such a loving smile, indicating she was really pleased to see you, such an infectious laugh, such a gentle voice, interrupted by squeaks of excitement, such a sweet, confiding way of tucking her arm through yours and asking after your wife or your sick grandchild or how your exams had gone, as if she really minded.
The words ‘that bastard Bancroft’ were never far from the lips of those familiar with the set-up. It was common knowledge in Dorset that Sampson not only bullied Etta insensible but kept her very short.
Why hadn’t she left him? For the same reason that birds often don’t escape when the cage door is left open: she had lost the ability to fly. Then she couldn’t leave because disaster struck.
Except for the rare sporting injury, Sampson had never been ill. His superhuman energy had enabled him to work all day and make love all night. Then, during a long winter in the early 2000s, his secretary noticed Sampson nodding off in the afternoon and even during crucial meetings.
In May, the firm’s annual cricket match took place, traditionally held on Sampson’s birthday to provide yet another showcase for his prowess. Even into his seventies he had taken wickets and knocked up the odd forty runs. This year he was bowled first ball and dropped two easy catches.
At the dinner afterwards, Sampson, who never forgot a face, blanked half the distinguished guests, and his normally rabble-rousing speech to the faithful was slurred and rambling.
Leaving the hotel, he had tripped and hit his head on a pillar and ended up in hospital. Here blood tests revealed Howitt’s – a dreaded, degenerative heart disease.
An outraged Sampson turned to the internet. Finding a prognosis not only of blindness and the collapse of organs and muscles but also of searing pain and probable dementia, he rolled up at a board meeting next day and once again collapsed. As his resignation became official, shares in Bancroft Engineering went into temporary free fall.
Back at Bluebell Hill, where he was confined to bed or a wheelchair, Sampson could no longer terrorize Etta by appearing massive-shouldered and six foot three in doorways, his eyes as cold as a lake at twilight.
Instead he bellowed from all over the house but, except for the occasional very pretty carer allowed in to read or sit with him, he refused to let anyone but Etta look after him.
‘I can understand that,’ cooed an admiring district nurse. ‘Mr Bancroft is too proud a man to let a strange woman see him naked.’
That had never been Sampson’s problem, thought Etta wryly, remembering the serial mistresses he had kept throughout his marriage. But ever kind-hearted, aware that Sampson could no longer walk, was in dreadful pain, felt mocked by the books in his library that he could no longer read, and was finding even children’s crosswords increasingly difficult as his mind and his grasp on reality slid away, Etta felt desperately sorry for him.
Nor did their two children provide much solace. More than forty years ago Etta had nearly died giving birth to two hulking twins, Martin and Carrie, neither of whom she had managed to breastfeed. They seemed to have inherited Sampson’s contempt for their mother. Whenever she had tried to cuddle them they had gone rigid and wriggled out of her arms.
Not that they got on any better with each other, perhaps because when they were children Sampson, with stopwatch poised, had set them constantly at odds, not just on tennis court or sports track or in icy swimming pool but in endless history, geography and general knowledge tests.
As a result both twins were indelibly competitive. Dark, handsome, square-jawed Martin and heavy-faced Carrie, who was even more successful in the City than her brother, gazed belligerently out of silver frames on Sampson’s desk.
Neither child had been assiduous in visiting their stricken father, who admittedly wasn’t keen on his grandchildren and roared with rage when they switched television channels or rampaged across his painful feet.
When five-year-old Drummond managed to bugger both the stairlift and Sampson’s reclining chair on the same morning, his father Martin had threatened to smack him. Whereupon Sampson, to the rapture of Martin’s wife Romy, had growled that nothing could be achieved by smacking children – then spoilt it all by saying the only answer was to shoot them.
Since then, while claiming ‘Dad was such a joker’, both Martin and Carrie had found it hard to tear themselves away from their brilliant careers. To assuage their consciences, however, they