Mr. Morgan’s large wistful eyes looked inquisitively from me to my mother. He said, ‘You think they’ll meet in Morocco?’
‘Ask Wendy!’ my mother said.
By sheer chance, today I knew more than a fully fledged Executive Director. I said, ‘Sir Robert plans to meet their Finance Director in Marrakesh. At the Mamounia where he’s staying I suppose.’ I saw my mother’s eyes on me. I lowered mine.
‘Lucky MCG,’ said Mr. Morgan. ‘Lucky everyone else. I usually sleep in a tent.’
‘You haven’t been invited?’ said my mother, releasing my gaze rather thoughtfully. ‘Never mind. You have my ham, Mr. Morgan. I’ll make you a goulash.’
‘No one’s going to be invited,’ I said. ‘Not from the Board. Sir Robert wants to keep it all very quiet.’ I paused. I knew I couldn’t keep it from my mother much longer. I said, ‘All he needs is someone to take notes and send messages for him. He’s asked me to go.’
‘To Morocco?’ said my mother.
‘To the Mamounia?’ said Mr. Morgan. ‘Will you send me a takeaway?’
I knew my skin was red. ‘To a nice hotel, but just a holiday one. It’ll seem as if I’m on holiday. We mustn’t look like a team.’
‘You and Sir Robert a team?’ said my mother, with fondness. It sounded like fondness. She knew that, for all this to happen, I had told the Chairman all that I knew.
‘You and Sir Robert and Lady Kingsley a team?’ said Mr. Morgan. Compared to my mother’s, the gleam in his eye was quite virginal. He said, ‘You know, I’d like to go to those meetings? After all, I’m on holiday too. Would Sir Robert object?’
‘You’re on the Board,’ said my mother. ‘You get fresh bread where you stay?’
‘Not as good as yours,’ said Mr. Morgan. My mother got up. He added, ‘Wendy?’
‘Yes?’ I said. My mother was making up sandwiches for a director whose salary ran into six figures.
Mr. Morgan was frowning. ‘A nice girl like you, on your own. The Chairman needs to send someone with you. An aunt. A girlfriend. Your mother.’
My mother looked up. So did I. He went on talking. Eventually he got to his feet, and she handed him the sandwiches and walked him to the door where she stood, buttoning him into his coat. She came back without him. She was glowing. ‘There is a boy I would have been glad to call son! He said it himself. He said I should go with my child to Morocco. Tomorrow he speaks to Sir Robert. Tomorrow he tells us what happens, when he comes to deal with the plumbing.’
‘Mother?’ I said. ‘You know who this Mo Morgan is? He is an inventor. He had the best OEM design company in Europe, and Kingsley’s bought him over and presented him with an international division of his own, with all the money he needs for new processes. He has friends, colleagues, contacts, family. Why is he here fixing your bed blanket?’
‘Because you never have time, and he don’t want to see an old woman fry,’ my mother said, clearing the table. ‘Family? None. He lives in a flat: a service company cleans him on Thursdays. Friends? He sees them all day: they all work with him. That little inventor, he wants nice food and a mother. You’d do better with him than this man who is blind with the yacht.’
‘At the rate we’re going,’ I said, ‘he’s likelier to ask you than me to be the first Mrs. Morgan. Don’t be crazy. Mothering he may think he needs, but he’s not deranged enough to need it in Ealing.’ I’d been to look in the bedroom. He’d fixed her blanket, rewired her bed lamp, set the digital clock and propped up the bad leg of the bed. The gas cooker had recovered its pilots. On the wall, where he’d forgotten them, were three yellow stickers covered with drawings. I imagined they were ideas he’d had while he was working. I said, ‘You don’t suppose that after a hard day in the stratosphere he plans to relax by reclamping your ballcock?’
‘So what does he want?’ said my mother, sitting down and switching the television on to full volume. She didn’t say a thing about blowing the gaffe to Sir Robert.
I realised she had dismissed the fact as now unimportant. I realised I was telling her nothing about Mr. Morgan she hadn’t already worked out. This is the trouble with our relationship. I said, ‘He wants a personal line on Sir Robert?’
‘Maybe,’ said my mother.
I thought. ‘He wants to pick up shop floor gossip on Kingsley’s?’
‘Maybe,’ said my mother.
‘And he likes your cooking,’ I said. ‘But you’re not damn well coming to Morocco. And Sir Robert won’t let him in either.’
‘Are you joking?’ she said. ‘Whatever that brainbox wants, Kingsley’s can’t afford not to give him.’ Behind the smoke, I thought she was smirking.
She could smirk. The Chairman wasn’t running a package tour. I could see myself in Morocco. And Sir Robert. And Charity. I could see Sir Robert gratefully clinching his deal while, from his boat at the seaside, Johnson Johnson blindly commuted to finish his portrait. But Mr. Morgan and Mother I couldn’t see.
My mother could. My mother stubbed out her broken-kneed gasper. ‘Me and Morgan and Johnson. It’ll happen, Wendy,’ she said, coughing absently. ‘Change gives Birth to Leaders. You pour us two nice Cockburn’s Aged Tawnies while I fix us some travel insurance. Them Tuaregs is a shower of Vikings.’
I flew with my mother to Morocco. As she informed me (and the rest of the passengers), we travelled above France, Spain and either the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, since Morocco, being in the north-west corner of Africa, is bordered by both. As we landed, she noticed a camel. Although expecting a camel, she was rendered temporarily silent, and kept briefly in that condition by the fact that in Morocco the officials speak French. We had, as it turned out, a great deal to do with officials.
I prefer not to think of the two weeks before we left England. In malign and orderly succession, Mr. Morgan came to fix the plumbing, announced he was leaving for Toubkal and departed, carrying a ham and a polythene bag full of goulash, both of which were confiscated, as we later learned, by the Customs. Mr. Johnson withdrew from communication and presumably also set off, money no object, eventual destination Essaouira. Sir Robert, in a brief conversation, suggested that, at Kingsley’s expense, I should take my sick mother on vacation to Marrakesh. The suggestion had been Mr. Morgan’s since, after all, I had just come back from one holiday. It was the first hint I’d been given that the Chairman and Chief Executive of MCG had actually agreed to meet Sir Robert privately in Marrakesh. And I, his EA, was the person chosen to go with my Chairman. Not Paul or Frank or any of our top men whom everyone knew, but me, with my sick mother. That was the malign bit.
The news of my sick mother spread round our temporary office at Hendon, and was not entirely believed. My coffee was delivered unsugared by Trish, and amusing dialogues about Beau Geste and Ealing took place between her and Val Dresden. Jokes about Morocco Bound and Humphrey Bogart occurred to nearly everybody: I grew very tired of Sam’s tune. I spent a lot of overtime with Paul Pettigrew, being made to memorise figures, and memorise ways of transmitting fresh figures. I learned more than I had ever known before about the affairs of the Kingsley company, and what was known of the affairs of our target. I didn’t think of MCG as our victim. I thought of it as an enhancement and rescue operation. When I got home, I rehearsed it all with my mother.
Just before we flew out, Sir Robert called me in and spoke quite seriously about my hard work, and what a lot it meant to him personally. He added that, as I knew, Lady Kingsley would be in Morocco with him, and if I received a note from her, I was to respond to it. In this way, I should have an excuse to be present at meetings. Lady Kingsley was quite willing to do this but would not, of course, attend the meetings herself.
After that he paused and said, ‘And there’s something else you should know. The chap they found dead by the safe. Remember?’
I wondered what he was going to say. Up till then, the body had never been identified. Sir Robert said, ‘I’ve just heard from the police. He wasn’t killed by the bomb. He was shot before it went off. He’d been murdered.’
In our office. In the
Boardroom.
Seminars don’t cover this sort of thing. I said, ‘Why?’
Sir Robert shook his head. ‘Terrorists are unstable people. The police posit a quarrel, an accident.’
It seemed likelier to me that the murder had to do with the safe-breaking. I nearly said so. Then I realised what he was really telling me. The police didn’t know that someone had been through our strategy files, because Sir Robert had said nothing about it.
I thought about it, although not for long. I could see that there were several good reasons for silence. A witch-hunt for a culprit might upset the precious MCG meeting. He wouldn’t want a suggestion of leaks, which might shake Kingsley’s position in the market. And he didn’t have a compulsion to track down the villain for there was no sign that any use had been made of the figures. Perhaps because the man who meant to use them was murdered.
There was, of course, the matter of justice to be considered. But I thought the police could get on with it quite well without Sir Robert’s help or mine at this juncture. I said, ‘I understand. Well, thank you for telling me.’
Sir Robert said, ‘There’s a little more to it, Wendy, than that. Overseas, there may be other attempts to interfere with us. You’ve worked so unstintingly that I hesitate even to say it. But I have come to wonder if you wouldn’t be safer staying in London.’
I said, ‘No one else knows the figures. There isn’t time.’
‘I know enough to settle things broadly. I should go alone,’ said Sir Robert. ‘You shouldn’t have to run into danger. And there’s the risk to your mother as well.’
I looked at him in amazement. His own mother had worn out five husbands.
I said, ‘My mother feels as I do. The bottom line is the company’s welfare.’
‘Wendy,’ he said. ‘If you really think so.’ He looked a little shaken. Upper management, even today, don’t always recognise how far executive training has come. I went home, and packed, and refrained from saying anything about murdered safe-breakers until our plane was irretrievably airborne. There is a bottom line. There is also a sub-bottom line; and I didn’t want to explore it. My mother and I left, resolutely, for Morocco.
We didn’t have long to wait for the unpleasantness. It began at Marrakesh, when a Customs search at the airport revealed a radio-cassette player we weren’t supposed to have, plus thirty cassettes ranging from
Corporation Finance and Takeover Strategy
to
How to Turn Sales Mice into Tigers.
My mother had packed everything needed to send me up the corporate ladder and get us both jailed. The authorities were rigid with suspicion even before they got to her gas escape hood and her biomagnetic regulator bracelet and her packets and bottles against paratyphoid A and B, TB, gamma globulin (hepatitis and tetanus), and a sure fix for polio and malaria. When they penetrated to her anti-AIDS outfit at last, they just laid out the syringes, the needles, the sutures, and sent for the police. It was just as well I speak French.
After the British consul arrived, we were allowed away with a warning and sent off to our hotel with the courier, who had gone very silent and didn’t have the intellectual equipment, anyway, to handle my mother on an expense-paid trip to the land of the Desert Song.
By that time, it was dark. It was nevertheless warm when we finally got into a taxi and began driving through flat, lightless land from the airport. When we suddenly stopped, I saw we had caught up with a lot of other taxis and cars and horse-drawn vehicles and donkeys and people, who all seemed to be waiting. My mother put down the window, letting in a hubbub of noise, and some flowery smells, and some less than flowery. I could see – I knew it by now – a police uniform. My mother said, ‘Oh my God: they’re going to body-search us again. You know I put my girdle back on inside out? You know that’s bad luck?’
My mother’s Strong Control girdles are shaped like beer barrels: they must have had to send for a cooper. I said, ‘Why are we waiting?’
The driver turned round. He said, with reproof, ‘The King passes.’
At the time I was surprised. I looked out of the window. I saw, far back on the road from the airport, a black line of US stretch limos, making their way to the city. The motorcade hummed slowly nearer. A posse of motorcycle outriders came up and passed, followed by two limousines, both totally darkened. Behind them was a third, lit from within, in which a figure leaned back, amiably waving. There followed a fourth, also lit, which contained men in European dress, conversing together.
One of them had black hair, a cracked nose and glasses. Also a tailored dark suit, with classic white shirt and neat tie. I wouldn’t have recognised who it was, except that the cavalcade slowed, and I saw him quite clearly in profile.
Johnson Johnson, who might have a yacht on Essaouria but who was not, it was clear, safely sharing it with a friend. J. Johnson who, bitchily, must have been telling the truth from the start. He had claimed to have a portrait commission, and it was all too clear now that he had. He must be painting the Moroccan royal family.
I tapped my mother’s unyielding arm. I said, ‘That’s the man I had lunch with two weeks ago.’
‘The King?’ said my mother, with interest. She didn’t mean it. Her eyes were fixed on the bifocal glasses.
‘Just about,’ I replied. I felt disturbed. I said, ‘He must be staying in Marrakesh, same as we are. Now what do I do?’
My mother said, ‘You’re telling me that sharp item in the suit is your painter? What you do, Wendy, is zilch. He don’t suspect that you’re here: he don’t need to find out that you’re here. End of problem.’
‘That is the King’s cavalcade,’ said the courier.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You have a friend in the King’s cavalcade?’ said the courier caustically.
‘Just one of the great English portrait painters,’ said my mother, before I could kick her.
There was a silence inside the car, if not outside, where the traffic, blaring, was beginning to move again. The driver said, ‘The papers say that in honour of the Anniversary of the Enthronement of the Monarch, the royal family are allowing themselves to be painted. By an English painter.’