Broken Barriers, page 1
CHAPTER ONE ~1938
Norman Melton sat at his desk fingering the pages of the contract that lay in front of him awaiting his signature.
Abruptly and without looking up, he said,
“Well, we have pulled it off, Johnson.”
“Yes, Sir Norman.”
“You have read it all, I suppose.”
“Yes, Sir Norman.”
“You have made all those corrections that were agreed with Miller?”
“Yes, Sir Norman.”
He picked up his pen.
“This should be marked as a red letter day on all of our almanacs. It is the best deal the Melton Motor Company has ever done or is ever likely to do.”
“Yes, Sir Norman.”
Sir Norman put down his pen with a gesture of exasperation.
“Damn you, Johnson! Cannot you ever say anything but ‘yes’? Send Miller to me. No, wait, I will ring when I want him.”
Johnson, an aggrieved expression on his face, left the room.
Alone Sir Norman rose to his feet and moved to the window. He felt nervy and wondered vaguely to himself why Johnson’s usual monosyllabic manner annoyed him so much today.
He was used to curbing his impatience before his subordinates. He remembered vividly the years when he himself hated the blustering of his superiors.
Johnson, for all his efficiency, was the type of secretary he disliked.
He was deemed indispensable, yet the man’s lack of individuality and personality made his employer long to startle him out of his conventional attitudes,
‘I need a holiday,’ Sir Norman told himself, looking out onto the bustling yard below his office window.
The siren had just gone for luncheon and the men were streaming out of the workshops, struggling into their coats as they did so, taking packets of sandwiches from the pockets or lighting with relief a cigarette after the long hours of abstinence.
High above the buildings was the great sign The Melton Motor Company.
The yard was four stories below him and Sir Norman, watching, felt for a moment as if he, Director and Chairman of this vast Factory, was also the controller of the destiny of each man who worked for him.
‘I am a part of them, one of them,’ Sir Norman tried to tell himself.
But he knew that it was a false illusion. He had grown away from them and was changed now completely from the men who had once been his comrades as he was removed from the life they lived and the work they did.
He was the boss.
He remembered his own feelings when as a young man he had come into the Factory, a small gloomy building it had been then and he had first seen the heavy-moustached, black-coated figure of Edward Buller.
He had little thought then that twenty-nine years later he would be in Buller’s place and that Works would bear his name as the outward sign of his success.
Today was the greatest triumph of all.
He had hardly dared to believe that he would land for his own firm the Government contract for a ‘shadow factory’, but he had accomplished it.
Once the contract waiting on his desk had been signed, the orders would go out for new buildings, new machinery, and for at least five thousand more workers. It was a triumph for which he had been working for nearly three months now.
His Factory was small compared to the other great firms who were bearing their part in the rearmament programme.
There was a dozen other Factories of the same size all over the country. There was no reason why the Melton Motor Company should have been chosen except that its Director had the drive, the originality and the vision that were required if the work undertaken was to be successful.
The Melton Motor Company had been sensationally successful over the last five years.
The shares had risen until the shareholders’ meetings were nothing but a celebration of renewed confidence, congratulations and good wishes.
But the Chairman, on his forty-second birthday, had woken to the fact that he had joined the ranks of bored millionaires.
Only now when the contracts had been passed did Sir Norman realise how greatly he had wanted this new work, how much he had longed to get his teeth into something new and to find an outlet for his activity and drive, which had been wasting itself in trivial matters.
His nerves had been strained to breaking point this last week.
For the first time a sense of responsibility began to depress him. He was almost afraid of what he had undertaken. It was so big, far bigger than anything that he had attempted before.
He turned away from the window and lit a cigarette. Over the mantelpiece was a small badly executed drawing of Buller’s Motor Company.
He stood looking at it for some time and then he went back to his desk and rang the bell.
It was two hours later before he left the Works. He had had no luncheon, but had refused to have anything sent up to him in his office.
“My sister will be expecting me at home,” he said to Miller. “I will get off as soon as we have finished and I shall not come back today. Tell the architect to get on with those plans as soon as possible. We must waste no time.”
He felt already as if time was to haunt him. The very thought of ‘so much to, do, so little time to do it’, made him say to his chauffeur as he left the Works,
“As quick as you can, Davis.”
Norman Melton lived about three miles outside Melchester. His home, which had only been his for the past five years, had once belonged to an ancient County family and, flanking the drive gates, were stone lions balancing a heraldic shield between their paws.
The iron gates were wide open and the motor car drove up an avenue of oak trees. The house was Georgian in design although the original foundations were several centuries older.
As the car arrived at the front door, it was then opened. A bell at the lodge by the gates communicated with the pantry of the house and prevented any delay on the arrival of Master or guest.
“Where is Miss Melton?” Sir Norman asked the butler.
“In the morning room, Sir Norman.”
He walked over the wide hall and opened the door at the other end. His sister was sitting at her desk writing letters.
She looked up when he arrived and rose to her feet.
“You are very late, Norman,” she told him severely.
“I could not get away before.”
“Have you had any luncheon?”
“No, but I would like some.”
She touched the bell and, when the butler answered it, gave the necessary order.
“What time did you get up from London this morning?” she asked.
“I caught the seven o’clock,” he said.
Alice Melton waited. She knew quite well how important his visit to London had been, that the final decision would have been taken as to whether the Melton Motor Company were to have the Government contract, but she did not ask any questions.
She waited for her brother to tell her the news.
She was fond of Norman, yet she found it difficult to understand him. She was the elder by nearly ten years.
It seemed strange that they were brother and sister for Alice had none of Norman’s fire, no originality and an entire lack of self-confidence.
Norman was a good-looking man. He was a millionaire and his personality could neither be belittled nor ignored.
‘He ought to marry again,’ Alice thought to herself looking at him.
She wondered why the idea had suddenly come to her.
“We have the contract,” he said indifferently, as if he was speaking of something quite unimportant.
“I am glad,” Alice answered slowly. “It will mean a lot of extra work for you, though?”
“It will and I am glad of it,” Norman answered. “I am getting stale and dull and perhaps old.”
Before his sister could answer, the butler announced that luncheon was now served and Norman, without another word, walked from the morning room and left his sister alone.
Alice made no attempt to follow him. She knew that he would rather eat alone and, if he wanted further conversation with her, he would come back after he had finished.
Instead she looked through the windows to where the daffodils were just beginning to come out under the trees on the lawn. They gave her very little pleasure.
When his wife had died, he had asked Alice to come back to him and he had no idea how bitterly she had wept to leave the place that had been her home for so long and which was the one dear thing to her in her whole life.
Norman’s wife had always lived in London. On her death he had shut the London house and made up his mind to live near the Works, spending all his time there, just as he had done before he was married.
He had no idea how lonely Alice found it. They had little to say to each other, having nothing in common beyond their blood relationship.
Alice made him an excellent housekeeper and, if he thought about her at all, he imagined that it was to her benefit to live with him.
He came into the room slowly, a cigar between his fingers, a glass of brandy in his hand.
He settled himself by the fire before he spoke. He stretched out his long legs, sipped the brandy reflectively and then, as though making a solemn pronouncement, said,
“I have decided to re-open the London house.”
CHAPTER TWO
The rain was |pouring down and the gutters of Shaftesbury Avenue were awash.
A few theatre-goers still stood disconsolately beneath the dark porticoe s of the theatres, waiting for their motor cars or hoping for a taxi.
The porters had closed the doors inhospitably behind them, anxious to get away to their homes and their suppers.
From a stage door that opened onto a side street a girl came slowly out, calling a cheery ‘goodnight’ to the doorkeeper as she passed.
“Oh, it’s been raining!” she expostulated.
“It’s been doin’ that for the best part of two hours, miss, and it doesn’t look as if it’s likely to stop.”
She opened her umbrella and hurried out into the rain.
She crossed the street to wait for a bus. There was a small crowd of people also waiting, all huddled under umbrellas, standing in silence, their faces turned in the same direction.
After some minutes a bus came and pulled up with a jerk. Instantly there was a scramble to get aboard it.
Carlotta hurried forward, shutting her umbrella and feeling the rain against her face.
She stepped off the pavement and then, she was not certain how it happened, she might have slipped or been pushed by someone – she fell slithering forward under the legs of those scrambling onto the bus.
For a moment she was too surprised to do anything. She felt helpless, afraid and drowned by the humanity about her. She struggled to regain her feet, feeling the cold wet road with her fingers.
Unexpectedly a hand was placed under her elbow and she was hoisted up.
“I say, are you hurt?” a voice asked.
“Not at all,” Carlotta started to reply, but, as she spoke, her ankle gave under her and she cried out with pain.
“My ankle!” she exclaimed, standing on one leg, still held steady by the support of a firm hand.
The bus had already driven off and the few disappointed people who had been unable to get aboard it were now waiting for the next and were watching them.
“Here’s a taxi. I’ll help you into it.”
The man who had dragged her to her feet hailed the taxi that was coming towards them. He opened the door and half-lifted, half-pushed her into it.
“What’s your address?” he asked.
Carlotta told him and added,
“But please don’t trouble to come with me. I am quite all right really.”
The man did not answer her. Instead he got into the taxi beside her, slamming the door.
“I say, you are in a mess!” he said, looking at the patch of wet which stained one side of Carlotta’s red coat and at the state of her stockings and thin patent leather shoes.
“I cannot think how I was so silly,” she said ruefully.
“Would you let me feel your ankle?” he asked. “I am a Doctor.”
She looked at her companion. He was large, broad-shouldered and clean-shaven. He had, she thought, a particularly nice calming voice.
There was just a faint accent in his speech which she could not place, she wondered what it was while painfully she moved her leg a little so that he could touch her ankle.
He knelt down on the floor of the taxi and felt it with expert fingers.
“I hope it is only a slight strain,” he commented. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes,” she confessed, “there – where your fingers are now,”
“A strained tendon,” he said. “You must get a cold-water bandage on it at once. It might have been worse, no bones are broken.”
“I cannot think how it happened,” she whispered. “How I hate buses,”
“So do I,” he answered, “but not so much as the rain.”
He took off his hat, which was dripping, and threw it on the floor in front of him and she saw that he was younger than she had expected.
“I am very lucky to be helped by a Doctor,” she said lightly, a little embarrassed at the situation. “Usually on these occasions there is not one within twenty miles.”
“You have been most unfortunate,” he said and something in the way that he pronounced the words made her exclaim,
“You are Scottish, aren’t you?”
“My name is Hector McCleod,” he answered and they both laughed as if it was a joke.”
“Mine is Carlotta Lenshovski,” she answered.
“Russian!” he exclaimed and they laughed again.
The taxi drew up with a jerk.
“Is this the right place?” the taxi-driver then asked her rather doubtfully, pulling back the communicating window.
“Yes, this is right,” Carlotta answered. “It always looks a bit strange at night,” she added to her companion.
A huge doorway with carved stone figures round it held an imitation medieval oak door with iron studs and a barred peephole.
Carlotta produced a Yale key and Hector McCleod climbed out of the taxi and opened the door before coming back to help her alight.
“Can you manage all right now?” he asked as she went into the shelter of the doorway.
“Will you come in and have a drink?” she asked him,
He hesitated a moment.
“Are you quite certain it will be no trouble?”
“None,” she assured him, “and you have been so kind.” She held out her purse. “Will you please pay the taxi for me?”
“I’ll do it,” he countered.
“But you must let me pay,” Carlotta parried.
He then paid the man off, the rain pouring down on him as he waited for his change.
“Please be sensible and let me give you the fare,” Carlotta pleaded when he returned to her.
He shook his head.
“I would not think of it,” he replied. “It is not often I get the opportunity of rescuing a damsel in distress!”
“But I insist.”
“You cannot insist with only one leg,” he answered with a grin. “Please let me help you upstairs if it is up we go,”
He looked around him in a bewildered manner.
They were in a high narrow hall in which he could dimly see what looked strangely like suits of armour standing by the walls.
Carlotta hobbled on his arm to where she switched on the electric light.
“Don’t look so surprised,” she said as the light revealed not only suits of armour but two great showcases filled with theatrical jewellery, wigs, feathers and ornaments of every kind.
“Surely you know this place by name even if you have never been here before?”
He shook his head.
“I am from the North,” he apologised.
“This is Lenshovskis,” Carlotta said. “Theatrical costumes. I am afraid that you will have to help me up these stairs, our rooms are at the top.”
They went up the stairs extra slowly. When they reached the top they were in a huge room filled with dresses hanging in rows on stands. There was the faint musty smell of worn clothes.
They passed through the room to a baize door at the end of it.
Carlotta was leaning heavily on Hector’s arm and her ankle was beginning to throb in a most alarming fashion.
“Are you quite sure you can manage?” he asked. “Would you like me to carry you?”
“I am all right,” she answered. “Open the door, will you?”
He did as he was told and instantly Carlotta called out,
“Magda! Magda! Where are you?”
A deep mellow voice answered her.
“Are you back, dearie? Supper’s ready.”
They passed through a small hall and opened yet another door into a room that seemed brilliantly lit in contrast where, seated at the supper table waiting for them, was the largest woman that Hector had ever seen in his life.
It took him some time before he could take in the details of the room, for what he saw took his breath away, it was so unexpected. It was a small room, hung from floor to ceiling with a miscellaneous collection of objects.
There were photographs, pieces of embroidery, valuable Persian carpets, Russian Ikons, swords with jewelled hilts and various trophies that could only have a sentimental value,
A log fire was blazing on the hearth. Before it in two huge armchairs lay an assortment of cats. There were three blue Persians, a Siamese kitten, which was being most destructive to one of the cushions and a ginger-coloured tabby.
The owner of this room was even more surprising than the room itself.
Magda Lenshovski must have weighed nearly twenty stone. She was a huge mountain of flesh, It was surprising that she could move at all and that she could move with agility and quickly.
Hector stared at her in fascination, wondering what glands were working too fast or too slowly in her monstrous body.
