Lingering Shadows. Penny Jordan

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