Free The Decision by Penny Vincenzi

we’d try and track down a couple of the others, have a real reunion.’
    ‘Yes, why don’t you?’ Eliza sounded distracted suddenly. ‘Charles, there’s something I want to talk to you about.’
    ‘What’s that? You’re not getting engaged finally, are you?’
    ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Why does everybody think I have to get engaged? No, Summercourt.’
    ‘What about it?’
    ‘I was talking to Mummy last weekend. She’s desperately worried. It needs a lot of money spent on it, not just painting it and general refurbishment, but they might need a new roof as well. They had it patched up a couple of years ago, but now it’s getting really bad. And they haven’t got a bean, she’s even talking about selling a bit more land.’
    ‘They can’t do that! Anyway, the trustees won’t let them. What does Pa say?’
    ‘Not a lot, as far as I can make out. You know how loyal she is, but reading between the lines his head’s firmly the sand. Just denies there’s a real problem. I can’t think what we can do to help, but at least we must show her some support. When are you going down next?’
    ‘Well, I could pop down tomorrow. I really can’t have her selling the land. It’d wreck the place. Could you come too?’
    ‘I could actually. OK, let’s do that. It would cheer her up if nothing else. She’s really worried, can’t sleep.’
    ‘Poor Mummy. Yes, let’s go and see her. I’m sure we can come up with something. Now, how’s the job? I want to hear all about it.’
    Eliza was even less inclined towards marriage than usual that summer; gearing up for the autumn opening of Woolfe’s Young Generation was consuming all her energy. It had taken longer than even Lindy had expected, had been postponed twice and she had been in despair over the delay; Bernard Woolfe, initially enthusiastic, became slower and more cautious as he and the rest of the board debated endlessly the range of the merchandise, the look and feel of the department, its location within the store and what it would cost. Lindy and Eliza were both insistent that Woolfe’s did an own-label range of clothes to stock alongside the other designs, to link the youth and fun of the department more closely with the store and its gilt-edged fashion reputation; Bernard Woolfe said this would be a mistake, that should the new department fail, it would reflect badly on Woolfe’s as a whole, a question mark on their judgement.
    ‘Bernard, that’s just ridiculous,’ said Lindy, trying to keep her voice calm. ‘Either we believe in this thing or we don’t. If we don’t do our own line, it will look as if we’re hedging our bets.’
    ‘Perhaps that’s exactly what I am doing,’ said Woolfe, his dark eyes gleaming with good-natured malice. ‘Not such a bad thing, you know, when the going’s a bit rough …’
    If Lindy had had her way, they would have opened within three months, ‘to beat the competition that I know there’s going to be’, but Bernard argued that unless everything was right the competition would win.
    Jan Jacobson, the brilliant young buyer hired to work exclusively for Young Generation, had brought in some beautiful clothes; comparatively established designers like John Bates (of Jean Varon) and Sally Tuffin and Marion Foale would hang on rails alongside entirely new talent. He had discovered Mark Derrick, who designed apparently shapeless little shift dresses that still flattered girls’ bodies: the bodies that had seemed almost overnight to have been transformed from the shapely curves of the late Fifties to something almost boyish with neat, small breasts and flat, hipless torsos. And then there was Pattie Newton, whose clinched trench coats cut in the finest light gaberdine could be worn to work, to the theatre, even to parties over nothing more substantial than a silk slip; and Eliza herself had discovered Maddy Brown who had reinvented the sweater so that it continued downwards from the waist, to somewhere above the