LITMIR.BIZ

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when the two boys came together into the room where she sat by the window, the tiny habitual difference in her tone when she spoke to her elder son, her first-born.

      ‘I’ve thought once or twice lately,’ Carole said, playing with a spoon, ‘that your father’s developed – I don’t know – some little oddnesses. He seems to be growing old quite suddenly.’ She raised her eyes to her husband. ‘I imagine he’ll get over this attack – and pretty quickly – but I wonder …’ She didn’t finish the sentence, but it finished itself in both their minds. I wonder just how long he will last? Will there be a second attack? A third and perhaps a final one? And before too long?

      ‘Oddnesses?’ David said sharply. ‘Exactly what kind of oddnesses?’

      ‘He’s got rather strange about money, for one thing.’

      ‘He was always careful about money.’ Not mean, but careful, everything accounted for, no waste, no pretentious lavishness. Solid comfort, good value in return for cash laid out – but never stingy.

      ‘I don’t mean that, I mean the way he’s taken to keeping a little hoard of money in his bedroom. He never used to.’

      ‘I didn’t know he was doing it now.’

      Carole pleated a fold in the crisp damask of the table cloth, looking down idly at her fingers in their meaningless task.

      ‘Quite a lot of money, in notes.’ She smiled. ‘He has an old-fashioned cash-box. I saw it a few weeks ago, I called in to see him one morning, he was rather tired, he was having breakfast in bed.’ The first signs of advancing age, that. He’d have been appalled at the notion of breakfast in bed only a couple of years ago. ‘He was counting the money, fivers mostly.’ She looked up and smiled again. ‘Just like a miser in a storybook. He snapped the box shut as soon as I came in. He pushed it into the drawer of the bedside table, but I saw it all right.’ She stood up. ‘And the housekeeper was complaining to me that he’d taken to querying the domestic accounts in a way he never used to. Saying they were ordering too much milk. Silly little things like that.’

      David got to his feet. ‘I shouldn’t think it’s of much consequence. An old man’s fancy. People do have funny notions when they get old. It’s only to be expected.’

      ‘Hardly a good idea, though,’ she said. ‘All that cash. With servants in and out of the room. And that secretary, Gina Thorson …’ She let the little implication lie there. A hundred pounds, forty pounds, even twenty or ten, might represent temptation to a girl like Gina Thorson.

      Carole’s practised eye had assessed Gina and her possessions when the girl had first arrived at Whitegates, recognizing from harsh experience the signs of skimped means, the striving after an appearance of well-kept respectability, the cheap smart clothes, shoes and handbags designed to imitate leather.

      David raised his eyebrows. ‘Gina’s all right. She wouldn’t take anything she wasn’t entitled to.’ He lost interest in Gina Thorson and what she might or might not feel herself entitled to. He let his mind slip back to its major preoccupation. ‘Do you think we should ask Kenneth to dinner 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

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