Barbara Bradford - A Woman of Substance

‘I’ll go as soon as we get back to London,’ Paula said swiftly.

‘Yes, that’s a good idea,’ Emma agreed rather brusquely, as glad as Paula to change the subject, but also instinctively pressed for time, as she had been all of her life. Time was a precious commodity to Emma. Time had always been evaluated as money and she did not want to waste it now, dwelling on the past, resurrecting painful events that had taken place some sixty years ago.

Emma said, ‘I think I must go directly to the office when we arrive in New York. Charles can take the luggage to the apartment, after he’s dropped us off. I’m worried about Gaye, you see. Have you noticed anything peculiar when you’ve spoken to her on the phone?’

Paula was sitting back in her seat, relaxed and calm again, relieved that the subject of Jim Fairley had been dropped. ‘No, I haven’t. What do you mean?’

‘I can’t pin it down to anything specific,’ Emma continued thoughtfully, ‘but instinctively I know something is dreadfully wrong. She has sounded edgy during all of our conversations. I noticed it the day she arrived from London and called me at Sitex. Haven’t you detected anything in her voice?’

‘No. But then she has been speaking mostly to you, Grandmother. You don’t think there is some trouble with the business in London, do you?’ Paula asked, alarmed.

‘I sincerely hope not,’ Emma said, ‘that’s all I need after the Sitex situation.’ She drummed her fingers on the table for a few moments and then looked out of the window, her mind awash with thoughts of her business and her secretary, Gaye Sloane. In her sharp and calculating way she enumerated all of the things that could have gone wrong in London and then gave up. Anything might have happened and it was futile to speculate and hazard wild guesses. That, too, was a waste of time.

She turned to Paula and gave her a wry little smile. ‘We’ll know soon enough, my dear. We should be landing shortly.’

The American corporate offices of Harte Enterprises took up six floors in a modern office block on Park Avenue in the Fifties. If the English department-store chain Emma Harte had founded years ago was the visible symbol of her success, then Harte Enterprises was the living heart and sinew. An enormous octopus of an organization, with tentacles that stretched half around the world, it controlled clothing factories, woollen mills, real estate, a retail merchandise company, and newspapers in England, plus large blocks of shares in other major English companies.

As the original founder of this privately held corporation, Emma still owned 100 per cent of the shares of Harte Enterprises, and it operated solely under her aegis, as did the chain of department stores that bore her name, with branches in the North of England, London, Paris, and New York. Harte Stores was a public company, trading on the London Stock Exchange, although Emma was the majority shareholder and chairman of the board. The diversified holdings of Harte Enterprises in America included real estate, a Seventh Avenue dress-manufacturing company, and other stock investments in American industries.

Whilst Harte Stores and Harte Enterprises were worth millions of pounds, they represented only a portion of her fortune. Apart from owning 40 per cent of the stock in the Sitex Oil Corporation of America, she had vast holdings in Australia, including real estate, mining, coal fields, and one of the largest fully operating sheep stations in New South Wales. In London, a small but rich company called E.H. Incorporated controlled her personal investments and real estate.

It had been Emma’s custom to travel to New York several times a year. She was actively involved in all areas of her business empire and although she was not particularly distrustful of those to whom she had given extraordinary executive powers, confident of her own shrewd judgement in these choices, there was a canny Yorkshire wariness about her. She was impelled to leave nothing to chance and she also believed that it was vital for her presence to be felt in New York from time to time.

Now, as the Cadillac that had brought them from Kennedy Airport pulled up in front of the skyscraper that housed her corporate offices, Emma’s thoughts reverted to Gaye Sloane. Emma had instantly detected Gaye’s nervousness during their first telephone conversation when she had arrived from London. Originally Emma had thought this was due to tiredness after the long transatlantic flight, but the nervousness had accelerated rather than diminished over the last few days. Emma had noted the tremulous quality in Gaye’s voice, her clipped manner, her obvious desire to terminate their talks as quickly as possible. This not only baffled Emma but disturbed her, for Gaye was behaving totally out of character. Emma contemplated the possibility that personal problems might be upsetting Gaye, but her inclination was to dismiss this idea, knowing Gaye as well as she did. Intuitively Emma knew that Gaye was troubled by a business problem, one which was of some import and one which ultimately affected her. She resolved to make her talk with Gaye the priority of the day’s business.

Emma shivered as they alighted from the car. It was a raw January day, and although the sun was bright in a clear sky, the wind was sharp with frost and Atlantic rain. She could barely remember a time when she had not felt ice cold all over and sometimes it seemed to her that her bones were frozen into solid blocks of ice, as if frostbite had crept into her entire being and petrified her very blood. That numbing excruciating coldness that had first invaded her body in childhood had rarely left her since, not under the heat of tropical sun nor in front of blazing fires nor in the central heating of New York, which she usually found suffocating. She coughed as she and Paula hurried towards the building. She had caught a cold before they had left for Texas and it had settled on her chest, leaving her with this hacking cough that flared up constantly. As they swung through the doors into the building, Emma was for once thankful for that furnace-like heating in her offices.

They took the elevator up to the thirtieth floor, where their own offices were located. ‘I think I had better see Gaye at once, and alone,’ Emma said as they stepped out. ‘Why don’t you go over the balance sheets of the New York store with Johnston and I’ll see you later,’ she suggested.

Paula nodded. ‘Fine. Call me if you need me, Grandmother. And I do hope everything is all right.’ Paula veered to the left as Emma continued on to her own office, moving through the reception area quickly and with agility. Emma smiled at the receptionist, and exchanged cordial greetings with her as she swept through the double doors that led to her private domain. She closed the doors firmly behind her, for she did not subscribe to this American custom of open doors in executive offices. She thought it peculiar and distracting, addicted as she was to total privacy. She threw her tweed coat and her handbag carelessly on to one of the sofas and, still holding the briefcase, she crossed the room to the desk. This was a gargantuan slab of heavy glass on a simple base of polished steel, a dramatic focal point in the highly dramatic office. It was angled across a corner, looking out into the vast and lovely room, facing towards a plate-glass window. This covered the whole of one wall and rose to the ceiling in a glittering sweep that presented a panoramic view of the city skyline, which Emma always thought of as a living painting of enormous power and wealth and the heartbeat of American industry.

She enjoyed her New York office, different as it was from her executive suite in the London store, which was filled with the mellow Georgian antiques she preferred. Here the ambiance was modern and sleek, for Emma had a great sense of style and she had decided that as much as she loved period furniture, it would be unfitting when juxtaposed against the slick architecture of this great steel-and-glass structure that pushed its way up into the sky. And so she had assembled the best in modern furniture design. Mies van der Rohe chairs were mingled with long, slender Italian sofas, all of them upholstered in dark leather as soft and as supple as silk. There were tall steel-and-glass étagères filled with books, cabinets of rich polished rosewood, and small tables made of slabs of Italian marble balanced on polished chrome bases. Yet for all of its modern overtones there was nothing austere or cold about the office, which had a classical elegance and was the epitome of superior taste. It had, in fact, a tranquil beauty, a softness, filled as it was with a misty mélange of intermingled blues and greys, these subdued tones washing over the walls and the floor, enlivened here and there by rafts of more vivid colours in the cushions on the sofas and in the priceless French Impressionist paintings which graced the walls. Emma’s love of art was also evidenced in the Henry Moore and Brancusi sculptures and the temple heads from Angkor Wat, which were displayed on black marble pedestals around the room. The great soaring window was sheathed in sheer bluish-grey curtains which fell like a heavy mist from the ceiling, and when they were open, as they were now, the room seemed to be part of the sky, as if it was suspended in space above the towering concrete monoliths of Manhattan.