Choral Society

by Prue Leith

  ‘God, I’m sorry!’ he said, dropping his arms and stepping back. With her glasses half off Lucy could not see his face clearly. She pushed them into place and burst out laughing.

  For a moment he stood, dismayed, then laughed too. ‘Bit out of practice, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Snap,’ she said, ‘and I’m not sure I’m ready for it anyway.’

  Lucy turned back to the sink and said, ‘Josh, do you think I could just stick this stuff in the dishwasher while you make us some tea?’

  ‘I don’t think I have ever heard such a romantic suggestion!’ he said. But he was smiling like the Cheshire cat.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  A week after banishing Rebecca from Pencarrick, Joanna had to go north to a Greenfarms meeting. She still felt unsettled and unhappy about the row with her friend, and she was tempted to ring her and make amends, but she couldn’t do that without asking her to return. And she did not feel up to controlling Rebecca. The woman was a law unto herself, incapable of acting her age: you could not change her, you just had to let her be. But she missed her.

  She usually visited Greenfarms every week for a catch up with Caroline and Stewart but last week Pencarrick’s high season had forced her to cancel.

  So she hadn’t been with Stewart for a fortnight and she was both longing to see him and dreading it. The thought of Stewart as her lover still made her feel sick with anticipation, but Stewart as her chairman and the father of Caroline was another thing. She could not put off the confrontation over his daughter any longer.

  Stewart met her off the ten a.m. train. As he put his arms around her and she buried her face in his collar, for a moment she couldn’t speak. It was just so good to be where she belonged: inside that embrace, breathing in the familiar smell of him.

  He drove to her hotel. She grabbed her overnight bag and jumped out. ‘I won’t be a minute. I’ll just check in and they can take my bag up.’

  But he followed her. ‘I’m coming with you,’ he said, ‘It’s only been two weeks but it’s felt like for ever. I can’t wait any longer, let’s go to bed.’

  ‘But we’ve a board meeting in half an hour!’

  ‘No we haven’t. I put it off until this afternoon. “Urgent business” I said. Which is true.’

  The Wakefield Hotel was hideous, all swirly carpets and lumpy brown furniture, but to Joanna it was veritable heaven. Latterly, since Caroline had found out about her and Stewart and there was no longer any real need for secrecy, she had spent one or two nights in his big old house. But she didn’t feel easy in Elaine’s territory and, if she had to stay in Yorkshire, she preferred the hotel. After work, with both their mobile phones off and no one knowing where they were, they could exist in a private cocoon of love, sex and drifting sleep.

  So the ugly hotel bedroom welcomed her with comfortable familiarity and she simply put off the evil hour of the Caroline conversation. She would live in the moment.

  At one o’clock she woke up, ravenous. Stewart was snoring gently, and she had to ease herself from under his arm. She rang room service for sandwiches and a pot of tea.

  Stewart stroked her spine idly with his finger-tips. ‘No champagne?’

  ‘No, darling, I need a clear head for the meeting.’ And, she thought, to talk to you.

  They ate the sandwiches and drank the tea, slowly waking to the outside world. At last Joanna summoned her courage. She went into the bathroom and quickly dressed. Somehow she could not have this conversation naked. When she returned, Stewart had got as far as his boxer shorts and one sock and was sitting on the bed, pulling on the other.

  ‘Stewart, I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Oh? What about?’

  Joanna didn’t think he was really listening and she fetched the dressing table stool and sat on it, facing him where he sat on the side of the bed. If she sat next to him he would surely put his arms around her and she would abandon her mission.

  She felt her heart sink as she began.

  ‘Stewart, the thing is, we have to persuade Caroline to resign. She’s a liability.’

  ‘How can you say that? The business is doing brilliantly.’ She heard the hardening in his voice, but she kept hers steady and gentle.

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s breaking even, yes. But I am getting pleas from the executives about Caroline.’

  She watched Stewart setting his jaw, the colour rising in his cheeks. She ploughed on.

  ‘Her management style is dreadful. She loves the business, she has real sympathy for the workers, but she seldom has a kind word for any of her managers. She countermands their instructions, rides roughshod over their plans.’ She held her hand up to stop Stewart interrupting. ‘Hear me out, Stewart. Caroline won’t sit down and talk about anything. Frankly, darling, she’s going to lose her senior staff. Two of them are looking for other jobs as we speak. And if they go, then more in the office and in distribution will follow.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  This got to Joanna and she could feel her famous cool melting. ‘Is there any reason why I should lie to you? Or any reason why, if there wasn’t a problem, the senior staff should appeal to me?’

  She managed to keep her voice calm, but it sounded hard and bossy. Horrible. Not an hour ago it had been soft and dreamy with love. With difficulty Joanna re-girded her tough business persona.

  ‘Stewart, it is not just the senior staff. Caroline is contemptuous of the board and only implements decisions if she agrees with them. She constantly backtracks on policies the directors have agreed upon, but which she argued against at the time and lost.’

  Stewart shakes his head. ‘That’s not true, Joanna. Name one instance.’

  Joanna hated doing this. She had become fond of Caroline despite everything, and she admired her. And since the awful business of explaining the redundancies to the workforce, Caroline had been, if not friendly, at least less quarrelsome and prickly.

  Most of all she hated to see Stewart antagonistic and angry, but she told herself to be professional, wear her business hat and do the job she’d been hired to do.

  ‘OK. You will remember that back at the start of the year we agreed to mothball half the factory. This would halve the energy costs, maintenance costs and staff costs.’ She was looking into his face, but he would not meet her eye. She stopped speaking and waited until he reluctantly faced her.

  ‘That was months ago. She only agreed the redundancies because you had me go in and sort it out with her and Alasdair. So at least that is done and dusted. But we now have the ridiculous situation of an enormous factory being used to produce very little. And of course it has to be heated, cleaned, maintained. It costs money we simply cannot afford. I’ve raised the question with her on almost every visit and she either agrees she needs to get on with it, or argues that it really isn’t necessary, or gets emotional and says I’m hounding her.’

  Stewart’s expression went from angry to unhappy. He said nothing for a while, and then leant forward to take Joanna’s shoulders and look into her face.

  ‘Darling, are you sure you’re not misjudging her? Maybe she’s confident of winning new business that would fill the space?’

  Joanna gently pushed his hands off her shoulders. ‘Sweetheart, don’t touch me. I need to be rational about this, and your hands on me make it impossible. You know there are no big orders in the pipeline, nor likely to be since we’ve agreed not to sell to the big supermarkets. The problem is that Caroline sees visible retrenchment as a sign of failure. She’s an “onwards and upwards” person, not one prepared to take a step back in order to take two forward. If we asked her to add more factory space, she’d do it in a week.’

  Stewart sat thinking, not looking at her. She pressed her point home.

  ‘Our growth now is organic, slow but steady. Which is fine, since you and I are the principal investors and we are happy with slow but steady. But merely breaking even won’t do. If we’re to start making money, we need to save more costs.’

 
When he answered there was anguish in his voice.

  ‘But why do we have to sack Caroline? We should just insist she carries out board decisions.’

  ‘Stewart, I’ve tried. Believe me, I have tried. But Caroline cannot hear what she doesn’t want to hear. She can’t help it. She’s a typical start-up entrepreneur, all imagination and passion but, like so many, a nightmare to work with.’

  Stewart said what Joanna knew he would, and her heart sank.

  ‘I can’t do it, Joanna. It’s Caroline’s company. She dreamt it up, she got it going, and it’s her life.’

  One last try, thought Joanna, without much hope. ‘Stewart, I have turned round a fistful of companies. This is the first time I have agreed to the existing CEO staying in post. And I’m ashamed to say I only agreed because I’m in love with you. I never should have. Of course I told myself it could work, and that we owed it to her to give her a chance. I would have loved it to work.’

  Stewart countered. ‘But it is working. We are doing better!’

  ‘Not better enough, and not fast enough, and not with a happy workforce.’

  They went on, Joanna detailing Caroline’s failings, Stewart defending her. Joanna knew that with every word she said she was doing her duty by the company and ruining her relationship with her lover. She knew he saw the sense of her argument, but could not bear to follow it through to the consequences. After a while he stopped arguing, and just looked miserable.

  There was a long silence. Joanna, her heart weak with sympathy, longed to stretch out her arms and pull his head into her breast, to kiss his thinning patch, to make it better.

  She said, ‘It’s hard, darling, but it’s simple. If you want to keep Caroline in post, then I will resign today at the board, you can buy me out, and you’ll have a lifestyle business that will probably just about give her a living, but won’t ever repay your investment. Or you can let me run the business, and make some money for all of us, including Caroline.’

  He looked at her, his eyes defeated, his voice dead. ‘Don’t go on any more, Joanna.’ He stood up, his shoulders slumped. ‘You’re right of course. I will tell Caroline to resign.’

  As they drove to the office, Joanna wanted to beg him to say that this changed nothing between them, that it would not affect their love affair. Most of all she wanted him to say that he loved her. He had never said that. Perhaps now he never would.

  But she feared the wrong answer, and said nothing.

  There was not a word from Stewart after the board and Joanna would not let herself ring him.

  Alone that night in the hotel, she wished she could telephone her father and tell him her troubles, but she’d never done that. She’d seldom complained as a child – trying too hard to be Little Miss Perfect. They talked only of her successes. He’s got a completely skewed vision of me, thought Joanna. And it was now too late for confidences.

  It was worse with her mother. On their long-ago visit to London she’d chided Joanna for her feebleness with Tom, saying she should make him marry her. Or come home and find some nice Australian man before it was too late to catch anybody. Her mother’s certainty of her own rightness and lack of understanding had driven Joanna mad.

  She could ring Lucy of course. Lucy was lovely – sensible and understanding and kind. But Joanna didn’t want her friends to know her affair with Stewart was going wrong. Not while there is hope, she thought. But was there?

  That night she slept the sleep of exhaustion. She was unhappy, yes, but so tired she could barely feel the pain.

  The next morning she took herself to work with a heavy heart. That, she thought, is exactly what it feels like, as though I had this leaden lump of misery in my chest, weighing me down, preventing me from breathing. But she went to work because she had a meeting with Alasdair in the morning, and because, whatever happened, she had a hard afternoon’s work ahead of her.

  She suspected Stewart might have changed his mind about Caroline. There was no sign of him at the business. Caroline was in and out of the office, clearly oblivious to any impending sword of Damocles. If Stewart had decided Caroline was to stay, then she would have to resign and tell everyone. On the other hand, if he was sticking to his promise, then she would need to plan the damage limitation exercise. He was too experienced a businessman not to give her time to organise a plan of communication for the company. He would ring if he was going to sack her. Either he’d changed his mind or he was undecided.

  At noon she had a text message from him. She opened it, praying it would be a personal, loving one, sympathetic to their joint plight.

  ‘Will do the deed this afternoon at five p.m. Caroline will not be returning to work. Please inform the staff she has resigned.’

  Do the deed! The unfairness of the implication! With its overtones of stabbing in the back and Lady Macbeth inciting her husband to murder. And then a curt chairman’s command to follow through.

  But Joanna tightened her jaw and put her feelings aside. She went into business-crisis mode. These things needed clear thinking if they were not to escalate appallingly. She drew a pad towards her and started jotting. She would need to draft the central points of the message and get the board and execs to put the right spin on it: Caroline resigning, looking for a new challenge, leaving the company in good hands, the usual stuff.

  Her mind turned to timing. Five o’clock. Clever Stewart: too late for Caroline’s possible histrionics to get to the office workers who left at five. And the trick would be to make sure the key people knew immediately, before Caroline could speak to them. They had to be trusted to tell no one overnight. Then the info had to be cascaded down the organisation with no time between meetings for leaking.

  She wrote:

  5 pm: Alasdair re acting CEO

  5.30 pm: Exec board

  9 am tomorrow: Execs to tell their teams

  10 am: Execs to tell

  factory staff

  distribution

  agric.workers

  transport

  Me to tell office staff with Alasdair.

  11 am: Fax local paper with press release

  With luck she’d be on a train before midday tomorrow.

  She picked up the telephone to her PA. ‘Carla, book me into the Wakefield for one more night will you? And can you track Alasdair down and see if he could come to the office at five? Tell him it’s important.’

  At nine o’clock that evening Joanna was sitting up in bed, surrounded by papers and trying to make sense of Pencarrick’s finances, when the telephone rang.

  ‘I want to speak to Mr Stewart Muirhead.’ It was a tense woman’s voice, vaguely familiar, with a pronounced Yorkshire accent.

  ‘He’s not here, I’m afraid, can I help?’

  ‘Oh, is that you, Miss Joanna?’ Only one person called her Miss Joanna. Doris, Stewart’s housekeeper.

  ‘Doris, it’s Joanna. Is something wrong, Stewart isn’t …’ And then she realised nothing could be wrong with Stewart, because Doris thought he was there with her.

  ‘Oh Miss Joanna. Please come. It’s Miss Caroline, she’s not right. She’s ill … I don’t know what to …’

  ‘What sort of ill?’

  ‘She’s taken something, Miss. And now I can’t wake her … I’ve called the ambulance, but they haven’t come and I …’

  Joanna was already out of bed, reaching for her clothes.

  ‘Doris, where are you? At Caroline’s house?’

  Doris’s voice was going up. She was stuttering and shouting. ‘Please come … please … I just found her …’

  ‘Doris. You need to be calm. Is she breathing?’

  ‘Please come, Miss … Breathing?Yes, she’s moaning …’

  Joanna tucked the telephone under her cheek and started pulling on her trousers and shirt. Forget underwear, she thought, just get a jacket, money, keys.

  ‘Doris,’ Joanna almost yelled, ‘which house are you in? Stewart’s?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, the big house.’

  ‘
And you have rung for an ambulance? What did they say?’

  ‘They said they were coming … but …’

  ‘Good. Just stay with her, Doris. If the ambulance comes, just do as the paramedics say. OK?’

  She slammed down the phone, yanked her jacket off its hanger in the cupboard, grabbed her keys and bag and ran down the stairs.

  Joanna was good in a crisis, and within minutes she was on her way, being driven by one of the Wakefield hotel waiters in the hotel manager’s car.

  As they slowed to a halt in front of the house they heard the sound of a siren, and Joanna looked back to see an ambulance turn into the drive. Thank God, she thought, someone else can take charge.

  The front door was ajar, the hall brightly lit, and she sprinted through to the drawing room. Caroline was lying on the sofa dressed in a crumpled summer dress. Doris was kneeling beside her, washing the carpet. There was the sour smell of alcohol and vomit with an overlay of Doris’s carpet cleaner.

  As Joanna came in, Doris looked up. ‘Oh, thank God. Is the ambulance here? She’s been sick. I got a bucket but …’

  ‘You did brilliantly,’ said Joanna, putting her arm briefly round the woman’s shoulder, and sitting on the edge of the sofa. She took Caroline’s hand in both of hers and looked into her face. She was pale, but conscious. Her face was covered in tiny beads of sweat and curls of damp hair stuck to her forehead and neck.

  ‘Poor darling,’ she said. ‘What did you take, Caroline?’

  Caroline looked at her and shook her head, then closed her eyes. Joanna used her bare hand to stroke Caroline’s brow and face, half caress, half to wipe away the sweat. Caroline’s eyes fluttered open for a moment, then closed, a look of relief, or maybe just exhaustion, on her face.

  And then the paramedics were there, all kindness and calm efficiency, asking Joanna and Doris if they knew what Caroline had swallowed, asking Doris to give them the bucket in case it was needed for analysis, lifting Caroline onto a stretcher, carrying her out and into the ambulance, strapping her into the narrow bed.