by Tim Pears
James listened in disbelief.
‘Guests can stay in the house,’ she continued, ‘and in the marquee, and even in their own tents in the garden if they want. We’ll get up and stroll around and have breakfast with them. And then we can go to the airport on Sunday afternoon. And fly to Italy.’
‘Is that it?’
‘That’s it,’ Laura confirmed.
‘You’ve gone completely mad,’ James told her. ‘You must know there’s no way we can do this. How can you possibly suggest it?’
‘Because, my love,’ she said slowly, ‘I’ve had enough. Of living in a kind of shadow world, in the shadow of that house; and of your family; of seeing Robert surreptitiously, in the dark, and now you too, just the same when it’s so different, when I want everyone to see us together in the sunlight; of your obstinacy, James, and the rift between you and your father; of Adamina being the offspring of this shadow world and knowing that very soon she’s going to have to start groping forward.
‘It’s got to stop, my love. I want everything up and out in the open. You’ve got to face your father. And you can do it, James; because I’m here beside you.’
Chapter 11
CHINESE WHISPERS ON THE WIND
CHARLES FREEMAN, THE man-in-charge, had an air of invulnerability about him. There’d never been doubt about whether he’d succeed, in any of his ventures; only to what extent. He gave succour and strength to those around him, however much he also terrorized them. Even his opponents over the years thought less of weak spots he might harbour than of their own he might attack.
Despite rumours, the sheer force of Charles’ personality and his confident, exaggerated forecasts of growth and profit in the Freeman Communications Corporation’s annual reports (their figures ratified by City accountants of unimpeachable reputation) had kept Charles’ standing intact, share prices inflated and creditors at bay.
When it came, the collapse of Charles’ small empire in a town in the middle of England, built up over forty years, happened in a matter of hours. What triggered that collapse was the result of Charles’ having made the mistake of borrowing one sum of money from a Swiss bank, and another from an American broking firm to whom he gave FCC shares as collateral. While British banks remained convinced by Charles Freeman’s confidence and promises, the foreign ones had a more distant and a cooler perspective. It was they who moved first.
In April the Swiss bank issued its first threat for loan interest repayment that was six months overdue; in May the US brokers gave an ultimatum: repay now or we’ll sell the collateral.
Charles was unable to respond. On Thursday, 21 May, the New York firm sold a huge tranche of their FCC shares. Able to delay formal notification of the sale for two business days, they officially informed FCC on Tuesday, 26 May – that Monday was a bank holiday. Twenty-four hours later Charles’ company secretary notified the Stock Exchange of the sale. At one o’clock on Wednesday a short announcement streamed across brokers’ monitors stating that the American firm’s percentage holding of Freeman Communications Corporation had declined. Within an hour FCC’s share price began to plummet.
Afterwards, countless people announced to the world that they’d known all along he was heading for a fall, they’d seen it coming, obvious and inevitable, and what’s more he was a bullying cheat, a shyster and a fraud; they’d known it all along.
In reality only one man in the town, Harry Singh, had the foresight both to diagnose his father-in-law’s imminent demise and to prepare for it. Everyone else in a position to know what was happening had happily thrown more money at Charles when he asked for it. Then came that Wednesday afternoon, and the world turned. The figures that flashed across computer screens were like the whimpers of an animal in distress, and the hunters picked it up and came running; they knew he was in trouble and came for him in a pack; they knew they were in trouble. Charles’ shield – the illusion of power – fell away. They came, the financiers, bank managers and brokers, scared and ruthless. To find that Harry had only just got there before them.
It was Saturday, 23 May (two weeks before James and Laura’s wedding), and Laura cooked an early supper, on the table at six o’clock, so that adults could eat at home and then go out if they had plans and the children would have time to digest food before going to bed. Alice helped their au pair, Poonam, take the children upstairs. Sam dragged on his mother’s arm and said: ‘Can Grandad play a game?’
‘Can Uncle Simon tell a story?’ Amy asked.
‘I’m sure Simon’s got better things to do,’ said Harry.
‘I’ll be happy to,’ Simon said, and he asked what book he should read from; while five different requests poured forth, Harry took advantage of the hubbub to lean across to Charles.
‘I think it’s time we had a talk, Charles,’ he said. ‘I have a proposition to put to you.’
The two men slipped away from the dining-room, through the hall to Charles’ study. He poured himself a bourbon and a mineral water for his son-in-law and, uncharacteristically subdued, sat down and invited Harry to go ahead.
They stayed talking in Charles’ study through the evening, during which time Harry explained his rescue package: he proposed a way of separating Charles’ private Freeman Company from his public one, protecting the albeit nearly worthless factory, and the house, from creditors of FCC. He was calm, pedantic, and reiterated each detail; Harry was irritating and irrefutable, and enabled Charles to come to terms with the fact that he was in a predicament from which he could no longer extricate himself with either bluff or bluster.
Charles was unsure whether his phlegmatic son-in-law was demon or saviour, as he signed contracts Harry had brought with him and handed over the property deeds for the factory and the house.
‘I’d just like to recap, Charles,’ Harry said.
‘Yes, yes,’ Charles responded.
‘That this is a formal procedure between us, a piece of paper, and nothing will change here: as far as the family are concerned, you are the head and this is your house as much now as it always has been. You are simply bequeathing it a little earlier than is customary.’
‘As you say,’ Charles agreed. He felt a deep weariness seep into his bones, and he couldn’t work out why he had no other response. The engine inside him had run down; he was all out of gas. That was the thing, he thought: Harry was so reasoned and respectful even as he cut your balls off. Impossible to combat, he imagined; he wondered why he hadn’t used such tactics in negotiations over the years. Then he noticed Harry looking away, smiling to himself.
‘What do you think you’re laughing at?’ Charles asked.
‘Oh, nothing,’ Harry replied. ‘I was just looking at the curtains.’
‘What about them?’ Charles demanded.
‘I never liked the colour, that’s all,’ Harry explained.
Laura arranged everything: the service, reception, marquee hire, catering, music, bridesmaids’ dresses, even a bona fide wedding photographer found in the Yellow Pages. She arranged, too, a reconciliation in advance of the wedding: a walk the week before; a meeting on neutral ground.
Laura drove James, Adamina, Zoe and herself to the moor to the west of town, where they met the others: Charles, Simon, Natalie and Lucy, Harry and Alice and their children, as well as Dick the dog.
They left the cars and walked down to the moor, a marshy area, chequered with ditches, of scrub, poor grazing and some arable fields around its edge; a place appreciated more by ornithologists than farmers.
The adults present all knew that the main purpose of the exercise was for Charles and James to talk to each other, and so they talked more loquaciously than normal, both to avoid the awkward silences of so contrived a gathering and in the hope that such breeziness might be infectious.
Simon led the way, clutching an Ordnance Survey map he had no idea how to read, following instead whatever looked most like paths ahead of him. Natalie and Adamina dogged his footsteps, both telling him he was going wrong. Charles c
ame next, surrounded by his older grandchildren, playing a kind of blind man’s bluff as they strolled. Alice, Laura and Lucy were discussing arrangements for the wedding. James walked beside Zoe and Harry, who was carrying his youngest, Mollie, on his shoulders.
Zoe, James realized, listening to her, was goading Harry: the M40 motorway from London had recently been extended northward to Birmingham, west of the town. Its original route had been earmarked as cutting straight through the moor, and Harry had led a consortium that tried to buy the land off farmers in advance of the Department of Transport. They were beaten to it – in what was a celebrated victory for the Green movement – by a local environmental group who bought one sympathetic farmer’s fields and then subdivided them into countless minute plots, which they sold on to friends and supporters all over the world. The bureaucracy required to obtain each and every one of these plots by compulsory purchase order turned out to be unfeasible, and so the motorway was rerouted further to the west, through land of less significance to wildlife.
‘I really don’t mind where the road goes,’ Harry was saying. ‘Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t get involved in the end: I don’t think the countryside suits me. I’m restricting all my future dealings to land within the ring road.’
‘You’re just saying that ’cos you lost,’ Zoe replied; ‘’cos we beat you.’
‘That may well be true,’ Harry conceded. ‘Although I don’t see the need for your use of the royal we.’
‘What are you talking about? We might be walking over my property. I own one of those plots of land.’
‘Are you serious?’ Harry asked.
‘Sure,’ Zoe told him. ‘I’m one of the Two Hundred.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Harry said quietly.
James’ attention shifted. He looked up ahead, and watched his father playing with the children. Charles was strolling along looking at the view, apparently unaware that the children were creeping up on him. But then he suddenly turned growling like a furious bear, and lumbered after the now shrieking infants fleeing rapidly away.
James knew by now, as did everyone else in the family, of Charles’ bankruptcy, as well as the general drift of Harry’s salvage operation – buying the house (and factory) at a nominal price to save them from Charles’ debtees, and keep them in the family. James watched the children, how they enjoyed Charles’ extrovert antics; a generation removed from his smothering paternal embrace, they were unworried and enthralled. James sensed how needless this resentment was, this hatred he had felt all his childhood and then stored up for his adult life. There was something monstrous about his father, but it was grotesque rather than cruel. He was a windbag full of hot air – there was no need to be burned by it. Not any more.
‘How stupid I’ve been,’ a tranquil voice said inside James’ head. ‘They’re just people,’ the voice said, echoing Zoe. ‘They’re just people, James.’ He saw, too, for the first time since his own infancy, the advantage of his father’s extrovert heart: in the midst of personal ruin, here he was playing an infantile game with his grandchildren.
Simon, meanwhile, had led them into an empty field. Except that halfway across it they discovered it wasn’t empty: from around a corner came a dozen bullocks loping towards them. Or, to be more precise, towards Dick the dog who, disconcerted by these unknown beasts approaching, sought refuge among his fellow human beings.
Simon strode forward. ‘Follow me, everyone,’ he declared, aiming for a gate some fifty yards away. The bullocks seemed barely aware of the humans: they were fascinated by Dick. They lowered their snorting nostrils to the ground, breathing with an excited nasal huffing, and stared at him with wide-open eyes. The children huddled around their elders, infused with the same mixture of delight and terror as when playing with Charles a moment before, as if this were an extension of the same game.
To James’ amazement, one person really was scared, the one he’d have least expected to be: Natalie was literally clinging to Simon as he strode along, cowering around him – as the bullocks moved around the group – for whichever side afforded her the most protection.
‘Hurry up!’ she urged Simon through clenched teeth. ‘Oh, shit!’ she cried. ‘They’re coming closer! Lucy!’
‘No need to panic, darling,’ Simon proclaimed. ‘Let’s not run, now. They’re just dumb animals, they’re more scared of us than we are of them, they won’t come near us.’
‘They are near us, dummy,’ she hissed.
The person they were near was Alice, because Dick had sought safety with his mistress, had insinuated himself between her feet, causing her to trip and kick him as she walked.
‘It’s all right,’ she announced, stumbling, to a bullock that had come within a few feet of her. ‘It’s all right, we’re vegetarians,’ Alice said, a remark which made James burst into loud laughter.
‘What the bloody hell are you laughing at?’ Natalie yelled shrilly at him, before deciding to make a dash over the remaining ten yards for the gate, which she clambered over with clumsy but effective haste.
The others followed her. By this time each of the children had become chaperoned by an adult, Tom and Susan scooped up in Charles’ and James’ arms, who reached the padlocked gate together. Charles handed Tom to James, who held him as Charles managed to surmount the gate without destroying it. James passed Tom over to Charles, who set him down and then took Susan.
Once they were all safely over, recriminations swiftly issued: Natalie had unaccustomed tears in her warrior’s eyes as she rebuked Simon, which triggered sobs from Amy too, and then Tom, at which point Harry accused his brother-in-law of gross irresponsibility considering the number of young children in their care. Not that all the young children looked suitably scared: the bullocks had now aligned themselves in a crescent around the gate, upon whose middle rung Adamina stood, leaning over with her bared arms stretched out towards them. Losing now their obsession with Dick (who had retreated to the rear of his family), the boldest among them stepped forward and licked one of Adamina’s bare arms with a brief sweep of his rough wet tongue.
‘Look, Mummy,’ she cried, and Sam climbed up beside her.
‘You know I’m scared of the bloody things, I told you,’ Natalie was sobbing.
‘My God!’ Simon exclaimed. ‘Someone else can map-read. It’s not exactly my idea of fun, you know.’
‘There’s no need to get huffy,’ said Laura, ‘you can see she’s upset.’
‘He’s licking the salt,’ said Zoe.
‘I want to go home,’ Amy wailed.
‘Trust a man to get us lost,’ said Lucy.
‘Careful, Sam,’ Harry counselled.
With all the confusion of tears and reproaches, of children and animals, Charles and James found themselves off to one side. They looked at the scene and at each other.
‘I guess some things never change,’ James said.
‘Well, let’s hope not, eh? It’d get ruddy boring if they did.’
‘You remember that time you went out of the kitchen to get champagne with Stanley?’ James asked. ‘And came back to mayhem? Which for once you hadn’t caused.’
‘I think I do,’ Charles replied. ‘We all make mistakes, that’s for sure. Are you all set for next week?’ he asked James. ‘Is there anything you need?’
‘No,’ James replied. ‘It’s all sorted, I think. We have what we need.’
‘That’s good,’ Charles said. ‘We’re all looking forward to it, James. Well, I’m looking forward to it more than anyone.’
James nodded. ‘Good,’ he said, and then he was interrupted by more raised voices. Simon, Lucy and Zoe were arguing over the map.
‘We can’t be on this path,’ Simon maintained, ‘it’s not red.’
‘It’s red on the map, doesn’t mean it’s red in reality, you buffoon,’ Zoe pointed out.
‘Good God!’ said Lucy.
Then Amy stepped forward. ‘Can you carry me, Grandad?’ she asked Charles, and he did. And they set off again b
ack to the cars, with Harry leading the way because from years of studying architectural drawings he stood the best chance of reading an Ordnance Survey map – though he wasn’t helped by the fact that a blustery wind had blown up in the warm afternoon and crumpled the map every time he tried to open it out. They walked across flat fields, with the wind swirling through and around them.
‘Let’s hope it’s not like this next Saturday,’ said Simon.
‘No, the long-range forecast’s excellent,’ Laura told him.
James was walking between Zoe and Natalie, and he realized he was straining to catch what they were saying: the wind was blowing their words away. He could hear more clearly snatches of a conversation in front, and then a phrase uttered by one of the children behind him.
‘Some people just have a healing energy, darling, they can’t help it,’ he heard Simon tell Lucy.
‘You’ve got big red ears, Grandad,’ he heard Amy say.
‘One has to choose one’s direction and stick to it,’ came Harry’s voice.
‘They turn the lights off in the daytime just like we do, Sam,’ he heard Adamina’s lisping voice. ‘That’s why we can’t see stars now. Everybody knows that.’
James couldn’t hear what Zoe said beside him but the wind made him an eavesdropper on other, disjointed conversations; words, phrases being blown around, Chinese whispers on the wind. Is this what families are like? he wondered. We don’t really hear what we’re being told; we pick up unintelligible messages. Our attention drifts and scurries around, walking back to the cars on a late spring afternoon.
Laura didn’t push the reunion further: the group got into their own vehicles and drove separately back into town. She dropped James off with Zoe at the cinema because she had a dinner party to cater for that evening.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked him. ‘It went all right, didn’t it?’
‘It went fine,’ James told her. ‘I trusted you, anyway; I knew it would.’
Laura laughed as she kissed him. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said.