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.
‘Suppose Kenneth calls here before you get back?’
‘You’ll just have to play it by ear.’ He could trust Carole to do that. She would handle the situation as well as he could himself, better actually, if he were to be honest. She had an instinctive knack of saying the right thing at the right time.
‘I’m leaving in five minutes,’ Kenneth Mallinson said into the phone. ‘I spent a couple of hours last night going into the figures.’ Up till four o’clock in the morning, staring at the wretched figures, if the truth were told, but one didn’t need to tell one’s junior partner everything. ‘And I’ve decided to hang on for a little while longer, I think I may be able to raise some more capital.’
‘Just how long is a little while?’ The junior partner knew better than to ask Kenneth Mallinson exactly where he proposed trying to raise twenty thousand pounds. If the information weren’t volunteered in that first moment, a direct question wasn’t going to elicit it.
‘Two or three weeks, less perhaps. I can let you know in a day or two.’
When he gets back from Rockley, the junior partner thought, after he sees his ailing father. Was he proposing to approach the old man for a loan? Hoping for a death-bed reconciliation? Something of that kind? He might pull it off of course. One never knew with families. It might be possible.
‘About that job I’ve been offered,’ he said. ‘They’ll want an answer in a few days.’ All things being equal, the junior partner would much prefer to stay on in business with Kenneth Mallinson. But if the firm was on the verge of bankruptcy he’d be glad of the job. Quite a good opening really.
‘I’ll let you know,’ Kenneth said. ‘You can stall them for a day or two.’
‘What do you want me to do while you’re away?’ the junior partner asked. ‘Go round to the bank and try to talk the manager into giving us more time?’
‘Yes.’ Quite good at that, the junior partner, better than Kenneth Mallinson, who found it hard to go cap in hand to any man. ‘Tell him I’ll be in touch with him in a day or two.’
‘Right you are. I hope you find your father on the road to recovery.’ Though was that what his senior partner wanted? Would it not in many ways be more convenient if he found his father on the point of death? With just enough remaining strength to put his signature to a cheque, to summon his solicitor to draw up a new will?
‘I don’t think he’s all that ill,’ Kenneth said. ‘From what Doctor Burnett told me. You can phone me at the local pub, Rockley village that is, the Swan, if you need to get in touch with me urgently.’
‘You’re not staying at the house then?’ Surprise in the junior partner’s tone.
‘No, they won’t want to be bothered with extra work just now. It’ll be more convenient for them if I get a room at the pub.’
And more convenient for you as well, the other man thought, smiling wryly to himself. No one to overhear your phone calls, no one to realize just how rocky our finances are at this moment.
‘Have a good journey,’ he said, and replaced the receiver.
A few minutes later Kenneth Mallinson picked up his overnight bag and let himself out of the flat. No wife to smile a farewell on the threshold. He had never felt the impulse to marry. The deep channels of his emotions had always been directed towards his mother, the youthful energies of his affections had spent themselves in trying to ease the silent unhappiness of her existence, to make up to her in some tiny measure for the huge error of her marriage to Henry Mallinson, a man whose cold strong nature could not even begin to comprehend how a woman with a warm and loving nature might shrivel and wither from simple lack of the caressing hand of love.
It had taken Kenneth years to recover from his mother’s death – if he had ever truly recovered. He had come in the end to accept the fact that she was gone, that things hadn’t after all come right for her, that she had died at last from nothing more complicated than a broken heart. By the time he had contrived to construct a shield of armour around his inner turmoils, he was approaching forty and as far as marriage was concerned it was already too late.
He eased the car out on to the main road and pointed it towards the south, towards Rockley and Whitegates. I suppose I’ll have to see David, he thought, staring out through the windscreen. And that wife of his, Carole.
He had seen the photographs in the newspapers, the pretty, fair-haired girl standing demurely smiling beside her new husband. Father would like a daughter-in-law like that, he thought, a quiet, compliant girl, one who would fall in with his wishes, play her part in the Mallinson scheme of things, provide him in due course with grandchildren to carry on the family business long after he was dead and gone.
The early-morning traffic began to thicken. As he drove through the outskirts of a town he saw the first sleepy shopkeepers beginning to raise the blinds, to attack the windows with wash-leathers and buckets of water.
‘Thirty pounds!’ Tim Jefford stared at the proprietor of the tiny shop with horrified disbelief. ‘Thirty pounds for one miserable coin!’
‘Guineas,’ said the proprietor smoothly. ‘Thirty guineas. You won’t do better elsewhere. Fine condition and a rarity of course. You’d be hard put to it to find another like it in the whole of London.’ He didn’t waste time addressing the wild-looking young man as Sir. Hardly likely that a fellow like that, greasy jeans and a shirt very
