The Collected Short Stories

by Jeffrey Archer

  We met up on the Sunday morning to play squash, when he ran me ragged, without even appearing to raise a sweat. “We must get together again,” he said as we walked to the showers. “If you’re really thinking of expanding into Europe, you might find I’m able to help.”

  My father had taught me never to make the mistake of imagining that your friends and your colleagues were necessarily the same animals (he often cited the cabinet as an example). So, although I didn’t like him, I made sure that when I left Bristol at the end of the conference I was in possession of Jeremy’s numerous telephone and telex numbers.

  I drove back to Leeds on Sunday evening, and when I reached home I ran upstairs and sat on the end of the bed regaling my sleepy wife with an account of why it had turned out to be such a worthwhile weekend.

  Rosemary was my second wife. My first, Helen, had been at Leeds High School for Girls at the same time that I had attended the nearby grammar school. The two schools shared a gymnasium, and I fell in love with her at the age of thirteen, while watching her play net ball. After that I would find any excuse to hang around the gym, hoping to catch a glimpse of her blue shorts as she leaped to send the ball unerringly into the net. As the schools took part in various joint activities, I began to take an active interest in theatrical productions, even though I couldn’t act. I attended joint debates and never opened my mouth. I enlisted in the combined schools orchestra and ended up playing the triangle. After I had left school and gone to work at the depot, I continued to see Helen, who was studying for her A levels. Despite my passion for her, we didn’t make love until we were both eighteen, and even then I wasn’t certain that we had consummated anything. Six weeks later she told me, in a flood of tears, that she was pregnant. Against the wishes of her parents, who had hoped that she would go on to university, a hasty wedding was arranged, but as I never wanted to look at another girl for the rest of my life, I was secretly delighted by the outcome of our youthful indiscretion.

  Helen died on the night of September 14, 1964, giving birth to our son, Tom, who himself only survived a week. I thought I would never get over it, and I’m not sure I ever have. After her death I didn’t so much as glance at another woman for years, putting all my energy into the company.

  Following the funeral of my wife and son, my father, not a soft or sentimental man—you won’t find many of those in Yorkshire—revealed a gentle side to his character that I had never seen before. He would often phone me in the evening to see how I was getting on, and insisted that I regularly joined him in the directors’ box at Elland Road to watch Leeds United on Saturday afternoons. I began to understand, for the first time, why my mother still adored him after more than twenty years of marriage.

  I met Rosemary about four years later at a ball given to launch the Leeds Music Festival. Not a natural habitat for me, but as Cooper’s had taken a full-page advertisement in the program, and Brigadier Kershaw, the high sheriff of the county and chairman of the ball committee, had invited us to join him as his guests, I had no choice but to dress up in my seldom-worn dinner jacket and accompany my parents to the ball.

  I was placed at Table 17, next to a Miss Kershaw, who turned out to be the high sheriff’s daughter. She was elegantly dressed in a strapless blue gown that emphasized her comely figure, and had a mop of red hair and a smile that made me feel we had been friends for years. She told me over something described on the menu as “avocado with dill” that she had just finished majoring in English at Durham University and wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do with her life.

  “I don’t want to be a teacher,” she said. “And I’m certainly not cut out to be a secretary.” We chatted through the second and third courses, ignoring the people seated on either side of us. After coffee she dragged me onto the dance floor, where she continued to explain the problems of contemplating any form of work while her diary was so packed with social engagements.

  I felt rather flattered that the high sheriff’s daughter should show the slightest interest in me, and to be honest I didn’t take it seriously when at the end of the evening, she whispered in my ear, “Let’s keep in touch.”

  But a couple of days later she called and invited me to join her and her parents for lunch that Sunday at their house in the country. “And then perhaps we could play a little tennis afterwards. You do play tennis, I suppose?”

  I drove over to Church Fenton on Sunday, and found that the Kershaws’ residence was exactly what I would have expected—large and decaying, which, come to think of it, wasn’t a bad description of Rosemary’s father as well. But he seemed a nice enough chap. Her mother, however, wasn’t quite so easy to please. She originated from somewhere in Hampshire, and was unable to mask her feeling that, although I might be good for the occasional charitable donation, I was not quite the sort of person with whom she expected to be sharing her Sunday lunch. Rosemary ignored the odd barbed comment from her, and continued to chat to me about my work.

  Since it rained all afternoon we never got around to playing tennis, so Rosemary used the time to seduce me in the little pavilion behind the court. At first I was nervous about making love to the high sheriff’s daughter, but I soon got used to the idea. However, as the weeks passed, I began to wonder if I was anything more to her than a “truck driver fantasy.” Until, that is, she started to talk about marriage. Mrs. Kershaw was unable to hide her disgust at the very idea of someone like me becoming her son-in-law, but her opinion turned out to be irrelevant, as Rosemary remained implacable on the subject. We were married eighteen months later.

  Over two hundred guests attended the rather grand county wedding in the parish church of St. Mary’s. But I confess that when I turned to watch Rosemary progressing up the aisle, my only thoughts were of my first wedding ceremony.

  For a couple of years Rosemary made every effort to be a good wife. She took an interest in the company, learned the names of all the employees, even became friendly with the wives of some of the senior executives. But, as I worked all the hours God sent, I fear I may not always have given her as much attention as she needed. You see, Rosemary yearned for a life that was made up of regular visits to the Grand Theatre for Opera North, followed by dinner parties with her county friends that would run into the early hours, while I preferred to work at weekends, and to be safe in bed before eleven most nights. For Rosemary I wasn’t turning out to be the husband in the title of the Oscar Wilde play she had recently taken me to—and it didn’t help that I had fallen asleep during the second act.

  After four years without producing any offspring—not that Rosemary wasn’t very energetic in bed—we began to drift our separate ways. If she started having affairs (and I certainly did, when I could find the time), she was discreet about them. And then she met Jeremy Alexander.

  It must have been about six weeks after the seminar in Bristol that I had occasion to phone Jeremy and seek his advice. I wanted to close a deal with a French cheese company to transport its wares to British supermarkets. The previous year I had made a large loss on a similar enterprise with a German beer company, and I couldn’t afford to make the same mistake again.

  “Send me all the details,” Jeremy had said. “I’ll look over the paperwork on the weekend and call you on Monday morning.”

  He was as good as his word, and when he phoned me he mentioned that he had to be in York that Thursday to brief a client, and suggested we get together the following day to go over the contract. I agreed, and we spent most of that Friday closeted in the Cooper’s boardroom checking over every dot and comma of the contract. It was a pleasure to watch such a professional at work, even if Jeremy did occasionally display an irritating habit of drumming his fingers on the table when I hadn’t immediately understood what he was getting at.

  Jeremy, it turned out, had already talked to the French company’s in-house lawyer in Toulouse about any reservations he might have. He assured me that, although Monsieur Sisley spoke no English, he had made him fully aware of our anxieties.
I remember being struck by his use of the word “our.”

  After we had turned the last page of the contract, I realized that everyone else in the building had left for the weekend, so I suggested to Jeremy that he might like to join Rosemary and me for dinner. He checked his watch, considered the offer for a moment, and then said, “Thank you, that’s very kind of you. Could you drop me back at the Queen’s Hotel so I can get changed?”

  Rosemary, however, was not pleased to be told at the last minute that I had invited a complete stranger to dinner without warning her, even though I assured her that she would like him.

  Jeremy rang our front doorbell a few minutes after eight. When I introduced him to Rosemary, he bowed slightly and kissed her hand. After that they didn’t take their eyes off each other all evening. Only a blind man could have missed what was likely to happen next, and although I might not have been blind, I certainly turned a blind eye.

  Jeremy was soon finding excuses to spend more and more time in Leeds, and I am bound to admit that his sudden enthusiasm for the north of England enabled me to advance my ambitions for Cooper’s far more quickly than I had originally dreamed possible. I had felt for some time that the company needed an in-house lawyer, and within a year of our first meeting I offered Jeremy a place on the board, with the remit to prepare the company for going public.

  During that period I spent a great deal of my time in Madrid, Amsterdam, and Brussels drumming up new contracts, and Rosemary certainly didn’t discourage me. Meanwhile Jeremy skillfully guided the company through a thicket of legal and financial problems caused by our expansion. Thanks to his diligence and expertise, we were able to announce on February 12, 1980, that Cooper’s would be applying for a listing on the Stock Exchange later that year. It was then that I made my first mistake: I invited Jeremy to become deputy chairman of the company.

  Under the terms of the flotation, 51 percent of the shares would be retained by Rosemary and myself. Jeremy explained to me that for tax reasons they should be divided equally between us. My accountants agreed, and at the time I didn’t give it a second thought. The remaining 4,900,000 £1 shares were quickly taken up by institutions and the general public, and within days of the company being listed on the stock exchange their value had risen to £2.80.

  My father, who had died the previous year, would never have accepted that it was possible to become worth several million pounds overnight. In fact I suspect he would have disapproved of the very idea, as he went to his deathbed still believing that a ten-pound overdraft was quite adequate to conduct a well-run business.

  During the 1980s the British economy showed continual growth, and by March 1984, Cooper’s shares had topped the five-pound mark, following press speculation about a possible takeover. Jeremy had advised me to accept one of the bids, but I told him that I would never allow Cooper’s to be let out of the family’s control. After that, we had to split the shares on three separate occasions, and by 1989 The Sunday Times was estimating that Rosemary and I were together worth around £30,000,000.

  I had never thought of myself as being wealthy—after all, as far as I was concerned the shares were simply pieces of paper held by Joe Ramsbottom, our company solicitor. I still lived in my father’s house, drove a five-year-old Jaguar, and worked fourteen hours a day. I had never cared much for vacations, and wasn’t by nature extravagant. Wealth seemed somehow irrelevant to me. I would have been happy to continue living much as I was, had I not arrived home unexpectedly one night.

  I had caught the last plane back to Heathrow after a particularly long and arduous negotiation in Cologne, and had originally intended to stay overnight in London. But by then I’d had enough of hotels, and simply wanted to get home, despite the long drive. When I arrived back in Leeds a few minutes after one, I found Jeremy’s white BMW parked in the driveway.

  Had I phoned Rosemary earlier that day, I might never have ended up in jail.

  I parked my car next to Jeremy’s and was walking toward the front door when I noticed that there was only one light on in the house—in the front room on the first floor. It wouldn’t have taken Sherlock Holmes to deduce what might be taking place in that particular room.

  I came to a halt and stared up at the drawn curtains for some time. Nothing stirred, so clearly they hadn’t heard the car and were unaware of my presence. I retraced my steps and drove quietly off in the direction of the city center. When I arrived at the Queen’s Hotel I asked the duty manager if Mr. Jeremy Alexander had reserved a room for the night. He checked the register and confirmed that he had.

  “Then I’ll take his key,” I told him. “Mr. Alexander has booked himself in somewhere else for the night.” My father would have been proud of such thrifty use of the company’s resources.

  I lay on the hotel bed, quite unable to sleep, my anger rising as each hour passed. Although I no longer had a great deal of feeling for Rosemary, and even accepted that perhaps I never had, I now loathed Jeremy. But it wasn’t until the next day that I discovered just how much I loathed him.

  The following morning I called my secretary, and told her I would be driving to the office straight from London. She reminded me that there was a board meeting scheduled for two o’clock, which Mr. Alexander was penciled in to chair. I was glad she couldn’t see the smile of satisfaction that spread across my face. A quick glance at the agenda over breakfast and it had become abundantly clear why Jeremy had wanted to chair this particular meeting. But his plans didn’t matter anymore. I had already decided to let my fellow directors know exactly what he was up to, and to make sure that he was dismissed from the board as soon as was practicable.

  I arrived at Cooper’s just after 1:30, and parked in the space marked “Chairman.” By the time the board meeting was scheduled to begin I’d had just enough time to check over my files, and became painfully aware of how many of the company’s shares were now controlled by Jeremy, and what he and Rosemary must have been planning for some time.

  Jeremy vacated the chairman’s place without comment the moment I entered the boardroom, and showed no particular interest in the proceedings until we reached an item concerning a future share issue. It was at this point that he tried to push through a seemingly innocuous motion that could ultimately have resulted in Rosemary and myself losing overall control of the company, and therefore being unable to resist any future takeover bid. I might have fallen for it if I hadn’t traveled up to Leeds the previous evening and found his car parked in my driveway, and the bedroom light on. Just when he thought he had succeeded in having the motion passed without a vote, I asked the company accountants to prepare a full report for the next board meeting before we came to any decision. Jeremy showed no sign of emotion. He simply looked down at his notes and began drumming his fingers on the boardroom table. I was determined that the report would prove to be his downfall. If only it hadn’t been for my short temper, I might, given time, have worked out a more sensible way of ridding myself of him.

  As no one had “any other business” to raise, I closed the meeting at 5:40, and suggested to Jeremy that he join Rosemary and me for dinner. I wanted to see them together. Jeremy didn’t seem too keen, but after some bluffing from me about not fully understanding his new share proposal, and feeling that my wife ought to be brought in on it at some stage, he agreed. When I rang Rosemary to let her know that Jeremy would be coming to dinner, she seemed even less enthusiastic about the idea than he had been.

  “Perhaps the two of you should go off to a restaurant together,” she suggested. “Then Jeremy can bring you up to date on what’s been going on while you’ve been away.” I tried not to laugh. “We haven’t got much food in at the moment,” she added. I told her that it wasn’t the food I was worried about.

  Jeremy was uncharacteristically late, but I had his usual whiskey and soda ready the moment he walked through the door. I must say he put up a brilliant performance over dinner, though Rosemary was less convincing.

  Over coffee in the sitting room, I
managed to provoke the confrontation that Jeremy had so skillfully avoided at the board meeting.

  “Why are you so keen to rush through this new share allocation?” I asked once he was on his second brandy. “Surely you realize that it will take control of the company out of the hands of Rosemary and me. Can’t you see that we could be taken over in no time?”

  He tried a few well-rehearsed phrases. “In the best interests of the company, Richard. You must realize how quickly Cooper’s is expanding. It’s no longer a family firm. In the long term it has to be the most prudent course for both of you, not to mention the shareholders.” I wondered which particular shareholders he had in mind.

  I was a little surprised to find Rosemary not only backing him up, but showing a remarkable grasp of the finer details of the share allocation, even after Jeremy had scowled rather too obviously at her. She seemed extremely well-versed in the arguments he had been putting forward, given the fact that she had never shown any interest in the company’s transactions in the past. It was when she turned to me and said, “We must consider our future, darling,” that I finally lost my temper.

  Yorkshiremen are well known for being blunt, and my next question lived up to our county’s reputation.

  “Are you two having an affair, by any chance?”

  Rosemary turned scarlet. Jeremy laughed a little too loudly, and then said, “I think you’ve had one drink too many, Richard.”

  “Not a drop,” I assured him. “Sober as a judge. As I was when I came home late last night and found your car parked in the driveway and the light on in the bedroom.”

  For the first time since I’d met him, I had completely wrong-footed Jeremy, even if it was only for a moment. He began drumming his fingers on the glass table in front of him.

  “I was simply explaining to Rosemary how the new share issue would affect her,” he said, hardly missing a beat. “Which is no more than is required under stock exchange regulations.”