by Anne Doughty
The afternoon grew steadily hotter as she entered up the monthly figures and collated them with the Ulster Bank lodgement book. As she worked away steadily, she thought of the last time she’d met their accountant. He’d told her his senior clerks were experimenting with automated calculating machines. The sooner the better, Clare thought, as she totted up a huge column of figures. She looked at the result, then did the sum all over again, because the figure was so encouraging she had to be sure she’d not made a mistake.
She paused, got up and stuck her head out of the window. The sun had moved round, so the side of the house was now in shadow, but there was no coolness anywhere. Her face prickled with heat and she could feel her thin, cotton print blouse sticking between her shoulder blades.
She took a deep breath and went through the figures yet once more, sure there must be something she had missed, even though she knew her records were right up to date. She checked the Pass books again. It all tallied exactly. All the loan repayments had been made for the year and there was no bill for repair or maintenance work outstanding. Then she found what she was looking for. It was now some five months since they’d made the last transfer of funds from Andrew’s salary into the Drumsollen Trading Account to prevent it going into overdraft. The present healthy balance was all their own work.
‘Hello love, how’s things?’ Andrew asked, as he took his briefcase from the passenger seat.
‘Not bad,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Wedding invitation from Ginny and wine from Robert. John’s arrived and says he has jobs to do at the front, so I though we’d be posh and have dinner upstairs as its Friday night.’
‘Great, I’m starving. Had to use the lunch hour to consult. Someone went out for sandwiches. Cheese with some sort of salad cream,’ he said, making a face, as they walked side by side along the corridor to their bedroom. ‘They were horrible.’
‘Never mind, we’ve got something nice for dinner. And dessert.’
She picked up his black jacket and pinstriped trousers as he dropped them on the bed, shook them and hung them up to air beside the open window.
‘You won’t mind if I don’t dress for dinner,’ he said, teasing her with his best English accent, as he pulled on some flannels and an open-necked shirt.
‘Well . . .’
‘I’ve missed you,’ he said, putting his arms round her. ‘A wretched day, I’m sorry to say. One more victory for the status quo. I want to forget it all as quickly as possible. Can I carry something?’ he added vigorously, as if only immediate action would erase the memory of the shabby show he’d been forced to witness in court.
‘Yes, it’s all in the bottom of the Aga. Except the dessert,’ she added, laughing, as they pushed open the kitchen door. ‘That’s upstairs already.’
She loaded up the tray for him to carry and wrapped two warm dinner plates in a tea cloth, leaving her a hand free to open the door of Headquarters.
‘I say, what are we celebrating?’ Andrew asked, as he caught sight of the small table under the window. After years of squeezing round the large and very solid piece of furniture thought appropriate when Headquarters had been the morning-room at Drumsollen, Harry had found them a customer who had offered them a remarkably good price. The new table they’d chosen together stood below the window and was laid this evening with a white damask cloth. On it were laid two place settings, a slim vase of golden roses, two silver candlesticks and a bottle of red wine in an ornate silver wine cooler.
‘Food first,’ she said, as he put the tray down on the sideboard and she took the lid off the casserole.
‘Anything you say, ma’am. But I can almost smell good news,’ he confessed, as he carried the vegetable dish to the table and poured two glasses of wine.
They were both hungry and ate devotedly, finishing off every scrap of the tasty casserole and all the vegetables as well. As they sat sipping their second glass of wine with the remaining fragments of crusty roll, Andrew suddenly spoke.
‘It’s not your birthday, nor is it our anniversary. I’m sure of that.’ He paused and asked sheepishly, ‘Is this the day we met?’
Clare laughed and looked at him more closely.
‘Oh, Andrew dear, don’t be anxious,’ she said gently. ‘I wasn’t setting you a test. Anybody can forget anything if they’ve been as busy as we’ve been. It might be the anniversary of the day we met, but I certainly can’t remember. Have you any idea when that was?’
Andrew claimed never to remember personal things, but to her amazement, he proceeded to give her a vivid picture of the day when he found her bicycle, parked against the low wall beside the gates of Drumsollen, the tyres having been let down.
‘Dear Jessie. She really thought I’d let them down and she was very, very cross. But you said you didn’t think I had,’ he continued thoughtfully, his blue eyes sparkling as he put his glass down. He paused and looked at her. ‘What made you say that?’ he asked abruptly.
‘I’m not sure now,’ she began hesitantly. ‘I’m amazed you can remember. I think I just looked and saw what you were like. Your basic honesty, perhaps. Robert used to ask me about clients he wasn’t sure about. He always said I could see if there was any badness in people.’
‘Like Charles Langley?’
‘Oh yes, dear Charles, your one-time slave at school. I couldn’t believe it when he told me about fagging for you,’ she said, laughing. ‘I wish we’d been able to go to his wedding,’ she added, a little wistfully. ‘But you’re quite right. Charles is a good example. Like you, my love, he was doing a job he had to do. The old obligation of a family business descending to the next in line. He certainly did the job to the best of his ability, but he never looked quite right doing it.’
‘Was that why you had to explain to Robert about Englishmen and duty?’
‘Stiff upper lip and all that sort of thing,’ she agreed. ‘Robert was very shrewd about people. He’d read about the English Public School style and manners, but he’d never seen it in action, so he couldn’t judge for himself if Charles was completely honest or not.’
‘Was he?’
‘Of course he was. As honest as you are. But he couldn’t get excited about buying and selling fruit and needing money to expand the import business.’
‘Any more than I can go along with some of what passes for normal legal practice in this province,’ he said sharply. ‘And now he and Lindy have a flying school in the South Downs.’
‘And are coming over to stay sometime during the winter when they can’t fly,’ she reminded him.
He smiled wryly and Clare guessed what he was thinking. Charles and Lindy had already managed to do what they so much wanted to do. When Charles’s father had died suddenly, he was free to sell up. Weekend flying had become a major leisure pursuit in the south-east and both he and Lindy were passionate about flying. Now they had more customers than they could cope with and the project was a great success.
She stood up and cleared away the empty plates and dishes and carried a domed silver dish ceremoniously to the table. Once part of the equipment for serving a cooked breakfast to be laid out on the long sideboard in the dining room, it had been redeployed for covering whatever might be a temptation to the summer flies. She removed the cover with a flourish.
‘Shall I carve, or will you?’ she asked soberly.
Andrew peered at the soft icing decorating one of June’s Victoria sponges and looked at her quizzically. ‘Did you put this icing on?’
‘I added the little sugar flowers, but June did the house and the fields. She said a cow was a bit much at short notice.’
‘So it is an anniversary, or nearly. Are you telling me we can think about buying a cow and a field?’
‘Yes, I am,’ she said, as she picked up the cake knife and handed it to him. ‘Perhaps even two of each if we can do as well next year as we have this year. We can certainly open a new account. What shall we call it? Cows or fields? Or Drumsollen estate?’
Six
Drumsol
len House,
24, June 1963
My dear Robert,
I have some wonderful news. We have done it. We have broken even. Just. Only just, but as our good friend Emile used to say, ‘That my friends is a great achievement. Without that first step nothing else can happen.’
I still can hardly believe it! If you had seen me checking and rechecking the additions and not believing what they were saying you would have laughed. Had those been the figures presented by one of your clients I would have been satisfied right away.
Clare paused, shook her fountain pen impatiently, then reached for the bottle of ink. Perhaps, if she wanted to write as fast as this, she should use the typewriter, but Robert always wrote to her by hand. She was sure he felt it was more personal. Besides, there was the question of punctuation. As she was unlikely to find a typewriter with a French keyboard in one of the second-hand shops in Belfast, she’d still have to add acute and grave accents afterwards.
She wiped the excess ink from her nib with blotting paper. Immediately, she had a vivid image of the meticulous way Robert performed the same task, a small, robust figure hunched over his enormous desk, looking even smaller when set against its wide expanses of rosewood and polished leather and the tall windows overlooking the Place de l’Opéra reaching upwards behind him.
Five years ago, she stood in front of his desk for the first time and five years ago, this very month, she had made the journey to Paris, lonely and dispirited after breaking off her engagement. She had no idea where she could find a job or somewhere to live. All she had was a single suitcase and the Paris address of Marie-Claude, whose children she had cared for at Deauville for three summers in her student years. Marie-Claude had comforted her, dressed her like a Frenchwoman, and Gerard, her financier husband, had found the job with Robert and encouraged her to apply for it.
She put down her pen again and paused, overwhelmed by the memory of the vulnerable girl she had been, suddenly bereft of the love that had sustained her since the death of her grandfather. With no home to go back to in Ireland and no job awaiting her in France, she arrived in the lovely apartment in the Bois de Boulogne not knowing she was about to get a First, that Marie-Claude and Gerard would support and care for her and that Robert would take her on as his interpreter and personal assistant at a salary far in excess of anything she could ever have earned in Belfast.
Travelling with him and translating what he had to say to the businessmen who came to him for loans taught her about banking, about money, about risk and the problems of running a business. Now it was these very skills she deployed day and daily to make Drumsollen a viable proposition, its hoped-for success the basis for all their future hopes and plans.
Running a guest house in Ireland might seem far removed from the problems Charles Langley had faced importing fruit from France and Italy, even more so from those of the good-natured Texan entrepreneur who had decided to add some vineyards to his European investments, but she had grasped very quickly that business had its own logic, its own repeating patterns, and a whole set of variables to be considered and balanced against each other. Sometimes she thought the problems were like a difficult jigsaw. You searched for missing pieces and kept finding nothing would fit. At other times the difficulties she regularly translated for Robert’s benefit seemed to her more like a route march, a long, hard struggle over rough ground, littered with unforeseen obstacles to a distant goal which was just as likely to recede before you as be reached by your efforts.
She had enjoyed her work, the strangely varied people they met and the travelling together. Sometimes, listening to clients arguing their case, Robert or Emile asking for clarifications, she felt that the whole business of assessing the viability of a project was little better than guesswork. Sometimes she felt quite defeated by the sheer variety and complexity of the factors to be taken into account, like shifts in fashion, unexpected competition, the opening up of alternative markets, a sudden rise or fall in the exchange rate.
Once, in a light-hearted mood, she’d suggested to Robert that they might do just as well assessing the viability of their clients’ projects by gazing into a crystal ball. To her delight, Robert had laughed, a rare thing with him. Not many men in banking achieved the equivalent of the large desk set against those tall windows. There was no question as to how successful he was and how seldom one of the projects he financed had failed. She often wondered if it was his habitual sober consideration that had all but removed his capacity for humour.
It was a rule they had when they dined together on their travels that they never spoke about the work of the day, but on that occasion Robert had taken up her light remark and reflected upon it.
‘You see, my dear Clare, it is about possibilities,’ he said, refilling her glass. ‘You could take two situations that seem at first sight to be identical in practical terms, but then you look at the people involved. Perhaps it is a little like chemistry, of which I have no personal knowledge at all, except what I have read,’ he said, with a small wry smile, ‘but you will understand about catalysts, elements which enable other things to happen. People are like that. Simply by being who they are, they can cause things to happen that would not have happened without them. That is the secret of many successes.’
‘And do you think, Robert, that personal qualities can outweigh brute fact?’
‘But of course,’ he said, nodding. ‘A fact and a brute fact are two different things. It is the clear perception of a hard and unpleasant fact that mitigates its power to overwhelm.’
‘So you’re saying that facing facts, however unpleasant, gives you power over them.’
‘Yes, I am. It’s one of the many things I learnt from Emile. He is not a religious man any more than I am, but his father was deeply religious and Emile had the great wisdom to test in experience all that he learnt from him. One thing he used to say to me often was: Robert, in any situation there is always something we can do. But we have to believe that is true, otherwise we won’t even look.’
‘And if we don’t look, there’s no possibility of finding,’ she’d added, remembering how often round the negotiating table Emile had seen ways of proceeding no one else had even thought of.
‘That is why your crystal ball has its limitations,’ Robert continued. ‘It can show you a future, good or bad, but it cannot show you the resources of the people who will make that future, or indeed remake that future should circumstances move against them.’
Clare was still sitting at her desk, pen in hand, lost in her own thoughts, her letter barely begun, when Helen tapped at the open door and told her that some guests had arrived and would like to see her.
‘Oh yes, fine,’ she said hastily, her mind and her memory still lingering on a flower-lined terrace in Northern France. ‘Is there a problem?’ she went on more steadily as she gathered her thoughts. Helen was normally able to deal with new arrivals quite unaided.
‘No, no problem at all,’ she replied, laughing, ‘except that their name is Hamilton and they’ve just come from Annacramp.’
When Mary and John Hamilton chose the dining room for their welcome tray, Clare asked Helen to bring an extra cup and led the way, a sense of excitement bubbling up as she responded to their easy manner and friendly comments.
‘Now Hamilton has to be good news,’ she said, as they shook hands and exchanged Christian names, ‘but Annacramp is somewhat special. I sense a story to tell.’
‘Yes, you’re quite right,’ John Hamilton replied, grinning broadly as he draped his jacket over the back of his chair. ‘The single word Annacramp brought my father back from Canada. One word, held in a child’s memory. That and his name pinned to his jacket on a luggage label was all he had of his life on this side of the Atlantic.’
‘My goodness, this is wonderful. You must be Uncle Alex’s son,’ Clare said, beaming at the smiling faces of her guests. ‘Granda Hamilton told me how your father came back and went looking for his family. And he did find them,’ she went on happ
ily. ‘Or rather, he thought he had found his uncle, and that pleased everyone, but then, later on, in Manchester, he found out how he’d come to be sent to Canada in the first place. He also found out that the John Hamilton he’d thought was his uncle was actually his cousin. Their fathers were brothers, Tom and Lofty, and they both lived at Annacramp.’
‘Poor Mary,’ said John taking his wife’s hand. ‘She’s had to put up with the tangle of Hamilton family history for years now. She’s so good about it, and it’s quite unfair as she’s as orphan herself and the Hamilton tribe has more branches than an apple tree.’
Clare looked at the warm smile on the kindly face of the dark-haired woman opposite her and thought what a happy couple they were, for Mary was taking such delight in John’s pleasure.
‘I’m an orphan too, Mary,’ Clare said quietly, ‘and so is Andrew, my husband. Like John, I’m fascinated by family history, but Andrew couldn’t care less. He seems to me to be doing his best to forget his family entirely,’ she went on, laughing at her own frustration. ‘The awful thing is that his family were all excessively literate and were once wealthy, so there’s masses of information about them, letters and genealogy, leases and deeds and all the rest of it. I’d give so much to have even a fraction of what he could have, but my lot were mostly ordinary working people. Apart from Granda Hamilton’s stories, I don’t know much about them at all. My mother’s father, Granda Scott, was a dear man but he was very quiet and self-contained and hardly ever told stories and never about family. If it weren’t for a friend of his, Charlie Running, I’d have nothing at all on that side.’
