Harry Bingham - The Money Makers

George slowed his Lotus and turned in between the factory gates. Beyond the factory, there were a few fields of rough grazing, then open moor. It would be a bleak place to work in winter, comfortless in summer. A couple of men dawdling across the yard glanced at the newcomer, then stared. Not many Lotuses came to The Gissings Modern Furniture Company nowadays.

George turned the engine off and listened to its musical notes dying away. The yard which doubled as a car-park was covered with a mixture of rainwater, gravel, wood chippings, and machine oil. George poked his beautifully shod foot out of the car and stood up carefully, making sure his turn-ups weren’t dirtied by contact with the ground. He drew his Dior sunglasses from his jacket pocket, put them on and walked over to the door marked ‘Reception’.

A listless woman at the reception desk put down her copy of Puzzler magazine and stared at the apparition. George stared back. ‘Tom Gissing, please.’

The receptionist gestured towards a hideous suite of furniture in the corner of the small lobby. ‘Please sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ll let Mr Gissing know you’re here.’ George sat on one of the Gissings chairs in the corner, which wheezed and creaked as he lowered himself. Just for a moment, George wondered why he’d come.

In time, an elderly man limped over to George.

‘Mr Gradley? George Gradley?’ he said shaking George’s hand. ‘I knew your father, you know, back in the sixties when he was starting up. Tried to have him join our Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club, but I fear he was a little fast for our ways. Still, he did well for himself and we’d have liked to have had him. You do look like him, you know. Everyone must tell you that. I’m very sorry, of course, to have learned of his, er, accident’ – the old man couldn’t bring himself to use the word death – ‘I always feel these things are terribly hard on the young. So much less experience of loss, you see. Nothing, really.’

As the old man rambled on, he led George to the proudly named executive office. A secretary, only about thirty but already ageless, watched them grimly.

‘D’you want tea?’ she asked.

‘Coffee, please,’ said George.

‘The machine’s knackered, so you’d best have tea,’ she said and left the room. She was short and squarely built, much as George himself was, and much as Bernard Gradley had been too. The ginger hair which crowned George’s head was there on hers too, worn in a bob. Her face was a bit wonky and her chin was too broad to be quite feminine. But George’s face was crooked too and his features were hardly delicate. To a stranger, the two of them would look like brother and sister. The old man took George to a table at one end of the room and twitched at some papers which lay there.

‘Mr Ballard from the bank told me you would be coming. It’s a relief to see you, not the receiver. I am afraid we had more or less resigned ourselves to that fate.’

‘Yeah, well, I haven’t made any decision yet.’

‘No, of course not. Well, you couldn’t. I mean, you’ll want to see the shop floor, and the cutting room, and the paint shop. And we have some wonderful designs on the drawing board right now. All we really need is a bit of a cash injection and I really believe we’d get ourselves going properly again. And our workers are excellent, you know. We’ve always kept the traditional craft methods here, and all our lads are properly trained. Lord, some of them must have forty years’ experience and I know there’s a round dozen of them who have been here longer than I have. Quality. That’s what we’ve never sacrificed. Our buyers don’t always recognise it these days. Don’t really care whether a joint is dovetailed or glued, you know. But if you do things the right way, it’ll tell in the end. Quality never goes out of fashion. That’s my motto. Well, my father’s actually. But he was right about that.’

A mug of tea slapped down in front of George.

‘Ye didn’t tell me how ye liked it, so I gave you two sugars.’

‘Thank you, Val,’ said the old man.

George didn’t like tea much, but the day before he’d enjoyed a rare day in London celebrating a friend’s new racehorse at the Café Royal in Regent Street. The meal had been served on the whitest china. The bergamot scent of Earl Grey tea had mingled with the smell of freshly baked cakes, warm napkins, women’s perfume, polished wood, and the promise of smoked salmon and brown bread. Kiki had been there, petite and elfin in a pale blue dress, gorgeous and inaccessible. She’d complained because ‘I had to fly to Paris two times for the dress fitting, then go back again because I swear there aren’t any nice shoes in London.’ As she complained, she’d twirled around angling for compliments which George and others had willingly supplied.

The smell of the tea steaming in front of him brought him back to reality. The tea was strong enough to poleaxe a navvy and the sugar had been added with a shovel. Jesus Christ. George was penniless. In a month or so’s time when his cash ran out, George wouldn’t even be able to afford a mug of tea like this one. And as for mingling with the likes of Kiki, the thought was absurd. The only way she knew how to have a cheap day out was to forget her purse, and that only meant somebody else picked up the bills. George shoved his mug away.

‘Let’s take a look around,’ he said.

The old man led him around the factory. A sawmill operated at one end of the complex. Logs came in, were sawn and treated, and lay stacked in neat rows. Right now it was clear that the sawmill was not exactly busy. The few men who were there made no pretence of working when they saw their boss. Instead they stared bluntly at George and George was not left in much doubt whether they approved of what they saw. The day was dull with rain on the moors, but George tucked his sunglasses more firmly on to his nose.

The factory floor was busier. Around half the men glanced up and continued to work, the rest gave George the same candid appraisal he had received in the sawmill. The verdict, he guessed rightly, was the same.

The old man hadn’t lied when he spoke of craft methods. The factory used machine tools, of course, but each piece of furniture was sawn and assembled by hand. Gissing showed George how they had been forced to compromise standards by the imperative of cutting costs. Dovetailed joints had given way to tongue-and-groove, tongue-and-groove to nails and glue. Old man Gissing seemed to want to lament each nail until George dragged him off. The tour finished with the paint shop, the warehouse, and a totally absurd factory shop, whose last customer had died in the shock of the Profumo scandal.

Back in the executive office, the old man pulled out the company’s accounts. It was a relief to see they had been run off using a computer, not a quill pen. George pored over the papers. Until a little over two months ago, he’d never looked at a balance sheet in his life and vaguely thought that double-entry book-keeping was something practised by the shadier sort of bookmaker. He’d had plenty to learn.

He looked at the annual accounts for every year since 1980. He looked at the monthly reports for each of the last thirty-six months. He had Tom Gissing explain to him in laborious detail the intricacies of the ‘LIFO’ inventory reporting system, the reducing balance method of depreciation, the acronyms used to identify the machine tools logged on the register of assets. He even drank two mugs of peaty tea.

After eight solid hours he understood the story. Back in the early eighties, recession had actually been kind to Gissings. Larger competitors had seen their export markets wither and hadn’t chopped their costs quickly enough. Gissings, without an export market to lose, had trimmed costs, redesigned its products, and made money. It had earned revenues of £1.9 million on costs of £1.7 million. Mr Gissing, as managing director, had elected to pay the shareholder, Mr Gissing, a handsome dividend of £50,000. But that was a long time ago.