Borrowed Time

by Robert Goddard

  Adrian was home by Wednesday. But nothing was seen of him at the factory. He phoned in to say jet-lag had claimed him, but he’d be fit to chair an informal board meeting on Thursday morning to which he’d report the outcome of his trip. By now, I was beginning to smell a rat—or the marsupial equivalent. Simon and Jennifer were as puzzled as me. And so was Uncle Larry, who called me that night. “Why does Adrian want me to attend this blasted meeting, Robin? What’s he up to?” I couldn’t tell him. But we didn’t have to wait long to learn the answer.

  It rained that morning. All that day, as it turned out. The rain ticked at the boardroom windows and ran in reflected rivulets down the glazed face of Joseph Timariot. He seemed to be listening to us as we conferred. Measuring our achievements against his. And taking silent note of the disparity.

  We were expectant and uneasy. All of us were uncomfortable, though some more obviously so than others. Even Adrian looked strangely abashed. As if what he had to report was something worse than simple failure to strike a deal with Bushranger Sports. And so it was. Far worse. It was what he called success. But success often has a higher price than failure. And he was about to invite us to pay it.

  “I spent quite a long time with Harvey McGraw. I got to know the man pretty well. He is hard. But fair. He made me an offer which, after I’d thought about it, I realized was both of those things. Hard to accept. But fair. And in the circumstances, the best we can hope for. As I’m sure you’ll agree when you’ve reflected on it. I don’t want instant reactions. That’s why I’ve kept this meeting informal. I want your mature thoughts when you’ve mulled it over.”

  “Mulled what over?” asked Simon impatiently. But by now, I suppose, we all had an inkling of what was coming.

  “McGraw’s offering to buy us out.”

  “Of Viburna? The guy must be—”

  “Not Viburna. Not just Viburna, anyway. McGraw wants the whole operation.”

  “You mean Timariot & Small?” put in Uncle Larry.

  “Yes.”

  “Good God.”

  “But you told him we’re not for sale, didn’t you?” I asked disingenuously.

  “Not exactly. He knows we’re in the mire. He knows we have to listen.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a good offer. He’ll cover Viburna’s debts. And pay us two and a half million on top.” Adrian risked a smile. “Pounds, that is.”

  There was momentary silence. Then Uncle Larry said: “Am I to take it that you’re recommending acceptance?”

  “I am.”

  Uncle Larry stared at him in stupefaction. “You’re advocating the sale of this business? After more than a hundred and fifty years of independent trading? To an Australian? Good God almighty, Harvey McGraw’s great-grandfather was probably in chains on a convict ship bound for Botany Bay when my great-grandfather—”

  “Reciting the firm’s history isn’t going to help,” snapped Adrian. “We’re staring crippling losses in the face.”

  “But we wouldn’t be, would we?” I couldn’t help asking. “Not if we hadn’t bought Viburna in the first place.”

  Adrian glared at me, but didn’t speak. Instead, Jennifer tapped her pen on her note-pad and said: “It’s a good offer. From a strictly financial viewpoint. It’s more than we’re really worth. At the moment. And for the foreseeable future.” She turned to Adrian. “Any strings?”

  “None.”

  “There don’t have to be, do there?” said Simon. “Bushranger can make a go of Viburna thanks to their deal with Danziger’s. And they can use us to expand over here just like we planned to use Viburna to expand over there. When we dipped our toe in Australian waters, I thought we might get it bitten off. I never expected we’d be swallowed alive, though.”

  “I had reservations about the Viburna takeover,” I said, looking accusingly at Adrian. “But you trotted out some cliché about having to get bigger if we weren’t to get smaller. Now it seems what you mean by getting bigger is going out of business.”

  “Recriminations won’t help,” said Jennifer, ever the conciliator.

  “Nor will acquiescence. We’re being asked to sell the workforce down the drain to pay for our mistakes. The mistakes of some of us, anyway.”

  Adrian was angry. That last shaft had hit home. I could tell by the tic working in his cheek. But not by the tone of his voice. It stayed calm and reasonable. “Bushranger wants to take us over, not close us down. The workforce will be fully protected. Timariot and Small will become a subsidiary of Bushranger Sports, that’s all. In some ways it’ll be a bigger and more challenging operation. We’ll be marketing Bushranger’s products along with—”

  “Who’s we? Who’s going to head this subsidiary? Our current chairman?”

  Adrian flushed. “Perhaps. But—”

  “No doubt a seat on the Bushranger board will go with the job. I can see you’ll have done very well out of taking this company from profit into self-inflicted loss.” I was angry too. Angrier than I could ever have foreseen at the terminal consequences of my smooth-talking wide-horizoned brother’s leadership. And at my own naïvety. I should have nipped his ill-considered ambitions in the bud long ago. I should have known better than to trust him with stewardship of the values and traditions bound up in Timariot & Small. I should have realized he saw them merely as a stepping-stone to something bigger and grander. Bigger and grander, that is, for him.

  “Your share of two and a half million won’t be a bad return for three years’ exile from the fleshpots of Brussels,” said Adrian, his face darkening.

  “Won’t? Don’t you mean wouldn’t? If we compounded your errors of judgement by accepting this offer?”

  He sat back and composed himself, refusing to let me draw him into open confrontation. “I’m confident this board will accept the offer, when it’s had time to consider its merits. For the moment, that’s all I’m asking it to do. Though I should tell you I stopped off in France on my way back from Australia. I visited Bella in Biarritz and put her in the picture. She, like me, favours acceptance.”

  So there it was. The virtual declaration of his victory. Between them, he and Bella controlled more than 40 per cent of the company’s shares. If Jennifer voted with them—as her guarded remarks had suggested she would—Adrian would be home and dry. Simon was bitter enough when I cornered him in his office later. But he was already becoming philosophical. “This could net me more than three hundred thou,” Rob. Enough to keep Joan at bay and then some. I’ve got to go for it. You do see that, don’t you?” Oh, I saw. I saw all too clearly. “Anybody who votes no will get the chop if it goes through. That’s obvious. And it will go through. You know it will. So why fight it?”

  Why indeed? It was hard to explain to somebody who didn’t understand. Uncle Larry understood, of course. I went out with him for a long lugubrious lunch at the Bat & Ball on Broadhalfpenny Down, the cradle of organized cricket. Afterwards, we stood outside in the rain, gazing over the fence at the famous ground, its old thatched pavilion and memorial stone bearing witness to the legendary exploits of the Hambledon club more than two hundred years ago.

  “John Small played here many times,” said Uncle Larry. “Old John, I mean. He was a bat maker for more than seventy years, you know.” I knew very well. He was also grandfather of the John Small who’d gone into business with Joseph Timariot in 1836. “I suppose you could say he was our founder in a sense.”

  “I shall vote against,” I solemnly declared.

  “So shall I. But we’ll lose, won’t we? Adrian has his children to consider. Simon needs the money. Jenny can’t stop thinking like an accountant. And to Bella it’s all antediluvian nonsense. Our goose is cooked.”

  “But not served or eaten. Not yet.”

  I drove straight home from Broadhalfpenny Down and telephoned Bella. But she wasn’t in. Instead, Sir Keith came on the line.

  “Anything I can do for you, Robin?”

  “I don’t think so. I wanted to talk to Bella
about the Bushranger bid.”

  “Ah yes. Your brother told us all about it. Seems a neat way out of the hole you’ve dug yourselves into. Bella certainly seems to think so.”

  “Does she?”

  “I suppose you’re mightily relieved.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You should be. Salvation of this order doesn’t often present itself. I’m glad you called, by the way. My solicitor tells me that TV programme Benefit of the Doubt is going to take a sceptical look at Naylor’s conviction. Have you heard anything from the producers?”

  “No,” I heard myself lie. “Not a thing.”

  “Well, if you do—”

  “I’ll know what to tell them.”

  Looking back, I can see why it happened. My anger at the probable demise of Timariot & Small and my frustration at being unable to do anything to prevent it had to find an outlet. I didn’t think it through on a conscious level. I didn’t plan to lash out at Bella by upsetting her husband’s cosy assumptions. But that’s what I did. I’d spent a couple of hours at Greenhayes, drinking scotch and watching the rain sheet across the garden, when Seymour and his cameraman arrived, dead on time, at six o’clock. I’d worked up a fine head of resentment by then. Resentment of the greed that had dragged down Timariot & Small; of the ease with which Adrian and the rest seemed able to turn their backs on the labour of four generations; of the readiness I and others had displayed to mould the memory of Louise Paxton to fit our requirements. The ends seemed to have justified the means once too often. I wanted to give honour and tradition a solitary triumph over commercial expediency; honesty and sincerity a single victory to savour. I wanted to speak my mind without tailoring my words to their audience and my thoughts to their results. I wanted my own blinkered form of justice. And Nick Seymour gave me the chance to have it.

  I’d expected to dislike him. In the event, his self-deprecating humour and affable manner won me over. He had wit and patience. The wit to see I was in the mood to talk. And the patience to let me. He had a long list of questions to ask. I saw them typed out on a sheet of paper in his hand. But he didn’t need to reel them off. I answered them without prompting. I tried—for the very first time—to describe my meeting with Louise Paxton fully and accurately. I had enough sense not to contradict or withdraw anything I’d said in court. But I also had enough courage—or stupidity or recklessness or all three rolled together—to try to define what it was that had lodged in my mind after our fleeting encounter on Hergest Ridge.

  After Seymour had gone, evidently pleased with the material he’d got on tape, I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d said to him. Not every word and inflection. I certainly couldn’t imagine how it would look and sound on television several weeks down the road. And I didn’t much care. Not at the time. It was sufficient to have unburdened myself. To have told it as it really was. Or as it had seemed to be that day. Recalled at last. Without distortion or evasion. Without fear of whatever the consequences might be.

  I poured myself another drink and toasted the fragile truth that was all I could throw back at Bella and Sir Keith and my hard-hearted siblings. I’d paid my dues to Louise Paxton. Late but in full. I’d cleared my debts. Now I was free to remind others of theirs.

  C H A P T E R

  TEN

  Sentimental appeals proved even less effective than recriminatory arguments. I tried both over the next couple of weeks without making the slightest impact on Adrian’s determination to push through acceptance of the Bushranger bid. From his point of view, it solved our problems at a stroke, never mind that the problems were of his creation and the solution an humiliating end to a proud piece of history. Simon and Jennifer went along with him, Simon because his share of the sale price would get Joan off his back and Jennifer because she could see no other way out of deficit. As for Bella, when I eventually succeeded in speaking to her, it became apparent that she regarded the dissolution of Timariot & Small as tantamount to a mercy killing. “Hugh should have negotiated something like this years ago. Then he might not have worked himself into an early grave.” My hope that Sir Keith might consider injecting capital into the company to make it independently viable was abandoned before I’d even expressed it.

  That left Uncle Larry and me in a decisive minority. Adrian dismissed us as unrealistic romantics and I suppose he had a point. Uncle Larry’s reluctance to see the family firm taken over could be seen as no more than an old man’s refusal to live in the present. While the irony of my position was that I’d become more committed to Timariot & Small—past and future—than my brothers or sister, despite remaining aloof from it far longer than any of them. Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps I understood what we’d lose by selling out just because I’d spent twelve years away from it. And perhaps they failed to because they hadn’t. Familiarity had bred contempt. Later, I knew, they’d regret it. But their regrets would be futile. We could only destroy what our forefathers had created once. It was an irreversible act. But it was an act they were clearly set on carrying out.

  Busy chasing false hopes and faint chances of staving off the Bushranger takeover, I gave little thought to my Benefit of the Doubt interview besides savouring the prospect of any small embarrassment it might cause Bella. Seymour had told me the programme would go out sometime in mid-June and had promised to send me a video of it in case I didn’t catch the broadcast. I’d intended to check Radio Times to see when it was coming up, but somehow never got round to doing so. If I had done, I’d have known a week in advance that it was scheduled for transmission at eight thirty on Wednesday the sixteenth of June. In the event, my first inkling of that was when I returned home from work two nights before to find a parcel small enough to fit through the letter-box lying in wait for me on the doormat. It was the promised video. I played it straightaway. And long before the end I realized just how big a fool I’d been.

  Seymour wasn’t just a handsome front man. He was clever as well. If I hadn’t known that before, I found it out now. The doubt he sowed in the viewer’s mind about Naylor’s guilt wasn’t based on clinching facts or convincing arguments. It relied instead on impressions and implications. The programme started out as a straight-forward summary of the case from the discovery of the murders to Naylor’s conviction. Then Seymour turned his attention to Naylor’s defence. “Let’s see if this stands up,” he coolly said. “Let’s suspend disbelief for the time it takes to subject Shaun Naylor’s version of events to some obvious tests. We’ll begin where he says it began, at the Harp Inn, Old Radnor.” The camera panned across the pub’s façade, then moved to the man who’d testified at the trial that he’d seen Naylor there with a good-looking woman on the evening of 17 July 1990. He seemed more confident now than before that it was Louise Paxton. “I reckon it was, yes. They were getting on well together. Laughing and joking.” If he was right, Seymour pointed out, they could only just have met. At the very least, this indicated a willingness for flirtation on Lady Paxton’s part. Was that credible? Did that fit her character?

  Suddenly, Sophie Marsden was on screen, relaxing in the horse-brassed black-beamed interior of her Shropshire home. She looked as much at ease as Seymour had made me feel, perhaps more so. And she was talking freely about the friend she’d known. “Louise wasn’t really the saintly wife and mother she’d been portrayed as. She was a lot of fun. She lived life to the full. Sometimes she flirted with strangers. And sometimes it may have gone beyond flirting. I know of at least one occasion when it certainly did. She told me about it. She wasn’t boasting. It was . . . the kind of secret we shared.”

  Before I could absorb the full ramifications of what Sophie had said, Seymour was in the picture, striding up the track from Kington to Hergest Ridge. “So, according to Lady Paxton’s best friend, Shaun Naylor’s account of how they met is feasible. What’s more, we know she met at least one other man that evening under similar circumstances. Up here, on Offa’s Dyke, where solitary male walkers are often to be found.”

  Then
my face was staring out of the screen at me, the sitting-room at Greenhayes visible in the background, including part of the very television set I was watching. And I was saying what Seymour wanted to hear. “Lady Paxton was friendly and approachable. She seemed to want to talk. Not just about the weather. About something else. But she was reluctant to talk at the same time. As if . . . Well, I’ve never really been able to describe her state of mind, even to myself. It was so difficult to assess. When she offered me a lift, I thought it was just a kindly gesture. Now I’m not so sure. I think she must have wanted me—wanted somebody—to stay with her.” Then we were back with Seymour on Hergest Ridge. Leaving me to shout at his video-recorded face: “Hold on. What about the rest? That’s not all I said, you devious bastard.” Just how devious he’d been sunk in only when I replayed the interview several times. Then, at last, I was able to recollect exactly what I’d gone on to say. “I think she must have wanted me—wanted somebody—to stay with her. To give her some disinterested advice about a problem she was trying to solve. To listen while she talked whatever it was out of her system.” What I’d recounted couldn’t possibly be regarded as a sexual proposition. But Seymour’s edited version of it could be. “I think she must have wanted me—wanted somebody—to stay with her.” The phrase echoed in my mind as Seymour quoted it to camera. “Failing to find that somebody in Mr. Timariot, did Lady Paxton strike luckier half an hour later at the Harp Inn? The evidence available to us suggests she may have done.”