Night Over Water - Ken Follett [150]
Nancy was grateful to him for talking about something, just so that they did not have to sit there thinking about holding hands. “Which one is the engineer?” she said.
“A good-looking lad, about my height, fair hair.”
“I know. And which passenger?”
“I don’t know his name. Businessman, on his own, in a pale gray suit.” Mervyn got up and poured her some more brandy.
Nancy’s robe unfortunately came only just below her knees, and she felt rather undressed with her calves and her bare feet exposed; but once again she reminded herself that Mervyn was in frenzied pursuit of an adored wife, and he had no eyes for anyone else; indeed, he would hardly notice if Nancy were stark naked. His holding her hand had been a friendly gesture from one human being to another, pure and simple. A cynical voice in the back of her mind said that holding hands with someone else’s husband was rarely simple and never pure, but she ignored it.
Searching for something to talk about, she said: “Is your wife still mad at you?”
“She’s as cross as a cat with a boil,” Mervyn said.
Nancy smiled as she recalled the scene she had found in the suite when she returned from getting changed: Mervyn’s wife yelling at him, and the boyfriend yelling at her, while Nancy watched from the doorway. Diana and Mark had quieted down immediately and left, looking rather sheepish, to continue their row elsewhere. Nancy had refrained from commenting at the time because she did not want Mervyn to think she was laughing at his situation. However, she did not feel inhibited about asking him personal questions: intimacy had been forced on them by circumstances. “Will she come back to you?”
“There’s no telling,” he said. “That chap she’s with.... I think he’s a weed, but maybe that’s what she wants.”
Nancy nodded. The two men, Mark and Mervyn, could hardly have been more different. Mervyn was tall and imperious, with dark good looks and a blunt manner. Mark was an altogether softer person, with hazel eyes and freckles, who normally wore a mildly amused look on his round face. “I don’t go for the boyish type, but he’s attractive in his way,” she said. She was thinking: If Mervyn was my husband, I wouldn’t exchange him for Mark; but there’s no accounting for taste.
“Aye. At first I thought Diana was just being daft, but now that I’ve seen him, I’m not so sure.” Mervyn looked thoughtful for a moment, then changed the subject. “What about you? Will you fight your brother off?”
“I believe I’ve found his weakness,” she said with grim satisfaction, thinking of Danny Riley. “I’m working on it.”
He grinned. “When you look like that, I’d rather have you for a friend than an enemy.”
“It’s for my father,” she said. “I loved him dearly, and the firm is all I have left of him. It’s like a memorial to him, but better than that, because it bears the imprint of his personality in every way.”
“What was he like?”
“He was one of those men nobody ever forgets. He was tall, with black hair and a big voice, and you knew the moment you saw him that he was a powerful man. He knew the name of every man who worked for him, and if their wives were sick, and how their children were getting along in school. He paid for the education of countless sons of factory hands who are now lawyers and accountants: he understood how to win people’s loyalty. In that way he was old-fashioned—paternalistic. But he had the best business brain I ever encountered. In the depths of the Depression, when factories were closing all over New England, we were taking on men because our sales were going up! He understood the power of advertising before anyone else in the shoe industry, and he used it brilliantly. He was interested in psychology, in what makes people tick. He had the ability to throw a fresh light on any problem you brought to him. I miss him every day. I miss him almost as much as I miss my husband.” She suddenly