An Ocean Apart

by Robin Pilcher

  He shook his head as he began to take in fully the ruthlessness of Duncan’s actions.

  “And bang! It works! I fly out of the office, in a worse state than ever before.” He took in a deep breath before continuing.

  “So that’s me out of the way. Deakin calls you and confirms all has gone according to plan. You then contact my father and tell him that you now need a marketing director, because I’m not in a fit state to fulfil my job.” He pointed to Giles Barker. “And you were brought in—from Kirkpatrick’s, I presume?”

  The three directors were by now looking extremely uneasy.

  “I take it from your lack of interjections that I’m not doing badly so far.”

  Duncan shook his head, and blowing out an impatient breath, linked his hands behind his head.

  “That only left you with my father to deal with. However, you managed to get him out of the way pretty easily by saying that there was no need for him to come into the distillery any more, and that you would keep him in touch by visiting him at home.” He turned and stared directly at the managing director. “How very thoughtful of you, Duncan.” He began pacing up and down the boardroom.

  “Now, you have the full run of the distillery to yourself.” He held up a finger and waggled it in the air. “Ah, but what about Margaret? She commands the switchboard. How can you begin to receive endless telephone calls from Kirkpatrick’s without raising her suspicions? Easy! Get rid of her! So out she goes.”

  He paused for a moment, as he tried to get the next point into his mind.

  “Okay, so what about this take-over? What made you think that you could buy out a company that was in the hands of private shareholding? Ah, the workers’ stock-purchase plan. You found out that they now owned thirty-one per cent of the shares. Not enough to swing an outright purchase, but nevertheless, a good-enough thumbscrew when the time was right…” David turned and thumped his hands down onto the table. “… to approach my father!”

  David took a deep breath.

  “So what were you going to say to him? ‘Listen, old boy, you’re getting on a bit, and your son has lost all interest in the company and won’t want anything to do with it, seeing that he’s just had a nervous breakdown in the States. Much better that you realize your capital from the company now—anyway, thirty-one per cent of the shares are already owned by the workers, and they’re all for making a bit of money out of the deal, which I’m sure you will agree is owed to them after so many years of faithful service. So why not do the right thing, old boy’!”

  David spat out the last words in sheer fury at the three men who sat in front of him. He turned away and stood rubbing at his forehead with the tips of his fingers, his eyes tightly shut.

  “But then, I found out about Kirkpatrick’s, didn’t I? And I began putting two and two together, even though my evidence was somewhat sketchy. So I faxed Archie through Margaret, but of course, Margaret wasn’t there, so your … tame woman out there”—he pointed with a thumb over his shoulder towards the door—“brought the fax directly to you. And that not only spelt the end of Archie’s involvement with the company, but also made you realize that I had an inkling of what you were planning.”

  He turned back and looked directly at Duncan. “But what gets me is that you continued. I can’t believe that—unless you were being pushed like hell by John Davenport in London.”

  Duncan made no move to comment, and David shook his head. “Christ, I am doing well, aren’t I? So you went on. You told the work-force on Friday, and then, on Saturday afternoon, you began to put the pressure on my father … and the consequences of that we all know too well.”

  Giles Barker broke the silence that followed by clearing his throat.

  “So what do we do now?” David asked. “You tell me, Duncan: What do you think we’re going to do now?”

  Duncan pushed himself forward in his chair and linked his hands together, placing them in front of his chin. “Well, we could still go ahead with it. It would still be hugely profitable for your family. If you would just, for one moment, consider—”

  David turned, a look of sheer horror on his face.

  “What? I don’t believe you said that! God, you are so fucking thick-skinned! Oh, no, Duncan, this is as far as it goes. Not only do I hold thirty-four point five percent of the Glendurnich shareholding, but under the circumstances that surround my father at present, I stand here in proxy of his thirty-four point five per cent shareholding as well! That is sixty-nine per cent, Duncan, just in case your mental arithmetic is not as sharp as your underhandedness. There is no way that you can swing this deal now! No, I think you have totally misunderstood my question. What I’m really saying is: What are you lot going to do now?”

  Duncan was silent. He rubbed at his chin and glanced across to his fellow directors, who in turn looked back at him.

  “I don’t know,” he said eventually. “What do you want us to do?”

  David pulled out a chair and sat down opposite them, fixing each with a penetrating stare.

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned, you have only one option, and that is to leave today, and never, ever set foot in Glendurnich again. But if you feel that you want to go against that option, then I’ll tell you exactly what I’ll do. Tomorrow morning, first thing, I shall call the Scottish correspondent of the Financial Times and the industrial editors of both The Scotsman and The Herald, and I shall issue them with a news release explaining exactly what has happened at Glendurnich. You’ll agree with me when I say that I know the story well enough. And when it is printed, I doubt that you three will ever get a job again in this country.” He leaned back in his chair. “I certainly don’t think John Davenport will want to know you. He would no doubt put his damage-limitation exercise into overdrive and distance Kirkpatrick’s as far as possible from your escapades up here. You’d take the brunt, I’m afraid.”

  He glanced over to Dougie, who was looking down at his feet, slowly nodding his head. There was a soft scraping on the carpet as Giles Barker and Keith Archibald pushed back their chairs and made their way over to the door. David turned and watched as they silently left the room, then stared over at Duncan, who eyed him with disdain, as if determined to make his final stand of dominance in the company. At that point, there was a knock at the boardroom door.

  “Come in!” David called out.

  Margaret put her head around the door, and he saw immediately that there were tears in her eyes.

  “Yes, Margaret?” he asked in a concerned voice.

  “Mr. David. I’m so sorry. Your mother has just been on the telephone.” Her voice choked. “I’m afraid that your father died a quarter of an hour ago.”

  David looked at her and then over at Duncan.

  “You fucking bastard!”

  The fuse blew in his head and, fuelled by the resultant overload of anger and hatred, he moved so fast around the table that Duncan had no time to get out of his chair. David pulled back his fist as he approached him, and the man cowered away, clamping his hands to his head to protect himself from the blow. He swung with all his force at the side of Duncan’s head, but just as he was expecting to feel the satisfying crunch of hard knuckle against soft cheek-bone, his hand was caught inches short of its target in Dougie’s rock-hard palm.

  “No, Davie!”

  David turned to look through his blurred vision into Dougie’s face.

  “It would’na help, laddie. It just would’na help.”

  David turned away, and pulling his hands across his head, he walked to the far end of the boardroom and let out an anguished cry.

  “Oh, no, Pa! Oh, no, no, no!”

  He looked up at the painting that hung above the fireplace and stood, for a time indeterminable, staring into the kind, gentle face of his father. His eyes watched him, his smile enveloped him, and it slowly began to dawn on him that his mother had been right. The old man had picked his time. He had done all that he could, and he had clung on long enough to make sure that his son was t
here to carry on.

  He turned. There was no one in the boardroom. The chairs were left pushed away from the table. It was all over. Glendurnich was unequivocally back in the hands of the Inchelvie family.

  Chapter THIRTY-FIVE

  As the haunting strains of “The Dark Island,” played by a piper from the First Battalion, The Highlanders, skirled distantly from the hill above Dalnachoil, George, Fourth Lord of Inchelvie, was silently laid to rest in the grave next to his daughter-in-law. Not a sound was heard from the village, not a car driven through, as every one of the inhabitants of Dalnachoil, along with all the employees of Glendurnich Distilleries Ltd., were present at the funeral, packed into every available space in the tiny churchyard.

  As the minister finished reading out the final dedication, David dropped the cord into the grave and looked up from where he stood at its foot to give the signal to the other bearers to stand down. With a long bow of his head, he turned and walked back to his mother’s side, taking her gloved hand in his and giving it a reassuring squeeze. Sophie, who had been standing behind, holding hard to Charlie and Harriet, stepped forward, so that the Inchelvie household stood in line in front of the grave. Then, each giving a final bow of his head, they turned and made their way through the gravestones towards the path that led down to the gate.

  When he reached the path, David stopped and looked over at his mother. “It’s better to do it now,” he said quietly. “Much better here than back at Inchelvie.”

  His mother looked round at the gathering and nodded. “Yes, you’re probably right. What about the locals? Do you mind them hearing?”

  David shook his head. “They’ve as much a right to hear what I’m going to say as any.” He smiled at his mother. “It’ll give them something to talk about at any rate.”

  He stepped away from her and walked back towards the grave. Everyone was looking at him. “If you could all just bear with me for a minute!” he called out at the top of his voice.

  The grave-diggers, who were readying themselves to finish off their task, pushed their spades back into the soil and returned to lean their backs against the churchyard wall. David waited until the querying whispers had died down before he started.

  “I had planned to say this to you all back at Inchelvie after the service, and I hope therefore you don’t think it improper of me speaking to you here, especially in the context of what has just taken place. Nevertheless, both my mother and I think it apt that this should be said before the final curtain has been brought down on my father’s life, because we both are certain that he would have wanted to hear what I am about to say.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “I know that many of you here are not employees of Glendurnich, and even though I am specifically addressing them, I think it only right that everyone knows and understands the implications of what I am going to say and how important it is for the future of our community.”

  He paused as a gust of wind blew through the churchyard, rustling the leaves on the trees.

  “You know, I consider myself incredibly fortunate to live up here in Scotland. We have a way of life, or what they now term ‘a quality of life,’ which is the envy of many in other parts of this country. But things are not always what they seem, as we all well know. We are a remote nation, especially up here in the north, but that remoteness only helps to strengthen the bond of belonging within our communities. We all look after each other—and we all respect each other, and this could be no more apparent than it is right now, with you all being present here—and I thank you for that from the bottom of my heart, not only for the support you have given my family today, but also for the care and understanding that you have shown towards myself over the past months.

  “However, the consequences of remoteness can be fickle. Whereas it can bring us together, it can as easily split us apart, and this is nowadays all too dependent on what employment is available. We do what we can up here, we do with what’s available, otherwise there is no option but to pack up and move into the cities where there are more jobs. And that is what erodes our communities. So, it is therefore essential that we protect for ourselves every available source of established employment—and Glendurnich is no exception.”

  David stopped for a moment and thrust his hands into the pockets of his kilt jacket.

  “Last Friday, the employees of Glendurnich were called to a meeting to be briefed on the proposed buyout of the company by a London-based corporate called Kirkpatrick Holdings Public Limited Company. The reason for this was that the employees, in total, own thirty-one per cent of the shares of Glendurnich, as the result of a stock-purchase plan set up by my father twenty-five years ago. Now I know that, to many of you, the idea of being able to cash in on this might seem extremely attractive, but what I want to put to you is that it could be a very short-lived bonus.

  “What you must understand is that Glendurnich is almost unique up here. It is entirely independent, and at present it holds a significant share of the malt-whisky market world-wide. For over one hundred years now, we have never stopped producing whisky. Yet this industry is cyclical, which means that we do have periods of feast and famine, and I can tell you that I have seen what happens to small corporate-owned whisky companies in times of famine. They become a statistic. They become a minus figure on the wrong side of the balance sheet, and because they are only of minor importance to the actual company that owns them, they get closed down. Maybe not for ever—maybe just for a year or two, until demand rises again—but nevertheless they get closed down. And everyone loses his job.

  “No one has ever lost his job at Glendurnich through redundancy, and, by rejecting the offer from Kirkpatrick’s, I am going to make damned sure that it never will happen. Now, I’m not doing this for any selfish reason, or just for the good of my family, but for you, all of you being the extended family at Glendurnich. Your welfare is as important to me”—he turned and gestured with his hand towards his mother and his three children standing on the path—“as that of my own family, and that is why I could never live with myself if, say in five or ten years’ time, I witnessed the closing down of the distillery and the subsequent loss of your jobs.”

  He paused and looked around the faces, trying to judge from their expression whether he had said enough to convince them.

  “Now, I’m not going to say anything further at the moment, and I am certainly not going to ask you for your opinion on the matter right now, because it is neither the time nor place. Nevertheless, for those of you who would like to discuss this further, I am setting up a committee at Glendurnich, and I think it appropriate that that committee should be a true representation of the distillery as a whole. It will therefore consist of myself, Dougie Masson and Archie McLachlan, representing the board, the distillery workers and office workers respectively.”

  David cast his eyes to the ground for a moment before looking up again.

  “That’s it. Now, please, I do want you all to come back to Inchelvie where we can have a good few drams of Glendurnich malt and celebrate in style the life of a great man. And talking of which, I think by now you will understand the reason why I chose to speak to you here. Because in everything that I have just said, you would have heard exactly the same from my father.”

  David watched as sombre heads began to nod in agreement. As they turned their eyes back to the corner of the graveyard where his father had been laid to rest, David nodded briefly to the grave-diggers, and they stepped forward and began to shovel earth into the grave.

  He turned and walked back to his mother and put his arms around her. “I’m sorry. That was a bit longwinded. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it here after all.”

  His mother pushed herself away from him and smiled up into his face. “Darling, you were wonderful, and your timing was perfect. You said it all. Only your father could have said it with so much feeling.”

  She looked back towards the grave where the pile of earth was fast diminishing. “There are two people ov
er there, David, lying side by side, who would be so proud of what you have just done.”

  David smiled at her, then took hold of her hand and together they walked down to the gate where the children stood waiting for them.

  * * *

  Just before six o’clock that evening, David helped the last of the workers climb unsteadily into the hired coach, and stood watching as the laden vehicle lumbered off down the drive. He turned to make his way back to the front door, but then hesitated, and instead walked across the gravel to the gate that led into the front garden. He pushed it open and rounded the high hedge to view, for the first time since he had returned, the new rose garden. It was in full bloom, every one of the bushes having taken root, despite the appalling conditions under which they were planted. David smiled to himself. Appalling conditions. God, how true that was, not only in terms of weather, but of circumstances as well. He walked along the grass path that ran between the borders, every so often reaching over to pluck off a deadhead. It had worked out just as he had planned. Every ounce of effort that he had put into it had come to fruition. And it was all for Rachel. The perfect memorial, representing, in every way, her pure, unadulterated beauty.

  He bent down and dug his fingers deep into the earth around the roots of a lone dandelion, feeling the cool stickiness of it against the skin on his hand, so different from the warmth of the light, sandy soil to which he had become so accustomed in Leesport. He threw it onto the grass beside him, then rolled up a lump of earth into a tiny ball between his fingers. Two gardens so different, yet linking two women so alike, and even though one had touched his life for only a fragment of the time of the other, he knew that he would never be able to forget either.