Davina’s stomach clenched as she remembered the anger, the guilt she had felt on hearing this disclosure. No wonder so many of the women watched her with stony-faced dislike when she drove through the village. She suspected that they would not have believed that Gregory had kept her as short of money as he did them, but it was true.
She had been shocked to learn just how much money Gregory had in his private bank accounts, but, large though that sum was, it was nowhere near enough to save Carey’s.
As she had learned since his death, Gregory had run Carey’s as an autocrat whose word was law. No amount of representations to him from the unions had persuaded him to increase his workers’ wages, nor to provide them with anything other than the most basic of facilities.
Davina had been stunned when she had been shown the lavatories and wash-basins, the crude and unhygienic area that was supposed to be the canteen and rest-room.
Giles, who had escorted her around the company after Gregory’s death, had been sympathetic and understanding, but not even his presence had been able to lessen her shock, her sense of despair and guilt.
And there was nothing she could do to put things right. There was barely enough coming in to pay the wages.
He himself was not a financier, Giles had told her. He was in fact the company’s personnel manager, but even he had been able to see the financial danger the company was courting.
Gregory had refused to listen to him, just as he had refused to listen to anyone else who had tried to advise him, as Davina had learned.
Davina had no idea what on earth she was going to do to prevent the company from having to close down. Find a buyer, the bank had told her, or a backer. But how, and where? Her head ached with the constant tension and worry of suddenly finding herself with this kind of responsibility.
Only last week Giles had told her how much he admired her calm, her strength, but inwardly she felt neither calm nor strong. She was adept at hiding her feelings, though. She had had to be. Very early on in her marriage she had realised how much Gregory enjoyed hurting her. By then she had, of course, known how much of a mistake their marriage was. She had blamed herself, or rather her naïveté, for the failure of her marriage.
She had been a shy teenager, sent to a very small all-girls’ boarding-school when she was eleven years old, and then abruptly removed from it at fourteen when her mother died suddenly from a brain tumour.
At first she had been thrilled because her father had wanted her at home. She had always been much closer to her mother than she had to her father. Theirs had never been a physically close household, but in her grief and shock at her mother’s death she had gone up to him, wanting him to hold her.
Instead he had stepped back from her, rejecting her, his displeasure at her actions written on his face. Confused and hurt, knowing that she had angered him, Davina retreated into herself.
The rough and tumble of the local school confused and alarmed her. The other pupils made fun of her accent, the boys tugged painfully on her long plaits and even the girls ganged up against her, taunting and bullying her. She was an outsider, different, alien, and she was acutely aware of it.
She also soon discovered that her father had brought her home not because he wanted her company or because he loved her, but because he wanted someone to take over her mother’s role as housekeeper. And, while other girls spent their teenage years experimenting with make-up and boys, Davina spent hers anxiously ironing her father’s shirts, cooking his meals, cleaning his house, with what time she did have to spare spent on trying to keep up with her homework.
Of course, her schoolwork suffered. She was too proud, too defensive to try to explain to her teachers why she was always so tired, why she was always being accused of not concentrating on her lessons, and of course when her father read their end-of-term reports on her he was even more angry with her.
The dreams she had once had of emulating her grandfather, of exploring the world of natural medicines and remedies, died, stifled by her father’s contempt and her teachers’ irritation at her lack of progress.
‘Of course we all know, Davina, that you won’t have to work,’ one of her teachers had commented acidly one afternoon in front of the whole class, causing her fellow pupils to shuffle in their seats and turn to look at her, while her face had turned puce with shame and embarrassment. ‘Which is just as well, isn’t it? Because you certainly won’t be employable.’
One of the boys made a coarse comment that caused the others to laugh, and even though the teacher must have heard it she made no attempt to chastise him.
There were girls whom she could have been friends with, girls who, like her, seemed rather shy, but because she had come so late to the school they had already made their friends and formed their small protective groups, and Davina certainly did not have the self-confidence to break into them.
Everyone else at school looked different as well. The girls wore jeans or very short skirts, which were officially banned, but which were worn nevertheless. They had long straight hair and the more daring of them wore dark kohl lines around their eyes and pale pink lipstick.
Davina studied them with awed envy. Her father did not approve of make-up. The one time she had dared to spend her money on a soft pink lipstick he had told her to go upstairs and scrub her face clean.
At fifteen years old she knew that she still looked like a little girl, while her peers were already almost young women.
At sixteen she left school. There was no point in her staying on, her father told her grimly as he viewed her poor exam results.
Instead he paid for her to attend a private secretarial school in Chester so that she could learn to type and so do work for him at home when necessary.
And then just before her seventeenth birthday a small miracle occurred. Out of the blue one morning, while she was engaged on her bimonthly chore of polishing the heavy silver in the dining-room, a visitor arrived.
Davina heard the doorbell ring and went to answer it, wiping her hands on her apron as she did so. She was wearing a pleated skirt, which had originally been her mother’s and which was too wide and too long for her, and her own school jumper, which was too small and too tight.
It would never have occurred to her to ask her father for new clothes. He gave her a weekly housekeeping allowance, but she had to provide him with receipts for the meticulously kept accounts he went through with her every Friday evening.
As she opened the door Davina blinked in surprise at the girl she saw standing there. She was tall, and very slim, and a few years Davina’s senior. She was wearing a very, very short skirt; her long straight hair would have been the envy of the girls in Davina’s class at school and in addition to the kohl liner around her eyes she was wearing false eyelashes.
Her mouth was painted a perfect pale frothy pink, and as Davina stared at her she smiled and said cheerfully, ‘Hi, you must be Davina. Your dad sent me round with some stuff for you to type. I’m working for him while Moaning Martha is recuperating from her op. Honest to God, the instructions she gave me before she left …!’
The thick black eyelashes batted. She was, Davina recognised in awe, chewing gum. The thought of this girl working for her father, replacing Martha Hillary, her father’s fifty-odd-year-old secretary, was almost too much for Davina to take in.
‘I’m
