew the value of capital from never having been able to lay his hands on any. He had inherited nothing from his poverty-stricken parents.
In his clerking days he had saved every penny, done what he could with it, but it never amounted to a row of beans.
As soon as he found himself in control of the Cannonbridge Thrift Society he lost no time in putting Duncan Murdoch’s reserve capital to work, shrewdly and carefully.
He kept all the original basis of the business but branched out to embrace small property deals, very small to begin with, tail-end bargains from executors’ sales and the like, run-down shops, clapped-out businesses, disreputable-looking cottages.
Everything he touched prospered. The cottages cleaned up and modernized remarkably well, the shops sold to developers who pulled them down and reared in their place neat modern frontages.
And Foster was above all fortunate in being able to jump on the bandwagon at the right time. When the markets took a tumble and inflation ran riot, he was busy buying and selling, trading and dealing.
But he didn’t lose his head, didn’t start to fancy himself a potential tycoon. He had the little office in Cannonbridge done up and made a good deal more efficient and convenient. But that was all.
He employed only one assistant, a general clerk. She was a formidably competent and respectable woman of powerful build and indeterminate age. He would no more have dreamed of employing some daft and decorative little eye-catcher unschooled in letters and numbers than his father-in-law would have done.
Foster came back now into his wife’s bedroom carrying a briefcase and an overnight bag. ‘You’re certainly looking a lot better,’ he said bracingly. ‘You should be up in a day or two.’
‘I feel very far from well,’ Vera said with one of her sudden fits of moodiness. ‘You have no idea how painful sciatica can be.’
‘I don’t suppose I have,’ he said with an air of apology. He stooped and kissed her cheek. ‘But I do know I’m leaving you in very good hands.’
He gave a little formal nod in
