Уильям Николсон - Motherland

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.’

On landing at Heathrow, Larry finds his driver is not there to meet him. 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.