Cruel Legacy (12 page)

Joel stopped the car three doors down from his own house and then reversed abruptly. He couldn't go to work leaving things like that with Sally. Perhaps he had over-reacted, snapping at her like that and then quarrelling with her, but he couldn't sleep properly for worrying about what would happen if he was made redundant. It was his role, his responsibility, his life function to support and protect his family, and if he couldn't do that, then...

As he walked past the kitchen window he looked inside and saw Sally hugging Paul. He could see her love for their son in the soft curve of her mouth, its tenderness and warmth. How long was it since she had held
him
like that... since she had looked at
him
with love?

As he turned away from the door and headed back to his car he felt the angry pain burning inside him like bile.

Jealous of his own son. Sally had accused him of it often enough in the past. He had denied it, of course—he loved the children—but seeing her holding Paul like that had made him sharply aware of the contrast in the way she treated him and the way she opened to them.

Deborah had timed her arrival at the crematorium to coincide with that of the last of the mourners, so that she could slip inside and sit at the back of the room without attracting any attention.

The first thing she noticed was how few people were actually there.

A small, very pretty blonde woman in black who was presumably the widow, an older couple beside her—her parents perhaps. Another couple, the tall man with a rather imposing and self-important manner, the woman at his side signalling by her body language that she considered herself above the proceedings, as she held herself slightly aloof from the others. She was dressed in a way that proclaimed her county origins; the Hermes scarf was plainly not a copy and neither were the immaculately polished loafers she was wearing. She looked the type to have sons at one of the better boarding schools and daughters who rode in gymkhanas and did a season working in Val d'Isere for a friend of a friend at one of the most exclusive chalets before marrying men who were something in the city with the right kind of county connections.

Without knowing why, Deborah instinctively disliked both of them.

There were a handful of other mourners, their numbers barely filling the front two rows of seats, and suddenly she felt not just out of place but guilty almost of the kind of tactless and distasteful rubbernecking she had always despised. Mark had been right. She should not be here.

Quickly she turned round and hurried towards the door, slipping silently outside.

Ryan would laugh at her when he knew what she had done, mock her for her squeamishness, but as she looked at Andrew's pale, fragile blonde widow she hadn't been able to stop herself imagining how she would have felt in her shoes... the pain and anguish the woman must be experiencing ... Had she known what her husband had intended to do? She could not have done, of course. How much greater then must be her pain and despair, her sense not just of loss, but also of having somehow failed him.

She got into her car, switching on the ignition. Suddenly all she wanted was to be at home with Mark. Just the two of them together, safe in their own private world where no one else, nothing else could intrude.

'Just the local paper, thanks,' Joel told the girl behind the counter in the newsagent's as he handed over his money.

It was all over the factory that there was to be a big meeting with the bank and some firm of accountants on Monday morning. And then what? The spectre of redundancy hung heavily over him as he left the shop. He didn't really know why he had bought the local rag—he already knew what he would find in the 'situations vacant' column, or rather what he would not find. This area, this town which had originally grown prosperous from the profits of the small local engineering firms which had supplied the car industry, now had no jobs for men like himself. The apprenticeship he had been so proud to get, the skills he had worked so hard to learn—what use were they to him now? A piece of machinery programmed by a computer had virtually made his skill obsolete.

As he paused in the street, turning to the 'situations vacant' page, the print blurred in front of his eyes. Part-time check-out girls for the local supermarket, newspaper-delivery boys and girls, auxiliary nursing aides at the hospital.

He grimaced as he read this last entry. Sally complained fiercely that he objected to her working, calling him old-fashioned and unfair, but it wasn't her working that he minded but the fact that it was necessary. It hurt his pride that he no longer earned enough to support his own family, and it hurt him even more sensing that Sally found an enjoyment and pleasure in her work that she no longer seemed to find with him.

He folded the papers, his attention caught by the slow progression of a funeral cortege. His mouth twisted as he watched it.

They were cremating Andrew Ryecart today—that pale, fragile-looking little blonde in the front car must be his wife. She looked younger than he had expected. He felt the anger and bitterness swelling inside him as he stared at the car. It was all right for her. She would be financially secure; that sort always were. She would not be scanning the papers praying desperately for another job... any job just so long as it was a job. He was forty-four years old and the shadow of his father and the way he had lived his life, earning a few pounds here and there through a variety of casual jobs, not seeming to care about the contempt others held him in or how it might affect his family, hovered over him.

Joel had sworn that that would never happen to him; that his kids would always be able to hold their heads up high, that they would never know the humiliation he had known as a child, or the deprivations.

When his teacher had suggested putting him forward for the qualifying examination for a free place at a local independent school, his father had laughed out loud. A son of his, go to some posh private school?

'You can forget it,' he'd told Joel. 'That's not for the likes of us. Come sixteen you'll want to be out earning, not wasting your time getting some fancy education.'

Joel seldom thought about that these days. What was the point? And besides, he had been happy... happy and content with his life until they had started having all these money problems, until Sally had started making him feel inferior to that brother-in-law of hers, with his posh job and his detached house.

Well, there was no way he would ever be able to give Sally anything like that. Not now... They'd be lucky to keep their existing roof over their heads if he was made redundant, even with Sally working full-time.

Philippa glanced idly out of the car window. There was a man standing on the side of the road, staring fiercely at her, his black hair ruffled by the sharp breeze. He had a hard, sharp-boned face, his body tall and lean, and just for a moment, although really there was no physical resemblance between them at all apart from the dark hair and the fact that they were both male, there was something so hard and angry in the way he was looking at her that her heart jerked in angry panic and she was momentarily thrown back into the past to another man and his anger.

Quickly she looked away, biting down hard on her bottom lip to stop it from trembling.

Michael, her second brother, lived in Edinburgh and couldn't make it for the cremation. He had telephoned her the night before to apologise, explaining that he was committed to giving a presentation to the clients of the design company he worked for.

Philippa had reassured him that she understood. She had always been closer to Michael than she had to Robert. Three years younger than Robert and three years older than herself, Michael had been the ideal older brother, offering her comfort and sanctuary when the criticism of her parents and Robert had been too much for her.

She had missed him when he had left home to go to university and now that he was working quite a distance away, but, although they had always kept in touch, he and Andrew had never really hit it off.

Elizabeth saw the funeral cortege on her way back to the office after lunch.

She paused automatically and quietly by the side of the road, noting as she did so how few of the other pedestrians trudging down the street even glanced at the slow procession, never mind paid it the old traditional mark of motionless respect. Those who did were in the main like herself, offspring of a generation to whom strict observance of society's conventions had been important.

As the cortege passed, leaving her free to cross the road, she gave a small shiver. Such sad things, funerals. Both she and Richard were fit and healthy and not old by any means at all, but not young any more either. She had her daughter and a grandchild, her work and some very good friends, but none of them could ever fill the space, the emptiness in her life that would come if she lost Richard. Physically he looked much closer to fifty than sixty, with a full head of hair and a lean, athletic body.

She smiled a little to herself, recalling just how athletic that body could be and just how much pleasure she still got from touching him and being touched by him in turn, but then he had always been a particularly tactile man, hugging and kissing his daughter and showing her physical affection, which had not been common at the time among their peers.

She remembered once seeing him reach out and fiercely hug one of his young male students when the boy had finally passed his examinations after two daunting failures. The boy had looked surprised and slightly embarrassed at first, but Elizabeth would never forget the look of pride and joy which had quickly followed. It had brought home how severe and hard the pressure was on boys to conform to their sexual stereotyping from a very young age. For a moment that young man had looted again like a small boy, thrilled by the acknowledgement and acclaim, the approval of a male parent.

She had often wondered if it was this side of his nature that made Richard such a skilled and almost intuitive surgeon. Although he was in every single way a very vigorously male man, there was also, she thought, a softening, warming mixture of some feminine instincts and emotions in his genes which in her eyes only served to underline and

increase the effect of his masculinity.

»

Robert was making a speech. His voice was full-bodied and measured, grave, as befitted a person speaking of the dead. He was asking them to ignore Andrew's weaknesses in the final months of his life and to think instead of the man he had been before he fell victim to the unfortunate circumstances which had led to his taking his own life. To listen to him, one would have thought he felt nothing but sympathy and compassion for Andrew, Philippa reflected as she watched him.

Was this really the same man who had told her that he couldn't help her, that he couldn't afford to be tainted by the relationship between them, who had betrayed so conclusively his own weakness of character; his own selfishness and instinct for self-preservation?

It surprised her a little how distant and divorced from the proceedings she actually felt, more as though she was merely a casual observer rather than Andrew's widow, her feelings, her emotions numb and frozen. Would they, like thawed fingers and toes, start to ache with violent pain when that numbness wore off?

Robert had stopped speaking. People shuffled politely, waiting for her to make the first move. Silently she did so, pausing as she emerged into the cold rawness outside the crematorium, her body stiff as she thanked people for coming and accepted their expressions of sympathy.

There had been few mourners there, few brave enough to admit that they knew the dead man. Was it that they feared that they might be contaminated by the failure which had destroyed him? Philippa smiled bitterly to herself.

'Come along, my dear,' her father urged her, taking hold of her arm. 'We all understand how you must be feeling.'

Did they? She doubted it, Philippa thought savagely as she pulled away from him, ignoring his irritated frown and her mother's displeased tutting.

Oh, she knew how they expected her to feel, the conventional emotion she was expected to betray. The shock, the tears, the grief.

But it was none of these she felt as she walked back to
¹
the car.

If she wept now it would not be for Andrew, it would be for herself, and they would not be tears of grief but tears of anger and resentment. Tears of admission of a helplessness she could not afford to feel—neither for her sons nor for herself.

Philippa
dressed apprehensively for her appointment with the bank manager. What did one wear for such an interview? Her black suit was probably the most appropriate and businesslike thing she had in her wardrobe, but she shrank from putting it on again so soon.

The only other formal outfits she possessed were the pretty silk dresses and matching jackets, the expensive silk and cashmere pastel-coloured separates which Andrew had always insisted on her wearing; the kind of clothes which looked fragile and luxurious. School open days and private garden and house party clothes, Philippa had always privately thought of them. Pretty clothes for a pretty woman; expensive and impractical clothes to show off and underline Andrew's wealth and achievements.

And totally unsuitable for her to wear now; they would make her feel like a modern Marie Antoinette, flaunting her luxuries while others went without.

Now that she was over the initial shock of Andrew's death, now that she had forced herself to admit the anger and resentment she felt at what he had done, she had started to broaden the scope of her thoughts and anxieties. She might not be responsible in any way for the fate of the factory, of those who worked in it, but that did not stop her feeling concerned, anxious, guilty almost, mentally comparing their fate with her own.

In the end she wore the black suit, crushing down her feelings of distaste as she put it on.

She had driven up to the school yesterday, Sunday, to see the boys, and her car would now need filling with petrol, she reminded herself as she left the house.

Both Rory and Daniel seemed to be coping well with their father's death, but she suspected that the reality of it would not really touch them until they returned home for the Easter holidays.

Her appointment at the bank was not until ten o'clock and she had plenty of time, she assured herself as she pulled in at the garage where she always got her petrol. Andrew had an account there; it was one of those domineering male traits which she often resented in him that, while he always insisted on her having the best of everything, he did not like handing actual cash over to her. The bills for all her credit cards were sent to him; her car, her clothes, even their food were all paid for via these cards and the small amount of actual cash he allowed her carefully monitored by him. Not because he didn't trust her, but, she suspected, because he enjoyed and needed to feel he was in control of her and of her life.

She filled her tank with petrol and then walked into the shop.

The woman behind the till was the wife of the garage manager. Philippa smiled at her as she asked her if she would put the cost of her petrol on their account.

The woman flushed uncomfortably and glanced uncertainly over her shoulder towards an open door that led into what Philippa presumed was an office. Then, even though there was no one else in the shop, she lowered her voice slightly as she leaned towards Philippa and asked awkwardly, 'I'm sorry, Mrs Ryecart, but could you possibly pay cash?'

Taken aback and flushing slightly herself in response to the woman's embarrassment, Philippa reached automatically into her handbag, fumbling for her purse.

'It's the rules, you see,' the woman was explaining uncomfortably. 'The account was in your husband's name and...'

'Yes, yes, of course. I understand,' Philippa assured her. She could feel her face starting to burn with embarrassed heat as she opened her purse. How much money did she have? Please God, let it be enough to pay for her petrol. Why on earth hadn't she had the sense to realise for herself that this would happen? Andrew had always countersigned the petrol bill at the end of the month when he'd paid it and she ought to have recognised that with him dead problems might arise. The garage obviously had done.

Even as she felt the relief of discovering that she had enough cash with her to cover the bill, she was still furiously angry with herself and dismayingly aware of how dismally lacking in common sense and ordinary everyday awareness she must be not to have anticipated what might happen.

She could sign cheques on the joint account, a concession it had taken her many months to win, but only for amounts of fifty pounds at a time and never more than two hundred pounds in one month.

No doubt this was one of the reasons why the bank manager wanted to see her, she acknowledged as she left the garage and got back into her car.

Neville Wilson was a pleasant enough man, very much the archetypal bank manager type, worthy and perhaps a little on the dull side, addicted to his golf, and the type of man who enjoyed observing the conventions of small-town life and who would, in Philippa's estimation, feel uneasy and out of his depth without them.

Andrew had often boasted to her that he was the bank's biggest customer and that because of his flair and initiative, because of the way he had expanded the company, Neville's stock had been increased with his head office.

'It's no wonder they've never promoted him,' Andrew had told her after they had left one of the Wilsons' dinner parties. Andrew had been in a good mood that night, boasting at the dinner-table about the new contract he expected to win.

'He's too cautious... too stuck in his ways. I keep telling him that these days to make money you have to spend it. His own boss agrees with me. In fact I'm beginning to think I should deal with the regional office direct and bypass Neville. I'd get much faster results that way. They understand how important speed is these days.'