An Excellent Wife?

‘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.