by Rosie Thomas
‘That’s right.’ A smile, but as wintry as the weather. Gratefully Harriet accepted the moment of rapport. She put his cup of tea down at his elbow and bent down to open her case, placed on the floor for lack of a clear space anywhere else. She took out Conundrum, Mr Jepson’s expensive Conundrum, with the ritual incantations of the three wise monkeys somehow still clouding its polished flanks. She put it into Simon’s hands like an offering and laid its box beside it, its resonant colours almost too bright for the meagre room.
‘You’ve done this?’
‘I brought it to show you. I want to tell you all about it.’
In his eyes Harriet saw a dark spectrum of responses, from disgust to fear, quickly shuttered, and wished that she had not. She stooped on her haunches, to bring herself to his sitting level.
‘It’s all right,’ she said gently. She did not know exactly what she was trying to reassure him about.
‘What do you mean?’ He wouldn’t admit her through the smallest chink in his armour. Harriet wished for the disarming surprise of her last visit, or for the levelling of whisky. There was no excuse for whisky at three o’clock in the afternoon.
‘Where is my game? My packing case game?’
‘It’s safe. It’s at home, but I can bring it straight back for you, if you want that.’
‘No. It’s funny, I’ve kept it with me all these years. But I feel better with it out of the house.’ He picked the gates out of the slots and shook the white bones in his cupped hands. Then he swept a clearing in the table’s litter and laid out the bones in a line, a series of Ys, two narrow paths diverging from each broad central one, offering choices. ‘You’d better sit down properly,’ he told her. ‘And say what it is you’ve come for.’
Harriet described everything, from the first tentative plans she had made alone in the rented basement to this morning’s confrontation with Mr Jepson. Her words came out in a rush. She didn’t weigh them or try to modulate them. She simply told Simon what had happened, in a rapid, fervent, breathless outpouring. And when she had finished, there was silence. It was a particularly cold and weighty silence after the heat of her delivery.
‘You told me I could do what I like with it,’ she said, very humbly.
‘I know I did. I meant it.’ Simon studied her face. He was realising that, in the time that had passed since her last visit, he had been recalling Harriet as prettier than she really was. Somehow he had superimposed Kath’s soft, bloomy features on the daughter’s thinner, sharper ones. Kath had never looked threateningly famished, as this girl did.
‘Simon?’ she was prompting him, in a voice that carried the echo of her mother’s, just as her face carried the print of the other one.
‘What is it?’
‘I …’ Harriet’s words dried. Glancing at it she saw that Conundrum looked meaningless, and its box garish. She had been wrong to come bearing her bits and pieces to Simon in search of approval and praise for her industry and cleverness. His game, to him, was Shamshuipo camp and so it was nothing to do with this shameless, glossy reflection of it.
There was another thing to remember, also. Simon was not her father. She had no right of filial expectation, no right to resent his lack of paternal pride. He could not be her father, however much she might wish him to be.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not very appropriate, this, is it?’
Simon gave a cough of laughter. ‘I hadn’t tried to gauge the appropriateness. What exactly is it that you want, Harriet?’
She would be businesslike, then. ‘I want to launch your game commercially, under the name Conundrum.’ She went on, spelling out her plans. She couldn’t tell if Simon was listening or not, but at the end he said, ‘I see.’
‘Before I can do any of this, I have to establish who owns the rights in the game. As we stand, they are yours. You could lease them to me for an agreed period. You could make them over to me. Or we could come to some other arrangement. But we must do it legally. Do you understand?’
‘I’m old, but I’m not a fool. What will I have to do? Because I don’t want to have to do anything, anything at all outside what I do here. Do you understand that?’
They regarded each other. Simon had reared up in his seat, as if to protect his narrow territory.
Harriet said, ‘Yes. You only have to sign something, a simple document, if you’re willing to make over the rights completely. If we make a more complicated arrangement it might mean a visit to a solicitor together.’ She was trying to be impartial. She wanted to do what was right, but she needed the simplest solution that would leave no loopholes.
Simon sighed. ‘You can have it. I told you the first time. Give me what I have to sign.’ He read her intentions. He was shrewd enough to know that she wouldn’t have made the journey unprepared. Harriet felt grubby as she took out her papers. She had taken legal advice, not Henry’s but specialist advice. She held out her simple, watertight contract. There was an interval in which Simon shuffled in search of his spectacles, another in which he read the words she had presented him with.
At length he looked up. ‘That seems very thorough,’ he said. He took up a pen, and signed.
‘It should be witnessed.’
‘Do you think I will renege?’
She bent her head. ‘No.’
‘No other intrusion?’
‘None, I promise. Only we must decide between us what your share of the profits will be.’
There was another dry sound, neither a cough nor quite a laugh. ‘What will I do with profits, Harriet?’
She held her ground. ‘Heat your house adequately. Repair the roof.’
‘And if I told you that I am happy as I am?’
‘Are you?’ But as she said it she felt her impudence. He would share no whisky-confidence with her today. ‘Money never hurt anyone,’ she defended.
Simon swept the Y-shaped gates together into a heap, and funnelled them from his cupped hands into the mocked-up box. He put all the components neatly together, fitting the lid in place, and held it out to Harriet. ‘Here. Take your game.’
She was being dismissed. Well, she would make the division of the money between the two of them as and when the time came. The time seemed a long way off. Harriet was afraid of everything she must do before it could come.
‘Thank you for giving me the game,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m grateful.’
This time the desiccated laugh did turn into a cough. ‘You should get some medicine for that,’ she told him. Simon’s face altered. He fell against the back of his chair. ‘You sounded like your mother, saying that. Here.’
She went to him. He lifted her hand and held it, very briefly, against his cheek. A moment later he had disengaged himself, impatient, unfolded his height from the chair. ‘You’ll want to be on your way.’
The touch had been a father’s gesture, Harriet thought. She felt lighter, happy now. He came with her to the front door, peered briefly into the rain before retreating into the shell of his house. Harriet left him, and drove back down the motorway to London.
In the next month, Harriet worked harder than she had ever done in her life before. By the last week of February, using the Toy Fair Directory, she had mailed five hundred publicity kits to every buyer, every store representative who might have the remotest interest in Conundrum. She had designed the dressing for the bigger stand, in white parachute silk and black PVC, and supervised its making-up. She wanted black, shiny curves and cloudy white billows to back her sunray trade-mark. She had found a team of props designers who had made the huge, polystyrene sunray itself, and painted it in the rainbow colours of the boxes. She had dozens more boxes made, ready to be heaped in apparent profusion on the ledges of the sunray. Through an agency, she had booked two girls to man the stand with her. Remembering Sandy and her friend, Harriet had chosen young students, part-timers, whose hair could be dressed in the same nodding plumes.
She had bought three black-and-white outfits, and replaced the buttons wi
th penny-sized ones in rainbow colours. Through Jenny, who knew his agent, she had cajoled a television personality to be on the stand for the busiest day, to challenge buyers to solve Conundrum. His fee was enormous. Jane and Jenny and the others helped her to stuff envelopes for the mail shots, and Jenny machined yards of parachute silk. Her friends worried gently about her, and tried to persuade her to slow down, but she was driven beyond the ability to rest. Only Charlie Thimbell told her that if she was going to do it at all, she might as well give it all she had.
Harriet did everything she possibly could, and she neglected Stepping. There was very little left of her fifteen thousand pounds.
Three nights before the fair opened, Harriet had a nightmare. When she woke up, sweaty and disorientated, she couldn’t remember the details of it. But an oppressive fear made her head and limbs heavy. She felt deathly tired but she couldn’t go back to sleep again; in the morning the weight of it was still with her. She felt drained of all her strength, ill without any symptoms.
The feeling was the exact opposite of the euphoria she had experienced after the strange, waking dream in her old bedroom at home. It was as if all the anxieties and weaknesses she had suppressed had surfaced at once to cripple her. She was afraid of everything she was doing, of the ballooning enterprise she was trying to launch on such shaky foundations. Harriet lay in bed, with her knees drawn up, her arms folded around her head.
The thought came to her, effortfully, I need help. I can’t do this alone.
After a time she got up, and groped painfully around the flat. She found the card that Henry Orde had given her.
As soon as she judged the working day to have started, she telephoned Landwith Associates.
Seven
Landwith Associates occupied a stucco-fronted house in a quiet side-street. There was no marble entrance hall, and no opulent fountain. A discreet brass plate gave the company’s name, and an equally discreet bell placed beside it brought an immaculate girl to open the door.
‘Harriet Peacock,’ Harriet announced herself.
She had christened her embryo company Peacocks, and since the meeting at Morton’s she had resolved that there would be no more Mrs Gold. Nor would she go back to calling herself Harriet Trott. The direct identification of herself with her company, and also with Kath in the years when there had been just the two of them, with Simon’s Kath even, gave her pleasure.
‘Mr Landwith is expecting me.’
Armed with an introduction from Henry Orde, and once past the barrier of an ingeniously defensive secretary, Harriet had found it quite easy to achieve an appointment with Martin Landwith. It had been harder to find the time in her own schedule. The Toy Fair opened the next day. Harriet knew that she should have been on her stand, organising the pinning and draping and positioning.
‘This way, please, Miss Peacock.’
The hall was panelled and empty, except for a Persian rug on the floor and an oval table with a big bowl of fresh flowers. Harriet followed the girl up the shallow curve of the stairs, passing three serious, gloomy still lifes in weighty frames. Harriet suspected that they were worth, individually, about as much as the total amount she was trying to borrow.
The girl opened the double doors facing the top of the stairs. Harriet saw Martin Landwith stand up at once, and come round his desk to greet her. He was a stocky man, not very tall, but dressed in a dark blue suit of such magical cut that he seemed perfectly proportioned. He was wearing a pale blue shirt and a sober tie. Narrow, shiny, hand-made shoes emphasised the smallness of his feet. His dark hair was greying at the temples; it seemed sculpted rather than mundanely cut. The silver threads glittered as he turned his head. He had dark eyes, and his naturally dark skin had the healthy polish of a real sun-tan. Harriet judged that he was in his early or mid-fifties. The fingernails of the hand he held out to her were professionally manicured.
‘Please sit down, won’t you?’
His voice was friendly, his smile followed the invitation only a second or two later. Martin Landwith made no attempt to disguise his scrutiny of her. Harriet accepted it, looking coolly back at him, and then sat down in the chair opposite his desk. She glanced around the room. To her right there were tall windows overlooking the street. They were framed in curtains of some honey-coloured material, with deep, soft scallops above and long rippling tails that were fringed in dull gold. Opposite the windows stood a Chinese Chippendale cabinet, the glass front reflecting the light in lozenges over the plain walls. Over the mantelpiece was a Victorian portrait. The whiskered subject might have been Mr Landwith’s grandfather. His grandson, if he was his grandson, sat beneath the picture at a partner’s desk probably inherited from the old man. Only the telephones, dictating machine, computer terminal had been added at some later date. On the floor there was a rug whose subtly glowing colours and intricate pattern spoke to Harriet of tiny silk threads, and thousands upon thousands of hand-knots. There wasn’t much else in the room. It was a masterpiece of understatement that still shouted money as clearly as if the walls had been pasted with layers of notes. It made the glass and steel temple of Morton’s seem by comparison like a hamburger bar in a new shopping precinct.
Harriet’s mouth curved. She sucked the corners of it inwards to contain her smile. But she saw at the same time that Martin Landwith had noted her inventory, and her amusement, and seemed to approve of it.
‘This is my son, and partner. Robin Landwith.’
Harriet turned. He must have come silently in behind her.
He was taller, and thinner, than his father. He had the same dark colouring, but there was no grey in his hair and it was thicker and more casually cut than his father’s. Clearly they shared the same tailor, but Robin’s lapels were two hairs breadths wider, and there were discreet pleats at the front of his trousers. His hand, when Harriet shook it, was larger and warmer.
He looked her over, just as Landwith senior had done. There was more open appreciation in his smile, but afterwards his glance flickered back to his father, as if for approval. Only that made Harriet notice how young he was. He was younger than herself. Perhaps only twenty-five, twenty-six at the most. Not quite ready, yet, to be given free rein. It struck Harriet, seeing him take his place beside his father, that Robin looked like a particularly fine thoroughbred colt. He had been sired for this particular course, for races in which the stakes were pure risk and the prizes were all the multiplications of money. Clearly the bloodlines were faultless, whatever the running he would finally make.
For now, father and son made a formidable combination.
Martin Landwith was sitting with his chin resting on one hand. With the other hand he made a small, polite gesture of invitation.
‘Won’t you tell us how we can help you?’
Harriet told.
She left nothing out, nor did she add anything, but she avoided the operatic performance that had failed her at Morton’s. If the proposal was good enough, she reasoned, these two would spot it even if she made her pitch in Swahili. She spoke quietly, without emphasis, letting the information do its own selling.
When she took out Conundrum and set it up on the broad desk, they examined it carefully and asked half a dozen questions about the manufacture, but they didn’t try to play the game. Instead, when they had finished with the board itself, they scrutinised the box and the point-of-sale roughs and all the leaflets and promotional material that the design studio had expensively prepared for the Toy Fair. But the time expended even on all of that was brief.
‘The package is probably good enough,’ Martin Landwith judged. Then he moved on with practised speech to her business plan.
They went through the figures line by line, and they accepted none of her forecasts without query. Harriet was glad of the thoroughness of her preparation and relieved that they couldn’t fault her calculations. She wouldn’t care to have stumbled in front of the two Landwiths. But she had to admit, under their questioning, that she had only investigated the performanc
e of roughly similar products.
‘There’s nothing on the market quite like Conundrum,’ she told them. ‘A direct parallel between potential performance and real sales is impossible for that reason. But that is Conundrum’s strength, too, isn’t it?’
She saw that they didn’t glance away at the game but kept their attention fixed on her. She felt a small beat of triumph. She was right, it was herself and her own capabilities that she was trying to sell. If the Landwiths would buy her, she would show them that she could make the world buy Conundrum.
‘I think we should discuss your marketing strategy now,’ Martin Landwith said.
That was more difficult. Without having tested the water at the Fair, Harriet wasn’t quite sure what direction her marketing thrust would follow. But she brought out the research notes that showed the performance of the most nearly similar products out of the big chains, and talked about targeting W.H. Smith, Menzies, Toys ‘R’ Us and the rest.
Father and son listened attentively, but without any encouraging sign. When she finished, she saw Martin glance at his watch. Then he put his fingertips together, looked at her over the crest of them.
Harriet’s heart began to thump unpleasantly.
‘I like your game,’ Martin said. ‘It may well be a seller. But I wouldn’t want to try to predict how strong a seller, or how durable. I don’t see any convincing way of doing so and – I’m sorry – I don’t see that your due diligence succeeds either. The FMCG world is unpredictable …’
Fast moving consumer goods, Harriet translated silently. Oh, please.
‘… and we prefer our risks to be calculated. Can you demonstrate the value of your Conundrum other than theoretically?’
Harriet wondered if she should tell him about her Sundays on the top deck of the 73 bus, and the enthusiasm and friendliness she had met there. But she doubted that Martin Landwith would know where to go to catch a bus, and doubted even more strongly that he would accept the vote of its passengers. And Robin Landwith, with his long legs stretched out to one side of the desk, didn’t look as though he had ever ridden a bus in his life.