CHAPTER TWELVE: PRESS CONFERENCE

Harry swung into the rest of the week on the crest of a wave. He felt generous after Doreen’s submission, particularly as he woke next morning to find her stroking the side of his face, rasping gently against the bristle along the line of his chin. He was still bleary-eyed as she kissed him, trailing her lips across his chest, but he knew that it was time for him to be rising, because time was important. Sylvia never delayed him. But Doreen was enchantment, and for a moment enchantment carried the day, and he was powerless to resist. Afterwards he knew, as he shaved, that he must foster this enchantment. But he was still a little uncertain how generous fostering should be. He had promised Doreen a budget, and made a down payment. But the numbers first in his mind had now begun to tarnish a little, and he would not, for the world, have liked to be deemed a cheapskate. He needed to bind her tightly, and most thoroughly. He searched in his wallet for another four pink grannies, popping them into an envelope as Doreen made toast, and tucked the envelope under her plate as she turned her back on him to fetch coffee.

She placed their cups on the table and took the envelope, and then laid it down again, smiling at him. ‘You don’t have to.’ She wrinkled her nose, and the sight charmed him. ‘I’ve still got the others.’

‘It’s to help take the place of the, of the other things,’ Harry was not usually a man to be bashful, but Sylvia’s name caught in his craw.

Doreen dimpled. She had never played poker, but she imagined that she might be good at the game. ‘I won’t miss them.’ She made her voice just a little reluctant, because the black and white silk dress really had ranked as a victory trophy. ‘Well, most of them. I’d really like to keep the black and white one, because I wore that the first time you took me out.’

Harry hesitated. He knew that Sylvia ranked the dress as the jewel in her wardrobe, at least in the wardrobe she kept in his flat. He searched in his mind for a counter-offer, but search as he might, he could only envisage numbers climbing a ladder, and he had a strange feeling that Doreen saw a matching ladder in her own imagination. He shook his head, glancing at his watch. Time was slipping past fast.

‘I don’t think she’ll let you. You’re lucky you weren’t wearing it when she came here, it was her trophy dress.’

Doreen nodded. She understood completely, because the flags hanging in the Tithing St. Mary parish church were also trophies. She moved to stand beside him, because she could see that he was impatient to go. ‘Will you buy me something like that, one day?’

Harry broke away as she kissed him, but a rush of desire made him rash. ‘I’ll take you shopping on Saturday, before I go back to Tithing.’ He wondered, as he spoke, to what he might be committing himself.

Doreen eyed him archly as she followed him to the door of the flat. ‘Will you take me back with you?’

Harry fled.

Dreamstone ranked tame by comparison. Christine was already in place, and had sorted his mail, and a pot of fresh black coffee appeared as though by magic within minutes of him powering up his screen. Harry spent the next couple of hours handling official announcements, and fielding incoming calls from institutions and the media. He deferred them all deftly - Christine had already booked a suite at the Four Seasons for a lunchtime press conference – and Harry knew from long experience that queries were always very much more easily handled en masse. He liked the Four Seasons, it was just a quick walk from Dreamstone, and Enrico, the banqueting manager, always knocked up a good buffet – Harry knew that food and drink ranked high in press conference ratings.

The Dreamstone team walked to the hotel with a spring in their steps. Levon was busy talking to someone in the US on his mobile, and then switched into something impenetrable that might have been Turkish, or possibly Yiddish, for a call to somewhere in the Middle East, whilst Harry chatted to Christine, armed with a folder holding copies of Dreamstone’s official bid annoucement, and Pierre Bonnier and Sophie brought up the rear. They were five winners on their way to a triumph.

Enrico was already waiting for them in the hotel lobby. He knew Harry well, and valued Dreamstone’s business – Dreamstone’s annual Christmas parties at the Four Seasons were always expensive and lavish, and had brought the hotel much good business in their train. He led the way to a large suite, comfortable and airy, with a table for the Dreamstone board at one end, and serried rows of small chairs facing it. Four Seasons’ staff were busy setting out a long buffet along the wall behind them.

Harry began sampling the buffet snacks, but Christine chased him away. He was fond of her, in a rather asexual way, and she mothered him discreetly. Sometimes he wondered what she might be like on a tropical beach, or even on the bed in his flat. But he was scrupulous about not mixing business with pleasure. Levon had moved to stand by a window, and was now deep in conversation again with his mobile phone pressed to his ear.

Suddenly a flurry of people came spilling through the door. Levon broke away from his phone, and the Dreamstone team grouped around the new arrivals with much bonhomie and shaking of hands. The newcomers included Stephen Montagu, the group’s broker, solicitor Evan Lewis, and a couple of non-executive Dreamstone directors, Lord Marsford, also a director of Natcam, one of the world’s big banks, and Hans Sigurmeyer, Dreamstone’s eyes and ears on the Continent. The four shone with the well-nourished and well-tailored air of men accustomed to the very best kind of living, though Lewis had a habit of looking nervously over his shoulder from time to time, as though shadowed by some dark force, and they brought additional muscle into play. Dreamstone had assembled, and stood ready for action.

Christine bustled about, assigning each to a place with its own large printed name card, for the benefit of press and analysts with vision problems, and then the door opened again and their audience began to trickle in. It was like a show, almost a theatre, with Dreamstone’s board seated behind its table in a dark-suited and authoritative line of judicious wisdom, facing upwards of thirty assorted journalists and analysts. A gaggle of photographers snapped the Dreamstone team looking benevolent.

Levon opened as chairman and swept through the group’s formal announcement at speed, before sitting down to let Harry field questions. Harry was deft, crisp and jovial by turns. It was plain that all his questioners took a quick Dreamstone victory for granted. One American analyst referred to a ‘shoo-in’, and the room rippled with polite laughter.

Then Harry took a question from a chubby serious girl with dark red hair frizzed up around her head like a halo. She was not bad looking, but looked a little out of place in a fluorescent pink teeshirt and dun-coloured dungarees, though he noted appreciatively that her teeshirt seems very well filled, and was conscious that Levon was also inspecting her with interest. The girl wanted to know Dreamstone’s potential profit on the deal, and he twinkled. ‘I can’t possibly answer that.’ He beamed. ‘We’re not home and dry yet yet.’

The girl remained standing. ‘But you’re going to break Wide Horizons up.’ She spoke as though dealing with a certainty.

Harry frowned slightly. Time was moving on, and he had run through his circus act. The buffet lunch at the back of the room was calling in siren tones. He also sensed something doubtful about the girl. She had an aggressive look about her: the kind of woman to ask a trick question. ‘We’ll take a view as and when we win.’ He spoke a little sternly, in dismissal.

The girl stayed on her feet. ‘You’re going to break it up and sell off the assets, and you don’t care a damn about the employees.’

Suddenly the room was very still. Harry stared at her. ‘I don’t think I quite understand.’

‘You’re going to throw all the workers to the wolves.’ The girl’s voice sharpened with passion, and her sentence ended almost in a squeak.

Harry shakes his head slowly. He would deal with this one in avuncular mood, and talk down to the girl. She probably worked for some small left-wing paper. ‘We think we might be able to exploit some inefficiencies, focus Wide Horizon’s assets more precisely.’ He raised his hand as the girl attempted to interrupt him. ‘We think we might be able to use the group more advantageously.’ He paused to savour the word. It was a good word, and rolled well off the tongue. He smiled benevolently. ‘We don’t plan to feed any wolves at all.’

Dreamstone’s board murmured approvingly.

The girl raised her arm, pointing at him accusingly. ‘You’re just a bloody corporate executioner.’

The room was silent again. Harry felt a little discomforted.

Levon got to his feet. ‘I don’t think this is a time for cat-calling, ma’am.’ He glared down at the girl, but she had resumed her seat, and plainly said her piece. He looked across the rows of journalists and analysts. Some shrugged, some seemed a little amused. One or two avoided his eyes. ‘I think we better all go get something to eat.’ He beamed. ‘Don’t stick your knives in our backs.’

Harry queued at the buffet, judiciously selecting some cold beef and salad, with a nice glass of claret. The girl had caught him a little off-balance, and he was still unsettled, in a kind of reverse image to the excitement he felt when he was with Doreen. But he regained most of his good spirits as his fellow directors came up to him to be pleasant, and pat him encouragingly, and Lord Marsford spoke paternally. ‘You dealt with her well.’

It was a compliment. But Harry was still a little discomforted. He did not relish being publicly attacked. He talked to a couple of journalists and several analysts, and knew the girl had voiced a general consensus. He felt a little aggrieved. Everyone knew that Dreamstone planned to break up Wide Horizons, for the company was bound straight for the breakers. But he was no corporate executioner: companies buying up bits of Wide Horizons would have to do the butchering. He looked around for the girl in a bid to find her, feeling a strange need to justify himself. But she was gone.

He was about to help himself to a fresh slice of beef and half a glass more of claret when he realised that Evan Lewis, Dreamstone’s solicitor, had joined him. Lewis looked over his shoulder, and then full at Harry.

‘Be careful.’

Harry raised a questioning eyebrow. He had done nothing wrong.

Lewis shook his head. ‘Not her. Jack Underwood. He’s making threatening noises.’

Harry snorted. He knew Underwood for a braggart and a bully. ‘Tell him pistols at dawn.’

‘No, boyo.’ Lewis reverted at times to his roots. ‘Just don’t stand with your back to a window.’ He patted Harry’s shoulder. ‘He’s hiding some really nasty messes in Wide Horizons, and he doesn’t want them to see the light of day.’

Diana Simonson left the press conference feeling particularly grumpy. She disliked being patronised by men, particularly plummy men who kept their hearts, if they possessed such things, locked up in bank safes, not to mention journalists who sold their souls for canapes and glasses of nicely chilled white wine. Dreamstone had staged its press conference as a free lunch, and nobody had bothered with real questions, or tried to follow her through. The capitalist system had carried the day once again, she reflected wryly, and she would have to cry for justice alone in the New Proletariat whilst the rest of the world focussed on bun fights in high places, and girls with top-heavy contours. Sometimes she wondered whether she was really cut out for political crusading, sometimes she thought she should listen to her mother.

‘Diana, my own life. Why can’t you give up beating your head against the system, and find a nice man?’ The question was a constant every time she returned home to her mother’s cosy semi in Ealing, a nice house with a view out over the Common. ‘You’re trying to rebuild the world single-handed, and one day you’ll find youself stuck on a shelf, and no one to love you.’

Momma Simonson was a matriarch of the old school. She believed in women being influential, important even, by holding the fabric of society together. Children, and chicken soup, and politics on a back burner. But Diana burned with a sense of injustice. She was a bright girl, with a good degree from the London School of Economics, after spending her gap year looking after children at an Israeli kibbutz, and she wanted to stand, and be counted, and play a part in building a better world. New Proletariat provided a path. She could see capitalism rotting around her, hospitals overflowing whilst consultants lined their pockets, railways crumbling whilst company cars hogged the highways, education pricing degrees beyond the reach of the toiling masses. She knew the system would implode one day in bitterness and bloodshed, ahead of the Liberation, and she was counting the days, along with a small but devoted band of comrade souls. Love and anarchy would cleanse the land and bring deliverance. But sometimes, when she went to events like the Dreamstone press conference, she wondered, and she had been mightily tempted by the cold buffet.

A voice broke in on her reverie as she trudged back towards the Canary Wharf Docklands Light Railway station. ‘Excuse me, Miss, but I just had to tell you. You were brilliant.’

Diana slowed, wondering whether she was listening to a voice in her head. Marty had that way, via several overdoses. She had been to see him at West London, in a secure room on his own, with needle tracks coalescing in a huge blue-red bruise just below his left elbow. He had looked dreadful, and she had known he was dying, corrupted by drug dealers allowed to roam at will.

‘Really. You were a star.’

Suddenly she realised that a man was walking beside her. She glanced at him quickly. He was thin, angular, in a dark suit, perhaps in his thirties. He did not look like a predator.

‘I was at the press conference, sitting behind you.’

Diana kept walking. But she made it plain that she was listening.

‘They’re going to close down all the Wide Horizon plants, and flatten the sites. One of their people leaked me a copy of their plans.’

Diana stopped. ‘Why tell me?’

‘My paper won’t touch it.’ The man hesitated. ‘I write for Factory News. My boss is only interested in finding out who’s going to pay how much for what at the end of the line.’

‘But why me?’ Diana found it hard to believe she was hearing correctly. Men did not generally pounce with scoops on girls working for fringe newspapers.

‘I want to help the Wide Horizon workers get a fair deal.’

Diana frowned. The man was speaking a little too glibly. ‘How?’

‘They want to throw a spanner in Dreamstone’s spokes, expose how Haris and Chapman plan to ditch them.’

She bit her lip. She was not sure she believed him, but he was whetting her curiosity. Her reporting instincts swung into action. ‘But a spanner won’t stop Dreamstone.’

‘They’re going to stage a big demo outside Dreamstone’s offices.’ The man hesitated again. ‘Some of them are talking of taking the law into their own hands.’

Diana stared at him. Hope began to stir in her, but it was hope struggling against experience. She knew Wide Horizons owned key motor component plants in the Midlands, and was rumoured to be doing secret work for the Ministry of Defence. She doubted that authority would permit such disruption. Yet industrial unrest had undermined governments at home and abroad in the past, and industrial unrest might yet pave the way forward to a new dawn. She thought quickly. ‘Can I meet them?’

The man smiled thinly. ‘No problem. I’ll pull them together and call you.’

They swapped mobile numbers, programming them into their phones, and he stared at Diana appraisingly. She was a well-built girl, with plenty of superstructure, and he liked his meat beefy. She also looked deprived, as though she had gone without for a while. But then he averted his eyes, because he knew he would get nowhere if he tried too fast, and held out his hand, in a gesture of comradeship. ‘You tried, at the press conference. You deserve to succeed.’

Diana smiled. She could sense that he had begun subtly to try and change the agenda, but she had met worse. ‘Let’s see how it goes.’

They parted, and the man walked quickly away. He turned a couple of times, looking over his shoulder, and then walked on quickly, to stop at a parked car. The driver looked at him as he settled himself in the passenger seat.

‘How did it go?’

‘I’ve got the Revolution on our side.’ The thin angular man licked his lips. ‘We’ll hit Dreamstone hard.’