An Ocean Apart (59 page)

The fuse blew in his head and, fuelled by the resultant overload of anger and hatred, he moved so fast around the table that Duncan had no time to get out of his chair. David pulled back his fist as he approached him, and the man cowered away, clamping his hands to his head to protect himself from the blow. He swung with all his force at the side of Duncan's head, but just as he was expecting to feel the satisfying crunch of hard knuckle against soft cheek-bone, his hand was caught inches short of its target in Dougie's rock-hard palm.

“No, Davie!”

David turned to look through his blurred vision into Dougie's face.

“It would'na help, laddie. It just would'na help.”

David turned away, and pulling his hands across his head, he walked to the far end of the boardroom and let out an anguished cry.

“Oh, no, Pa! Oh, no, no, no!”

He looked up at the painting that hung above the fireplace and stood, for a time indeterminable, staring into the kind, gentle face of his father. His eyes watched him, his smile enveloped him, and it slowly began to dawn on him that his mother had been right. The old man had picked his time. He had done all that he could, and he had clung on long enough to make sure that his son was there to carry on.

He turned. There was no one in the boardroom. The chairs were left pushed away from the table. It was all over. Glendurnich was unequivocally back in the hands of the Inchelvie family.

Chapter
  
THIRTY-FIVE

As the haunting strains of “The Dark Island,” played by a piper from the First Battalion, The Highlanders, skirled distantly from the hill above Dalnachoil, George, Fourth Lord of Inchelvie, was silently laid to rest in the grave next to his daughter-in-law. Not a sound was heard from the village, not a car driven through, as every one of the inhabitants of Dalnachoil, along with all the employees of Glendurnich Distilleries Ltd., were present at the funeral, packed into every available space in the tiny churchyard.

As the minister finished reading out the final dedication, David dropped the cord into the grave and looked up from where he stood at its foot to give the signal to the other bearers to stand down. With a long bow of his head, he turned and walked back to his mother's side, taking her gloved hand in his and giving it a reassuring squeeze. Sophie, who had been standing behind, holding hard to Charlie and Harriet, stepped forward, so that the Inchelvie household stood in line in front of the grave. Then, each giving a final bow of his head, they turned and made their way through the gravestones towards the path that led down to the gate.

When he reached the path, David stopped and looked over at his mother. “It's better to do it now,” he said quietly. “Much better here than back at Inchelvie.”

His mother looked round at the gathering and nodded. “Yes, you're probably right. What about the locals? Do you mind them hearing?”

David shook his head. “They've as much a right to hear what I'm going to say as any.” He smiled at his mother. “It'll give them something to talk about at any rate.”

He stepped away from her and walked back towards the grave. Everyone was looking at him. “If you could all just bear with me for a minute!” he called out at the top of his voice.

The grave-diggers, who were readying themselves to finish off their task, pushed their spades back into the soil and returned to lean their backs against the churchyard wall. David waited until the querying whispers had died down before he started.

“I had planned to say this to you all back at Inchelvie after the service, and I hope therefore you don't think it improper of me speaking to you here, especially in the context of what has just taken place. Nevertheless, both my mother and I think it apt that this should be said before the final curtain has been brought down on my father's life, because we both are certain that he would have wanted to hear what I am about to say.”

He cleared his throat.

“I know that many of you here are not employees of Glendurnich, and even though I am specifically addressing them, I think it only right that everyone knows and understands the implications of what I am going to say and how important it is for the future of our community.”

He paused as a gust of wind blew through the churchyard, rustling the leaves on the trees.

“You know, I consider myself incredibly fortunate to live up here in Scotland. We have a way of life, or what they now term ‘a quality of life,' which is the envy of many in other parts of this country. But things are not always what they seem, as we all well know. We are a remote nation, especially up here in the north, but that remoteness only helps to strengthen the bond of belonging within our communities. We all look after each other—and we all respect each other, and this could be no more apparent than it is right now, with you all being present here—and I thank you for that from the bottom of my heart, not only for the support you have given my family today, but also for the care and understanding that you have shown towards myself over the past months.

“However, the consequences of remoteness can be fickle. Whereas it can bring us together, it can as easily split us apart, and this is nowadays all too dependent on what employment is available. We do what we can up here, we do with what's available, otherwise there is no option but to pack up and move into the cities where there are more jobs. And that is what erodes our communities. So, it is therefore essential that we protect for ourselves every available source of established employment—and Glendurnich is no exception.”

David stopped for a moment and thrust his hands into the pockets of his kilt jacket.

“Last Friday, the employees of Glendurnich were called to a meeting to be briefed on the proposed buyout of the company by a London-based corporate called Kirkpatrick Holdings Public Limited Company. The reason for this was that the employees, in total, own thirty-one per cent of the shares of Glendurnich, as the result of a stock-purchase plan set up by my father twenty-five years ago. Now I know that, to many of you, the idea of being able to cash in on this might seem extremely attractive, but what I want to put to you is that it could be a very short-lived bonus.

“What you must understand is that Glendurnich is almost unique up here. It is entirely independent, and at present it holds a significant share of the malt-whisky market world-wide. For over one hundred years now, we have never stopped producing whisky. Yet this industry is cyclical, which means that we do have periods of feast and famine, and I can tell you that I have seen what happens to small corporate-owned whisky companies in times of famine. They become a statistic. They become a minus figure on the wrong side of the balance sheet, and because they are only of minor importance to the actual company that owns them, they get closed down. Maybe not for ever—maybe just for a year or two, until demand rises again—but nevertheless they get closed down. And everyone loses his job.

“No one has ever lost his job at Glendurnich through redundancy, and, by rejecting the offer from Kirkpatrick's, I am going to make damned sure that it never will happen. Now, I'm not doing this for any selfish reason, or just for the good of my family, but for you, all of you being the extended family at Glendurnich. Your welfare is as important to me”—he turned and gestured with his hand towards his mother and his three children standing on the path—“as that of my own family, and that is why I could never live with myself if, say in five or ten years' time, I witnessed the closing down of the distillery and the subsequent loss of your jobs.”

He paused and looked around the faces, trying to judge from their expression whether he had said enough to convince them.

“Now, I'm not going to say anything further at the moment, and I am certainly not going to ask you for your opinion on the matter right now, because it is neither the time nor place. Nevertheless, for those of you who would like to discuss this further, I am setting up a committee at Glendurnich, and I think it appropriate that that committee should be a true representation of the distillery as a whole. It will therefore consist of myself, Dougie Masson and Archie McLachlan, representing the board, the distillery workers and office workers respectively.”

David cast his eyes to the ground for a moment before looking up again.

“That's it. Now, please, I do want you all to come back to Inchelvie where we can have a good few drams of Glendurnich malt and celebrate in style the life of a great man. And talking of which, I think by now you will understand the reason why I chose to speak to you here. Because in everything that I have just said, you would have heard exactly the same from my father.”

David watched as sombre heads began to nod in agreement. As they turned their eyes back to the corner of the graveyard where his father had been laid to rest, David nodded briefly to the grave-diggers, and they stepped forward and began to shovel earth into the grave.

He turned and walked back to his mother and put his arms around her. “I'm sorry. That was a bit longwinded. Maybe I shouldn't have done it here after all.”

His mother pushed herself away from him and smiled up into his face. “Darling, you were wonderful, and your timing was perfect. You said it all. Only your father could have said it with so much feeling.”

She looked back towards the grave where the pile of earth was fast diminishing. “There are two people over there, David, lying side by side, who would be so proud of what you have just done.”

David smiled at her, then took hold of her hand and together they walked down to the gate where the children stood waiting for them.

*   *   *

Just before six o'clock that evening, David helped the last of the workers climb unsteadily into the hired coach, and stood watching as the laden vehicle lumbered off down the drive. He turned to make his way back to the front door, but then hesitated, and instead walked across the gravel to the gate that led into the front garden. He pushed it open and rounded the high hedge to view, for the first time since he had returned, the new rose garden. It was in full bloom, every one of the bushes having taken root, despite the appalling conditions under which they were planted. David smiled to himself. Appalling conditions. God, how true
that
was, not only in terms of weather, but of circumstances as well. He walked along the grass path that ran between the borders, every so often reaching over to pluck off a deadhead. It had worked out just as he had planned. Every ounce of effort that he had put into it had come to fruition. And it was all for Rachel. The perfect memorial, representing, in every way, her pure, unadulterated beauty.

He bent down and dug his fingers deep into the earth around the roots of a lone dandelion, feeling the cool stickiness of it against the skin on his hand, so different from the warmth of the light, sandy soil to which he had become so accustomed in Leesport. He threw it onto the grass beside him, then rolled up a lump of earth into a tiny ball between his fingers. Two gardens so different, yet linking two women so alike, and even though one had touched his life for only a fragment of the time of the other, he knew that he would never be able to forget either.

Chapter
  
THIRTY-SIX

The wind and rain drove hard against the windows of the offices of Culpepper Rowan, causing the water to run in diagonal streaks across the tinted glass before settling in the sheltered crevices at the side. Jennifer stood with her arms crossed and her head resting against the cold pane as she gazed vacantly down onto the traffic far below on Fifth Avenue. It was only three in the afternoon, but the sky was so heavy with dark, scudding clouds that the cars were already driving with their headlights on. It all looked so depressing. Thank God it was only two weeks to the beginning of May, and then everything would hopefully transform to sunshine and warmth. Summer would be here.

But there again, it would be only the weather that would change. Not her life. As far as that was concerned, it might just as well be winter all the time—cold, colourless and dismal. It had been that way since November, when Alex had eventually left, and even before that, the effort of trying to work things out with him had been more stressful to deal with than his subsequent departure.

She turned from the window and went over to her desk and, slumping down in her chair, she reached forward and scrolled through the page on her laptop. She laughed scathingly to herself.
THE
page! That was all she had written. She was supposed to have finished the damned proposal by that evening, but every ounce of creative adrenaline had deserted her. It was as if her brain were swimming in syrup.

She guided the arrow up to the “save” option, then shut down her computer, gently closing the lid and sitting back in her chair. She just couldn't concentrate any more. And it seemed to be getting worse.

She pushed her chair away from the desk and stood up, and as she made her way back to the window, there was a brief knock on her door and Sam entered. “Hi!” he said, clapping his hands together. “Just wanted to find out how you were doing on the proposal.”

Jennifer glanced at him, then turned away to look out of the window.

“Not good, huh?” he said morosely.

Jennifer shook her head.

“Well, tell you what, I'll get Russ to have a look at it. I think we should try to get something faxed to them by this evening.” He walked over to her desk and picked up her telephone. “Yeah, Russ, it's Sam. Could you come to Jennifer's office? Thanks.”

He replaced the receiver and came over to stand beside Jennifer, leaning his back against the window and pushing his hands into his pockets.

“You're not feeling too good, are you?”

“I'm sorry, Sam. I haven't been much use to you over the past six months, have I?”

Sam reached out and took hold of her arm. “Come on, you've said that before. You've done just fine. Things have been pretty difficult for you, and I can live with that. You'll get back into the swing of things soon enough.”