“That was on the way back. They tried to overcharge us. They tried to land us with the full tariff, when they’d agreed to demi-pension.”
Collings, who was no French scholar, pronounced this last word as though it was something his employers were going to pay him when he retired.
“But you sorted it out.”
“Morgan sorted it out. He told the proprietor exactly where he got off.”
“In English or French?” said Ronald Cheverton, looking up for the first time from some papers he was studying.
“Oh, in French.”
“Pretty fluent, I suppose.”
“The proprietor seemed to understand it all right.”
Ronald Cheverton said, “Hmm,” and returned to his reading.
“He’ll be waiting for his pay packet,” said Bob. “Do we keep on with him?”
“Yes, I think so,” said Ronald. “We’ll give him a dry run to Italy and make our minds up after the next French trip.”
Later that evening, in Henekeys bar, David said, “Big celebration tonight. We’ll have a couple of drinks here and then go on and have a slap-up dinner.”
“They must pay you better than they do me,” said Paula.
“It’s not the pay. It’s the perks.”
“What perks?”
“They liked their courier so much they had a whip-round at the end. Forty-five pounds. Ten of them from Mrs Fairbrass, bless her old heart. Who said Yorkshire people were close with their brass?”
They had two drinks and then one more and went to a restaurant in Soho and had a couple of drinks while waiting for their meal. Paula had a hard head, for a girl, but she was loosening up by the time they were halfway through a large flask of Val Policella.
“It’s all right for us wage slaves,” said David, “but I’m damned if I know how Ronald and Bob do it.”
“Do what?”
“Make a living out of it. I know what the customers paid for this trip and I know what the accommodation cost. Add in the petrol for the coach and the cross-Channel tickets and pay for me and Collings and there can hardly be twopence left for them.”
“I expect they get a rake-off from the hotels.”
“Could be. I know someone who gets a rake-off and that’s Mike Collings. He chooses the places we stop for our midday meal. Must be worth a tenner a time to him.”
“He gives me the creeps,” said Paula. “He’s like one of those people on the telly. As soon as he comes on, the music goes ‘twang’ and you know he’s a baddy.”
But her mind wasn’t on Collings. It was fully engaged in the tantalising problem that David Rhys Morgan presented. He was a grand talker. Was he also a doer? In short, was she going to end the evening alone in her bed, or with him in his?
She need not have worried.
“And this,” said Martin Brandreth, “is the print shop. You won’t have anything to do with it, not directly, but it’s a good thing for my secretary to know what goes on at the sharp end.”
It was a huge room, lit from above and on three sides by big windows. It was full of a bewildering variety of machinery which Susan later identified as the Roland Parva, the Roland Ultra and the Roland Favourit, the Kords, the Smart Densitometer, the Muller-Martini Trimmer Stitcher and the Krause-Wohlenberg Guillotine.
“We’re one of the best-equipped outfits in the South of England. We can tackle anything from a pocket-sized brochure to a six-by-eight poster. Basic red, black, yellow and blue, but any number of combinations and shades. The client chooses the exact mix. Just like when you buy clothes in a shop. You pick out the colours you want before they start designing the dress.”
He led the way through the clattering room to an apparatus of gleaming steel and blue glass. Susan was doing her best to take in the information which was being tossed at her, but was really more interested, at that moment, in the people who were operating the machines.
Her father, who had been a soldier, had once said to her,
“If you want to find out whether it’s a good regiment, watch the men when the Colonel goes on a tour of inspection.”
Judged by this, it did not seem to be an entirely happy outfit. The men answered up when Brandreth spoke to them, but they proffered no information, and she had yet to see one of them smile.
The young man who seemed to be in charge of this particular machine stood back as they approached. He had carroty hair, worn rather long, and the pale, freckled face which goes with hair of that colour.
Brandreth said to him, “Well, Simon. How is it going?” and turned away as he said it, giving the impression that he either anticipated a routine response or was not really interested in what it turned out to be.
When the young man said nothing at all, Brandreth swung round on him. He said, “Something up?”
“I’d rather you talked to Mr Lambie about it, sir.”
The “sir” came after an interval long enough to make it sound not only reluctant, but offensive.
Susan had noticed a white-haired man hovering near the machine, who took this as a cue to advance.
“Something wrong, Lambie?”
“I’d prefer to discuss it in the office.”
“As you like.”
When Susan hesitated, he said, “You’d better come along too. Lambie is the father of the Chapel. He’s the most important man here. Much more important than me. I’m just the mug who signs the pay checks.”
He led the way out of the print shop and up to the next floor. The works had been built on a sloping piece of ground, and when they had climbed the stairs and made their way to the front of the building they were still on street level.
The front office was busy with clacking typewriters. Brandreth’s suite of offices was at the far end. A conference room, a small outer room for Susan, then Brandreth’s private sanctum. It was like a self-contained flat. There was even a tiny bathroom. Brandreth paused in the conference room, as if making up his mind whether to go any farther. Then he pulled back the chair at the head of the table, plumped himself down in it and gestured to Susan and Mr Lambie to be seated. Everything he did, Susan decided, was based on the idea of how a top man ought to act. It would have been more convincing if it had been less self-conscious.
“Well, Lambie,” he said. “What is it?”
“It’s Simon Wales.”
“That much I did grasp. What does he want? More money?”
“No, sir. He wants an assistant.”
There was a thick, red-covered, thumb-indexed book on the table. Lambie had a copy of the same book with him. Both men opened their books together and found the place they were looking for. Just as though they were going to sing a duet, thought Susan.
“He’s within his rights, you know,” said Lambie. “That machine rates two operators.”
“I can read,” said Brandreth. “If it rates an assistant, why hasn’t he got one?”
“He did have. Young Ward. Went off to join his father in a newsagent’s business end of last month. You remember?”
“I thought we’d got a replacement.”
“We advertised for one. But the earliest anyone could come was beginning of June.”
“Well, okay. Tell him he’ll have his assistant. In three weeks’ time.”
“He says he wants him now.”
“For God’s sake!” said Brandreth, losing all hold of a temper which had been slipping for some minutes. “What is this place? A bloody nursery. Does everyone want their hand held by someone else? He can have an assistant in three weeks’ time. Until then he’s got to work the bloody machine by himself.”
“He won’t do it, sir.”
“Then put someone on the machine who will.”
“If we start moving people from their jobs on to other jobs, we really shall be in for trouble. Like as not, they’ll all walk out.”
“Then shut that machine down for three weeks and send Wales on holiday.”
“What about the Golden Apple job?”
There was a long and brittle silence.
Finally Brandreth jerked back his chair, jumped to his feet and started to walk up and down. Someone had left a box-file on the floor beside the table. Brandreth kicked it so hard that it flew open and all the papers spilled out on to the carpet. Mr Lambie watched him impassively. When the exercise had worked some of the steam out of him, Brandreth sat down again and said, “Suppose you make a helpful suggestion for a change. You’re meant to be impartial.”
“It’s difficult. We might offer him a large bonus. On the grounds that he’ll be doing two people’s work for the next three weeks.”
“Blackmail.”
“In a way.”
“And another thing.” Brandreth was leafing through the book on the table which Susan was now able to see was called the
Printing Industries Annual.
“There are three other machines where the rules say that the operator
may
have an assistant i/the work justifies it. You can bet your bottom dollar, if those three lads hear that Wales has been paid a bonus, they’ll all ask for an assistant, or a large bonus if they don’t get one.”
“It’s more than likely,” said Mr Lambie stolidly.
Susan watched Brandreth curiously. He was up against a brick wall, and no one was going to help him to climb it. He seemed to realise this, because he sat back and said, “All right, Lambie. I’ll have to think about it. Tell Wales I’ll give him an answer by the end of the week. He can carry on for three days, surely.”
“I expect he’ll do that,” said Mr Lambie.
When he had gone Susan said, “What are you going to do about it? It seems quite a problem.”
“I’m going to have a word with Blackett,” said Brandreth. “He’s solved worse problems than that. Let’s get on with the work in hand. Come inside.”
They went into the inner office, and Brandreth picked up the top letter from his in tray and started dictating an answer, rather fast. Susan kept up with him, her shorthand moving smoothly over the page. A lot of the letters were about the Holmes and Holmes order. It seemed to be a major operation and one that was being carried out against the clock. She began to understand why no breakdowns or delays in the print shop were wanted at that particular moment. It seemed that Holmes and Holmes were mounting an advertising campaign for a new sparkling nonalcoholic drink under the name of Golden Apple. It invigorated and refreshed, stimulated your mental and physical powers and had remarkable rejuvenating properties. Susan thought it sounded the sort of drink she would go a long way to avoid and smiled in the middle of taking down a letter to the marketing manager.
Brandreth said, “What’s the joke?”
“Sorry,” said Susan. “Just a thought. I was wondering what a Welsh ex-boyfriend of mine would have said if you’d offered him a glass of Golden Apple.”
“Filthy muck, I imagine. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it’s one of the biggest orders we’ve had for some time. Posters, shop-window displays, tear-out leaflets and brochures. And it’s a race.”
“Against whom?”
Brandreth smiled and looked almost human for the first time that morning. He said, “I’ve never had a secretary before who’d say ‘whom.’ It’s a race against Peppo. That, you may be surprised to hear, is a remarkable new sparkling non-alcoholic drink which inspires, refreshes and rejuvenates. It’s being put out by the UK subsidiary of an American firm, and Merry and Merry are doing the advertising. With all these new products it’s the early bird that catches the worm. A fortnight’s start—even a week—can make all the difference.”
“And we’re running neck and neck.”
“I should say we’re ahead at the moment. But Merry’s get all their printing done in Belgium—where they don’t have strikes and go-slows and work to rules and bloody twerps like Simon Wales gumming up the whole show to screw a few more pounds for himself, and old women like Lambie sitting on their bottoms and not lifting a hand to help. Next letter—”
That was on Tuesday.
On Thursday, Brandreth suspended his morning’s dictation to say, “I’ve had an idea.”
“Yes,” said Susan cautiously.
“There are a lot of points about our organisation that I haven’t been able to explain to you. Mainly because I haven’t been able to spare the time. Why don’t you come down at the weekend, to my cottage in the country. We’d have plenty of time then. No disturbances. I could put you fully into the picture, give you a real idea of the organisation.”
“It sounds an excellent idea,” said Susan. “There’s just one thing. I take it your cottage is equipped with a resident chaperone?”
“Good gracious! You don’t imagine—what a very old-fashioned idea.”
“I’m an old-fashioned girl,” said Susan. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be possible this weekend. I’m spending it at Salisbury.”
“Oh?”
“With my grandmother. She lives in the Close. She ranks next to the Dean’s wife in order of unofficial precedence.”
“It sounds like a weekend of mad gaiety. Then perhaps one of the following weekends? I will install my sister as chaperone specially for you. She will bring an Alsatian bitch and two Skye terriers.”
“That sounds reasonably safe,” said Susan.
Mrs Perronet-Condé would have been a remarkable character in any setting. After only ten years she was, as Susan had observed, the Second Lady of the Close.
She welcomed her granddaughter affectionately, said, “I’m afraid you’ll find it very dull,” and proceeded to organise her weekend for her.
“There are several people I want you to meet. General Wheeler was a great friend of your father’s. They went out to North Africa in the same convoy in 1940. You won’t mind talking about him?”
“Not a bit,” said Susan, with a smile. “It’s long enough ago, now, not to mind.”
Her father, having survived an adventurous war, first in the desert and afterwards in Burma, had fallen dead, under the shower-bath, after a not particularly strenuous game of squash. Susan had been fifteen years old at the time. She had loved her father very much, and it had taken her a long time to get over it, but she could think about him and even talk about him now without the cold, knotted-up feeling in her inside.
“If we call on him at twelve o’clock,” said her grandmother, he will be able to offer us a glass of sherry, and our own luncheon will be an excuse to get away at a quarter to one. There’ll be tennis in the afternoon at the West Canonry. You’ve brought your racquet? And proper tennis clothes? Good. In the evening we are having drinks with the Dean. On Sunday morning, after Morning Service, we all congregate in the Chapter House for a cup of coffee. You’ll be able to meet everyone else then.”