‘No,’ Digger told her. He was amused. ‘And that girl doesn’t think so either.’
‘Why’s she after ’im then?’
‘It’s ’er job. She’s doing ’er job, that’s all. Being aggressive.’
‘Mr Smarty Pants!’ Jenny shouted, ‘Mr Smarty Smarty Pants!’
5
VIC, STILL IN his shirt-sleeves, pushed back the breakfast plates, shifted the pepper and salt shakers and the toast-rack to a new position, poured himself more tea, lit a cigarette, and leaned back in his chair. He had a habit, when he was about to propose a new idea, of clearing a space before him. You could, Ma knew, judge how large or risky the idea was by the extent of cloth he laid bare.
Their consultations together often took place over the remains of breakfast. With Pa already installed in his office and Ellie off delivering the boy to kindergarten, they had a good half-hour to themselves. The domestic setting, the fragments of the meal (‘There is something very reassuring,’ Ma thought, ‘about burnt toast’), gave an unemphatic quality to their talk; the solid grip on things suggested by teacup handles and spoons grounded what might otherwise have seemed fantastic in the ordinary and commonplace.
It astonished Vic, when he recalled the anxieties she had been racked by, that Ma could be so changed. She had never failed him, not once. If he drew back sometimes, and even he had his moments of doubt, though he did his best not to show them, she saw it and would be there to urge him on.
Her mind was sharper than his. He came up with a scheme, presented it to her, and let her knock it down if she could. If she couldn’t find the crack in a thing it was foolproof.
He relied on her. They were a team. Arguing a deal out with her was like arguing with his other self, the sceptical one he might not otherwise have made contact with, or not so immediately. He accepted criticisms from her that, if a man had made them, he would have felt bound to reject. They knew one another too well for that, and cared too much, both of them, for what they were doing, to be soft with one another.
He was lingering this morning, deliberately holding back. There was a vagueness in him — not quite weakness, it was never that — which she would have in a moment to acknowledge and deal with. She knew him very well by now. But there was also this new space he had opened up. ‘First things first,’ she thought.
‘So,’ she said briskly, ‘this is it, eh?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Ten-thirty.’
He saw how she was looking at him. He pushed his plate back another inch.
‘I find all this a bit difficult,’ he said, ‘I mean, he can’t be that innocent. I thought he’d be tougher, a bloke like that.’
‘He is tough,’ Ma told him. ‘Don’t be fooled by all that soft talk. He’s tough in the old way, like my father. You fellows are a different breed.’
She saw the little flicker across his brow. She had not meant it as a criticism.
‘He doesn’t seem to realise that he’ll no longer have control. What does ’e think we are? A charitable institution?’
He was speaking of Jack Creely, an old school friend of Pa’s who had an engineering firm with government contracts. Needham’s were taking him over.
‘He’s so full of himself! He thinks he’s been clever, pulling the wool over our eyes.’ His pride was touched.
What disturbed him, she knew, was the talk it would generate. He had made a good many enemies these last years. People thought he was getting too big for his boots; he was too sure of himself, too successful. They would be only too eager now to use Jack Creely as further evidence against him.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘we’re in for forty-six thousand, aren’t we? That doesn’t look like charity to me. Jack knows the score.’
The sharpness with which she heard herself say this gave her a start. She too had come a long way in these last years.
As for the forty-six thousand, just saying it straight out like that took her breath away. As if it was nothing!
She thought of her father, and saw him raise his eyebrows, half-shocked, but half-admiring too, at the summary way she had dealt with Jack Creely. But what would really have shocked him, as it did her too a little, was the forty-six thousand. Her father’s rule had been a strict one. You stayed within limits, you kept out of debt. ‘This feller’s a lunatic,’ her father would have told her, half-admiring of that too, but with a strong suggestion that she ought to look out for herself. ‘Can’t you see that?’ She heard it so clearly in the room that she was surprised Vic didn’t jerk his head up, in that aggressive way he had, and answer him.
He had been a buccaneer, her father, but of shallow waters. They were in open waters now.
For more than three years the factory had been abandoned and boarded up. The brickwork was crumbling and weeds had sprouted, not just between the flags of the yard but on the stone windowsills, and even, in places, from the roof. The little boy, Greg, was scared to go there. She had seen him more than once standing in the archway, peering into the yard and daring himself to go on.
The house and the factory, when her father built them, had been a single unit, two halves when she was growing up of a single world. The girls who worked in the packing room were part of the family. They might step across to the kitchen to get a cup of sugar if they were short at morning teatime, and if one of them took sick she would be brought over to lie in one of the rooms off the verandah. As a little girl Ma had often put aside her dolls or her jigsaw, or left off practising with her roller-skates on the long side verandah, to go across and have a chat with her favourites among the packers, Alice Green or Mrs Danby, or to watch a van being unloaded in the yard. Or she would perch on a stool in her father’s office and cut out floral patterns from the Needham’s labels and advertising placards and paste them into a ledger.
All this had brought the world of manufacturing and business into their daily lives, so that for her there had been no gap between them, the two worlds were interpenetrable. It was this view of things that she meant to re-establish by making the breakfast table the scene of her consultations with Vic, and all the more because what they were engaged with was no longer something you could stroll across to the other side of the garden and see.
Margarine. That had been their first move. Astonishing how easily, given a little capital, you could shift from one commodity to another. Soap, margarine — it was all the same, it seemed, though her father mightn’t have thought so. He had brought his knowhow about soap-making from the Old Country, and from the Lake District, where he grew up, the recipes for the perfumes he used. It was all very personal to him, and to all of them. The soaps had been named after English flowers, lilac, violet, musk-rose, and the finest and most expensive of them after her mother, Mary Louise. At Christmas, special packets were made up as presents to clients and friends.
But there was no call these days for things that were hand-made. Hicks had seen the point of the move straight off, and was delighted to be let loose on a new product, with new premises and a real staff, including a dozen trained technicians.
The amount they had had to borrow was terrifying. Hadn’t she just got them out of the red? But Vic saw things in a different way.
‘Listen,’ he told her, ‘things have changed. There’s nothing to be gained by playing safe and staying out of debt. A millionaire isn’t a man who’s got a million. He’s a man who owes a million, and if he owes ten million, all the better. That’s how we’ve got to think. If it worries you, Ma, just you leave it to me.’