Fault Line - Retail (2 page)

‘How?’

The smile was restored. ‘Find the missing records, I suppose. Between you and me, Jonathan, I don’t care whether this history ever gets written or not. But the old man cares. So, we need to look as if we care too.’

‘Maybe you need to, Presley. I don’t see how that applies to me.’

‘Really? You disappoint me.’

‘But I’m sure I don’t surprise you.’

He gave a pained frown, as if baffled by my uncooperative attitude. ‘I’m going to have to insist, Jonathan. It’s in your contract. “Such other duties as the chairman may at his discretion ask you to perform from time to time”. This is one of those times. And you wouldn’t want to put yourself in breach a few months away from your pension, now would you? That would be … kind of stupid, don’t you think?’

It would be stupid, of course. But then chasing after missing company records from forty or fifty years ago didn’t sound very sensible either. Casting my mind back to my earliest involvement with Cornish China Clays, in 1968, I felt a shiver of apprehension. That period was surely a book Greville Lashley should want to keep firmly closed. What was going on inside the old man’s mind? ‘Maybe I ought to talk to Greville about this, Presley.’

In Presley’s eyes there was a gleam of something close to pity. ‘I suggested that myself. He said there was no need. You were just to … deal with the problem as you saw fit. We’ve scheduled a meeting for you with Doctor Whitworth, day after tomorrow. Beth has the details.’

‘The day after tomorrow?’

‘The sooner you go, the sooner you can get the job done and start planning your retirement.’ Presley drained his coffee and glanced at his preposterously bulbous wristwatch. ‘Now, I need
to
move my day along, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave it there. I can tell the old man you’re on the case, can’t I, Jonathan?’

There could be only one answer to Presley’s question. I would be on the case. Not because of a clause in my contract. But because, like Greville Lashley, I’d have trusted no one else to find out what was really going on. I was uniquely qualified for the task, as the old man well knew. And for a host of reasons – many of which he was familiar with – I was bound to accept it. At his contriving, a mystery I thought I’d put behind me had tapped me on the shoulder. And I had no choice, as he must clearly have understood, but to turn and face it.

1968

TWO

MEMORIES ARE MORE
than recollected experiences. They’re displacements of ourselves in time and space. They’re events our younger self witnessed and participated in, recalled by an older self who often wonders if he’s truly the same person. They’re visions of people we once knew. And, bewilderingly, we are one of those people.

When I left St Austell Grammar School in July 1968, I was well aware my life was entering a new phase. A new and exciting one, if my hopes for it were to be fulfilled. The world was changing in big, mind-expanding ways. The old order was crumbling. And I liked the sound of what was reputedly replacing it – liberation in every kind of beguiling form.

But in St Austell all that was just rumour – second- or third-hand accounts of glamorous, even dangerous, events far, far away. For first-hand experience, you had to leave. And that was exactly what I was planning to do. A place at LSE awaited me in September. London was where I was confident I’d find everything – including myself.

Ironically, London was where I was actually from. But we’d moved to Cornwall when I was two, so I had no memories of my birthplace. The bank had offered my father a branch managership and west we’d gone. Managership of a bigger branch elsewhere had failed to follow. I could see in him the narrowness of vision his
bosses
had probably seen too. If he’d ever thought of St Austell as a stepping stone to greater things, he’d stopped thinking that way by the time I was old enough to understand him.

We’d moved into a brand-new three-bedroom semi in Eastbourne Road, between the cemetery and the bypass, on the southern edge of town. Sixteen years later, we were still there, or at least Mum and Dad were. In my mind, I was already packed and ready to go. Dad had tried gently to steer me towards engineering or geology degree courses, on the grounds they would help me get a job in the china clay industry back in Cornwall after I’d graduated. I’d opted for economics because a job in the china clay industry was the last thing I aspired to. I didn’t want to think about returning to Cornwall. I wanted to think about getting out and staying out.

As a child, I believed the spoil heaps on the horizon north of St Austell were natural formations. Later I understood that St Austell’s hinterland was entirely man-made: a weird, out-of-scale moonscape of vast pits worked by huge machines that looked no bigger than my Dinky toys when seen from above; of conical waste mountains dwarfing the terraces of labourers’ cottages; of gleaming blue-green lakes in flooded pits and drying sheds as big as cathedrals; of long, lumbering trainloads of clay trucks heading for Par Docks while Mum and Dad and I sat in the Morris Minor at the level crossing in St Blazey, watching them slowly pass. The china clay blew in storms of fine dust on dry, windy days, or flowed in milky slews of mud on wet ones. It curdled the rivers and bleached the land. It was everywhere.

It was also every other local resident’s employer. St Austell wasn’t just a china clay town. It was
the
china clay town. The industry was dominated by one company, Cornish China Clays, operating out of a large, newly built headquarters easily visible from the playing fields of the grammar school. While I was in the sixth form, we were taken to see the wonders of their IBM computer and tour their research laboratories. We met assorted science graduates recruited from all over the country. The message was clear: this was a modern, efficient, innovative business we
should
think seriously about getting involved in. Absolutely. Just a pity it was in St Austell. Where I had no intention of remaining.

A summer job with CCC sounded too much like being sucked in to me, so, to raise money for the wild time I was determined to have in London, I looked elsewhere. Walter Wren & Co. were a china clay firm right enough, but much smaller and older-fashioned than CCC. And their advert in the
Cornish Guardian
made it clear the vacancy in their office was menial
and
temporary – the perfect combination, as far as I was concerned. Two months would suit them as well as me. I started the job ten days after the end of term.

Wren’s operated out of dilapidated premises in East Hill. Not only were there no research labs or computers, there was little sign that anything much had changed since before the war. Maurice Rowe, the lugubrious, chain-smoking head of accounts I was at the beck and call of, informed me before the end of my first week that the company would be swallowed by CCC sooner or later, so the directors saw no sense in investing in new equipment or procedures. ‘We’re not exactly what you’d call go-ahead.’

That was a serious understatement. The accounts office functioned on manual typewriters, double carbon copies and wooden filing cabinets. It was fortunate for me I didn’t have to spend all day every day there choking on Rowe’s cigarette smoke. There were errands to be run at the so-called shipping office, attached to the firm’s drying shed near the harbour a mile away at Charlestown. I never had to be asked twice to take the van down there. The place was every bit as antiquated as East Hill, but livelier, thanks to all the loading and unloading that went on around it.

Par Docks was CCC territory, so Wren’s and a few other small firms used Charlestown for their shipments. There was no rail access, the harbour was tiny and facilities hadn’t been upgraded since the village was built by local landowner Charles Rashleigh at the end of the eighteenth century. But it was a pretty spot when the sun shone and the sea sparkled. I spent as much time there as I could contrive. Jim Turner, the shipping manager, cordially hated
Maurice
Rowe, so took pleasure in keeping me hanging around. And I never put up much resistance.

Most of the staff were at least twenty years older than I was and behaved as if the gap was even bigger. Exceptions included Polly Hodge, the long-legged accounts typist, who tormented all the men in the office with her micro-mini-skirts but was so wonderfully brainless she never realized it, and Peter Newlove, who was exactly my age and had joined Wren’s at fifteen straight from school (secondary modern, in his case). A whippety lad with a Ringo Starr moustache and an insatiable appetite for Polo mints, he viewed me with a mixture of awe and resentment. University and London were both unimaginable concepts to him. He cultivated me, I think, in the hope that I’d invite him to visit me in the big city after I’d left Wren’s. Naturally, there was no chance I’d ever do that. But he was amusing company during lunchtime forays to his favourite pub, the General Wolfe, at the other end of Fore Street.

Pete pretended not to care what would become of him in a merger with CCC, but his detailed knowledge of feuds and alliances in the Wren family suggested he was pondering the future with some anxiety. George Wren, son of the original Walter, had died a few months previously. His son-in-law, Greville Lashley, was now cock of the walk and was rumoured to be cosying up to the CCC board for all he was worth. He’d married Muriel, George’s daughter and only child, after the death of her first husband, Ken Foster. ‘Suicide,’ Pete gleefully informed me, as if he had some personal knowledge of the event, whereas under questioning he admitted it had happened when he was still at junior school.

Further rumour had it that old George had let the firm’s finances deteriorate to the point where a takeover by CCC was the only way to avoid bankruptcy. Pete was all for it. So were most of the staff, according to him. ‘Provided we get to keep our jobs.’ There was the rub. Lashley would be negotiating to protect himself and the family, not the staff. There was no way to tell how many of them would make it to the promised land with him.

Greville Lashley struck me as a clever, quick-thinking man doing his best in difficult circumstances. Tall, slim and darkly handsome,
with
distinguished wartime service in the RAF behind him, he always dressed immaculately and drove a mirror-polished Jag. If he was staring ruin in the face, you’d never have known it. But that, according to Pete, was just an act. ‘This year’s make or break – for him
and
us.’

The problem, apparently, was that the split of shareholdings in the family meant Lashley couldn’t put through any deal he succeeded in negotiating without support from one of George Wren’s two surviving siblings. There was a brother, Francis, who lived abroad and a sister, Harriet, who shared Nanstrassoe House, the Wren residence in Carlyon Road, with Greville and Muriel Lashley, their young son and Muriel’s two children by her first marriage. Harriet was believed to be opposed to a takeover. Francis’s opinion wasn’t known.

None of this was of more than idle interest to me. Unlike Pete and his co-workers, I had no stake in what happened. I’d soon be on my way to a place where the fate of a small Cornish china clay company was supremely unimportant. Still, it was impossible not to be aware of the intrigue and uncertainty that lay behind the workaday routines at Walter Wren & Co. and Pete made sure I was kept informed about what was reckoned to be going on.

The consensus was that a crisis was looming. But how long it would go on merely looming was unclear. ‘You’ll probably have left by the time it comes to a crunch,’ Pete speculated. ‘But don’t worry. I’ll tell you all about it when you come home for Christmas.’ In my own mind, I felt sure I wouldn’t be the least bit interested by then. I’d forget all about Walter Wren & Co. as soon as I got on the train to London on Sunday, 22 September. Oh yes. I already knew the date when I’d be putting St Austell behind me. And it couldn’t come fast enough.

The reality, of course, was that it would come when it came and no sooner. Meanwhile, there was a summer to be enjoyed and I was going to do my best to enjoy it, humdrum working days notwithstanding. And, as it turned out, the crisis Pete had predicted didn’t wait until after I’d gone to break.

The first sign of its imminence came one damp Tuesday afternoon in the middle of August, though at the time its significance was lost on me. I’d just driven back in the van from Charlestown. As I turned into the small yard behind Wren’s, I had to slam on the brakes to avoid a collision with a boy who darted out of the back door of the offices and ran straight across my path, heading for the road. He didn’t even seem to notice me and was gone in a flash. All I remembered of him was jeans, a white shirt and a mop of blond hair. But that description was enough to identify him in Accounts and to elicit a frisson of unease that I found distinctly puzzling.

‘Oliver Foster,’ Maurice tartly informed me. Ah, of course. One of the two children of Muriel Lashley’s first marriage. He’d looked about fifteen, which probably made sense. ‘He’s been making a nuisance of himself. Don’t encourage him. He’s a pain in the neck.’

Mutterings from Pete while we were at the tea urn later suggested there was more to be learnt for the price of a lager and lime (his drink of choice) at the General Wolfe at opening time. As he’d probably calculated, I was bored enough to relish any gossip. So, just a little after opening time, off we went.

Oliver and his sister, Vivien, had been sent to private boarding schools outside the county. Not much was seen of them in St Austell. They were both home for the summer and Vivien was about to go up to Cambridge. ‘That outranks London, doesn’t it, Jon?’ Pete observed. (I’d tried to stop him calling me Jon, which no one else did, without success.) ‘Her and Olly are a brainy pair, apparently.’

Exactly what Oliver might be applying his brain to at Wren’s was unclear, but evidently Lashley had sent his secretary, the formidable Joan Winkworth, down to the basement, where records dating back to the company’s formation in 1895 were stored, to fetch something shortly after his return from lunch. Joan had come upon young Oliver searching through the files. He’d scooted off without explanation. She’d reported back to Lashley, who’d reacted by issuing an instruction that the basement door should be kept locked in future, with the key in Joan’s keeping, and emphasizing that no non-staff members were to be allowed the run of the
premises.
By implication, the ban applied to his stepson as much as to anyone else.