she being unkind in suspecting that the doctor wanted to have Hugo to herself? And if she did what business was it of hers? Dee thought as she hurried upstairs.
Peter looked very small and frail lying there in bed, the sunshine pouring through the open windows highlighting the thin boniness of his hands.
‘Peter!’ Dee exclaimed warmly as she sat down beside him and reached for one of his hands, holding it tightly.
‘Dee, Hugo said you were here…Now, you’re not to worry,’ Peter told her before she could say anything. ‘Hugo is just fussing. I just felt a little bit short of breath, that’s all. There was no need for him to call the doctor…
‘Dee…’ Suddenly he looked very fretful and worried. ‘You won’t let them send me…anywhere…will you? I want to stay here. This is my home. I don’t want…’
Dee could see how upset he was getting.
‘Peter, it’s all right. You’re not going anywhere,’ Dee tried to reassure him.
‘The doctor was saying that I ought to be in a home,’ Peter told her anxiously. ‘I know. I heard her…she…’
He was starting to get even more upset, increasing Dee’s concern for him.
‘Peter, don’t worry…’ She started to comfort him, but as she did so the bedroom door opened and Hugo came hurrying in, glowering at her as he strode protectively to Peter’s side.
‘What have you been saying to him?’ he demanded acerbically. ‘You’re upsetting him…’
She was upsetting him? Of all the nerve.
‘Peter, it’s all right,’ she promised her father’s old friend gently, deliberately ignoring Hugo—not an easy feat with a man the size Hugo was, and even less easy when one took into account his overpowering sexual charisma. ‘The only home I would ever allow you to move into would be mine, and that’s a promise…’
Out of the corner of her eye Dee could see the way Hugo’s mouth was tightening.
What was he doing here anyway? She had had no idea that Peter still had any contact with him. He had certainly never mentioned Hugo to her.
‘I don’t want to go anywhere; I want to stay here,’ Peter was complaining fretfully, plucking agitatedly at the bedcover as he did so. Dee’s tender heart ached for him. He looked so vulnerable and afraid, and she knew, in her heart of hearts, that for his own sake he ought not to be left to live on his own. Somehow she would have to find a way to persuade him to come to live with her, but he would, she knew, miss his university friends, the old colleagues he still kept in touch with.
‘And staying here’s exactly what you shall do—at least so long as I have any say in the matter,’ Hugo told him firmly.
Dee glowered at him. It was all very well for Hugo to make promises that were impossible to keep. And as for him having any say in the matter…!
But before she could say anything, to her astonishment she heard Peter demanding in a shaky voice, ‘You are going to stay here, then, are you, Hugo? I know we talked about it, but…’
‘I’m staying,’ Hugo agreed, but although he said the words gently the look in his eyes as he looked across the bed at her made Dee feel more as though he was making a threat against her than a promise to Peter. What on earth was going on? What was Hugo doing here? There were so many questions she wanted—needed—to ask Peter, but it was obvious that he was simply not well enough to answer her—and that knowledge raised other concerns for Dee.
Peter shared with her the legal responsibility for administering the charities her father had established, and, whilst technically and practically speaking the work involved was done by Dee, via her offices in Rye-on-Averton, so far as legally rubber-stamping any decisions was concerned Peter was her co-signatory, and his authority was a legal requirement that had to be adhered to. He, of course, had the right to nominate another person to take over that responsibility for him, and Dee had always assumed that, when the time came, they would discuss who would take on that duty. Now it seemed it could well be a discussion she was going to have to have with him rather earlier than she had expected.
Peter was a gentleman of the old school, with the old-fashioned belief that women—‘ladies’—needed a strong male presence in their lives to lean on, and Dee knew that he secretly deplored the fact that she had never married and had no husband to ‘protect’ her. She suspected too that he had never totally approved of the licence and authority her father had left to her so far as his financial interests went, and she often wondered a little ruefully what Peter would have thought had he known that her father had appointed him as a co-trustee for Peter’s benefit and protection rather than for hers.
‘His ideas, his ideals are more than praiseworthy,’ her father had once told her, adding with a sad shake of his head, ‘But…’
Dee had known what her father meant, and very tactfully and caringly over the years she had ensured that Peter’s pride was never hurt by the realisation that her father had considered him to be not quite as financially astute as he himself believed he was.
In less than a week’s time Dee was due to chair the AGM of their main committee. There were certain changes she wished to make in the focus and operation of her father’s local charity, and she had been subtly lobbying Peter and the other members of the committee to this end.
Her main aim was to focus the benefit of the revenue the charity earned, from public donation and the endowments her father had made to it, not on its present recipients but instead on the growing number of local young people Dee felt were desperately in need of their help. Her fellow committee members, people of her father’s generation in the main, would, she knew, take some convincing. Conservative, and in many ways old-fashioned, they were not going to be easy to convince that the young people they saw as brash and even sometimes dangerous were desperately insecure and equally desperately in need of their help and support. But Dee was determined to do it, and as a first step towards this she needed to enlist Peter’s support and co-operation as her co-signatory.
She had already made overtures to him, suggesting that it was time for them to consider changing things, but it would be a slow process to thoroughly convince him, as she well knew, and she had sensed that he was already a little bit alarmed by her desire to make changes.
Peter had fallen asleep. Quietly Dee stood up and started to move towards the bedroom door, but Hugo got there first, not just holding it open for her but following her through and down the stairs.
‘There’s really no need for you to stay here with Peter,’ Dee began firmly once they were both downstairs. ‘I could—’
‘You could what? Move him into your own home? What about your own family, Dee…your husband and child? Or is it children now? No, Peter will be much more comfortable where he is. After all, if you’d genuinely wanted him there you’d have taken steps to encourage him to live with you before now, instead of waiting until he’s practically at death’s door…’
Death’s door! Dee’s heart gave a frightened bound.
‘I did try to persuade him,’ she defended herself, ignoring Hugo’s comment about her non-existent husband and family in the urgency of her desire to protect herself from his criticisms. ‘You don’t understand…
Peter’s very proud. His friends, his whole life is here in Lexminster…’
‘You heard what the doctor said,’ Hugo continued inexorably. ‘He’s too old and frail to be living in a house like this. All those stairs alone, never mind—’
‘It’s his home,’ Dee repeated, and reminded him quickly, ‘And you heard what he said about wanting to stay here…’
‘I heard a frightened old man worrying that he was going to be bundled out of the way to live amongst strangers,’ Hugo agreed. ‘At least that’s one problem we don’t have to deal with in Third World countries. Their people