Deception and Desire (38 page)

Since Van's background was in leather, that was an obvious starting point; to it she added her own love of the natural. Searching through countless glossy magazines, scribbling and sketching the ideas for bags and belts that came to her then and at the oddest moments – in the bath, cooking dinner, even, sometimes, in bed – she was at last able to forget her baby, at first for minutes, then hours, then eventually days at a time. At first she was shy and reluctant to show her sketches to Van, and she remembered with a twinge of poignancy how ready she had been when she had first known him to share her inspirations. Now she felt curiously protective, both of them and of herself, as if she was afraid they might suffer the same rejection as Stephen. Perhaps, she thought, it was simply that it was much more important now that Van should like her ideas, because on them the future was to be based; in her heart, though, she acknowledged it was more. Last time around she hadn't known how ruthless Van could be. Now she had first-hand experience of it and she had been left with the bruises.

Van's reaction when she showed him the first set of sketches seemed to bear out her fears. He was at best noncommittal, at worst dismissive.

‘They are run-of-the-mill. Not original enough.'

‘They are original!'

‘Not so as you'd notice. There are belts just like that on market stalls all over the place.'

‘I've never seen any!'

‘Try going to Portugal, or one of the Greek islands. They're good quality, some of them, too.'

Dinah tried not to be hurt. She went away and tried again, letting her imagination run riot. But this time Van's reaction was even less encouraging.

‘Oh my God, Dinah, what have we got here?'

‘You said to be original,' she said defensively.

‘Yes, but these are completely over the top. Where the hell would you find a market for these – apart from Carnaby Street, perhaps? Can you imagine anyone actually carrying that bag? And we've got to make the stuff, remember. Plaited leather is all very well, but … What we want is something simple but exclusive to us. A sort of trademark, to stamp our identity in the minds of the public right from the beginning. Do you understand?'

Dinah nodded. She understood. It was just that she was beginning to lose faith in her ability to do what he wanted. For days the new ideas she needed refused to come, she walked around in a daze, she wept, she pummelled her head with her fists. She thought she was going mad, or having a nervous breakdown, or both. When she could bear the four walls of the house around her no longer she went out for a walk, hoping that the fresh air would blow the cobwebs away but finding to her frustration that the cotton-wool cloud enveloping her had gone along too.

It's no good – I just can't do it! she thought. Oh please, please, let me have just one little inspiration, one really good idea, just to show Van I
can
do it!

Afterwards Dinah always remembered that moment in absolute detail, for it seemed to be the beginning of everything. One moment a sense of helplessness was choking her, the next she looked down and saw a grass snake, its movement a perfect graceful curve through the scrubby grass. It was there so briefly and then gone, but in her mind's eye she could see it still – the markings on its skin, the fluid way it moved. Dinah caught her lip between her teeth; the idea was not just taking shape but exploding in her brain so fast she didn't know if she could catch it.

For the first time for weeks she had gone out without pencil and paper. She hurried home, thoughts racing. When Van came in from the factory at six that evening he found the back door – and all the other doors in the house – wide open, with the exception of the smallest bedroom, which Dinah had taken to using as a den.

‘Dinah, are you all right?' he called anxiously.

Dinah was sitting in the middle of the floor surrounded by pages from her sketch pad. She looked up and smiled, that wonderful come-alive smile that could make his heart turn over.

‘I think I've got it,' she said, and he knew from her tone that this time she probably had. But he exercised caution all the same.

‘Tell me.'

‘Come and see!' She pulled him down on to the floor beside her. ‘You see this little grass snake? He's our trademark. See how beautiful he is? He curves into the buckle for a belt and his tail flicks to make a join at the back. Or he can decorate a bag, or even make a clasp. I know you don't want to do shoes, but if you did you could put him around the back of the heel – like this – and if ever, ever, we could get our own fabric printed I'd work him into the design for a silk scarf. Now – what do you think? Don't you think I'm brilliant?'

He had to smile then too. The idea
was
brilliant, exactly what he had been looking for. But he didn't want her to get too carried away.

‘Well done,' he said, with more restraint than he was feeling. ‘Yes, I think that is one we can use.'

Van decided they would trade under an amalgam of their two names – Vandina. Their logo was the grass snake and their slogan was ‘A Touch of the Country'. Van had dreamed that up and Dinah had greeted it with all the enthusiasm he had denied her.

They made the belts in the barn which Van had converted into a makeshift workroom, and to begin with they employed a staff of one.

Fred Lockyear had been with Kendricks from the time he was demobbed from the army in 1945 until he retired, six months previously, at the age of sixty-five. He was a solid and reliable, if unimaginative, craftsman, and he was only too pleased to oblige when Van visited him and suggested he might come out of retirement to work a few hours a week for the new enterprise.

‘To tell you the truth I'm bored stiff stuck at home,' he told Van. ‘The missus complains I'm under her feet all the time – and I could do with earning a few bob to help make my pension go a bit further.'

When it came to cutting and stitching Fred's hand was as steady as it had ever been, and Dinah took over for the artistic snake emblems which Fred referred to as ‘the twiddly bits'.

Van handled the marketing himself. There was no way they could mass produce the belts, and in any case Van did not want to. Their very exclusivity was their selling point – the fact that each was handmade and slightly different. Van went direct to the big London stores, Harrods and Harvey Nichols and Swan and Edgar, and came home with his order book full. Fred and Dinah worked flat out to fill the orders – and within a week the stores were back requesting repeat orders and a sight of any new lines Vandina might produce.

Scenting success, Van sent Dinah to her little studio to refine some more of her ideas ready for production, and Fred brought in his daughter, Mandy – who had also worked for Kendricks before leaving to get married and start a family and who was now glad of the chance of a few hours' work a week – and a cousin, similarly placed, who had been a glove machinist.

‘I feel I'm being overrun by Lockyears!' Dinah confided to Van, but she did not mind. They were all good workers, and besides, the cousin's previous work experience had given Dinah another idea – why not gloves? With the help of the cousin, a plump, jolly woman named Marian, she designed a glove with the trademark snake worked in stitching at the wrist.

Glove-making required a different machine. Van went to see the bank manager and arranged for a loan to cover the capital expenditure, and the gloves went into production. Once again, they were a huge success, and since some of the work on them could be done at home, by hand, Marian suggested that some of her former colleagues could be employed as outworkers. In between designing and stitching her ‘twiddly bits' Dinah found herself parcelling half-made gloves for the outworkers to collect, checking their handiwork and keeping records.

Now there were simply not enough hours in the day – she was up with the dawn and scarcely ever in bed before the small hours. She did not mind the hard work – being fully occupied meant she had no time for fretting over Stephen – but there were times when she felt she was being dragged away from what she did best: planning and designing. Vandina was, she thought, a little like Frankenstein's monster – it seemed to have acquired a life of its own, taking her over body and soul.

Christian Senior was becoming awkward too. Like everyone else he believed that the baby had been stillborn and at first he had viewed his son's enterprise, with a certain amused indulgence, thinking it a harmless amateur operation to give Dinah something to occupy herself and keep her mind off her tragic loss. But as Vandina grew and prospered, with Van still handling the marketing and accounting himself, he began to feel less kindly towards it.

‘You are spending too much time fart-assing about,' he told Van bluntly. ‘You're hardly ever in your office these days. All you seem to think about is Dinah's damn-fool fripperies.'

‘Dinah's fripperies, as you call them, are doing very well indeed.'

The old man snorted. ‘A flash in the pan. You'd better stop to think which side your bread is buttered.'

‘That is exactly what I am thinking of. I'm looking to the future, and I don't believe it lies in industrial footwear.'

‘Industrial footwear pays your salary.'

‘For how much longer? I've been telling you for years – working conditions are changing. But you won't listen to me. You're too damned blinkered. You refused to sanction any changes at the factory, so I've taken it into my own hands.'

‘At the expense of what I pay you to do!' Christian was becoming angry. Reluctant though he was to admit it, he was experiencing the first niggling doubts that Van might be right; the orders for industrial footwear
were
falling, not disastrously – yet – but certainly the pads were no longer as full as they had once been and it was a long while since the machines had worked at full stretch. The trend worried Christian, but it was not in his nature to admit he might have been wrong, even when the evidence was staring him in the face. Instead he reacted as he always did when doubts assailed him – by digging himself into a yet more entrenched position.

‘As far as I am concerned you have two choices,' he growled. ‘Either give my company your undivided attention or else get out.'

Van was shocked. He had not expected it to come to this. But he could be as stubborn as his father – and as convinced that he was in the right.

‘Very well,' he said calmly. ‘If that's what you want.'

‘Dammit, Christian, it's
not
what I want! You know that. I built this firm up from nothing – when I retire I want you to take over.'

‘Then let me do things my way.'

‘Van Kendricks make working boots. It's what we are known for.'

‘Correction – it's what
you
are known for. I am going to be known for high-quality fashion, made to Dinah's designs.'

The old man's patience finally snapped.

‘Then damn well get on and do it.'

‘I will,' Van said coolly.

‘But don't come running to me when the bank calls in your loans and you can't keep a roof over your head. I won't bail you out and you might as well know it. And don't think you can manage your wild schemes on my time. You're fired!'

‘Very well,' Van said. ‘But just remember you are the one who made the decision, not me.'

He went straight to his office and cleared his desk. The quarrel had left a bad taste in his mouth, but at the same time he felt exhilarated with a wonderful sense of freedom. For too long he had been crown-prince-in-waiting. For too long he had had to work in his father's shadow and he had known, deep down, that that would never change. The old man would not retire and leave him to run things his way. Even if he came to the factory less and handed over control nominally it would still be his hand on the reins. Van felt a huge surge of freedom, and with it excitement. From here on in he would be his own man.

It was not, of course, quite as easy or trouble-free as it sounded.

A production company with just a handful of employees operating out of a converted barn as an innovative sideline was one thing – transforming it into a profitable business that would keep him and Dinah in the manner to which they were accustomed was quite another. It had to grow, and grow quickly, if it was to survive, increasing output and turnover many times over. But it had to grow in the right way. Not for Vandina a descent into mass marketing. Exclusivity was its life's blood.

Over long days and longer nights Van evolved a two-pronged strategy.

On the one hand he set about looking for premises that would accommodate a much larger operation; on the other he explored the avenues for market expansion.

The question of premises was solved more quickly and easily than he had dared hope – a local firm who had made electrical components had recently gone into liquidation and Van was able to secure the lease on the factory space and warehousing for what he considered a reasonable outlay. It would have to be gutted and re-equipped, of course, and in order to raise the necessary finance Van had to be able to produce plans and forecasts for vastly increased turnover and profitability.

In some ways it was a classic chicken-and-egg situation but Van revelled in the challenge of it. He left Dinah to make the necessary marketing approaches to the most exclusive British suburban stores and took off on a whistle-stop tour of the shopping capitals of the world, a Gladstone bag containing samples in one hand, an order book in the other.

Three weeks later he was back. Buyers in all the major stores had enthused over ‘A Touch of the Country'. He had gained important orders in New York; Bostonians, wooed by the exclusivity, were enchanted. A boutique chain with outlets in the most glamorous shopping malls throughout the Far East had placed a sizeable order – guests at the luxurious Peninsula in Hong Kong, visitors to Penang, Singapore and the Philippines would be able to buy Vandina belts, gloves and wallets. Van had also approached the glossy magazines about advertising – better one horrendously expensive advert in American
Vogue
than a dozen in the cheaper, more down-market publications. And it had already paid dividends – the advert had sparked interest in the editorial department and there was talk of a feature on the new, very English, very exclusive Vandina.