CHAPTER TEN

SAUL got his promotion, and a large increase in salary. He planned to take Karen out to dinner at Le Circe to celebrate, but when he telephoned her she told him that she had to go away for a week on business. ‘A brainstorming session to put together a new campaign for one of our largest clients.’

Karen’s voice was full of unusual excitement. She had been picked to head the team chosen to come up with something innovative. It was a breathtaking opportunity, one she hadn’t expected to come anywhere near getting at least until she was a few more rungs up the ladder.

In fact, she had been told that it was a testimony to her talents that she had been chosen. Brad Simons, the director who dealt with the account, had summoned her into his office to give her the news, and that evening he was taking her out to dinner so that they could discuss the client’s particular foibles.

Saul tried not to feel disappointed. As he replaced the receiver he told himself that Karen had every right to feel pleased and that it was unfair of him to feel that somehow his promotion had been pushed into second place.

Everyone considered them a fortunate … even an ideal young couple; they had more social invitations than they could fulfil; their company was always in demand. They had the approval of Saul’s senior partners, and he had even been mentioned in the Wall Street Journal as someone to watch. He had earned praise from the partners for the work he was doing, and he had received several tentative, subtle enquiries from other organisations inviting him to join them.

And yet he still woke up in the night with that tight, aching pain in his chest and the awareness that, somewhere in his dreams, a child had been crying. And while he lay there, with Karen asleep beside him, he fought to dismiss the feeling he had that somehow his life was empty. How could it be? He had met all the targets he had set for himself at this stage of his life and more. He had a wife he knew was a good partner for him. They were the envy of their friends, and he could tell from his father’s voice whenever he rang home how pleased and proud he was of his progress.

Yes, he had everything he had ever planned to have. Everything he had ever wanted. But inside there was still that sense of loss, of a dimly perceived awareness that something was missing.

And then Karen lost her job.

He came home one Friday to find her in the apartment, her face white with rage as she paced the floor.

She had been sacked … fired, she told him. And why? Why? Because those bastards had deliberately set her up. They had known they were going to lose the McCall contract and so they had set her up for a deliberate fall … handing her all those lies … giving her all that praise, and the whole time knowing …

At first she was so enraged that she could barely speak coherently, and then slowly the whole story came out. How the agency had slowly been losing some of its best clients, and how Brad Simons had known that they were going to lose their most important and biggest client, McCall’s …

‘He set me up. I should have guessed. He never liked me. He wanted me to fall on my face. He used me to get out from under himself.’

Saul had never seen Karen so angry. Her eyes blazed with the intensity of it; her body was so tense that he was afraid to touch her, her face as white as the chic modern minimalistic walls of their living area.

‘It isn’t the end of the world,’ he told her. ‘You’ll get another job.’

She rounded on him then, contempt spiking the look she gave him. ‘You mean it isn’t the end of your world,’ she threw back at him. ‘And as for getting another job … what agency would touch me now? I’m dead, Saul … poisoned meat. The ad exec who lost the McCall account—that’s how I’ll be remembered. Do you know when I walked out of my office today not a single soul looked at me … never mind spoke to me?

‘Of course, they’ve always resented me because I’m not one of them … because of my background.’ She was pacing the room again, bitterness corrosive in her voice, her eyes darkening with resentment.

Saul tried to comfort her, to tell her that there would be other jobs, other successes, but she refused to listen to him, deriding him as being naïve, asking him how he would have felt in her shoes. When he tried to take hold of her she pushed him off.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Saul, don’t touch me,’ she told him. ‘Can’t you see that sex is the last thing I want right now? Men.’ Her mouth curled with disdain. ‘You really can’t think of anything else, can you?’

The charge was so unjustified, the criticism and the contempt in her voice so acidic that Saul immediately stepped back from her. Sex had been the last thing on his mind. He had simply wanted to touch her, to hold her, memories of how, as a child, he had been comforted by his mother’s arms somehow motivating him.

But Karen was making it plain that she didn’t want his comfort … that she didn’t want him.

That night she slept in the spare room.

He had work to do over the weekend. He offered to stay home with her, but she laughed bitterly and told him there was no point. For a month she stayed in the apartment, refusing to go anywhere or see anyone.

Saul’s immediate boss commented to him that his wife was concerned because she had been trying to reach Karen by phone about a committee they were both on but had not been able to get in touch with her. He said nothing about her sacking from the agency, although everyone knew about it. The agency’s loss of the McCall account had made news in the financial Press.

That night when Saul got home Karen was waiting for him. Bob Lucas’s wife had called round to see her, she announced. Bob Lucas was Saul’s boss, and he felt his body tense as he searched her face, looking for clues to see how she had reacted to this visit.

‘I think it’s time we moved out of New York, Saul,’ she told him. ‘There are some very nice properties available in Westchester and—’

‘Westchester?’ Saul stared at her. She had always claimed that she could never live anywhere but in the heart of the city, deriding those who chose to move outside it.

‘After all,’ she continued without looking at him, ‘once we start a family we’ll need more space.’

‘A family? But I thought you were going to look for another job …’

‘No,’ Karen told him evenly. ‘No, I’m not going to look for another job … How can I?’ she demanded savagely. ‘How can I after the way I’ve been humiliated and made to look a fool? What agency in their right minds would want me?’

‘Karen, you’re taking all this too personally,’ he told her gently. ‘I know what happened hurt, but … but everyone knows the agency was just using you … that they’d lost McCall’s account long before you—’

‘Before I what … before I really messed up for them? Oh, yeah, everyone knows that … and everyone’s laughing at me for being such a fool as to fall into their trap. I can’t go back, Saul … I can’t and I won’t.’

Nothing he could say would change her mind. They could afford to move out to Westchester, she told him. It was the right kind of career move for him to make. She was twenty-five … the right age to start thinking about a family.

All of what she said was quite true, but it still made Saul feel on edge and uneasy. Karen had always claimed that she wanted a career, she had always told him how important that was to her. It was not that he didn’t want children, he did, but he was afraid that in starting their family now they would be doing so for the wrong reasons, and he was also afraid of telling Karen so. There was something dangerously brittle about her these days … something that made him feel that he had to hold back … to move cautiously so as not to upset her.

And so he gave in. They bought a house in Westchester, a move that was firmly applauded by the senior partners and rewarded with another increase in salary plus a slightly freer hand with his work and more responsibility.

His peers, those other graduates from Harvard, who had the WASP advantages that Saul had not, and who had at first been inclined to rather look down on him, now watched him enviously and sometimes even a little resentfully. He was gaining the reputation not just of having an astute brain, but also of being prepared to use it and to devote himself exclusively to any given task. Dedicated, hard-working, ambitious—those were the words used to describe him. And more and more often Saul found that he was being approached by friends and acquaintances outside the firm for his advice, discreet, off-the-record advice that they could use to further their own careers. Saul was also gaining the reputation of being a good person to know.

The house in Westchester was only small, but in one of the best residential districts, and it had a good-sized garden, or ‘yard’, as the Americans called it.

Karen was soon pregnant and apparently content. She was kept busy with her charity work and assured Saul that she was happy.

Saul could not be with her for Josephine’s birth. He was away on business. He hadn’t thought too much about how it would feel to become a father until he saw his small daughter for the first time.

She was three days old, and as he looked at her he fell in love for the second time in his life, but this was a very different emotion from the one he had felt for Angelica. This was for his child … his daughter, a new life that was so much a part of him that when he reached out to touch her his eyes filled with tears and his body with protective pain.

Karen was a perfect mother. Everyone said so. She wanted the best … the very best for her child. And so, of course, did Saul. He remembered his father telling him that one day he too would have a family to support … He remembered everything his father had warned him about the importance of doing well and achieving success. He earned a good salary but they had heavy expenses. He started to work longer and longer hours.

Karen complained that he was never at home, and yet in the same breath she told him she had put Josephine’s name down for an exclusive and expensive nursery school.

When Josephine was two years old one of the graduates who had been taken on at the same time as Saul got his partnership. Karen was bitterly resentful on Saul’s behalf. That partnership should have been his, she complained, but of course Saul did not have John Feltham Ill’s family connections.

Something about her comment rubbed Saul raw inside. Was Karen blaming him because he had not been offered a partnership? Had he failed in some way … failed to meet the standards, the targets he had set himself? It was not good enough simply to do reasonably well; his father had told him that much. He had to succeed, to excel.

Saul started looking around for another job. He found it in a thrusting, go-ahead new firm that had recently set up in business.

On the strength of his increased salary they moved house, and when Josephine was two and a half years old Thomas was born.

‘Of course, it should have been the other way round,’ Karen complained petulantly after the birth. ‘Thomas should have been born first.’ And somehow, as he listened to her, Saul felt as though she was actually blaming him; that he had somehow failed her in giving her first a daughter and then a son instead of the other way round.

Karen was once again the perfect mother. Saul, who had tried his best to involve himself with Josephine after her birth, but who had been firmly excluded from the nursery by his wife, found that with Thomas he was hanging back, allowing Karen to take charge, and, besides, he was away such a lot. The firm had so much business out on the West Coast that they had jokingly said that they might as well send Saul out there full-time.

When he had time to think about it, which wasn’t very often, Saul was aware that he and Karen were drifting further and further apart; that they now virtually lived separate lives; that Karen seemed impatient and irritated by him when he was at home; that the children, especially Thomas, seemed not to respond to him at all.

When he could spare the time for a holiday, a vacation, it always seemed as though some all-important business would come up and that he would be forced to turn what should have been a complete break into a working holiday. But then, what option did he have if he was to succeed? And success was even more important to him now that he had a family to support.

It was when Thomas was still a baby that, on a fleeting visit to Britain, a business visit into which he had managed to squeeze some time out to see his family, he discovered that his younger sister was pregnant … pregnant by a married man who, it seemed, had no intention of leaving his wife.

She was so close to the end of her medical training, and he couldn’t stop himself from asking her, ‘Why … why, Christie? You could have had an abortion. You—’

‘I didn’t want one,’ she told him fiercely. ‘This is my child, Saul,’ she went on, holding her stomach. ‘My child.’

‘But your career …’

She gave him a painful smile. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘Mum and Dad … do they know?’

She shook her head. ‘No, not yet. I’m dreading telling them. They were so proud of me, especially Mum. I don’t think Dad ever really felt that it was quite the thing for a woman … to want to be a doctor.’

It all seemed such a waste … such a crime. To have to give up all that she had worked for. Saul contemplated the future that lay ahead of his sister and her child, the child she was determined to have, and knew there was only one thing he could do.

When Christie went home to tell her parents about her pregnancy, Saul went with her. Christie must not give up her training, he told them, and before he left to return to New York it was arranged that Christie would return home to live; that their mother would look after the baby once he or she arrived and that Christie would continue with her studies and take her final exams.

‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ she whispered weepily to him as she saw him off at Heathrow.

‘Thank me by succeeding,’ he told her quietly. ‘Thank me by working hard and qualifying.’ He hugged her and kissed her, but went back to New York with a hard lump of undissolved pain burning inside him.

Karen was not pleased when she heard what he had done. With two children of their own to bring up and educate, they could hardly afford to take on the responsibility for a third—a fourth if you counted the cost of supporting his sister through what remained of her medical schooling.

Her voice became shrill and sour as she yelled at him. She had lost weight, and, where she had once looked elegant, she now looked thin, her face and voice marred with dissatisfaction.

As he looked at her and recognised that dissatisfaction Saul knew that it was his fault, that he had somehow failed as a provider … a husband … a man. That he had not been successful enough.

He started to look around for a better job. After all, they needed the extra money. What he wanted now was to find a business where ultimately he would be the one in control. When he was head-hunted by Sir Alex, he thought that he had found it.

Sir Alex owned the Davidson Corporation. He had no son to succeed him, he told Saul openly, and he was looking for someone he could groom to one day take over for him. In Saul he thought that he might have found that someone.

Saul thought so too. He brought all his formidable intelligence and skills to bear on attacking the problems of turning Davidson’s from a company that was reasonably successful to one that was the most successful in its field.

The financial Press showered him with plaudits and praise. Sir Alex rewarded him with a generous profit-sharing scheme, a large office, a new car and a very generous salary, but he did not relinquish control.

What he did do, though, was to agree to one of Saul’s suggestions that it might be an advantageous time to reorganise the London office. Sir Alex had two power-bases: the office he ran from New York, and the London end, which was not performing as well as could have been hoped. What Saul had not bargained for was that he would be put in charge of that office.

By now he was well versed enough in office politics to listen, narrow-eyed, to Sir Alex’s suggestion and to wonder cynically if this was Sir Alex’s way of demoting him. As he had quickly discovered once he joined the company, he was not the first ambitious young man in whom Sir Alex thought he might have found his ‘natural successor’. Not the first. But he intended that he should be the last.

Karen was furious when he gave her the news. She and the children were established in the American way of life. She had neither the intention nor the desire to move to London, she told him flatly.

Saul was stunned. He tried to reason with her, to point out the advantages of the move, but Karen refused to listen. Saul was baffled and infuriated by her attitude. He was doing this for her, he told her furiously, for her and for their children. Karen remained adamant. She was not going to London. Saul would have to go without her. After all, there was no real guarantee that the venture was going to be a success.

Saul interpreted her comments as a lack of belief in his ability to succeed; a questioning of his ability to protect the financial future of herself and his children. It resurrected all his old feelings of anxiety and tension. He had to prove himself; to prove that he was successful and that he could be even more successful.

Perhaps Karen was right to refuse to go with him. Perhaps she was right to demand that he prove to her and to the world that he could achieve the targets he had set himself.

Saul went to London without Karen. Six months later she filed for divorce. Their marriage had been failing for a long time, she told him calmly when she made her announcement at Christmas. Saul had flown home on Christmas Eve. The Westchester house, the new one Karen and the children had moved into when Saul got his first year’s profits from the company, had a long shrub-bordered drive, and was well set back from the road, a 1920s Tudor Gothic edifice made respectable with its coating of ivy. Discreet outdoor lighting sprang to life as he drove towards the house. When the front door opened he could see the Christmas tree in the large square hallway. It was illuminated with a myriad tiny plain white lights, the tree itself decorated in traditional reds and golds, satin ribbons tied to the branches, no trace of inelegant glitter anywhere in sight. The rich red carpet in the hallway gave the room a warm glow, subtly patterned heavy curtains hung at the windows either side of the doorway, and in the ornate wooden-frame fireplace a log fire glowed.

The room was full of the rich, warm scent of spices … of Christmas itself, and yet as he stepped inside the house Saul felt cold; felt a deep inner iciness, a chill of foreboding that took him instantly back to his childhood, back to his memories of those confusing, painful things he had felt when his father talked to him about the importance of success.

Over dinner Josey was subdued, turning to her mother before answering his questions. Even baby Tom refused to hold out his chubby arms to be held by his father.

When Saul pushed away his meal, barely touched, Karen raised an eyebrow, her mouth compressing with irritation. He shook his head. He had suddenly lost his appetite; he felt alien, out of place, an intruder. The doll he had bought for Josephine in London was, he realised, far too impersonal a gift for the withdrawn girl sitting watching him with such cool, wary eyes, and as for the train set he had bought for Tom … Obviously the boy was still too young to appreciate that present, and there was every likelihood that Saul wouldn’t be around to see him eventually start to play with it. Saul wasn’t happy with his thoughts.

‘Uncle Richard said he would come by to take me to the park on Tuesday,’ Josephine announced to her mother. ‘He said to tell you that he’d drop by on Boxing Day and that you weren’t to forget that he was taking you to the Feldmans’ for drinks.’

A faint glow of colour seemed to illuminate Karen’s pale face as she removed Saul’s plate. She was still thin; she had never regained the weight she had lost before the children’s births, and the sport she played had given her a taut suppleness that somehow Saul found depressing. As he watched her he contrasted her almost boyish figure with the round softness of the girl she had been when he first knew her.

She was wearing her hair in a different style and she had changed her make-up. She looked, he realised with a small start of shock, far more American than British; she had lost that difference, that individuality which had once so clearly marked her out. She was wearing a silk shirt and a plain wool skirt, and her skin had the cool year-round tan of someone who spent time and money on maintaining her appearance. She looked … she looked groomed, he decided as he hunted for the right word … Too groomed. Impossible to think of taking this elegant, disdainful woman to bed and making love to her. If he did, it would no doubt be an antiseptic, unappealing process, a dutiful coupling after which she would retire to her bathroom to fastidiously and thoroughly remove the physical evidence of his intimacy with her.

There was a raw, uncomfortable sensation in his chest, a sense of being weighed down … a depression … an awareness of pain … of failure.

Karen was saying something about taking the children to Aspen during the Christmas vacation. Saul frowned and started to tell her that he doubted that he would be able to go with them; that he would have to return to London virtually before the New Year.

‘Uncle Richard’s coming with us.’

He focused on Josey’s face as the girl delivered the aggressive statement, suddenly sharply aware of the hostility emanating from everyone else in the room.

‘Josephine … I want to speak to your father on my own. Why don’t you take Tom and go down to the den and watch television for a while?’

Quietly, without looking at him, Josephine slid out of her seat, gathered up Tom and headed for the door.

Almost as soon as it was closed Karen told him coolly, ‘I want a divorce.’

He stared at her, his heartbeat suddenly accelerating, his body reacting to the threat by going into an adrenalin-boosted fight mode, but Karen wouldn’t let him speak.

Their marriage had been failing for a long time, she told him … in fact, she should never have married him in the first place. Should never have given up her career in New York.

Saul listened in silence as she told him how she felt about the way she had been forced to abandon her own career to bring up his children, the way she had been forced to stay in the background, a stay-at-home wife, while he neglected her and their children in favour of his career. There was, she told him, someone else. Someone who was more than prepared to accept that she had other needs beyond and above those of merely being a wife and a mother … someone with whom the children had already bonded in a way they had never bonded with him.

There was to be no fuss, no squabbling, she told him. That would be bad for the children. The children he had proved were not important to him by the way he had left them and her when he took up the job in London, a job she had pleaded with him not to take. Financially there need be no problems. He … her lover was more than prepared to support both her and the children. The Westchester house could be sold and the proceeds split between them.

‘You can keep the damned house,’ Saul had told her savagely when he was at last allowed to speak.

Later that night, alone and wide awake in the anonymity of his motel room, he reflected helplessly on all that he could and should have said, and cursed himself for his ineptitude.

He spent Christmas Day alone in his motel room, asking himself over and over again where he had gone wrong. He had done as his father had told him, hadn’t he? He had worked … achieved … succeeded.

Karen could not be dissuaded from going ahead with the divorce and in the end, rather than upset the children, who, she told him cruelly and clinically, did not really consider him to be their father at all, he gave way.

She and ‘Uncle Richard’ were married almost as soon as the divorce was final. Under pressure from Karen’s lawyers, Saul had agreed not to demand access to the children. It would only upset and distress them, Karen had told him, pointing out that he rarely saw them anyway, and for their sakes, remembering how they had turned away from him at Christmas, how they had rejected him, Saul felt bound to agree.

Richard had his own business. A year after he and Karen were married he went bankrupt. Karen got in touch with Saul, reminding him that the children were his. Saul agreed to support them, but Karen still refused to allow him any real contact with them. It would only upset them, she said, and during the one meeting his lawyers managed to arrange for him to see them they were so antagonistically aggressive towards him that he had to agree, and, besides, he was rarely in the States these days.

Ironically, the British arm of Davidson’s was thriving and succeeding way beyond his original forecasts. He was commonly and sometimes enviously known as Sir Alex’s ‘blue-eyed boy’.

Over the years he had discreet sexual liaisons with several women, but made it plain to all of them right from the start that he was not looking for any kind of emotional commitment and that he could most certainly not give one. None of them believed him … at first. The business was his life, its cut and thrust life’s elixir. He neither wanted nor needed anything else.

And then, totally out of the blue, Karen and Richard moved to Britain. Richard was working for a West-Coast-based computer firm, which had opened an office in the south of England. He was transferred there with certain other key staff.

Saul knew of this because he was still financially supporting his children, and of course Karen had to write to him requesting him to redirect his monthly cheques.

‘Why don’t you try to make some kind of contact with them?’ Christie had suggested to him when he’d told her what had happened. ‘They are, after all, your children, Saul.’

‘Not as far as they’re concerned,’ he’d told her bluntly, but whenever he thought about it, which he tried not to do too often, there was an ache inside him, a hunger … the same kind of ache and hunger he had known as a child. He knew that people found him intimidating and that they withdrew from him, all except Cathy.

Cathy loved him. Right from being a small child she had loved him. Running up to him whenever he could make time to visit, holding out her arms to him, demanding to be picked up and cuddled. And he loved her too, loved her with an intensity that sometimes confused and disturbed him. How could he love this child of his sister’s so much when, as his ex-wife had so bitterly told him, he had not loved his own children? But he had loved them. When they were born … He could still remember so vividly how he had felt the first time he’d seen Josephine, the first time he’d picked her up in the hospital.

A nurse had come bustling in, he remembered, snatching the baby out of his arms, telling him that he must not touch her.

Karen had done much the same once Josephine was at home. He remembered once, when Karen had gone out shopping, Josephine had been crying. He had picked her up and had realised she needed changing. He had done his best, but his hands were large and the baby so tiny, and when she lay there, looking up at him so trustingly, he had felt so clumsy, so incompetent and yet at the same time so proud, so full of love.

What on earth did he think he was doing? Karen had demanded, pushing him out of the way. Josephine had immediately burst into tears, causing Karen to pick her up and croon to her, ‘Never mind, darling. Mummy’s here now … Mummy’s here.’ And Saul had left the nursery, knowing that somehow he had transgressed … that he was not needed.

With Cathy, though, it was different. From the time she was a baby she had crowed with joy when Christie, weary from the long hours she spent at the hospital, had picked her up and thrust her into Saul’s arms, telling him, ‘Here, Saul, you hold her, otherwise she’s going to think the world is completely made up of females, and I don’t want that for her.’

Unlike Karen, Christie seemed to have no qualms at all about leaving her baby with him, and when Cathy was wet he changed her nappy for her and received a big beam of delight and a crow of pleasure in return. He found that he was spending more and more of his spare time with his sister and her child.

And then their father died. At the funeral Saul stood apart from the others, trying to come to terms with his confused feelings. He felt sorrow and pain, of course, and guilt as well … guilt because somehow he still had the feeling of having failed, of somehow not having met enough targets, of not having done enough to prove to his father that he had listened to everything he had told him, of not having done enough to make it up to him because he had not got all he had wanted out of life. And then shamingly allied to that emotion was a frightening well of anger.

Anger against his father! His father, who had loved him. His father, who had only wanted the best for him … the very best. His father, who had brought him up to know how important it was to be a man, how heavy a man’s responsibilities were and how strong he needed to be to carry them …

* * *

With Karen and Richard living in England, Saul made sporadic attempts to see his children. Sometimes Karen agreed, sometimes she did not, but what was constant was that the visits were never a success. Neither child seemed able to talk to him. Of the two of them, Josephine was the more antagonistic and aggressive. She seemed to hate him, whereas Thomas simply shut him out.

Thomas was now at boarding-school, the fees paid by Saul, of course, while Josephine attended a private local girls’ day school. Both of them were doing well. They had to. After all, one day they would have to support themselves, Karen commented bitterly.

She had, Saul noticed, become a very bitter woman, who seemed to lose no opportunity of telling them her marriage to him had contributed to the destruction of her own career plans and hopes.

Saul said nothing. After all, what was there to say? He had no regrets about the divorce, but when it came to his children … Every time he saw them his sense of failure increased. He found that sometimes he was actually avoiding having to see them because of that guilt.

But Davidson’s continued to thrive. At Saul’s instigation they had taken over several weaker rivals, deadly, precise take-overs that stripped the fallen rivals of their assets and which left their managements stunned and disbelieving. But still Sir Alex remained in control; still Saul felt that the final prize, the ultimate success was being withheld from him.

And then, the Christmas after his thirty-ninth birthday, Cathy had looked across at him, her eyes alight with love and excitement, her face glowing with the happy pleasure of the day, and she had said to him, ‘I’m so happy, Uncle Saul. Are you?’

He had started to assent automatically, but for some reason he had stopped; for some reason the simple untidy warmth of his sister’s sitting-room had momentarily dimmed and he was once again standing listening to his father telling him how important it was to succeed, watching with pain and apprehension as he saw the unhappiness in the older man’s eyes, and then, as he blinked away that vision, he had another one: the hallway of the Westchester house, the tree with its red and gold satin bows, the set, bitter face of his ex-wife, the taut, withdrawn expression of his daughter and the lack of recognition in his young son, and he had experienced a sensation within himself that left him bereft of words, a spasm of pain contorting his face so that Christie, who was watching him, had asked anxiously if he was feeling ill.

Her cooking was a joke between them, and he had complained last Christmas that her roast potatoes were more like cannon balls, more for Cathy’s benefit than anything else. She loved it when he teased her mother and was mocked in return.

‘No. It’s nothing,’ he told her and he told himself the same, but after that nothing was the same. It was as though his whole world had somehow subtly shifted its axis so that he was looking at things from an unfamiliar and often unwelcome angle. He found himself questioning things he had never questioned … he found that he was aware of feelings, emotions that he didn’t want to be aware of … he lost track of what was going on at an important meeting. He couldn’t sleep; he was irritable with his staff; he was frighteningly aware that somehow his life was slipping out of his own control, and that knowledge generated further fear, further anger, terror almost, as he fought desperately to regain all that he felt he was in danger of losing.

He was afraid … more afraid than he could ever remember being in his entire life; more afraid than he had been when as a child he had looked into his father’s eyes and seen the pain there, more afraid than he had been when he’d failed his A levels, more afraid than he had been when he’d held his small daughter, more afraid than when Karen had asked him for a divorce; and yet he could not analyse why he should experience that fear, or what there was to fear.

He had everything he had ever wanted, didn’t he? All right, so there had been some sacrifices, but he wasn’t the only man to be divorced and lose contact with his children … that was what happened these days. It was sad, but it was a fact of life. He was successful. Sir Alex had intimated six months ago that he was virtually ready to step down. There was no one else on the board to challenge Saul’s right to step into his shoes. So what was happening to him? Why, when he woke up in the morning, did he have the sour taste of bile in his mouth? Why, when he looked in the mirror, did he experience revulsion? Why, when he pictured the faces of his children, did he feel such violence … such anger?

Stress, the doctors said. Stress! The ultimate accolade … the ultimate acknowledgement that he had made it. What successful businessman did not know the meaning of that word, did not thrive on the adrenalin-based narcotic it produced? But his stress wasn’t like that. His stress did not fuel him; it destroyed him … it was as though in some way his own body, his own senses, his own perceptions had turned on him and attacked him.

And then Sir Alex had told him that he wanted him to use his friendship with Dan Harper to enable them to take over his company in an asset-stripping exercise which would have left it as picked clean of every ounce of flesh as though carrion had devoured it, and something within him, something he had hitherto not known existed, refused to let him do it.

For the first time in his adult life he experienced the realisation that his brain could not always have domination over his emotions. That awareness had produced a shock effect as cataclysmic to him as a complete nervous breakdown might have been to someone else.

It had been weeks, months almost, before he had been able to accept what was happening to him, and since then he had been experiencing the most acutely painful kind of self-analysis and self-inspection he had ever endured.

He had looked at himself for the first time in years; had seen himself not in the image cast for him by his father, and the long shadow of his father beside that image dominating it, but as the man he actually was, an individual with a right to his own feelings and needs, and he had experienced the deep soul-sickness of someone who knew that spiritually and emotionally he had been denied something deeply necessary to his life.

He had tried to ignore his feelings, of course, dismissing them, fighting them, even ignoring them, but stubbornly they refused to let him go; they were his accusers, his tormentors, his judge and jury, and they never seemed to tire of drawing for him comparisons between what his life was and what it might have been.

Another, weaker man might have tried to blame his father, but Saul had loved his too strongly for that, and still loved him. But did he still believe that his father’s ambitions for him had been right?

Tiredly he got up. It was late. He should be in bed, not sitting here, indulging himself in useless introspection.

Tomorrow he would have to start making some discreet enquiries about Carey’s. It was one thing to know that the company was looking for either a buyer or an investor; it was quite another to get them to accept the kind of offer Sir Alex wanted to make, and, more important, to accept the consequences of that offer.

Sir Alex was no philanthropist. He would run the company on the smallest shoestring he could; that would mean wholesale redundancies, and a virtual closing down of production, leaving the company as a mere shell, to be reactivated when it suited Sir Alex to do so, and then only so that he could take advantage of the government’s new grants package.

None of that need necessarily influence the company’s shareholders, of course. The bank, for one, would be only too glad to see it sold off, if only to clear their outstanding loans.

Control of the company’s shares lay with Davina James, and everything written in the reports he had on her indicated that she would be only too pleased to sell.

So why did he have this niggling frisson of awareness that obtaining Carey Chemicals was not going to be as easy as he had first assumed?