Sing Like You Know the Words (28 page)

-It surprises me sometimes that
you keep at this. You know; crime. Don’t you get fed up of them
all?

-No I don’t. I can see how you
might think I should be something important, like a tax barrister
for example, but Raj and Pete are no worse than other clients I
might have, and it matters that someone speaks for them. I remember
being warned off crime: it’s not first rate work you know. The
first time in my life I turned away from whatever was hardest and
had most prestige, but I never regretted it.

Matthew smiled.

-You tell me that David has no
doubts about life, and I have nothing but doubt. But Pat, you’re
life is all about struggle. If life isn’t already a struggle,
you’ll make it one. It’s as if good fortune was a curse and you
have to spend your time trying to prove yourself worthy of it.

Patricia considered telling him
about the sense of failure that still haunted her from that old
Obuswu case. She wasn’t sure why is should be relevant, though it
seemed to be. That memory represented something that she had not
explained even to herself, so instead she only shrugged.

-If you’d been a Victorian lady,
Matthew continued, you’d have spent your time doing good works and
caring for the poor.

-Maybe, but we’ve progressed. We
know that the underprivileged deserve rights not handouts; and that
charity demeans the giver as well as the receiver, when it’s not
about getting a tax break.

-If you say so. Is that why you
prefer crime?

-It suits me to be a trial
lawyer. There’s a verdict at the end. You have winners and losers.
You know how I hate compromise, and I like to win.

Matthew thought about what she’d
said. It sounded like a good answer, but it wasn’t the full story.
But then, what business was it of his? She was only a friend after
all and she didn’t even like him much. Probably he shouldn’t even
be seeing her like this, though it was an arrangement they’d both
become comfortable with. He saw a woman who sometimes had what
looked like desperation in her eyes. She’d become tough, but there
was a brittle quality to the hardness, and something that she
needed (not him, he knew) but couldn’t find or even talk about.

-Are you sure you’re not hungry?
he asked her.

***

As the year progressed, the next
stage of David’s plans was revealed.

The Examiner exclusively
reported that Cromwell Engineering was gearing up for an early
public listing of its shares on the London Stock Exchange. The
still youthful entrepreneur who had nurtured the success of the
company, David Thomas, was quoted on his intention to have less day
to day control over the business, giving space to the professional
management team that he had brought in. It was announced that there
would be a new Chairman of the board, Peter Douglas, who was well
known to the City and would help to guide the flotation of the
business on the stock exchange.

Matthew had to ask him privately
about that.

-What’s this crap about you
taking a back seat in future? Off the record.

-Apparently it’s what the City
likes to hear. The chaps don’t believe that people like me, who
only make businesses and understand what they do, speak their
language. They prefer their own sort to be in charge; men who
understand the importance of getting rich quick and don´t get too
sentimental about the companies they run.

-And will you really step
down?

-We’ll see about that. But we do
need the money to grow. It´s too expensive to borrow from the
banks.

-What about Peter?

-Peter will do what I tell him,
that’s what I pay him for.

The flotation of the company
went well, despite the uncertain times. Money was starting to flow
again and there was a lot of nonsense in the media about the
emergence of citizen shareholders. It seemed that now everyone
wanted to be an investor. More importantly, the City of London had
been freed of regulation and could do a lot more dealing with other
people’s money. It was money that was hungry for investments. David
went to market with a little over half the total shareholding. It
felt like losing control but the advisers pointed out that he would
still outvote other investors, and warned him that he couldn´t put
less than that on offer if he was serious about listing.

The demands of the process took
over; for the next few months he was sucked into a whirlpool of
meetings and presentations about what he had achieved and all that
he hoped to do. It was easy to forget why they had even started it
all off. But when it was all done, he found that the company had
been valued more highly than their best expectations. Suddenly, and
unexpectedly, he discovered that he was rich.

Matthew tried to be happy for
him, though he was still depressed and trying to get over another
Conservative election victory that meant more years in the
wilderness for the people’s party. But he noticed that David
himself seemed a lot less pleased than he should be. He’d achieved
all that he’d set out to do. He’d saved the company and made it
prosperous and now he was going to take a less active interest in
day to day management and concentrate on strategy. But somehow
David could not be content, or even satisfied, with his lot. Within
a few months of the flotation, his mood had become morose and short
tempered. For the first time, he even appeared to have some
pessimism about life in general, as if he’d found a bitterness that
he had not tasted before.

The new chief executive, Andrew
Foster, was the City’s man. David couldn’t argue that he and his
team hadn’t increased the profits sharply in a few months, but he
couldn’t make himself warm to the man either. The advisers had told
him that Foster was widely respected and his appointment would be
good for the share price. From the brief conversations David had
with him, it was clear that Foster had little knowledge of
engineering, and less interest in it. Not for the first time since
he had brought in the merchant bankers, David had the sensation of
having called into play forces that were beyond his control. It was
all a new game and he was feeling his way with the rules, or
perhaps it was that he was only a minor piece in the game, moved by
the unseen hands of others.

Andrew Foster was a small man
with prematurely wispy hair and apparently boundless energy. His
own people seemed absolutely dedicated to him, and David supposed
that was good. He only wished that Foster had not needed to employ
quite so many of them, and it troubled him that most of them seemed
to be accountants spending their days compiling long reports that
in David’s view added little to what he already knew about the
business.

You knew that things had to
change, he told himself, and it´s true that now everything is on a
bigger scale. He had to remind himself that underneath there was
still the creature that he had found half-dead and brought back to
life.

He fought against giving way to
small minded resentment, but it was difficult for him to understand
what Foster was trying to achieve. There were new people every day:
sales people, marketing people, accountants, but when he toured the
shop floor David didn’t see any new equipment or any new engineers.
All the various kinds of managers seemed to be people who had
worked with Foster before at other companies. David made an effort
to be patient, but patience came even harder to him than letting
someone else run the show. In advance of the first annual meeting
of the company, he felt that he had to confront Foster with his
doubts.

David´s old office had been in a
shed like construction at one end of the plant, with windows that
looked out over the shop floor. In the short time since he arrived,
Foster had removed some of the older machinery and dedicated a
large section of the plant to accommodation for the growing numbers
of office staff. It was an area that was effectively sealed off
from the works, where you had no sense of being in a factory that
made things. David had gone along with the idea that it was
reasonable to give the clerical types the kind of environment they
were used to; though already Foster was making noises about the
space being too cramped and needing some sort of corporate
headquarters separate from the plant.

Foster´s own office was spacious
enough: in fact the furnishings were positively luxurious. It was
the office of a powerful man, confident in his grip on the business
he managed. But when David tried to explain his doubts, Foster
seemed confused.

-I’m not sure I understand what
you’re saying David. My job is to make you and the other
shareholders richer. We have beaten our forecast for every quarter
since I started. You know where the share price is right now. All
the movement has been in one direction. I know it’s hard for you to
let go of the reins, but I don’t know what else you can ask of
me.

-When I floated the company, one
of the main reasons was that we couldn’t afford investment to
compete with plant that is being developed overseas.

-Of course, we mentioned that as
a risk in the prospectus. Everyone knows about it. I remember you
telling me about your visits to factories in Asia and the new
machinery they have there, but this business has always been a high
skill, low volume operation. Our investors know that.

David felt his point was being
missed.

-It’s true we’ve got skilled
workers here, and that’s what I wanted to save. It was the reason I
bought this place. We’ve got people hand machining parts to
tolerances that some of our competition wouldn’t even be able to
measure. But look at the men: they’re not young. So far we’ve been
able to grow by taking on guys from the same generation as our
existing people; only because so many other works have been
shutting down. I’ve tried to set on apprentices, but it takes time
when you can find them and the lads don’t seem to have even basic
knowledge. There are no new skilled men coming through. And it’s
more than that. Those factories I visited, they can do everything
that we can, but with machines: their skill is in setting the
machinery up. Once they have done that – cheap and reliable
production and volume not an issue.

-I don’t really see where you
are going with this.

-It’s the machinery we need, and
the new skills to use it. The idea was that after we went public
we’d have the cash to make investment in the plant. Most of the
equipment we need is designed in this country anyway. Once we’ve
done that we can compete in the long term. But we’re losing time.
So far, all you’ve done is increase the profits, pay a bigger
dividend, and push the share price up.

-You make it sound as if that
was easy. Our business plan committed us to some challenging
targets as you know, and we’ve hit and bettered all of them. You
know the cost of what you are suggesting? – We might even need a
new factory to do it properly. What do you think would be the
reaction of your investors, you for that matter, if I said; no
profits for the next three years, we need to transform the
business? Trust us; it will come out right in the long run. No one
would give us a few years: you know it.

-Why not? We’d increase the real
value of the company and its shares many times over by doing that.
I didn’t bring this company to market for it to be a cash cow that
you can milk to death.

-Of course not. And you wouldn’t
need me and my team if that was the extent of your ambition. But
you have to understand, corporate strategy is a little more complex
than buying new tools for the engine shed.

-What is the strategy then - the
real one I mean, not what we put in the glossy handouts and spin to
your friends in the City?

Now Foster was on more
comfortable ground. There was a gleam of true enthusiasm in his eye
and his speech grew more fluid.

-First; we have a good war
chest. The float went well and our equity funding is strong. We’ve
been looking at acquisition targets and we have some very
interesting possibilities.

-An acquisition makes you look
good as a chief executive, but I don’t see how it helps our
fundamental difficulty.

-Modern business is
international David. You need to think more globally. Buying an
overseas company will give us access to new markets. That makes us
bigger and gives us economies of scale.

-So we need to get bigger before
we invest in being able to do the job properly?

-Capabilities are international
as well. You’ve said it yourself: the capabilities in the Far East
are ahead of what we have here. Production is more reliable and
cheaper. There’s no reason why Cromwell should not benefit from a
capability that already exists.

-If you’re suggesting that we
might move production overseas, I’m telling you no. I won’t oppose
you if you want to make a small acquisition; you know more about
that than I do; but you won’t have my agreement to moving the work
offshore, ever.

-I can see that it’s something
you are passionate about. It’s good that we should understand each
other´s values and objectives and it’s useful for me to share your
insights. We should talk again about this.

The conversation with Foster
left David feeling more uncomfortable than ever. He had to fight
back anger when Foster suggested they put dates in their respective
diaries to continue the discussion; as if they were making polite
theoretical conversation that had nothing to do with the day to day
running of the business. But what could he say? In the old days he
would not have left the room without resolving an important
business issue, but now it seemed that every decision required a
period of reflection and discussion.

In the months that followed,
David found himself becoming more and more remote from the
business. He felt defeated without knowing why. It was as though he
had slipped backwards, to the days when he worked for the partners
and had no say. He had lost control of his own business and all he
had to show for it was money.