Lingering Shadows

‘You have to be single-minded to succeed, Saul.’ That was what his father had always told him, his face shadowed by the disappointments of his own life, by the effects of his own inability to achieve the goals he had set himself.

Fate had been unkind to his father.

But it had been kind to him, he himself had seen to that, or so he had thought until recently.

CHAPTER THREE (#u6f0fd936-9bca-5424-abf4-f69d60383cb6)

‘DAVINA, I know you’re busy, but I wonder if you could spare me half an hour before you go home.’

Davina forced herself to smile.

‘Of course I can, Giles. Would five o’clock be all right?’

As soon as he had closed the office door behind him her smile disappeared. There had been many challenges for her to face in the three months since the death of her husband Gregory, and now it seemed that she was going to have to face another one.

She suspected that Giles Redwood was going to tell her that he wanted to leave. She couldn’t blame him. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy and she knew quite well that the only reason Giles was still here was because he was too gentle, too kind-hearted to leave her completely in the lurch.

And because he loved her?

She winced, her mind shying away from the thought, not wanting to admit its existence.

She had always liked Giles, but it was only since Gregory’s death that she had become aware that he might have much stronger feelings for her. It disturbed her to have to acknowledge that she might have inadvertently played on those feelings in asking him to stay and to support her through the initial crisis of Gregory’s death.

She hadn’t meant to do so. Had, in fact, been motivated purely by panic, the panic of discovering that her father’s company wasn’t the thriving concern she had so foolishly believed, but was actually close to insolvency. That had shocked her more than Gregory’s death in many ways.

It had been Giles who had comforted her, who had told her that she must not blame herself for the lack of awareness of the company’s situation. And it was true that Gregory, and her father before him, had always refused to allow her to have anything to do with the company, to play any part in it.

But now she had no choice. Carey Chemicals was the largest local employer. If Carey’s closed, people would be put out of work; families, whole households would suffer. She could not allow that to happen.

Giles had told her gently that she might have no choice. He had been warning Gregory for some time, he had added uncomfortably, that they must make some kind of provision for the time when their most profitable patent ran out.

Gregory had refused to listen to him. Gregory had had his own obsessions and they had nothing to do with the time and care it took to research and develop new drugs.

Gregory had liked playing the money markets. And, in doing so, Gregory had lost the company many millions of pounds.

Davina felt sick every time she thought about it … every time she remembered her own blind, wilful acceptance of all the lies Gregory had told her. She ought to have questioned him more closely, to have insisted on knowing more about the company.

She ought to have done a great many things, she told herself tiredly, including ending her marriage.

What marriage? There had been no marriage for years. Ever since … Her mind skittered back from a dangerous precipice.

She had married at twenty. Now she was thirty-seven. For seventeen years she had stayed in an empty, sterile marriage, and why?

Out of love? Her mouth twisted. Out of duty, then … out of necessity … out of cowardice. Yes, definitely that, or rather out of fear, fear not so much of being alone—that would almost have been a pleasure—but fear of the unknown, a fear that, once on her own, she would prove her father’s and Gregory’s contempt of her to be a true estimation of her character; and so she had stayed, too afraid to leave the security of a marriage that was a sterile mockery of all a marriage should be, hiding from life within its dead, empty embrace.

But now Gregory was dead. Killed in a road accident, his body twisted in the wreckage of what had once been his expensive saloon car. There had been a woman with him.

A woman who was not known to Davina, but who she suspected was very well known to her husband.

He had been consistently unfaithful to her and she had turned a blind eye to it, as she had to so many other things, telling herself that she was better off than most and that if her marriage had not turned out as she had hoped then she was not alone in her disappointment.

And always at the back of her mind had been the knowledge that her father would never have permitted her to divorce Gregory.

And of course Gregory would never divorce her. How could he, when in effect she owned the company? On paper, that was. Her father had made sure that effective day-to-day control of the company’s affairs lay in Gregory’s hands, but then he had tied those hands by ensuring that the shares were in her name and that Gregory could never sell them.

Carey’s had meant a lot to her father. He had set up the company with his father shortly after the end of the war. Davina had never known her grandfather, he had died before she was born, but she had often wished she had.

It had been her mother who had told her the most about him. How he had had a reputation locally for making his own potions and cures, mainly for cattle ailments originally, but later for human ailments as well.

It had been his lifelong interest in such things that had led him to the discovery of the heart drug which had established the company right at the forefront of its competitors, although he himself had died shortly after the company had been established.

Her own father had been at medical school when war broke out. He had left to join up and had never completed his training.

As a girl, Davina had had dreams of following in her grandfather’s footsteps, but her father had very quickly squashed them. Girls did not become chemists, he had told her contemptuously. They married and produced children … sons. Davina could still remember the look he had given her mother as he spoke. Her parents’ marriage had not produced any sons … only one daughter. Davina.

And as for her own marriage … She frowned quickly. Giles would be coming back soon and she had no idea what she was going to say to him. His wife, Lucy, was one of her closest friends, or at least she had been. Recently Lucy had been behaving rather oddly towards her, and Giles had inadvertently let slip that it was partly because of Lucy that he still intended to leave Carey’s.

Not that she could blame him. After all, if the bank manager was right, Carey’s would not exist for much longer anyway. Unless she could find a buyer prepared to take it over and pump in enough money to save it.

It wasn’t for her own sake that she wanted to keep the company going, and it certainly wasn’t for her father’s.

Carey’s employed almost two hundred people, all of them local, and in a relatively sparsely populated country area that was a very large proportion of the working population.

More than half the workforce were women, and Davina had been dismayed to discover how poorly paid they were.

An economic necessity, Giles had told her. He had been unable to meet her eyes when he had added that Gregory had been able to maintain such a poor wage structure simply because they were the only major local employer.

Davina’s stomach clenched as she remembered the anger, the guilt she had felt on hearing this disclosure. No wonder so many of the women watched her with stony-faced dislike when she drove through the village. She suspected that they would not have believed that Gregory had kept her as short of money as he did them, but it was true.

She had been shocked to learn just how much money Gregory had in his private bank accounts, but, large though that sum was, it was nowhere near enough to save Carey’s.

As she had learned since his death, Gregory had run Carey’s as an autocrat whose word was law. No amount of representations to him from the unions had persuaded him to increase his workers’ wages, nor to provide them with anything other than the most basic of facilities.

Davina had been stunned when she had been shown the lavatories and wash-basins, the crude and unhygienic area that was supposed to be the canteen and rest-room.

Giles, who had escorted her around the company after Gregory’s death, had been sympathetic and understanding, but not even his presence had been able to lessen her shock, her sense of despair and guilt.

And there was nothing she could do to put things right. There was barely enough coming in to pay the wages.

He himself was not a financier, Giles had told her. He was in fact the company’s personnel manager, but even he had been able to see the financial danger the company was courting.

Gregory had refused to listen to him, just as he had refused to listen to anyone else who had tried to advise him, as Davina had learned.

Davina had no idea what on earth she was going to do to prevent the company from having to close down. Find a buyer, the bank had told her, or a backer. But how, and where? Her head ached with the constant tension and worry of suddenly finding herself with this kind of responsibility.

Only last week Giles had told her how much he admired her calm, her strength, but inwardly she felt neither calm nor strong. She was adept at hiding her feelings, though. She had had to be. Very early on in her marriage she had realised how much Gregory enjoyed hurting her. By then she had, of course, known how much of a mistake their marriage was. She had blamed herself, or rather her naïveté, for the failure of her marriage.

She had been a shy teenager, sent to a very small all-girls’ boarding-school when she was eleven years old, and then abruptly removed from it at fourteen when her mother died suddenly from a brain tumour.