Learning curves: a novel of sex, suits, and business affairs

by Gemma Townley

  George stared at Harriet. Was this the article Malcolm was referring to? Why the bloody hell hadn’t he seen it? “No one believes those bloody rags anymore,” he said defiantly. “Journalists just make things up to fill space.”

  “Making up letters from Malcolm Bray to George Bell thanking him for his help?”

  George flinched slightly. “What letter? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Harriet raised her eyebrows. “I’m sure you do, if you think about it. The letter that was quoted in the article? If you don’t remember it, this might jog your memory.”

  She took a newspaper out of her bag and passed it to George, who skimmed the story quickly.

  “What the . . . How dare they!” he roared. “I’ll have their guts for garters. I’ll . . .”

  Harriet frowned, then smiled, then laughed. “Oh dear me,” she said, delighted. “Oh my word. You hadn’t seen it, had you? Oh, how funny.”

  “It’s rubbish,” George said flatly. “Anyway, no one saw that letter. No one knew about it.”

  “One person evidently did. I just can’t believe she didn’t tell me about it. But then again, she always did have a mind of her own.”

  Harriet narrowed her eyes as she watched for George’s reaction. She had no idea whether Jen had found the letter and leaked it to the press or not—in fact, she suspected that she probably hadn’t. But she rather hoped that George might think she had. It didn’t do to have your daughter and ex-husband too close.

  George looked at his ex-wife incredulously, realizing that she was talking about Jen. “She wouldn’t,” he said firmly. “We talked about it, and we agreed it wouldn’t go any further.”

  Harriet’s eyes widened. “So it was her,” she said with a smile. “I suspected as much. Oh, George, you are dreadfully naïve, you know. You really think that your daughter loves you and is on your side?”

  She shook her head. “George, she hasn’t seen you in years. She hates Bell Consulting as much as I do. But I’m sure you’re right. No, after all that dedicated parenting you put in over the years, I’m sure she wouldn’t dream of shopping you to the newspapers.”

  George stared at her. “She’s seen through you, you know,” he said carefully. “I wouldn’t play the moral upper-hand card on this one.”

  Harriet’s eyes narrowed. “Look, George,” she said eventually, deciding to extend her bluffing. “You’re fighting a losing battle here. Just accept it—you lost your daughter a long time ago, you lost me even longer ago, and now you’re going to lose your firm, your reputation, and all your money. And the best bit is you deserve everything that’s coming to you!”

  “Keep out of this, Harriet, I’m warning you,” George growled.

  “Oh, but it’s so much fun, George,” Harriet said with a little smile. “If you’d only listened to me all those years ago, none of this would have happened. But you didn’t, and . . . well, here we are.” She looked at her nails, pushing back a stray cuticle.

  George looked at her incredulously. “You’re still banging on about Axiom, aren’t you? You can never just let anything go.”

  Harriet stood up. “Why should I, George? I told you to ditch Axiom the first time they breached regulations. They were my client and I said I wanted to terminate the contract, but oh no, not Malcolm Bray, not your old school pal Malcolm. The school pal who’s been jealous of you since you were in short trousers and you never even realized? Well, you didn’t listen to me then, and you’re evidently not going to listen to me now, so I think I’ll be off.”

  “You wanted me to get rid of Malcolm because you’d been sleeping with him and he finished with you,” George said softly. “You talk so much about ethics, but I don’t think that getting rid of a client because they’ve moved on to another woman is truly ethical, do you?”

  Harriet faltered slightly. She hadn’t expected this. “You knew?” she asked, her voice nearly a whisper.

  She watched as George looked at her oddly as if concentrating hard on something, then turned as if rummaging behind his pillow for something, wiping his face and cheeks as he did so.

  “I blamed myself in a way,” he said in a strangled-sounding voice. “I was never there. Malcolm saw his opportunity.”

  “And you’re still friends? After all that, you’re still friends?” Her voice was wobbly now. She couldn’t decide what upset her the most—the thought that George had known all along or the knowledge that it obviously mattered so little to him that he was still friends with that bastard. Malcolm had convinced her that he was in love with her. Had made her believe him. And had then walked away without a second glance. How could George remain friends with a man who had betrayed both of them like that?

  “We all have our own way of dealing with things, Harriet.”

  Harriet paused for a moment, then smiled tightly. “Yes, George, I suppose we do.” And with that, she left the room, shutting the door behind her. As she walked down the corridor she thought she could hear the sound of a man sobbing, and it reminded her just how much she hated hospitals.

  Jen went white as she scrolled through the document. Payment after payment from Bell Consulting to a numbered Indonesian account. No details, no explanations. Why would a spreadsheet like this exist? And what was it doing on her father’s computer? She wracked her brains, trying to ignore the little voice inside her head that kept saying “Bribes. It’s bribe money,” but it kept getting louder. Had her mother been right all along? Had she fallen hook, line, and sinker for her father’s lies?

  She didn’t want to believe it. She was desperately trying to think of any justifiable reason for the money transfers. Trying to think of something her father might have said that could explain it. But she drew a blank. He had an Indonesian office, but these weren’t business transfers—there was no “in” and “out”; just “out.” These were payments for services rendered. Payments to make things happen. They had to be bribes.

  The . . . the bastard. Her father was a lying, cheating bastard. The past few weeks had just been a ruse to get her off his case, to stop her finding out the truth. And she’d fallen for it. He was lower than low, and she . . . well, she was even worse for letting him suck her in, letting him flatter her into believing him, into trusting him again.

  She was breathing quickly, her heart pounding in her chest. What was she going to do? Who was she going to tell?

  She stood up and started pacing around. She should call her mother.

  No. No, she needed the truth first. She was going to give her father his bloody laptop. She was going to tell him what she’d found. And she was going to make him tell her, admit the truth. She wanted to see his face, wanted him to see the hurt on hers. Wanted him to know that he would never have a daughter again, ever.

  In what felt like slow motion, she sat down and transferred the file across onto her CD. Then she calmly bundled the laptop back into its case, picked up her bag, and left for the hospital, slamming the door behind her so loudly that the neighbors upstairs ran to the window to see who’d left in such a rage.

  “I’m sorry, dear, you missed him.”

  Jen looked at the nurse blankly. “What do you mean I’ve missed him? He was right here yesterday. He’s staying here—it’s not like he could have just popped out.”

  The nurse looked at her strangely and Jen realized that her tone was perhaps a little on the sarcastic side.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “What I meant to say was, do you know where he is?”

  The nurse shook her head. “Home, I expect. He checked out about an hour ago.”

  “Checked out?” Jen said indignantly. “This is a hospital, not a hotel. How can he just check out?”

  The nurse smiled indulgently. “We’re not a prison,” she said. “People can leave if they want to.”

  Jen frowned. “But why would he want to leave? Why would he just go, when I was bringing his things round to him? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  The nurse shook her head again.
“I don’t like to get involved,” she said with a little shrug.

  “But I’ve got his computer,” Jen said redundantly. “He asked me to bring his computer.”

  “Maybe you could take it to him at home?” the nurse suggested.

  Jen frowned and looked around the bare room. Suddenly she noticed something next to the bed. There, on the bedside table, was a newspaper. She walked over and looked more closely at it and discovered that as she’d feared, it was the copy of the Times with the story about Malcolm Bray’s letter in it. Her heart sank as she realized that someone had shown it to George, that he probably thought she’d leaked it on purpose.

  “But he can’t have gone home,” she insisted. “I need to talk to him.”

  The nurse nodded understandingly and Jen wondered how many loopy relatives she had to deal with on a daily basis. She’d probably be in the staff room—or whatever nurses had—that evening telling her colleagues about the crazy daughter who refused to believe her father had gone home. “Sad, it was,” she imagined her saying. “Didn’t look crazy, but just shows, you never can tell . . .”

  “I’m sure he’d be happy to see you if you dropped by at home,” the nurse suggested.

  Jen felt like stamping her feet and crying out like a toddler. She didn’t want to go to his house; she wanted her father in this bed, a captive audience, so that she could shout at him, so that she could give him the speech she’d prepared and memorized on the way here, the speech that would hound him for the rest of his days, make him realize how inadequate he was, how alone he would be in this world. He’d probably have people around him at home. And it was his territory, his power base. It just wouldn’t be the same.

  “Actually, I can take that.”

  Jen turned, startled, to see a Bell consultant at the door. She recognized him. It was the one called Jack.

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said firmly. “My father asked me to bring this to him, and I plan to do so.”

  He held out his hand and smiled smoothly. “Actually, Mr. Bell asked if I’d swing by and collect it from you. Save you the bother of having to go to his house. I think you’ve got his phone, too?”

  Jen stared at him. This was all the leverage she had, the only thing that she knew her father needed. If she gave them up, he wouldn’t ever have to see her. He’d obviously read the article, obviously deduced that she’d never trusted him in the first place, that she’d run to the newspapers and betrayed him. Well, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe that’s all he deserved.

  “If you don’t mind?” Jack said with the hint of a smile but cold, calculating eyes.

  “Fine,” Jen said eventually, thrusting both at him. “But you can tell him from me that I hate him. That as far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t have a daughter anymore.”

  And half expecting the Dynasty theme to start playing, she ran from the room and all the way to the tube station.

  23

  “Okay guys, settle down now,” Jay said as Jen, Lara, and Alan filed into the lecture hall the following Monday morning. “I’d like to introduce Dr. Marjorie Pike, who will be talking to you about strategic options and evaluation. Marjorie did her MBA at Henley Management College, and her doctorate at Wharton in the U.S., and she’s been lecturing there for the past five years, so we are very fortunate to have her here with us today. Marjorie, over to you.”

  The three of them scurried quickly to find seats as Marjorie slowly and decisively walked to the front. She was a small woman with white skin and black hair pulled into a chignon, and her eyes seemed to pierce each and every person in the room. No one made a sound.

  “Options, options, options,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you do an MBA or a marketing qualification? Do you work in the U.K. or the U.S.? Do you buy this house or another—or do you hedge your bets and wait to see how the housing market plays out over the next year or so? Every day, we face options and make decisions. The problem is, most times we make the wrong ones—do you stay for one more drink or go home while you’re ahead? We generally have that last drink and we generally find ourselves regretting it in the morning. And while making a bad decision might be okay if it’s just the wrong toothpaste that you bring home, it’s not okay if you invest billions of dollars of shareholders’ money in the wrong venture. Right?”

  Jen nodded glumly. She knew more than she’d ever wanted to about making the wrong decision. Frankly, she felt that she was an expert in the subject.

  “So what do you do?” Marjorie was saying. “You have your strengths and weaknesses set out. You’ve identified your threats and opportunities. How do you turn those into options, and how do you decide among them?”

  More silence. Then Alan put up his hand.

  “Yes?”

  “Well,” he said falteringly, “you develop actions that take advantage of opportunities, and others that mitigate the risks.”

  “How?”

  “Well, if an opportunity is to . . . attract a new customer—type of customer, I mean—then you do research to find out if you’ve got a chance. If it’s viable, I mean. And if a threat is a competitor who’s also, you know, after the same customer, then you have to work harder to make sure he doesn’t get her . . . get them. So, you know, you might do some heavy advertising or something . . .”

  He trailed off and Jen looked at him strangely, wondering why he was sounding so gung-ho about all this. She guessed it was just his usual geeky enthusiasm for anything to do with strategy, but even so, he was getting all excited, bobbing up and down in his seat. She stared at him for a second, then lost interest as she found herself thinking about her father again. He’d certainly taken advantage of opportunities. And she’d let him walk all over her. Well, he wasn’t going to get away with it. She wasn’t sure quite yet what she was going to do about that spreadsheet, but she was definitely going to do something. Take it to the police, probably.

  “Good. That’s very good,” Marjorie said briskly. “But in this situation you could also decide to consolidate, couldn’t you? Buy up one or two of your competitors or maybe even your suppliers. What if you have more than one opportunity? What if you could enter a new market or rebrand your product for a new audience or focus on increasing your existing market share? What then?”

  Alan frowned. “Rebranding,” he said seriously. “I didn’t think of that.” He started scribbling frantically, and Jen rolled her eyes dismissively.

  “In a textbook, strategic options are very easy,” Marjorie continued. “You pick a couple of horses, see if they’ll run, and bingo, you can make a decision. In real life it ain’t that easy. In real life it’s messy and complicated and you don’t just have to consider the business imperative; you also have to consider the people and their personalities. One option might be to sell off a loss-making part of the business. But if the managing director set that business up himself and is emotionally attached to it, selling it probably won’t be a viable option. Okay, someone give me an example, a company you’ve already analyzed and that we can look at briefly to highlight the issues.”

  She looked around the room searchingly and everyone looked at one another shiftily. Finally someone at the back said the fateful words, “We’ve already done some work on a condom company.”

  There were a few sniggers, although subdued ones— somehow Marjorie wasn’t the sort of person anyone fancied their chances with. But she took it in her stride.

  “A condom company? Interesting. Okay, then. And presuming that you have all exhausted the humorous elements of a condom’s strengths and weaknesses, what are the possible options for this theoretical company?”

  “Sex toys,” someone called out.

  “Market penetration,” someone else called out to a quick applause.

  “Entering new geographical markets,” shouted another.

  “Okay, thank you,” said Marjorie, scribbling them down on the board as people giggled. “So we’re looking at market penetration, new markets, and new products, right? And how
do we choose from among these options?”

  “Well, it has to be a good fit,” said someone in a deadpan voice. Marjorie chose to ignore the joke.

  “Sure, strategic fit. But what does that really mean? You,” she said, pointing at Alan, who immediately sat up straight.

  “Well,” he said seriously, “I suppose that you need to align yourself to your brand. Your product, I mean. Align your product to your brand.” He looked slightly flustered. “So, you’d need to change your brand before you could interest a new market, like, you know, sex toys.”

  “Right,” said Marjorie uncertainly. “I’d probably look at it the other way around; you look at your brand values and your unique selling point and don’t try moving into a new market if it doesn’t fit. Once you damage your brand, you may not have a company. Of course, nothing is sacrosanct—some companies change their raison d’être successfully, like IBM, who were a manufacturing company and are now more focused on consultancy. But you’ve got to be pretty confident—or desperate—to pull something like that off. So, what else?”

  “Viability,” Alan said. “Assessing whether you have the internal capabilities required. If you do, you might be able to . . . adapt your brand.”

  “Okay,” said Marjorie, frowning slightly, “give me some examples.”

  “Like finding out what the customer wants and then trying to figure out if you’ve got it. What they want, I mean.”

  Now Marjorie was looking at Alan strangely.

  He reddened and cleared his throat. “I mean, if you want to move into Europe, do you have any infrastructure there?” he said quickly. “Do you speak any European languages? That sort of thing.”

  “Great. This is good,” said Marjorie, and Alan sat back, looking relieved. “What I’m trying to get across here is that when you get to the point of options, you might think that you’ve done all the hard work, but the reality is that the work is just about to begin. You need to think through everything, consider the outrageous and the mundane. You need to know what’s going on in your company and out of it—and that includes the quirks of your top team and the politics of the current government. You need to consider whether an option is achievable, whether it’s credible, whether it’s acceptable. What are the risks? Can they be managed? So, back to our condom company. Let’s think about the risks associated with moving into a new market. . . .”