Ruthless Passion

by Penny Jordan

  Her father had, Davina was forced to admit, remained as much a stranger, an enigma to her in his death as he had been during his life. She knew that during the war, partly qualified and obviously idealistic, he had enlisted as a medical orderly with the army.

  How could a man with those sort of ideals then become the same man who, it seemed, had ignored all the advantages, all the challenges his training had given him, all those opportunities to benefit mankind, and instead simply lived off the profits of the company?

  Had he perhaps been afraid that no matter what he did he might never match the achievements of his own father? But her grandfather’s discovery of the heart drug had been more by accident than design; he had been an untrained explorer in a world which her father’s education should have mapped out so clearly for him that it would have been easy for him not just to follow in his father’s footsteps, but to continue that journey even further.

  There was no point now in looking back into the past for answers to questions that could never be answered, she told herself as she drank her coffee. What she had to do was to concentrate on the problems of the present. And those of the future? If Carey’s had a future.

  She finished her coffee and went upstairs to shower and get dressed.

  Despite the warnings of the environmental lobby concerning the detrimental effect of the motor car on the quality and health safety of people’s lives, and even in spite of the fact that driving was an increasingly stressful activity, with the roads becoming more busy and more hazardous every year, people, including herself, still continued to ignore all the disadvantages of driving for its one simple heavyweight advantage, Davina reflected as she parked her car in the car park that surrounded her local food hypermarket.

  And what woman, having endured the discomfort and sheer physical effort involved in lugging heavy bags of grocery shopping on and off public transport in all kinds of weather, having carried that same shopping from the bus-stop to her home, more often than not having to cope with small children at the same time, would willingly go back to such a protracted means of carrying out what at best was an unattractive and stressful chore?

  No wonder the car park was full, and Davina suspected that, until someone came up with a truly viable alternative to the motor car, this and other car parks like it all over the country would continue to be full.

  The years of living first with her father and then with Gregory had taught her to be an economical and thrifty shopper, but these days, with only herself to cater for, Davina found she was becoming less and less inclined to cook. She liked simple meals—fruit, crusty bread, cheeses and pasta rather than the heavy meat, potato and vegetable main courses her father had always insisted upon.

  She shopped quickly and methodically, her mind on other things. The check-outs were busy, and she sighed a little to herself, knowing that whichever queue she chose it would be the wrong one. For once, though, she seemed to be in luck. The girl on her check-out was quick and efficient, pleasant too, Davina noticed as she watched the way the girl smiled and responded to the person she was serving.

  Davina was just about to unload her own trolley when she noticed that the woman standing behind her was only carrying a few items, and, moreover, that she was rather obviously glancing at her watch.

  Even though she suspected that she was being deliberately manipulated, Davina gave in, wryly inviting the woman to precede her in the queue. As she stepped back to allow her past she saw the man standing in the next queue.

  Her heart gave a ferocious bound as against all the odds she recognised him immediately. It might have been growing dark then and bright neon-lit daylight now, but she hadn’t just recognised him with her sight, she had somehow known him with her senses as well. He wasn’t looking at her. He was talking to the young girl he had with him. His daughter? Certainly they were close, the girl leaning confidently and lovingly against him as she said something to him.

  An unfamiliar emotion gripped Davina as she watched them. Once, a long time ago it seemed now, she had hoped for children, when she had been young and naïve. She had years ago come to accept that Gregory was the last man she would have wanted as a father for her child, a role model, and that, in denying her children, life, or fate, had been generous to her rather than cruel.

  But suddenly, seeing him, with that child … she was overwhelmed not just by a sense of deprivation and loss, but also by a feeling of resentment, of dislike almost, so sharp that it was an actual physical pain.

  She turned away abruptly, not wanting to see any more, quickly attacking the tangled mountain of shopping piling up at the other end of the conveyor.

  It was only once she was back at home, feeling calmer, that she was able to ask herself just why a man who was a stranger to her should cause her to react to him with such intense antagonism. Surely not merely because he had given her a bit of a shock, thrown her off guard and made her feel vulnerable for a handful of seconds?

  Was it, then, because for some inexplicable reason he had reminded her briefly of Matt, or rather because that momentary accidental physical contact with him had stirred up memories of Matt?

  It wasn’t a line of self-investigation she felt it wise to pursue.

  She had work to do, she reminded herself as she put away the last of the shopping. And surely enough tangible things to worry about without adding any foolishly unnecessary intangibles.

  * * *

  ‘Where are we going now, Uncle Saul?’

  Saul’s frown disappeared as he looked down into Cathy’s expectant face. She always had such a shining happiness about her, this niece of his, a warmth and the kind of innocence that belonged to those who genuinely loved their fellow humans and who saw only the good in others and never the bad.

  As he stowed away their shopping in the boot of his car he couldn’t help contrasting her loving openness with the cynicism and materialism of his own children, especially Josephine.

  True, she was older than Cathy, and perhaps more exposed to the kind of lifestyle that encouraged materialism. But her cynicism, the deep-rooted contempt and disdain he could see in her, not just for him but for almost everyone she came into contact with—how had she come by those? Was it his fault, not perhaps by example—he had never spent enough time with either of his children for that—but maybe by omission?

  His children needed him, Christie had told him. He doubted that they would share that view. He and Karen should never have had children, he decided savagely. Neither of them had turned out to be even adequate parents, never mind good. It would have been better if he and Karen had remained childless like Davina James and her husband.

  Davina James! It had startled him to see her in the supermarket this morning, dressed casually in jeans and a loose cotton top. He had watched her, unobserved, while she shopped, noting her neat, methodical movements, the quick, intent way she made her choices, her manner efficient and contained, controlled, and somehow very much at odds with the way she had to pause occasionally to push her hair back off her face when it swung forward, obscuring her view, as she bent to take something from a lower shelf. That gesture had betrayed a vulnerability that for some reason had reminded him of Cathy. He was irritated with himself, and his frown deepened.

  Davina James meant nothing to him other than through her connection with Carey’s and the fact that she was its main shareholder.

  He realised that Cathy was still waiting for an answer to her question. ‘I don’t know,’ he responded. ‘We could have lunch somewhere if you like.’

  Vigorously Cathy nodded her head. As he drove through the town Saul had noticed a family pub-cumrestaurant which was part of a nationwide chain, and when he suggested this to Cathy as a lunch venue she beamed responsively.

  The place was quite busy, mainly with family groups, and a smiling waitress quickly showed Cathy and Saul to a table.

  Saul hid his amusement at the very adult air Cathy assumed when she was handed a menu. A quick glance at its contents made him suspec
t that his sister would not have entirely approved of what was on offer as an example of nutritious healthy eating, but he stifled his conscience by telling himself that it was only a one-off.

  The table next to them was occupied by a couple with two early-teenage children, both boys, both enjoying large plates of some kind of battered fish and chips, and Saul grimaced a little to himself as he saw Cathy eyeing the contents of their plates lustfully. There was nothing on the menu that really appealed to him, but he ordered from it nevertheless, his attention suddenly caught when he heard the woman at the next table saying grimly to her husband, ‘I tell you, Bert, it makes my blood boil. Everyone at Carey’s knows that it’s the stuff the girls have to handle that gives them these rashes, but will they do anything to stop it? No. Too damn mean to care what happens to those who make their money for them.’

  ‘Carey’s … Carey’s … Come on, love, you’re not at work now,’ her husband retorted, clearly irritated and bored by a conversation he had obviously heard over and over again. ‘You’re the shop steward. It’s up to you to get them to do something about it. There’s no point in complaining to me. I don’t even work there.’

  ‘No, thank God. It looks as if the lot of us will be out of work anyway before too long.’

  ‘Has she told you that?’

  The woman shook her head, chewing a mouthful of food before responding.

  Saul’s own meal had been served, but he was too interested in listening to what was being said at the next table to do more than pretend to eat it.

  ‘No. She seems to think she’s going to get someone to buy her out … at least, that’s what we’ve heard, although she’s not admitting it.

  ‘Mind you, I’ve got to say that at least she does seem to take more of an interest in us than that husband of hers ever did. Never saw him down in the packing sheds or on the assembly line unless he’d got his eye on one of the girls working there. A right one, he was. Always at it, and never cared who with either. He was with someone else the night he was killed. It’s no wonder she’s taken up with Giles.’

  Her husband put down his knife and fork. ‘Has she, now? Well, she wouldn’t be my type, and I’m surprised she’s his with a wife like he’s got. Now, she’s—’

  ‘Bert,’ his wife warned, glaring at him and then looking towards their two sons, who were both oblivious to their parents’ conversation.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m quite happy with what I’ve got at home,’ Bert told her with a grin, and Saul suspected from the brief silence that followed and the way they were looking at one another that the hand Bert had slid under the table wasn’t entirely innocently occupied.

  So Davina James was having an affair with Giles Redwood.

  He pushed away his meal virtually untouched, causing Cathy to give him a brief uncertain look.

  The couple at the next table had finished eating and were chivvying their two sons to finish theirs. The woman was small and vigorous-looking, with thick dark red hair, the man taller and more relaxed. Saul observed the way the man’s hand rested momentarily on his wife’s buttock as they left the restaurant. Karen would have poured scorn and contempt on their behaviour, her voice acidly derisive as she criticised them, but momentarily Saul found himself envying them.

  They were just an ordinary couple, an ordinary family such as one might see anywhere, a couple without many financial or educational advantages, but they had something that he had never had: they had a closeness not just with one another, but with the two boys who had now joined them, a family closeness and a personal awareness of and for one another which he and Karen had never truly known. And which he never would now know?

  He shook off the heaviness of his thoughts as he waited for Cathy to finish the chocolate-laced ice-cream dessert she was battling with. Too much introspection, too much dwelling on self-pity was an affliction peculiar to modern-day man and woman, according to a doctor friend he knew. But his chief fault over the years had not been too much delving into his own motivations, but too much sealing himself off from them.

  Because he had been afraid of looking behind the shadow over his life which his father had cast in case he might not recognise the reality of the self that stood behind it?

  ‘I’m finished, Uncle Saul.’

  * * *

  Saul spent the rest of the day rereading the file he had brought with him and adding to it the snippets of information he had picked up since his arrival in Cheshire.

  Christie rang to check that everything was all right. She sounded preoccupied and distant when Saul spoke to her, almost edgy, in fact, but he put this down to the fact that she was probably caught up in the self-generating tension such conferences always seemed to produce.

  His own next logical step was to get in touch with the manager of the local branch of the bank that Carey’s used and to make sure that he won them over to his, or rather Alex’s, way of thinking.

  It shouldn’t be too difficult. Carey’s were heavily in debt to the bank and he had no doubt that in the present financial climate the banker would be only too pleased to offload its liability on to Alex.

  Gregory James had been very clever when setting up the original loans in managing not to give the bank any personal guarantees for them; and, with the value of commercial property of any sort so very low, the bank would be lucky to realise even half of its borrowing if it forced Carey’s into bankruptcy and sale.

  Yes, he suspected the manager would welcome him with open arms and do everything he could to persuade Davina James to sell out.

  He frowned a little to himself, drumming his fingers on the table. Davina James was no businesswoman; so little so in fact that she had had to plead with Giles Redwood to stay on and to take over running the company for her.

  By sleeping with him? Or had that merely been a bonus, for both of them? Had they in fact been having an affair before Gregory James died? And how much did the fact that they were having an affair affect his own initial assessment of the situation?

  If she did prove stubborn, in view of that relationship, it might not be a possibility to consider applying leverage by bribing Giles to leave. It depended which one of them needed their affair the most. It had to be her, surely? A lonely, probably insecure woman whose husband had been openly unfaithful to her for years …

  He frowned briefly. It irritated him that she was proving so difficult to slot neatly into the place he had made for her; there were too many conflicting components … too many things about her that didn’t tie in together neatly, and yet what was there really about her to cause him all this unwanted consideration? She was a widowed woman of thirty-seven, forced to step into her husband’s shoes on his death; a woman who could not really have the slightest interest in the company of which she was the main shareholder, a woman who on the face of it should not have caused him even a second’s deviation from the path he had set himself. Not young, not beautiful, not brilliantly clever. So why had she lodged in his thoughts with all the irritation of a small pebble in a tight-fitting shoe?

  He shrugged it off, denying the reason for its existence. Just as he had denied for too many years that he was playing a role in life which rightly belonged to someone else. That they were not his choices, his goals he was reaching for. That the need which had driven him had never been to achieve financial success and recognition but simply to receive his father’s approval and love?

  Why did he feel so demeaned by having to admit that need? Why did it make him feel so vulnerable, so afraid … so angry?

  Because it was wrong for a man to admit that he needed anyone’s love, much less a parent’s.

  He glanced across at Cathy, her head over the book she was reading. No need to question if Cathy felt secure in her mother’s love. It was obvious that she did. But what about his own children? Did he want his son, his daughter to repeat his mistakes, to waste their lives questing for something every child should have as a birthright? What kind of father was he anyway, that he might have denied that need,
might not even have recognised it?

  He moved restlessly in his chair. He was letting Christie get to him. His children had no real need of him, and they certainly did not want or need his love; they had demonstrated that to him often enough.

  But what if they did? What if beneath the indifference, the cynicism, the apparent contempt and disdain, they too ached for his approval, his time, his attention, his unequivocal acceptance of them as they really were, as he had done for his father’s?

  His eyes had started to blur. He lifted his hand to rub away the exhaustion clouding them and discovered with a sense of disbelief that it wasn’t tiredness or strain that had blurred his sight, but tears.

  Tears. For his children or for himself?

  He needed time to think things through properly, he told himself wearily. To allow himself to be pressured by his emotions into any kind of impulsive action was simply not sensible. Not possible either. Before he could give any attention to his personal affairs he needed to get this business of the purchase of Carey’s sorted out. Well, hopefully, with the bank to bring pressure on Davina James, if it was needed, it shouldn’t take too long.

  Davina James.

  Where was she now? With her lover? Another woman’s husband, by the sound of things. Odd—he hadn’t somehow thought of her as the type. But then, what was the type? Did there have to be a type? As far as he could see from his own cynical observation of heterosexual relationships, there were only two main reasons for those relationships breaking up, both related to control and power. And within most relationships there were only two bases for that control: one was money, and the other was sex. And in the past it had, as a generalisation, normally been the man who controlled the money and the woman the sex, and, like any kind of transaction in which mankind indulged, it very quickly became common currency for one to barter with his or her power-base for what he or she wanted from the other.

  Equally, it never took long for one and often both of them to discover that anything that was not freely and generously shared with full equality soon became not worth having, or so loaded down with resentment and hidden anger that it came to be used as a means of punishment rather than a reward.