The Fisher Lass (26 page)

‘Going already?’ Aggie looked up, amusement in her eyes. ‘So soon?’ She stood up too and now her face was suddenly serious. ‘Jeannie, I know what everyone round
here thinks about me and I expect you share their opinions. Well, some of it’s probably true, but a lot of it isn’t. One thing I will tell you, I do not spread gossip. Oh, I hear a lot.
I know just about everything that goes on around here. But it wasn’t me who spread the rumours about Mr Robert Hayes-Gorton and his visits to see his nephew when Tom was at sea. Nor did I
tell young Joe about young Sammy’s – er – origins.’

Jeannie gasped and her eyes widened. So, Aggie knew even this.

‘Your gossip-monger, Jeannie, is closer to home. Someone in your own street whose lace curtains twitch every time someone sneezes.’

‘Who?’ Jeannie said, disbelieving.

‘Well now, I’d be gossiping too if I were to tell you, now wouldn’t I?

‘Och, dinna be so aggravating, Aggie Turnbull.’

At this the woman threw back her head and laughed. ‘Oh Jeannie, I like you. I really like you. How I wish I had a friend like you.’

As Jeannie opened her mouth to make a sharp retort, Aggie held up her hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said and, suddenly, Jeannie detected a note of wistfulness in her voice. ‘I
know it can never be. Just, my dear,’ her tone was softer, gentler, ‘as there can never be anything between you and Mr Robert.’

‘There is nothing between us,’ Jeannie retorted hotly, her face fiery red.

‘I know, I know. But you’d both like there to be, wouldn’t you?’

‘No!’ The denial was like the crack of a sail, yet both women knew it to be false.

‘Why else,’ Aggie asked quietly, ‘would you bother to come here, to risk visiting a woman with my reputation, if there was absolutely nothing to feel the tiniest bit guilty
about?’

Jeannie blundered from the room and out of the house, knowing that she had made a dreadful mistake in coming. Aggie Turnbull was nothing like the woman she had imagined her to be. She was
intelligent and sharp and she had neatly turned the tables upon Jeannie.

Robert turned away from the window as he heard the rattle that heralded the arrival of the evening newspaper. Automatically, his mind still preoccupied, he walked across the
tiled floor of the hall and pulled the paper from the jaws of the brass letterbox. He unfolded it and stood in the middle of the hall, staring down at the paper. The newsprint blurred before his
eyes and then suddenly, it sharpened as he read the headline. A headline so dramatic that at once his thoughts were pulled back with a jolt from the events of eight years ago to the present.

‘
HITLER MARCHES INTO CZECHOSLOVAKIA
’.

The answer to his boredom was staring up at him. With more energy and enthusiasm than he had felt for years, he flung the newspaper to the floor where it lay in a crumpled heap on the otherwise
immaculate and sterile floor. Robert picked up his hat from the table and left the house, pulling the door closed behind him with the satisfied air of a decision made.

‘You are going to do what?’ Samuel Hayes-Gorton rose from his swivel chair and leant on his desk towards his son standing on the opposite side.

‘I said,’ Robert repeated calmly, ‘I am going to join the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserves.’

‘Edwin,’ the older man roared. ‘Get in here this instant.’

A moment later the communicating door between two offices opened and Edwin poked his head round it. ‘Hullo, old chap,’ he beamed at his brother. ‘Nice to see you back. Feeling
better?’

Robert felt the colour rising in his neck and felt guilty about the small lie he had told for his absence from the family business during the past week. ‘I’ve got the bost dreadful
co’d,’ he had said into the telephone five days earlier, holding his nose as he did so. ‘I can’t bossibly come in.’ He remembered sniffing loudly and had even
manufactured a sneeze.

‘Of course not, Mr Robert,’ Miss Jenkins, secretary to all the senior partners, had gushed. ‘I do hope you’ll soon be feeling better.’

And now he was back with not so much as a red nose to lend credence to his pretence. ‘Fine. Didn’t last long, as it happens.’

‘Fine? Fine, he says?’ their father boomed. ‘The boy’s taken leave of his senses.’ He snorted derisively. ‘If he ever had any.’

Edwin’s puzzled glance went from one to the other. Then Samuel Hayes-Gorton flung out his arm. ‘Only says he wants to join the Royal Navy. That’s all.’

‘The . . .?’ Edwin began and then said, ‘Whatever for?’

‘Exactly!’ Samuel bellowed again. ‘Whatever for?’

‘The Volunteer Reserves,’ Robert corrected. ‘And I shan’t be going away. There’ll just be training sessions once or twice a week, I expect.’

It had all seemed so easy, that spur of the moment decision standing in the empty loneliness of his house – and he used the word ‘house’ deliberately for it never had been and
never would be a home. Not without a woman who . . . He sighed again. Not without Jeannie there. And that was another reason. Maybe if he could find some direction for his energies, he might be
able to stop thinking about her every waking moment.

‘Robert?’ Robert heard Edwin’s gentle voice interrupting his thoughts. ‘Why, old chap?’

Robert lifted his shoulders. ‘I just need something positive to do with my life.’’

‘Something positive?’ their father roared again. ‘You don’t regard running the Gorton-Hathersage Trawler Company as something positive?’

Since the alliance of the two companies through marriage, the ties had become even stronger and following the death of Henry Hathersage the two companies had merged and become the
Gorton-Hathersage Trawler Company Limited. Samuel Hayes-Gorton took the Chairman’s position and Francis, Managing Director. With Edwin as Company Secretary, Robert had only a seat on the
Board as a Director. There was no useful position and little for him to do in the day-to-day running of the business. His role, he thought bitterly, was, and always had been, merely a means to an
end.

Well, they all had the ‘end’ they had wanted now. Even Louise was quite happy with the money she received as a major shareholder, though she had never bothered to attend so much as
one meeting of the Board.

‘Of course, Mummy’s got an annuity for life but everything else comes to me,’ Louise had informed Samuel Hayes-Gorton and his three sons after the reading of her father’s
will. ‘But I don’t want anything to do with the business.’ She had fluttered her eyelashes and looked at each of the men in turn. ‘What does silly little me know about boats
and the price of fish. So, Robert is to have – what did the solicitor man call it, darling?’

‘Power of attorney.’

‘Oh yes. It means Robert can sign anything on my behalf. All I want,’ she giggled prettily, ‘is the money.’

‘My dear Louise,’ Francis had risen from his chair behind his desk and come round it to take her slim hand in his and raise her fingers to his lips, ‘your business could not be
in safer hands than your husband’s and his fellow board members.’ He waved his hand to encompass himself, Edwin and their father. ‘You leave everything to us, my dear, and you
just enjoy yourself spending the money we make for you.’

‘Oh Francis, you say the sweetest things. You must come to dinner on Friday. Mustn’t he, Robert?’

‘Of course,’ Robert murmured dutifully.

‘That’s settled then,’ Francis said as he opened the door for her. Louise, clad in a suit with a fur stole around her shoulders and a hat with a pheasant’s feather,
kissed the air beside her brother-in-law’s cheek.

‘See you Friday,’ she trilled as she left the office, but Robert had the distinct feeling that Francis had not been referring to her invitation to dine, but to the official
amalgamation of the two companies which had long been his ambition.

Since then, Francis had set about systematically acquiring not only all the other small shipping companies in Havelock, but he had begun also to buy out the service industries including
engineering and ship repairing, coaling and even cod liver oil production and net making.

Net making, Robert thought, immediately reminded him of Jeannie. If his brother had his way, all the nets would be made in one of his factory units and the women who worked in their own homes
would lose a valuable source of a little extra income for their families.

‘By God, the ingratitude.’ Samuel was still shouting, bringing Robert’s wandering thoughts back to the present and the bombshell he had just dropped. ‘After all
I’ve done for you, this is the thanks I get. Your duty is here with the family business and even more so if there is going to be a damned war.’ He paused, waiting for some response from
his son. When none came, he threatened, ‘Well, if you go, boy, you go without my blessing. You’ll have no part in this company ever again. I’ll have you voted off the Board and
I’ll cut you out of my will.’

‘Father, I’m superfluous in this company and you know it.’ Robert’s mouth tightened. ‘The only useful purpose I have ever served was to be the means of an alliance
between the Gorton and the Hathersage companies.’

Samuel’s face turned purple. ‘You make it sound like a business transaction, boy, instead of a marriage between two people, who—’

‘It was,’ Robert said curtly. ‘You and old man Hathersage concocted the idea between you. She was his only daughter, his only child, and more than anything he wanted a
grandson. You saw your chance to build your empire. But why me? Why the second son? Why not Francis?’

His father glanced away now, suddenly embarrassed under the scrutiny of his two sons. He cleared his throat and said gruffly, ‘Francis would have broken the poor girl’s heart in a
fortnight. The – er – kind of life he leads. You knew that at the time.’

Robert nodded slowly. ‘The only trouble is, we weren’t in love with each other. Not then, not now. You know she spends nearly all her time in London. Has done for years. She’s
there now, has been for the past week. That so-called home I bought was a last-ditch effort to try to make the marriage work. Well, I failed.’

Samuel, still belligerent, wagged his finger towards his son. ‘You should have given her a child, boy. That’d’ve made her stay at home instead of gallivanting to the city every
five minutes. You should have—’

‘I tried, oh I tried, believe you me. But she wouldn’t let me near her. Never has. Why do you think we came back from honeymoon early? Why do you think I spent the whole of my
inheritance from my grandmother on a house for her? Why do you think I indulge her every whim?’ Robert leant towards his father and slowly and deliberately, said, ‘The marriage has
never been consummated.’

Now Samuel’s mouth dropped open. ‘What?’

‘You heard,’ Robert said bluntly. ‘And now it never will be, because I’ve no taste for it either.’

‘Really?’ Now there was sarcasm in his father’s tone. ‘Maybe not with your wife, but from what I’ve heard you’re not above trips to a terraced house in
Baldock Street.’

It felt as if a knife had been driven in just below his ribcage and Robert almost gasped aloud at the force of it. He stood rigidly still for a moment and then let out a long breath. So, he
thought, Jeannie had had good reason to stop him going to her home. If the rumours had even reached his father, then they must certainly be rife around the docks. He pulled in a breath now and then
sighed heavily. ‘Like I said, I’m not much use around here anyway. You’re still head of the company. Francis, for all his dissolute ways, has a superb business sense. He’s
proved that over the last few years. He just about controls the whole of the fish docks. And Edwin here, well, he runs the office side of things like clockwork. So what exactly is my role? Tell me,
because I’d really like to know.’

For a moment Samuel blustered, refuting Robert’s words, but then his voice trailed away leaving unfinished sentences.

‘Precisely,’ Robert said quietly and calmly now. ‘Even you can’t define my usefulness, can you? Look, Father, I don’t want to quarrel with you. That’s the
last thing I want, but I want to do something useful with my life. And if,’ he added sadly, ‘you don’t want me to be a part of the family business in the future, well,’ he
paused before saying, ‘then so be it.’

‘That’s not going to happen,’ Edwin’s quiet voice put in now, with such a firmness in his tone that both Samuel and Robert looked at him in surprise.

‘Now, don’t you start—’ Samuel began, but Edwin said, ‘Father, the company, one day, will come to the three of us. The three Hayes-Gorton brothers. Nothing is going
to change that. Francis and I wouldn’t want it any different.’

‘Don’t you try to tell me how to arrange my own affairs.’

‘I’m not,’ Edwin said. He remained unruffled and there was even a small smile on his lips. ‘I’m just saying that whatever happens, whatever Robert decides to do . .
.’ He lifted his shoulders. ‘Whatever you leave in your will, Robert will always be a part of this company. Francis and I will see to it.’

‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ Samuel sat down suddenly and heavily in his chair and rocked backwards. ‘The young cubs ousting the old fox, eh?’

Edwin laughed. ‘Oh, I think there’s plenty of bark still left in the wily old fox yet, don’t you?’

Robert looked on in amazement. His younger brother was really showing his mettle these days. Edwin turned and laid a hand on Robert’s shoulder. ‘I don’t want you to leave the
company, old chap, but you must do what you want to do. And – and I’m sorry if I’ve taken the role that should rightly be yours.’

Robert shook his head. ‘You haven’t. You’re brilliant at the administration side. You’ve a head for figures and accountancy that I’ve never had. I couldn’t do
it anyway. Any more than I could wheel and deal like Francis does. I haven’t got his – er – business acumen.’ The two brothers exchanged a glance and smiled slightly at one
another.

‘Have you told Francis?’ their father put in, glaring at Edwin. ‘Are you sure he feels the same way?’

‘Not yet,’ Edwin said and added confidently, ‘but he will.’

Samuel grunted. ‘Where is he, anyway?’

Again the two brothers exchanged a glance.