Betrayal Read Free

got back into the driver’s seat and, after a last five minutes with my head back and my eyes closed, I started the engine.
    I drove gingerly, half expecting knocking sounds or wobbles from the steering, but after a time I forgot to worry about the car and slowly accelerated to mid-lane speed, my mind miles away again, in a dark and distant place.
    I arrived at Hartford half an hour late. Driving in through the gates, I tried to picture the factory through the eyes of potential investors. With its twenties architecture, drab brickwork and mean windows, the place had the air of old glories long faded, while its clusters of ventilation pipes and aluminium chimneys suggested spasmodic and piece-meal modernisation. Only the recently completed warehouse, a spare metal structure in cobalt blue, emitted anything approaching an up-to-date image. Lacklustre sales . . . Low investment . . . The newspaper’s comments were ill-founded but they still pricked at me.
    George Banes came out to meet me. The production director was a burly man, his large belly testing the fastenings on his shirt, with a thick head of hair that had been silvery grey for as long as I had known him, which was almost twenty years.
    ‘Thought the traffic might delay you,’ he commented, as we shook hands and made for the entrance, ‘so I told the staff we’d meet at ten minutes to noon.’
    ‘You explained that it was just an update?’
    ‘I did. I said you wanted to keep them abreast of developments but that there was nothing definite at the moment.’
    Even now, in my state of preoccupation, I couldn’t walk through the doors of the factory without feeling a proprietorial thrill. I was too much my father’s son, too deeply instilled with his old-style paternalistic pride not to feel an attachment to the place that was decidedly emotional.
    George took me into the office that had been my father’s and would have been mine if Howard hadn’t pressed for what he liked to call an integrated management structure, and insisted we put the management and sales of all three divisions under one roof at Slough.
    The room was virtually unchanged since my father’s retirement ten years ago. His wide oak desk stood in the same spot by the window, the ancient wooden in- and out-trays squatting on a worn leather surface that still bore the pattern of a hundred ink marks. When I was a small boy this room had seemed cavernous, and my father, behind the mass of his desk, an oddly distant figure. It was only when he finished his business and took me down to the factory floor and chatted in his easy soft-voiced manner that I had felt I knew him again.
    George brought coffee and we sat down at the conference table.
    ‘So it’s all signed up with Zircon?’ he demanded eagerly .
    ‘It’s signed.’
    ‘No quibbles with the business plan?’
    George and I had worked so hard on the business plan that we knew every word and financial projection by heart. ‘No quibbles with the business plan,’ I reassured him, and saw his eyes spark with satisfaction. ‘But I tell you, George, whatever happened to them on the playing fields of Eton, it turned their hearts to stone.’ I was thinking of the additional leverage the venture capitalists had demanded, and the personal guarantees covering the fifty per cent of my personal worth that was not already committed to the buyout. ‘They’ve made financial pain into an art form.’ I managed an ironic laugh.
    ‘But they’re behind us now, that’s the important thing.’
    ‘They still have their doubts about me, I think. Or rather the idea of me.’
    ‘What? Why? ’
    ‘According to the City, family firms are breeding grounds for inefficiency and nepotism. And a family buyout – well!’ I rolled my eyes. ‘That’s even more unhealthy. Incest.’
    ‘But that’s ridiculous! It’s not like that here. Don’t they realise that? We’ve always been a team, for God’s sake! And, this buyout – well, we’re all in it