A Fortnight by the Sea. Emma Page
post first. A bit late this morning. I’ve been downstairs, fixing up a spot of leave.’ He saw Jourdan’s questioning look. ‘I’m taking next week off. I fancy a breath of sea air.’
I’ll ask Fiona again next week, Bob thought, with a sense that events had somehow taken a decisive turn. He had a strong notion that with Stephen Lockwood out of the way for what? – the best part of ten days? – Fiona might have time to stand back and take a look at his own apparently teasing pursuit of her, might begin to reconsider the situation between herself and Lockwood, might very well, before the week was out, decide that she was not after all perpetually too busy to accept a dinner invitation from the Assistant Home Sales Manager.
In the larger and better-furnished office next door Stephen glanced through his letters. Nothing of world-shaking interest this morning. He raised his head and twirled his pencil between his fingers. That look of surprise and pleasure on Jourdan’s face when he told him he’d be away for a week . . . how well he could remember feeling exactly that blend of emotions in his junior days whenever his immediate boss declared an intention to take himself out of the premises for a while. I’ll show them, he used to think, I’ll make my mark. Into the office every morning at eight o’clock, the last one to leave at night . . . His shoulders moved in wry amusement.
Now he was no longer the young thruster, but the establishment figure the new wave of young thrusters must push aside on their way up the ladder. He caught the way that Jourdan looked at him sometimes, a curious, obsessive look. Did I ever look at my boss that way? he wondered. I don’t suppose he cared for it very much either. How rapidly the years slipped by, with what speed the game of musical chairs was played, how swiftly one was forced out of one role and into another. Was there ever any real choice in the matter? Was the whole thing inexorably played out in accordance with a set of rules totally beyond one’s control?
He became aware of his secretary standing at the other side of his desk. ‘Yes?’ He forced his attention back to the concerns of Monday morning. ‘By the way,’ he added when he had dealt with her query, ‘I shall be away next week. Taking a few days by the sea.’ He stood up and walked over to a framed map on the wall, jabbed a finger against the glass. ‘There, that’s the place. Chilford. We’re not actually staying in the town. We’re going to relatives, a little village a few miles along the coast. A pretty little place. A good golf-course.’
‘Westerhill,’ Jean Ashton said to her mother. ‘I’d better write the address down for you.’ She took a pencil from her handbag. ‘Oakfield, Westerhill, near Chilford. You can put care of Barratt if you like, but I shouldn’t think it’s necessary.’
Her mother took the paper and studied it. ‘It’s not a hotel, then?’
‘No, it’s some kind of guest-house. I got it from one of the Sunday papers.’ One of the better Sunday papers of course, her tone implied, it’s certainly not any kind of common seaside boarding-house. What she would really have liked would have been a jet flight to Majorca, she could have sunned herself all winter in the glow of that memory. She smiled suddenly. ‘Next year we might be able to afford a holiday abroad.’
Her mother frowned. ‘You’re not serious about getting Mike to apply for that security job? His heart’s obviously in the police, you can’t ask him to leave the force.’
The smile vanished from Jean’s face. ‘He’s already applied for the security job.’ I saw to that, her look added. ‘Far better pay. I’m not just thinking of myself,’ she said defensively, ‘nor about luxuries like foreign holidays. We can give the kids a better start, we could buy a house of our own.’ Instead of living in a police house set in a kind of ghetto.
‘He would have a proper career in the police,’ her mother said with unusual firmness. ‘This Guardcash job would be just that, a job.’ She shook her head. ‘Mike’s the kind of man who needs satisfaction in his work.’
Jean set her mouth in a stubborn line. ‘It’s an administrative post he’s applied for. He wouldn’t just be one of the guards riding the vans.’ She stood up. ‘And anyway, he hasn’t got very far in the police. In a couple of years he’ll be forty and what is he? Just a sergeant.’
‘You’re lucky to have a good husband,’ her mother said in a low voice. Five years now since she’d been widowed and she still felt the loss almost as keenly as in those first dreadful weeks.
Jean sighed and glanced at the clock. ‘I must go, I’ve got to meet the twins.’ Her oldest daughter was fifteen, too late now to rescue her from the clutches of state education, but the twins were only seven and one of the first things Jean intended to do, as soon as Mike’s appointment with Guardcash was a definite fact, was to take the twins away from their primary school and send them to a select little private academy in Perrymount. In the best residential area of Perrymount, of course.
‘Remember your father’s Cousin Arthur,’ her mother said suddenly. Jean gave her an exasperated glance and went out into the hall to get her coat. Cousin Arthur was a new one on her but she was only too familiar with her mother’s habit of producing outlandish – and, Jean had a shrewd suspicion, mythical – relatives to illustrate a point or drive home a moral. ‘He was a plumber.’ Her mother’s voice winged its way from the sitting room. ‘A very good plumber.’ Jean pulled a face of distaste at this fresh plebeian sprouting from the ancestral tree. ‘His wife kept on at him to take up some more refined career. In the end he became a sort of glorified clerk in the gas showrooms.’
Jean came back into the room, wearing a light summer coat of pale cream with gilt buttons; after sixteen years of marriage she still looked slim, almost youthful. ‘He was as miserable as sin,’ her mother said. ‘He shrank into himself, he lost weight, he even got shorter.’
‘You’re making all this up,’ Jean said calmly. She picked up her silky gloves. ‘There never was such a person as Father’s Cousin Arthur.’
Her mother’s eyes widened in a look of bland innocence. ‘He stuck it for four or five years,’ she said, ‘and then he ran away with the barmaid from a pub fifty yards away from the gas showrooms. A very vulgar sort of barmaid, I believe, plump and jolly.’
‘And the moral of this tale, I take it,’ Jean said, repairing her make-up in front of the mirror, ‘is that Cousin Arthur went back to plumbing and lived happily ever afterwards.’
‘Whether he went back to plumbing or not,’ her mother said with an air of subtle cunning, ‘I have no idea. Neither he nor the barmaid was ever heard of again. Not in our family, that is. But Cousin Arthur’s wife spent the rest of her life wishing she’d left well alone in the first place.’
Jean turned from the mirror. ‘You ought to take up writing improving pamphlets.’ She stooped and kissed her mother’s cheek. ‘We’re setting off on Saturday morning,’ she added amiably. ‘I’ll try to pop in to see you on Wednesday or Thursday.’
‘And you ought to take up something yourself,’ her mother said on a sharper, more direct note. ‘You’ve plenty of intelligence, you had a good job before you were married. No reason why you shouldn’t earn a decent salary. You’ve got too much spare energy, that’s your trouble. You’re young enough, you’re only thirty-five, you could make a career for yourself, it would take your attention off your husband, you might let him alone to live his own life.’
Jean flicked her mother an unsmiling glance. ‘Don’t bother to come to the door,’ she said. ‘I can see myself out.’
At four o’clock on Friday afternoon Detective Sergeant Mike Ashton came down the steps of the central police station in Perrymount. The rain had cleared, the sun was shining brilliantly, the air in the streets was heavy with the moist jungly warmth of late July.
‘Hope you have a good holiday,’ they’d said in the canteen. ‘You need it.’ Meaning his irritability and moodiness hadn’t gone unremarked in the last week or two.
He got into his car and slammed the door shut. Might as well stop by Brigid’s school and pick her up. Jean would want her home early today, there’d