Motherland

by William Nicholson

  ‘Meetings? Don’t tell me about meetings! My life is meetings. But we’re here to enjoy ourselves, right? How about the brandy without the singing waiters?’

  ‘I left a copy of my report with your assistant,’ says Larry. ‘Can I be sure he’ll get it to the president?’

  ‘Don’t you worry about that. Don’t you worry about anything. This is the VIP treatment. You’re having a good time, right? Have a cigarette. You like something sweet? They got crêpes here, they roll ’em round cream cheese and brandy pecan stuffing, they float ’em in strawberry sauce, and all you have to do is open your mouth. You will die and go to heaven.’

  *

  The next day is a frustrating one for Larry. He waits in his hotel but no message comes. He calls Brunstetter’s office, only to learn he’s out of town for the day. He calls the president’s office to confirm that they received his report, and is assured the matter is being attended to. Left to his own devices, reluctant to walk the streets in the sultry heat, he stays in his hotel room and thinks about Kitty. He thinks about how he kissed her and how he told her he loved her, and the petty annoyances of the day fade into nothing. Something so big has come so right that now all he can do is rest silent, grateful, in its presence.

  In the end, because thoughts of Kitty so fill his mind, he writes her a letter. All his letters to her have been love letters, but this is the first time he has written openly about his love.

  I don’t know how to begin this letter. Whatever I write will sound either too faint to express what I feel or too presumptuous. What am I to you? One who has loved you for ten years and only kissed you once. One who wants only to spend the rest of his life with you and knows it’s impossible. What a mess it is. What a wonderful ridiculous joyful mess! Everything is wrong but all I feel is happiness. I suppose from now on we’re to lead lives of guilt and subterfuge but I don’t care. It turns out I don’t care about anything or anyone but you. I suppose this is how crimes of passion come about. As you see from the letter paper I’m in a grand hotel in New Orleans. They give me grand dinners, and a car and driver to take me wherever I want. And all I want is you. I long to say to my driver, Take me to Kitty. Then an immense American car would come swishing down the track to your house, and you’d get in the back seat with me, which is deep and soft and long, and …

  He doesn’t finish the letter. Nor does he send it. He knows he can’t involve Kitty in a secret life she has to hide from Ed. But he keeps the letter, just in case the time should ever come when he can show it to her.

  *

  The next day a message comes from Jimmy Brunstetter. He would like to meet Larry at ten a.m.

  Larry finds Brunstetter has the McKinsey report on his desk, but sees no sign of his own report. There’s another man in the room who is only introduced as ‘Walter’. This time Jimmy Brunstetter gets straight down to business.

  ‘So the McKinsey boys did a fine job, right? We were pretty pleased with what they turned up. There’s your company future right there, Larry. You seen the latest figures? We didn’t see Geest coming, did we?’

  ‘No, we didn’t,’ says Larry. ‘But the market’s potentially big enough for both of us.’

  ‘Potentially.’ Brunstetter glances at Walter. ‘We like actually.’ He taps the McKinsey report. ‘This is actually.’

  Larry made up his mind before leaving London to show no signs of his real feelings about the McKinsey report. After all, United have paid for it.

  ‘The report is excellent in its analysis of costs,’ he says. ‘But it doesn’t take account of company culture. You’ll find in my report that there’s another approach.’

  ‘That’s good, that’s good,’ says Brunstetter. Once more he taps the McKinsey report. ‘The president and the board have signed off on this.’

  ‘Signed off? I don’t understand.’

  ‘The recommendations of this report will now be implemented.’

  ‘Implemented? I’m sorry, Jimmy, there’s some misunderstanding here. I don’t accept the McKinsey findings, and nor does my board.’

  ‘I don’t think you mean that, Larry.’

  Walter is taking notes.

  ‘Give me a year,’ says Larry. ‘You’ll see in my report how I plan to tackle the issues the McKinsey report raises.’

  ‘You’ll make the redundancies?’

  ‘I’ll do all that’s necessary.’

  ‘Come on, Larry. We’re old friends, we don’t need to bull around. Fyffes needs to lose at least half its people. You know that. I know that. Are you going to do it?’

  ‘I don’t accept that cuts on that scale are needed,’ says Larry. ‘The company’s in good health. In a year we’ll be back in profit.’

  Brunstetter turns to Walter.

  ‘What do you reckon, Walter?’

  ‘The question is very simple,’ says Walter. As soon as he starts talking Larry knows he’s a lawyer. ‘The board of the parent company requires the report here to be implemented in full. Is Mr Cornford willing to do that or not?’

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ says Larry. ‘I’m here to talk about the report. I’m here to talk about the best way forward for Fyffes. After all, I was born into this company. My grandfather created it. My father made it successful. I think I can claim to know more about how Fyffes works than either McKinsey or your board.’

  ‘Well, there you have the problem,’ says Brunstetter. ‘You just put your finger right on the button, Larry. You were born into the company. Maybe the time has come for fresh blood.’

  ‘Fresh blood?’

  ‘The question is very simple,’ says Walter. ‘Will you or will you not implement the recommendations of this report?’

  ‘Why should I?’ He can’t help himself. ‘It’s narrowly based, error-riddled, ill-conceived, and concerned with nothing but the bottom line.’

  ‘We are concerned with the bottom line, Larry,’ says Brunstetter.

  ‘The company is greater than its profits.’

  The two Americans greet this with silence.

  ‘The question is very simple,’ says Walter doggedly.

  ‘No! It is not!’ Larry is angry now. ‘It’s complex, and there are many ways forward. I will not accept this corner shop chiselling as any way to run a company.’

  Another silence follows.

  ‘Are we to understand,’ says Walter, ‘that you are offering your resignation?’

  That’s when Larry gets it at last. They want him out.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Fyffes is my family. How do you resign from your family?’

  He looks from one to the other. He realises now that it’s Walter who’s the power in the room.

  ‘Are you telling me that if I don’t agree to implement this report, I’m out?’

  ‘Are we to understand,’ says Walter, ‘that you’re offering your resignation?’

  ‘Can I have time to think about this?’

  ‘No, sir,’ says Walter.

  ‘No time? You ask me to choose between the jobs of a thousand employees of my company, and my own job?’

  They give no answer to that.

  Larry gives a laugh.

  ‘It seems the question is very simple after all,’ he says. ‘You’ve already made up your minds. Half the staff are to go. The only remaining question is whether I go too.’

  He turns and looks out of the window, seeing nothing of the street below, not wanting to see their faces.

  ‘I believe this strategy to be profoundly mistaken,’ he says. ‘I can’t run the company on this basis. If so many lives are to be destroyed by the shortsightedness and greed of you gentlemen in the United Fruit Company, then let mine be destroyed too. You’re choosing to sink a fine company. As captain, I choose to go down with the ship.’

  ‘Are we to understand,’ says Walter, ‘that you are offering your resignation?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Larry. ‘You are.’

  39

  On landing at Heathrow, Larry finds his driver is not there to meet hi
m. Exhausted by the flight, he considers taking a taxi home, but chooses instead to ask the cabbie to take him to Piccadilly. The company is in crisis and he feels an urgent need to be with his colleagues; almost as urgently, he does not want to have to explain to Geraldine how everything will now have to change.

  London looks drab and poor after New Orleans. A smattering of rain brings out the black umbrellas on the pavements. Larry sits in the jolting cab, eyes closed, preparing himself for the shock he is about to deliver. He remains sure he has done the right thing, and is ready to pay the price. But so many others will pay too.

  It’s just past three in the afternoon when the taxi pulls up outside 15 Stratton Street. Larry hauls his suitcase through the heavy door into the dark lobby where Stanley the doorman has his cubbyhole.

  ‘Mr Lawrence, sir!’

  ‘Hello, Stanley. Sorry if I look like a tramp, I’ve come straight from the airport. I’ll leave this with you.’

  He drops his suitcase and makes for the stairs.

  ‘Sir!’ cries Stanley. ‘Sir! I’m sorry, Mr Lawrence!’

  Larry turns round.

  ‘What is it, Stanley?’

  ‘I’m not to admit you, sir.’

  ‘Not admit me?’

  ‘Your things have all been sent to the house, sir. Mr Angelotti is in your office now.’

  ‘Mr Angelotti?’

  ‘The new boss, sir.’ Stanley can’t meet Larry’s eyes. ‘He came Thursday.’

  ‘Thursday!’

  ‘And sir. Mr Lawrence, sir. We was all so sad to hear about Mr William, sir.’ Now he looks up at Larry, and his eyes are blurry. ‘They’re saying it’s all over for us, sir.’

  Larry struggles to keep a grip on what he’s hearing. As gently as possible he responds to the doorman.

  ‘Nothing’s over,’ he says. ‘Now tell me what’s happened to my father?’

  ‘Your father, sir? Didn’t no one tell you? He passed away, sir. We heard this morning. I’m sorry, sir. He was a gentleman.’

  *

  Larry returns to the house in Campden Grove to find the situation entirely under control. Geraldine is superb in a crisis. Undertakers have been called. The library has been turned into a lying-in room. All the necessary people have been informed.

  ‘I tried to reach you,’ she says.

  Larry is almost mute with shock and grief. Coming on top of the stress induced by his resignation, and the long flight home, this news comes close to breaking him.

  ‘When? How?’

  ‘Yesterday evening. They phoned with the news from the office. We were in the middle of dinner. Cookie called him to the phone. He spoke on the phone, then he came back to the dining room and said, “They’ve brought in an American to run the company.” Then he put his hands forward on the table, as if to steady himself. Then he fell to the floor.’

  ‘Dear Lord!’ groans Larry.

  ‘The doctor says it was a single big stroke. They say it must have been instantaneous.’

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ says Larry. ‘Oh, Dad.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Larry. What can I do? Just tell me how I can help you.’

  ‘You’ve been wonderful. You’ve done everything. I don’t know. I can’t think.’

  Timidly she says, ‘There’ll have to be a funeral.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

  ‘I can arrange it if you like.’

  ‘Please. Arrange everything.’

  He goes into the library, where the curtains are closed, and two candles burn on either side of an open coffin. His father lies in the coffin, looking like a poorly executed dummy. Larry kneels and prays, briefly. But his father is not here.

  He climbs the stairs to the suite of rooms on the second floor his father has used for the whole of his life. The small sitting room opens onto a bedroom, a bathroom, a dressing room. Everything here is neat and tidy, as his father liked it. Larry came into this suite of rooms from time to time as a child, but has not been through the doors for twenty years or more. He closes the door onto the stairwell behind him, wanting to be alone in his father’s presence. Almost delirious with exhaustion, he walks about the rooms, touching the items his father touched every day: his quilted dark-red bath robe, his badger-hair shaving brush, the pomade with which he added a discreet shine to his greying hair. On the bedside table lie his rosary and his breviary, its silk marker in yesterday’s place. He read Compline to himself every evening, Matins every morning. How can he be dead?

  His father kept a prie-dieu in the little sitting room, though Larry never saw him kneeling at it. He must have done so in the night, the kneeler cushion is deeply indented.

  Larry kneels, resting his elbows on the armrest, letting his head sink into his hands.

  ‘Lord Jesus Christ,’ he prays, ‘take my beloved father into your loving arms. Let him know the peace and rest he deserves. Tell him I admired him so much. Tell him he was the only truly good man I’ve ever known. Tell him I loved him all my life. Tell him … tell him … Dad … don’t leave me now. Don’t leave me. Dad, I need you so.’

  Then he lets himself cry, wetting his jacket sleeves with his tears.

  In time the tears pass. He looks up and sees, through the open dressing room door, on the wall above the chest of drawers, a blur of colour. He blinks and dabs at his eyes. He rises from the prie-dieu and goes into the dressing room. There, close beside the rail of suits his father wore that still carry his familiar smell, hang two small pictures on the wall. Two views of Mount Caburn, with Edenfield church in the foreground. Two pictures painted by a son who had disappointed his father. Bought from the Leicester Galleries five years ago, by a father who wanted only that his son should be happy.

  *

  Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine.

  The Carmelite church is packed for the funeral. Looking around the pews Larry sees board members, directors, managers, storemen, porters, maintenance workers; ships’ captains and crew men; company representatives from Jamaica, Honduras, the Canaries, Cameroon. These are the people his father served. These are the people he too has served in his turn. And now it’s all over.

  This is not how it should have been. His father’s death should have been celebrated as the end of a good life, his achievements recognised and perpetuated. He built a company that he meant to outlast him. And when he took his leave, honourably, asking for nothing for himself, looters and wreckers rose up to destroy his heritage.

  Who are these mighty masters of the world, these presidents of a far-off empire who look with their cold eyes on balance sheets and turn them into shrouds? Zemurray and Brunstetter and McKinsey and the rest, what God do they worship? In the name of what grand design do they exploit their workers and corrupt their governments?

  Dies irae!

  ‘Oh what fear man’s bosom rendeth, when from heaven the Judge descendeth, on whose sentence all dependeth!’

  So while others mourn, Larry rages. His anger is directed against himself, too. His father entrusted the company to him, and he promised to keep the company safe, and he failed.

  I have killed my father.

  Libera me, domine.

  ‘Deliver me O Lord from eternal death on that awful day when the heavens and the earth shall be moved, when Thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.’

  Sitting in the car following the hearse, with Geraldine by his side elegant in black, leading a convoy of cars from Kensington to Kensal Green, he feels entirely alone. Standing by the grave-side, watching the priest sprinkle the coffin with holy water, he wants to laugh at the absurdity of the whole charade.

  My father isn’t here.

  ‘May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.’

  What mercy? The good men are broken and the hard men endure. Here lies a man abandoned by God. He built a business, and that business was the well-being of others. They told him a slow buck is still a buck. But they lied.

  No, don’t rest in peace, Dad. Stand up before that
heavenly throne and rage. Waken the anger of the Lord of Hosts. The time has come to judge the world by fire.

  *

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ says Geraldine, her voice soft and insistent, ‘is why you resigned?’

  ‘Hardly a resignation,’ says Larry. ‘Even while I was in that meeting, back in London they were clearing my office.’

  ‘But you said you resigned.’

  It’s true. Larry clings to this version of events to salvage something of his honour. When asked to preside over the butchery of his father’s company, he declined.

  ‘I had no choice,’ he says wearily.

  The funeral is over. The guests are gone. The tall dark house is left to Geraldine and him.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, darling,’ says Geraldine, ‘but I wish I could understand. Why couldn’t you have stayed on, and done your best to make it not be so bad? I don’t see what you meant to achieve by resigning.’

  ‘Why should I keep my job and my comforts when the rest lose theirs? Because that would be all I’d be left with. The title, the salary, the car. Do you think I’d have been able to look my colleagues in the eye, as they cleared their desks and crept away?’

  ‘Yes, I do see that, darling. But how are things any better this way? I don’t see how it helps them having you out of a job too.’

  Larry contemplates his wife. She seems to him to be living in another universe, far away. Nothing touches her. She remains perfectly groomed.

  ‘You miss the title, and the salary, and the car?’

  ‘Am I wrong to worry?’ she says. ‘What will we live on? Do we even own this house?’

  ‘Yes, Geraldine,’ says Larry. ‘We own this house. And the house in France. We have some shares in the company. We won’t starve. And anyway, we’re young still. We can work.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Then he realises he does know; or at least a part of it. With this knowledge comes a release of kindness for his wife.

  ‘Geraldine. Please. Let’s not pretend any more.’

  ‘Pretend what?’

  But she’s frightened. She knows too.