Betrayal (15 page)

‘D
AVID CALLED
it depression. He even prescribed me anti-depressants. Typical David! If only it’d been that simple. Pop the pills and lose your troubles! But it wasn’t depression, you see. Not in the way he meant it anyway. It was sheer disbelief. Everything was going wrong and I couldn’t seem to do anything to stop it. The business was in trouble and still sliding, the banks were moving in for their pound of flesh, and it suddenly hit me – I mean, quite suddenly, in the period of a day or so – that we were in real danger of losing the company. And then . . .’ It was still mortifying to say it. ‘Howard was going behind my back, setting up the takeover. It took me for ever to realise it. God, I was so slow! Good old Hugh – blind to the obvious!’ My laugh sounded bitter to my ears.

‘And then . . . things were difficult at home. Ginny thought – well, I don’t know what she thought, that was half the trouble – but we started to disagree over nothing, everything. There was this awful
wall
between us. We couldn’t seem to make contact. We seemed to wear each other down the whole time. And the money . . . She couldn’t see how desperately we needed to cut down, she had this blind spot. She just . . .’ But my words were stifled by the peculiar mixture of exasperation and guilt that Ginny always seemed to engender in me, and I returned to less confusing ground. ‘You know the worst thing, though, about the company? The worst thing was knowing that it was my own stupidity, my own pigheaded bloody idiocy that had got us into trouble.’

‘Come on – what about Howard?’ Mary protested. ‘It must have been his fault too.’

‘Oh, Howard didn’t know any better,’ I exclaimed sweepingly. ‘Howard was the ideas man, always had been, while my talent, such as it was, was for keeping us on the tracks financially. That was the theory anyway. But then I completely lost it! I let myself get seduced by ideas of easy money and limitless expansion. Pure conceit. I thought I knew best, you see! Prudence, restraint, all the things Pa had preached – well, they were just quaint and outdated, weren’t they? Leverage was the name of the game. You borrowed up to the hilt, you traded right up to your limits.’

‘But the board, the accountants,’ Mary argued, ‘they should have realised, surely?’

‘They were under Howard’s spell, just like the rest of us. And everything seemed to go so well at first, you see. Profits booming. Sales rocketing. Except for poor old Hartford, of course, which was left in the dumps.’

‘So it all seemed hopeless?’ she said, drawing me back to the story.

‘Not immediately, no. For a long time I believed the situation could be salvaged. I worked like mad on the restructuring plan, I took a pay cut – half my salary. I really thought I could get it all together.’

‘Then?’

‘Then . . .’ The memory caught me with fresh force. ‘Then I realised what Howard was up to.’

I found out purely by chance. One day my driver was off sick and it was Howard’s driver, Brian, who chauffeured me to our bankers for yet another fraught meeting on restructuring – a City euphemism for raising more money at heavy cost. I made some remark about the traffic and Brian launched into a stream of good-natured complaint about contraflows and roadworks, and how it was getting increasingly difficult to outmanoeuvre them. Stafford last week had been a particular challenge, he told me, because an accident on the M6 had caused a ten-mile tailback.

I thought of reasons for Howard to go to Stafford, I came up with a few, all perfectly plausible, yet, even as I tried to talk myself into believing them, a single thought chimed insistently in my mind: that Cumberland had its headquarters in Stafford, along with three of its four factories.

Watching Brian in the rear-view mirror, I went through a show of searching my memory. ‘Ah yes . . . that was Howard’s meeting with – who was it?’

Brian was about to reply when his eyes jumped guiltily and there was an awkward pause before he mumbled something unconvincing about some lunch engagement Howard had had at a hotel whose name he couldn’t recall. When he dropped me off he was still looking uneasy, and then I knew all I needed to know.

Over the years I had discovered that there were only two ways of approaching Howard on subjects he wasn’t ready to discuss. One was to lift his mood with a joke; the other was to tackle him head-on, with something approaching aggression.

The next morning as soon as he was free I strode into his office and planted myself in front of his desk. I hadn’t slept much the night before, my nerves were humming, and I could feel a pulse beating high in my head. Howard glanced up from some report and raised a lazy eyebrow.

‘Tell me about Cumberland,’ I said.

He sank back in his chair. He took his time. I could almost see his mind working. ‘Cumberland?’

‘You’ve had a meeting with them?’

‘There’s no need to get upset, Hugh,’ he said smoothly. ‘I was just opening out our options. The beginning of a contingency plan, if you like. Something to consider if the banks get threatening.’

A wild inarticulate anger rose over me, I had to clamp my lips together to stop them trembling. ‘How could you?’ I knew it was the wrong thing to say to Howard, for whom a moral stance was always a source of irritation, but I was beyond discretion.

‘Look, it’s no good taking an emotional line on this,’ he intoned in his most infuriating way. ‘That’s been half our trouble, Hugh. No objectivity.’

I couldn’t begin to work out what objectivity had to do with betrayal. I said unsteadily, ‘Behind my
back
, Howard.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ he declared. ‘It was just a preliminary chat to see how the ground lay. Nothing to get excited about. I was going to talk to you about it today. I mean, just
think
about it, Hugh,’ he argued archly, ‘I could hardly progress anything without you, could I?’

‘And how
does
the ground lie, Howard?’

Reverting to old mannerisms, he gave a cat-like smile and dropped a half-wink in an expression that wouldn’t have looked amiss on a used-car dealer. ‘I tell you – they’re rather hot for us! Oh, they’re not letting on, of course, but they’d be mad not to progress the idea and they know it.’

‘And what exactly is the idea, Howard? A takeover?’

He looked offended. ‘God, no! A merger. A
merger
,’ he repeated, as if I were incapable of taking it in first time. ‘Integration of administration, distribution and sales. Big savings to be made, Hugh, big savings.’

‘And where would Hartford fit into this?’

He tightened his lips and slowly shook his head as though I had conjured up this remark just to try him. ‘Hartford is a great asset, Hugh. Nobody’s going to throw it away, now are they?’

Staring at him, then, I wondered which of us had gone mad, whether he had always been like this or I was the one who had changed. It seemed incredible that we had ever worked happily together, or that I had ever trusted him.

But even then I hadn’t really grasped the situation. ‘No more clandestine meetings,’ I warned him. ‘No more going behind my back, Howard. No more going behind the board’s back!’

The way his eyes slid away, the knowing look that drifted across his face told me the rest of the story.

‘I
see
. How silly of me,’ I said bitterly. ‘You’ve been setting the scene for the board, have you?’

‘Hugh, all this anger really doesn’t help, you know. I do wish we could discuss this rationally.’ He gave a small sigh and waited, as though a little sensible reflection would cause me to see the childishness of my ways.

‘And your family?’ I asked as levelly as possible.

‘My family are all in favour of finding a happy conclusion.’

A suspicion leapt into my mind. ‘And
my
family? Where do they stand?’

He spread his hands, the picture of baffled innocence. ‘I wouldn’t know. But presumably they’re aware of how precarious the situation is? Presumably they’ve read the financial reports? I mean – I
presume
.’

He wanted me to see through him. He wanted me to think he’d already persuaded my family to vote for a takeover. He wanted me to think it, and, hating myself for being so easily manipulated, I did.

‘Thanks for letting me know,’ I said tightly.

Howard shook his head again and pulled himself indolently to his feet. He paused, running his hand down his tie as if to test its smoothness. ‘Sometimes it’s important to remember that there’s no disgrace in making money, Hugh. No disgrace in cashing in one’s hard-earned assets and reaping the rewards of success.’

‘
Success?
’ Sometimes Howard simply robbed me of speech.

‘Success.’ He lifted his head to the sound of it. ‘You seem to have a problem with that, Hugh.’

‘No, Howard, no. I don’t have a problem with that.’

I stopped sleeping then. I spent hours staring into the darkness, burning with disbelief. The shock wasn’t so much that Howard was prepared to sell the business out – he had absolutely no sentimentality where money was concerned – but that after all our years together he was prepared to treat me with such contempt.

In the next couple of days I embarked on a frantic damage limitation exercise. I phoned each of the board in turn, I threw together a paper listing the reasons a merger would be a bad idea, but of course Howard had been there ahead of me. He’d laid his ground very carefully. He’d already won them over.

‘It was then I began to lose heart, Mary. Or to lose faith in myself, which probably amounted to the same thing. I began to question things I hadn’t questioned in a long time. Wondering why on earth I’d been slaving away for most of my working life if it was to get stabbed in the back by my partner.’

Mary nodded ruefully at this. She never took exception to criticism of Howard; sometimes she actively endorsed it.

‘I thought of all the years that had just vanished – just
gone
. I thought of the hours I’d worked, all the evenings and weekends I’d never got home, all the time I’d never found for Ginny . . .’

‘She never seemed to mind too much.’

‘Oh, she never complained. But it mattered. It mattered a lot. We were always in such a rush that in the end I think we simply forgot how to talk.’ I grasped at a new realisation and floated it tentatively. ‘Or we were frightened to talk. I think there may have been something of that too. We were frightened in case we had to face up to how . . .
wrong
things were. How very differently things had turned out from the way we’d expected.’

Mary leant forward and turned the fire down.

‘And then . . . oh, it was everything, really. I began to think a lot about Pa. How much I missed the old devil – you know? And how little time I’d found for him towards the end.’

‘Not your fault.’

‘Oh, but I should have
made
time, Mary. You can always make time if you really try. I didn’t try hard enough. I think I was ashamed. I didn’t want to have to tell him how badly the business was doing. I didn’t want to admit how everything he’d worked for was slipping away.’ Halted by force of memory, I felt a fresh pull of affection and loss. The old man had maddened me sometimes, especially when I was a young man; he had been forceful and opinionated, he had been shamelessly paternalistic, particularly towards women, my mother included, but he had also been a spectacularly successful human being, full of warmth and feeling, and ingrained with a strong sense of duty and loyalty.

‘So you were feeling pretty low?’

‘Low? Yes –
low
. But you know something?’

Mary shook her head, and her sharp eyes did not leave my face.

‘The idea of losing the business was terrible, of course it was, but I would have bounced back all right. I was stunned – yes, and angry, too – but it was more of a
reaction
than a state of mind. I hadn’t really given up. I was just exhausted, utterly wiped out. All I needed, really, was some sleep and the chance to work things out. A bit of time, that was all.’

Mary read my expression and raised an eyebrow. ‘But you didn’t get it?’

‘It wasn’t Ginny’s fault,’ I insisted, betraying my guilts. ‘People, fund-raising, parties . . . It was her whole life. I’d left her alone so much, what else did she have?’

Mary’s face was still, deliberately so.

I continued to argue unhappily, ‘What else did she have? No, whatever went wrong, Mary, it wasn’t Ginny’s fault.’

It was on the Friday at breakfast – the first breakfast we’d managed to have together in some time – that I realised what sort of a weekend lay ahead.

Ginny peered at me and exclaimed, ‘Oh, such woe!’

I arranged my face into something more cheerful and mumbled about bankers giving us a hard time, and how life would be a lot easier without them.

When I picked up the newspaper she turned away to make the orange juice. The whir of the electric squeezer rose to a sudden shriek. ‘This thing’s playing up,’ she tutted. ‘I might buy us one of those shiny steel things. You know, the smart Italian jobs that look like cappuccino machines.’

She poured the juice into a glass and wiped her slender fingers on a cloth. She stood in profile, the glossy fall of her hair tucked behind one ear, her features unreadable, and for an instant she seemed like a stranger, someone I had always known yet hardly knew at all. I looked away abruptly because the idea frightened me so much.

She put the juice on the counter and, sliding onto the stool opposite, flicked her hair back from her forehead with a characteristic sweep of her hand. ‘I thought I’d leave about ten, as soon as the fish man delivers,’ she announced in the light rapid tones she used to discuss arrangements. ‘You did order enough wine, didn’t you, darling? It’s soup then fish then duck, remember.’

It came back to me then that we were having one of our social weekends in Wiltshire. Ginny always went down to Melton early to make sure everything was ready. ‘How many people?’ I asked, trying not to think of the expense.

‘Twelve. And Cook thinks the pudding could do with some dessert wine. Is that all right, darling? I mean, I would organise it, but . . .’ She gave a tiny shrug. She took a strange pride in boasting that she knew absolutely nothing about wine, except whether it was any good or not, which she could establish at the first sip.