Mrs. Trentham hesitated for a moment, then nodded her agreement.
“So what’s the catch?”
“Only that your brother will try to talk you out of the whole idea,” said Mrs. Trentham. “He may even attempt to bribe you in exchange for—”
“Not an ’ope,” said Kitty. “’E can talk ’is ’ead off as far as I’m concerned but it won’t make a blind bit of difference. You see, I ’ate Charlie almost as much as you do.”
Mrs. Trentham smiled for the first time. She then placed the brown paper parcel on the end of the bed.
Harris smirked. “I knew you two would find you had something in common.”
BECKY
1947–1950
CHAPTER
35
Night after night I would lie awake worrying that Daniel must eventually work out that Charlie wasn’t his father.
Whenever they stood next to each other, Daniel tall and slim, with fair wavy hair and deep blue eyes, Charlie at least three inches shorter, stocky, with dark wiry hair and brown eyes, I assumed Daniel must in time comment on the disparity. It didn’t help that my complexion is also dark. The dissimilarities might have been comic had the implications not been so serious. Yet Daniel has never once mentioned the differences in physical makeup or character between himself and Charlie.
Charlie wanted to tell Daniel the truth about Guy right from the start, but I convinced him that we should wait until the boy was old enough to understand all the implications. But when Guy died of tuberculosis there no longer seemed any point in burdening Daniel with the past.
Later, after years of anguish and Charlie’s continued remonstrations, I finally agreed to tell Daniel everything. I phoned him at Trinity the week before he was due to sail for America and asked if I could drive him down to Southampton; that way at least I knew we would be uninterrupted for several hours. I mentioned that there was something important I needed to discuss with him.
I set out for Cambridge a little earlier than was necessary and arrived well in time to help Daniel with his packing. By eleven we were heading down the A30. For the first hour he chatted away happily enough about his work at Cambridge—too many students, not enough time for research—but the moment the conversation switched to the problems we were facing with the flats, I knew he had presented me with the ideal opportunity to tell him the truth about his parentage. Then quite suddenly he changed the subject and I lost my nerve. I swear I would have broached the topic right there and then, but the moment had passed.
Because of all the unhappiness we subsequently experienced with the death of my mother and with the life of Mrs. Trentham while Daniel was away in America, I decided my best chance of ever being frank with my son had been squandered. I begged Charlie to allow the matter to drop once and for all. I have a fine husband. He told me I was wrong; that Daniel was mature enough to handle the truth, but he accepted that it had to be my decision. He never once referred to the matter again.
When Daniel returned from America I traveled back down to Southampton to pick him up. I don’t know what it was about him but he seemed to have changed. For a start he looked different—more at ease—and the moment he saw me gave me a big hug, which quite took me by surprise. On the way back to London he discussed his visit to the States, which he had obviously enjoyed, and without going into great detail I brought him up to date on what was happening to our planning application for Chelsea Terrace. He didn’t seem all that interested in my news, but to be fair Charlie never involved Daniel in the day-to-day working of Trumper’s once we both realized he was destined for an academic career.
Daniel spent the next two weeks with us before returning to Cambridge, and even Charlie, not always the most observant of people, commented on how much he had changed. He was just as serious and quiet, even as secretive, but he was so much warmer towards us both that I began to wonder if he had met a girl while he had been away. I hoped so, but despite the odd hint clumsily dropped, Daniel made no mention of anyone in particular. I rather liked the idea of him marrying an American. He had rarely brought girls home in the past and always seemed so shy when we introduced him to the daughters of any of our friends. In fact he was never to be found if Clarissa Wiltshire put in an appearance—which was quite often nowadays, as during their vacations from Bristol University both the twins were to be found working behind the counter at Number 1.
It must have been about a month after Daniel returned from America that Charlie told me Mrs. Trentham had withdrawn all her objections to our proposed scheme for joining the two tower blocks together. I leaped with joy. When he added that she was not going ahead with her own plans to rebuild the flats I refused to believe him and immediately assumed that there had to be some catch. Even Charlie admitted, “I’ve no idea what she’s up to this time.” Certainly neither of us accepted Daphne’s theory that she might be mellowing in her old age.
Two weeks later the LCC confirmed that all objections to our scheme had been withdrawn and we could begin on our building program. That was the signal Charlie had been waiting for to inform the outside world that we intended to go public.
Charlie called a board meeting so that all the necessary resolutions could be passed.
Mr. Merrick, whom Charlie had never forgiven for causing him to sell the van Gogh, advised us to appoint Robert Fleming to be our merchant bankers in the runup to the flotation. The banker also added that he hoped the newly formed company would continue to use Child and Company as their clearing bank. Charlie would have liked to have told him to get lost but knew only too well that if he changed banks a few weeks before going public, eyebrows would be raised in the City. The board accepted both pieces of advice, and Tim Newman of Robert Fleming’s was duly invited to join the board. Tim brought a breath of fresh air to the company, representing a new breed of bankers. However, although I, like Charlie, immediately took to Mr. Newman I never really got on the same wavelength as Paul Merrick.
As the day for issuing the tender documents drew nearer, Charlie spent more and more of his time with the merchant banker. Meanwhile Tom Arnold took overall control of the running of the shops, as well as overseeing the building program—with the exception of Number 1, which still remained my domain.
I had decided several months before the final announcement tha
t I wanted to mount a major sale at the auction house just before Charlie’s declaration of going public, and I was confident that the Italian collection to which I had been devoting a great deal of my time would prove to be the ideal opportunity to place Number 1 Chelsea Terrace on the map.
It had taken my chief researcher Francis Lawson nearly two years to gather some fifty-nine canvases together, all painted between 1519 and 1768. Our biggest coup was a Canaletto—The Basilica of St. Mark’s—a painting that had been left to Daphne by an old aunt of hers from Cumberland. “It isn’t,” she characteristically told us, “as good as the two Percy already has in Lanarkshire. However, I still expect the painting to fetch a fair price, my darling. Failure will only result in offering any future custom to Sotheby’s,” she added with a smile.
We placed a reserve on the painting of thirty thousand pounds. I had suggested to Daphne that this was a sensible figure, remembering that the record for a Canaletto was thirty-eight thousand pounds, bid at Christie’s the previous year.
While I was in the final throes of preparation for the sale Charlie and Tim Newman spent most of their time visiting institutions, banks, finance companies and major investors, to brief them on why they should take a stake in the “biggest barrow in the world.”
Tim was optimistic about the outcome and felt that when the stock applications came to be counted we would be heavily oversubscribed. Even so, he thought that he and Charlie should travel to New York and drum up some interest among American investors. Charlie timed his trip to the States so that he would be back in London a couple of days before my auction was to take place and a clear three weeks before our tender document was to be offered to the public.
It was a cold Monday morning in May, and I may not have been at my brightest but I could have sworn I recognized the customer who was in deep conversation with one of our new counter assistants. It worried me that I couldn’t quite place the middle-aged lady who was wearing a coat that would have been fashionable in the thirties and looked as if she had fallen on hard times and might be having to sell off one of the family heirlooms.