Betrayal Read Free Page A

together, aren’t we?’
    We certainly were. George was putting fifty thousand cash into the buyout, and another fifty thousand against his house. So were Alan and John, the other Hartford directors. But that was how the venture capitalists liked it, to have the whole lot of us over a financial barrel.
    I passed George the page from The Times . ‘This may not help.’
    George read the article and spluttered, ‘What’s this? Years of low investment? What are they damn well talking about! We’ve upgraded the batching plant, for God’s sake. We’ve installed the stem-pulling machines—’
    ‘It’s nonsense, of course—’
    ‘And lacklustre sales! They’ve stood up bloody well, considering. Apart from Packenhams.’
    This was one of our worst blows, being de-listed by London’s second largest department store.
    George thrashed a hand against the paper. ‘Who gives them this rubbish?’
    But I didn’t try to answer that.
    George hadn’t cooled down yet. ‘It makes Hartford sound like some cottage industry filled with Luddites! As if we’d fought change tooth and nail!’
    The irony wasn’t lost on either of us. While Howard and I had been running the company it had hardly stopped changing. That was the whole trouble. We had moved too far, too fast, expanding rapidly into mass-market glass and chinaware just as trading conditions began to worsen. While my father was alive he hadn’t liked much of what we had been doing but had never tried to interfere. I was glad he had died in February. It had saved him the anguish of seeing quite what a mess I had made of everything.
    ‘At the end of the day it’s only a newspaper story,’ I said.
    George, forcing himself back to his natural state of optimism, declared, ‘Right! Right!’ He laughed loudly and abruptly. ‘We never thought it was going to be easy, did we?’
    I laughed too, awkwardly. This deal was the hardest thing I had ever attempted. In the six weeks since the Cumberland takeover, I had been cut loose from the new parent company to run Hartford Crystal on a nil-salary basis, while simultaneously planning to buy it out. Raising the three million pounds of leverage from the banks, keeping all the financial and legal balls in the air, pulling together all the strands of what was an amazingly complex deal, was a Herculean task which, even on an eighteen-hour day, was stretching me to my limits. Much of the time I was suffused with a wild conviction that we would pull it off, and then I flew on adrenalin. At other times, faced by endless setbacks, I settled into something more mechanical, a mindless persistence fuelled by the determination to save what I had so foolishly jeopardised.
    There was no mystery about my motives. For me this buyout was about restitution. My father had worked hard for twenty years to build up the company and pass it on to me in good shape, while I had worked hard for ten to achieve nothing more, it seemed, than to let it slip away and threaten the livelihoods of all the people who worked for us. I wanted it back, I wanted to show what I could do with it now that I was free of Howard and his remorseless drive for diversification. I wanted to make a success of it for my own sake, certainly, b ut more than that I wanted to feel I could look the employees in the eye again.
    George and I talked our way through the monthly sales figures and were just starting on the cash flow analysis when a woman’s voice sounded in the outer office. There was something about it, the suggestion of a lazy laugh, of dark overtones, that caught at my memory and chilled my heart.
    ‘You all right?’ George asked.
    ‘Fine.’ Reaching for my coffee, I promptly knocked it over. Trying to retrieve the cup, I got that wrong too and sent it flying across the table.
    I muttered ‘Jesus!’ Then as I picked the cup off the floor: ‘What an idiot!’ I gave a disbelieving laugh. But as soon as George had gone in search of a cloth I sat in silence, wondering