You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (2 page)

George shrugged. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘So,’ he went on, as he fell into step beside her, ‘how long’s it been, since New York?’

Connie did the maths. ‘Twenty years, I suppose,’ she said.

‘Can’t be. My God.’ He sighed. ‘And you’re still with JWW. Is it true, by the way, what I’ve been hearing?’

‘That depends on what it is,’ she said quietly.

‘About the takeover.’

‘Ah.’ She smiled. ‘So what have you been hearing, exactly?’

Yet another salient fact about George: he always knew less than he thought he did about everything. So, over the rice with little bits of stuff in, Connie learned that J. W. Wells & Co, the oldest established firm in its field, had been having a rough time of it lately - four of the seven partners dead or in permanent exile, public confidence shattered, client base uncertain, the corporate hyenas prowling - and had finally succumbed to an aggressive hostile takeover by an undisclosed buyer. Unfortunately, she knew all that already, and George hadn’t heard anything else apart from the kind of vague rumour she’d been swapping with the others over coffee an hour or so earlier. Annoyed, she let George pay for lunch and scuttled off to do whatever it was she’d been on her way to do when she’d bumped into him—

Ah, yes. Unstick Cassie. Connie sighed. One damn thing after another.

In Mortlake, where the shadows lie, the small family business of Hollingshead and Farren have been making small, intricate brass widgets for the plumbing, heating and hydraulic industries practically since the dawn of widget-making in the United Kingdom. Put an H&F widget in the hands of a skilled engineer who truly loves his craft and he’ll recognise it at once; most likely he’ll comment lovingly on its beautiful lines and exquisite quality of manufacture before pointing out that you can get something nearly as good and made in China for a fifth of the price. Even so, the old firm is still there, pouring, fettling and machining its small brass miracles; and although the Farrens have long since died out or gone away, the Hollingsheads remain: father, two uncles, six cousins and one son, Colin.

‘And when you’ve done that,’ Dad had said at breakfast, ‘you can nip down to Crinkell’s and pick up those end-mills.’

‘Fine,’ Colin had replied. ‘Can I take the car?’

‘No, I’m using it. Walk’ll do you good. And you can drop in Boots while you’re passing and get me some of those heartburn pills.’

Not for the first time, Colin reflected as he trudged down the High Street, collar folded up against the rain, that it really wasn’t fair that he didn’t have a car of his own any more. True, the business wasn’t doing as well as it should have been, and times were hard, and if he absolutely needed a car for something he could always borrow the Daimler, if Dad wasn’t using it. Even so. He’d been fond of his perky little Datsun, and they’d got next to nothing for it when it was sold.

Preoccupied with these reflections, Colin was almost through the door of Boots before he noticed it was Boots no longer. Instead, it had at some point turned into a John Menzies. He went in anyway and bought a refill for his pen (a Christmas present from Uncle Phil; it hurt the tip of his middle finger, but you don’t want to give offence). That, and a detour to Tesco (who did a practically identical heartburn tablet in a slightly different-coloured box) explained his late arrival at the meeting, which he’d forgotten all about.

It turned out to be the sort of meeting that he’d cheerfully have missed altogether. There was a grim man from the bank, and an equally forbidding-looking woman from the accountants; also some sort of lawyer and a young woman whose name and function Colin didn’t quite catch, but what the hell; from context he assumed her to be another species of commercial vulture, wheeling by invitation over the moribund carcass at seventy-five pounds per hour plus VAT.

‘The bottom line is,’ the man from the bank was saying, ‘unless you can find a way to compete with low-cost imports—’

Colin tuned out. The same man, or someone very like him, had said the same thing at the same time last year, and the year before that, and just because something’s unpleasant and true it doesn’t necessarily mean that it makes for gripping listening. He glanced across the table at the unspecified young woman. Her name, he remembered from the round of cursory introductions, was Cassandra something, and she was rather nice-looking; not that that signified, since it’s hard to take a romantic interest in a scavenger who’s about to strip the residual flesh off your atrophied remains. Assuming she was a vulture, of course, but it was probably a safe bet. Unless she was a fabulously wealthy widget collector who wanted a hundred thousand 67/B’s by next Thursday, chances were she wasn’t there to make things better.

Odd about Boots, he thought. Maybe they’re feeling the pinch too. Colin wasn’t inclined to take the withering and perishing of H&F personally, since he hadn’t been working for the company very long (he’d wanted to go to university and learn to be a vet, but Dad wouldn’t hear of it), but he felt sorry for the rest of them - Dad, Uncle Chris, Uncle Phil, the cousins. If Boots was also finishing off its hearty breakfast while the hangman tested the drop mechanism in the prison yard below, at the very least it implied that the hard times were general, and accordingly it wasn’t really anybody’s fault.

‘Anyway,’ said the accountant, ‘that’s more or less the position. Unless you can increase turnover by at least twenty-five per cent over the next three months, or else cut costs by forty-two per cent—’

How old can you be, Colin wondered, and still train to be a vet? All he actually knew about the profession was what he’d gleaned from repeats of All Creatures Great & Small, and the hero in that had been, what, about his age (but you can’t tell with actors, of course, they’ve got make-up and all sorts). The careers bloke at school had said he needed all sorts of A levels and stuff, and he’d left as soon as he was legally able to do so, and had come here to start at the bottom and work his way up in the customary fashion. As it was, he’d started at the bottom and more or less stayed there, partly through lack of the killer instinct needed to get on in modern commerce, partly because there wasn’t anywhere up for him to go until either Dad, Uncle Chris, Uncle Phil or one of the cousins decided to call it a day. A bit of a waste of time, he couldn’t help reflecting, these past few years. His fault? Well, most things proverbially were, but in this case, not everything. If Dad had been a little bit more broad-minded, his life could have been quite different at this point. He could have been standing up to his knees in mud with his arm up a cow’s backside, if only he’d been given a decent chance.

‘I think that’s more or less covered everything,’ Dad was saying (and Colin couldn’t help thinking of a man in a black suit drawing a cloth over the corpse’s face). ‘Thank you all for your time, and obviously we’ll be in touch as soon as we’ve reached our decision.’

The vultures spread their wings; all except the nice-looking Cassandra female, who followed Dad into his office. No summons for Colin to follow, so he wandered slowly back to his own miniature lair, crept in behind the desk (he was slim going on scrawny, but he still had to breathe in), stacked his feet on top of the Albion Plastic Extrusions file, and allowed himself to slither into a reverie of petulant thought.

It was all very well cramming his mental screen with images of Christopher Timothy saving the elderly farmer’s beloved sheep-dog, but assuming he wasn’t ever going to be a vet after all, what was he going to do with his life once Hollingshead and Farren went under? The accountant, he remembered, had been ferociously upbeat about certain aspects of the disaster. The freehold of the factory and warehouse, he’d pointed out, would pay off the debts and redundancies and leave a nice fat lump sum over to provide for Dad and the uncles in the autumn of their lives. That, however, was more or less it as far as comfort and joy were concerned. The machinery had a modest value as scrap iron, maybe enough to pay the accountant’s hourly rate for telling them it was otherwise worthless. The patents were about to expire anyway, the office equipment was a joke, and the best thing to do with the Daimler was to leave it parked temptingly in the street and hope a joyrider with an antiquarian bent might take it away and crash it into something solid. The men would be paid off, of course, and that would be that. Apart from one loose end, behind whose desk he was currently sitting. Nobody had ventured any suggestions as to what might be done with him. Like it mattered.

Colin frowned. As a general rule, he didn’t do self-pity. Looked at from another perspective, he was tolerably young, more or less healthy and not a complete idiot, and after a childhood and early adulthood spent chained to the widget-smith’s bench he was free to do whatever the hell he liked. Not so much a disaster, therefore, as an opportunity in fuck-up’s clothing.

Opportunity; he considered the concept objectively. To date, opportunities had mostly been things offered to Colin via e-mail by benevolent Nigerian lawyers. Otherwise, he had always followed a path ordained for him by those who knew better - and a pretty narrow track it had been, running straight through a small and circumscribed world consisting mostly of rather boring work and running errands for senior family members. There had always been an undeniable logic to all of it, of course. Why should he want to move out to a place of his own when the family home was only a minute’s walk from the factory gate? What did he need a car for? What conceivable purpose would be served by him spending a year backpacking round the Andes, given that the entire Latin American widget market was sewn up by the big US manufacturers? Furthermore, whence had he got the curious idea that he had time to go running around after girls when there were inventories to be made and quality to be controlled? Over the years, widget-making had been held up to him us a combination of Holy Grail, family curse and closed monastic order. Without it, the world would be a big, strange, interesting place, even if his role in it was as yet poorly defined.

Besides (he shifted his feet, nudging Albion Plastic Extrusions off the desk onto the floor) it was by no means certain that the old firm was even dead yet. This time last year, they’d been squinting down the twin barrels of an empty order book and a catastrophic tax demand; then, just as the doctor’s finger had been quivering over the life-support machine’s off switch, some lunatic in Newport Pagnell had bespoken a quarter of a million J/778c-30’s, payment fifty per cent in advance. In due course he’d paid for and taken delivery of his widgets, and nobody had seen or heard of him again. If there was one such loopy philanthropist in the world, why not another? Maybe even now he was stuffing a cheque into an envelope, a crazed look on his face and a lampshade balanced on top of his head in place of a hat.

Enough about that, then; Colin let the unruly Highland terrier of his mind off the lead and let it chase pigeons through the bushes of more enticing improbabilities. The nice-looking female at the meeting, for instance. When the other suits had buggered off to shake their heads and pad their bills, she’d stayed behind to talk to the old man. What was she, then? Some business-school whizz-kid or efficiency guru, come to set them all to rights? Hadn’t looked the type, although Colin freely conceded that he hadn’t a clue what the type was supposed to look like. Not a customer, or we wouldn’t have been giving her a guided tour of the dirty laundry. For the same reasons, not a creditor. So: apart from clients, people we owe money to and charcoal-grey-clad leeches, who the hell else do we know? Nobody.

Not that he’d have spared her one per cent of a passing thought if she hadn’t been nice-looking. A realist in matters of self-appraisal, Colin was well aware that he was both shallow (he preferred ‘uncomplicated’) and unregenerate when it came to nice-looking - not that he got much chance to be either in and around the widget trade, where people tended to be male, middle-aged, harassed-looking and generally sad. Even five years ago, things had been rather more lively. Now, however, his friends from school were mostly paired off and domesticated, and his social life had accordingly dwindled down to this: surreptitiously ogling nice-looking lady scavengers over the raised lid of his briefcase. He frowned. Maybe H&F going down the bog wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all, if it meant that he’d be turned loose in rather more varied society. O brave new world, he said to himself, that hath living, unmutilated females under forty-five in it.

(Slowly but surely, he thought, I’m turning into a real mess. Note to self: do something about that, before it’s too late.)

At some point Colin looked up at the clock on the opposite wall and saw that it was gone six. He sat up. Brooding morosely on his own time was something he tried to avoid. True, he had nowhere much to go apart from home. But even he, indentured servant of a family business, had some rudimentary grasp of the great Work/Fun dichotomy that informs the whole of modern Western civilisation. If it was after hours, it was time he buggered off. He went home.

An old-fashioned, rather shiny brown trilby hat on the hook in the hall; for once, Dad was home before him. Colin hung up his coat next to the hat and drifted into the front room.

Mum was there, reading a magazine. She didn’t look up as he came into the room, but the cat lifted her head and gave him her trademark scowl of disappointed contempt. The TV was on as usual, with the sound turned down. You could tell it was autumn by the small drift of yellow leaves nestling round the foot of the massive tree that grew in the exact centre of the room.

‘When’s dinner?’ he asked.

‘Don’t know,’ Mum replied, eyes glued to print. ‘What d’you want?’

‘What is there?’

She thought for a moment. ‘Fish fingers,’ she said. ‘Or chicken kievs. You could open a tin for Gretchen while you’re out there.’

‘Mphm.’ Colin nodded, and set course for the kitchen. For Gretchen the cat he opened a can of chicken fillets in gravy. He made himself cheese on toast. The ad hoc catering implied that Dad was having something on a tray in his study; figures to pore over, books to fiddle, whatever. Just as well; Colin didn’t feel like an evening of painfully synthesised conversation in front of the muted telly.