CHAPTER THREE

‘DAVINA, I know you’re busy, but I wonder if you could spare me half an hour before you go home.’

Davina forced herself to smile.

‘Of course I can, Giles. Would five o’clock be all right?’

As soon as he had closed the office door behind him her smile disappeared. There had been many challenges for her to face in the three months since the death of her husband Gregory, and now it seemed that she was going to have to face another one.

She suspected that Giles Redwood was going to tell her that he wanted to leave. She couldn’t blame him. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy and she knew quite well that the only reason Giles was still here was because he was too gentle, too kind-hearted to leave her completely in the lurch.

And because he loved her?

She winced, her mind shying away from the thought, not wanting to admit its existence.

She had always liked Giles, but it was only since Gregory’s death that she had become aware that he might have much stronger feelings for her. It disturbed her to have to acknowledge that she might have inadvertently played on those feelings in asking him to stay and to support her through the initial crisis of Gregory’s death.

She hadn’t meant to do so. Had, in fact, been motivated purely by panic, the panic of discovering that her father’s company wasn’t the thriving concern she had so foolishly believed, but was actually close to insolvency. That had shocked her more than Gregory’s death in many ways.

It had been Giles who had comforted her, who had told her that she must not blame herself for the lack of awareness of the company’s situation. And it was true that Gregory, and her father before him, had always refused to allow her to have anything to do with the company, to play any part in it.

But now she had no choice. Carey Chemicals was the largest local employer. If Carey’s closed, people would be put out of work; families, whole households would suffer. She could not allow that to happen.

Giles had told her gently that she might have no choice. He had been warning Gregory for some time, he had added uncomfortably, that they must make some kind of provision for the time when their most profitable patent ran out.

Gregory had refused to listen to him. Gregory had had his own obsessions and they had nothing to do with the time and care it took to research and develop new drugs.

Gregory had liked playing the money markets. And, in doing so, Gregory had lost the company many millions of pounds.

Davina felt sick every time she thought about it … every time she remembered her own blind, wilful acceptance of all the lies Gregory had told her. She ought to have questioned him more closely, to have insisted on knowing more about the company.

She ought to have done a great many things, she told herself tiredly, including ending her marriage.

What marriage? There had been no marriage for years. Ever since … Her mind skittered back from a dangerous precipice.

She had married at twenty. Now she was thirty-seven. For seventeen years she had stayed in an empty, sterile marriage, and why?

Out of love? Her mouth twisted. Out of duty, then … out of necessity … out of cowardice. Yes, definitely that, or rather out of fear, fear not so much of being alone—that would almost have been a pleasure—but fear of the unknown, a fear that, once on her own, she would prove her father’s and Gregory’s contempt of her to be a true estimation of her character; and so she had stayed, too afraid to leave the security of a marriage that was a sterile mockery of all a marriage should be, hiding from life within its dead, empty embrace.

But now 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 been friends with, girls who, like her, seemed rather shy, but because she had come so late to the school they had already made their friends and formed their small protective groups, and Davina certainly did not have the self-confidence to break into them.

Everyone else at school looked different as well. The girls wore jeans or very short skirts, which were officially banned, but which were worn nevertheless. They had long straight hair and the more daring of them wore dark kohl lines around their eyes and pale pink lipstick.

Davina studied them with awed envy. Her father did not approve of make-up. The one time she had dared to spend her money on a soft pink lipstick he had told her to go upstairs and scrub her face clean.

At fifteen years old she knew that she still looked like a little girl, while her peers were already almost young women.

At sixteen she left school. There was no point in her staying on, her father told her grimly as he viewed her poor exam results.

Instead he paid for her to attend a private secretarial school in Chester so that she could learn to type and so do work for him at home when necessary.

And then just before her seventeenth birthday a small miracle occurred. Out of the blue one morning, while she was engaged on her bimonthly chore of polishing the heavy silver in the dining-room, a visitor arrived.

Davina heard the doorbell ring and went to answer it, wiping her hands on her apron as she did so. She was wearing a pleated skirt, which had originally been her mother’s and which was too wide and too long for her, and her own school jumper, which was too small and too tight.

It would never have occurred to her to ask her father for new clothes. He gave her a weekly housekeeping allowance, but she had to provide him with receipts for the meticulously kept accounts he went through with her every Friday evening.

As she opened the door Davina blinked in surprise at the girl she saw standing there. She was tall, and very slim, and a few years Davina’s senior. She was wearing a very, very short skirt; her long straight hair would have been the envy of the girls in Davina’s class at school and in addition to the kohl liner around her eyes she was wearing false eyelashes.

Her mouth was painted a perfect pale frothy pink, and as Davina stared at her she smiled and said cheerfully, ‘Hi, you must be Davina. Your dad sent me round with some stuff for you to type. I’m working for him while Moaning Martha is recuperating from her op. Honest to God, the instructions she gave me before she left …!’

The thick black eyelashes batted. She was, Davina recognised in awe, chewing gum. The thought of this girl working for her father, replacing Martha Hillary, her father’s fifty-odd-year-old secretary, was almost too much for Davina to take in.

‘I’m dying for a Coke. Not got any, I suppose?’

She was already stepping inside the house, while Davina apologised that all she could offer her was tea or coffee.

The thickly pan-sticked pale face contorted briefly, the long hair barely moving as she tossed her head. ‘OK, go on, then. I’ll make do with the coffee.

‘What on earth do you do all day, cooped up in this place?’ she demanded when Davina led her to the kitchen. ‘It would drive me crazy. That’s why I do temping. Just as soon as I can get a bit of money together, I’m off to London. That’s where it’s all happening.’

It was the start of a brief and wholly unexpected friendship.

Davina never knew why Mandy befriended her. Later on in her life she suspected that Mandy, beneath the outrageous clothes and make-up, had a very strong crusading and protective streak, for she could certainly think of no other logical reason why Mandy should have taken her under her wing.

Under Mandy’s tutelage and because she was equally afraid of disappointing her as she was of angering her father, she forced herself to do as Mandy urged and to ask—Mandy had told her to demand—her father to give her a personal allowance.

When he agreed Davina could only assume that either she had caught him in a moment of unfamiliar weakness or that he had been so shocked by her request that he had acceded to it without thinking.

When Mandy heard how much she was to get she had pulled another face.

‘Peanuts,’ she had said scoffingly. ‘You should have asked for at least twice as much. God, the typing you do alone would cost him hundreds if he sent it out to an agency.’

Several times a week Mandy would sneak out of Carey’s and come racing over in her bright red battered Mini, entertaining and alarming Davina with her tales of her hectic and tangled love-life.

She consistently tried to persuade Davina to go out with her at night, but Davina always refused. Although often she envied Mandy her confidence and her worldliness when Mandy described in graphic detail the more intimate side of her life, Davina found herself recoiling a little. She was an avid reader, a dreamer, a romantic, who cherished ideals of the kind of man she would eventually love and who would love her, and he bore no resemblance whatsoever to the descriptions Mandy gave her of her boyfriends and their sexual demands.

And then, just over six weeks after they had first met, Mandy announced that she was leaving Cheshire and going to London.

Davina mourned her going and missed her. Mandy had brought colour and warmth to her life. She was the first close friend she had ever had, and without her life seemed dull and flat.

Her father, who had never approved of the friendship, made no bones about the fact that he was glad she had gone, even though he complained that she had left before his actual secretary was well enough to return to work.

It was summer. Working in the garden, keeping the flowerbeds and the lawn in the immaculate state her father demanded, had tanned Davina’s body and firmed her muscles. She wasn’t very tall, her body slim and delicate, and she had shoulder-length mousy fair hair. She hated her hair. It was neither one thing nor the other, neither curly nor straight, but possessed of an unwanted wave, so fine and silky that it was constantly falling in her eyes. It was a hot summer and the sun had bleached it a little, giving it blonde highlights, which emphasised the fragility of her small face with its sombre grey eyes.

Davina had never thought of herself as being pretty. Pretty girls looked like Mandy or like the models in magazines, and she did not look like them, but one Saturday morning, as she was weeding the front garden, dressed in her shorts and the cotton top she had made herself on her mother’s sewing-machine, the paperboy abandoned his bike to stare admiringly at her and to tell her with a grin, ‘Great legs, babe.’

He was seventeen years old and modelled himself on his American TV heroes. Davina blushed deep pink and hurriedly tucked her legs out of sight.

But even though his comment had embarrassed her, it had also in some complex way pleased her.

Sometimes now at night she lay awake in bed, confused by what she was feeling, aching for someone she could talk to … for someone to love.

She had started playing tennis with the local vicar’s daughter, who was home from university for the holidays. They played together a couple of times a week.

Vicky Lane had a boyfriend, a fellow student, and the two of them were planning to spend a year backpacking once they finished university. As she listened to Vicky describing their plans, talking about the life they intended to live, Davina envied her. Compared with others, her life seemed so constricted, so dull and boring, but what could she do? She could not leave her father. How would he manage, and besides, how could she support herself? She had no skills. She could type and do some book-keeping; that was all.

She had tried to suggest to her father that maybe she could work at Carey’s, but he had been furious with her. Who was to take care of the house and of him? he had demanded. She was becoming selfish, spoiled, he had added, and guiltily she had abandoned the subject.

The village they lived in was small, with very few other people of her age. Most of them had left to work elsewhere and those who remained worked either for Carey’s or on their parents’ land.

There was a certain pattern to village life, a certain hierarchy into which Davina and her father did not really fit.

There were the farming families, established over many, many generations, whose positions had been created not just by wealth but also by the length of time their family names had been associated with the area.

Davina and her father were outside that hierarchy. There were older people in the village who remembered her grandfather and who still made disparaging remarks about her father, saying that he had got above himself, reminding themselves and others that his father had been nothing but the local apothecary … one of them, in fact.

Now Davina’s father was the wealthiest man in the area, and it was his wealth as well as her own shyness that isolated Davina.

Their house was outside the village, set in its own grounds, a large early Victorian building bought by her father when he married her mother, after the war, when such houses were cheap. When Davina’s father brought senior members of his staff home with him for dinner he expected them to be impressed by the house’s grandeur, and they were.

He had a keen eye for a bargain: the heavy old furniture, the Edwardian silver had all been sale-room bargains, and since it was Davina and not he who had to polish the carved wood and the intricately moulded silver he had no idea of the work entailed in keeping his home and his possessions as immaculate as he demanded.

He didn’t love her, Davina knew that. He had wanted a son, and she always felt somehow to blame for the fact that she was not that son. She also felt guilty in some way because her mother had died, as though in doing so her mother had proved that her father was right to despise her sex as weak and second-class. Somehow Davina felt as though it was up to her to justify her sex’s right to exist, but these were vague unadmitted thoughts and feelings that subconsciously shaped the way she behaved.

Yes, she had been very lonely in those years—and then she had met Gregory. Tall, good-looking, charming Gregory had been the ideal she had dreamed of secretly for so long.

A brief knock on the office door roused her from her thoughts. She wasn’t using Gregory’s office with its ostentation and luxury; somehow she hadn’t felt able to. The contrast between it and the rest of the building had not only shocked her, it had also almost made her feel physically ill.

In her father’s day Carey’s had been austere enough, but it had been kept scrupulously clean and well painted. Gregory had discouraged her from visiting Carey’s. And so the shock of discovering the conditions in which their employees were expected to work was something for which she had been totally unprepared.

And she was just as guilty as Gregory in that regard, guilty of taking the easy way out, of going along with what Gregory wanted because she didn’t want to argue with him.

She felt responsible; she was responsible, even though Giles had tried to comfort her and reassure her that she was not to blame.

Giles! That would be him outside the office now—a small square room at the rear of their premises without a window, just a chair, a desk and a telephone, but it was all she needed. There was no place, in a company on the verge of bankruptcy, for plush, expensive offices, for fax machines and computers that lay idle through lack of orders. She had asked Giles innocently about the fax machine in Gregory’s office the first time she visited it after his death. He had looked away uncomfortably and when she pressed him he had blurted out that he thought Gregory used it for his money-market dealings.

That had been the first she had known of her husband’s disastrous gambling in the world money markets.

She called out to Giles to come in and smiled warmly at him as he did so. Although he was almost six feet tall, Giles always seemed shorter because he had a slight stoop. His thick dark blond hair flopped endearingly over his forehead and he was always pushing it back. He was a quiet, studious-looking man who at forty still had a boyishness about him. There was something gentle and non-threatening about Giles that Davina found very appealing.

She wasn’t sure when she had first realised that Giles was attracted to her. Last Christmas at their annual Christmas party he had danced with her, and then, when she was in the kitchen stacking used glasses in the dishwasher, he had come to help her. He had kissed her before he and Lucy left. A brief enough embrace, but she had sensed the need in it … even though she had firmly denied to herself later that it had existed.

She liked Giles and of course it was flattering that he was attracted to her, but she was married to Gregory, and Giles was married to Lucy.

Only now Gregory was dead.

‘Giles—come and sit down.’ She patted the spare chair and smiled warmly at him.

He looked tired, and she felt guilty. He was their personnel manager and was not really equipped to take over the running of the company, but there was no one else. Gregory had always refused to allow anyone to share control of the company, and now Davina knew why: he hadn’t wanted anyone else to know how much money he was losing.

The sales director, their accountant, their chemist—all of them had reported directly to Gregory and had had no real power at all; the chemist had already left, telling Davina grimly that there was no point in his staying. The company was living on its past, he had told her, and Gregory had kept his department so starved of the money needed for research that their very existence was little more than a bad joke.

The sales director had said much the same thing, and their accountant was in reality treated as little more than an accounts clerk, dealing with the wages and day-to-day expenses.

The only person Davina had been able to turn to had been Giles, who at least knew something of how the company functioned.

She was learning, though, but what she was learning she did not like. The working conditions of her employees shamed her, as did their poor wages.

‘You look tired, Giles,’ she said sympathetically.

‘Davina, I’m sorry … I hate to let you down, but I’m going to have to hand in my notice.’

He had been rehearsing his speech all day, dreading making it, but last night Lucy had given him an ultimatum. ‘Leave Carey’s or I leave you,’ she had told him. She was given to making tempestuous threats, and at one time the volatility of her nature had entranced and amused him. She was so different from him, so alive and vital, but gradually he had begun to find her unpredictability a burden; to find that he was longing to go home to someone who was calm and relaxed, who wanted to listen to his problems rather than to unload upon him the avalanche of her own. Someone, in fact, like Davina.

Davina, who was always so calm and so kind. Davina, who had never once in anyone’s hearing criticised her husband, even though everyone knew that he had been unfaithful to her; Davina, whom, to his increasing despair and guilt, he was beginning to believe he loved.

‘Giles, there’s no need to apologise. I’m more than grateful to you for all that you’ve done. Without your support, your loyalty …’ Davina made a wry gesture. ‘I know what you think … what everyone thinks—that nothing can save Carey’s now, that we’re bound to go bankrupt.’

‘You could trade on for another six months or so, but that’s all,’ Giles told her.

‘I can’t give up yet, Giles,’ Davina told him. ‘And it isn’t for my sake. If Carey’s closes down so many families will suffer.’

Giles remained silent. What she was saying was true. Carey’s was the largest, virtually the only major local employer.

‘If you could just stay for a little while longer,’ Davina pleaded with him. ‘We could still find a backer … a buyer …’

Davina could see the indecision in his eyes. She hated having to do this, but what alternative did she have? Without Giles the company would have to close. She was doing all that she could, but there was so much she had to learn. If Giles left they would lose what little credibility they still had, and it was all too likely that the bank would insist on her closing down the company.

‘I know I shouldn’t ask,’ Davina continued. ‘You’ve got your own future to think of, yours and Lucy’s, but Carey’s needs you so much, Giles …’ She took a deep breath, and then looked directly at him and said quietly, ‘I need you so much.’

She saw the colour recede from his face and then flood painfully back into it. He moved as though he was about to get up and then settled back in his chair.

‘Davina …’

‘No, please don’t say anything now. Think about it. Talk it over with Lucy,’ Davina begged him. ‘Philip Taylor at the bank has promised to do what he can to help us find a buyer.’

The overhead light highlighted the delicacy of her face. She had lost weight since Gregory’s death, Giles thought and then wondered bitterly what it was about that kind of man that gave him a wife who was so devoted and loyal, so gracious and loving, while he …

He swallowed quickly. He must not think like that about Lucy. He loved her. He had been desperately in love with her when they married, and she had loved him … had wanted him. He flinched a little as he recognised the direction his thoughts were taking, shifting his weight slightly as his body was jolted into a sudden sharp and dangerous awareness of how alone he and Davina were, and how much he desired her. When he had kissed her last Christmas she had felt so light in his arms, so small. He had wanted desperately to go on kissing her … holding her.

‘Please, Giles,’ she repeated huskily now, and he knew that he couldn’t refuse her.

Lucy often said things she didn’t mean; often lost her temper and gave him ultimatums which within hours she had forgotten. In fact, he had been surprised that she actually cared what he did. Sometimes recently when she looked at him he felt almost as though she hated him, there was so much anger and bitterness in her eyes.

‘I’ll … I’ll think about it,’ Giles promised her.

Davina smiled her thanks at him.

Outwardly she might appear calm, but inwardly her stomach was churning; inwardly she felt full of despair and guilt. How could she be doing this to Giles, using him … using what he felt for her? But what alternative did she have? It wasn’t for her own sake. Owning Carey’s meant nothing to her. She felt no possessive pride of ownership in the company.

But what she did feel was a very powerful and strong sense of responsibility towards its employees, an awareness of how guilty she had been over too many years of turning a blind eye to what was going on.

She could have overridden Gregory’s refusal to let her come to Carey’s. She could have insisted on doing so, but she had, as always in her life, taken the easy way out.

Well, there was no easy way out now … not for the people who depended on Carey Chemicals’ survival for their living.

She was all right. She had the money her father had left her, money that had been left untouched since his death—a good deal of money, in her eyes, but Mr Taylor had explained patiently, almost a little condescendingly to her that, as far as Carey’s was concerned, it was little more than a drop in the ocean.

He had told her then the extent of the company’s overdraft, an overdraft secured by Carey Chemicals’ premises and land, and she had blenched at the extent of it.

The money had been lent to Gregory some years ago by his predecessor, he told her grimly. An advance that should never have been made and certainly would not have been made in today’s harsh financial climate.

That advance, together with Carey Chemicals’ profits, Gregory had used to fund his money-market gambling.

Why had he done it? He had always been a man who enjoyed taking risks; who craved their dangerous excitement. That was, after all, why he had died. He had been driving far too fast for the road conditions, the police had told her, and yet there had been no need. He had not been expected anywhere. No, it had been the thrill of driving at such an excessive speed that had excited him, and killed him and the woman with him, just as his greed and reckless addiction to danger was now killing Carey’s and threatening the livelihoods of everyone involved with it.

Davina stood up, and so did Giles.

They both walked to the door. Giles opened it for her. She thanked him, taking care not to stand too close to him, guiltily aware of the way his hand trembled slightly as he opened the door.

‘Give my love to Lucy,’ she told him. ‘I haven’t seen her for ages.’

She felt uncomfortably hypocritical for mentioning Lucy’s name, as though she had no knowledge of Giles’s feelings for her.

They left the building together, walking to their separate cars, Giles waiting while Davina unlocked and got into hers.

Carey’s was within easy walking distance of the village, its two-storeyed buildings surrounded by the lush Cheshire countryside. The site on which her grandfather and father had originally set up the business had once been occupied by a corn chandler’s. The original two-storeyed Cheshire brick mill was still there. It had a preservation order on it now, because of its age.

Face it: Carey’s doesn’t look like a profitable drug-producing company, Davina reflected as she drove off. She surveyed the jumble of buildings that housed the company, contrasting them with photographs she had seen of the premises of the huge multinationals that dominated the drugs market.

Carey’s, she had to admit, was an anomaly. But for her grandfather’s discovery of that heart drug, Carey’s would never have existed. At home she had his notebooks with his meticulous descriptions of the drugs and potions he had made up for his customers, human and animal. When he had been a young man there had been no National Health Service and very few ordinary people had been able to afford the fees of a doctor, so men like her grandfather had doctored them instead.

She thought it was a pity that her own father had been so reluctant to talk about his childhood and his parents. It had been her mother who had told her about her grandfather, and she had only known him for a couple of years, as he had died shortly after she and Davina’s father had married.

There was a portrait of Davina’s father in the room that was used as the boardroom, and Davina had always thought that there should have been one there of her grandfather as well.

There never would be now, of course. If she was lucky enough to find a buyer, the last thing they would want would be portraits of the original founders of the company.

She drove home, worrying about whether or not Giles would stay with the company, and trying to quell her guilt at the way she had manipulated him.

And then, even more guiltily, she found herself wondering what her life would have been like if she had married someone like Giles instead of Gregory.