Old Sins (10 page)

‘Planning to try, though.’

‘Not at all. Simply trying to make the company a little more cost effective. And Susan, this really is none of your business. I don’t think you should get involved in wage negotiations. You can’t begin to understand any of it.’

Susan eyed him contemptuously. ‘Don’t lie to me, Mr Morell. And don’t insult me either. I understand all about it and I think it’s disgusting. There you sit, you and your mother, in your charming little house in your posh little street, driving around in your smart cars, complaining that you can’t get any decent champagne, and that Harrods won’t deliver before nine o’clock in the morning, and you begrudge a few women the chance to get their kids a new pair of shoes before the last ones actually fall to pieces. Some of those bloody women, as you call them, haven’t had a decent meal in months; some of them are doing two jobs, filling your rotten bottles in the day, and doing factory cleaning at night, just so they can stay in their homes and not get turned out for not paying the rent. Some of them have got three kids and no husband, they either didn’t come home because they’d been killed, or they went off with some popsie they met while they were away, while the poor stupid
loyal wives stayed at home, minding the baby and saving themselves for the hero’s return. Just do me a favour, Mr Morell, and find out what life’s really like. Try living on a quarter, an eighth of what you’ve got, and see how you get on. You wouldn’t last a day. Come on, Jenny, we’re going home.’

She turned and walked out; Julian looked after her appalled, and then turned to Jim, who had a strange expression of admiration and trepidation on his face. ‘What the hell do I do with her now? Fire her?’

‘I don’t think you’ll get a chance to fire her,’ said Jim. ‘Your problem will be persuading her to stay.’

‘I don’t want her to stay,’ said Julian, scowling. ‘That was bloody, outrageous, rude, inexcusable behaviour. How dare she talk to me like that?’

‘She’d dare talk to anybody like that,’ said Jim. ‘She’s got guts, that girl. And besides, it was true. All of it. Those women do have a dreadful life, some of them. And you don’t even begin to know what it’s like for them.’

‘Oh, rubbish,’ said Julian wearily. ‘Who created the opportunity for them to work in the first place? Me. Who risked everything, to get the company going? Me. Who works all night whenever it’s necessary? I do. Who drives the length of the country, until I’m practically dead at the wheel? Don’t you take up all that pinko claptrap, Jim. Someone should give people like me some credit for a change.’

‘Why?’ said Jim. ‘Why should they? You enjoy it. Every bloody moment of it. And she’s right, that girl, you may work very hard, but you enjoy a standard of living most people can’t even begin to imagine. And you have the satisfaction of knowing all the work you put in is building up your own company. You don’t need any credit. You have plenty of other things. Now if you’ve got any sense you’ll go after the lass and apologize. Or you’ll lose one of the two best people you’ve got in your company.’

He grinned suddenly. Julian scowled at him again.

‘Oh, all right. But she can’t go on talking to me like that. Well, not in public anyway. She’s got to learn to draw the line. I won’t have it.’

‘Oh, stop being so pompous, man, and get a move on. She’ll be on her bus by now and you’ll never see her again.’

Susan was indeed on the bus, but Julian’s car was waiting for her outside the shabby little house in Acton when she struggled wearily along with the children an hour later. He got out and walked towards her.

‘Piss off.’

‘Look,’ said Julian, ‘I came to apologize, to say I’m sorry I offended you. There’s no need for that.’

‘There’s every need. I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t want to have any more to do with you. I should never have got involved in the first place. I don’t like your sort and I never will. So just go away and leave me alone. And pay me for the work I’ve done this week.’

‘Susan,’ said Julian, surprising himself with his own patience, ‘my sort, as you put it, is giving you the chance of a lifetime. To get out of this miserable dump and make something of yourself.’

‘Don’t you call my home a dump.’

‘It’s not your home, and it is a dump. Working for me, you can have your own home, and lots of other things too. A career. A life of your own, that you can be proud of. Think of Jenny and Sheila. A good education.’

‘If you’re suggesting I’d want to send them to some bloody private school you can forget it. I wouldn’t have them associating with those sorts of kids.’

‘No, of course I don’t,’ said Julian, encouraged that she had moved outside her outrage and into a more abstract argument. ‘But you can live in the sort of area where the schools are better. You can buy them books. Send them abroad in due course. Let them choose their own destinies. And,’ he added with a dash of inspired deviousness, ‘show them what women can do. On their own. Make them proud of you. Set them an example.’

Susan looked at him and smiled grudgingly. ‘You’re a clever bastard. All right. I’ll stay. But only if you give the outworkers a rise.’

‘Can’t afford it.’

‘Of course you can.’

‘Susan, I can’t. Ask my mother.’

‘OK. But as soon as you can then.’

Julian sighed. ‘All right. It’s a deal. But I certainly didn’t think I’d find a trade union in my own company at this stage.’

‘Well, you didn’t think you’d be working with someone like me. Do you want to come in and have a cup of tea?’

‘No thanks. I’m –’ He had been about to say ‘going out to dinner’ but stopped himself. ‘Going home. I’m late already, and I’ve got a very early start. Good night Susan. See you tomorrow.’

‘Good night. And –’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, thanks. Sorry I was rude.’

‘That’s all right. You’d better get those children to bed.’

He drove away feeling curiously disturbed. It wasn’t until he was getting into bed after an excellent dinner with Letitia and an old school friend that he realized that the intense outrage and anger Susan had caused him had been mingled with another sensation altogether. It was sexual desire.

Morell’s Indigestion Treatment, as Julian finally called it (the name implying something more medically ethical and ongoing in its benefits than simply an antacid tablet), was a huge success. All the chemists who already stocked the cough linctus took it immediately, recommended it to their customers, and ordered more. Printed on the cardboard pill boxes, under the name, was the message ‘Keeps the misery of indigestion away’ and on the bottom of the box was a helpful little paragraph instructing sufferers to take the tablets before the pain struck, not to wait until afterwards, as it doubled the efficiency of the medication that way.

Within weeks orders had doubled, trebled, quadrupled; Julian was physically unable to deal with the deliveries, and hired two salesmen/drivers (in whom he invested sufficient time and money to enable them to talk to the chemists with at least a modicum of authority), and Jim and Susan were equally unable to cope with the manufacture, and to oversee the filling and packaging arrangements. The company acquired a second building in Ealing, twice the size of the first, and invested the whole of the year’s profits paying builders and laboratory outfitters double time to get it operational in a month. Over half the women outworkers were taken on full time in the new
factory and Susan Johns became, at the end of her first year, factory manager. It meant she no longer did much of the laboratory work, but Jim had two other assistants working almost full time on research and manufacture, and Susan’s real talent was for administration, not formulation.

She and Letitia were a formidable team; Letitia found Susan not only interesting but challenging to work with, she had a mind like a razor, a great capacity for hard work and, even more unusually, an ability to exact a similar dedication from other people. Letitia liked her, too; she found her honesty, her courage, and her absolute refusal to accept anything without questioning it, interesting and engaging, and she was slightly surprised to find herself amused, rather than irritated by the way Susan regarded Julian with just a very slight degree of contempt. This was entirely missing from the attitude Susan had towards her. She liked Letitia enormously, and rather to her own surprise found her blatant snobbery amusing and unimportant; probably, she told herself, because it was so blatant. ‘She’s honest about it,’ she said once to Julian when he teased her about it, ‘she’s not a hypocrite, she doesn’t go round patronizing everyone, pretending she thinks everyone’s equal, she really believes they aren’t. Well, that’s all right. She’s entitled to her own opinion.’ Julian laughed, and told her she was a hypocrite herself, but she was unmoved; Letitia was her heroine, she admired her brain, enjoyed her guts and her sense of fun and was constantly delighted by the fresh thinking and innovative approach Letitia brought to the company. Letitia was fascinated by new financial systems; she spent hours reading reports from big companies, she lunched with financial analysts and accountants, and hardly a week went by before she introduced some new piece of sophisticated accountancy, and drove Julian almost to distraction by constantly updating and changing her methods.

‘I really can’t see what’s wrong with the way you’ve done things so far, Mother,’ he said slightly fretfully one evening, as he arrived home exhausted after a long session with the buyer for a chain of chemists in the West Country and found her deep in conversation with Susan over the latest refinements to her system and the effect it was going to have on the next year’s wage structure. ‘I spend my life trying to follow your books and
work out fairly crucial basic things like how much money we’ve got in the bank and I have to plough through three ledgers before I know if it’s OK to buy myself a sandwich.’

‘Well, I can always tell you that,’ said Susan briskly. ‘I understand all the financial systems perfectly well. And buying anything, even sandwiches, is my job, not yours. So there really isn’t any problem.’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Letitia. ‘Susan’s quite right, Julian, you just stick to your part of the operation and let us worry about ours. If Susan can cope with my systems, then it doesn’t matter if you can’t.’

‘Well thanks a lot,’ said Julian tetchily, pouring himself a large whisky. ‘I had no idea I played such a small part in this organization. You two seem to have something of a conspiracy going. Do let me know when I’m to be allowed to do something more challenging than planning the salesmen’s journeys.’

‘Oh, don’t be childish,’ said Letitia, ‘you’re obviously hungry. It always makes him fractious,’ she added to Susan. ‘Why don’t you take both of us out to dinner? Then we can try and explain whatever it is you don’t understand, and I can put in my request for a new accounts clerk at the same time.’

‘Dear God,’ said Julian, ‘your department will be the biggest in the company soon, Mother. What on earth do you need a clerk for?’

‘To do a lot of tedious repetitive work, so that I can get on with something more constructive.’

‘I think you’re just empire building,’ said Julian, laughing suddenly. ‘It’s a conspiracy between you and Susan to get more and more people employed in the company, and keep my wages bill so high I never make a profit. Isn’t that right, Susan?’

‘Well, people are the best investment,’ said Susan, very serious as always when her political beliefs were called into a conversation. ‘And there’s no virtue in profit for its own sake.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Julian. ‘Come out to dinner with Mother and me and I’ll show you the virtue of spending a bit of it.’

‘No, honestly I can’t,’ said Susan, ‘I must go home. It’s getting late.’

‘Well at least can I give you a lift?’

‘No, it’s all right, thanks.’

‘Well, let me get you a taxi.’

‘No. Really. It doesn’t take that long from here by bus.’

‘Susan, it takes hours,’ said Letitia. ‘For heaven’s sake, let Julian take you home.’

‘Oh, all right. I would be grateful.’

Julian looked at her. She seemed terribly tired. She was basically in far better health than she had been, and was altogether strikingly changed; she had filled out from her painful thinness, she had been able to buy herself a few nice clothes, she had had her hair cut properly, the cheap perm was gone and so was the peroxide rinse, and she wore it swinging straight and shining, a beautiful nut brown, just clear of her shoulders; her skin looked clear and creamy instead of pasty and grey. But the biggest change in her was the air of confidence she carried about with her. He could see it in her clear blue eyes, hear it in her voice, watch it as she walked, taller, more purposefully.

‘That girl,’ Letitia had said, looking at her across the factory one day, ‘is turning out to be something of a beauty.’

‘Yes,’ said Julian, ‘I know.’

She had looked at him sharply, but his face was blank, his attention totally fixed apparently on some orders. Thank God, she thought, that would never, ever do.

‘Tell you what,’ said Julian as the car pulled out into the Brompton Road and headed for Hammersmith Broadway, ‘how would you like a car to use? You could have one of the vans, we’ve got a spare, and it would make such a difference to you.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly,’ said Susan. ‘Company car? Not my sort of thing, Mr Morell.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, why not?’ said Julian irritably. ‘I’d like it even if you didn’t. I’m always either worrying or feeling guilty about you, or having to drive you home.’

‘Good,’ said Susan, ‘helps keep you in touch with reality.’ But she was smiling.

‘Look,’ said Julian, ‘if you like, if it’ll make you feel any better, you can pay me for the use of it. A bit. Give me what you pay on bus fares. And do the odd delivery, if it fits in. You work such long hours, Susan, you really do deserve it. And it would help with getting the kids to the minder in the morning. Go on.’

‘No,’ said Susan, ‘honestly I couldn’t. I may deserve it, but I
can’t afford it. I can’t afford to buy a car for myself, I mean. And so I don’t think it’s right for me to have one I’m not paying for. It would make me feel uncomfortable. And what would the other girls think?’