Fault Line - Retail (7 page)

Something strange, odd, inexplicable
. Such as Oliver’s determination to gain access to the basement. Yes, that would certainly count as all those things. Except that maybe to Greville Lashley it wouldn’t be inexplicable. If I confessed what I’d done now, how would it end? The sack? Or recruitment to some charmed circle of his acolytes?

‘You probably think Wren’s is a dead-end outfit and china clay’s no business for a clever and adventurous young man,’ Lashley continued. ‘I wouldn’t blame you. But you have to see the big picture. The future is written, Jonathan. In words and numbers. We generate more every single day. And that means more paper. Good God, that computer CCC have spews out scrolls of the damn stuff. So, worldwide demand for china clay to fill and coat paper is only going one way: up. And it’s not just about paper. A growing population needs more of everything. Coffee cups. Toothpaste. Pill capsules. Condoms. Particularly condoms, if it isn’t going to grow too much, hey?’ He laughed and I made an effort to join in. ‘Well, there’s china clay in all of them. That’s the point. Them and hundreds of other products. It’s going to be a worldwide industry. And I aim to be at the heart of it. Along with a few people who have what it takes to support and, who knows, one day succeed me. The sky’s the limit. No … wait. There’ll be dozens of components containing something manufactured using china clay in whichever Apollo makes it to the Moon. So you see? The possibilities are literally limitless. Think about it, Jonathan. Just think about it.’

Greville Lashley evidently saw merger with Cornish China Clays as his stairway to success – his and anyone’s who clung to his coat-tails. It sounded like pure bombast to me. He was surely too old and too marginal to CCC’s concerns to gain anything from the deal beyond a comfortable run-in to retirement. He called it a merger, but it was really a takeover. Wren’s would be swallowed whole. And that would be that.

By then, I’d be on the lower rungs of my own stairway to success, in London. The only reason I had to tread carefully at Wren & Co. in the interim was Vivien. I was half in love with her already and we hadn’t so much as kissed. I couldn’t bear the thought of alienating her by antagonizing her brother or some other member of her family. But the secrets I was keeping were piling up alarmingly. Something had to give. I just had to hope it wasn’t something Vivien would blame me for.

Pete Newlove naturally demanded to know what Lashley had wanted with me. I was forced to admit I’d been to Nanstrassoe at the weekend. But chess with Oliver was the limit of my contact with the family in the version of events I treated him to. I claimed not to have seen Vivien at all. Pete seemed to accept this, partly, I think, because it reinforced his impression of her as utterly aloof. He also accepted that Lashley hadn’t said a word to me about Thursday’s board meeting, of which, as I’d anticipated, word had reached him on the jungle telegraph.

‘It all gets settled this Thursday, Jon. Nothing for you to worry about, of course. But for the rest of us toilers it’s D-Day. D for decision. D for dole queue. We’ll all be sweating on the top line.’

I felt sorry for Pete. He had every right to be worried and obviously hadn’t the least suspicion I might be holding out on him. It was just as well his sister was a chambermaid at the Carlyon Bay Hotel rather than a waitress. I was in the clear, I reckoned. For the time being, at least.

I did some juggling of the facts for my parents’ benefit as well: Oliver had asked me to accompany him and his sister to their
dinner
with Great-Uncle Francis and his wife; I’d barely exchanged two words with Vivien on the subject. Mum was so pleased to see me togged up in my one and only suit come Tuesday evening that she accepted the story at face value. Likewise the arrangement I’d supposedly made to walk up to Nanstrassoe and set out with them from there.

In fact, I only went as far as Alexandra Road, where I loitered outside the Capitol cinema until I saw Vivien’s bright yellow Mini bearing down on me.

She was beautiful whatever she wore, but the elegant brocaded velvet jacket and fern-patterned silk trousers she’d chosen for our evening at the Carlyon Bay added a new level of maturity to her appearance that I found almost as intimidating as it was alluring.

‘Uncle Francis didn’t sound pleased when I told him Oliver had turned down his invitation,’ she said as we sped away. ‘He cheered up a bit when he heard he’d be meeting my new boyfriend, though. Well, that’s what he sort of assumes you are and I didn’t like to complicate things by disillusioning him. I hope that’s not going to be awkward for you.’

‘Desperate,’ I said with a smile. ‘It’ll be sheer hell.’

She took one hand off the steering-wheel long enough to slap my shoulder. ‘Beast.’

‘Actually, I think the role’s perfect for me.’

She cast me a sidelong glance. ‘Do you now?’

The Virginia creeper-clad Art Deco palace of seaside relaxation that was the Carlyon Bay Hotel was hardly my normal stamping-ground. Entering it that evening with Vivien made me feel as if it easily could be, though. Her company carried with it a charge of life-changing possibilities.

The weather was warm enough for parties to be sitting under parasols out on the terrace. But Francis Wren, we were informed, was waiting for us in the lounge. ‘Cold by Capri standards,’ Vivien murmured as we went through.

And so it clearly was, to judge by the light sweater Francis was wearing under his blazer. He was a ruddy-faced, white-haired man
in
his mid-sixties, with too much fat on his stocky frame. But his handshake was firm and there was a hint of steeliness in his blue-eyed gaze. His blazer, cravat and weatherbeaten complexion gave him the look of a veteran yachtsman whose best yachting days were behind him.

‘Luisa’s still titivating,’ he explained, urging us to be seated and to join him in a gin and tonic. ‘Women, what, Jonathan?’

I smiled, as if drawing ruefully on extensive experience of the fair sex, which won me a sharp look from Vivien before she diverted Francis into a rambling account of how he and Luisa had been passing their days. Idly was the sum of it. A little reading; a little swimming; a lot of sun-lounging; and a minuscule amount of tennis. If he’d been studying a merger proposal document in advance of Thursday’s board meeting, he didn’t mention it.

That subject disposed of, he’d just turned his attention to the minor mystery (to him) of my sudden appearance in Vivien’s life when Luisa arrived in a cloud of perfume and a shimmer of midnight blue. Gowned, stoled and multiply pearled, she had the full voice and stage bearing of the opera-singer she’d once been. She also had instantly infectious jollity, pinching Francis’s cheek, triple-kissing Vivien and clasping my hand while gazing at me with big, brown, spikily lashed eyes. Her hair was dark and glossy, drawn back to show off the fine bone structure of her face. She was no longer young, but she still had glamour as well as charm.

I wasn’t to be spared an account of myself, but I kept it as brief – and factual – as possible. Vivien and I had met through Oliver (true) and hadn’t known each other long (also true). Vivien intervened deftly to insist Luisa describe to me the setting of their villa on Capri.

But that proved difficult. ‘You have to see it to believe how heavenly it is,’ Luisa explained. ‘Have you ever been to Capri, Jonathan?’ I shook my head. ‘Ah, but you will, now you and Vivien are friends. And then … you will understand.’

Capri with Vivien: a dream of everything that was delicious and unattainable. But it wasn’t unattainable. And I willed myself to believe it could actually happen.

Meanwhile, there were the hazards of fine dining to be braved. I was more of a stranger to four-star hotel restaurants than I wanted Vivien to realize, but dinner passed without my using the wrong cutlery or drinking too quickly. I managed to make some contributions to the conversation that weren’t completely stupid. And I even caught Vivien smiling at me on several occasions in a way that seemed, well, affectionate.

Francis said nothing directly about the travails of Wren & Co. and remained tight-lipped when Luisa referred to ‘Thursday’s meeting’. He was happier bemoaning the state of his homeland under a Labour government and took it in good part when Vivien said he sounded like a reactionary old colonel, pointing out that he really was an old colonel and was entitled to be reactionary. Altogether, he wasn’t anything like as crusty as he looked.

When I asked him why he’d settled in Italy, he explained he’d served there during the war with the Eighth Army (‘all the way from Sicily to Venice’) and had fallen in love with the country even while fighting in it. Returning to work at Wren & Co. after the war was ‘just one god-awful anticlimax’ and after a few years he ‘simply couldn’t stick it any longer’. It was easy to believe. As for Luisa, ‘meeting her was the best thing that ever happened to me’. And that too was easy to believe. Unless you noticed, as I felt I did, the tightness of Luisa’s smile as she listened to him. Everything was superficially right about this adoring couple. Yet something was also subtly wrong.

The story of their first meeting, which it was clear Francis had told many times before, was a case in point. They’d found themselves sharing a carriage on a train from Rome to Naples one warm spring afternoon in 1949. This was a few weeks after Francis’s departure from St Austell. He was wandering down through Italy at a leisurely pace, hoping some opportunity with a salary attached would present itself before his money ran out. ‘It was just a few days after you were born, my dear,’ he said to Vivien. ‘I had a telegram from your grandfather in my pocket informing me of the happy event.’ His greatest asset, he explained, was his utter
ignorance
of opera. ‘I had no idea who Luisa was.’ And that, after many a tedious encounter with fans and fortune-hunters, was a huge relief to her. Before the end of the journey, she’d offered him free bed and board in her villa on Capri in return for his services as handyman-cum-chauffeur. ‘I suppose you could say nothing’s changed since.’

‘Nothing – and everything,’ Luisa contributed on cue, before Francis eased into an account of how the adoring effusions of the taxi driver in Naples who took them from the station to the Capri ferry dock first alerted him to Luisa’s fame.

I couldn’t have said exactly what struck a false note in this paean to happenstance and true love. But something did. It wasn’t so much that I doubted the story was true. It was more a case of feeling there was a part of the story – the crucial part – that Francis wasn’t telling.

Maybe that’s what finally prompted me to ask Oliver’s planted question. Luisa gave me the perfect excuse by enquiring after him. I recounted my futile attempts to beat him at chess in a light-hearted, self-deprecating way calculated to lower Francis’s guard, then came sweetly to the point.

‘“To most people a pig’s egg is just a grey pebble,” he said, “but to someone who really looks at things it can be the key to everything.”’ I kept my eyes on Francis as I spoke and there was no missing his flinch of dismay. Oliver’s arrow had hit the mark. ‘When I asked him what a pig’s egg was, he just said, “Ask my great-uncle; he’s an expert.”’

‘“An expert”,’ said Francis, manufacturing a smile. ‘Is that what he called me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Expert in what?’ asked Vivien, frowning in puzzlement.

Luisa was also puzzled. ‘What does he mean,
caro
?’

Francis said something to her in Italian that contained the word
cristalli
. It seemed to satisfy her. But not Francis himself. His wineglass shook faintly as he raised it to his mouth.

‘So,’ I went on, ‘can you tell me what a pig’s egg is?’

‘I can,’ Francis replied, dabbing at his mouth with his napkin.
‘It’s
a large crystal of potash feldspar – a phenocryst, to use the correct mineralogical term – preserved within a softer matrix during kaolinization. The clay workers find them in the pits from time to time. They’re geologically interesting and often quite pretty. I have one in a small collection of crystals I put together while I was at Wren’s.’ I felt he was regaining his confidence now. Whatever the nature of the shock Oliver had given him through me, he had swiftly absorbed it and probably believed no one had noticed anything amiss. ‘Now I think about it, I recall I showed Oliver the collection when you and he came out to Capri with Harriet last summer, Vivien. The “expert” description rather flatters me, however. I used to have a coin collection as well. That doesn’t make me any more of a numismatist than I am a crystallographer.’

‘But how can a pig’s egg – a feldspar crystal – be the “key to everything”?’ asked Vivien, genuinely bemused.

‘Ah,’ said Francis, beetling his brow thoughtfully. ‘I believe Oliver is referring to the way in which the rocks at our feet, of which a pig’s egg is merely one particularly decorative example, reveal, if properly studied, the history of our planet over hundreds of millions of years. Climate changes. Rises and falls in sea level. Movements in the magnetic poles. They’re all recorded geologically. And the record is there to see, for someone who really looks.’

‘Sounds like you
are
an expert, Uncle Francis,’ said Vivien.

‘Not at all, my dear. Far from it.’ He looked across the table at me. ‘I’m afraid none of this is going to help you beat Oliver at chess, though, Jonathan. Perhaps nothing can.’

‘Have you ever played him yourself?’ I asked.

‘Once. Last summer, in fact.’

‘Who won?’

Francis smiled. ‘I believe it was stalemate.’

‘You do realize Oliver set you up with that business about the pig’s egg, don’t you?’ Vivien asked as we drove away from the Carlyon Bay at the end of the evening.

Looking back, I could see Francis watching us from the hotel doorway, puffing at his after-dinner cigar, his free hand half raised
in
farewell. Did he also realize it was a set-up? I wondered. And, if so, did he think I was a party to it? ‘Perhaps Oliver thought your great-uncle would enjoy displaying his mineralogical knowledge,’ I suggested.

‘Rubbish. It was a code for something.’