by Rosie Thomas
‘Sarufy!’ her less confident friend remonstrated.
‘It’s all right,’ Harriet said, as the little wishbone was retrieved, ‘it’s mine, it doesn’t belong to the shop. Have a try.’
Harriet showed them. Sandy rattled the counters in her fist as if they were dice, kissed her knuckles as she must have seen in the films, and cast the discs into the slots. The two of them hung over the shiny board, contradicting each other and pushing one another’s hands out of the way.
‘You’re daft, Nicky.’
‘Daft yourself. If you open this one it’ll only go like this, see?’
Harriet watched their faces. The spring was released and the musical rattle came again.
The girls’ eyes and mouths were fascinated circles as they watched the balls follow their paths. They dropped, with finality, into the wrong slots.
‘Bugger.’
‘Give us another go. That was your fault.’
There was more jostling, more contradicting.
Good, Harriet thought. She had tried the game on everyone she knew, but she was always afraid that the responses reflected an urge to be kind and encouraging, or to play devil’s advocate for her own good. She liked it best when strangers became instantly engrossed, as Sandy and Nicky had done. Their bony shoulders were hunched over it, and the plumes of hair sparred with a life of their own. There was a yodel of triumph as their second attempt was successful.
‘But your score’s too high,’ Harriet said. There was another outcry, and then they set to work again. The reaction was beginning to be familiar.
Harriet had done her research. She had spent two entire Sundays riding on the top deck of a 73 bus, north to south London and back again, through the dim streets at either end of the route and along the great channel of Oxford Street in the middle. Sunday was a good day for the buses. They weren’t too crowded, the passengers were bored by the slow journey and glad to be distracted. They only bothered to climb up to the top deck, Harriet discovered, if they were travelling some distance. She attracted their attention with the rattle and plop of the balls.
It took some courage, at first, to approach people and ask if they wanted to play. But they almost always agreed. Soon she had developed a professional patter. I’m doing some informal market research. Do you mind if …? Harriet enjoyed her encounters on the isolated, swaying top deck. She played with gangs of teenage boys, with pairs of old ladies, mothers and children and solitary middle-aged men. Once, on the last leg of her last journey on an empty bus, she played with the West Indian bus conductor. She thought that in a fairer world he would have been a professor of logic. He set the paths unhesitatingly, even for the hardest of all the permutations.
‘It’s good,’ he told her. ‘It’s fun. My children would like this.’
‘Would you buy it?’ Harriet asked, as she always did.
‘Maybe.’ He patted his ticket machine on its worn leather strap. ‘We’ve all got a path to follow, haven’t we?’
‘I don’t know,’ Harriet answered quickly, thinking of Simon’s path. All the gates closed. Or were they?
‘Would you buy it?’ she asked Nicky and Sandy.
‘Might do, for Christmas or something,’ one said, relinquishing the smooth discs.
The other added, ‘If it was cheap. We’ve got to go, Sand. You promised your Mum.’
They scuttled out of the shop with their silver bag, promising Harriet that they would come back another time. When they were gone she packed the game away in its box.
She knew it was good. Sometimes her earliest conviction of how good it was came back to her, and she shivered down the length of her spine. She had only to convince the cold men who had money to lend of the same thing. She had to show them how the game had been enjoyed on the juddering buses. And she had to convince the money men that she could sell it to the bus passengers, and those people multiplied by thousands. Perhaps tomorrow, Harriet encouraged herself. She felt the bite of adrenalin in her blood.
Harriet locked the shop and began to walk towards the tube station, turning the familiar equations over in her head as she went. When she was buying into Stepping, Harriet had found the shop and Ken had bought the lease for her. She was paying him back but the property still did not belong to her, and so she couldn’t offer it as collateral for a bigger loan. She would have done so if it had been possible; as she felt now she would have done anything, she wanted the money so badly. But the lease belonged to Ken, and although he had listened sympathetically to her proposal he was too careful to advance her the money for a second, much riskier enterprise. She needed too much money, in any case.
She wanted to launch her game in the way it deserved. With a splash, with sumptuous packaging, with advertising, and with piles of it in every window, in every outlet. The figures were set out, with the rest of her calculations, in the proposals she had spent the last four months poring over. The equations had become very familiar, but the size of them still daunted her.
Harriet had just under twenty thousand pounds of her own, her share of the proceeds from the sale of the flat she had owned with Leo. She had managed to add to her capital another pitifully small amount, by living on air in Belsize Park.
Almost as soon as she reached her rented flat and unpacked the prototype once more, the telephone rang. It was Charlie Thimbell.
‘Harriet? Jenny’s up in Newcastle for a publication party tonight, and I’m not going home to cook for myself. Let me come over and take you out to eat. We can go to the Chinese place.’
Jenny was back at her job as a publisher’s editor. From time to time she had to spend a night away, and Charlie was famous for his unwillingness to fend for himself. Harriet knew that there was nothing in her own fridge, and that even if there had been she probably wouldn’t get around to eating anything. She thought longingly of the little Chinese restaurant that Charlie was fond of, with its tasselled lanterns and kitsch mural.
‘Charlie, I can’t tonight.’
He made a disgusted noise. ‘Why not this time?’
‘I’m working. I just want to go through it all one more time. I’m seeing the venture capital division at Morton’s in the morning.’
‘Are you, now.’ Charlie was professionally interested. ‘What d’you reckon?’
‘I’ve got a feeling this could be just the right connection, at long last. They’re funding a lot of other small ventures, some of them just as much long-shots as mine.’
The notion of small amused Harriet now as it had done before. Small in the vocabulary of a big merchant bank like Morton’s meant a loan of less than a quarter of a million pounds. In her fruitless rounds of the banks and other funding institutions Harriet had been told more than once that she would find it easier to raise money if she was looking for a million or more. And yet she was shaking at the notion of a hundred thousand. She caught herself wondering if she had the right entrepreneurial qualities.
Firmly, she told Charlie, ‘I want to be word-perfect.’
‘You can over-prepare, you know. Come on, let me take your mind off it.’
‘Thanks. But not tonight, honestly. You can take me out to celebrate when they agree to fund me.’
‘OK, OK,’ Charlie said, and rang off. When Harriet refused, he knew that she meant it. He left his office and went to the newspaper’s pub instead, where he had several drinks with two sports writers.
Harriet made herself a cup of tea and sat down at the table she used as a desk. She set out the glossy black board beside the cracked packing case, and sat looking at the two of them for a moment. She had studied them so hard and for so long that she wasn’t even sure that she saw them clearly any longer. The numbers, the patterns and permutations, made long chains in her head.
Impatiently, she drew a sheaf of papers towards her. Everything was there.
The production estimates came first. Working with Mr Jepson, she had established the unit cost of each game, based on a first production run of thirty thousand. Thirty tho
usand was ambitious, but Harriet was convinced that to aim high was the only way. It would be cheaper to manufacture in the Far East, but from the other companies whom she had persuaded to talk to her, through a mixture of bluff and guile, Harriet had gathered that these sources were not all reliable. She calculated that it would be better, in the beginning at least, to pay for reliability and proximity. She could always drive up the motorway to see Mr Jepson at Midland Plastics. And she was sure that, on the spot, she could get what she wanted.
In fact the board itself had been the least of her problems. The balls and counters could be bought in from another company who specialised in such things, and the spring mechanism that released the balls would come from yet another source. It was the packaging that had troubled her most. During her four-month crash course in manufacturing methods, Harriet had learned that all her game components must be assembled for sale in a moulded plastic tray. An injection moulding machine would have to be specially built to produce it, and that alone would cost her nearly twenty thousand pounds. And after that came the cardboard box to enclose everything else, with the colour artwork to decorate it, that must be designed and proofed and then printed. The cost of quality colour printing had startled her more than anything else.
At last, when the components were all ready in their plastic trays, the instructions, and the bright, beautiful boxes must all be brought together and shrink-wrapped ready to be sold.
But none of this could be done until she had orders from wholesale and retail buyers, and perhaps only firm orders would enable her to raise the money to start a production run that would allow her to meet those orders.
It was like a shivering house of cards, in which the collapse of one corner would bring down the whole shaky structure. Wearily, Harriet rubbed her eyes.
She had come this far. She was going to show Morton’s that, if only they would back her, she would go much further. There would have to be no shaky corners, that was all. She returned her attention to her papers. The manufacturing details wouldn’t interest the money men, only the figures at the bottom of the neatly typed pages. At the wholesale price she had established, not quite as low as she could have pitched it because she wanted her game to appear a quality product, and assuming that she could get all her thirty thousand units into the shops in time for Christmas, she could accommodate a start-up loan of one hundred thousand pounds, and clear another hundred thousand for reinvestment, expansion, overseas sales. Break-even point was fifteen thousand units.
The prospect glittered at her.
But again, her card house trembled. To get the games into the shops in time for Christmas selling, the manufacturing must be completed by July, August at the latest. The buyers would place their basic orders at the Toy Fair in London at the end of February, and reorder later when selling got under way. Harriet had booked a stand at the Fair without any certainty that she would have anything to display on it except a split packing case and a lonely slab of black plastic adorned with white wishbones. And it was already mid-January.
The urgency of her need to raise capital gnawed at her all day, every day, but now it gripped her like a physical spasm. Harriet got up from the table, stretching her stiff limbs, and went over to the window. She hadn’t bothered to close the curtains before sitting down and she looked out at the dingy basement area and the railings above that separated it from the street. She rested her forehead against the cold glass and breathed slowly, reassuring herself. She would get the money. She would get the orders at the Fair. The game would be in the shops by the autumn. And her own efforts would make sure that it sold out of the shops again.
Harriet looked up and saw the two cats winding in and out of the railings, mewing at her. She had forgotten to let them in, forgotten to feed them. Stricken with guilt she went to the door and opened it. The cats bounded down the steps and streaked between her legs and into the kitchen. Harriet followed them and spooned meat out of a tin into two bowls. The yelping subsided at once into satisfied chewing, punctuated by bursts of purring. Harriet absent-mindedly cut herself a slice of bread and ate it leaning against the kitchen table, watching the cats’ complete absorption in their food. If she could only bring the same attention to setting up her company, she thought, the obstacles would probably melt away.
The tea had gone cold in the pot, but she poured herself another cup anyway and settled down to her figures again. Replete, the cats followed her to her seat. One settled itself like a hot cushion against her feet, and the other launched itself into her lap. Harriet stroked the soft fur. She was glad of the company of the cats. They didn’t distract her, as Charlie Thimbell would have done.
Beyond the practical details of manufacturing and sales, the bank would want to know about the structure of the company they were being asked to invest in. Weighing up her requirements very carefully, Harriet had concluded that it would be best kept very small. She calculated that at the beginning she could run it herself, as the sole proprietor. She would need a secretarial assistant, and a part-time book-keeper. She would also need an accountant, the best possible accountant. But in her card-house world she would need to raise the capital before she could appoint one.
With clear sight, Harriet knew that she was really asking for investment in herself. It was her own energy, her own selling skills, that would make her venture work. From careful analysis of her market – not at all scientifically done, but with the intuition that she would have to let herself rely on – she believed even a bad game could be made to sell well. If it was packaged right, and cleverly marketed, and if it was enough talked and written about where people noticed such things, then it would sell. It might only be played once or twice, but the price would still have been paid for it.
Harriet was convinced that she could package and sell and promote as well as anyone else; better, even, because it was all she had to concentrate on. There were no other demands on her, she had nothing else to give herself to. She would present herself to Morton’s.
And she had the added satisfaction, the added insurance, of knowing that her game – Simon’s game – was good. It was better than anything else she had seen or could remember.
The rain cleared overnight. Harriet reached the bank’s new black-glass building in thin sunlight, seven minutes early. She stood looking at the City edifices rearing up around her, at sooty stone and concrete and glass, feeling her irrelevance in their weighty shadows.
Of course, she told herself. What else should you feel?
At exactly two minutes before the appointed time, she presented herself to the receptionist at a desk in the marble lobby. Behind Harriet’s back a fountain expensively trickled amongst green fronds. As the receptionist telephoned to announce her, Harriet thought about the different languages that money spoke. This soft one, of quiet voices in harmony with polite water and smooth, cold stone, was becoming familiar to her. She was aware that if she penetrated further she would have to learn to interpret other, coarser tongues.
Following the receptionist’s instructions she took the polished box of the lift to a lofty floor. Up here there was a long carpeted vista and a plate-glass sweep at the end that gave a further vista of towers and blind eyes of glass. It was quiet, like being in the nave of a church, looking towards some vast altarpiece. In the distance, yet all around her, Harriet could hear a low humming. She knew that it was machinery, the bank’s electronic heart, but it reminded her irresistibly of the murmur of prayer.
A man came out of one of the doors that opened, like pew-ends, into the nave. In his dark clothes against the bright glass he seemed featureless, an acolyte.
‘Mrs Gold? Would you come this way, please?’
Obediently she went with him. Beyond the door there was a conference room. It was so ordinary, with its empty oval table and glass ashtrays and unmemorable pictures, that Harriet felt momentarily disorientated. The acolyte had become a middle-aged man in a conservative suit. There were two other men waiting in the room, surprisingly young, in j
ust the same clothes. All three of them had pink, smooth, pleasant faces, as indistinguishable one from the other as the pictures on the walls.
Harriet made an effort to collect herself. Unthinkingly, she smoothed the hem of her own plain, dark jacket. The skirt of her suit was narrow, but not too narrow, to the knee. Her shoes were plain, dark and low-heeled. She was dressed right, reflecting the bank men exactly.
‘Won’t you sit down?’
The youngest of the trio held out a chair. Harriet sat. She smiled at each of them but she refused the formal offer of coffee.
‘Well, Mrs Gold. Won’t you tell us about your project?’ The invitation came from the oldest one. He rested his wrists on the table, hands clasped, ready to give her his full attention. The other two, on either side of him, adopted almost the same position. Harriet looked at each of them in turn, remembering the names by which they had introduced themselves, and then she began.
Softly, without emphasis, she told them, ‘The game is called Conundrum.’
It had taken her a long time to fix on a name. Simon had never called it anything. For a long time, in her own head, it had just been Simon’s game. After meeting the logician bus conductor she had thought about his pathways, and his theory of predestination, and also of Simon’s words, It’s a wonderful game if you can play it right. Like life. But Harriet had rejected all the portentous names that went with such ideas. They would make the game seem too serious to be played with.
‘Conundrum’ sounded light, with the right element of mystery. People could read their own further significance into the shiny tracks if they so wished. Harriet just wanted them to give it to each other for Christmas.
In the conference room of the venture capital division of Moreton’s Bank, Harriet opened a small suitcase. As she had done on each of the previous similar occasions, she felt like a pedlar displaying her wares.
Inside the suitcase was a box, only a dummy as yet, but still looking enough like the box that Harriet wanted for the final Conundrum. The artwork for the design, bold Deco lettering backed by a sunray motif in brilliant colours, had been produced, after a dozen other attempts had been rejected, by a design studio recommended to Harriet by Jenny. The artwork had been proofed, using a five-colour run to give depth and richness, by an East End printer recommended by the design studio. Harriet had found her own manufacturer of boxes, and had a sample made up to her own specifications. All the experiments had been expensive. Harriet had paid out of her capital, knowing that she must practise no economies yet.