More Than Meets the Eye (6 page)

His own smile was awkward, embarrassed. He hadn't wished to go here, but he seemed to have led the way himself. ‘I only met her a couple of times.'

‘It wasn't really you, you know. It was her generation. She didn't approve of people living together outside wedlock.'

He wanted to say that they'd never really lived together. They'd each kept their own bases and met whenever they chose. Admittedly, that had been quite frequently, for a couple of years. He said lamely, ‘It's a long time ago.'

‘Yes, I suppose it is. Why didn't we get married, Dennis?'

She spoke as if that had been a puzzle to her for many years. He frowned, staring down at his desk, at the handsome ornamental stand for ink and pens which he never used. ‘Let's not go over old ground, Lorna.'

Part of her wanted to say ‘No, let's do just that!' But her decorum just held. She said sadly, ‘Mum wouldn't know you now.'

‘I'm sorry about that. Lorna, I wanted to—'

‘And now you're married and settled, and paid handsomely to live in a place like this. You've landed on your feet, Dennis.'

‘Yes. I'm conscious of that. I've been very fortunate.'

‘Sex all right, is it?'

‘Lorna, we really shouldn't be—'

‘We were good at that, weren't we? Good together, I mean. I often wonder why we let what we had go. I expect you wonder too, sometimes. Well, to be completely honest, I rather hope you do. That's no more than vanity, I suppose.'

He glanced at her. She was animated, when he had wanted her subdued. She was dictating the direction of their conversation, when all the rules said that in this office he should have been in easy control. She was still an attractive woman, but he mustn't tell her that. He had a sudden vision of them years ago in the bed in his flat, uninhibited, joyous, caring nothing for others in their happiness with each other. Lorna had never been one to play by the rules, in the old days.

Dennis Cooper thrust those days resolutely out of his mind. ‘We've moved on, Lorna, all of us. It's best that we leave the old times behind us, sweet as they were. I called you in here about a different matter altogether. Whether you realize it or not, you've been undermining my authority.'

She did not immediately respond. For a moment, she looked very tired. He was suddenly, belatedly, sorry for her. Then she said quietly, ‘I have a respect for truth, that's all. I like to see it observed.'

He was uneasy, wondering how widely she meant that to be understood. He said, ‘I know that you have a great knowledge of this place and its history. I respect that. But you must see that when you correct me on minor matters, as you did last week in committee and this morning in front of visitors, you diminish my position as leader here.'

‘I see. I thought you were a bigger man than that. I thought you'd want the proper facts to be stated.'

He saw how set her face looked, sensed that he needed to help her out of this. ‘I do respect the truth, just as I respect your knowledge and your enthusiasm for the correct facts. But when it's a matter of detail, it confuses people rather than illuminates. People like to see the man in charge of Westbourne as just that.'

She looked him full in the face for the first time in several minutes. ‘A matter of detail. I see. Well, I shall bear that in mind in the future. Thank you for putting me right on this. Is that all?'

‘Yes. Except that if your mother's becoming more of a burden, we can cut down your hours here.'

‘Yes. I'm sure you could. But that will not be necessary, thank you.' She rose, moved to the door, then turned to look at him again. He wondered what she was going to say now, whether there would be some bitter final thrust from this woman whom in another life he had loved.

Instead, she looked at him for seconds which seemed to stretch, with both of them as motionless as if they were fixed in a painting. Then she gave a little nod, turned on her heel, and left without another word. She closed the door behind her as quietly and carefully as he had done at the beginning of their meeting.

Jim Hartley found gardening the best of all escapes. Once you were pruning or mowing or hedge-cutting, you gave all your attention to the precision required to secure the right effect. That made you forget the troubles in your private life.

Digging was best of all. You worked yourself into a steady rhythm, efficient but not too fast – those who went bull-at-a-gate at their digging were soon panting and unsteady. More importantly, their work was poor; you quickly became ragged and uneven, if you didn't maintain an even pace. There wasn't a lot of digging at Westbourne, because most of the ground was already thickly planted, but today was an exception.

They were creating a new bed for perennials. Jim would have a major say in exactly what was eventually planted here, but a final decision wouldn't be taken until the end of the season. He had some firm ideas on the subject, but he was keeping them to himself at the moment. Meantime, the plot had to be marked out precisely and double dug. Then the soil would be analysed and compost and animal manures applied to the new surface, ready for planting in the autumn.

Jim Hartley had pulled rank and told his staff that he would initiate the digging himself. There was no such thing as a menial task in the garden, he always told his workforce: there was simply good work and bad work. Everyone should be prepared not just to try his hand at anything, but to master whatever skill was needed. Jim was secretly proud of his digging. He also knew that if the boss was prepared to take on anything, the rest of the gardeners were in no position to pick and choose which tasks were allotted to them.

He had already dug his first set of sods and his first trench, transferring the turfs and the soil by wheelbarrow to the other end of the plot, where they would be used to fill in the final trench. Now he was putting the next set of turfs face down in the trench he had created and covering them with the soil which had been beneath them. Double digging; men had treated virgin ground like this for centuries and still found no more effective method of intensive cultivation. It was slow and demanding, but it was effective. And he liked the feeling that he was continuing a tradition, that he was doing what many thousands of anonymous labourers had done in centuries long gone.

He worked steadily, finding the rhythm he had sought from the outset, hearing his breathing becoming steadier after the panting which had accompanied his creation of that first and very necessary trench. He was well under way now, settled into the pattern of the work. Now the activity itself rather than the labourer seemed to dictate the tempo. He felt it in his shoulders and his arms, in the steady turning of his waist.

‘You all right there, boss?'

He started violently, almost crying out with the shock. He had been even more deeply engrossed in the digging than he realized. A slim shape stood motionless between him and the sun, little more than a dark outline until his eyes refocused upon it. The Scottish lad, Alex Fraser, the apprentice who was so keen to learn that he sometimes seemed a little too enthusiastic to be true. Perhaps he realized that Hartley could not immediately comprehend his presence here, at the lower extremity of the gardens, for he said, ‘Ye told me to come here at ten. Ye said I was to take over the digging.'

Alex never stepped out of line, always did his best in whatever task he was given. But he never called Hartley ‘sir', as most of the other juniors did. Jim liked that in him. Jim nodded now. He asked if the Glaswegian had done this before and was told he had not.

‘It's simple enough.' Jim explained the principles of double digging, emphasized that although it was slow and demanding, it was by far the best method of getting a deep tilth in new gardening ground. He demonstrated as he spoke, enjoying his own proficiency in the task, finding himself out of breath as he combined instruction with labour.

He climbed reluctantly from his latest trench. ‘Don't rush it, or you'll need to keep stopping. Cultivate a slow, steady rhythm; that's good for the ground as well as for you.'

Jim Hartley left the young man with the bright red hair concentrating fiercely upon his simple task and moved reluctantly back into the activities of the established gardens. Over the multiple hedges of Westbourne, he looked towards his cottage and the problems that it held for him.

Six hours later, Jim Hartley's wife collected her two children from school. That's how she was defined nowadays, she thought, that's how people thought of her: as someone else's wife.

Julie Hartley wasn't looking forward to the birthday party to which the children had both been invited. To Julie's mind, a school day was quite taxing enough, without the added excitements and tensions of a gathering like this afterwards. Children's parties should be held at weekends or not at all, in her view. To hold one on a Monday evening after school was asking for trouble. There would be childish quarrels and tears before this one was over, if she was any judge.

She had a point. But Julie was not widely noted for her optimism.

She was a pretty woman with long black hair; her dark brown eyes seemed alert to everything around her. She smiled readily, but rarely at length; there seemed always something brittle in both her amusement and her approval. When she had been in college, few of her contemporaries had envisaged her as a wife and mother. She had seemed then too independent and spirited to settle into quiet domesticity before she had made her mark in the world. Of the several men who had passed in quick succession through her life in those days, the least likely candidate for permanency had surely been Jim Hartley. The fresh-faced, powerful young man couldn't discuss books or films or art or even television, and he had a passion for horticulture which seemed to most of the young people in Julie's set quite bizarre.

Yet the marriage seemed to have worked. And Julie, against all expectations, was quite certainly a splendid mother. Sam was eight and Oliver was six now; they were boisterous, happy boys, comfortable at home and doing well at school. To all outward appearances, the once mercurial Julie had settled happily into family life, accepting its challenges and coping well with its inevitable problems.

To all outward appearances.

The party was a huge success, despite Julie's earlier fears for it. The birthday boy's parents were richer than anyone had realized before this day. They lived in a huge modern house with three acres of grounds and a large swimming pool. On this broiling-hot day, the pool was the star attraction. Released from the disciplines of school, the boys – there were no girls at this celebration, on the strict instructions of the eight-year-old at its centre – splashed, screamed and flung balls and rubber rings to each other in joyful ecstasy.

There was no restriction on the decibels here, because there were no neighbours to disturb. There was that most important of childish requirements for happiness, infinite space. The adults were at hand to control over-excitement and excess, but in this environment there was surprisingly little of either. There were inevitably a few clashes and a few falls, even the occasional tear, but the injured were too eager to rejoin the party to grieve for long, especially with male pride at stake.

Julie Hartley watched her boys happily among the communal chaos, saw how well they fitted in with their peers, and wished suddenly and heartily that she could do the same. In the midst of this noisy and unthinking euphoria, she wondered bleakly how her own situation could ever be resolved.

Peter Nayland tried to see the humour of his situation. He was sure that others would, if he was ever fool enough to reveal the facts of it.

It was a strange thing to feel so vulnerable, when you were surrounded with all the trappings of power. Like all men who make fortunes by dubious means, Nayland had assembled around himself the muscle to repel both his rivals and the enemies inevitably made as he became successful. It was like the Swiss Guards around the Pope, he thought; you gathered a small group you could trust, who knew that their mission was both to display your power and standing and to enforce control whenever it was needed.

Peter liked the Swiss Guard comparison, for he had a lively sense of irony. He was an intelligent man, despite the dubious businesses he operated; the idea of the unthinking thug at the head of an enterprise had always been anathema to him. You needed to be well organized, whatever the source of your wealth. You needed to be aware of the competition. You needed to know your markets. You needed to be able to anticipate trends, to foresee what would be popular in two years' time as well as currently.

Wasn't it Sam Goldwyn who said that no one ever went bankrupt through underestimating the taste of the public? One of those movie moguls, anyway. Well, in Peter Nayland's view, no one had ever gone bankrupt through exaggerating the depths to which human sexual tastes could sink. That philosophy, combined with the absence of any sense of morality, had stood him in good stead over the years.

Yet today he felt vulnerable. Not to any threat from his enemies or his rivals, but to a totally unsuspected sentimentality he had discovered within his own being. He called it sentimentality in an attempt to despise it and thus control it. Sentimentality was mawkish and maudlin and could be easily dismissed.

Love was something else altogether. Nayland had a vague idea from his early youth that love was something you should cherish. Ever since he had watched her drive away from him after their last meeting in Stratford, Peter Nayland had been fighting the gnawing suspicion that he might be in love with Alison Cooper.

He'd had plenty of women over the years. He'd even felt quite close to a few of them, without ever considering setting up house with them for the long term. Nor had Ally the sort of Hollywood looks which would blind a man to reality and let his penis rule his brain. She was attractive enough, with her neatly cut dark-blonde hair, the blue eyes which were rarely without a twinkle, and the small, attractive nose which lifted just a little at the end. She'd kept her figure; not only did she curve in the right places but she made you want to stroke those curves. He smiled even now at that thought.