“Yes. I love it here,” she said.
“In fact, she’s always lived in this very house,” said Gordon Smith. “I had it built before she was born. It was meant to be my gift to her mother but she died without ever seeing it.”
They both smiled sadly at this private allusion.
“However,” said Gordon, “Alicia doesn’t mean she’s been confined solely to Camberloo. Right, Alicia?”
Thus prompted, she began to tell me more about herself, in the course of which I realized she’d had an altogether different kind of life from mine. She’d attended a private girls’ school in Toronto and spent a year at the Sorbonne studying fine art. And, of course, every year she’d go “roughing it” at their cottage in the north country, sailing on the Great Lakes, skiing in Vermont, or basking in the sun at their apartment in Key Biscayne.
Not that her entire life was play. She was a member of the board of the Camberloo Art Gallery where she spent several mornings a week as a volunteer. Gordon, it turned out, was a major supporter of the gallery. The muted paintings on the walls around us were part of the collection he was allowed to borrow.
I asked if she’d ever travelled with her father on any of his business trips.
She shook her head, and because of the head-shaking, I realized she kept that veil of hair over the left side of her face to partly cover some sort of discoloration on her cheek.
“I much prefer to stay here and look after the house,” she said.
“And I always look forward to coming home to her,” said Gordon Smith.
They looked at each other with great fondness.
Of course, I couldn’t help noticing that her account of her life had made no mention of a husband or boyfriend.
DINNER WAS SERVED in the dining room by an Asian maid who was also, I gathered, their cook and cleaning woman. They complimented her upon the main course — a dish that was one of Gordon’s favourites from his travels in the East. It consisted of tofu, eggs, shrimp, and rice done in various exotic spices.
I tried to look as though I enjoyed it.
The entire dinner took more than an hour, with short course after short course. The Smiths only pecked at them, as though this was more of a daily ritual than a means of sustenance.
I’d been feeling rather nervous, but the wine loosened my tongue and I did a lot of the talking, mainly about my life as a sailor and my experiences in Africa and South America. I wanted to be amusing, and they seemed amused. Even after the remnants of the meal were cleared away, we stayed at the table a while, drinking coffee and chatting.
Then Gordon Smith glanced over at Alicia, they nodded to each other, and she stood up. We stood too.
“I’ll leave you two now to talk business,” said Alicia. She kissed Gordon briefly on the cheek. She shook my hand again, perhaps a little more warmly than at our introduction.
“I’ve enjoyed meeting you,” she said. “I do hope you’ll visit us again.”
She seemed about the same age as me, so her enormous selfpossession impressed me all the more. I mumbled something to the effect that I’d no idea how long I’d be in Camberloo but I hoped I’d be invited to dinner again.
“I’m sure you will be,” she said. Then she left the dining room.
3
Gordon Smith now said, “Time for brandy and cigars.”
He led me into an adjoining room lined with bookshelves and let me have a look around. He called the room “the library” and indeed it was full of books, mostly matched sets of classical works as far as I could see — Plato and Shakespeare and Dickens and Tolstoy and so on — that looked as though they’d never been opened but were for decorative purposes. Near the fireplace, a smaller bookcase beside two comfortable armchairs with reading lights was clearly dedicated to books that were actually read. I glanced at a few of the titles: A History of Technology Throughout the Ages, The Hydraulic Deep Earth Pump, Clear Thinking in a Complex World, and Business: Strategic Approaches. I didn’t notice any fiction. A number of what appeared to be catalogues from galleries and large-sized art books were lying flat on the bottom shelves.
When the maid came in carrying a tray with a bottle and glasses and a box of cigars, we sat down in the armchairs.
She placed the tray on a little table near Gordon and silently retreated. He poured two sizable brandies then picked out two cigars. He snipped the tops off and handed me one.
“Cuban,” he said.
He lit them, we puffed, then we sipped the brandies. It was a most enjoyable sensation.
“Harry, it really is a pleasure to have you here,” he said.
We clinked glasses, puffed and sipped some more, then Gordon put down his glass.
“You remember when I came to see you in the hospital?” he said. “As I told you then, it wasn’t simply an act of kindness. I’d been looking for someone I could have complete trust in to represent the firm overseas. We’re doing very well, but I ought to be spending the bulk of my time here in Camberloo dealing with our expansion plans, not gallivanting around the world. In addition my doctor says my heart isn’t as good as it used to be and it’s time I cut out the rigours of long-distance travel.” The hawk eyes narrowed on me. “When I met you, I came to the conclusion that you were a fine young man, wasting your talents in those mining camps. I really think you could do a great job for us.”
I’d been thinking about this moment for weeks now and answered him carefully, letting him know I was very flattered by his interest in me. But, equally, I didn’t want him to put his faith in the wrong man. How could someone as ignorant as I was— even of basic science — be of any use as the representative of a highly technical, specialized firm like Smith’s Pumps?
“You probably don’t realize how refreshing it is to hear that,” he said. “It’s a quality we don’t often find in business. Some people would claim they were experts on pumps and ventilators because they’d lived for a few months in a town that had a coal mine — what was it called? Duncairn?”
We both laughed.
“Look, as I told you before, it’s not another engineer we need,” he said. “It’s someone who’s smart and adaptable and doesn’t mind travelling. Our clients have their own engineers and they’re the ones who decide whether our design and performance specifications will do the trick for them. But they’d much rather deal with someone they can trust. If they buy one of our machines, they want to be sure they can rely on us if problems arise during the warranty period and that we’ll be fair and helpful thereafter. Clients appreciate that kind of commitment.”
I was still worried about my lack of technical expertise and reminded him that he’d only been at the La Mancha mine that day because he could handle the technical equipment for testing the air. His ease with that weird device was something that had impressed me deeply at the time.
He shook his head.
“Honestly, in twenty years in the business, I’ve never had to do anything like that,” he said. “I went down to perform the test, not because I was an engineer, but because their own engineers were too superstitious to go down and do it themselves. One of them actually had to show me how to switch the testing machine on and off. A child could have done that.”
He saw I was still hesitant, so again he tried to allay my fears.
“If you agreed to give the job a try, I wouldn’t just send you off on your own,” he said. “No, naturally I’d go along with you on your first few trips to show you the ropes and let you see for yourself what’s involved. I’d go with you till you were totally confident.”