In the breakfast-room at Claremont, a graceful Queen Anne dwelling a few miles to the west of Cannonbridge, Howard Elliott and his wife Judith were finishing breakfast. Judith was meticulously groomed and carefuny dressed; no unexpected caller would find her looking less than her best. She wore a beautifully cut housecoat of heavy French silk the colour of almond blossom; it gave her a delusive air of fragility.
She ate a little fruit and crispbread while Howard despatched porridge and cream, bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade; the breakfast he had always eaten in his mother’s day, the breakfast he would have been astounded not to find presented to him punctually every morning. He read his newspaper as he ate, he kept his eyes on the paper as he pushed his cup across to Judith for more coffee. She refilled the cup and gave it back to him without speaking. She had learned very soon after her marriage that it was a waste of breath trying to talk to Howard over the breakfast table.
He picked up his cup and took a drink without raising his eyes from his newspaper. Judith gave him a long dispassionate look. He was forty-three years old, a tall, heavily-built man who looked his age and more. His youthful good looks had coarsened, his figure was slipping from control.
He was the only child of Matthew Elliott’s first marriage, which had ended twenty years ago in an acrimonious divorce. At the time Howard was working in the family firm; it had always been taken for granted that he would one day succeed his father. But Howard was deeply upset at what he saw as his father’s betrayal of his mother. He took his mother’s side over the divorce and quarrelled bitterly with his father. He left Elliott Gilmore and found a post with another firm of financial consultants in a neighbouring town. He never again exchanged so much as a word with his father.
Now he drank the last of his coffee and pushed back his chair. He folded his newspaper and tucked it under his arm. He had lived at Claremont all his life, with his parents until their divorce and afterwards with his mother, until her death some two years ago. He had inherited nothing under his father’s will, but Claremont and its furnishings, its pictures and objets d’art, had all been left to him by his mother, together with the substantial investments on which she had lived; she had received a very generous settlement at the time of the divorce. Whatever reasons she had for feeling bitter towards her husband – and she had continued to feel bitter towards him until the end of her life – a niggardly settlement certainly wasn’t one of them.
Matthew had been a good husband to her but she had believed him to be a blameless one, totally loyal; she had regarded this as no more than her due. She was a woman without warmth of nature, preferring the word duty to the word love. After a few years of marriage she had finally closed the door of her bedroom on Matthew, intimating that with the approach of middle age – rather a distant approach as she wasn’t yet thirty-five at the time – they were now, as she put it, past all that sort of thing.
But Matthew, only a year or two over forty, was very far from past it, he was in fact all for it, and certainly didn’t intend going without it. He took care to be discreet in his adventures and no doubt the calm surface of his family life would have continued unruffled but that one day a couple of years later he fell suddenly and violently in love – something he hadn’t bargained for.
He set up his new lady, a dark-haired, ivory-skinned beauty, warm-hearted and loving, in a secluded, charming little house at a safe distance from Claremont. He spent as much time with her as he could contrive. After a year or two Gavin was born. They both loved the child but there was no question of marriage; Matthew had made that very clear at the beginning.
But one day chance took a hand and the liaison came to light. Matthew’s respectable, conventional family life blew up in his face. His wife offered him the immediate option of divorce or severing all contact, except for any necessary financial arrangement, with the dark-haired beauty and Gavin, by now eleven years old; she had no doubt which course he would choose.
All his business life Matthew had been faced with the necessity for making swift choices. This one took him thirty seconds. He chose divorce, to the outraged and vociferous astonishment of his wife. Immediately after the divorce he married his love. He sold the secluded little house and bought a larger property to the south of Cannonbridge, out of his ex-wife’s immediate sphere of social influence. There he lived happily with his new family until the death of the dark-haired beauty ten years later.
When Matthew followed her after another seven years, neither Howard nor his mother attended his funeral. Without Matthew’s solid existence to sustain her bitterness his first wife lost her vitality, her sense of focus on life, and slid quietly out of it twelve months after Matthew’s funeral.
As soon as was decently possible Howard cast about for a suitable bride, someone to step into his mother’s shoes, look after his creature comforts, see that his well-ordered, agreeable existence was in no way altered. Within a short time he found Judith, ten years his junior; he proposed to her without delay.
Shortly after the wedding his half-brother Gavin, anxious to heal the family breach and feeling that now, with all the principal adversaries dead, might be a propitious moment, approached Howard and asked if he would consider returning to Elliott Gilmore to run the Wychford branch. This was long-established, on a very sound and stable footing. After a good deal of thought Howard agreed; he had now been running the Wychford branch for eighteen months.
Now Judith stood up from the breakfast table and followed her husband into the hall. She was a little over average height, with a slim, well-formed figure. Her looks were very English; fair hair well cut and disciplined, gleaming from regular attention at the best local salon; a fine, smooth skin, regular features, clear, blue-grey eyes.
‘Friday today,’ Howard said, sufficiently fuelled by now to be able to greet the new day with speech. ‘I’ll be over at Cannonbridge this afternoon for the meeting.’ His lips brushed her cheek. ‘I should be home around six. Are you doing anything today?’
‘I’m out to lunch.’ She mentioned the name of a female cousin of hers, married with a family, living several miles away. ‘I’ll be back well before you.’ Something else that Judith had learned very soon after her marriage was that Howard detested coming home to an empty, silent house.
She opened the front door and stood watching as he went off to his car. He turned and raised his hand in a ritual wave. She gave him a wave in reply, closed the door and stood with her back against it, contemplating the day ahead.
The main offices of Elliott Gilmore occupied a central position in an elegant early-Victorian terrace of shops and offices in the principal business area of Cannonbridge. There was no Gilmore now in the firm; old Matthew had bought out his partner’s widow many years ago.
Gavin walked round from the car park and stood surveying the frontage. For some time he had been contemplating alterations and improvements to the main office. He had no intention of losing any of the period charm but it could be made a good deal more convenient and efficient, more economical to run.
Apart from occasional primping and decorating, the building was very much as it had been when Gavin first walked up the steps. Before his parents married he had had no idea what his father did for a living, apart from the vague information that he was engaged in business which compelled him to be away from home a good deal of the time.
One day shortly after his second marriage, Matthew took Gavin into Cannonbridge and in through the front door of Elliott Gilmore. He introduced him to the staff simply as ‘my son Gavin’. He was well aware that they had all read the newspapers, they’d heard all the gossip, all the echoes of that fierce uproar, but he was also well aware that they all depended on him for their living. There would be no sly looks, no amused nudges – or at least not inside the building.
Gavin had been profoundly impressed by the grand air of the establishment, the pillared entrance, the wide