She had reacted instinctively on learning that Sophy, the other girl, had had nowhere to spend Christmas, inviting her to return to Cheshire with her, knowing quite well that another body would hardly be noticed in the crowd that her mother always drew around her. Having produced only one child, her mother had gone on to make up for this by maternally adopting every chance waif and stray she could, both of the human and animal varieties, and so it was that the farm had abounded with pet lambs turned aggressive and demanding sheep, goats who could never be milked, chickens too old to lay but whose necks could never be wrung, sheep-dogs who only dreamed lazily of sheep in their old age as they huddled up to the Aga, a collection of barn cats who never hunted—although thankfully in those days the parrot had not been in evidence.
Sophy had seemed to fit in so well with her family that it had come as a double shock to walk into the staff-room behind her and discover her entertaining a crowd of their fellow employees by telling them in her high-pitched Sloane Ranger voice about the chaos of the Turner household.
Elspeth had never felt so humiliated in her life. She had resolved there and then that, in the future, no one would ever be able to humiliate her or laugh at her in that kind of way again.
When her mother had asked gently why she no longer brought any friends home with her when she came back from London, she had quietly and firmly avoided a direct answer. From then on her home life and her career were two separate things.
After that she had been cautious about where and with whom she made friends. She had swapped her room at the small, crowded flat she’d shared with four other girls and had found herself a lone bedsitter.
Having more time to spend on her own had given her the opportunity to concentrate on her exams, so that when Sophy had been simpering over the engagement ring she had managed to extract from an up-and-coming bank clerk, she, Elspeth, had been quietly receiving the congratulations of her management on the excellence of her exam results.
While her colleagues had opted for the glamour and high-powered pressure of the dealing-room, she had set her sights in a different direction, cautiously looking ahead to the future, and equally cautiously deciding to leave the world of mainstream banking for the more specialised arena of merchant banking.
Here it seemed she had found her niche. She loved the meticulous, quiet, thoughtful concentration needed for such work; she liked being out of the public eye, working behind the scenes; and she was rewarded for her diligence with a good salary which had enabled her to buy her own small dockside apartment and to run a neat, economical car.
She had met Peter when he’d moved into an adjoining apartment. They had soon discovered how much they had in common. Unlike other couples, they had decided against moving into one shared apartment. After all, when they eventually decided to marry, by selling the two apartments they would have sufficient profit to enable them to buy a sensible London house which would be convenient for both their offices.
Later, when they had children, they might decide to move a little way out of London, somewhere convenient for the M4 and healthy for bringing up children. Yes, she and Peter had their lives all properly planned…Not for her the careless insouciance of her parents, who always left so much to chance.
When she had once gently chided her mother for this, the latter had replied firmly, ‘Elspeth, we like surprises, even the bad ones. I can’t understand how you can bear to have your life so carefully mapped out, every move planned. My dear, think how boring it will be…’
She had subdued the small, rebellious voice inside her which had found astoundingly that her mother had been right, reminding herself of her humiliation at the hands of the insufferable Sophy. That was never going to happen to her again—nor to her children. They would have parents whom they would know would never do anything to embarrass them. She would never forget the awful humiliation of that day…the mockery and laughter of her colleagues…the cruelty of Sophy, who had exaggerated her parents’ soft Cheshire accents just sufficiently to make them sound almost unbelievably bucolic, who had described in loving, cruel detail the plethora of cats, dogs and livestock that had run riot in and around the old farmhouse, who had mocked her mother’s somewhat casual attitude to the kind of housework that involved having a home in which nothing looked as though it was ever out of place. Even now it made her squirm to remember…
‘I’ll try to drive up to Cheshire for your second weekend there,’ she heard Peter saying, and automatically switched her thoughts from the past and back to the present.
Three weeks ago, just before her mother had telephoned and dropped her bombshell that she and Elspeth’s father had decided more or less on the spur of the moment to take a long holiday, Elspeth’s boss had sent for her, and had told her almost severely that it was time she used some of the eight weeks of leave that was due to her.
Thoroughly alarmed that he might have been suggesting a fall in the standard of her work, Elspeth had protested that she didn’t need a holiday, that she enjoyed her work so much.
‘Yes, Elspeth, I know and I do sympathise, but the board has issued instructions that, praiseworthy though they consider it that our staff are so conscientious, in this day and age with so many stress-related illnesses their staff must take their due allocation of holiday leave. Our personnel department tell me that it is over two years since you had a break of longer than three or four days.
‘The board has asked me to provide them with a list of all those members of staff who have more than one year’s allocation of leave built up.
‘The view of the board is that a healthy staff member with a well-rounded attitude to life will in the long run serve the bank better than, to use a current term, a “workaholic”.
‘I think you will agree that, in these circumstances, it might be as well if you could find a way of using up some of your built-up leave. I do sympathise, Elspeth, but the Livingstone contract is all but wound up, and unless you have something very pressing to attend to…’
Elspeth had shaken her head, her heart sinking, knowing that she had had no possible excuse for not taking her boss’s advice.
When he had added a further blow, telling her that he expected her to take at least four weeks’ leave, she had left his office feeling almost as sick with shock as she had done on that never to be forgotten occasion when she had overheard Sophy’s malicious description of her parents and home.
Had anyone told Elspeth that she was an extremely sensitive, almost over-sensitive young woman, whose emotions and self-confidence were easily bruised, she would have reacted with astonishment and dismissal. She considered herself to be one of that new breed of women who had managed to tame and control all those dangerously subversive feminine traits which had told so badly against her sex in the past.
Not for her sentimentality and the weakness of allowing her emotions to rule her head; not for her the folly of falling in love, of submitting herself to the pain of allowing another human being to become so important to her that he was the focus of her whole world. No, she preferred to put her faith, her trust in something far more dependable—like her work. Of course she wanted to marry, to have children, and in Peter she considered she had found the perfect mate: someone who felt about life exactly as she did.
They considered themselves an established couple, even though she wasn’t wearing an engagement ring, even though they were not as yet lovers. Peter was old-fashioned in such things, and she was glad of it. These days, when one heard and read of the appalling consequences of sexual freedom and promiscuity, it was reassuring to meet a man who considered his health more important than the satisfaction of physical desire. There had been one previous serious relationship in Peter’s life, a girl at university, but that was in the past. And as for her…
Elspeth moved uncomfortably