Betrayal (10 page)

‘And what was it you told the staff?’ she persisted solemnly.

‘Oh, I gave them the latest news in all its glory!’

‘Please, Hugh – I’d like to know.’

If I looked surprised it was because Ginny had never shown much interest in the details of the business. ‘Sorry,’ I said penitently. ‘What did I tell them? Well . . . I made Cumberland sound pretty ogre-ish. I said they’d sell Hartford to the highest bidder, and, if it didn’t happen to be us, then the staff faced almost certain redundancy. I said the future under a buyout would be pretty tough. But I think I made the bad times with us sound marginally more attractive than being out of work.’

She was listening intently, a small frown on her forehead, so I went on, explaining some of the risks involved in making our bid, and the hard work that lay ahead.

‘But you believe in the buyout?’ she said. ‘It’s what you want?’

‘What I want?’ I gave a shaky laugh. ‘I think so! When I last did any rational thinking anyway.’

‘There you go again,’ she said, her voice rising.

‘Where again?’

‘Not answering me properly.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I heard the note of injury in my voice and suppressed it. ‘Yes, it’s what I want.’ Articulating this gave my feelings new force. ‘Yes.
Ye s
. I can’t just let it be written off. Not when it’s got so much going for it. Oh, I know what you all think,’ I said as if she represented the rest of my family. ‘You think it’s just the
tradition
or something, that I’m incapable of letting go. But it’s not just that. It’s the people at Hartford, and the place . . . I love it! I love everything to do with it!’

Ginny said gravely, ‘So long as it’s what you want.’

‘Okay, and I want to be the person running it!’ I conceded, as if this had been in dispute. ‘I want to run it because I think I can do a better job than anyone else. With the right team beside me – and without crazy delusions of grandeur!’ Just thinking about Howard stirred me to anger once more, and it was a moment before I took in what Ginny was saying.

‘. . . I phoned the estate agent, threatened to take the house elsewhere unless they drummed up more interest in Melton. The man suggested some ads in the glossy magazines – which
we
pay for, of course. I agreed, but I told him he was on trial, that we’d give him six weeks at the most. Then . . .’ Some thought distracted her, she blinked rapidly. ‘Then . . . I asked the Murrays which agent they used for their place in France. Those local people are sharks, you know.’

Her calm acceptance caused me a flutter of remorse. ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this.’

She dismissed this with a slight lift of her shoulders. ‘Too many houses anyway.’

‘But you loved Melton.’ And she had loved the house in Provence too. Her great passion was for decorating, her great talent for putting furniture and objects and colours together in fabulous combinations. She had made the houses into showcases, and their loss would be far more painful for her than for me. But at least we were talking about it. There had been a time when Ginny seemed to think that I wanted to sell the houses for some capricious reason of my own, out of perversity, or even, in her blacker moments, because I wanted to undermine her in some way. For a while I had hardly dared to ask how the agents were getting on.

I ventured another risky subject, the matter of the costly couple who ran Melton. ‘The Kemps, have we managed to . . .?’

‘Yes, yes. They left a week ago. I told you.’

‘You did? Sorry.’ Another apology, another small descent.

‘Mrs Hoskins has agreed to go in three times a week.’

‘Well done.’

‘Will we have to sell this place as well?’ she asked in a voice that was deliberately calm.

‘No, of course not!’ I made a poor stab at humour. ‘No, I thought we’d go mad and keep at least one roof over our heads! The doorways along the Strand are a bit draughty. And you don’t meet the same class of dosser, so they tell me . . . Old Etonians, Lloyd’s bankrupts—’

‘Please don’t!’ she exclaimed suddenly, and the tension stretched out between us. ‘I do wish you’d just –
tell
me things! Sometimes you treat me like an idiot!’

‘I
am
telling you,’ I responded mildly. ‘And I’ve never treated you like—’

‘But if you’re going to be at Hartford all the time, we can’t live up here, can we?’

‘In time we could certainly think about moving nearer, yes.’

She exhaled sharply with exasperation. ‘Of course we’ll have to. It’s the only thing to do.’

I wasn’t sure what to make of this Ginny, vibrating with the usual tensions, yet unexpectedly and miraculously focused.

‘But we don’t have to live at Dittisham, do we?’ she demanded.

‘No.’

‘But you
were
thinking about it.’

It had been the briefest of suggestions, made soon after my father died, when I was still in a state of disbelief. The thought of losing both my father and the house where I had grown up had seemed too much to bear, and for a few weeks I’d nursed emotional ideas of restoring the place and using it for summer weekends. My imagination had cast a golden wash of nostalgia over the prospect; I had seen children in the garden again, and barbecues on the terrace, and Easter treasure hunts, and expeditions on the river. ‘It was just a thought. But no, it’s being sold. There was an offer today.’

‘Ah.’ And the relief showed in her face.

We both looked away into the unlit fire. The fake logs were so cleverly finished with ash and scorch marks that they were indistinguishable from the real thing; Ginny had seen them in America and ordered them specially. I felt her glance back at me, gathering herself to speak again.

‘That girl – the one they found in the river – did you hear anything?’

I kept myself steady, I showed nothing in my face. I brought my eyes back to hers. ‘Oh, David mentioned something. She was stabbed, apparently. Then dumped in the water.’

‘They haven’t got any idea who did it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

A pause. ‘You might have told me, you know.’

‘Told you what?’

‘That it was
her
.’ And Ginny’s voice was charged with an emotion I couldn’t read.

I didn’t say anything.

‘That she was the one you were in love with.’

I took a slow breath. ‘It was a long time ago, Ginny.’

‘But it
was
her?’ And her voice trembled slightly.

‘Yes.’

‘The one you wanted to marry, b ut couldn’t.’

‘Who said that?’

She dropped her eyes briefly, as if caught in some subterfuge. ‘Mary.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t believe everything Mary tells you,’ I retorted, wondering what else Mary had said. Then, to soften my words: ‘Honestly, darling . . .’

‘I don’t mind, it’s not that,’ she said, her voice high. ‘I just wish you’d told me.’

‘Really, it wasn’t anything . . .’

‘You did want to marry her though?’

There was a relentlessness in Ginny, a n inability to let go, that reverberated through our arguments like the beat of a discordant drum. Hearing it now in her voice, knowing what was to come, I said hotly, ‘It never got to that stage. There was never any question . . .’ She was waiting for me to elaborate. ‘Sylvie was very young,’ I explained unhappily. ‘Only sixteen.’

Something in the way Ginny took this, the suggestion of a nod, made me think that she already knew, that Mary must have told her, and, fired by the drink and the endless day, I felt a surge of resentment against this exchange of notes.

Ginny took a moment to frame her next question. ‘You saw her this summer?’ And the coolness of her voice did nothing to disguise its tautness.

‘Once or twice.’

‘And she was’ – the hesitation again, the careful choice of words – ‘living in Dittisham?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask.’

‘Mary said she was running a shop. Pottery or handicrafts . . .’

‘Well, Mary would be the one to know.’ I threw the last of the brandy down my throat and got up.

‘Mary thought—’

I twisted away to hide my exasperation and despair. I was so exhausted, I had survived so much today, that I longed to shout out, to beg her to leave it alone and give me some peace.

‘She thought the police would want to question everyone who was near the river on the weekend.’

Constrained by habit, or possibly futility, I made myself turn back and say, ‘Yes, I expect she’s right.’

‘So they might want to question us?’

I gestured the possibility.

‘And you? Because you used to know her?’

‘Yes. Well, in fact—’ I would have given anything not to talk about it just then, but one bad moment was probably as good as another. ‘They already have. Today.’ And I thought: now we start the argument in earnest. Because I have failed to tell her immediately. Because she’ll think I have something to hide.

But she was very still, her eyes fastened on my face. ‘And?’

‘Oh, it was just what you’d expect. They asked if I knew Sylvie. If I’d seen her this summer. It didn’t take long. Mainly because I didn’t have much to tell them.’

A progression of thoughts flickered over Ginny’s face like shadows across a screen. ‘There we are, then,’ she exhaled finally.

It was a moment before I realised that there was to be no row after all, that she was going to leave the subject alone. With the relief came an extraordinary fatigue, like a coat of lead.

‘I must get to bed.’

‘Yes,’ she declared. ‘You’ve had it! So’ve I!’ She swung away and walked towards the stairs without looking back.

Ye t I didn’t sleep immediately. And nor did Ginny. We lay on either side of the bed, facing away from each other, and I thought that this must be the loneliest feeling in the world, to lie beside each other yet find ourselves unable to reach out, to have things to say yet find it impossible to speak. Also – and the thought travelled painfully out of the past – to remember how different it had been at the beginning, the closeness – and yes, the love – that we had once felt for each other, and to realise that, for some reason that neither of us understood, those times seemed to have slipped for ever beyond our grasp.

Later something made me wake. The wind, the distant pattering of rain. And close by, the sound of Ginny’s breathing, coming in uneven jerks. A tiny gasp, then another. I rolled over and put my hand on her shoulder. She stiffened and held her breath. I moved to touch her cheek beneath the mask, to feel the tears I knew I would find there, but she pushed my hand away and said in a harsh voice, ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

I had no answer, and in the end it was easier to say ‘Nothing’ and turn away.

It was just before seven-thirty as I pressed the security code into the keypad at the entrance of the HartWell offices in Slough. The panel shrieked at me and for a moment I thought Cumberland must have had the code changed, but I must have had the code wrong first time because at my second attempt the door buzzed its acceptance. I noticed that the heavy inner doors of solid glass emblazoned with the HartWell logo had not yet been replaced. That logo. Howard and I had argued about every detail of it – the style, the size, the colour, you name it. In those days we had thrived on argument, it had been the lifeblood of our partnership, a stimulus for problem solving and fresh ideas, a constant source of hilarity, and the only way we knew to keep our minds sharp in the face of our terrifying success. Well, success that had been terrifying for me anyway; Howard took it as his due.

In the early days of our expansion into mass-market glass and china we had measured success in terms of turnover and profit margins. But profit margins don’t protect you from recession or cut-throat tactics by your competitors. And for Hartford, heavily dependent on exports, margins don’t defend you against the dollar taking a nosedive from which it never recovers.

I looked into my old office. The large Hartford crystal vase dating from the fifties stood in its usual place on the side table, now bereft of flowers. The aerial photograph of the Hartford factory still hung on the wall next to the dusty outlines of the two pictures I had removed to my temporary office in Hammersmith: a photograph of my father greeting a young Prince of Wales at Hartford during a visit in the seventies; and a picture of me as a self-conscious eighteen-year-old, trying to blow crystal.

No amount of framed pictures or crystal vases could ever have made me feel comfortable in this hermetically sealed glasshouse. Slough may have been equidistant from Hartford and our factories to the north, and convenient for Heathrow, but for me, imbued with the hands-on philosophy of my father, the place was a bureaucratic no-man’s land that had left me feeling dangerously out of touch.

I waited in Howard’s outer office. One thing I had learnt to rely on in my years with Howard was that he would always be late for our meetings, and, knowing full well that today would be no exception, I determined to remain calm.

It was ten to eight when Howard made one of the silent entrances at which he was so proficient. I looked up and there he was, filling the doorway. He was wearing a dark suit, expensively cut to disguise the weight which had settled evenly, and, despite his much-vaunted gym expeditions, it seemed permanently, over his broad frame. Crossing the room, he slid a hand elegantly down one lapel and unbuttoned his jacket with a flick of his thumb.

‘Is it just us?’ he asked in feigned surprise.

‘Who else was there meant to be?’

‘I thought – lawyers, accountants. No?’ He affected this ironic air when he wanted to intimidate me.

‘Don’t talk rubbish.’

He attempted an ingenuous look, something he had never quite managed to master, and I noticed that his grey eyes were looking puffy, and his hair, normally immaculate, was unkempt around the collar, while his cheeks were beginning to develop an unhealthy mottled look. But then if my social life was full, Howard’s was frenetic. Since his divorce four years before, he frequently featured in the glossy magazines that Ginny liked to read, pictured with a string of society women. When I had last chosen to listen, someone had told me that he was keen to marry the twice-divorced daughter of a landed duke.