by Gwen Moffat
He answered Nigel’s suggestion with a tetchiness in his voice he heard too often lately. ‘I’m not so senile yet that I can’t look after my own welfare. I’ve already arranged with Ison to let me have more pills.’
Nigel said nothing more for the time being, point taken, but looking up from his desk a little while later, he remarked, ‘Do me a favour, Father, would you, and walk along to Oundle’s this afternoon and pick up that new reference book I ordered? They rang this morning to say it’ll be there by four.’
Pills! Reference books! A visitor was expected, without doubt. Quite possibly female, and if so, young. Nigel had always been very attractive to women. He had a way of looking at them which conveyed a genuine interest in what they said and did, and a smile, deeply indented at the corners, that they seemed to find irresistible. They passed through his life regularly, in greater numbers than he let on, but conforming to a certain type. He liked to maintain the fiction that these affairs were not generally known about, certainly not to his father. George, though uneasy about them, didn’t disabuse him. In his own way, he could be as cagey as Nigel.
He’s my father all over, George thought, pottering about, covertly watching his son: Henri Fontenoy as he was when he took over the business from his father, Edouard, the founder of what had then been Fontenoy Gems. Shrewd and go-ahead and, in Nigel’s case, confident enough to be forever urging his father to expand, even in these difficult times. Not content with branching out into selling silver and small antiques, as well as fine old jewellery. But George (he’d dropped the ‘s’ at the end of his given name years ago; the family was British now, and proud of it) was stubborn, and clung to the old ways. That one disastrous foray into modern jewellery, many years ago, wasn’t something he was anxious to repeat.
Nigel remained uncharacteristically fidgety for the rest of the morning, making from time to time further suggestions as to how George might occupy himself during the afternoon, but George had no desire to go out. He wanted to stay where he was, in the shop, his place for over fifty years, if only to be there should any customer need his specialist advice on what piece of jewellery to buy. And, incidentally, to find out what Nigel was up to; although, in effect, George accepted that he no longer had the automatic right to expect to be told every little thing. His world had lately changed to a place where he was not the one who gave the orders, a fact he’d been forced to accept since his stroke. It was Nigel who was now in charge.
‘I might wander up and see Christine,’ he said at last, putting Nigel out of his misery, adding that he’d better make the most of this hot weather. Couldn’t go on much longer, it must break soon, which would mean he’d be confined indoors. He was committed, since his stroke, to taking regular exercise, and though he affected to despise doctors, Ison was a sound man whose advice George usually took, if sometimes with bad grace.
‘Good idea,’ Nigel replied, over-hearty with relief, ‘but I should get her to drive you back. The walk there’s quite far enough.’
George knew himself quite capable of walking both ways, and that it would be good for him to do so. The heat didn’t affect him — at his age, the problem was keeping warm enough. He didn’t say so, or remind Nigel that Christine, when he’d spoken to her on the telephone not an hour since, had said that Lindsay was coming home for the weekend. And since she always met Lindsay off the four-twenty, she wouldn’t be at home. It would do no harm, however, to lull Nigel into thinking he would be out of the shop for the time it took to walk along to Ham Lane and back, plus half an hour or so for a cup of tea when he got there. Evidently that would serve to keep George away long enough, or would have done if George had had any intention of making the abortive visit, which he had not.
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