A Fortnight by the Sea

He picked up the heavy table lighter and idly studied it. Silver, good quality, graceful design, set in a base of onyx. Fiona had expensive tastes. He ran a finger over the chilly smoothness of the stone. In a divorce settlement Marion would certainly get the house. And a substantial slice of his salary. He would very probably have to take out a large insurance policy for her benefit. He wouldn’t be left with an income of very impressive proportions. Hardly sufficient to create – let alone maintain – the elegant dream world he was to share with Fiona. He let out a long sigh . . . Love might begin with I will give you the moon and the stars, but it not infrequently ended in front of a judge with a vicious wrangle about ten pounds a week.

He clicked the lighter switch, he frowned at the yellow flame. What would the fading, suburban Marion do with her share of the spoils, with that house, far too large for a woman on her own? He extinguished the lighter and set it down with a little bang. Why should an able-bodied, childless woman of thirty-six have to be supported in idleness till the end of her life?

A bedroom door opened and Fiona’s steps sounded on the landing. He jumped to his feet, smiling, eager; he switched off the radio and went out into the hall.

‘By the way,’ he said a few minutes later as they came out into the bright evening, ‘I may be taking a little leave shortly. A few days or a week perhaps. I’ll let you know when it’s definite.’ Under no circumstances whatever did he allow the name of his wife to pass his lips when he was with Fiona. She knew, and accepted, that there was no question – as yet – of their going off together for a holiday.

He walked beside her to the car. She turned her head and gave him a brief cool glance but she said nothing. Again he had a strong sensation of time pressing relentlessly on behind him, hurrying him forward to an objective that seemed to glitter with the promise of joy but sometimes, disconcertingly, fleetingly, impelled towards him a sense of some obscurely chilling presence waiting for him at the end of the road.

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_b9b62b5f-87bb-50ba-8126-2da9ab1eeb1d)

Twenty-five minutes to nine and no sign of Lockwood yet. Bob Jourdan tilted back his chair and stared out of the window, biting his lip in annoyance. The Alpha staff were supposed to start work by eight-thirty sharp; he had been here himself since ten past, never saw the point of trailing in at the last moment. And on a Monday morning too, with the new week straining at the leash.

He let the legs of his chair slap down on the floor and snatched up a folder of papers from his desk. But it was no good, he couldn’t take a decision on his own about the Manchester job – or rather, he wasn’t permitted to take a decision on his own, he was perfectly capable of doing so. He had to have old Lockwood’s say-so. And he knew exactly what attitude Lockwood would take. The safe, conservative attitude of a man with his eye on a director’s seat.

A light rap on his door and Fiona Brooke came in with some files. ‘You look pretty grim,’ she observed, laying the folders in front of him. ‘Let me have these back as soon as you can.’

‘Old Lockwood’s late again.’ But some of Jourdan’s grimness began to fade. With his left hand he picked up the top file, running his eye over the cover which was stamped in red with the word Welfare; he suddenly shot out his right hand and without looking at her seized Fiona by the wrist. He dropped the file on the desk and idly flicked its pages. ‘Have dinner with me this evening,’ he said in a challenging voice tinged with amusement. His face seemed about to dissolve into laughter. Still keeping his gaze fixed on the folder he began to draw her towards him with easy strength.

‘I’m busy this evening,’ she said pleasantly, looking down at him with unruffled calm.

‘Tomorrow evening.’ He continued to pull her inexorably towards him.

‘Even more busy tomorrow.’ Her mouth trembled on the edge of a smile.

‘Wednesday. Thursday. Friday.’ She was right beside him now. In a swift movement he released her wrist and slipped his hand round her waist, holding her in a tight grip.

‘Absolutely frantically busy on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.’ She couldn’t help smiling broadly, it was as much as she could do not to laugh aloud.

He dropped his hand, looked up at her, his eyes suddenly intent and serious. ‘I’ll keep on asking.’

‘No harm in asking,’ she said lightly. ‘I must get back to Welfare.’

When the door closed behind her he abandoned all show of interest in the files and sat with his elbows on the desk and his chin propped on his clenched fists. Why do I do it? he asked himself yet again. He not only wanted to get on to a more intimate footing with Fiona, he wanted to marry her. Actually marry her! Why? He was thirty years old, had always looked on himself as an astute bachelor, had never wanted to marry anyone before. He’d never even kissed Fiona and yet he had this overpowering desire to put a ring on her finger, to hear her addressed as Mrs Jourdan. Is this what they mean by real love? he wondered with a sense of incredulity. It didn’t feel like anything he had previously identified as love. Could it possibly be – he frowned fiercely, trying to pin down the disturbing notion – that I want her simply because she belongs to Lockwood? He’d been transferred to Barbridge on promotion from another branch of Alpha only two or three months before; the liaison between Lockwood and Fiona was supposed to be a deadly secret but it hadn’t taken Jourdan half a day to spot how matters stood. It wasn’t the way two people looked at each other that was revealing but the way in which they carefully did not look at each other.

He passed a hand across his forehead, pressed his fingers into his scalp. Was it that, wanting Lockwood’s job, he was snatching symbolically at his mistress? If he somehow managed to step into Lockwood’s shoes at Alpha, would he instantly lose all interest in Fiona? Or was it after all simply that she was herself a tall, composed, elegant, intelligent woman?

Suppose by some chance that she was willing to marry him. And suppose also that by some other chance he took Lockwood’s place as Home Sales Manager. Was that a blueprint for happiness? Or would he in a month, six months, a year, find himself a prey to consuming retrospective jealousy? He had observed this ugly phenomenon once or twice in the marriages of contemporaries who had previously fancied themselves tolerant, broad-minded men of the world. The end result had never been anything but disastrous. Could it happen to him? He shook his head slowly. He simply didn’t know. He was almost totally ignorant of the depths of jealousy but it seemed to him that very strange fish might swim in those midnight waters.

A few yards away, in the corridor, he suddenly heard the crisp tones of Lockwood’s voice. At once he sat up and straightened the papers on his desk. A minute or two later Lockwood came into the room.

‘Morning, Bob. If you’ve got the details of that Manchester job, we can settle it now. Bring all the stuff into my office in—’ he glanced at his watch – ‘say ten or fifteen minutes. Must take a look at the post first. A bit late this morning. I’ve been downstairs, fixing up a spot of leave.’ He saw Jourdan’s questioning look. ‘I’m taking next week off. I fancy a breath of sea air.’

I’ll ask Fiona again next week, Bob thought, with a sense that events had somehow taken a decisive turn. He had a strong notion that with Stephen Lockwood out of the way for what? – the best part of ten days? – Fiona might have time to stand back and take a look at his own apparently teasing pursuit of her, might begin to reconsider the situation between herself and Lockwood, might very well, before the week was out, decide that she was not after all perpetually too busy to accept a dinner invitation from the Assistant Home Sales Manager.

In the larger and better-furnished office next door Stephen glanced through his letters. Nothing of world-shaking interest this morning. He raised his head and twirled his pencil between his fingers. That look of surprise and pleasure on Jourdan’s face when he told him he’d be away for a week . . . how well he could remember feeling exactly that blend of emotions in his junior days whenever his immediate boss declared an intention to take himself out of the premises for a while. I’ll show them, he used to think, I’ll make my mark. Into the office every morning at eight o’clock, the last one to leave at night . . . His shoulders moved in wry amusement.

Now he was no longer the young thruster, but the establishment figure the new wave of young thrusters must push aside on their way up the ladder. He caught the way that Jourdan looked at him sometimes, a curious, obsessive look. Did I ever look at my boss that way? he wondered. I don’t suppose he cared for it very much either. How rapidly the years slipped by, with what speed the game of musical chairs was played, how swiftly one was forced out of one role and into another. Was there ever any real choice in the matter? Was the whole thing inexorably played out in accordance with a set of rules totally beyond one’s control?

He became aware of his secretary standing at the other side of his desk. ‘Yes?’ He forced his attention back to the concerns of Monday morning. ‘By the way,’ he added when he had dealt with her query, ‘I shall be away next week. Taking a few days by the sea.’ He stood up and walked over to a framed map on the wall, jabbed a finger against the glass. ‘There, that’s the place. Chilford. We’re not actually staying in the town. We’re going to relatives, a little village a few miles along the coast. A pretty little place. A good golf-course.’

‘Westerhill,’ Jean Ashton said to her mother. ‘I’d better write the address down for you.’ She took a pencil from her handbag. ‘Oakfield, Westerhill, near Chilford. You can put care of Barratt if you like, but I shouldn’t think it’s necessary.’

Her mother took the paper and studied it. ‘It’s not a hotel, then?’

‘No, it’s some kind of guest-house. I got it from one of the Sunday papers.’ One of the better Sunday papers of course, her tone implied, it’s certainly not any kind of common seaside boarding-house. What she would really have liked would have been a jet flight to Majorca, she could have sunned herself all winter in the glow of that memory. She smiled suddenly. ‘Next year we might be able to afford a holiday abroad.’

Her mother frowned. ‘You’re not serious about getting Mike to apply for that security job? His heart’s obviously in the police, you can’t ask him to leave the force.’

The smile vanished from Jean’s face. ‘He’s already applied for the security job.’ I saw to that, her look added. ‘Far better pay. I’m not just thinking of myself,’ she said defensively, ‘nor about luxuries like foreign holidays. We can give the kids a better start, we could buy a house of our own.’ Instead of living in a police house set in a kind of ghetto.

‘He would have a proper career in the police,’ her mother said with unusual firmness. ‘This Guardcash job would be just that, a job.’ She shook her head. ‘Mike’s the kind of man who needs satisfaction in his work.’

Jean set her mouth in a stubborn line. ‘It’s an administrative post he’s applied for. He wouldn’t just be one of the guards riding the vans.’ She stood up. ‘And anyway, he hasn’t got very far in the police. In a couple of years he’ll be forty and what is he? Just a sergeant.’

‘You’re lucky to have a good husband,’ her mother said in a low voice. Five years now since she’d been widowed and she still felt the loss almost as keenly as in those first dreadful weeks.

Jean sighed and glanced at the clock. ‘I must go, I’ve got to meet the twins.’ Her oldest daughter was fifteen, too late now to rescue her from the clutches of state education, but the twins were only seven and one of the first things Jean intended to do, as soon as Mike’s appointment with Guardcash was a definite fact, was to take the twins away from their primary school and send them to a select little private academy in Perrymount. In the best residential area of Perrymount, of course.

‘Remember your father’s Cousin Arthur,’ her mother said suddenly. Jean gave her an exasperated glance and went out into the hall to get her coat. Cousin Arthur was a new one on her but she was only too familiar with her mother’s habit of producing outlandish – and, Jean had a shrewd suspicion, mythical – relatives to illustrate a point or drive home a moral. ‘He was a plumber.’ Her mother’s voice winged its way from the sitting room. ‘A very good plumber.’ Jean pulled a face of distaste at this fresh plebeian sprouting from the ancestral tree. ‘His wife kept on at him to take up some more refined career. In the end he became a sort of glorified clerk in the gas showrooms.’

Jean came back into the room, wearing a light summer coat of pale cream with gilt buttons; after sixteen years of marriage she still looked slim, almost youthful. ‘He was as miserable as sin,’ her mother said. ‘He shrank into himself, he lost weight, he even got shorter.’

‘You’re making all this up,’ Jean said calmly. She picked up her silky gloves. ‘There never was such a person as Father’s Cousin Arthur.’

Her mother’s eyes widened in a look of bland innocence. ‘He stuck it for four or five years,’ she said, ‘and then he ran away with the barmaid from a pub fifty yards away from the gas showrooms. A very vulgar sort of barmaid, I believe, plump and jolly.’

‘And the moral of this tale, I take it,’ Jean said, repairing her make-up in front of the mirror, ‘is that Cousin Arthur went back to plumbing and lived happily ever afterwards.’

‘Whether he went back to plumbing or not,’ her mother said with an air of subtle cunning, ‘I have no idea. Neither he nor the barmaid was ever heard of again. Not in our family, that is. But Cousin Arthur’s wife spent the rest of her life wishing she’d left well alone in the first place.’

Jean turned from the mirror. ‘You ought to take up writing improving pamphlets.’ She stooped and kissed her mother’s cheek. ‘We’re setting off on Saturday morning,’ she added amiably. ‘I’ll try to pop in to see you on Wednesday or Thursday.’

‘And you ought to take up something yourself,’ her mother said on a sharper, more direct note. ‘You’ve plenty of intelligence, you had a good job before you were married. No reason why you shouldn’t earn a decent salary. You’ve got too much spare energy, that’s your trouble. You’re young enough, you’re only thirty-five, you could make a career for yourself, it would take your attention off your husband, you might let him alone to live his own life.’

Jean flicked her mother an unsmiling glance. ‘Don’t bother to come to the door,’ she said. ‘I can see myself out.’

At four o’clock on Friday afternoon Detective Sergeant Mike Ashton came down the steps of the central police station in Perrymount. The rain had cleared, the sun was shining brilliantly, the air in the streets was heavy with the moist jungly warmth of late July.

‘Hope you have a good holiday,’ they’d said in the canteen. ‘You need it.’ Meaning his irritability and moodiness hadn’t gone unremarked in the last week or two.

He got into his car and slammed the door shut. Might as well stop by Brigid’s school and pick her up. Jean would want her home early today, there’d be plenty of last-minute jobs for all hands if they were going to make a reasonably early start tomorrow. He wasn’t in the least looking forward to the drive down to the coast. Or to the holiday itself.

He drove slowly out of the car park, turning his head once and looking back at the clean modern lines of the police station. When he walked up those steps again in a couple of weeks it would very probably be to hand in his notice. He felt again the slow smouldering of suppressed anger. His own fault too, which made it no better. He could have kept his mouth shut about the approach from Guardcash, he didn’t have to mention it in casual chat over Sunday lunch. If Jean had never heard about Guardcash, she would no doubt have nagged him from time to time to change his job, but it would have been in a vague, general sort of way, she wouldn’t have been armed with a specific point, the offer of an attractive alternative. He’d have got further promotion in the police during the next year or two, there’d have been a little more money, she’d have got used to the whole thing, she’d have stopped grumbling in the end. She’d have had to.