Maddie

by Claire Rayner

  But now, at last they could talk to each other and she slid into his arms gratefully as the band swooped into a syrupy medley of the songs from Kismet with ‘Stranger in Paradise’ to start with, and rested her head against his shoulder and let him lead her as he chose.

  They danced for a minute or more as she hummed the tune softly and then he said, ‘Maddie, I have a problem.’

  ‘Mm?’ It really was remarkable how rested and floaty she felt, and she went on humming ‘– lost in a wonderland, a stranger in Paradise –’

  ‘It’s Declan.’ He sounded sombre and she lifted her head and looked up at him, aware of the dazzle in her vision, and said carefully, ‘Declan? What about him?’

  ‘It’s always the same,’ he burst out, as the song ended and the band went immediately into a sprightly rendition of ‘Baubles, bangles and beads’. ‘As soon as I turn my back that bastard’s got all four feet in the trough. Cray’s been telling me – he’s milked a cool forty thousand out of the business this past two years, he reckons. And he should know on account of he’s the money man in the conglomerate, right? He says it ought to be sorted out for my good. Pa’s not able. He’s well past it, Cray says, and someone else has to be in charge. No use looking to Timothy Two – he’s got himself bogged down in Washington, Cray says, it’s amazing he ever finds time to take a crap, so it’s no use looking to him to do anything useful –’

  ‘What about your sisters?’ she said, lifting her chin to stare at him, feeling the excitement and delight in the evening begin to flatten inside her. ‘Can’t they help?’

  He snorted at that, turning her into the swirl of the dancers yet again as they reached the outer edge of the dance floor. ‘The girls? Be your age, Maddie! What good is a girl in business? Women like you don’t come more’n once in a blue moon, believe me. I can’t get any help from them –’

  The excitement and the delight bubbled back in all its glory and she slid her hand from his shoulder to his cheek. ‘Darling, I do see the problem – but what can we do? Will Costello be able to sort it out for you?’

  ‘Come on, Maddie! It’s not his interests that are at stake! He knows perfectly well that Kincaid’s is entitled to its share of the profits. He’s not complaining about that. He just wanted me to know that too much of that money isn’t going into Kincaid’s, but being filtered straight out to Declan. So, Pa and me and the girls – and Mother, of course – lose out. That’s why he told me – it’s no goddamned skin off his nose. He’s just a good guy, Cray. Best friend I could have over there, and that’s a fact.’

  ‘Then –’ she began and stopped, knowing all too well and too painfully what was to come.

  ‘Then I’ve no choice, have I?’ he said savagely. ‘I’ve got to go and sort the bastard out. I’ve had enough of this and I have to get it clear once and for all. Declan has to learn and no one else can teach him. I’ll have to go back with them all, Maddie. It’s a bastard, but what else can I do?’

  ‘We’ll come with you, the children and I –’ she began but even as the words came out she knew it was impossible.

  ‘And who takes care of what happens here in the meantime? I’ve got Dave Catterick and the Poundsley fella dealing with a lot of the stuff, but you know as well as I do they can’t be trusted without being watched. Catterick’s good, gets a lot of stuff set up, but he only hangs around for the pleasure of seeing where he can cut us up. I let him have a little just to sweeten him, but on his own? No question of it!’

  ‘Then I have to stay here –’

  ‘Like I said before, someone’s got to mind the store. With Declan minding my other store the way he is what can I do? I’ll try not to be away too long, Maddie. Goddamn it, I’ve got so many sweet little deals cooking up nicely here it’s a bastard to have to leave them –’

  ‘I know,’ she said dully. ‘The hospital development in Kent and the German shipping deal –’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘And there’s the spade work I’ve started to put in on that distillery in Ireland. Can you handle that? I have a good deal of the documentation already.’

  ‘If you’ve time to show me before you go, I can manage,’ she said and then as the music ended with a flourish of drums let her hands slide down his elegant tailcoat and tried to smile at him.

  ‘I’ll miss you, Jay,’ she said huskily and stared at him with her face quite still, in spite of her efforts to look agreeable. ‘How long will you be?’

  He shrugged and turned to lead her back to their table. ‘How can I know? I’ll be back as soon as I can manage it. D’you think I want to be away? You know I don’t. But what choice have I?’

  ‘None, I suppose,’ she said and followed him, her feet dragging a little. Any more than I have, she thought miserably. I have to let you go, whether I want to or not. And then as his broad black back moved away from her line of vision and she could see the table, and saw Gloria look up and smile a welcome to him, it all came rushing back, the jealousy, the doubts and the anger. And she stood there and stared at Cray Costello sitting so complacently beside his daughter, with his round face and his elaborate gold jewellery and expensive clothes and then at Gloria again, and felt herself so consumed with hatred for both of them that had they been within reach, she might even have hit out.

  But all she did was sit down again, and try to imagine how she would cope with Jay in America without her for the next couple of weeks. It was a horrible prospect.

  28

  June–August 1953

  But it wasn’t two weeks. It wasn’t even four. It was for much longer than that, and she spent a lot of time at the beginning dreaming of the day he would be back.

  He had gone by sea, travelling on the Queen Elizabeth, and that had irked her when he had first told her, for it would have been swifter by air. But as he had pointed out reasonably enough, there would be little point in getting back before Cray Costello. He had promised to help Jay deal with Declan, so what else could he do but travel with him?

  ‘I thought of waiting till they were back in the States, and then going by air,’ he had said to her, that night after they had got home and were lying in bed talking into the small hours, ‘but I didn’t think that’d be good politics. Cray wants to help me – so I have to be seen to be making an effort for him, right? I’d rather stay here another week, fly there, sort it out and be back before the end of the month when the Irish meeting’s due, but there it is, I have to go now. But I should be able to fly back and that’ll help, hmm? I’ll miss you, Maddie, quite apart from business –’ and he had turned and nuzzled her neck and they had made love and that had been important to her; not because it was so wonderful (it wasn’t, but then that happened fairly often now that she got so tired, what with the two boys as well as the office to worry about) but because it had been comforting. As long as Jay needed her as much as he was now making patently clear, she had no need to worry.

  But just dreaming of his return would not be enough to keep her even tolerably content. She needed more than that to cushion herself against her loneliness, so she took to filling in the waiting time with work. The children had settled so well with Daphne that at least she didn’t have to worry about them. There were no more tantrums and scenes when she went out, no panics because the nanny had left in a huff and the daily help had to phone and insist she come home immediately. All that was now forgotten as the house and children settled into a smooth easy-running system under Daphne’s care and Maddie could pour all her energies into the affairs of Alfred Braham Export Ltd.

  So she did work, much longer hours than she needed to. She would get to the office well before nine so that she could deal with the post and be ready to get the secretaries and clerks busy as soon as they arrived – and by being so early herself she made sure that they learned to come in well on time – and then had more opportunity to oversee the other two men on the staff. Catterick, who was Jay’s immediate deputy in normal circumstances, and Poundsley, a young man who was bright and eager and was being tra
ined to take on more work, seemed willing to let her lead the way, and were as energetic in doing as she told them as they had been in obeying Jay’s lead; which was a comfort. So often, in her experience, men took umbrage rather than orders from women bosses. It was good that these two men were more sensible than that. But she discovered very soon that in fact Jay had not been a good boss at all, and it might have been that fact that made the two men welcome her so willingly. He had clearly not been working as hard as he might have been, as far as she could tell, having spent large parts of the working day lunching or having meetings with potential clients at which there was more emphasis on conviviality than useful work.

  She herself had come into the office to help whenever she could, but the demands which her last pregnancy and then the care of the boys had made on her had made sure that these occasions were too few and too scattered to make her really aware of the way the business was running. But now she could find out and was irritated.

  They were not personally short of money, or didn’t seem to be; Jay paid their way comfortably as far as she knew, but they were by no means as rich as she had been led to believe. She had seen herself and Jay as a millionaire couple on Coronation night; now she knew they were a long way from that – but she also knew that they could rapidly become one with a good deal more effort. So she made it.

  June slid away in a series of twelve- to fourteen-hour days and long meetings well into the night as she mobilised the two men – and the extra staff she later took on – to be much more vigorous in their hunting down of new contracts, new clients, new possibilities. It wasn’t difficult; the optimism that was everywhere this Coronation year lingered well after the event itself. People were eager to do business and particularly eager to do it with a firm that seemed to be quick and thrusting and ready to take on major jobs without implying they were doing anyone a favour.

  So, before Jay had been away a month, she had landed no fewer than five major new clients and had three big projects in hand. The company had begun to diversify into much the same sort of avenues as the Boston company and now a carefully engraved plate, reading ‘Braham’s Construction Co.’, joined the brass plate that was already beside the modest street door that led up to the third floor from Great Portland Street, and Catterick spent most of his time rushing about the country tracking down suppliers of bricks and mortar, timber and glass, plumbing fixtures and roof tiles and all the myriad things needed to build a hospital, albeit a small one.

  It really was surprising, she discovered, how well she felt on her new regime. She would get home much too late to see the boys awake but would creep into their nursery to look at them and to melt at the sight of the starfish hands wide flung on their pillows and the long eyelashes shading their cheeks, and then would fall into bed, exhausted, but feeling well for all that. She missed Jay dreadfully, of course, she would tell herself sleepily, but it was nice to be able to keep her body to herself a little; and she would drift off contentedly and sleep better than she had done since before Buster’s birth.

  They spoke on the telephone once a week, each Friday night, just before she went to bed and Jay went to his folks, he would tell her each time, to eat dinner.

  ‘I’m sorry this is taking so long, honey,’ he would bawl at her through the crackling line, his voice fading and reappearing and then fading again. ‘It’s more of a mess than I knew – there are things here that have to be dealt with that I just can’t polish off in a week. Maybe the start of July I’ll be back. How goes the Irish business?’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Maddie shouted back, not wanting to waste their precious time detailing just how fine; she had bought in to the new distillery at a remarkably favourable price and already the market in the shares was rising fast. She had managed to persuade the board there to let Braham’s do some building for them too, and had already signed a contract for a £250,000 job; but she’d tell him all that when he came back. She was looking forward eagerly to being able to sit at a desk with him and go through all the documents and show him just how well she had done for them all while he’d been away. Now, on the phone, there were more important things to discuss.

  ‘How much do you miss me?’ she shouted and heard the faint echo of her own voice on the line, ‘… miss me … miss me …’ and then Jay, remote and disembodied, crying, ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I miss you,’ she shouted even more loudly. ‘I miss you, and so do the boys – a hell of a lot –’

  ‘I’ll talk to you next week, honey. Keep on going, kid. I can’t hear you tonight – sleep well. Talk to you next Friday …’

  All very unsatisfactory, and yet she managed somehow, because of the office and its demands; and it was really remarkable just how much comfort there was to be found in work. She spent her Sundays driving down to Kent where their first major building operation was beginning to see progress to check the state of the site and generally to reassure herself that all was going as it should, and every other day of the week, including Saturday, on the telephone or checking ledgers or head to head with their accounts and insurance people to see where they could pick up more equity and grow their money faster. It was an exhilarating, dramatic and curious time, for she felt as though she were operating fully on just one cylinder, while the other, the one that was Jay and happiness at home and peace of mind, had shut down altogether. Yet she forged forwards because that one working cylinder was so very powerful.

  But July limped into August and she began to get more restless, in spite of the pleasures and successes of work. Jay had been gone almost eight weeks now. He had warned her after the second week that it would take longer than he’d hoped; Kincaid’s, he told her on the phone, were to have a new corporate set-up, and to make that work all the family had to be in the State Street office at the same time to sign the necessary documents. His sisters could be rounded up well enough in the next month – but there was no way they could get Timothy Two out of Washington until the end of a committee on which he was sitting and which, according to Timothy, was the greatest thing in his life since it could lead to his nomination for a winnable seat in Congress.

  ‘He won’t come till August’s end at the earliest,’ Jay bawled on yet another bad phone line. ‘So hold on to your hat, honey. Is it still going well? You can manage? Is Catterick seeing that things are ticking over?’

  ‘We’re ticking over,’ she said and grinned to herself as she tucked the phone more closely to her ear to try to hear him the better. Wait till he comes home and sees just how well; oh, but it was almost worth being without him for the joy of that prospect. ‘We’re doing fine. I miss you, darling –’

  It was in the second week of August as work slowed down everywhere, with most of Britain on holiday and refusing even to think of overtime let alone doing any, which was what Maddie most wanted from her own and everyone else’s staff, that a message was sent from the nursing home about Alfred. ‘Would Mrs Kincaid,’ the secretary said, ‘please call them as soon as possible –’ and had added no, she didn’t know why, and no, they hadn’t said it was urgent, or at least she didn’t think they had.

  Maddie was in the middle of a complex discussion with Catterick, sorting out a new bonus scheme she had dreamed up for making sure he was as honest as it was possible for a man dealing with someone else’s money to be. She had devised it with the accountant who had complimented her on her sharp mind, while looking at her rather woodenly as he contemplated the deviousness of her ideas, and it seemed foolproof. If Catterick worked hard and closely supervised Poundsley, he could benefit more from honesty than from milking the job in the time-honoured way was what it amounted to, and as she sat there with him and described it as simply – and as tactfully – as she could, she forgot about the message from the nursing home.

  She had in fact given sadly little thought to Alfred lately. There was no point in making herself miserable about him, for there was nothing she could do to improve his situation, so she had deliberately stopped herself from thinking abo
ut him. As a result he had become more and more morose and more and more unwilling to talk once he had realised there was nowhere else for him to go than the nursing home. Her visits to him had become agonising hours spent being as bright and cheerful as she could, doling out delicacies and chocolates and little bottles of brandy from her bag while he sat and glared balefully at her and said nothing. It had been inevitable that with the new pattern of her life, office-centred as it was, he would slip into the background of her thoughts so easily.

  And so he died on the fourteenth of August, the morning that the nursing home matron phoned to warn her that her father was very ill, that he had slipped into a coma and if Maddie wanted to see him alive she had better come now.

  That had been what the Matron had intended to tell her as soon as she phoned back, not feeling it right, she told Maddie later in her most self-righteous manner, to discuss private family matters with a mere employee like a secretary.

  But Maddie didn’t get round to phoning until late afternoon, and by that time Alfred Braham was dead.

  It was a dreadful week. She cabled Jay, swallowed up in a great wave of guilt and loneliness so vast that she wanted him and only him, but all he could do was telephone and offer his condolences and tell her he couldn’t get back in time for the funeral, which was to be on the Sunday immediately after the death, at Golders Green Crematorium.

  ‘Listen honey, sure I’d like to be there, to take care of things, pay the old man my respects, but what can I do? If I left here right this minute, I’d be too late, and I’d still have to come back here. It’d be crazy. I send you all my wishes in your sorrow and that but, come on, honey, he was a sick old man! It was a blessed release – it’d be a sin to wish such a one a longer life than he had. Talk to Barney about the will, okay? He’ll see to the probate and so forth. You are the only beneficiary, aren’t you? Yeah – so, that’ll be okay. Leave it to Barney. Lawyers understand these things – he’ll take good care of you.’