Ruthless Passion

by Penny Jordan

  Giles had told her gently that she might have no choice. He had been warning Gregory for some time, he had added uncomfortably, that they must make some kind of provision for the time when their most profitable patent ran out.

  Gregory had refused to listen to him. Gregory had had his own obsessions and they had nothing to do with the time and care it took to research and develop new drugs.

  Gregory had liked playing the money markets. And, in doing so, Gregory had lost the company many millions of pounds.

  Davina felt sick every time she thought about it … every time she remembered her own blind, wilful acceptance of all the lies Gregory had told her. She ought to have questioned him more closely, to have insisted on knowing more about the company.

  She ought to have done a great many things, she told herself tiredly, including ending her marriage.

  What marriage? There had been no marriage for years. Ever since … Her mind skittered back from a dangerous precipice.

  She had married at twenty. Now she was thirty-seven. For seventeen years she had stayed in an empty, sterile marriage, and why?

  Out of love? Her mouth twisted. Out of duty, then … out of necessity … out of cowardice. Yes, definitely that, or rather out of fear, fear not so much of being alone—that would almost have been a pleasure—but fear of the unknown, a fear that, once on her own, she would prove her father’s and Gregory’s contempt of her to be a true estimation of her character; and so she had stayed, too afraid to leave the security of a marriage that was a sterile mockery of all a marriage should be, hiding from life within its dead, empty embrace.

  But now Gregory was dead. Killed in a road accident, his body twisted in the wreckage of what had once been his expensive saloon car. There had been a woman with him.

  A woman who was not known to Davina, but who she suspected was very well known to her husband.

  He had been consistently unfaithful to her and she had turned a blind eye to it, as she had to so many other things, telling herself that she was better off than most and that if her marriage had not turned out as she had hoped then she was not alone in her disappointment.

  And always at the back of her mind had been the knowledge that her father would never have permitted her to divorce Gregory.

  And of course Gregory would never divorce her. How could he, when in effect she owned the company? On paper, that was. Her father had made sure that effective day-to-day control of the company’s affairs lay in Gregory’s hands, but then he had tied those hands by ensuring that the shares were in her name and that Gregory could never sell them.

  Carey’s had meant a lot to her father. He had set up the company with his father shortly after the end of the war. Davina had never known her grandfather, he had died before she was born, but she had often wished she had.

  It had been her mother who had told her the most about him. How he had had a reputation locally for making his own potions and cures, mainly for cattle ailments originally, but later for human ailments as well.

  It had been his lifelong interest in such things that had led him to the discovery of the heart drug which had established the company right at the forefront of its competitors, although he himself had died shortly after the company had been established.

  Her own father had been at medical school when war broke out. He had left to join up and had never completed his training.

  As a girl, Davina had had dreams of following in her grandfather’s footsteps, but her father had very quickly squashed them. Girls did not become chemists, he had told her contemptuously. They married and produced children … sons. Davina could still remember the look he had given her mother as he spoke. Her parents’ marriage had not produced any sons … only one daughter. Davina.

  And as for her own marriage … She frowned quickly. Giles would be coming back soon and she had no idea what she was going to say to him. His wife, Lucy, was one of her closest friends, or at least she had been. Recently Lucy had been behaving rather oddly towards her, and Giles had inadvertently let slip that it was partly because of Lucy that he still intended to leave Carey’s.

  Not that she could blame him. After all, if the bank manager was right, Carey’s would not exist for much longer anyway. Unless she could find a buyer prepared to take it over and pump in enough money to save it.

  It wasn’t for her own sake that she wanted to keep the company going, and it certainly wasn’t for her father’s.

  Carey’s employed almost two hundred people, all of them local, and in a relatively sparsely populated country area that was a very large proportion of the working population.

  More than half the workforce were women, and Davina had been dismayed to discover how poorly paid they were.

  An economic necessity, Giles had told her. He had been unable to meet her eyes when he had added that Gregory had been able to maintain such a poor wage structure simply because they were the only major local employer.

  Davina’s stomach clenched as she remembered the anger, the guilt she had felt on hearing this disclosure. No wonder so many of the women watched her with stony-faced dislike when she drove through the village. She suspected that they would not have believed that Gregory had kept her as short of money as he did them, but it was true.

  She had been shocked to learn just how much money Gregory had in his private bank accounts, but, large though that sum was, it was nowhere near enough to save Carey’s.

  As she had learned since his death, Gregory had run Carey’s as an autocrat whose word was law. No amount of representations to him from the unions had persuaded him to increase his workers’ wages, nor to provide them with anything other than the most basic of facilities.

  Davina had been stunned when she had been shown the lavatories and wash-basins, the crude and unhygienic area that was supposed to be the canteen and rest-room.

  Giles, who had escorted her around the company after Gregory’s death, had been sympathetic and understanding, but not even his presence had been able to lessen her shock, her sense of despair and guilt.

  And there was nothing she could do to put things right. There was barely enough coming in to pay the wages.

  He himself was not a financier, Giles had told her. He was in fact the company’s personnel manager, but even he had been able to see the financial danger the company was courting.

  Gregory had refused to listen to him, just as he had refused to listen to anyone else who had tried to advise him, as Davina had learned.

  Davina had no idea what on earth she was going to do to prevent the company from having to close down. Find a buyer, the bank had told her, or a backer. But how, and where? Her head ached with the constant tension and worry of suddenly finding herself with this kind of responsibility.

  Only last week Giles had told her how much he admired her calm, her strength, but inwardly she felt neither calm nor strong. She was adept at hiding her feelings, though. She had had to be. Very early on in her marriage she had realised how much Gregory enjoyed hurting her. By then she had, of course, known how much of a mistake their marriage was. She had blamed herself, or rather her naïveté, for the failure of her marriage.

  She had been a shy teenager, sent to a very small all-girls’ boarding-school when she was eleven years old, and then abruptly removed from it at fourteen when her mother died suddenly from a brain tumour.

  At first she had been thrilled because her father had wanted her at home. She had always been much closer to her mother than she had to her father. Theirs had never been a physically close household, but in her grief and shock at her mother’s death she had gone up to him, wanting him to hold her.

  Instead he had stepped back from her, rejecting her, his displeasure at her actions written on his face. Confused and hurt, knowing that she had angered him, Davina retreated into herself.

  The rough and tumble of the local school confused and alarmed her. The other pupils made fun of her accent, the boys tugged painfully on her long plaits and even the girls ganged up against her
, taunting and bullying her. She was an outsider, different, alien, and she was acutely aware of it.

  She also soon discovered that her father had brought her home not because he wanted her company or because he loved her, but because he wanted someone to take over her mother’s role as housekeeper. And, while other girls spent their teenage years experimenting with make-up and boys, Davina spent hers anxiously ironing her father’s shirts, cooking his meals, cleaning his house, with what time she did have to spare spent on trying to keep up with her homework.

  Of course, her schoolwork suffered. She was too proud, too defensive to try to explain to her teachers why she was always so tired, why she was always being accused of not concentrating on her lessons, and of course when her father read their end-of-term reports on her he was even more angry with her.

  The dreams she had once had of emulating her grandfather, of exploring the world of natural medicines and remedies, died, stifled by her father’s contempt and her teachers’ irritation at her lack of progress.

  ‘Of course we all know, Davina, that you won’t have to work,’ one of her teachers had commented acidly one afternoon in front of the whole class, causing her fellow pupils to shuffle in their seats and turn to look at her, while her face had turned puce with shame and embarrassment. ‘Which is just as well, isn’t it? Because you certainly won’t be employable.’

  One of the boys made a coarse comment that caused the others to laugh, and even though the teacher must have heard it she made no attempt to chastise him.

  There were girls whom she could have been friends with, girls who, like her, seemed rather shy, but because she had come so late to the school they had already made their friends and formed their small protective groups, and Davina certainly did not have the self-confidence to break into them.

  Everyone else at school looked different as well. The girls wore jeans or very short skirts, which were officially banned, but which were worn nevertheless. They had long straight hair and the more daring of them wore dark kohl lines around their eyes and pale pink lipstick.

  Davina studied them with awed envy. Her father did not approve of make-up. The one time she had dared to spend her money on a soft pink lipstick he had told her to go upstairs and scrub her face clean.

  At fifteen years old she knew that she still looked like a little girl, while her peers were already almost young women.

  At sixteen she left school. There was no point in her staying on, her father told her grimly as he viewed her poor exam results.

  Instead he paid for her to attend a private secretarial school in Chester so that she could learn to type and so do work for him at home when necessary.

  And then just before her seventeenth birthday a small miracle occurred. Out of the blue one morning, while she was engaged on her bimonthly chore of polishing the heavy silver in the dining-room, a visitor arrived.

  Davina heard the doorbell ring and went to answer it, wiping her hands on her apron as she did so. She was wearing a pleated skirt, which had originally been her mother’s and which was too wide and too long for her, and her own school jumper, which was too small and too tight.

  It would never have occurred to her to ask her father for new clothes. He gave her a weekly housekeeping allowance, but she had to provide him with receipts for the meticulously kept accounts he went through with her every Friday evening.

  As she opened the door Davina blinked in surprise at the girl she saw standing there. She was tall, and very slim, and a few years Davina’s senior. She was wearing a very, very short skirt; her long straight hair would have been the envy of the girls in Davina’s class at school and in addition to the kohl liner around her eyes she was wearing false eyelashes.

  Her mouth was painted a perfect pale frothy pink, and as Davina stared at her she smiled and said cheerfully, ‘Hi, you must be Davina. Your dad sent me round with some stuff for you to type. I’m working for him while Moaning Martha is recuperating from her op. Honest to God, the instructions she gave me before she left …!’

  The thick black eyelashes batted. She was, Davina recognised in awe, chewing gum. The thought of this girl working for her father, replacing Martha Hillary, her father’s fifty-odd-year-old secretary, was almost too much for Davina to take in.

  ‘I’m dying for a Coke. Not got any, I suppose?’

  She was already stepping inside the house, while Davina apologised that all she could offer her was tea or coffee.

  The thickly pan-sticked pale face contorted briefly, the long hair barely moving as she tossed her head. ‘OK, go on, then. I’ll make do with the coffee.

  ‘What on earth do you do all day, cooped up in this place?’ she demanded when Davina led her to the kitchen. ‘It would drive me crazy. That’s why I do temping. Just as soon as I can get a bit of money together, I’m off to London. That’s where it’s all happening.’

  It was the start of a brief and wholly unexpected friendship.

  Davina never knew why Mandy befriended her. Later on in her life she suspected that Mandy, beneath the outrageous clothes and make-up, had a very strong crusading and protective streak, for she could certainly think of no other logical reason why Mandy should have taken her under her wing.

  Under Mandy’s tutelage and because she was equally afraid of disappointing her as she was of angering her father, she forced herself to do as Mandy urged and to ask—Mandy had told her to demand—her father to give her a personal allowance.

  When he agreed Davina could only assume that either she had caught him in a moment of unfamiliar weakness or that he had been so shocked by her request that he had acceded to it without thinking.

  When Mandy heard how much she was to get she had pulled another face.

  ‘Peanuts,’ she had said scoffingly. ‘You should have asked for at least twice as much. God, the typing you do alone would cost him hundreds if he sent it out to an agency.’

  Several times a week Mandy would sneak out of Carey’s and come racing over in her bright red battered Mini, entertaining and alarming Davina with her tales of her hectic and tangled love-life.

  She consistently tried to persuade Davina to go out with her at night, but Davina always refused. Although often she envied Mandy her confidence and her worldliness when Mandy described in graphic detail the more intimate side of her life, Davina found herself recoiling a little. She was an avid reader, a dreamer, a romantic, who cherished ideals of the kind of man she would eventually love and who would love her, and he bore no resemblance whatsoever to the descriptions Mandy gave her of her boyfriends and their sexual demands.

  And then, just over six weeks after they had first met, Mandy announced that she was leaving Cheshire and going to London.

  Davina mourned her going and missed her. Mandy had brought colour and warmth to her life. She was the first close friend she had ever had, and without her life seemed dull and flat.

  Her father, who had never approved of the friendship, made no bones about the fact that he was glad she had gone, even though he complained that she had left before his actual secretary was well enough to return to work.

  It was summer. Working in the garden, keeping the flowerbeds and the lawn in the immaculate state her father demanded, had tanned Davina’s body and firmed her muscles. She wasn’t very tall, her body slim and delicate, and she had shoulder-length mousy fair hair. She hated her hair. It was neither one thing nor the other, neither curly nor straight, but possessed of an unwanted wave, so fine and silky that it was constantly falling in her eyes. It was a hot summer and the sun had bleached it a little, giving it blonde highlights, which emphasised the fragility of her small face with its sombre grey eyes.

  Davina had never thought of herself as being pretty. Pretty girls looked like Mandy or like the models in magazines, and she did not look like them, but one Saturday morning, as she was weeding the front garden, dressed in her shorts and the cotton top she had made herself on her mother’s sewing-machine, the paperboy abandoned his bike to stare admiringly at
her and to tell her with a grin, ‘Great legs, babe.’

  He was seventeen years old and modelled himself on his American TV heroes. Davina blushed deep pink and hurriedly tucked her legs out of sight.

  But even though his comment had embarrassed her, it had also in some complex way pleased her.

  Sometimes now at night she lay awake in bed, confused by what she was feeling, aching for someone she could talk to … for someone to love.

  She had started playing tennis with the local vicar’s daughter, who was home from university for the holidays. They played together a couple of times a week.

  Vicky Lane had a boyfriend, a fellow student, and the two of them were planning to spend a year backpacking once they finished university. As she listened to Vicky describing their plans, talking about the life they intended to live, Davina envied her. Compared with others, her life seemed so constricted, so dull and boring, but what could she do? She could not leave her father. How would he manage, and besides, how could she support herself? She had no skills. She could type and do some book-keeping; that was all.

  She had tried to suggest to her father that maybe she could work at Carey’s, but he had been furious with her. Who was to take care of the house and of him? he had demanded. She was becoming selfish, spoiled, he had added, and guiltily she had abandoned the subject.

  The village they lived in was small, with very few other people of her age. Most of them had left to work elsewhere and those who remained worked either for Carey’s or on their parents’ land.

  There was a certain pattern to village life, a certain hierarchy into which Davina and her father did not really fit.

  There were the farming families, established over many, many generations, whose positions had been created not just by wealth but also by the length of time their family names had been associated with the area.

  Davina and her father were outside that hierarchy. There were older people in the village who remembered her grandfather and who still made disparaging remarks about her father, saying that he had got above himself, reminding themselves and others that his father had been nothing but the local apothecary … one of them, in fact.