‘That’s a long time in his day, believe me. I think you’d enjoy it, you know. Only thing is, it would be pretty stressful. You’ll be working longer hours and you won’t get home to see the children nearly so much. Better spell that out to Bianca. She might get a bit of a shock.’
Patrick was so used to his orderly existence, it was hard to imagine getting home late from time to time, and not being able to play his role of semi house-husband quite so devotedly. He could see he might even be unable to attend some crucial parents’ meeting while Bianca sat in all-night financial sessions or jetted off to New York at little more than a moment’s notice. For some reason – and he was shocked at himself as he realised it – it was a rather intriguing notion.
Lucy Farrell was leaving university. She was leaving, however, not in a cloud of glory, with a First, but in the middle of her course. With no degree of any size whatsoever.
She was hating the course. English literature – or certainly the way it was being presented to her – was a load of crap. Like the last essay, ‘the Marxist view of Jane Austen’, indeed. What could be less relevant to Jane’s work than that, for God’s sake? There’d been loads of others, just as hideously stupid, and almost two more years stretched ahead of her. She just couldn’t face it, wanted out. And she’d taken a deep breath and said so to her tutor. And he’d said she should take time to think about it and she said she didn’t want time, she was quite sure. And he’d been really very nice about it and said well, if that was how she really felt, then perhaps it would be better, and asked her politely, clearly not really wanting to know the answer, if she had any other ideas about her future.
She’d said no, and it wasn’t true, but she knew that if she’d told him, he wouldn’t even begin to understand. He would have certainly thought it wasn’t a proper job, think she was only doing it because, given that her family was in the cosmetic business, she could just walk into a job, no problem at all.
She wanted to be a make-up artist. She had read lots of articles about it, had watched a programme on the fashion shows, showing the make-up artists working in the chaos of the Paris collections. It looked like hard work, but huge fun. And she would be good at it, she knew that. She loved doing her own face, painting it all kinds of wonderful ways for parties, and had a bit of a reputation for doing her mates’ as well. And, while she didn’t think she’d ever want to work at Farrell’s, and had always resisted any idea of going into the business on a managerial level, there were lots of people there who’d be able to advise her how to go about this plan at least. She’d read in the article that you had to do a course somewhere, but that’d be fun, and if her father wouldn’t pay for her, she could fund it working at bars and stuff like that.
She was a bit worried about her father; he might not like her new plans. But he could hardly argue about them, when the cosmetic business was his whole life. Not that he particularly liked it being his whole life; in fact, he never seemed to enjoy it very much.
Hopefully Grandy would be pleased. Lucy was very fond of her grandmother. She found her more fun – and in many ways she seemed years younger – than her mother. Grandy was still quite incredibly glamorous, took her to lunch at The Ritz every year on her birthday, and quite often they went (mostly window) shopping in Bond Street. Lucy had tried to persuade her to go to Westfield, but Grandy said she hated shopping malls.
And then they’d go and have tea in the Berkeley Arcade with Florence – she was allowed to call her Florence once she was sixteen, before that it had been Miss Hamilton – Grandy was very strict about things like that – up in the little room at the top of The Shop.
She’d loved Grandpa too, and she’d been terribly upset when he died; but the good part of it was that it meant she could see a bit more of Grandy because she was suddenly alone a lot at the weekends. Well, she would see lots of her now; that would be fun.
But first she had to break the news to her father that she was leaving uni . . .
John Ripley, who was working for Pemberton and Rushworth on a vacation placement, had been given the draft contract between the House of Farrell and Porter Bingham, Venture Capitalists to read.
‘Interesting one, this, John,’ Walter Pemberton said, ‘we’ve worked very hard on it. You could learn a few things from it.’
Ripley did indeed study it very carefully, and when he had finished wondered why nobody had raised the question of voting rights. The more he thought about it, the more he wondered. He thought perhaps he ought to raise the subject with Mr Rushworth, but the question seemed to him to represent something of a criticism of Mr Rushworth’s legal skills and he didn’t want to alienate him in any way. He was hoping to get a training contract with the firm, and they were pretty thin on the ground these days.
He decided finally that it was impossible they could have failed to discuss it, and let the matter rest.
Chapter 7
Athina called them all into the boardroom before the final formal signing: the family, of course, all the key people who worked in the offices, and some extraneous ones as well, such as senior consultants and sales reps, and talked to them about what was going to happen. She explained that the deal had not been reached without considerable heart-searching, that they had struggled to find a different, independent solution, but that had, in the end, proved impossible. The arrangement with Porter Bingham had been essential for the House of Farrell, for the family . . .
‘And for you. I am aware that without the help we have now secured, some of you would have lost your jobs. These are hard times; many companies more stable than this one are failing every day. I am deeply grateful to the people at Porter Bingham for providing a chance for us but I cannot pretend to you that things will be the same. I fear, and I use the word advisedly, they will not. In spite of absolutely retaining for ourselves a majority share of the company, my family and I will have to make concessions and accept change, and I know we shall have to ask the same of you. But at least the House of Farrell will live on; I think and hope that is what we would all most wish for it. Certainly I know my husband would have done.
‘Thank you for your loyalty, for your hard work over the years, and for sharing our vision of the company; I assure you I have never, and will never, take any of it for granted.’
She stopped then. Susie Harding, watching her intently, felt her heart lurch as the clear, precise voice suddenly trembled, and the brilliant green eyes shone with tears. The House of Farrell would be no longer hers, and that would be hard, so hard for her, for the company was part of her, as she was part of it, and now the two must be wrenched apart . . .
Bertie Farrell thought he had never admired his mother more.
And Florence Hamilton, standing close to Susie, thought what a great loss to the stage Athina had been.
And there it was, next morning, on the front page of the Financial Times, lest anyone might not realise how important it was, and also, Susie thought, how important the part Porter Bingham would play. They had ensured it would be there, she and the PR guy at Porter Bingham, who she had actually found rather sexy in spite of his rather condescending attitude, and it was he who had managed to coerce Lady Farrell into what was actually a very generous quote. There was no doubt about it, Athina Farrell much preferred the opposite sex to her own.
The Prufrock column in the Sunday Times also had a lead item on the story.
Bianca Bailey, ex-CEO of toiletries firm PDN, which was sold under her aegis for £40 million, is seen here arriving at the Berkeley Arcade shop that is the showcase for the cosmetic company House of Farrell. Bailey, 38, who has just been appointed CEO of Farrell, following a deal signed this week between the Farrell family and Porter Bingham, Venture Capitalists, said she was ‘excited and daunted in equal measure’ by her new job. ‘The House of Farrell is such a marvellous brand and I am so fortunate that Lady Farrell, who founded it with her husband in 1953 – coronation year – still plays such an incredibly active role in it. She is truly a living legend,
and it will be wonderful to work with her – particularly in the next twelve months, with all the excitement in London created by the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and, of course, the Olympics.’
Bailey went on to say that several members of the royal family had visited the shop over the years – ‘although not, alas, the Queen herself but maybe we can tempt her now!’
‘Living legend indeed!’ said Athina, hurling the Sunday Times across the room. ‘Why not just say very, very old and be done with it. And she’s looking forward to working with me, is she? I find that a little condescending. And there’s another piece in the Telegraph about the Porter Bingham people, saying how marvellous they are and how successful they’ve been over the past ten years. If this is an indication of how things are going to be in the future, I feel even more depressed.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Bertie, mildly, ‘you know what they say about all publicity being good—’
‘Bertie, this isn’t publicity for Farrell’s,’ said Caro, ‘it’s for them, Bianca Bailey and the venture capitalists. They could at least have got a picture of Florence at The Shop . . .’
Had Susie Harding been there, she would have told them that both she and Bianca had tried to persuade Florence to pose outside The Shop with Bianca, and that Florence had said she couldn’t, not without Lady Farrell there as well, and that endless requests for interviews with Lady Farrell had come in from the diary pages – all of which she had refused, saying she had no wish to court what she called irrelevant publicity.
It had all been rather agonising.
Patrick had seen the papers heaped up on the kitchen table of the Oxfordshire house, clearly intended for Bianca to read when they were back in London that night. He never failed to be impressed by her ability to compartmentalise her life; the weekends were, as much as humanly possible, for the family, they had both agreed that and she never did anything for the media at the weekends, not even Radio 4 who were always asking for her. And while she periodically checked her emails and her messages, she only acted on them if they were truly urgent; the rest waited till they got home on Sunday evening, when she did disappear into her study. Supper, and getting the children ready for school, was Patrick’s job – those were the house rules, drawn up long ago.
Just the same, he couldn’t help flicking through the top two papers while Fergie sank into his Nintendo and Milly her phone and clocked very nice pictures of Bianca on the front of Mail on Sunday Money and at the top of Prufrock. As usual, the captions made her sound like a single, or, rather, a divorced woman, unless it was a woman-focused piece which went overboard about the children and the houses and her ‘wonderful, life-support accountant husband’, but he’d got used to that. He hadn’t had much choice.
Which brought him back to the one matter that he did wish to discuss with her, and fairly urgently. So far she had eluded him three times, pleading meetings, the children, or her own exhaustion; tonight – no, tomorrow night, when she would definitely be home early – he intended to insist on at least broaching the subject. It was too important to be postponed indefinitely, bringing changes as it would, into both their lives, of considerable proportions.
Patrick felt a little nervous about her reaction, to say the least.
Chapter 8
The image was so hopelessly wrong. About Day One.
The image of some kind of dynamo rushing in, righting wrongs, firing people, hiring more, slashing budgets, cancelling campaigns, closing departments – all practically before lunch on Day One. What actually happened was you moved in quietly and slowly, finding out who was really there and what they actually did; talking to people, asking for things; studying reports and checking on status; getting a feel for and an understanding of the most important areas; gaining people’s confidence, grasping how they saw things. You had to find your core people, the ones with some insight, a few ideas; you had to find who was driving each department, and who was putting the brakes on it; you had to get your own handle on the politics and to take nothing at face value; you had to be respectful, patient, and extremely brave.
What Bianca found, on Day One, was a demoralised staff, and a slack work ethic. She found disinterest and self-interest. She found lethargy and cynicism. She found hostility and suspicion.
She sat in her new office, bland and beige as they always were, with a temporary PA, and an odd, dull silence outside it. Nobody was talking or laughing or shouting or arguing; they sat in a kind of siege condition, waiting for they knew not what. And for the time being they must go on waiting, for nothing very visible would happen at all. And certainly not on Day One.
The only thing that she always did on Day One was go home early.
Athina was perhaps the only person in the company not to expect huge change and dramatic action on Day One; mainly because she would not have allowed it, nor on Day One Hundred and One either. She had gone into the deal, recognising at last its inevitability, but determined to make things as difficult for her new colleagues – she refused to admit the word masters – as she possibly could. If they wanted changes, they must fight for them. Apart from anything else, she argued to herself, that would ensure those changes were truly necessary. Nevertheless, once the deal had become inevitable, she had forced herself to take a hard look at the House of Farrell, and she could see that the brand was indeed in a mess.
She more or less knew why: in a swiftly changing market, there was a loss within the House of Farrell of a sense of direction, and an ageing clientele – but there any certainty ended.
One of her major uncertainties was caused by, she knew, the fact that she didn’t really like much of what she saw of the new market and its prime customer: both seemed to her either rather tacky, or indulging in a mystique of pseudo-scientific jargon that she found rather irritating. When they had founded the House of Farrell, in a glory of fantastic colour promotions, posters lining all the main roads into London and other big cities, and adorning the sides of double-decker buses, a good quality, high-image skincare range – The Cream its star product – was the perfect counterpart. It hadn’t needed the added benefit of hyper-high, double-depth, super-charged ingredients developed in a laboratory; but then, nor had any of the others.
That was the difference. Skincare had been skincare then, vital but straightforward, as laid down in the immortal concept and routine of Elizabeth Arden: you cleansed, you toned, you nourished, and after that your well-fed skin would take its make up and look as good as it could. Now science had been smoothed on to the beauty counters in a big way, with talk of cellular levels, free radicals, ultra-hydration. Half the stuff the beauty editors wrote sounded like A Level biology papers. Did women really want that? Athina wondered, and if so, why?
Finding no satisfactory answer to that one, she faced down again her fears for the future of Farrell; too late now, she knew, but still she wondered – was it really going to be safe with its new masters? Would the new management team, led by the dangerously powerful and glossy Bianca Bailey, really understand what treasures there undoubtedly still were, lying within its admittedly old-fashioned packaging and clearly out-of-date marketing and advertising?
She half-liked Bianca – she represented too much that was disagreeable to her life to go further than that – but she did respect her. Moreover, she knew both those emotions were returned. And Bianca certainly seemed to understand the importance of charm; and charm went a very long way in cosmetics. The most dazzling colours, the most earth-moving perfumes counted for nothing without it. A cosmetic brand must, at the end of the day, have an aura of pleasure about it. Bianca, she felt, would bring that to the brand at least, and she must encourage her. But it wasn’t going to be easy. And she knew, moreover, that she couldn’t afford for one second of one day to lose one millimetre of whatever ground she had left.
‘I really would like to talk about this job,’ said Patrick. ‘Can we . . . ?’
He had his heavy expression on, a sort of brooding reproach. It was unusual, but Bianca had le
arned to respect it. Patrick’s breaking point was seldom reached; the last time had been when Fergie had broken his arm playing rugby and she had refused, initially, to cancel an overnight trip she was on to Edinburgh.
‘Darling, it’s a huge sales conference and my speech is top of the bill – I have to be here.’
A few well chosen words had her on the next plane.
‘Darling, of course we can,’ she said now, ladling pasta on to his plate. ‘I am totally at your disposal. So – are you more worried than excited by it? That’s how you felt at first. Excited, I mean. And if so – well, tell me why.’
‘Yes, well I did feel excited at first. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot more and actually it could be too exciting by half.’
Bianca reached for the Parmesan. ‘The thing is—’
‘Hi, Mum!’
‘Oh – hello, Fergie. I thought you were supposed to be getting ready for bed?’
‘I am, but I remembered I had to ask Dad something. Dad, can you play in the Parents’ Day cricket match?’
‘I expect so. But why on earth are you asking me now? It’s not even this term.’
‘I know, but I was meant to take the note back last week.’
‘What note?’
‘The one I didn’t give you. And Mr Squires gave me a bollocking and—’
‘Fergie, that’s not a nice word!’
‘Oh, Mu-um! Dad uses it.’
‘Well . . . anyway, Fergie, yes,’ said Patrick quickly, ‘of course I’ll play in the cricket match. Tell Mr Squires. Now off you go.’
Bianca looked rather helplessly at Patrick.
‘Now what were we talking about?’
‘My new job?’
‘Of course. I’m sorry. Oh, God, Milly darling, what is it?’
‘Mummy or Daddy, I need you to sign off my homework.’
A Perfect Heritage Page 7
