by Janet Tanner
A waiter approached the table to present them with menus.
‘Shall we order?’ Sarah suggested.
Alicia glanced briefly at the menu then lowered it to the table placing her hand upon it with a decisive gesture.
‘No, I’d like to talk first if you don’t mind. When I know why you wanted to see me I’ll be ready to order.’
Sarah looked at the waiter but he had already taken his cue and merged into the background.
‘As you like.’ She fingered the stem of her glass but did not drink. ‘As I told you on the telephone something has happened which I think you should know about.’
‘You mean the proposed expansion?’ Her eyes were laser sharp and watchful.
‘Is that what you choose to call it?’
Alicia raised one eyebrow a fraction.
‘What would you call it?’
‘The Board call it a merger. Personally I would think the term ‘‘take-over’’ might be more apt.’
She saw the slightly veiled look come into those sharp amber eyes.
‘Take-over? My dear Sarah, who on earth would attempt to take over Morse Bailey?’
Sarah lifted her head. Light from the overhead lamps gleamed on her soft silver hair.
‘The one person who has always wanted just that, Alicia,’ she said steadily. ‘Leo de Vere.’
The moment the words were out she knew they had had just the impact she had intended. Alicia’s immobile face appeared frozen, only the amber eyes widened slightly to give her an expression of incredulity.
‘Leo de Vere?’ All the old emnity was there in her tone as she repeated the hated name. If anything, Alicia loathed Leo de Vere even more than Sarah did. She had known him longer, resented him and his intrusion into her life before she and Sarah had even met.
‘The same,’ Sarah said levelly. ‘He has come up with proposals for a merger, Alicia – but you and I both know that he would never be satisfied with that. Leo has never wanted anything but to gain control of Morse Bailey. It was his downfall once and he has had to wait a lifetime for his opportunity. Oh no, Leo will not be satisfied with anything less than total control and I thought you should know about it.’
‘My God,’ Alicia said. ‘Guy …’
‘Guy is backing him,’ Sarah explained. ‘ You know what that means.’
There was silence for a moment as Alicia digested what Sarah had said.
‘I can’t believe that,’ she said at last, taking out another Black Russian and lighting it from the stub of the first. ‘Guy knows my feelings on the subject of Leo de Vere. He would never play into his hands.’
Involuntarily Sarah felt a stab of pity for Alicia. It was not pleasant to be betrayed by one’s own children, especially when one doted on them as Alicia did on Guy. She had trusted him totally. I am destroying her, Sarah thought, but it has to be done. Morse Bailey and all it stands for is more important than any of us.
‘I’m sorry, Alicia, but it is true,’ she said simply. ‘I don’t know what Leo has offered him but I assure you Guy is backing the merger all the way – and backing it with your votes as well as his own. This is why I telephoned you. I was fairly confident you did not know what was going on and I believed you had a right to know.’ Alicia said nothing, and gaining confidence Sarah went on: ‘The only way for me to stop this going through was to appeal to you direct. Use your own votes, Alicia, in concert with mine. Together we can prevent Morse Bailey from falling into Leo de Vere’s hands.’
For long moments Alicia remained motionless, so still she might have been carved in stone. Then, abruptly, she leaned forward, stubbing out her cigarette with a quick angry movement.
‘What are you trying to do, Sarah? Drive a wedge between me and my son? My God, haven’t you taken enough from me already? Do you want to take him from me too? Is that what is behind asking me here?’
‘Of course not,’ Sarah said quickly. ‘I know how painful this is for you, Alicia, but …’
‘Guy would never do such a thing – never!’ Alicia stated with conviction.
‘I’m sorry, Alicia, but he is doing it.’
‘Then he must have some very good reason.’
‘If there is then why hasn’t he explained the position to you – asked your blessing on the merger?’
Alicia’s fine nostrils flared. ‘ Quite likely he prefers not to have me worried by all this.’
‘He knew such a move would upset you, you mean,’
‘Exactly. But I am certain he would never give merger with Leo De Vere a second thought unless it was absolutely necessary.’
‘Or unless it would advance his own career,’ Sarah said – and regretted the rash words the moment they were out.
There was fury in Alicia’s eyes. She pushed back her chair.
‘I think, Sarah, that this meeting is at an end. I came here today against my better judgement because I thought it was possible that we might, after all these years, have something to say to one another. I never, for one moment, expected to hear you make wild accusations against my son. Surely even you should have known better than that?’
‘Alicia, please!’
‘As far as I am concerned, Guy makes the business decisions now and you should have known I would never align myself with you against him. If he believes merger with Leo de Vere is in the interests of the company then I am prepared to back his judgement. Perhaps he is less blinkered than we are. Perhaps it is time to forget what Leo did. It’s the future that matters now – the future as Guy sees it. The past is dead and gone.’
Is it? Sarah thought, seeing the flame of hatred in Alicia’s eyes and knowing it was for her. The past may be gone but it is certainly not dead – not as far as you and I are concerned. I must have been a fool to think even for a moment that it might be. But I can’t give up Morse Bailey and all that it stands for. I must fight it to the bitter end.
‘Alicia, please, will you at least think about what I’ve said?’ she pleaded. ‘ Talk to Guy by all means. Ask him for his version of what he plans to do. But don’t just hand Morse Bailey to Leo de Vere on a plate. It’s not just the family heritage that is at stake, though heaven knows, when you think what it cost in blood and sweat to those who were very dear to us, that should be enough. But there’s more – much more. You speak of the future. Have you thought what Leo would do? He could decimate Morse Bailey. Hundreds of jobs might be at stake as he creamed off our profits for the benefit of his own companies. He may want to move the head offices out of Bristol – hundreds more jobs, the daily bread of local people, as well as the whole history of Morse Bailey. I beg you, don’t let this happen simply because it is me who is asking you – and you hate me. Try for once to forget our differences. Let us work, just this once, in harmony – the way Gilbert intended us to.’
For a brief moment she thought she saw a gleam of indecision in Alicia’s eyes. Then the older woman rose.
‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t stay to lunch with you, Sarah,’ she said, her tone cold and level. ‘I will talk to Guy but I make you no promises. I believe this is just your latest attempt at mischief making. If it is, you should know that I look upon it with the utmost contempt. If it is not – well, you know, I believe, that I stand shoulder to shoulder with my son.’
‘Even if what he is doing is detrimental to Morse Bailey?’ Sarah asked desperately.
Again she saw that flicker that might have been uncertainty in Alicia’s eyes. Then they hooded once more.
‘I don’t think that remark requires an answer,’ Alicia said coldly. ‘Goodbye, Sarah. I wish I could say it has been pleasant to see you again. Unfortunately I cannot – and even if I did I doubt you would believe me.’
Sarah smiled sadly. She felt very tired suddenly.
‘That’s true. Thank you, anyway, for coming, Alicia. I still hope I may hear from you when you have had time to think about this.’
A waiter, who had seen Alicia rise, hovered attention.
‘Thank you, I am not
lunching,’ Alicia informed him. ‘Would you kindly find my coat for me?’
As she moved away between the tables, where more than one diner watched with covert curiosity as she passed, Sarah felt the tiredness increase, an ache behind her eyes throbbing up into her temples.
So – the lunch had been the unmitigated disaster Kirsty had predicted it would be. She had gambled on Alicia’s hatred for Leo being stronger even than the hatred she felt for her, Sarah. She had gambled – and lost.
Or had she? Alicia had originally turned down her request for a meeting and later changed her mind. Perhaps pride had made her react violently – pride and shock that her precious Guy could behave so treacherously. Maybe when she had had time to talk to him and time to think she would realise that now, for the first time ever, she and the woman she hated so much must become allies for the sake of the company.
Dear God, how did I ever manage to instil such hatred? Sarah wondered. I never meant to. I never meant to hurt anyone. And yet she knew that was exactly what she had done, always.
Thoughtfully she lifted her glass, draining the remains of the gin and tonic, and as she stared into its crystal depths it seemed suddenly that her whole life was reflected there with its triumphs and heartbreaks, its turbulent loves and its bitter hatreds.
And what a life! What would I change if I could? she wondered and the answer came back to her: not a great deal. I have lived for seventy-three years and each one of them fully. And even if I wanted to – could I have changed it?
Certainly not the beginning – and it was from that beginning that every thread flowed. In the beginning she had been just a child, a pawn in the hand of fate, and afterwards it was probably much too late …
Sarah sipped her drink and let memory take her back in time to a past so real, so vivid, it might have been happening now.
You are a child of the universes no less than the trees
and the stars. You have a right to be here.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons – they are
vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with
others you may become vain and bitter for always
there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Desiderata
Chapter Four
‘Billy Stickland, will you come on please!’ Sarah begged. ‘Pick your feet up and stop kicking every stone you see. We’ll never get home at this rate.’
She tugged impatiently at the hand of the small boy who was lagging along beside her, trying to hurry him, but he only pulled back and dug in his toes more determinedly.
‘Aw, Sarah, it’s hot – and me boots are pinchin’. Why can’t we go down by the stream?’
‘Yes, Sarah, you promised we could fish for tadpoles …’ The girl, Phyllis, was a year older than her brother and even more inclined to show signs of rebellion. Sarah might be bigger than they were but Phyllis resented having to do as Sarah told her. It wasn’t even as if they were related; Sarah just happened to live next-door-but-one to them in the row of cottages at Starvault and when their mother had been growing fat and clumsy with yet another baby Sarah had been asked to take Billy the mile and a half to the village school and back each day. ‘He’d never do what you told him to,’ Phyllis had been informed by her mother when she protested about the arrangement and although she knew in her heart that it was true, Phyllis did her best to salve her wounded pride by ensuring that Billy did nothing Sarah told him to either.
‘You said yesterday we could fish for tadpoles,’ Phyllis persisted. ‘I brought a jam jar with me to school and our Billy’s been looking forward to it all day.’
‘I didn’t promise,’ Sarah said. ‘ I only said we might, but now we can’t.’ She gave Billy’s hand another tug in an effort to make him keep pace with her.
‘Stop it, Sarah, you’re hurting me arm!’ Billy whimpered and Phyllis took up his cause.
‘You’re mean and bossy, Sarah. I shall tell our mum you hurt our Billy.’
‘You can tell your mum what you like. I don’t care. Only come on, will you?’ Sarah said, fighting back tears of sheer desperation. ‘If you don’t I shall leave you here, both of you.’
‘Then you will be in trouble.’
‘I don’t care, I tell you. I’ve got to get home.’ But she did care. She knew and they knew she would never leave them – not when they had been entrusted to her care. Not Sarah. She might be only nine years old, skinny as a bean pole in a blue cotton pinafore, but her sense of responsibility was well developed. However anxious she was to get home she would make sure she took Phyllis and Billy with her if she had to drag them every inch of the way.
‘Why do you keep making us run?’ Phyllis asked complainingly. ‘Why are you in such a hurry today?’
For a moment Sarah did not answer. Most of her breath had been used up struggling with the unwilling Billy and she felt hot, flustered and close to tears. But Phyllis was a friend – almost – and she was so very worried.…
‘It’s our mum,’ she confided. ‘She’s ever so bad, Phyll. I started to tell you this morning but you kept going on about your six-times-table.’
‘Yes, ’cos we had to know it by today. Miss Keevil said she’d give us three strokes if we didn’t get it right and … Well, what’s wrong with your mum anyway?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sarah said, and felt more like crying than ever. ‘That’s just it, Phyll. I don’t know what’s the matter with her and I don’t think she knows either. She’s got this really bad pain in her tummy and …’
‘P’raps she’s going to have a baby,’ Phyllis suggested. ‘My mum had a pain in her tummy just before we had our Frank.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Sarah said scathingly. ‘I haven’t got a dad, have I?’
‘No, but I don’t see …’
‘Babies don’t get delivered to houses where there’s no dad,’ Sarah said. ‘ I don’t know why but they just don’t. And anyway, this is different. She keeps being sick. I heard her moaning and retching all night. And this morning she was too bad to get up at all. She just lay there.’
‘Ooh!’ At last Sarah had impressed Phyllis. Her eyes went round with horror. Children like her and Billy and little Frank were often sick, but mothers …when mothers were sick the world seemed to have fallen off balance. Phyllis experienced a small stab of guilt and she took her young brother’s other hand. ‘Come on, can’t you, our Billy? Why are you so slow?’
Billy scowled and kicked defiantly at a small piece of gravel but he knew better than to argue. When the two girls put up a united front it was worse than useless.
For a few moments the three of them hurried along in silence while the sun beat down from a clear blue sky onto their bare heads and arms. Sometimes, on afternoons such as this, they would take off their socks and boots and wade through the lush green grass that grew along the edge of the lane, sometimes they would stop to pick handfuls of golden celandines and purple cock-robins, snow white feathery heads of cow parsley and scarlet silk poppies, fine and delicate as butterflies’ wings, sometimes they would take a stick and poke into the ditch that lay between hedge and verge to see what treasures might be uncovered in its overgrown depths. It was so good to be free after a whole day of sitting on hard forms in the sunless schoolroom, constantly nagged at by Miss Keevil’s piercing voice and threatened by the cane she kept propped up in the corner, and they loved to make the most of that freedom.
Not so today. Sarah’s anxiety had at last transmitted itself to the other two children and even Billy stopped whining and marched along between them, his pinching boots forgotten as a strange sense of urgency flowed like an electric current from the girls’ hands into his own.
From the village school the lane wound steeply upwards for the first half mile, then followed the curve of the hill until it dipped away to where Starvault Cottages nestled in the lee. From the last bend before the lane began its descent they were plainly visible, looking like dolls’ houses in the narrow valley below
– three stone-built dwellings set at right angles to the lane with tiny patches of flower garden and a cinder path separating them from the long strips of vegetable garden which sloped up the hillside. The houses were identical except that Sarah’s – closest to the lane – had a little wooden porch and a honeysuckle creeping around the door, while the small patch of garden outside Phyllis’s house was surrounded by a low wall which dripped great cushions of clematis and snow-on-the-mountain.
Often as they rounded that last bend one or other of the children would cry: ‘There’s our house!’ or ‘See – there’s our mum in the garden. Wave! Wave!’ for the first sight of home at the end of a long day seemed to them every bit as welcome as an oasis to a traveller who has been lost in the desert. But today there was no pleasurable sensation of homecoming, only a creeping foreboding which seemed all the more oppressive because of the brightness of the sunshine, and in the cottages and gardens nothing stirred.
Billy was beginning to drag again and Sarah felt the tears of frustration threatening once more. Just why she was so anxious she was not sure, but the fact that this black dread which had been closing in around her all day was nebulous only served to make it more frightening. Perhaps if there had been someone she could talk to it would not have been so bad – a bigger girl at school, maybe, or the teacher. But the bigger girls, about to go out into the world and earn their living, tended to think themselves above talking to a nine-year-old, drawing into a huddle and turning their backs if they saw her approaching, and Miss Keevil was a daunting figure. No child ever dared to speak to Miss Keevil unless they were first spoken to and even then there was always the danger of attracting three strokes from that ever-ready cane of hers if they were careless with their choice of words. And at home there was no-one. No-one but Mum. They only had each other.…
