Fault Line - Retail (28 page)

If so, I resolved to tell her, if I got the chance, she should go easy on herself. If there was guilt to be borne, there were other shoulders besides hers to bear it, mine included. I went back to the Freelander, drove it to the other side of the yard and reversed into a position between the milling shed and the slope up to the settling tanks. I couldn’t be seen from the approach road there, but I still had a clear view of the caravan. With any luck, Vivien would have no idea when she returned that anyone was waiting for her, least of all me.

I wound down the window and let the cool, moist air waft into the car. Memories drifted in with it: of my childhood in St Austell; of the day at Charlestown when I’d met Oliver and Vivien Foster for the very first time; of Oliver’s body floating in the lake at Relurgis Pit; of Vivien as she’d been the following summer on Capri; of Vivien
and
me as we’d been then; and of our fractious parting at the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome.

Pete would have been amused to know how certain I felt then that I’d never end up working in the china clay industry. But certainty has a habit of being confounded by experience. I suppose that’s the process we call living.

Most of the living I did at university scored higher in fecklessness and self-indulgence than it did in career-focused academic attainment. The result was that I was still living in Walworth, though in crummier accommodation even than the house I’d shared with Robin and Terry and the others, several months after graduating with a third-class degree. I was working as a porter at St Thomas’s Hospital and trying to persuade myself, in the teeth of ample evidence to the contrary, that my on–off relationship with one of the nurses might amount to something serious in the end.

To say I was surprised when Greville Lashley tracked me down
at
the hospital one day would be a gigantic understatement. He was in London chasing a contract and didn’t want to pass up the chance, he explained over a pub lunch, of reminding me there was always an opening for me at CCC. Nor, he emphasized, did such an opening have to be in Cornwall. CCC was expanding all the time. I’d have to prove my worth in St Austell in the first instance, but he reckoned someone with an economics degree and a chemistry A level – someone like me, in other words – would be ideal for the team he was putting together to run new plants in Australia.

Australia. The other side of the world. Land of sunshine and opportunity. I looked up through the clear-glazed top half of the pub window at the grey London sky and knew in that instant I was going to say yes. And Lashley, to judge by the smile playing at the edges of his mouth, knew it too. Pete had won our bet.

Why had Lashley gone to the bother of asking my parents where I was working in London? Why had he made time in his busy day in the capital to seek me out and sign me up? He said it was because I was the kind of reliable, resourceful young fellow he needed about him in the commercial empire he was planning to build. I didn’t take him seriously at the time. No one else I knew would have called me either reliable or resourceful. And I didn’t think Lashley had it in him to build an empire of any kind.

But he was the better judge of me – and himself. The future was his natural territory. He saw far and he thought long. Within six months, I was in Ballarat, playing my part in CCC’s opening up of the high-yielding Victoria china clay deposits. Within a year after that, I was managing a refining plant. Progress, mine and the company’s, was, as Lashley had promised, rapid. I was young, as eager to learn as I was to prosper. I enjoyed the rawness of Australia. I thrived on it. I married a local girl, who subsequently divorced me in favour of a local boy. By then seven years had passed and I was thirty.

Lashley himself discussed only business when he visited the Victoria operations. Such news as I had of Vivien reached me
indirectly,
via my mother, who’d struck up a chatting acquaintance with Harriet Wren. When I heard from her that Vivien had married the Hon. Roger Normington, the future Viscount Horncastle, it was no great surprise. I didn’t waste my time dwelling on what might have been. A couple of years later, she gave birth to another future viscount. The course of her existence amidst the landed gentry of Lincolnshire seemed firmly set.

Oliver – and the mystery of how he’d died – faded from my thoughts. I was reminded of him, though, when Bobby Fischer won the World Chess Championship. Oliver had said Fischer deserved to be World Champion and it seemed he was right. But then he was right about most things. He was a great prover of points, even if it wasn’t always clear what the point was that he was proving. As it turned out, Fischer never defended his crown. Somehow, I felt Oliver would have approved of that.

I couldn’t help wondering from time to time what, if anything, Countess Covelli had done in response to the letter I’d sent her. But there was nothing I could do to find out. And the question was eventually rendered redundant. From the obituaries page of the Melbourne
Age
I learnt of the death in October 1978 of the celebrated Italian opera singer Luisa d’Eugenio. Her most memorable performances were faithfully recorded. Her marriage to Francis Wren merited one sentence. Her dealings with the SS in Mussolini’s Fascist republic received no mention.

My mother wrote to me a few weeks later, mentioning that Luisa had died without having changed her will following Francis’s death, which meant the Villa Orchis had been inherited jointly by Harriet Wren and Muriel Lashley. They’d decided the family should use it as a holiday home. I instantly imagined Vivien returning there, a wife and mother now, introducing her husband and her son to Countess Covelli, revelling in the status her own title would give her in Capri society, serenely forgetful of the weeks we’d spent there together, content with the cosseted life she’d settled for.

I might have been misjudging her. I might not. There was no way to tell. I’d have had to meet her to form a fair opinion. And I didn’t
expect
that to happen. Nor did I expect that I’d ever return to Capri myself.

But my expectations, not for the first time, were to be confounded.

1984

TWENTY-FOUR

GREVILLE LASHLEY HAD TOLD
me working in the United States would be geologically simpler but commercially more challenging than the time I’d spent in Australia. As ever, he was right. The china clay deposits of Georgia and South Carolina were ideal for strip-mining. But the presence of a well-established competitor, North American Kaolins, forced us to operate within very tight margins. And Lashley, ever more assertive once he’d manoeuvred his way first to managing director of CCC, then managing director
and
chairman, didn’t like the squeeze that put on our profits one little bit.

I’d been number two for a couple of years to Harvey Beaumont at Cornish China Clays (US), based in Sandersville, Ga, when, early in 1984, Lashley came to see us, took Harv and me out to lunch and unveiled the strategy he’d devised to solve the problem.

‘Merger, gentlemen. That’s the answer. We’re going to join forces with NAK. It makes perfect sense. China clay is global business. And CCC plus NAK will dominate it.’

Harv, whom Lashley had poached from NAK, objected that his old boss, Don Hudson, would never consent to a genuine merger. He’d only be interested in a takeover.

‘That’s what I’ll let him think the deal amounts to,’ Lashley smilingly responded. ‘But it won’t. Don’s not the man he was. Age has caught up with him. Losing his son in Vietnam has fogged his vision of the future. Don’t worry. I can manage Don. And the rest
of
the NAK board. I can manage this whole thing very sweetly. The important point for you two to bear in mind is that I see you both playing vital roles in the enlarged organization I’ll be putting together over the coming years. I trust you. All you have to do is trust me. How does that sound?’

Like a younger man talking, it struck me at the time. Lashley was sixty-five, pushing sixty-six. By rights he should have been contemplating retirement. But not a bit of it. Instead he was contemplating a bold and ambitious corporate coup. No one could say age was catching up with
him
. He didn’t look much different from when I’d first met him sixteen years earlier, though it was even harder now to believe the glossy blackness of his hair was genuine. I didn’t doubt he could achieve what he was proposing. After all, I’d seen him do it before.

‘I’d appreciate it if you kept this under your hats, gentlemen. It’s not going to happen overnight. But it
is
going to happen. I’ll see to that. I’m mentioning it to you now so you’ll understand the thinking behind the changes and … the compromises … that will be necessary in the months ahead. I want you to keep the boat steady when others are tempted to rock it. You follow?’

We followed. That, I’d learnt, as had Harv, was what you did if you wanted to prosper as a trusted lieutenant of Greville Lashley. He hadn’t stopped. He hadn’t even slowed down. He was still going places. And we were going with him.

Exactly how Lashley subsequently set about wooing NAK I didn’t know. Nor did I need to know. But by early summer there were indications that change was afoot, which unsettled some, though not, obviously, me or Harv. We had to do some minor boat-steadying, as Lashley had anticipated. It didn’t prove unduly difficult. We heard nothing directly from Lashley after our powwow over lunch. And we didn’t expect to. We knew what was going on.

But what was going on took a sudden swerve in July, just as I was about to head off on holiday. Harv conveyed an urgent message to me from Lashley. I was needed to help him deal with a grave
but
unspecified emergency. I was to join him as soon as possible – on Capri.

I’d never been back there. Capri spelt loss and regret for me: loss of the happiness I’d briefly known with Vivien and regret for the part we’d played in the events that had led to Francis Wren’s death. It was a place I’d have preferred to avoid. But a summons from Lashley couldn’t be ignored. My preferences were irrelevant. He paid me well to keep them that way. I was on the next flight.

It was Wednesday afternoon when I landed in Naples. The weather was breezy, but the breeze was blowing from an oven. The runway shimmered liquidly in the heat haze. No one was waiting to collect me and Capodichino was like dozens of other airports I’d jetted into over the years. It stirred no memories.

The taxi ride to the ferry terminal was different, as I’d known it would be. I couldn’t stop myself remembering my journey there from the railway station with Vivien. The city looked and sounded and smelt just as it had then: bright and loud and pungent. But Vivien wasn’t sitting beside me, glancing at me and laughing as we jolted along. And I wasn’t the person she’d glanced at and laughed with anyway. Time had changed me, as I didn’t doubt it had her.

I assumed Vivien wasn’t staying at the Villa Orchis. I doubted Lashley would have called for me if she had been. Who might be there besides Lashley himself I didn’t know. The message had given no details. Muriel, I supposed. Harriet, quite possibly. And Adam too. He was twenty-one, reading English (not a choice of subject I could imagine his father approving of) at Oxford. Since encountering him as a child, I’d met him just once, three years previously, when Lashley had brought him into the office in Sandersville. I recalled a tall, floppy-fair-haired youth who greeted everything he saw of CCC’s US operation, including me, with undisguised boredom. Whether Lashley hoped he’d follow him into the business he’d never disclosed. But the signs hadn’t exactly been promising.

The ferry carried me out into the brilliant blue of the bay. I sat on the top deck, watching Capri slowly assume its familiar shape as we approached. It felt both more and less than fifteen years since my last visit. I’d done a lot of living in those years. But nothing I’d done had eclipsed my memories of the few weeks I’d spent on the island. Nothing ever would. I knew that without the need to tell myself. It was a given. It was a fact of my life.

Facts, of course, were what Greville Lashley dealt in. They were the currency of his commercial existence. He’d summoned me to Capri. So to Capri I’d come.

I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived. But seeing Lashley waiting for me on the jetty at Marina Grande still came as a major surprise. In his panama and linen suit, he looked like some ex-pat leading a life of leisure in his retirement. The truth, as I knew, was that he had little use for leisure and even less for retirement. The emergency mentioned in his message had to be just that to bring him down to the port to meet me. Something must be seriously wrong.

There was no way to tell that from his casual bearing, however, or his smile as I stepped off the gangway. He shook my hand and clapped me on the back. ‘I reckoned you’d make this ferry, Jonathan,’ he said. ‘And here you are.’

‘Good of you to come down here, sir. I could have … made my own way.’

‘No need. I brought the car. But actually …’ His hand was on my shoulder as we followed the other disembarking passengers along the jetty. The gesture was trusting and confidential, almost intimate. ‘I’d like us to have a word before we go up to the villa. I need to explain the lie of the land to you. We can talk at the café along here.’

I knew the café he was referring to. Its tables, sheltered from the ferry crowds by the harbourmaster’s office, were set out on a terrace overlooking the beach. Vivien and I had stopped there for coffee several times. Customers were few at that stage of the
afternoon
and by a troubling coincidence Lashley chose the very table where Vivien had always wanted to sit. I tried to tell myself I couldn’t be sure it was the same table. But, of course, it was.

The waitress approached as we sat down and we ordered coffees. Lashley lit a cigarette and offered me one. I accepted, rare though it had become for me to smoke. I welcomed this one more as a prop than anything else.

‘I’m sorry to have disrupted your holiday plans, Jonathan,’ Lashley said as he took a first draw on his cigarette. ‘Be assured I didn’t do so lightly. A situation’s arisen – a dire situation – in which I need your assistance.’