Last Child

by Terry Tyler

  Next, the Christmas bonuses, currently received by everyone. We paid our staff well; I didn’t see why we should dish out rewards to half the workforce simply for showing up, which was all some of them did. I decided to award on merit, and asked the head of each department, company-wide, to grade each staff member from one to ten on performance. Eights and overs would get the customary bonus, while those graded from five to seven would get a smaller payout. Threes and fours would get nothing, and zero to two would get a written warning with their December payslip.

  Ruth e-mailed a memo to every single staff member to say that from now on, the distribution of Christmas bonuses would be performance-related only, but without giving away who was being assessed by whom, especially not as the heads of department themselves were being evaluated by Ruth and Cecilia.

  Jane and Susan went into the fray to report on the reaction to the new standards.

  “Seventy percent are grumbling, and the rest think it’s a good idea,” they told me.

  I laughed. “Let me have the names of those are who are e-mailing their grumbles to each other during working hours, won’t you? Get thingy in IT to do his magic with key words so they flag up.”

  My sister delivered her score chart for the Human Resources staff personally.

  “I am not happy about doing this, not at all,” she said, “and people know they’re being graded by their heads of department. Some of my girls rely on their bonus to do their Christmas shopping. If they don’t get it, they’ll be looking for someone to blame.”

  “Tough,” I said. “Why should I fund their families’ Christmas presents while they spend their days taking extended tea breaks and sending personal e-mails on company time?”

  “Isabella, you don’t understand human nature,” she said. “Doing this won’t give them the impetus to work harder, it’ll make them resentful and take the piss even more.”

  “Good. This is another way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff, then, isn’t it? The ones who are sharp enough to pull their socks up will be rewarded next year, and the ones who get stroppy will stay on my hit list.”

  Erin raised her eyebrows. “Or they might just go and get another job.”

  “Even better. Saves me the trouble of firing them.”

  “It’s not making you very popular.”

  “I’m taking care of Dad’s company for our children, not trying to win friends,” I reminded her.

  I became even less popular when the second memo was e-mailed round, the one about Christmas itself. The big office party was a ridiculous expense and always resulted in time-wasting next day hangovers, embarrassing scandal about who’d been caught groping whom in the stationery room, and the poor cleaners’ discovery of at least one vomit-filled wastepaper bin. I cancelled it, instead allocating small financial gifts to be put towards the individual departmental Christmas lunches. Altogether, I cut the cost of Christmas by half.

  Jane showed me an e-mail that was doing the rounds. It was a cartoon of Scrooge, with my face Photoshopped onto it. On my right side was a jolly Santa Claus, with Dad’s face, and I would have just laughed and discarded it, had there not been another figure on my left; an angel, with Erin’s face. The cartoon was captioned ‘Christmas past, present and future’.

  I shut my eyes. “Find out who did it, and sack them,” I said. “I don’t want to see them, just get rid.”

  Turned out it was the head of the Art department, John Dee. Happily, there was a clause in everyone’s contract stipulating that the public derision or slander of management was a form of gross misconduct and punishable by immediate dismissal. Dee had been a friend of Jim Dudley, so I was even happier to see him go.

  One place I didn’t spare any expense, though, was the annual Christmas drinks party in the boardroom. I wanted it to be a lavish affair because it was my first year at the helm, but also because it would be a tribute to my brother and my father. After my speech, there was hardly a dry eye in the house.

  There was no dissenting element in the boardroom that day; all the Dudley tribe were gone, and I had Ruth, Cecilia, Jane and Susan circulating nicely around the room while I concentrated on the people who mattered.

  “You’ve achieved so much, so quickly,” Will Brandon said. “Another new era; change comes about so fast, these days.”

  “Yes, well, now we’re changing back to how things were in my grandfather’s day,” I said. “No more daft schemes. No more vineyards and hotels. We’re a construction company, and we build the best houses and the best business premises in the country; I’m sticking to what we do best.”

  “Old Jasper would be proud of you. So would your dad.” He smiled at me. Behind him, on the wall, there was a black and white photo of him and Dad in the 1970s, leaning against Dad’s desk with their arms folded, laughing. They were in their shirtsleeves, Will suitably dressed for the office, tie straight, Dad with his sleeves turned back, his collar unbuttoned, his hair long; it was a lovely, casual photo, a perfect snapshot of a moment in time. I felt a pang of loss.

  “I couldn’t do it without you, Will,” I said, linking arms with him and thinking that I most certainly could, but Will was my strongest link to Daddy and the past, and for that, I loved him.

  My first Christmas back in my family home was quiet, and made me even more aware of those no longer with us. Mum went to friends from the church and Pat was spending a week or so with a relative, so I took charge. Christmas Day was just me, Erin and Hannah, and we had a lovely time doing nothing in front of the fire, dressed in pyjamas and slippers, with candles lit, far too much to eat and drink, and loads of DVDs. We all felt it was important not to get morose about Jaz, while still wanting to remember him, so it was a good way to spend the day. Boxing Day was more lively. We threw a small lunch party to which we invited the Seymours, Jane, the Brandons, and a few of Erin’s less rowdy friends. Later when everyone was gone, even Hannah, and Erin had taken off to the pub with her chums, I walked around the house from room to room, and thought about my childhood there. Doing so made me want what seemed like the impossible, more than ever.

  I wanted a husband and children. I wanted a family of my own, so I would have someone to whom I could pass on my home and the business. I wanted to start living.

  The post-Christmas blues were already well underway by the time we reopened on the third of January, with staff moaning because they had to start back on a Monday instead of being eased back in gradually with a short week.

  Was it my fault the third fell on a Monday instead of a Wednesday? Evidently so.

  “Don’t blame me, blame Pope Gregory the thirteenth,” I said to the first person who addressed their grumbles to me, but I don’t think they got it.

  Some of those who’d received written warnings instead of Christmas bonuses did not return, which pleased me; while Erin was out partying, I’d spent New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day doing an overview of the whole company, and highlighting areas in which I suspected we might be overstaffed. As the calendar flipped over from 2010 to 2011 I read texts wishing me a happy New Year, from Hannah (at her secretary’s NYE bash) and Jane (at a dinner party with friends). I sat alone at my desk in Dad’s old study, lit only by an anglepoise lamp shining on my work, a single glass of red wine at my side. This year I would be thirty-five; nearer forty than thirty. The clock was ticking faster all the time. My biological one, I mean.

  On that first week back, I called a meeting of the directors to outline the new strategies I’d worked on while everyone else was sleeping off their hangovers. The first step in my personnel streamlining was natural wastage.

  “It won’t be well received,” Bill Paget told me. “Your father tried it back in the 1990s, and it creates just as much discontent as redundancies because the remaining staff have to take on the duties of the people who’ve left.”

  “They’re already griping about it,” Erin said. “You don’t see it in practice because you don’t work in a department—obviously—but here’s an example: Ta
sha, my junior, sent me an e-mail to say she’s not coming back; she’s got a job in a café. So I need another office junior to do the filing, take the post down, get the coffee, run errands. But if I can’t have one, my staff will have to do their own filing, take their own post down, et cetera, et cetera. It’s obvious when you’re cutting corners, and it doesn’t go down well; it makes the staff think that either the company’s in trouble, or you don’t give a shit about them. Either way, it’s bad for morale.”

  I slammed my fist down on the table, making them all jump. “I don’t care about their bloody morale! They’re paid to do a job, I’m not in the business of mollycoddling the poor little dears! It’s the responsibility of each department head to run a happy ship; I’m sure you’re intelligent enough to work out an efficient way of distributing the HR workload, aren’t you?” I looked around at ten surprised faces. Well, that’d woken them up, anyway. “All the estate agencies are overstaffed; if necessary, I’ll be making redundancies up and down the country. There are passengers in every single department here and in North, people who’ve been coasting along for months or even years, doing the odd bit of admin work and twiddling their thumbs half the week. At least a hundred jobs could be cut, or made part time. Erin, I want you to look into it further and compile a detailed report, which I will act upon. I want to know exactly what duties every single employee performs—no, not their job descriptions, but what they actually do.” I turned my attention to Will. “You oversee the IT department, don’t you? I’d like you to send up thingummy, what’s his name, Brett, isn’t it? One of the first things I’m going to do is get all these time-wasting games removed from our computer network. Solitaire, Minesweeper, and whatever else is on there.”

  Will shook his head in disapproval, which irritated the hell out of me. “Ooh, that won’t be popular,” he said.

  My clenched fist nearly went down on the table again; I actually held it down with my other hand to stop it from doing so. “I don’t care!” I said. God, I could feel my face going red. “I don’t pay all these people to come here and play games! I’m not running a ruddy community centre!”

  “But they like to play them in their lunch hours,” Erin said.

  “Tough! They can bring in newspapers, go for a walk—hell, I don’t care what they do!”

  Jane and Susan became my eyes and ears; as the weeks went on I heard many whispers about me not having the right personality for leadership, how things had been better under Jim Dudley, or in Dad’s day, or even with Ned Seymour running the show. Many of the men slanted disparaging remarks towards the fact that I happened to be female, of course. When I put the redundancy plan in motion I acquired several nicknames; ‘The Axe-woman’ was the one that stuck. To make me even less popular, out of several new projects proposed to me in the first few months of the year I only agreed provisionally to two, but I wasn’t going to give the go-ahead to anything until I’d had it thoroughly checked out and was sure it would make a healthy profit for the company.

  I remembered something, from years ago, when Mum and Dad’s old friend Tom Morley used to visit us in that cottage. He talked about how different Dad was from his father, Jasper Senior, who’d had a reputation for being penny-pinching, and was thus not much beloved of the staff. I had a moment of clarity. I wasn’t King Harry, distributing largesse wherever I went; I was my grandfather’s child. I read his ideas in the document Will gave me, and I got to know him. Each morning when I walked into my office I smiled at the portrait of him above my desk; it gave me strength. He had a long, naturally serious face, like mine. Dad had taken his film star looks from the Yorks, his mother’s side of the family, and Jaz and Erin after him, but maybe I was the true Lanchester. The last Lanchester. Until I had a child of my own, of course, though if I was married he would not have our name.

  I was Jasper’s granddaughter, carrying on his work. I liked that.

  Sometimes I talked to him, asked him what I should do. I felt as though he could hear me. He told me when he approved of something I’d done; I could sense it.

  Though I told myself I could deal with not being the darling of the workforce, the way Erin was fêted by everyone as Harry’s princess did grate. I’d never had that sort of treatment, not even when I first started work there. I just didn’t inspire that reaction in people. I knew how we compared—Erin, the clever, personable breath of fresh air, and me, almost thirty-five, unmarried, childless, and struggling with leadership in a very traditional company used to having men in the seat of power—and of course I didn’t have her traffic-stopping appearance.

  I remember Kate saying, when Erin was flirting with Aiden, that she was seventeen going on thirty-five. She knew how to play everyone.

  I used to be jealous that the Dudley men singled her out.

  At the boardroom drinks do, this Christmas, I’d noticed how even the cocksure Rob was transfixed by her; I also clocked that he arrived without his fiancée, and left with Erin. Whenever he had cause to come down to Head Office he always took her out for lunch. I wondered if that little girl he was marrying in June was aware of this. I suspected not, poor cow.

  I couldn’t fathom Erin, even though I now lived with her. Was she just effortlessly charismatic, like Daddy, simply a young girl who lived life to its fullest, or an evil, scheming witch like her mother?

  She claimed to feel mortified about what she’d done to Kate, but clearly didn’t attach the same principles to whatever she was doing with Rob Dudley. I asked if she’d learned nothing, playing around with a man who was engaged to be married as she was, and she just tossed her hair over her shoulder in the way she did, and said, “What? Does being engaged mean you can’t speak to members of the opposite sex?”. I had no proof that they were anything other than ex-lovers and good friends, whatever I and many others suspected. If indeed they were having it off, they weren’t doing so at Lanchester Hall.

  We got on fine at home, on the surface, though we didn’t see a great deal of each other. If Erin wasn’t out enjoying her frenetic social life, she spent much of her time in her room. I presumed she was just watching DVDs and beautifying herself, but one day Pat remarked, after cleaning the bedrooms, that she was impressed by my sister’s reading matter. I took a look myself and was immediately worried. Erin had piles of books by her bed about psychology, people management, business administration, and the housing market. I thought of how easily Ned Seymour had been ousted, how willing Erin had been to throw in with the Dudleys against me, and I couldn’t help wondering if she was plotting something.

  She still hadn’t done that report I’d asked her for, the one that would result in redundancies. Didn’t want to lose popularity, I presumed.

  Will had told me, often (Will told me a lot of things often, bless his heart), that Dad had been as sharp as a razor; when he took the company over at the age of eighteen everyone expected him to just be the little rich boy playing at it, but he had his finger on the pulse from the word go.

  Erin was so much her father’s daughter.

  All it would take was a vote of no confidence.

  If I lost the company I would have nothing.

  The thought made me sick with fear.

  The first quarter of 2011 was a trial indeed. I hardly dared relax, even when I wasn’t at work; I was constantly analysing financial forecasts, reviewing reports from other departments, including many from the annals, to make sure that I didn’t repeat mistakes made before. All the time I was aware of my image. ‘The Axe-woman Cometh’, they said when I walked into a room, apparently. Well, I was trying to run a successful company, not a job creation scheme.

  I had Jane, Susan, Cecilia and Will, but nobody to support me once I left the office. Nobody to help share the burden. Men had wives to go home to, who would pour them a drink, talk to them about their day. All I had was me. If I stopped, I brooded, so I never stopped.

  If I let myself think about it, I would have had to face the fact that I was incredibly lonely.

  One Sunda
y evening at the end of another weekend with just me and my paperwork, Hannah dropped in on the way back from an early evening drink (with some clients who had now become friends, something that never happened to me), and I dared admit this to her.

  She said it was one of the downsides of life as a twenty-first century woman.

  “We’re able to live life on our own terms, not be married or have children, without being seen as freaks, but with independence can come loneliness, alas,” she said, though I suspected this was mock empathy to make me feel better; Hannah never appeared anything other than content.

  “I’m just glad I’ve got work,” I said. “I don’t know what I’d do with myself otherwise. Since Jaz died, I’ve felt—oh, like there’s this big gap. Not just because I miss him, but because I need to feel useful. I need someone to look after.”

  “You could take up another interest outside work. Or get a pet,” she suggested, and laughed. “Dotty and Parker saved my life! Better to pour your love into a living thing than a pile of reports. Don’t get too obsessive about the company.”

  “I have to.”

  “I mean, don’t be too hard on yourself. You need to think about your emotional health as well as Lanchester Estates.”

  Already I regretted confiding in her; pets, indeed. I wasn’t ready to become a sad old spinster with a cat. As for the phrase ‘think about your emotional health’—well, I hated all that self-help type jargon. “I’m fine,” I said.