Good Morning, Midnight (33 page)

Slowly I began to emerge from my shell of grief. Very slowly. Some time in all this, I became aware there was important stuff going on-big shake-ups, crisis meetings, worried faces all over the place-but my awareness never got close to interest or understanding. Maybe my indifference somehow got confused with loyalty and dependability, for at the end of it all, I found Tony’s PA inviting me to work as her gofer. She was good, so good she got head-hunted. I’d been working with her nine months when she said she was leaving. I expected the job to be advertised and even wondered if I dared apply, but not very seriously. Then I came to work one morning and found my name being stencilled on her office door.

I was so knocked over, I didn’t think of Alba for over an hour.

And when I did, for the first time since she died I found I was totally aware of who I was, where I was, and what I was doing.

Still no men in my life. Understandable, as anyone who gave me the eye I automatically hated. Not that there were many. Under Tony’s watchful eye, I could probably have walked round the plant naked carrying a sackful of gold without fear of molestation. As for elsewhere, there wasn’t really any elsewhere.

Then we came to England for the Maciver takeover negotiations and I met Pal.

I could see he was interested from our first encounter, and he didn’t give a damn if Tony approved or not.

Me, at first I was amused. Twenty years older than me, a widower with three kids, a Brit-nobody needed to rehearse the strikes against him. And even if I’d fallen madly in love with him at first sight, my first sight of Pal Junior and Cressida would probably have nipped that in the bud. I don’t know in what terms their father had prepared them for my appearance, but they were on full security alert, all systems armed. I was the enemy, their mission was to destroy. I couldn’t blame them. Young Pal was fifteen, Cressida twelve, not the most rational of ages. And nine months earlier they’d lost their mother.

I would have signalled no-contest and got out of there if it hadn’t been for Helen. She had big blue eyes and blonde curls and she was just turned four, the same age Alba would have been. A kid that age loses her mother, it must leave a gap of instant unquestioning love no amount of sympathy and concern can fill. It was sympathy and concern I felt for the older children, but not for Helen. I saw her and all the love I’d had for Alba came surging through. She must have felt it, for there wasn’t even a moment when we were strangers.

And Pal watching us together at that first encounter must have known he’d got himself a wife.

I’d expected if not objection at least reservation from Tony but once more he surprised me. He was more than encouraging, he was enthusiastic. “The kid needs a mother,” he said, by which at first I thought he meant I needed a kid. But thinking about it since, I don’t recollect ever hearing Tony say something he didn’t mean.

Anyway, the marriage went ahead, the takeover went ahead, everyone was happy.

Except Pal Junior and Cressida.

They set out to make my life hell. Not too obviously and never in front of their father. But they worked at it, oh yes, they really worked at it. And they might have succeeded if it hadn’t been for Helen. She was my antidote. She made my life a heaven their feeble attempts at hell couldn’t touch. Naturally they tried to get to me through her, but I let them see that here was the line in the sand. Step over that and I’d go nuclear. They backed off, but the guerrilla war continued. There’s no defence against a guerrilla war; all you can do is tough it out and hope that at last simple fatigue will bring them to the conference table. I did try to talk to Pal Senior, but it was hard. He’d got himself the family grouping he wanted and he didn’t care to see any cracks in the plaster. I tried to get to him through his sister, Lavinia, but she was right off the map, both mentally and physically. I called in to see her once and it was like stepping into that Hitchcock movie The Birds.

So I just had to play the waiting game. I thought things might get better when Cressida went away to school. It was her own idea and her father was keen. Me, I’d never have wanted any child of mine to spend so much of those formative years away from home, but I wasn’t about to object in Cressida’s case. With Pal Junior out of the house for much of the time doing whatever teenage boys do, it meant I’d have lots of quality time with Helen. And I was still naive enough to hope every time Cressida came home for the holidays, that she’d have grown up a bit and grown out of her petty resentment. Certainly for a while I began to feel that maybe her brother had made this progress. He had gone into the sixth form and there’d been some friction between him and his father about his choice of subjects. Pal Senior had been the active outdoor type in his younger days, I gathered, climbing, shooting, that stuff, and later he’d channelled all those energies into the business, which made giving it up so hard. Pal Junior had never shown any interest in outdoor activities and now he announced bluntly that he certainly didn’t want to follow his father into a business career, instead it was his ambition to go to university and study art history. If the family firm had still existed as an entity, I dread to think what a schism this might have caused. Even without the inheritance factor, his father was seriously pissed, but I stuck up for the boy and acted as mediator and I guess I hoped that this might have helped him see what an asshole he’d been over the past couple of years. Certainly to start with he seemed much less surly towards me. In fact on occasions he was positively attentive. Then gradually I began to feel he was being over attentive. He always seemed to be around, bringing me drinks, checking that I was comfortable. If I sat on a sofa, he’d flop down next to me. And, even more worryingly, whenever I lay around the garden sunbathing in my bikini, he’d turn up too. Or if I went to have a shower, when I came out of the shower room with my towel draped around me, he’d just happen to be strolling along the corridor. I began to feel stalked. This was just a new technique to get at me, I decided. The bastard knew how hard it would be for me, after complaining for so long that he took no heed of me, to start protesting he was over-attentive!

But maybe I should have spoken up instead of just taking steps to keep out of his line of sight… Maybe he took my lack of open complaint for encouragement.

I’m being charitable here. I don’t really feel it.

It was towards the end of his last term in the sixth, exam time. I had the house to myself one afternoon. My husband was at the works-he still insisted on going in most days, even though it was clear to everyone else that his so-called advisory responsibility was merely a face-saver. Cressida was away at school, Helen was at a friend’s birthday party and Pal Junior, who was doing his last exam that morning, had announced he and his friends were going to spend the rest of the day celebrating. I took the chance to do some work in the garden. I love gardening but didn’t get much encouragement from my husband, who hired a man to come in two or three times a week and, like a true Yorkshireman, didn’t see why I should do work he’d paid someone else to do. Today wasn’t one of the gardener’s days, so I was able to really sort out a couple of the beds that had been irritating me for some time.

It was funny. From time to time I felt like I was being watched but whenever I looked up, I could see no one. After a couple of hours I’d worked myself into a good sweat and my back was beginning to ache so I went into the house for a shower. It was heaven just to stand there under the hot jet and feel the water washing the sweat off my body and the aches out of my muscles. I stood there I don’t know how long with my head back and my eyes closed.

And when at last I opened my eyes I saw through the steamed-up glass of the shower cubicle a figure standing outside.

I said, “Pal, is that you?” and opened the door.

It was Pal all right, but Pal Junior. He was standing there naked, jerking off.

We just looked at each other for a long moment. Then he flung himself at me, forcing me back into the cubicle.

What would have happened then I don’t know, but fortunately he was already so roused that his efforts to force himself between my legs brought him to climax. I felt him go into spasm against me. He was screaming out my name, whether in pleasure or frustration I don’t know. I pushed him away with all my strength and he stood there, still firing come at me like he wished it were bullets.

I lost it then for a while and began to yell at him, incoherently at first, but eventually I got back control. I grabbed a towel around me and I told him he was a disgusting little shit and this was one piece of behaviour his father wasn’t going to be able to ignore. I’d stopped being frightened now-he certainly wasn’t a sexual threat any more-and even as I spoke I found myself thinking I sounded like some outraged doyenne of the League of Purity. But I didn’t know how else to deal with the situation.

Pal was much more self-possessed.

He just stood there smiling and said, “You do that and I’ll tell Dad that what really happened is you’ve been coming on to me and you got pissed because I turned you down.”

“And you think he’ll believe that?” I demanded.

“Why not? I’m a lot nearer your age than he is, aren’t I?” he replied. “In fact, come on, admit it, there’s a bit of truth in there somewhere, isn’t there? Don’t pretend you’ve never wondered how it would be with me. So how about it some time? Keep it in the family, eh?”

I ran at him then, wanting to scratch the sneering complacency out of his face. It was probably a stupid thing to do, but he didn’t retaliate, just ducked out of my reach and turned and left. A few minutes later I heard him go down the stairs and I ran to the bedroom window and watched him stroll off down the drive. He even turned to wave at me!

At that moment I was absolutely resolved to tell Pal Senior everything, but by the time he came home that evening, I had weakened. Faced with such a conflict of stories, how would he react? Would he recall the way I’d taken his son’s part against him in the matter of the university course and let this sow the seed of doubt? Anything but total belief on his part I couldn’t tolerate.

He was in an angry mood when he got home, which made my silence the easier. After years of being master of all he surveyed at the plant, and first mover of all activity there, he grew increasingly frustrated each time he found himself being cut out of the loop. This was driving a wedge between us too. Tony had stayed on in Mid-Yorkshire to oversee the transition period at A-P’s new acquisition and I’d carried on as his PA after my marriage, thinking it was short term till he went back to the States. But for one reason or another after a couple of years Tony seemed to have settled into the job of head man at Ash-Mac’s on a more permanent basis and had even got himself a house out in the sticks at Cothersley. I carried on working for him but only after I made it quite clear looking after Helen was my first concern. Tony said no problem, he’d have sacked me if he thought I wouldn’t put Helen first, which was sweet. And for a while, Pal had seemed cool with the idea, but as his frustration with being side-lined as he saw it grew, I think he started resenting his feeling that I was a lot closer to the action at Ash-Mac’s than he was .

So all in all it seemed better to keep my mouth shut and take even greater care to avoid letting Pal Junior in striking distance.

This proved easier than I’d hoped. He announced he wanted to spend most of his pre-Cambridge vac doing a modern version of the Grand Tour with some chums. His father fulminated about the expense but I chipped in that, in view of his degree course, this could be regarded as useful preparation.

So he disappeared, Cressida went off to stay with a school-friend, and I had a lovely summer with Helen.

For the next eighteen months, with Pal Junior up at Cambridge and Cressida in her school sixth form, things got a bit easier, but only because they spent less and less time at Moscow House. When they were home, their campaign against me was pretty unrelenting. Its form had changed. No malicious practical jokes. In their father’s presence they were coldly polite. Out of it they treated me as an ignorant foreigner untouched by either learning or culture who needed to be talked to in words of one syllable and who nursed an illicit passion for Pal Junior .

But familiarity breeds indifference even to offence, and I let all this roll off me, helped, as I say, by the knowledge that I never had to put up with it for long.

Then came last Christmas. They were at their worst. Their father was immersed in one of his deepest bouts of resentment at what he called the mismanagement of Ash-Mac’s, which, in my view, amounted to little more than a pig-headed refusal to admit he’d sold the company and finally move on. Some of this resentment seemed to spill over on to me and the children, sensing the barrier his presence normally created was lowered, were merciless. Even when they went back to college and to school in January, things didn’t get much better. My husband too now treated me with a cold reserve which made life very uncomfortable. So when Tony told me that Ashur-Proffitt were having a big party in Hartford at the end of March to celebrate fifty years of trading and invited me to attend, I jumped at the chance to get away. It seemed silly to fly all that way just for a weekend, and in any case I really wanted a longer break from Moscow House. The only trouble was Helen, who got deeply upset when I told her I might be away for a couple of weeks, so in the end I got this great idea of taking her with me and showing her a bit of the States. It meant taking her out of school but with the Easter holiday not far ahead, it wasn’t going to make very much difference. Pal Senior reacted with indifference. He seemed to be totally immersed in some scheme he was hatching to get back some of his old power at Ash-Mac’s. What he thought he could do, God knows. I tried to remind him that legally he was out of the loop with no way back in, but he wasn’t listening. A couple of weeks ago he took off on some mystery trip to London, and that same afternoon I heard the front door open and when I went to see who it was, I found myself looking at Pal Junior.