Lingering Shadows. PENNY JORDAN

sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ Gregory told her smoothly as he released her hand.

      For a moment Davina felt confused. There was something about the tone in which he delivered the apology that jarred on her, some falseness, some instinctive awareness of a mockery of her, as though he intended the words to have a double meaning, as though he was laughing at her for her reaction to him, but these feelings were so vague and unformed that they had vanished before she could really grasp them, leaving her to stammer a few incoherent words, while Gregory continued, ‘Your father was on his way to tell you that everyone is ready to eat, and I asked if I might deliver the message for him. And to see if there was anything I could do to help.’

      To help? Davina gave him an unguarded startled look. Her father believed that it was a woman’s place to be subservient in every way to the males in the household, and the thought of any man offering her any kind of domestic help was a concept with which Davina was completely unfamiliar.

      ‘Thank you, but there’s really no need,’ she began breathlessly, but he stopped her, looking at her until she could no longer meet the intensity of his gaze as he said slowly,

      ‘Oh, yes, there is. There is every need. I’ve been wanting to meet you, Davina.’

      He … this wonderful, good-looking man, had been wanting to meet her? She shook her head dizzily, wondering if she had fallen asleep and was having a dream, but no, it was real. He was real. She was so flustered that she could barely even breathe, never mind think of moving, and Gregory, watching her, allowed himself a small inner smile of satisfaction. Good. She was obviously as naïve and dumb as he had heard. He had met her. Now the rest should be easy.

      Brought up by a widowed mother who had died while he was in his first year at university, Gregory had always bitterly resented the good fortune of others, a good fortune which had been denied to him. His mother was poor. He was clever and good-looking, but he learned early in life that that did not compensate for lack of wealth. Wealth was power, and power was what Gregory wanted. He had learned young to smile and say nothing when others taunted him or drew attention to his second-hand school uniform and the poverty of his possessions. His time would come. He would make sure that it came.

      It was while he was at university that he realised how hard it was going to be for him to achieve his ambition. The best jobs, and with them the money and the power he craved, would not be offered to someone like him. They would go to others, youths with far fewer qualifications than he possessed, far less worthwhile degrees, but they had something more important than intelligence: they had family; they had position and power.

      It had been a chance conversation he had overheard between two fellow graduates which had told him the path he must take through life. Both of them were unaware of his presence, and were discussing a third, absent friend.

      ‘You know, his sister’s getting married in June. He was telling me about it last week. She’s in the club. His family are furious. Apparently she’s been going around with some working-class type, who obviously knew which side his bread was buttered on. Now she’s pregnant, the family have no option but to let them marry, and they’ll have to support them, find him some sort of decent job. They’re furious about the whole thing, but, of course, they’re putting a brave face on it.’

      ‘Nice work if you can get it,’ the other man commented wryly. ‘Marrying a rich girl.’

      Marrying a rich girl. Gregory mulled the thought over in his mind, letting it lie fallow for a short time before finally allowing it to take root.

      The problem was that he did not know any rich girls. He knew girls … plenty of them. He was a good-looking young man who had grown up in an environment where teenagers had begun experimenting with sex well under the legal age limit, and he had learned early the basic mechanics of sex. To those over the years he had added a variety of refinements which so far had ensured him as much success as he needed or wanted with the opposite sex.

      When he wished he could be ingratiatingly charming and well mannered, surface attributes that went no more than skin-deep, as those of his sexual partners who had not immediately taken the hint that he was tired of them had very quickly found out.

      Gregory had no real warmth about him, no real kindness; as far as he was concerned, they were weaknesses he could not afford.

      A rich wife. He bided his time. The doors to the homes of his fellow graduates, or at least those who could have introduced him to the lifestyle he craved, remained firmly closed to him. He got a job and then another, and finally a third with Carey’s.

      He had chosen Carey’s out of three possible employers because he had learned from eavesdropping on a casual conversation while waiting to be interviewed that the man who owned Carey’s had only one child, an unmarried daughter.

      Gregory had become very adept over the years at listening to other people’s conversations. He had discovered it was an extremely profitable way of learning things.

      He had been at Carey’s now for six months. That was how long it had taken him to discreetly and cautiously bring himself to old man Carey’s eye, without offending or arousing the suspicions of his co-employees.

      He had accepted the accolade of the dinner invitation for one purpose only, and that had been to meet this small, naïve girl with the flushed face and untidy hair. He had made enough discreet enquiries into Carey’s now to know just how rich Davina would one day be.

      Physically she was not his type. He liked women with endless legs, generously curved bodies and with that look in their eyes which said they knew what life was all about.

      Davina Carey was small and slight, her body girlish rather than sensual. Her eyes held naïveté and self-consciousness. And when they looked at him they also held awe and wonder.

      As he accepted Davina’s disjointed dismissal and left the kitchen—after all, he had never intended actually to help her; that had simply been an opportune method of meeting her—he was smiling to himself.

      Physically, as a woman, she might not appeal to him, but as a wife, a rich wife, she would be ideal.

      Davina served the meal in a daze of gauzy unbelievable daydreams in which all manner of impossible things suddenly seemed dramatically possible.

      Now, she told herself breathlessly as she cleared the plates from the main course, scraping them into the waste-bin before soaking them in hot water and then hurrying to serve the pudding, she knew why there had never been anyone else in her life: it had been because fate had already chosen Gregory for her. Because fate had known that he was there, that he existed; that he lived and breathed … even if she hadn’t.

      Her body completely still, she stared out of the kitchen window, lost in her dreams, and then abruptly and painfully jolted herself back to reality by reminding herself that she was probably reading far too much into what he had said to her, in the way he had looked at her. Achingly she wished she had someone, a friend in whom she could confide, whose advice she could seek, with whom she could discuss the wonder and excitement of what had happened.

      Gregory deliberately waited almost a week before getting in touch with her. A week was just long enough for her to have begun to lose hope, but nowhere near long enough for her to have even begun to forget about him.

      He telephoned her, using his office telephone.

      Davina had just returned from doing some shopping. She picked up the receiver and said the number, her heart shuddering to a frantic standstill of shock and pleasure when she heard Gregory’s voice.

      So many times over the last six days she had mentally relived those moments when he had walked into the kitchen, the things he had said, the way he had looked, and, with each day that passed, so her belief in herself, in the message his eyes had silently given her, had diminished.

      And now, just when she had been on the verge of giving up hope, of accepting that she had foolishly read far too much into what had happened, he had rung her.

      And then as abruptly as her hopes had swung upwards they were dashed again as he said