An Excellent Wife?
His mouth was oddly dry; he needed a drink. Getting up, he walked over to a discreetly concealed cabinet in the oak-panelled wall.
Opening it, James selected a tumbler and poured himself a finger of good malt whisky, dropped ice cubes into the glass and shut the cabinet again, then walked back to his desk, nursing his whisky.
He rarely drank before the evening, apart from a glass or two of wine during lunch. He sat down, leaned back, sipping the whisky. He must put the whole stupid incident out of his mind and get on with his work.
He looked at his watch. Half an hour left; he might still finish the report before he had to meet Charles, if he wasn’t interrupted again. Finishing his drink, he turned his attention back to the closely typed pages.
He was on the final page when a confused noise began outside. James looked up, frowning. Now what?
Someone was shouting—it was Miss Roper’s voice, he recognised a second later with amazement, since he had never heard her shout that way before.
‘No, he doesn’t want to see you! Look, I’m sorry... You can’t go in there! Stop...’
The door fell open and bodies crashed through into his office. Three bodies, to be precise. Miss Roper. Her halfwitted assistant. And a third woman, who rolled across the floor in a flurry of arms and legs and fiery red hair in a tangle of tight, exploding curls, finishing up close to him.
James was so stunned that he didn’t even move; he just sat there behind his desk, staring down at her.
Clutching at a chair to stop herself falling, Miss Roper burst into stammering explanation, on the verge of tears.
‘I told her...said she couldn’t...she forced her way past me. I’m sorry, I did my best...she wouldn’t listen.’
Her assistant was already backing out, away from James’s terrifying presence, making gasping noises of panic and alarm. He took no notice of her, expecting nothing else from her by now, and in any case far too intent on the third person who had imploded into his room.
She was at his feet, quite literally, suddenly reaching out and attaching herself to his shoes with both hands, clinging on like a limpet.
‘I’m not going until you let me talk to you!’
James looked at Miss Roper again. ‘Is this who I think it is? The Kirby woman?’
‘Patience Kirby,’ said the girl, her slanty hazel eyes fixed on his face. ‘Please, Mr Ormond, just give me five minutes of your time, that’s all I ask. I won’t go until you do.’
‘Call Security, Miss Roper,’ James ordered, flintyhearted.
Miss Roper gulped and headed for her own office.
‘You might as well get up,’ James told the girl. ‘I am not listening to you. If you aren’t out of here in one minute my security men will carry you out. And let go of my feet!’ He couldn’t move with her tethered to him, except by dragging her along with him.
Her hands let go of his shoes, but she immediately shot up and clasped his legs instead, wrapping her arms around them. ‘Why won’t you listen to me?’
‘You tiresome female! Let go of me, will you? You’re making yourself ridiculous—this isn’t some soap on TV; this is real life and you are in serious trouble. I could have you arrested for forcing an entry and physical assault!’
‘I’ve got a message from your mother,’ she said, ignoring his threats.
‘My mother is dead!’ James heard the running feet of the security men along the stone floors in the corridor from the lift. Thank God, they would be here soon to end this embarrassing scene.
‘No, she isn’t, she’s alive.’ She bit her lip, frowning. ‘You didn’t really think she was dead, did you?’ The small face lifted to him had an annoyingly childlike look: heart-shaped, with large, beautifully spaced glowing eyes fringed by a ludicrous number of thick ginger lashes which shone in the sunlight like gold, a small nose and a wide, warm mouth. She wasn’t pretty, but she was oddly appealing. Not his type, of course; he preferred women to be elegant and coolly beautiful, with good brains, like Fiona, but he could imagine that boys of her own age might find this girl adorable.
‘My mother is dead!’ he insisted, his teeth snapping out the words.
‘Did your father tell you that? And all this time you’ve believed she was...? Oh, that’s terrible.’ Tears actually formed in those eyes. One began sliding down her cheek while James watched it incredulously.
‘Stop that!’ he muttered. ‘What are you crying about?’
‘It’s so sad...when I think of you... How could your father lie to you like that? Only ten years old, to be told your mother was dead! You must have been heartbroken.’
He had been. He remembered the coldness that had sunk into him, the misery and anguish, the sense of betrayal, of desertion. Of course, his father hadn’t told him his mother was dead. His father wasn’t a man given to telling lies. He had told him the cold, bitter truth.
‘Your mother has run off with another man and left us both,’ his father had said curtly. ‘You’ll never see her again.’
James had been taken off to stay with an aunt who had a bungalow at Greatstone, on the Kent coast, and had stood, day after day, on the beach, staring out at the grey, heaving waters of the English Channel, listening to the melancholy cry of gulls, the slow, sad whisper of the tide rising and falling on the sand. Whenever he heard those sounds something inside him ached, a stupid emotional echo of almost forgotten pain.
‘But she isn’t dead! She’s alive!’ said Patience Kirby.
‘She’s dead to me,’ James said tersely.
It was too late now for his mother to come back. He had spent a quarter of a century living without her; he had no need of a mother now.
Three security men burst into the room, big men in dark uniforms and peaked caps, ready to do battle with whatever they might find.
‘Get her away from me,’ James ordered.
The girl turned her small, heart-shaped face to them. They stared at her tear-wet eyes and trembling lips, then all three men shuffled their feet and looked sheepish.
One of them said uneasily, ‘Better get up, miss.’
Another offered her a hand. ‘Come on, miss, let me help you up.’
‘No, I’m not moving!’ she obstinately refused, shaking her head so that the red curls flew around like the petals of a flower in wind.
‘Well, don’t just stand there, pick her up!’ ordered James, and leaned down to loosen her grip on his legs.
Her hands were smaller than he had expected; soft little fingers curled around his like tendrils of vine around a tree and he felt a queer tremor in his chest. Clutching them, he stood up, pulling her up with him. She came without a struggle, her head just below his shoulder level.
Was she an adult, or a child pretending to be grown up? he wondered, looking down at her in closer, sharper assessment. Five foot two or three, and, no, not a child, just a very small girl in her early twenties, in scruffy blue jeans and a cheap dark blue cotton sweatshirt which clung to small breasts and a skinny waist. Yet she was not boyish; indeed she was amazingly female in a way he found hard to explain to himself.
‘Your mother’s alive, Mr Ormond,’ she said softly. ‘She’s old and broke, and lonely. It would make her so happy to see you. She’s all alone in the world and she needs you.’
‘You mean she needs money,’ he said with a cynical twist of his lips. Now and then he wondered if his mother would one day get in touch and ask for money; he had never been quite sure whether or not he would give her any. In the divorce settlement she had been given a pretty considerable sum. his father had assured him; she was not entitled to anything else. But she had always been extravagant, his father had said; she would probably run through her money and be back for more one day.
Patience Kirby bit her lip. ‘Well, she hasn’t much, it’s true—just her old-age pension, actually, and when she has paid her rent she has barely enough to live on—but I throw in three meals a day and...’
‘You throw in three meals a day?’ he interrupted sharply.
‘She’s living with me.’
My God, is this girl her child? His stomach sank. He hated the idea. Is this my half-sister, daughter of whatever man his mother had run off with twenty-five years ago? He searched her face, looking for some resemblance, but found none. The girl did not look like his mother or any of their family.
‘I run a little hotel, a sort of boarding-house,’ Patience Kirby said. ‘The local Social Services people send me old people who need somewhere cheap to live. That’s how I got your mother; she came three months ago. She’s very frail; she’ll only be sixty next week, but she looks much older, she’s had such a hard life. She’s been living abroad, in France and Italy, singing in hotels and bars, she told me. Earning very little, just enough to keep her going.
‘I thought she had nobody in the world, then one day she told me about you, said she hadn’t seen you since you were ten. She thinks about you all the time; she has pictures of you and cuttings from newspapers about you stuck up everywhere around her room. She would give anything to see you at least once. You’re all she has in the world now, and she’s sick; the doctor doesn’t think she’ll live for more than a couple of years.’
James was furiously aware of their audience—the three security men, Miss Roper, the bird-brained assistant—all standing on the other side of the room, listening with obvious sympathy, their eyes moving from the girl’s emotional face to his set, cold one, their expressions reproaching him for being so hard-hearted.
Harshly, he said, ‘My mother chose to go away with some man twenty-five years ago, leaving me and my father without a backward look. It’s too late now for her to turn up and ask for help, but if you leave your name and address with my secretary I’ll make arrangements for her to start receiving some sort of pension.’
‘That isn’t what she wants!’ Patience Kirby burst out. ‘She wants to see you!’
‘But I don’t want to see her! Now, I’m very busy, I have a lunch appointment and I am going out.’
‘I’m not leaving here until you promise to come and see her, at least once!’
James told the security men, through clenched teeth, ‘Get her out of here, will you?’
They shuffled forward. ‘Please come along, miss!’
She sat down in James’s chair, hazel eyes defiant, red hair tumbling over her small face, and held on tightly to the arms. ‘I am staying put!’
Helplessly, they looked at their employer.
‘Pick her up and carry her out!’ James snarled. ‘Unless you no longer want your jobs?’
Galvanised by this threat, the three took reluctant hold of Patience Kirby’s arms and legs, in spite of her struggles, and began to carry her towards the door.
‘How can you be so heartless? Whatever she did all those years ago, she’s still your mother!’
‘She should have remembered that fact years ago. Now, don’t come back or next time you’re going out of the window!’ he shouted after her disappearing red curls, surprised to hear his own voice sounding so out of control.
He hated losing control; it was Patience Kirby’s fault; she had pushed him to the limit. But she had wasted her time. He was going to forget everything she had said about his mother, you didn’t wipe out a lifetime of rejection by simply turning up and asking for forgiveness after twenty-five years. Patience Kirby wasn’t getting through his defences a second time. He would see to that. He hoped never to set eyes on the girl again.
CHAPTER TWO
AS HE left the office shortly afterwards James told Miss Roper to find out how Patience Kirby had got up to his floor and make sure it did not happen again.
‘She should never have got past the receptionist, let alone into a lift. Check which receptionist was working this morning, and which security guard was on duty by the lifts. That girl could have been a terrorist or a bank robber! Security has obviously become very lax. I want them to have a surprise security exercise tomorrow. Let’s see how alert the team really is!’
‘Yes, sir.’ Miss Roper sounded meek enough but James knew her very well; she rarely called him sir, and when she did it was always a sign of suppressed rage over something that had upset her. He could see that her normally placid brown eyes were smouldering, glinting with red. Miss Roper was angry with him; she hadn’t approved of the way he’d dealt with Patience Kirby. She didn’t understand how he felt. Miss Roper’s mother hadn’t left her when she was ten years old.
‘Don’t look at me like that!’ he crossly said, then turned away and stamped off to the lift feeling ill-treated and sorry for himself.
His chauffeur, Barny King, always drove him during the day so that James did not have to hunt for a parking space. Barny would drop him wherever he wanted to go, then drive off back to Regent’s Park, have his own lunch with his wife, Enid, in the kitchen of James’s house, and when James summoned him by telephone drive back to pick him up again.
He would be waiting outside now; he was always punctual. You could rely on Barny and he wouldn’t dream of implying criticism. Only women thought they had a God-given right to sit in judgement on other people. Men were far more reasonable and tolerant.
James did not use the same lift as all the other bank employees; he had an express lift which shot you straight down to the ground floor or the underground car park without stopping on any of the other seventeen floors. His father had installed it not long before he died because he’d feared being buttonholed with complaints or requests for a rise by employees using the opportunity of being in the same lift.
Emerging on the marble-tiled ground floor, James paused to glance around in case Patience Kirby was hanging about, but he didn’t see her. There were crowds going in and out of the other lifts, walking to the revolving doors which led to the busy city street, taking the escalator upwards. But no Patience.
What a name for a little hothead like her! Her parents must have seen that red hair and expected her to have a temper to match, surely! The name must have been their warped idea of a joke.
As he walked across the foyer James admired the decor, as he always did; he had chosen the design of the long, high, wide plate glass wall along one side, admitting as much light as possible, the marble-tiled floors and the glass-walled escalator which slowly ascended through hanging vines and rubber plants which were of a tropical height now and kept on climbing. The original bank had been a far darker place, with fewer, smaller windows and no plants at all, just ancient, creaky, over-fussy furniture.
As a child he had not enjoyed his visits; he had thought the place gloomy and alarming, and had not looked forward to working there, as he knew his father would insist he did when he was old enough.
Looking back down the long tunnel of those years, he couldn’t remember what he would have liked to do instead. Drive a train, maybe? Or be an explorer? He certainly had not wanted to work in a bank. It was his destiny, his father had told him. Doom would have been a more accurate word.
When his father died, four years ago, James’s first act as managing director and chairman had been to begin making changes to the structure of the bank in an effort to create a more pleasant working environment for the staff and customers. The work had cost millions, but every time he looked around the light-filled reception area, the glass and greenery, he was satisfied that it had been well worth it.
The dark and gloomy building he remembered from his childhood had been buried for ever in his memory.
He hurried out through the revolving doors and across the pavement to where his chauffeur was holding open the door of the white Daimler. James shot into the back and gave a sigh of relief as Barny closed the door on him and walked round to get behind the wheel.
‘Lock the doors!’ James ordered, and with a glance of surprise Barny obeyed.
‘Something wrong, Mr James?’
‘No, just taking precautions,’ James enigmatically said, deciding not to mention Patience Kirby’s visit.
A man in his mid-fifties, with iron-grey hair sliding back from his forehead, leaving his scalp shiny and smooth, Barny King had been working for the Ormond family for years. He had driven James to boarding school, aged ten, with a set, pale face and very cold hands, had ferried him and all his luggage to Cambridge when he went off to university, trying to look thirty when he was actually only eighteen, and he had driven old Mr Ormond back and forth to the City from the exquisite house in Regent’s Park, where Barny and his wife had a private apartment over the garage.
Barny and Enid were an important part of James’s life, as important to him as Miss Roper but even closer because they had known him as a child and been kind to him when he needed kindness, comforting when he was lonely. When he remembered his childhood from the age of ten he remembered Barny and Enid, rarely his father. They had almost been parents to him; he had happy memories of sitting in the kitchen with them eating buttered crumpets and home-made jam sandwiches, neither of which were permitted on the table if he ate with his father.
James stared out of the window as they drove off. Patience Kirby must have given up and gone away. He suddenly remembered those tiny, soft warm hands clutching at him and felt a strange stab of undefined feeling in his chest.
Angry with himself, he frowned, pushed the memory of her away, got the financial report out of his briefcase and began skimming it through again. He wanted all the details fresh in his mind when he met Charles.
Traffic along Piccadilly was as heavy as usual, but Barny fought his way through to drop James at the side entrance of the Ritz.
‘I’ll ring for you in a couple of hours,’ James told him, getting out.
He found Charles in the Palm Court, drinking a champagne cocktail. Waving cheerfully, Charles summoned the waiter to bring another for James.
‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’
James looked blank. ‘Is it? I hadn’t noticed.’
Charles roared with laughter. ‘All work and no play, Jimmy.’
He had always called him Jimmy, indifferent to the fact that James hated it. James sipped his cocktail and studied the menu, choosing in the end to have rocket and anchovy salad sprinkled with grated parmesan followed by a Dover sole with asparagus and new potatoes.
‘Grilled, served off the bone,’ he instructed, and the head waiter nodded.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Sometimes I get déjà vu, lunching with you, Jimmy,’ Charles said. ‘You’re the image of your old dad. Time whizzes back for me, listening to you.’
‘I’m flattered,’ James said, knowing Charles had not intended to flatter him, was being sarcastic. ‘I was very attached to my father.’
Charles made a face. ‘Really? I hated mine. Never stopped lecturing me, tedious old Victorian of a chap.’
They ate in the beautiful dining room looking over Green Park. Their table was in a comer by the windows, which were slightly open to let mild spring air into the room, setting the gilded metal chains on the elaborately painted ceiling swinging and tinkling softly.
They talked business throughout the meal, but occasionally James looked out into the park at the daffodils, golden and swaying, under the trees which were just breaking into tiny, bright green leaf.
Noticing his occasional abstraction, Charles grinned at him. ‘How’s Fiona, Jimmy?’
How James hated that nickname, but he suppressed a shudder. ‘She’s fine, thanks.’
‘Ravishing girl, you lucky boy! I’d swap places with you any day. You’ve been seeing her for months, haven’t you? We going to hear the ringing of wedding bells before long?’
James gave him a cool look. Charles was not that close a friend and James had no intention of discussing Fiona or his personal life with him.
When he didn’t answer, Charles said cynically, ‘In no hurry to tie yourself down, eh? I wish I’d been as wise as you. Well, I’ve learnt my lesson now. No more marriages for me. In future I’ll just have affairs.’
In his early fifties, elegant, willowy, always smoothly tailored, with silvering at his temples among the smooth raven-black hair, Charles had been married four times so far and was currently in the middle of his latest divorce from a much younger woman, a ravishing TV star with her own series.
Coming home late after a business dinner, Charles had caught her in bed with her co-star. He might not have minded so much if it had not been the matrimonial bed, his own bed in his own bedroom, and if the other man had not been her age and something of a sexual athlete.
The divorce was to have been discreet, on grounds of breakdown of the marriage. Charles had not wanted the whole world to know his wife had been cheating on him with a much younger man. But his wife had not been so silent; she had given exclusive interviews to several daily newspapers and Charles had had the chagrin of reading intimate details of his sex life printed for everyone to see.
As they began to eat, James produced the report he had spent the morning studying and asked a series of shrewd questions. Charles might be a fool where women were concerned but he had a good business mind and was able to tell James everything he needed to know.
The bottle of good white wine they were drinking had vanished long before they finished their main course, but James had consumed very little of it. He disliked drinking too much over lunch; it always meant you got very little done during the rest of the day.
He refused a pudding, ordering a pot of coffee; Charles, however, asked for spotted dick with custard and ate it when it came with half-closed, delighted eyes.
‘Delicious, just like school pud. You should have had some.’
‘I never eat puddings, especially heavy ones.’
‘Puritan! Your problem is you were never taught to enjoy life. That gloomy old father of yours had a very bad influence on you.’
James could have said that his father had taught him not to keep marrying women who cost a fortune and were always unfaithful, not to drink like a fish and wake up late every morning with a hangover, and not to spend his days hanging around bars and going to wild parties. But where was the point in offending Charles by telling him the truth?
He looked at his watch. ‘Sorry, Charles, I have to rush off. I have an appointment at three. Thanks for all your help.’ He pulled his mobile out of his briefcase and called Barny, told him to come at once, then called the waiter over, asked for the bill, signed it, dropped a tip on the plate and stood up.
‘I think I’ll have a little brandy before I go,’ Charles said, settling comfortably in his chair. ‘Thanks for lunch, old boy. My love to Fiona. Sexy as hell, you lucky bastard.’
James went to the cloakroom, used the lavatory, washed his face and hands and brushed his black hair back, staring at himself in the mirror. His grey eyes had a wintry look. Would he call Fiona sexy? Not a word he would have chosen to describe her, no. Beautiful, yes. Elegant, yes. But sexy? No, she was far too cold.
A shiver ran down his spine. Was that what he really thought about her? Dismay filled him. Of course she wasn’t cold. Cool, maybe, but not cold.
Yet the grey eyes reflected in the mirror had a distinctly uneasy look. This was being a very unsettling day so far. He hurriedly turned from the mirror, collected his coat, shrugged into it, tipped the cloakroom attendant and went out of the hotel to find Barny just pulling up outside.
‘I hope I didn’t keep you waiting, Mr James. Traffic a bit heavy the other side of the park today.’
James smiled at him. ‘No, I just left the hotel. Perfect timing, Barny, as always. Back to the office, now. Did Enid give you a good lunch?’
‘Her oxtail stew and mashed potatoes, and then I had an apple.’
‘Lucky Barny. One of my favourites. What is she making tonight?’
‘Thought you were going out for dinner this evening, sir.’ Barny looked anxiously into the driving mirror. ‘We booked to see the new musical, Mr James—will you need us, after all?’