Reckoning in Ice Page 2

  I regretted Oxford, but abandoning Oxford for accountancy gave my mother perhaps the happiest years of her life. She died the year I qualified, but throughout my articles we were able to live together in the flat at Richmond and although her illness left her a semi-invalid she complained of nothing, and I think she enjoyed making for me the home that the war had never permitted her to make for my father. I kept on the flat after her death. Looking after myself was nothing new, for I had really been looking after both of us for about a year before she died.

  I qualified well. My patron, the man who had given me a job, retired a couple of years later, but by then I knew the other partners fairly well and they offered me a junior partnership in the firm. It was a considerable opportunity. I saw ways in which our work could be expanded. We were a firm of high repute in the City, but regarded – rightly – as a little old-fashioned. I had become interested in applying the techniques of accountancy to the task of efficiency-auditing, and I had some ideas of my own on this. I persuaded my partners to let me set up a small department to undertake specialised work in the field of efficiency-auditing. I had some luck, and began to be known to one or two merchant banks.

  Then International Metals came along. My firm had been auditors for International Metals from its formation – it was about our biggest single customer. The man who gave me my job had been the partner most directly concerned with IM business, and as an articled clerk I had worked regularly on the company’s accounts. We were pleased, though a little surprised, when Gil Morgan-Jones asked if I could spend a year or so on an efficiency-audit of the company and its various ramifications. He wanted nothing in particular; he explained that he and the board all felt that a general study of the company’s management and performance, with such recommendations as I cared to make, would be of value to them. He had been nettled, I think, by the latest critical piece by a financial journalist saying that the company was getting old and could do with a shake-up. Anyway, it was likely to be a profitable assignment. I discussed it with my partners and it was agreed that I should take on International Metals more or less full-time, though I should still have to keep an eye on my other work. Morgan-Jones offered me a room in the IM building, told me that I was to report to him direct and invited me to use his own secretary, Caroline Manners, for any confidential secretarial work that I might want. I was slightly put out by this. I should have preferred to bring a girl from my own office, but the offer having been made before I had raised the question of a secretary I couldn’t do much else but accept it. As things turned out it was a reasonable enough suggestion. Caroline was not overworked. She had three assistants and it struck me that the prestige of being the managing director’s secretary had established a small private empire that was rather bigger than it needed to be. It also struck me that if I were to employ the managing director’s secretary for my own notes or memoranda the managing director would have access to a source of first-hand information about my own activities.

  I had been working at IM for about three months when Mr Villeneuve’s letter came. My auditing experience had given me a fairly clear picture of the structure of the company. IM did not make anything itself. It had been created simply to hold Villeneuve’s own patents, but Paul Villeneuve was exciting to work for and he had gathered round him a brilliant design team. In the early days research work had been done in Villeneuve’s wooden shed in Cornwall and in other small laboratories scattered over the country, their location determined mainly by where the man most interested in some particular line of work happened to live. After the war this was tidied up, and in 1955 all the company’s research work was concentrated in an impressive new research centre, built for the purpose on a site near Wallingford.

  The quality of Villeneuve’s design teams made their work sought after all over the world, but fundamentally the company relied on Paul Villeneuve’s extraordinary personal reputation. Could it survive his death, or even many more years of his withdrawal to Hee House?

  Ultimate control of International Metals was vested in a private company called Villeneuve Holdings which owned nearly sixty per cent of the equity. But how much of this belonged to the old man personally was not clear. This was another thing that periodically bothered the City – what catastrophic effects on the company might come with death duties on Villeneuve’s estate?

  Villeneuve had never held any other post in the company but the chairmanship. Morgan-Jones was the third of a succession of very able managing directors, and day-to-day control of the management seemed to be firmly in his hands. The board met monthly, but Villeneuve seldom attended more than twice a year. The deputy chairman, who normally presided, was John Stables, a lawyer who was head of the Legal Office. He had been given the job as a young man by Paul Villeneuve before International Metals became a public company, and had made it his life’s work. He, too, was getting on. He was sixty-six, and his age, and the fact that he had been deputy chairman for thirty years, provided further ammunition for periodic criticism of the company. There was no outward sign, however, of any disagreement or discomfiture on the board. Criticism was always ignored, and since the company’s half-yearly financial reports were almost monotonously brilliant the shareholders were contented, share prices stayed high, and criticism tended to evaporate.

  After three months at International Metals I was still puzzled to know why Morgan-Jones, and presumably the board, had called me in. The wider criticisms of International Metals were, no doubt, justified, at least up to a point. Paul Villeneuve was an empiricist, and it irritated modern thinking that an empirical organisation set up to meet particular needs some forty years ago should remain the administrative framework of the huge business that International Metals had become. But it worked, and it was hard to see how the financial return could be improved. The effect of death duties on the Villeneuve estate might be a problem for the Villeneuve family, but scarcely for the company. Its shares were highly marketable, and if the Villeneuve interests came on the market, they would be snapped up.

  So why had I been called in, first by Morgan-Jones and now summoned so secretively by the chairman? Presumably I should soon find out. It was time to go downstairs.

  Miss Villeneuve was waiting for me in the great hall. I did not quite know what to make of her. She had what I took to be the typical Highland colouring of dark hair and pale skin, and something of the arresting quality of her father’s eyes. Her age was hard to assess. She was in fact twenty-eight (three years younger than I am) but she might have been anything from twenty-three or so to the late thirties. She had a beautiful, lithe figure, with small but quite emphatic breasts. She was in a plain dress of some turquoise-coloured material, and wore no jewellery except a pair of turquoise earrings. I noticed that her ears were pierced: the earrings hung gracefully, they were not slipped on.

  She smiled as I came down the stairs. ‘My father is ready for you,’ she said. ‘He is delighted that you have come.’

  We crossed the hall and went up again by the left-hand staircase. ‘The place was originally a shooting lodge,’ Miss Villeneuve said. ‘The ground floor was all gun rooms and billiard rooms – what used to be the main gun room is now my father’s laboratory. The house was built by a Birmingham vinegar manufacturer soon after Queen Victoria discovered the Highlands. I think he came here only two or three times. His vinegar must have been very successful, for although he hardly ever came the house was kept up and staffed until he died. After his death it was a different matter. His widow wanted nothing to do with the place, nor did any of his children. It was more or less a ruin when my father bought it. He has done a lot to it, of course.’

  What seemed an expedition through a maze of corridors ended at Mr Villeneuve’s study. There was another fine log fire and he got up from a chair in front of it as we came in. Again his eyes fascinated me. Now they were out to charm, and I could understand why men gave their life’s work to him.

  ‘You have put me much in your debt by coming so far,’ he said. ‘I am
sure you need a drink. Do you know Glen Morangie? It is the only whisky I ever drink, and I think it is the best whisky in the world. Were you able to take the Struie Pass between Dingwall and Bonar Bridge?’

  ‘No, it was snowing, and on the map the Struie road seemed to go so high that I was afraid of getting stuck. I went on the coast road, by Tain.’

  ‘Ah, then you missed Glen Morangie – you would have seen the head of the glen from the Struie road. The distillery is in Tain.’

  He poured me a generous measure of extremely pale whisky, and he poured glasses for himself and for Miss Villeneuve, too.

  ‘Paula adds water,’ he said. ‘I do not. It is a matter of choice. A fine malt whisky can take water if it is soft – ideally it should come from a burn in the same countryside. But it does not need water. I consider it better without.’

  My need then was for a drink, the stiffer, I felt, the better. So I joined Mr Villeneuve in drinking the Glen Morangie neat. It was certainly a good whisky.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Mr Villeneuve said, ‘there is a matter that I wish to discuss with you. Tonight you are tired, and I do not want you to thrash over my problem instead of going to sleep. I expect you are ready for food. So let us have dinner and we can all have an early night.’

  He opened the door for Paula Villeneuve and motioned me to follow her in front of him. Our dinner was a simple meal served by a middle-aged Scots maid. There was an excellent claret. We talked of Hee House, of depopulation in the Highlands, of surnames. ‘What of Garston?’ Mr Villeneuve asked. ‘That strikes me as an unusual name.’

  ‘Garston is a place name,’ I said. ‘There are three Garstons in England, all with different derivations. One, in Hampshire, seems to come from an Old English word meaning grassland, or grazing place. Another Garston, in Lancashire, is apparently a corruption of something like “Gert Stane”, meaning “Great Stone”. But neither of these is our Garston. Ours is East Garston, a small village on the Berkshire Downs between Wantage and Newbury, and it is, I think, the most interesting of them all, because the “East” has nothing to do with location. There is no West Garston. The “East” in our Garston is what the English tongue over the centuries has made of Esgar, an early Danish name. Our Esgar was an official of some sort employed by Edward the Confessor, and he, or perhaps his father, acquired land in Berkshire. East Garston – Esgar’s Tun – was his “tun” or settlement. There is a family tradition that we are descended from that Esgar. It’s possible – we held land on the Downs for centuries. But it’s incapable of proof.’

  ‘Do you still have land on the Downs?’ Miss Villeneuve asked.

  ‘Alas, no. My father was the last of the Garstons of East Garston. The estate was pretty run down when he inherited. He believed in scientific farming and to raise the money for improvements he had to mortgage the land. Before he could do much the war came, and he was killed in Africa. The land had to be sold to pay off its debts. My mother worked as a schoolteacher in order to keep us.’

  Mr Villeneuve’s extraordinary eyes became strangely gentle.

  ‘I knew your father,’ he said.

  ‘How on earth . . .?’

  He was silent for what seemed a long time. Then he said, ‘I did some work on tanks during the war, and it was necessary for me to study the performance of tracked vehicles in sand. The War Office arranged for me to go out to General Wavell in the Western Desert. He gave me a lot of help, letting me go right forward to make observations on enemy tanks as well as on our own. I was doing this at one post when it was overrun. There was sharp fighting. Your father was the officer in command of the post. His second-in-command you also know – he was Joscelyne Gurney, to whom, I believe, you were articled as an accountant. We were standing together when an enemy soldier from a motorised patrol threw a grenade at us. Your father threw himself on the grenade. He was killed, and he saved us. Some reinforcements of our own came up and the position was restored a few minutes later. I have no words to describe the gallantry of your father’s act. It merited the Victoria Cross, but the next day Wavell was recalled, and in the ensuing political crisis such matters were forgotten, or ignored. When I got back to England I went to see your mother. I thought then that the grenade which had killed your father had killed her, too. Perhaps it had, in a way. She had a wonderful pride, a kind of icy pride, her only protection, maybe. She would accept no help, and implored me to do nothing about a posthumous decoration for your father. “Many men are dying gallantly,” she said. “Why should one be honoured rather than another?” ’

  Mr Villeneuve refilled my glass with claret. Miss Villeneuve said, ‘I think the snow has stopped.’ I blessed her for that – it seemed about all there was to say.

  When I got back to my comfortable quarters after dinner I found that a bottle of Glen Morangie and a fine cutglass tumbler had been put on the table in my sitting room. I left the bottle unopened and went to bed. I was deeply moved at learning what I had never known about my father. My mother never spoke of his death; it was as if she had tried deliberately to draw a blind across it. I still had no idea why I had been asked to come to Sutherland.

  II

  THE NEWSPAPER CUTTINGS

  I HAD SO much on my mind that I expected a wakeful night, but I slept well. At eight o’clock there was a knock on the door, the light went on and a maid came in with a breakfast tray. She was a pleasant, smiling girl of eighteen or so – the daughter, it turned out, of the woman who had served dinner last night. Jock, the manservant, was her father. On the tray was an envelope addressed to me. I opened it to find a brief note,

  Can you come to the study at ten o’clock? P.V.

  Miss Villeneuve had been right about the snow. It was still dark, but the sky was clear. My windows looked on to the loch. I could not see it properly, but I could make out snow-covered trees and a vague expanse of water.

  I breakfasted, had a leisurely bath, and went down to have a look at the world. Nobody was about. I went out by the big door I had entered last night. It was still not properly light, but it was light enough to get an impression of the landscape. The vinegar-maker, or his architect, may have had an unhappy hankering after the larger sort of Victorian railway station, but he (or they) had an unerring eye for a site. The house stood on a little plain, falling gently to the loch. Behind it rose the gaunt mass of Ben Hee, a splendid mountain going up to nearly 3,000 feet. Apart from the lodge of Hee House, and a place six or seven miles to the South East, in Glen Fiag, there was not another building within thirty or forty square miles. It was a strange social development that sent rich Midlands manufacturers to these remote Highlands – I supposed that the vinegar-maker had been a little late on the scene, and by the time he came into the market the more accessible sites on Tayside and Deeside had been snapped up. Without Villeneuve money no doubt Hee House would have remained a romantic ruin. Given Paul Villeneuve’s wish for detachment, and the means to make Hee House habitable, the location could scarcely have been bettered.

  By the time I had walked down to the loch and back it was a few minutes before ten and I set off to find the study. It was less difficult than I feared – what had seemed a labyrinth of corridors in the unfamiliarity of last night was in fact quite logical, and I got to his door as a clock in the stable yard was striking ten. The room was the same as last night but there was no tray of whisky and glasses and somehow it looked more businesslike. Villeneuve was friendly, and again out to charm. Miss Villeneuve was not there.

  ‘I hope you had a good night,’ he said.

  ‘Very good, thank you. And breakfast in bed was an unexpected treat.’

  ‘No more than civilised, I think. Mankind is not at its best at breakfast time. And as far as work goes it is probably less trouble to take round a few trays than to lay a table and wait for people to come down. Paula and I are alone for much of the time, and we don’t make great demands on the staff.’

  He had walked across to a filing cabinet while he was speaking, and he came back with a folder. r />
  ‘Sit down, my boy,’ he said. ‘I want you to read these.’

  He handed me the folder. It contained two newspaper cuttings. Both were from the Financial Chronicle, one dated nearly a year ago, the other in December. The earlier cutting was the longer. I recalled vaguely having read it. It was a fairly typical piece of speculation about the future of International Metals, suggesting the possibility of a takeover bid from the American consortium Lake Erie Chemicals. Headed ‘Another Wooer for IM?’ it went on:

  The board of International Metals may have to take seriously an approach that seems likely to be made soon by Lake Erie Chemicals. Erie is big enough to absorb IM, and much that IM does would fit logically into the structure of the Erie concern, particularly as it has been reformed by the aggressive new chairman Homer P. Reggio. A marriage would certainly have advantages for both partners. IM’s results are consistently good, but no one can be entirely happy about the long-term future. Precisely how the Villeneuve holding is arranged is obscure, but Paul Villeneuve is now seventy-four and in the nature of things the possibly crippling effects of death duties on his personal estate will one day have to be faced. Moreover, the IM team brilliant as it has been, is obviously ageing and some of the company’s methods seem scarcely to belong to the closing decades of this twentieth century …