Family and Friends

Owen tilted back his chair and stared thoughtfully at the opposite wall, not seeing its clutter of charts and graphs, the gay new calendar, the framed photograph of Ralph Underwood, his father-in-law, dead now for more than a quarter of a century but still looking out from the yellowing cardboard with his habitual half-smile of tentative goodwill.

Rather astonished, old Ralph would have been, at the way his modest gown and mantle shop in the High Street had given birth to this thriving garment factory. Even more astonished if he could have run his eye over the new plans and glimpsed the magnificent edifice his son-in-law was proposing to erect on the new manufacturing estate outside Milbourne.

Owen ran a finger along his nose. Everything was going well. I’m barely fifty, he thought, I have fifteen good years of work in me, twenty perhaps with luck. He looked after himself, didn’t smoke, took a drink only when the social side of business demanded it; he paid attention to his diet, found time for a round of golf now and then.

And he was respected in the town, highly thought of both as an employer and a responsible citizen. He lent his name to good causes, wrote out dutifully philanthropic cheques, had long ago taken care to join the right clubs.

He gave a little smile of satisfaction. At the next meeting of the Independents’ he would be nominated as President for the coming year, elected without a voice raised in opposition. An old and locally powerful organization, the Independents’, reaching out an intrusive finger into every pie worth mentioning.

As a young lad going straight from school into Ralph Underwood’s gown shop, glad of any steady job in that grimly depressed time, working as general dogsbody doing everything from sweeping out the store-room to taking annual stock, he used to walk past the Independents’ Club on his way home every evening. He would glance at the broad stone steps, at the weighty front door with its large knob and heavy brass knocker, and wonder if he would ever manage to storm that citadel of status and prosperity . . . And now he was going to be president.

His eyes encountered the sepia gaze of his father-in-law. I made it, old man, Owen thought with an amused lift of his shoulders. In a week or two they’ll raise their glasses to me at the Independents’, they’ll toast Owen Yorke with his tirelessly humming machines, his fat bankroll and his well-preserved waistline–and what else besides?

He put up a hand to his face with a moment’s sudden surprising shaft of sorrow, a searing sense of loss, of something valuable beyond all reckoning that had eluded him. He pressed his fingers against his forehead, forcing away emotions he had learned long ago to suppress but which had sprung up lately more than once, astounding him with their continuing existence, their vitality and power, when he had thought them withered from disuse.

Behind his closed lids he had a startlingly clear vision of young Owen Yorke, the lad from Underwood’s, staring up at the lighted windows of the Independents’, reaching out to grasp at dreams. He had wanted money and success all right, but he had wanted something more besides. He had wanted love, marriage, children. He had wanted happiness.

Someone rapped at the office door. Owen came at once out of his thoughts; he called a brisk ‘Come in.’

‘I thought you’d like some tea.’ One of the female clerks smiling down at him, proffering a cup, knowing his secretary had the day off.

‘Thank you, yes, I was beginning to feel thirsty.’ An easy interchange between them. He had never seen the necessity for undue formality towards employees. Underwood’s had started out as a little family business and a family business it remained, in spite of all the changes in the busy years.

He glanced at his wrist-watch. ‘I think you might all get off home now. Would you look into Accounts on your way, see if Mr Pierson is still there? Tell him I’d like a word with him before he goes.’ Might as well raise the matter now of the High Street shop, the original gown and mantle emporium. Monday would bring its rushing tide of work, it would be easy to overlook, and the question of the shop had to be settled sooner or later.

‘He’s still there.’ The girl paused by the door. ‘I saw his light on as I came by.’ It hadn’t crossed her mind to take Mr Pierson a cup of tea. One of the cleaners could do that–if indeed he was to get a cup of tea at all. Not exactly a man to inspire such little courtesies. Silent, self-contained, with a brooding, occupied air, hardly the type to set a junior clerk dreaming, to strive to make him notice her with skilful interruptions and gaily tinkling trays. ‘I’ll tell him you’d like to see him.’ She closed the door and went off towards Accounts, rapped smartly on the door panel and put her head into the room without bothering to wait for a reply.

‘Mr Yorke wants a word with you.’

Arnold Pierson raised his head from the comfortingly impersonal columns of figures in whose beautifully precise ranks he was able to lose himself eight hours a day. Nothing startled about the movement of his head; he looked like a man who would never entirely be taken by surprise.

‘Thank you, I’ll go along right away.’ He stood up with a controlled flexing of his powerful muscles; a big man, broad and well-built, dressed in utterly unremarkable clothes. He walked without haste to the managing director’s room.

Owen Yorke stood by the window, looking out at the hostile afternoon with its grey wreaths of mist. He felt fully alive and expansive again, a man only now on the brink of the real adventures of life, just beginning to scratch at the huge surface of possibilities opening up before him. He was back on the plane of living where all uncomfortable, intrusive emotions were firmly battened down, away out of sight and so out of existence.

‘You saw the New Year in in style, I hope?’ he said to Pierson as soon as the other man was inside the door, falling at once into the briskly cheerful manner he invariably wore like an armour in his business relations.

‘Hardly that.’ Pierson’s tone held the faintest overlay of rebuke and Owen remembered with a thrust of embarrassment that Arnold’s father, old Walter Pierson, was seriously ill with influenza.

‘I’m sorry, I forgot for a moment. How is your father? On the mend, I hope?’ But he knew old Walter might not be expected to weather the attack. Over seventy now. He’d served in the first war with Owen’s father, green lads together in that terrible baptism of fire and mud.

They’d both been decorated for a joint act of youthful heroism, crawling out one bitter night to where their mate, another local lad named Cottrell, lay helpless in a pocket of gas with half a leg blown away. They’d managed to drag young Cottrell back to safety of sorts. He’d lived another half-dozen years after that night, long enough to marry the girl who waited for him at home, long enough to father a son.

Arnold shook his head. ‘Dr Gethin isn’t very hopeful.’ He let the answer lie there, unqualified by any easy optimism. He stood with his hands hanging by his sides, waiting for Yorke to say what he wanted to see him about.

Owen dropped into his chair, indicating with a gesture that Pierson should sit down.

‘It’s about the shop.’

Arnold leaned back in his seat with a little movement of relaxation, as if he had expected Yorke to raise some other, trickier, matter. ‘I imagine you’ve decided it will have to be closed.’ His mouth twitched with a hint of amusement. ‘And you’re not too anxious to tell Sarah so.’

Sarah Pierson managed the shop; she was Arnold’s stepsister, older than himself by ten or eleven years. Her father had been a first cousin of old Walter Pierson’s. Walter’s wife had died of pneumonia when Arnold was still a child in a pushchair, and Sarah’s mother, herself widowed a couple of years, had naturally enough given Walter a hand with the rearing of his son. The two houses were in neighbouring streets; she had drifted into the habit of doing the washing, then the shopping and cooking, finally drifting into marrying Walter, moving her furniture and her daughter across the intervening couple of hundred yards.

Arnold had no memory whatever of his own mother but he remembered his father’s second wife with the deep attachment of a son. It might have been nothing more romantic than convenience, habit and old acquaintance that had prompted Walter to slip a gold ring on the finger of Sarah’s mother but there had been someone after all in the trim semi-detached house to offer her strong and unwavering love.

Arnold had been in a Japanese prison camp when he heard the news of her death. The war was already over, the prisoners waiting for repatriation, when the letter had come, six months out of date. The thought of her had kept him going, he had dreamed in the humid nights of walking up the narrow path to where she stood smiling in the doorway. And she had lain for more than six months in the cold earth of the municipal cemetery with a marble stone at her head and an urn of flowers at her feet.

None of it had mattered any more, the homecoming, the medal–for someone in authority had appeared to think that Arnold had earned a decoration at some moment in that incredible time–the piece in the Milbourne paper, his father’s hand resting proudly on his shoulder.

The only thing that had come through to him in those phantom weeks had been the realization that however long he lived, in joy and happiness or in wretchedness and despair, he would never see her again. And as it hadn’t much mattered what he did or where he went, he had stayed in Milbourne, had taken a job in the new factory Owen Yorke was beginning to get under way.

‘You know the shop isn’t making much money these days,’ Owen said now with a deprecating movement of his hands. ‘You’ve seen the accounts. It hasn’t done really well for the last few years. Ever since . . .’ Ever since Zena Yorke had ceased to take an active interest in it.

Owen fell silent for a moment, thinking with recurring astonishment of the change that had come over Zena with the onset of middle age. The prettiness of youth–and she had been pretty, with curling blonde hair and lively blue eyes–had totally disappeared.

The blue eyes, faded now, veiled with chronic discontent, looked out at him these days from a pale and puffy face, the once-delicate skin heavily powdered, patterned with a fine hatching of lines. The slim curves of her figure had vanished beneath distorting layers of slackened flesh. And the self-indulgent years of over-eating, over-drinking, increasing idleness, had brought ill-health in their inexorable train.

But Owen hadn’t the slightest intention of discussing his wife with Arnold Pierson. Some deep-lying part of his mind was aware that if he ever took it into his head to examine closely the exact nature of the relationship between Pierson and Zena, he might very well uncover matters that were better left concealed.

He set a high value on his own peace of mind and so he very firmly declined to probe, entrenching himself instead–as far as possible–behind a deliberate attitude of detached pity for the woman who had been the girl he had loved and married.

‘Don’t think I’m in any way criticizing your sister’s management of the shop,’ Owen said. ‘But it doesn’t fit in with the way the business has developed.’ Owen had never had a passionate interest in retail selling; what he liked was manufacturing. He concentrated now entirely on the production of ladies’ coats and suits; Sarah Pierson bought in dresses from the wholesalers, together with knitwear and lingerie, scarves, handbags and a host of other fashion accessories.

‘You’ve definitely decided to close the shop then?’ Arnold didn’t much relish the prospect of breaking the news to Sarah. She had spent her entire working life behind the double glass doors, forty-four devoted years, beginning as an apprentice alteration hand in the days when Ralph Underwood managed the business himself and his daughter Zena was playing with coloured building blocks in her first year at kindergarten.

Owen nodded. ‘Sarah still has a couple of years to go till the normal retirement age but there’d be no difficulty about that. Her pension will start as soon as the shop is closed down.’ He allowed himself to contemplate for an instant the fact that it wasn’t going to be a very magnificent pension. It was based on the salary Sarah received and as that salary had been fixed by Zena, it wasn’t exactly princely.

Sarah had never complained and probably thought she was well enough paid when she remembered the wage she had started out with. Her living expenses can’t be all that large, Owen thought, I imagine she lives rent-free with old Walter, probably doesn’t even have to pay for her food, gets it all for nothing in return for looking after the two men. And if Walter Pierson shouldn’t recover from his bout of influenza–well then, there’d be a little money coming to her there, no doubt, and a half-share in the house too, most likely.

He had been on the verge of adding that a lump sum of a year’s salary would be paid over to Sarah in addition to the pension but he saw now quite clearly that she wouldn’t in the least need such a sum.

‘She’ll be fifty-eight on the first of February,’ Arnold said suddenly. It struck him all at once as a cheerless sort of age. ‘Do you want me to break it to her about the shop or will you do it?’

‘If you could have a word with her–I’m afraid it’s going to be a bit of a blow to her, no getting away from that, but it might soften the blow, coming from you.’

‘I don’t know about that.’ Arnold looked at Owen with a trace of amusement. ‘But I’ll speak to her, if that’s what you want.’

Developers were already at work in Milbourne. A property in the High Street could be converted into a supermarket or simply torn down to make way for a new office building. Owen didn’t much care what happened to old Ralph’s emporium. It had served his purpose once but was now of no further use to him and so would be dismissed without a single pang of sentimental regret.

And the money it would fetch would be more than welcome. The expansion of Underwood’s had brought with it a massive need for more capital and in these days of credit restriction many of the conventional sources of fresh capital had inconveniently dried up.

‘She can retire on her birthday,’ Owen said. ‘That would seem to be convenient all round. She can make the January sale a closing-down sale now,’ he added. ‘Any stock that’s left over can be jobbed off to some other dress shop in the town.’ To Linda Fleming, for instance, he thought suddenly, seeing with a surprising leap of pleasure a clear picture of the young widow with her soft dark hair and gentle hazel eyes, kneeling in the window of her little shop, arranging a trail of artfully crumpled material at the foot of the display stands.

He would have been astounded to know that Arnold was also contemplating a mental vision of Mrs Fleming, only in Arnold’s mind she was smiling up at him from the other side of the counter in her trim establishment, offering him advice about a purchase. I could call in on the way home, Arnold thought with an agreeable flash of inspiration, I could buy something for Sarah’s birthday.

He stole a glance at his watch. He could clear off in a few minutes, as soon as he’d locked up in Accounts; Mrs Fleming would be sure to stay open till half past five at least. She’d taken the shop over only a few weeks before, coming to Milbourne as a stranger, from some town on the east coast; she couldn’t afford just yet to close early during holiday seasons.

‘One other thing before you go,’ Owen said. ‘The date of the annual audit—’ He broke off as the phone rang sharply on his desk, he reached out and picked up the receiver.