Innocent Mistress. Margaret Way

smoking, womanising. Despite the warnings it never occurred to him to give anything up. With any luck he was dead. Ralph had lost every skerrick of affection for that big bull of a man who was his father. He didn’t consider he closely resembled his father at the same age.

      Ralph shot out of bed, pulling on jeans and a shirt in a great hurry. He didn’t bother finding shoes. He rushed into the hallway, covering the not inconsiderable distance to his father’s suite in the west wing in record time. His mother and father hadn’t shared a bedroom in years. In his arrogance and insensitivity—Lester Rogan thought of his wife and children as property—he’d brought in workman to turn several rooms of the family mansion into a self-contained suite for himself. Ralph’s long-suffering mother had no back bone. She was a thin pitiful thing these days and she’d been left out in the cold. His father was like that: a law unto himself. That’s what came of too much money and power.

      Inside the massive bedroom with its heavy Victorian furniture inappropriate to the climate Ralph found his mother slumped to the floor beside his father’s bed. She was sobbing bitterly, her thin body convulsing as though shocked and grieved out of her mind.

      “I couldn’t sleep. I knew something had happened.” She turned her head, choking on her tears. “He’s gone, Ralph. He’s gone.”

      “And good riddance.” Ralph Rogan let a lifetime of bitterness and resentment rip out. For moments he stood staring at his father’s body, his heavy, handsome face dark with brooding, a thick blue vein throbbing in his temple. Eventually he moved to check if his father was indeed dead. A huge man in life, in death Lester Rogan looked surprisingly lighter, shorter, his mouth thrown open and his jaw slack. His eyes were still open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Ralph reached down to shut them, but abruptly drew back as if the corpse would rise up and bite him. He didn’t want to touch the man who had treated him so badly, who had never shown an ounce of pleasure or pride in him. All he’d received were insults and humiliations, comparisons with that clever bastard, Jude Conroy, the Golden Boy.

      “He’s dead all right!” Coldly he informed his weeping mother, throwing the sheet over his father’s face with something approaching violence. “I’ll get Atwell over. He’ll have to sign the death certificate.” Ralph cast another disgusted look at his mother, before drawing her to her feet. “What the hell are you crying about, Ma?” he demanded in genuine amazement. “He treated you like dirt. He never had a kind word for you. He kicked you out of his bed. He had other women.”

      “I loved him,” his mother said, disengaging herself from her son’s hard grasp and collapsing into one of the huge maroon leather armchairs custom built for her husband. It dwarfed her. “We were happy once.”

      Ralph’s laugh was near wild. “What a load of drivel! It must have been a lifetime ago. There’s never been any happiness in this house. You’ll have to pull yourself together while I phone Atwell. Where’s Jinx?”

      “Please don’t call your sister that, Ralph,” his mother pleaded. “Sometimes you’re so cruel.”

      He rounded on her, tall and burly, deep-set dark eyes, large straight nose, square jaw, already at twenty-eight carrying too much weight. “I didn’t give her the nickname, remember? It was Dad. Okay, where’s Mel?”

      “Here, Ralph.” A light soprano voice spoke from the door. “He can’t be dead.” Melinda Rogan cast one horrified glance at the sheeted figure on the bed, then advanced fearfully into the room.

      “He is, darling.” Myra Rogan answered, holding out her hand to her dressing gowned daughter. Melinda was two years younger than her brother, a pretty young woman with her mother’s small neat features, soft brown hair and grey eyes.

      “Well I’ll be damned!” Ralph mocked. “He never did a thing the doc told him.”

      “It’s such a shock, Ralph.” Melinda swallowed on the hard lump in her throat. Bravely she went to tend to her mother, putting her arms around Myra’s thin shoulders. “Don’t weep for him, Mum,” she said gently, her own eyes bright with unshed tears. Death was death after all. “He never showed you any kindness.”

      “He did once,” Myra insisted, rocking herself back and forth.

      “Oh, yeah, when?” Ralph busy pushing buttons on the phone looked towards them to bark.

      Myra tried to think when her husband had been kind to her. “Before you were born, a few years after that,” she said vaguely. Lester Rogan had taken little notice of his daughter.

      “So he never cared for me from day one,” Ralph snarled.

      “That’s not true. He loved you. He had great plans for you.” The fact that these plans never worked out was not always Lester’s fault.

      Abruptly Ralph held up a staying hand, speaking into the phone to his father’s doctor.

      “Here, Mum,” Melinda found a box of tissues. Copious tears were streaming down her mother’s face, dampening the front of her nightgown. Once her mother had been pretty, but for years now she had been neglecting herself, horribly aware her husband had no use for her.

      “Atwell will be here in twenty minutes,” Ralph informed them. “Could you please stop all that hypocritical blubbing, Mum, and get yourself dressed. That man in the bed there—” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder “—has done us a huge favour. At long last we’re free of him and his cruel tongue.”

      “Surely you mean at long last you can get your hands on the money,” Melinda challenged, suddenly looking at her brother as though he were the enemy. “You’re head of the family now. I tell you what, Ralph, I’ll take a bet you’ll turn out no better than Dad.”

      It was hours before Ralph Rogan was able to make his phone call to his old sparring partner, Jude Conroy. Good old Jude, the big success story. The hotshot lawyer. There was no love lost between them. Once when they were kids, around thirteen, Conroy had whipped him good and proper for bullying some new kid, a snivelling little runt, small as a girl, who’d been admitted to their excellent boys’ school on scholarship. Ralph had never forgotten lying on the ground, wiping the blood from his nose and his mouth—a loose tooth. It was easy to beat up other kids. It was humiliating to be beaten up yourself. One day he swore he’d get even with Jude Conroy, school hero, champion of the underdog, young lion. Even Ralph’s mother had said he’d probably deserved his beating, taking Conroy’s side.

      His father and Conroy’s father had been real close. Matthew Conroy had been his dad’s solicitor. Conroy knew all the secrets and he’d taken them down to the deep with him. Now Ralph was going to need a solicitor and loathe as he was to contact Jude, he knew he had to. Matthew Conroy had drawn up his father’s will but in the event of his death Lester Rogan had appointed Jude executor.

      Lester Rogan’s funeral was underway before a young woman slipped into the back pew of the church. She knelt for a moment, then sat back quietly. A navy silk scarf was wound around her hair in such a way not a tendril escaped. She wore a simple navy shift dress. A few people at the back of the church turned to glance at her. Most were caught up in the eulogies, as first Ralph Rogan, then various towns-people walked to the podium to endeavour to say a few words for the late Lester Rogan, whose real estate kingdom included half the town and stretched for miles.

      Though everyone tried—some better than others—there was no real feeling, not even from his son who stood with his hand over his heart, face beaded with sweat in the heat, rambling on about what a giant among men his father had been; how his father had taught him everything he knew. This had caused a little sardonic ripple to pass through the congregation that was quickly brought under control. Lester Rogan had not been loved and admired. Over the years he had become as mean as they come. Collective wisdom suggested Ralph was shaping up to be a chip off the old block.

      The family sat up the front, son and daughter with their faces blank, Myra Rogan inexplicably weeping uncontrollably as though her husband had been the finest man ever to walk the earth.

      Tears of joy, a lot of the congregation thought waspishly.