The Dust and the Heat

by Michael Gilbert

  I was trying to get used to the changes in him. Cumulatively these were startling, but it wasn’t so easy to itemize them. He was a lot fatter, but a first-class tailor can hide that; his face was settling into the heavy mask which I had noticed on so many American businessmen – the product of soft living and hard decisions. He looked as if he had used up about twenty years of life in the seven years since I had seen him, but there was still a look of the old Oliver in his eyes.

  He sat me down in the chair of honour and asked me a lot of questions about my doings in America. I realized that he had kept fairly close tabs on my movements and was flattered by the thought that he should have bothered. Soon, but not too soon, he eased round to what was in his mind.

  “We’ve changed a good deal in the last few years,” he said. “I expect you’ve noticed.”

  I said I had. I’d also followed his fortunes in the financial press, since it had been in my mind that our paths might cross.

  He said, “Bill Blackett and George Challen look after the production side at Elsfield Wood. We put Challen on the Board when Dumbo pulled out.”

  I knew enough about that not to pursue it.

  “Wilf Harrap and I look after the marketing and finance side. We’ve got a separate sales company that does that.”

  “You’ve got a hatful of companies,” I said. “I saw their names on the door.”

  “That’s mostly the property side. We’ve been buying up chemists’ shops. Basset & Munk is a north-country chain. We’ve got our eyes on a much bigger one in Scotland – Macfarlane & Rae.”

  “What on earth do you want with shops?”

  “Tied-house principle, old boy. We run ’em for profit but they have to take our special lines.”

  I was impressed in spite of myself. Macfarlanes was a big outfit, a household name north of the Tweed. I said, “What would it cost you to take them over?”

  “We’d have to offer cash and shares. The cash handout would be about half a million.”

  “Have you got half a million?”

  Oliver laughed. When he laughed he sounded a lot more like the old Oliver. “No one in business ever has half a million. It’d mean a loan transaction. That’s what I want you for. You’ve been doing that sort of work in New York. You know all the tricks of the trade. You’d start as Secretary to the Group and there’d be a reversion to a seat on the Board in about three years’ time when you’d got into your stride.”

  We talked about it. The terms were generous. If I’d been looking for a paid job I’d have jumped at it, and I said as much.

  After half an hour Oliver said, “Don’t say yes or no today. Can you come down for the weekend? Chrissie’d like to see you. She says you’re the only accountant she knows who has an honest face.”

  The house was on the select side of Sevenoaks and was a very different proposition to that unpainted box of bricks at Radlett. A whole-time gardener, I guessed, to look after three quarters of an acre of garden, and a married couple to run a house which had so many labour-saving gadgets it was practically self-propelled.

  Chrissie was hardly changed at all. She said she was very glad to see me. Almost as soon as we got there Oliver was hooked up on a long-distance call from Edinburgh which he took in his study. Chrissie and I settled down in front of a log fire with a man-sized gin each.

  “You’re pretty comfortable here,” I said.

  “Comfortable,” said Chrissie, “but bored. All day I have nothing to do except to drink coffee and to talk. My God, how the women of Sevenoaks do talk. Fortunately I am a good listener. I see nothing of my old bear from Monday morning until Friday night. And as you see, as soon as he comes home on Friday it is more business.”

  “He’s getting fat.”

  “He’s too fat. And he’s not fit. There was that trouble last winter.” I hadn’t heard about that. “It was pleurisy. He was in bed for a month and away from work for another month.”

  “It must have been pretty serious if it kept him away from his desk for two months.”

  “It was his heart. I was very much afraid. But he got better. The doctor said that much of it was overwork and worry. Also that he must not drink so much.”

  “Overwork, perhaps, but not worry. Oliver never worried about anything in his life.”

  “It is the lawsuit. Not the one in France. That’s over. A new one.”

  “I hadn’t heard about that,” I said. “Lawsuits can be very worrying things.”

  Chrissie poured me out another gin and told me a bit about it. It sounded troublesome, certainly. Chrissie said, “I know what Oliver wants. He wants you to help him. You will do it, won’t you?”

  “There are lots of accountants,” I said feebly.

  “It is not only an accountant he needs. He needs a friend. Someone from the old times, in the war. George Challen is the only one left now.”

  Once Chrissie has set her mind on a thing I don’t believe there’s a man born who can say “no” to her. When Oliver came back five minutes later, I had said I would give the thing a try. Actually I think he prolonged his telephone call so that she could work her will on me.

  After dinner Oliver settled down in front of the fire with the whisky decanter. He didn’t seem to be taking his doctor’s advice too seriously. He talked about Quinn & Nicholson and changes he had in mind. The future, as he saw it, lay in the American pressure-can.

  “It started with fly-sprays and things like that,” he said, “but it’s catching on fast. People are so damned lazy. If they can get something by pressing a button instead of unscrewing a cap or taking out a cork, they’ll go for it every time. We shall be cleaning our teeth with pressurized toothpaste before long. The machinery’s damned expensive. A lot of it’s under licence from abroad. And the stuff’s potentially explosive, which means elaborate safety precautions, and that costs money too.”

  Later on I mentioned the lawsuit and saw his face darken.

  “It’s Mallinson,” he said. “He couldn’t take what we did to him lying down. So he started this action. I think he sometimes wishes he hadn’t. I certainly do. It’s not just the money. You’ve no idea the amount of sheer bloody time a lawsuit takes up. It’s been going on for eighteen months and we haven’t got anywhere near the actual hearing yet.”

  “If it’s wasting so much time and money why doesn’t he stop it?”

  “It’s pride,” said Oliver. “Real deep, basic, old-fashioned pride. The sort of thing that used to make gentlemen meet at first light on Wimbledon Common and take pot-shots at each other from twelve paces. It wasn’t only the cash, although it must have cost him a packet. The real trouble was that the story got about and people laughed at him. He couldn’t take that.”

  Around midnight Chrissie appeared in a very attractive dressing gown and packed Oliver off to bed. The pleurisy must have taken something out of him. He wouldn’t have stood for that in the old days.

  Part Three

  Mallinsons v. Quinns

  National Health Service charges were doubled, Mr Benn failed to remain in the House of Commons and Bradshaw ceased publication. The Daily Mirror extended its empire by outbidding Lord Thomson for the Daily Herald and Mr Cecil King said that he saw nothing wrong with power so long as the power belonged to him. For the first time in nearly fifty years two British girls were seen in the Women’s Singles Finals at Wimbledon and a blue-throat was seen at Cley in Norfolk. June 1st was the coldest June day for eighty-one years. A group of British models visited Moscow to display Western fashions and Bank Rates went up to seven per cent. The Conservatives proposed a pay freeze and the Labour Party proposed a vote of censure on it, on the grounds that it undermined the well-established machinery for freely negotiating wage settlements. And the case of Mallinsons Pharmaceutical Supplies Limited v. Quinn & Nicholson Limited was finally set down for hearing.

  2

  As soon as he had a chance of assessing him, Oliver realized how lucky he was in his solicitor. Fergus Campbell was nondescript in ap
pearance. He was not clever. He would have considered the adjective “clever”, if applied to a solicitor, an actionable insult. He knew as much about the details of the law as most practising solicitors: which was precious little; but he had an infinite capacity for taking in the details of other people’s problems; and he had a nature which acted as a flywheel or governor to his clients’ mental mechanisms. If they were rash he was cautious. If they were sticky he would add the requisite dash of impetuosity.

  “I thought a good deal about counsel,” he said. “It was quite clear that we wanted a strong leader. That’s why I briefed Kendrick Starkey.”

  “What exactly do you mean by strong?” asked Oliver. He was stretched out in the very comfortable chair, almost a psychiatrist’s couch, which Campbell supplied for his clients.

  “In this context, I mean one who is capable of being rude.”

  “I thought rudeness went out with F E Smith.”

  “In criminal cases yes. In civil cases even now it is sometimes necessary. I think this is one of them. The whole case is a try-on. A monstrous piece of impertinence.”

  “Then you don’t think they’ve a chance?”

  “I didn’t mean that. Impertinence sometimes comes off in the Law Courts, as in other walks of life. No. We’ve got to fight this every inch of the way. That’s why I was particularly glad to rope in Lewis Moffat as a junior. He’s a good lawyer. He’ll supply the ammunition. Starkey will shoot it.”

  “We’re really coming under starter’s orders at last?”

  “We’re in the ‘warned’ list. It’ll be the end of this week or the beginning of next. I’d prefer to start on a Monday, if possible. High Court judges are human, and they’re mostly old men. They get tired by Friday. And when they’re tired they don’t want to listen to you. It’d be a pity to get brushed off after all the work we’ve put into the preliminaries.”

  “How long has the thing been going on?”

  Campbell turned back the pages of a bulging folder and said, “I see that the writ was issued almost exactly two years and three months ago.”

  “As long as that,” said Oliver. “It’s been quite an experience. Like having your large intestine wound off on a roller.”

  “Grab your hat,” said Campbell. “We mustn’t keep Starkey waiting.”

  Mr Starkey greeted them cordially. Lewis Moffat, pale and serious, was already installed at the conference table in the first-floor room overlooking the Temple Church.

  The QC was a surprisingly ugly man: small, squat and heavy with a face like a dyspeptic bulldog. His voice, in ordinary conversation, was soft and agreeable. He said, “It was clever of them to mount this case as slander of title. It enabled them to ask for a jury. Defamation and breach of promise are almost the only civil cases you can get ’em for now – thank goodness.”

  “You don’t approve of juries?”

  “Only when I’ve got a very weak case. There may be something to be said for ’em in the criminal courts.”

  “A relic, don’t you think, of the time when judges were in the King’s pocket?”

  “Maybe.” Starkey was weighing Oliver up carefully as he talked to him. He was visualizing him in the witness box under examination, and then under cross-examination. The impression he made on the jury was going to be a vital factor. “But in civil cases, juries are an anomaly. After all, if you had something wrong with you and got a competent surgeon to cut you open, you wouldn’t ask twelve good men and true to peer inside you and assess the result.”

  “If they’re as bad as that why on earth do we put up with them?”

  “It takes a long time to change anything in this country,” said Lewis Moffat sadly.

  “Particularly a public image,” said Starkey. “And you have to realize that the public image of businessmen is one of the things we’re up against. A jury automatically assumes that any undergraduate who is driving a car is speeding, that any actor who is friendly with a woman is sleeping with her, and that all businessmen are scoundrels. That’s where they’ll start from.”

  “I’m afraid it’s going to be a witch-hunt,” agreed Moffat.

  “No doubt,” said Oliver, “but which witch?”

  “Quite apt,” said Starkey. “Might use it in my closing speech. Which witch? That’s the case in a nutshell. If the jury comes to the conclusion that you were behaving unscrupulously, whilst your opponents were conducting themselves in a perfectly honest and above-board way, they’ll lean over backwards to award them substantial damages, whatever the lawyers say.”

  “And if that’s their line,” said Moffat, “they’ve picked the right counsel for it. No one at the Bar can drape a white sheet more effectively round a grubby client than James Snow.”

  “It was after one of his most effective perorations,” said Starkey, “in defence of a fraudulent stockjobber, if I remember rightly, that he earned the nickname of Driven Snow.”

  Oliver said, “If Mr Snow thinks he can transform Mallinson and Crake into a pair of lily-white innocents, he isn’t a barrister he’s an alchemist.”

  “We haven’t necessarily got to attack their characters,” said Moffat in his soft Lowland voice. “After all, they’re the plaintiffs. It’s up to them to prove their case.”

  “As my learned junior reminds us,” said Starkey drily, “it’s up to them to prove their case. He also implies, I fancy, that I am straying from the point. So let’s get down to business. We’ll take the proofs of evidence first. You realize that one of the most important witnesses is going to be this advertising man – what’s his name? – Wibberley.”

  “It’s a difficult business,” said Simon Bargulder. “Very difficult. What I’d like to do most is to have nothing to do with it at all.”

  “That’s what we’d all like,” said Oliver. “But we’ve got no choice. We didn’t start this action. We’re the ones who are being attacked. You don’t suggest we lie down and let them walk over us?”

  “That I don’t suggest, but it is a private fight between Mallinson and you. Must the agency be involved?”

  “You’re involved already.”

  “Shall I have to give evidence?”

  It was perfectly astonishing, Oliver thought, how big, tough businessmen wilted at the thought of having to stand up in court and answer a few questions. He said, “It all depends on Wibberley. Whether he decides to tell the truth, and if so, how much of it.”

  “What can he say?”

  “If he wanted to be devastatingly truthful, he’d say that he was made a fool of from beginning to end. That he was deliberately encouraged by us to ask for a seat on the Board, knowing that you’d smack his bottom for him and guessing that he’d walk out in a huff and go across to Pedersens with a load of carefully planted false information which would lead them up the garden path.”

  “If he is truthful, “agreed Bargulder, “that is what he would say, but do you think he will say it?”

  “I’m damned sure he won’t. No one’s going to stand up in court and admit that he’s been both a fool and a rogue. He’ll put across some carefully slanted version of the truth. The question really is, which way is he going to slant it – and how far?”

  “Do you think that if we made some approach–?”

  “What sort of approach?”

  “Suggested perhaps that we found him a suitable post in the advertising industry. He would like to return.”

  “It might work. On the other hand it might backfire badly. We wouldn’t want him to get up in court and say we’d tried to bribe him to change his story.”

  “It’s very difficult.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” said Oliver. “I’m not averse to a little judicious bribery. What I draw the line at is unsuccessful bribery. I’d like to keep Wibberley out of this as much as possible. He’s an unnecessary complication, and, God knows, we’ve got enough complications without him.”

  Bargulder looked at him curiously. Oliver was pale, and for the first time in their acquaintanceship h
e thought he detected a note of weariness, almost of despondency, in his voice. “It must be very trying for you, all this,” he said. “I have something which will do you good, I think.”

  He waddled across to the corner cupbard and got out a squat, brown bottle.

  “They are our clients. When we launched their last campaign the Managing Director gave me this.” He measured out two generous shots. Oliver said, “This is damned good whisky.”

  “You will not buy it in the shops. To get hold of it you have to be a distiller yourself.”

  “Maybe I’m in the wrong line,” said Oliver. “None of the stuff that Quinn & Nicholson brews does you half as much good as this.” He accepted a refill and stood with it in his hand for a moment. The colour had come back to his face. He added, “I don’t mind a fight in the ordinary way, but this is different. When the lawyers get in on the act they seem to turn it all sour.”

  “I want all your opinions on this,” said Oliver, “and I’m not just asking for them in order to disregard them–”

  “Makes a nice change,” said Harrap.

  “–as I’ve been sometimes accused of doing. This is really important. What it boils down to, as I see it, is a straight choice of tactics. Defence or attack? Do we sit tight and hope Mallinsons will make fools of themselves, or do we counter-attack and try to blast them out of their positions?”

  “Which do the lawyers advise?” asked Blackett.

  “All they can really say is that it’s up to the plaintiff to prove his case, which sounds fine but doesn’t get any anywhere.”

  “It seems to me,” said Harrap, “that a lot depends on how they put their case. Are they simply going to prove a string of facts – one lot of advertisements appeared on July 2nd and a second lot was due to come out on July 6th only it couldn’t because the second lot happened, by coincidence, to look so like the first that the second lot had to be scrapped. If that’s their case I’d say let ’em get on with it and try and prove it, and the best of British luck to them.”