Chapter Five

Nicholas George was born at three o’clock on the morning of third of April 1923 at Melsham hospital. He was a lusty seven and a half pounds and George was delighted. He had a daughter he loved, but a son was special, a son could join him in business and make it ‘Kennett & Son’.

On the day of the christening, George decided to photograph them all, grouped around Barbara and the baby, whom he positioned on the settee. Alison knelt beside Barbara, obeying her father’s instructions to hold the baby’s hand and smile at him. ‘Mum, you sit the other side of Barbara, I want the whole family in.’ He set the delay and raced round behind the settee and bent towards Barbara, smiling down at his son. The flash coincided with the ringing of the doorbell.

‘That’ll be Dad and Virginia,’ Barbara said, handing Nicholas to her mother-in-law so that she could let them in.

She was shocked by her father’s appearance. The strapping man who loved to be out of doors working on the farm, who liked to ride and shoot and fish, could hardly walk from one chair to another without becoming breathless. He was patently ill, but he smiled and sat with his grandson on his lap, sipping a glass of champagne, assuring everyone he felt fine. Virginia took him home at seven and helped him to bed, then she crept downstairs to eat a lonely supper. When she went up to bed herself, he was already dead. He was smiling, as if he had been enjoying a private joke when he drifted off.

Even though she had known her father was ill, Barbara could hardly take in the news when Virginia rang at seven the following morning. Her father had always been so strong and healthy, her bulwark. She didn’t want to believe it. George fetched his mother to baby sit and then drove her over to the farm, but there was nothing she could do except sit with Virginia in the kitchen drinking endless cups of tea. She had idolised her father. It was to her father she had gone to solve her childhood problems, and to some extent, those of her adulthood, those she felt able to confide. He had never failed to give her good advice. The only time their relationship had been strained was over his marriage to Virginia, but he had convinced her that it was right for him, and she had come round to accepting it. She was still not one hundred per cent sure of Virginia, but there was no doubt the widow was genuinely grief-stricken.

‘He loved you,’ Virginia said, after a long silence, when the only sound was the ticking of the old clock on the dresser. ‘He was always talking about the things you had done as a child, riding, playing the piano, school reports, your painting, that sort of thing. He was proud of you.’

‘I know. I wish I had been with him more at the end. I feel so guilty…’

‘Guilt is all part of grief, or so they tell me,’ Virginia said. ‘It must be, because I am riddled with it.’

Barbara turned to her in surprise. ‘What have you to feel guilty about?’

‘I wasn’t with him at the end, I was down here, eating my supper.’

‘Oh, come now,’ George said, putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘You stayed with him until he went to sleep. He didn’t wake up, so his life ended then, you mustn’t feel guilty about that.’

She looked up at him. ‘No, I suppose not. You are such a comfort, George.’

‘Do you want me to help with the funeral arrangements?’ he asked. ‘You shouldn’t have to cope alone.’

‘Oh George, would you? I’ve been dreading it, though he left instructions. He wanted to talk to me about them, but I wouldn’t listen. I stuck my head in the sand and told myself he would live for years and years. He wrote them down instead. They’re in his desk with his will. I haven’t opened it.’

‘Leave everything to me.’

John Bosgrove’s funeral service was as dignified as his end. Besides the immediate family, aunts, uncles and cousins came from wherever they happened to be living, sombrely clad but not in deep mourning: he had not wanted that. From the town came representatives of the NFU, the golf club, the Rotarians and the church where he had worshipped all his life.

Barbara, following the coffin down the aisle with George and Virginia beside her, was uplifted to see so many. Her father had been loved. Penny was there, elegant in a slate-grey jersey suit and black hat; and beside her Simon looking incredibly prosperous, with a glamorous Dodo at his side. Barbara’s step faltered at the sight of him, then she looked ahead towards the coffin and continued on her way with a firm tread. Tucked away in a back pew almost hidden by a column, she caught sight of Rita Younger and someone who could only have been her mother. She gave them a wry smile, glad that her mother-in-law had stayed behind to look after Alison and the baby.

Afterwards the mourners returned to the farmhouse for tea and sandwiches, standing about chatting to each other, sometimes even laughing, though not unkindly. They all had memories, nostalgic, bittersweet, happy, sad. Barbara endured as long as she could, then crept away to the stables and put her arms round Jinny’s neck and cried, hot, scalding, grief-laden tears she could not shed in company.

‘I saw you leave, thought I’d find you here.’

Startled, she looked up to see Simon in the doorway. ‘I thought you might need a shoulder to cry on.’

She turned and flung herself into his arms. He held her silently, feeling her misery through her shaking shoulders, sharing it. His was the best comfort she had known since her father’s passing: no words, no platitudes, no prattle about practicalities. With no one else there to see her, it was unadulterated, selfish grief. And after it came calm. The sobs eased and she looked up at him through a blur, smiling a little, her voice still watery. ‘I’ve ruined your jacket.’

‘It’ll clean.’ He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and gently mopped up her tears, almost making them flow again. ‘Do you feel better now?’

‘Yes, thank you. I’m sorry I’m such a drip. I can’t believe he’s gone. He meant so much to me.’

He grinned ruefully over her head: it was her love for her father which had triggered her marriage to George and he knew, though she had never said a word to him, that it was a disaster, just as his own marriage was. There was no point in saying anything to her, it was all water under the bridge and water didn’t flow backwards. ‘I know.’ He paused. ‘Do you think you can you cope now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s go in, then. I’m afraid I’ll have to leave soon. Dodo wants to get back to town. Work, you know.’ It wasn’t work; he did not want to stay and be tormented by the sight of Barbara whom he loved and might have had, but whom he had lost. He had been a mess when he came out of the army, unable to settle, not knowing what he wanted, trying to pretend that limbless bodies and sightless eyes were the price you paid for war and, if you had survived intact, then you should be glad, not eaten up by guilt. By the time he had come to some sort of shaky truce within himself, and decided it was useless blaming himself for the mistakes made by politicians and generals, it was too late, Barbara was married.

He should never have tried to seduce her at Pen’s party. He had never apologised for that, simply because he had not seen her again until today and putting it in writing was too risky: he did not know if George read her letters. If she had forgotten it or put it out of her mind, it was best not to remind her, but he wished he could forgive himself.

They turned and walked back to the house side by side. Once there, Dodo claimed him. Barbara went and stood beside George and took his hand, giving him a watery smile.

George began building the units on the industrial site amid gloomy forecasts from almost everyone that it would be a financial disaster. Gosport openly said he was grateful for the fire: it had stopped him ruining himself as Kennett’s was doing. That George was not ruined was down to his foresight and, to Barbara’s continuing shame, a total lack of business ethics. He spent more time than ever oiling wheels and cultivating anyone who could help him: bribed, threatened, diversified. It was no good protesting, he simply told her he was not doing anything more than hundreds of others were doing to survive. If she didn’t like it, she could always sell the farm.

To Barbara’s surprise and delight her father had left her the farm with the proviso that Virginia, to whom he had left a small annuity, was to live there as long as she wanted to or until she married again. ‘It’s a white elephant, Barbara,’ George had told her, two months after the funeral. ‘It’s too big for one person.’ He had come home for lunch and they were facing each other across the kitchen table with bowls of soup in front of them. Alison had finished hers and scrambled down to play under the table with some wooden bricks. Nick was asleep in his pram, but would wake soon demanding to be fed.

Barbara kept one ear open for him as she spoke. ‘I can’t sell it, you know that. It’s Virginia’s home.’

‘You can if she agrees. I could find her something smaller, easier to run.’

‘But it was my childhood home, where I was born and grew up. My parents loved that old house and so do I. Dad knew that. It’s why he left it to me.’

‘That’s sentimental claptrap. You can’t let sentiment interfere with business and Kennett’s could do with a cash injection right now. There’s the industrial site to finish…’

‘With businesses going to the wall almost daily, it would be madness to sell the farm to finance that. Go to the bank if you need money.’

‘I’ve reached my limit there.’ He was trying to be calm, but she was making it very difficult. Juggling money, handling employees, placating suppliers were the breath of life to him and held no terrors, but Barbara in one of her obdurate moods was a different thing altogether.

‘The farm is the only thing I’ve got of my own. Everything else is yours.’

‘And what’s wrong with that? You know I’ll always look after you. Have I ever begrudged you anything?’

She wanted to say, ‘Nothing but your time and affection,’ but knew it would spark another, more wounding, argument and she shied away from that. ‘No, but if Dad wanted the farm sold he’d have sold it himself, wouldn’t he? Or left it to Virginia outright.’

‘All I’m asking is for you to think about it.’

Nick woke and his pathetic wails for food diverted her. She picked him up and settled down to feed him. George watched them in silence for a few minutes, then went back to work, leaving her lonely and vulnerable. She needed a friend, someone she could confide in, but there was no one. She couldn’t say anything to Elizabeth who would undoubtedly take her son’s part. She might have been able to talk to Penny but Penny was filming in Spain and, in any case, she knew what her friend would say: ‘Hang onto your assets.’

Somehow George kept going. He expected his workers to accept lower wages, and though they grumbled, it was better than no work at all. Bonar Law had died and been succeeded as prime minister by Stanley Baldwin but he was soon in trouble and a general election was called. George campaigned as hard as anyone, knocked on doors, spoke at public meetings, harangued and argued. Although Melsham was a safe Conservative seat, the result over the whole country was a victory for the Labour Party and Ramsay MacDonald was invited to head the first ever Labour government, albeit with Liberal support. ‘It won’t last,’ George said and was proved right when another election was held in October.

The Conservatives swept back into office, helped by a fraudulent letter published in the newspapers purporting to be from the President of the Communist International, calling on British workers to prepare for armed revolution. As far as George was concerned, it meant he could start lobbying for new contracts, but with his capital tied up in the industrial site and Barbara being bloody-minded over selling the farm, all he could do was play a waiting game and hope something would turn up.

Lady Isobel Quarenton, returning from her weekly visit to Melsham market, discovered a leak in the manor roof. What made her look up as she got out of the car, she didn’t know. Perhaps it was the sun winking on the upper windows or a biplane flying overhead; whatever it was, it was fortuitous because she noticed several slates missing.

James, her last surviving servant, who was butler, footman, gardener and chauffeur rolled into one, was shutting the passenger door of the Bentley, before driving it round to the coach house. ‘James,’ she said. ‘Had you noticed those tiles were missing?’

He looked in the direction of her pointing finger. ‘No, My Lady. Had I done so, I would have drawn your attention to them.’

‘I’d better go and see what the damage is.’ Maintenance of the once lovely old house was horrendously expensive and getting worse and she simply did not have the money; her only income was a tiny annuity her father, the Earl of Cotterham, had left her and the rents from a couple of cottages which had once been part of the estate. Inflation had reduced the former to next to nothing in value and the cottages also needed repairs.

Her mother had died when she was a child and her father of influenza in 1918, which was probably a blessing: he would have found the changes in their fortunes impossible to live with. But Melsham Manor was her home; she had never known another. Cosseted and protected all her life, and having no brothers, which might have made a difference, she had had little opportunity to meet young men, certainly none her father approved of. Consequently she had never married and now she lived alone, except for James, whose whole working life had been spent in the service of the family. Given the opportunity to leave, he had refused to budge on the grounds that she needed him. He did everything about the house and garden except the cooking, which she managed herself. One man couldn’t be expected to do so much and so it didn’t get done. But leaking roofs were important.

The attics, which had once housed kitchen maids, parlour maids, chambermaids and footmen, were now filled with lumber: old furniture; lampshades; toys; an old cradle on rockers; suitcases full of school books which her mother would never throw away; umbrella stands; a stag’s head; a stuffed owl whose glass cover was broken; tennis rackets; board games; a blackboard and a desk put up there when the schoolroom became redundant, all of it thick with dust and festooned with cobwebs. She hadn’t been up there for years and was appalled by the clutter. But she couldn’t ask James to clear it out and she couldn’t face doing it herself. She picked her way carefully through it to the spot beneath the missing tiles. It wasn’t difficult to find because the ceiling had collapsed and the floorboards beneath the hole were wet. If it rained again, it would seep down to the room below. Something had to be done. She went downstairs and rang Kennett’s.

It was the first time George had been inside the gates of the manor. There was a weed-encrusted gravel drive leading to the front door of a substantial mansion which was mostly Georgian, though one wing, at right angles to the main facade, was older and there was an extension at the back which had been added more recently, but everywhere spoke of neglect. His professional eye roamed over it as he got out of his car and rang the bell.

He was admitted by the butler and conducted to the drawing room where her ladyship was waiting for him. It was a well-proportioned room with a high ceiling and long windows which looked out onto a paved terrace. There was an Adams fireplace on which stood an ormolu clock and two small figurines. A display cabinet beside it contained a few pieces of porcelain. Lady Isobel was sitting in a winged chair by the empty hearth. There was a small table beside her on which stood a small vase of flowers and a family photograph.

‘Mr Kennett, My Lady,’ the butler said. George noticed that the sleeves of the man’s jacket were slightly frayed, though the creases in his trousers were knife-sharp.

It was difficult to tell how old her ladyship was, probably in her forties, he decided. She was dressed in a shapeless purple frock and her hair was dragged up into a bun on top of her head which she held very upright.

‘Mr Kennett,’ she said, in her precise, well-modulated way. ‘I am afraid I have lost a few tiles from the roof and the rain has penetrated the attics. I need a quote for repairs.’

‘That’s no problem, My Lady. If I might take a look.’

She instructed James to show him the way and sat down to wait for him to come back.

Following the servant, George climbed an impressive flight of oak stairs which curved up from the marble-tiled entrance hall, then walked the length of a gallery to more stairs at the back of the house. These were narrow and carpeted in cord, which was threadbare. At the top he found himself in a long corridor lined with doors. James opened one of them. ‘In here, sir.’

George looked round the damaged room, picked up some fragments of plaster and rubbed them between thumb and finger, stamped on the wet floorboards, then asked James for a pair of steps and climbed up through the hole in the plaster to take a closer look at the tiles. Then he went downstairs, out of the front door and down the drive far enough to peer up at the roof, then he wandered round to the back, taking in the old stable block and returning to the front door, where James was waiting to escort him back to the drawing room. In spite of the neglect, the building seemed basically sound and would repay a few thousand spent on it. The trouble was that he didn’t think Lady Isobel had a few thousand and he wondered why she continued to live there in such decaying splendour.

‘Well?’ she queried. ‘How much?’

‘It needs doing urgently if the first-floor bedroom ceilings are to be saved,’ he said. ‘There are a lot more loose tiles besides those that have already come off and more will come down with the next wind. I can’t be sure how many until we get some scaffolding up and look closer, but it will be almost impossible to match them. If you want the job to look anything at all, you really ought to have the whole roof done. Some of the timbers are saturated and I noticed a bit of woodworm. The wet floorboards need replacing; one or two are downright dangerous. As for the ceilings—’

‘I didn’t ask for a catalogue of disasters, Mr Kennett, I asked how much to patch it up.’

He pretended to consult the notes he had made but the figure he had in mind had very little to do with what he had written. ‘A few thousand, My Lady.’

‘How many thousand?’

‘Three, at least, maybe more.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’ She was shocked. ‘I can’t afford to throw money away.’

‘It would be throwing it away not to have a proper job done,’ he said. ‘This is a lovely old house, it deserves to be looked after.’

‘You don’t need to tell me that, Mr Kennett, but I think your estimate is too steep. Mr Gosport would not have been so expensive.’

‘No, My Lady, which is perhaps why he is no longer in business. Times have changed. Inflation is higher than it’s ever been.’ He paused, watching her face carefully. ‘I could use some of the tiles from the old wing, which will give you a good match at the front, and then re-roof the back with cheaper tiles. That would bring it down to two and a half thousand…’

‘Still too much.’

He waited, allowing the full horror of what he had said to sink in, before adding, ‘There is another way…’

‘What might that be?’ She spoke warily.

‘I noticed that there is a triangular piece of land in the corner of your grounds close to Mill Road, which is separated from the main grounds by a copse of trees. I would guess it’s just over an acre. If you let me have that plot free gratis, I’ll do the work for half price.’

‘If you want it to build one of those dreadful estates with matchboxes for houses, the answer is no, Mr Kennett.’

‘Not an estate, my lady, one house for myself and family. I’ll fence it and access it from Mill Road. You won’t even know we’re there. So what do you say?’

‘That land has been in our family for hundreds of years. My father would turn in his grave.’

‘Better to part with a tiny piece of land which is useless for anything else, than lose the whole house, don’t you think? You will, if the roof isn’t looked after.’

She knew perfectly well he was trying to bamboozle her, she could see the gleam of avarice in his eye, but she really didn’t have the money for the repairs and they had to be done. This was a way out, and what was an acre, after all? ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.

‘Don’t think too long, My Lady. If it rains again or the wind gets up…’ He left the rest of the sentence in the air.

‘I believe the forecast for the next twenty-four hours is fair,’ she said with some asperity. ‘I will telephone you with a decision tomorrow.’

‘Very well, My Lady. I look forward to hearing from you.’

She didn’t take the hand he offered but turned and rang for James to show him out.

She would come back to him, he knew. All he had to do, he told himself as he walked to his car, was to make sure that the bill for the repairs was double a fair price for the land and that wouldn’t be difficult to fiddle. If the tiles were taken off the Victorian wing very carefully, their second-hand value would cover the cost of the new tiles, even allowing for those he put on the front and a few breakages. It would cost a few man-hours, but that would help to keep his men in employment when he might otherwise have to lay them off. The damage to the roof timbers was minimal, the woodworm was not extensive and could be treated. And a few new floorboards and a bit of plaster wouldn’t break the bank. With luck, the land would cost him nothing at all. He would have the bigger house he had been promising himself on a prime site. But he wouldn’t tell Barbara, not yet. He was still miffed with her over the farm and wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily.

They were growing more and more distant with each other and Barbara didn’t think it was only because of her attitude over the farm. He was never at home but it was a long time before she admitted, even to herself, that he might have found someone else. The signs were there: the late nights, the vague excuses, the faint smell of perfume that clung to him. Their sex life, once so satisfying, had dwindled to a quick thump every couple of weeks, which left her miserable and unsatisfied. And when she tried to initiate something herself, he was always too tired, or he had a work problem on his mind. He was always polite, never angry, which did nothing to help her accept it.

She was stagnating, sinking into a mire of household routine which was unshakeable. Get up, take Alison to school, put Nick in his pushchair to go shopping, do the washing, ironing and housework, grab a snack at lunchtime and be at the school gates at four o’clock. Then home, give both children their tea and cook dinner, that was if George was coming home to eat, most of the time he didn’t and then she would sit with a tray on her lap, a mass of nerves and worry. Was her marriage falling apart? If she pretended nothing was wrong, would the problem go away of its own accord?

She didn’t want the trauma of a broken marriage and the hurt it would cause the whole family. She would have to start again on her own and that wouldn’t be easy: she had no qualifications, no experience, no money and she would be blamed for the breakdown. Besides, she thought, she still loved her husband and she adored her children; they were the most important people in her life, more important than her own happiness. And perhaps she was being a dog in a manger over the farm. If she did something about that it might put things right between them.

‘George, am I free to sell the land Dad left me, even if I keep the house?’

They had just finished Sunday lunch and he was sitting in an armchair reading the Sunday Times. Alison was drawing and Nicholas was thumping a drum Elizabeth had given him and making an awful din. Both were attractive children, but he had the sunniest smile and was, even at his naughtiest, adorable. Alison was much quieter, very intelligent, and less prone to tantrums. Given a book or a piece of paper and some coloured crayons, she could amuse herself for hours.

‘Yes, but I don’t see how that helps,’ he said, carefully laying aside the paper.

‘I was thinking. If you’re strapped for cash, why not abandon the idea of building another house? We could move into the farmhouse ourselves and convert the stable block into a self-contained home for Virginia. The structure is perfectly sound.’

‘That’s the daftest idea I’ve heard yet,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m the sort of man who’d live in a house owned by his wife? People will think I’m on my uppers. I want a modern house with every convenience, and doing repairs and modernising would swallow up all the money the land made, wouldn’t it?’

‘Not necessarily. You are a builder, after all and—’

He cut her short. ‘I have already negotiated the land for our new house. I intend to start building as soon as I can spare the cash and the men.’

‘You have? Where is it? Why didn’t you say?’

‘It was meant to be a surprise. I’ve bought an acre from Lady Quarenton, on the corner by Mill Road.’

‘Does that mean you don’t want the farmhouse after all?’

‘I never said I didn’t want it, simply that I didn’t want to live in it. But if you’re determined not to sell, why not let it? The rent would come in useful.’

‘But what about Virginia?’

‘There’s this house,’ he said. ‘Shall we give it to her when we move out, hand the deeds over? Make it a final settlement. It will leave you to do what you like with the farmhouse.’

‘Do you think she’d agree?’

‘Leave her to me. I’ll go up and see her after work tomorrow. I think I can persuade her it’s a good idea.’

She took the drum away from Nicholas. ‘Then do it, please, and put the sale of the extra land in hand. Use the money any way you like.’

He left his chair to bend over and kiss her. ‘Thank you, darling. It couldn’t have come at a better time.’

Virginia was in the stable grooming her horse when George arrived. She was wearing jodhpurs and a pullover that looked as though it might have been one of John’s. It’s sloppiness enhanced, rather than detracted, from her slim figure. He took her in his arms and kissed her, then stepped back to hold her at arm’s length. ‘God, you’re beautiful.’

She laughed. ‘In this old thing?’

‘We can soon remedy that.’ He pulled the jumper over her head and threw it over the side of the stall before pulling the strap of her brassiere down so that he could kiss her breasts, one by one, licking his tongue round the nipple and nipping them with his teeth when they rose in response. She pulled his shirt out of his trousers, undid the fly and pushed her hand inside. Oh, he was so hard, so big, so exciting, everything she could wish for and she wanted him. How she wanted him!

It had begun as a simple interest in her welfare after John died, then a mutual sharing of problems, and after that it had escalated into something far more important. He was dynamic, purposeful, successful, handsome in a rugged way, and very sexy. Did Barbara know that? Virginia doubted it.

‘God, George, I need you. I need you right now.’

‘Me too.’ He took her hand and pulled her towards the stairs to the hayloft, where they undressed each other in a frenzy of impatience. Nude she was like a goddess; he couldn’t see enough of her lithe body, still youthful and untouched by ugly stretch marks. Two or three times a week for the last six months, he had feasted his eyes on it, stroked it, kissed it, entered it. And she loved it. Loved him, she told him time after time, crying out when she climaxed, gripping him with her thighs, holding onto him, as if she were drowning. She revelled in it, in everything they did, the strange places they found to indulge in sexual fantasies, the risks they took.

‘George, how long can we keep this up?’ she asked, some time later, when they were lying side by side, with their bodies glowing and the smell of straw and sex in their nostrils.

‘For ever, I hope.’

‘You’re simply sticking your head in the sand. Barbara will find out sooner or later.’

‘Why should she? I make no secret of the fact that I take an interest in your affairs. Which is why I’m supposed to be here. She wants to sell the land and let the farmhouse. I’m supposed to find out how you feel about moving into something smaller.’

‘You know how I feel about it, George.’ She rolled over and propped herself on her elbow to look at him. ‘I want to get out of here. It’s haunted by John and his first wife. Everywhere I look I see them, every time I move even the smallest ornament, I imagine them standing over me, disapproving. To me it represents a year or two of happiness and endless months of horror watching him die.’

‘I’m going to build us a bigger house, so how do you like the idea of moving into the one we’re in now? You would own it outright which is more than you do the farm.’

‘It’s OK by me, so long as we can still be together.’

‘Then, I’ll put it in hand.’ He reached for his clothes, picked the straw out of them and dressed. ‘I’d better be going.’ He bent over to kiss her. ‘See you soon. There’ll be lots of legitimate reasons for me to come now.’ He laughed. ‘Business reasons.’

She stayed where she was for several minutes after he had gone, then slowly dressed herself and went down to finish grooming her horse.

Things didn’t improve on the business front: the economy lurched from one crisis to another. Bankruptcies were at an all-time high, leading to massive unemployment. Barbara’s sympathies were all with the men who were out of work and she felt guilty that she had so much, that her children were plump and well clothed, that George seemed to be able to maintain his lifestyle with barely a hiccough. ‘I work damned hard for it,’ he told her, more than once. She forbore to remind him of the money that had come from the sale of the land belonging to the farm. He was touchy about that, even though it had been his salvation.

They moved into their new home in the spring of 1926. George christened it The Chestnuts because a couple of the old trees were included in the garden. The house was large and modern with every possible labour-saving device built into the kitchen, including a refrigerator. There were four bedrooms and a luxurious bathroom. Barbara had enjoyed furnishing it, though George had haggled over every single item, bullying the poor shopkeepers, who were struggling as much as he was, into huge discounts. And though she was glad to leave their first house, which had always been associated in her mind with sharp practice, if not downright dishonesty, she wished he hadn’t used so much of the proceeds from the sale of the land to build it; the plot alone must have cost a fortune. She had intended the money to help with the business, not for her own comfort.

He had an answer to that, as he had for everything. ‘It proves George Kennett is not only a survivor but a winner,’ he told her when she mentioned it one morning at breakfast, the only time of day they had more than two minutes together. ‘If he can build a house like this in the middle of a recession, then there must be something special about his business acumen. Besides, it kept the workforce busy when I might have had to lay some of them off. What sort of message would that have sent out, do you suppose?’

‘Lay them off? Things aren’t that bad, surely?’

‘They will be if the miners have their way. The country relies on coal for almost everything. If my customers suffer, then I suffer.’

Barbara hardly blamed the miners. They had a dreadful job to do, tunnelling away in semi-darkness under the ground, many in seams so poor, they had to dig the coal out lying on their bellies, getting ill with lung troubles and failing eyesight. The trigger that caused the unrest was the lifting of subsidies, which left the mine owners struggling and they demanded wage cuts from their employees.

‘Four pounds a week, I ask you!’ George said, tapping the newspaper report he had been reading. ‘That’s more than I pay my skilled workers. Holding the country to ransom, that’s what they’re doing. In the old days—’

‘They sent women and children down the mines,’ she said, spooning boiled egg into Nick’s mouth. ‘It took a lot of hard work to put an end to that.’

‘Don’t be silly, there’s no comparison.’

It was always the same: whenever she tried to voice an opinion counter to his own, he dismissed it, as if she had no brain to think for herself. She must be the little woman, the homemaker, a shadow of her husband. Almost in defiance, she started painting again, setting up her easel and paints in the spare bedroom and working away in the lonely evenings after the children had been put to bed. It was a large canvas of a girl sitting on a rock gazing out to sea. She didn’t know why she chose that theme, but it seemed to suit her mood.

In the event, remembering how they had let the miners down the last time, the Trades Union Congress called out the dockers and the transport, iron and steel, gas and electricity workers and a general strike began on the third of May. Uncollected rubbish began to pile up in the streets, commuters couldn’t get to work, raw materials weren’t getting through to factories and the threat of food shortages sent some people scurrying to the shops to buy up things like sugar, tea and coffee in spite of government warnings not to do so. And there were long queues at all the petrol stations. The army and navy were called in to move goods, and volunteers suddenly appeared prepared to drive trucks, trains and trams, and man the telephone exchanges. People in the rural communities fetched out long disused pony traps and roamed the woods for fuel.

‘It’s almost impossible to get about,’ Penny told Barbara in one of her periodic telephone calls. ‘What with amateurs driving trams and buses and car owners volunteering to take people to work, London is one big traffic jam. And picketing strikers are throwing stones and slashing tyres. Simon got a gash on his face from a half brick. He was only doing his bit, driving a tram. He came through the war without a scratch and now he’ll have a scar on his face.’

Barbara pictured Simon’s unblemished handsome face and her heart gave a sickening lurch to think of it being disfigured. ‘Is it very bad?’

‘You know Simon. He’s making a joke of it, as usual: says it will make him even more attractive to the ladies and they won’t look sideways at him anymore because he has no war wounds to show he did his bit.’

‘Tell him I’m sorry.’ She meant more than just sorry he had been injured, but sorry for everything else, for the unnecessary guilt he seemed to carry around with him, for the fact that she had used him for comfort when her father died and had none to offer in return, for the feelings she still had for him, feelings which seemed to have survived her marriage and which she could never speak of.

‘I will. How is it with you?’

‘Apart from the fact we can’t travel on public transport and have to be careful about using coal, not much is different.’

‘How’s the new house?’

‘It’s fine. I’m just about straight. You’ll have to come and visit. I haven’t seen you for ages.’

‘I will as soon as I’ve got a day to spare. I’m busy filming at Cricklewood, or I would be if everything had not ground to a halt over this strike.’

‘Perhaps it won’t last long.’

She was right. The general strike collapsed after only nine days, though the miners stayed out until August when hunger forced them back to work. Some of the smaller mine owners had gone out of business and there were no jobs to go back to. They left their homes and drifted south looking for work.

Charities were set up to help not only the miners, but others hit by unemployment, and Barbara volunteered her services to an organisation set up in Melsham to help unemployed men and their families. Alison was at school and Elizabeth was happy to look after Nick.

Mrs Gregory, who was its driving force, was a woman of enormous proportions, very efficient but with a heart of gold, who put Barbara to work making soup in a kitchen set up in an empty shop. By the time the soup was ready, there was a long queue of ragged, half-starved applicants. Barbara had known there were poor people, struggling to get by, but she was appalled to think that in a comparatively affluent place like Melsham, there were men in rags and children without shoes.

Later she took her turn manning a clothes store, sorting and ironing donated garments, sewing on buttons, ranging shoes in pairs, and putting clothing too worn and dirty to be passed on into bags for the rag-and-bone man. From not having enough to do, she now didn’t have a moment to spare. She found herself with a new circle of friends: colleagues in the charity including Lady Quarenton who worked as tirelessly as anyone. She ceased to worry what George was up to every minute of the day, and because there was always something going on, some humorous or sad tale to tell, she became a more interesting person in herself. It didn’t happen overnight: she had her difficult days when nothing seemed to go right, days when she wished she had time to have her hair done, when it was an awful rush to get to the school by four. But on the whole she began to enjoy life again.

George viewed this new Barbara with tolerant amusement. It kept her off his back and let him get on with his work without having her forever peering over his shoulder, trying to catch him out oiling wheels, not to mention being able to see Virginia whenever he liked. Virginia had moved into their old house and the farmhouse was let to an American colonel who had come over during the war and liked England so much he had married an English girl and stayed. Things were on the up and George intended to stand for Melsham Town Council in the forthcoming local elections. It was easier to control what was happening in the town from the inside, instead of having to lobby for everything he wanted.

Barbara was busy on the picture she was calling Girl on a Rock the evening he was elected with a majority of a hundred and fifty. It was Virginia who was photographed standing behind him on the rostrum, though in his acceptance speech, he was at pains to say his wife had supported him throughout and would have been with them that night but their small daughter had a tummy bug and needed her mummy, which left Barbara fielding solicitous enquiries for several days afterwards.

It meant he had another excuse for not being at home in the evenings. Council meetings were notorious for going on and on and he was duty-bound to stay to the end. ‘Most of it’s waffle,’ he told Barbara. ‘Some of them have no idea how to come to the point, but I have to listen. In the middle of the dross, there might be something worth listening to. And of course, I have a contribution to make. Quite an important one, as it happens.’

‘I’m sure, you have,’ she murmured, folding the ironing which had been airing on the clothes horse. He had been a great deal more cheerful of late, possibly because he had got his own way – or most of it – over the sale of the land and his election, but was he being unfaithful? The signs were still there, though she tried not to think of it, tried not to wonder who it might be. His secretary? Someone he had met at work? When these soul-destroying thoughts invaded her mind, she deliberately pushed them from her, refused to listen to herself, kept herself busy painting in the long, lonely evenings when the children slept soundly and the house was quiet.

Because of the children she couldn’t go with George when he went on a business visit to Paris with a combined delegation from county council and Melsham Town Council, though she knew some wives were going, paid for by their husbands. She helped him pack in a flurry of last-minute instructions, watched as he kissed the children goodbye and stood on the step with them, waving as the car went off down the drive to the station. Then she turned back indoors with a sigh that was almost one of relief.