Читать книгу The Legacies of Powerful Men онлайн | страница 6

At university, Jason had made friends with much wealthier students. Was that when her sibling had begun to succumb to the kind of driving ambition and greed that would only lead him into trouble? Or had that change taken place only after Jason had become a high-flying banker with a Porsche and a strong sense of entitlement? Whatever it was, Ella thought with newly learned bitterness, Jason had always wanted more and almost inevitably that craving for easily acquired riches had tempted him down the wrong path in life. But what she would never be able to forgive her brother for was dragging their parents down with him into the mire of debt and despair.

The worst had already happened though, Ella told herself in urgent consolation. Nothing could equal the horror of her mother’s collapse. Once the shock of their disastrous financial situation had finally kicked in, her mother had suffered a heart attack. Rushed into hospital the day before, Jennifer Gilchrist had had emergency surgery and was now mercifully in the recovery ward. Her father had tried hard to adjust to his sudden change in circumstances but, ultimately, it had been too much for him once he appreciated that he would not even be able to pay his staff the wages they were owed. Shock and shame had then overwhelmed him and he had broken down in the hospital waiting room and cried in his daughter’s arms, while blaming himself for not keeping a closer eye on his son’s activities within the firm.

A slight noise sent Ella’s head whipping round. Her brother, who had the thickset build of a rugby player and the portly outline of a man who wasted little time keeping fit, stood in the kitchen doorway nursing a glass of whisky. ‘How’s Mother?’ he asked gruffly.

‘Holding her own. The prognosis is good,’ Ella told him quietly and she turned back to the sink, keen to keep busy rather than dwell on the disquieting fact that her brother had neither accompanied her to the hospital nor made the effort to visit their mother since.