Chapter 3: Mind Games

1. Close Call

It was coming up to the second anniversary of my formal appointment as Chief Executive of Black Sheep UK and my fourth year in effective control. I am not happy and, it appears, neither is anyone else. The high point of my popularity was a month or two after Kirsty and I discovered that we were Great Uncle Henry’s heirs. We got married and decided that she should continue working towards a PhD while I took the reins from Henry’s twin Harriet and became boss in my own right.

I’m Kenneth and I was only eighteen when Aunt Harriet asked me to help; I was welcomed and encouraged by staff and clients alike. Our nursing homes house very rich old people in considerable splendour combining five-star hotel accommodation with first rate medical care. My aim from the start was to maintain the standards that Henry had established but I soon perceived that I could not do so without change.

One of the things that helped me decide was a study of the records. Henry was a great innovator with a gift for selecting changes that were widely welcomed by staff and clients alike. He understood that the bond between staff and patients contributed to the well-being of both groups. I am seventy years younger than he was and I simply don’t have the experience of life to make such sure-footed choices without reference to older and wiser heads. Henry was an autocrat and was loved for it; I’m a democrat listening carefully to advice but making my own decisions in the end.

The effect on staff and clients has astonished me. They think that I show weakness in seeking advice and accuse me of being autocratic when I don’t take it! Henry won universal respect for decisiveness, but I’m awarded the wooden spoon for being an indecisive bully. What was seen as boyish charm four years ago is now interpreted as woeful incompetence!

In some ways I would have liked to run the homes exactly as Henry had but the world around us continues to develop and we must anticipate these changes if we are to continue to justify the enormous sums we charge for our services. In the very early days, I took every suggestion and offered it to Aunt Harriet since everything was done in her name. Within a few months she had effectively given me carte blanche although I continued to brief her before I implemented changes. She often became impatient with me for doing so, especially when delay inconvenienced our clients.

She is chairperson of the company and I still keep her informed of my decisions and plans, but I will, though rarely, introduce a minor alteration in our procedures without informing her first. In the past two years I have sensed that she has become cooler towards me and my nemesis, Jenny, reports that Aunt Harriet now feels that I exclude her from the decision-making process. I find it hurtful that she is criticising me behind my back. Perhaps I have let the hurt show because it seems to have contributed to my reputation for weak management.

When I first visited Uncle Henry in the home, I was snubbed by Jenny who was the receptionist at that time. She has been a critic ever since. Even when my approval ratings were high, Jenny would take every opportunity to bring me down to earth. She is in her late thirties, and I know that she has little reason to like men but I have treated her well and fairly.

When I discovered that she was doing the work of company accountant without getting the credit, I insisted on her taking on the role openly with all the advantages in prestige and salary that the job attracted. Rather than soften her attitude, it seems that her promotion has made her even more critical of my attempts to run the company. I can’t pretend to like her very much as a person, but I offered her advancement on merit; it was, it now appears, weak of me to do so without exacting an oath of loyalty to me.

She is very good at her job, but her satisfaction comes from contrasting her success, which I praise, with what she perceives as my failings. The foremost of these failings is my willingness to put the interests of the company before my personal feelings.

At present we are in the final stages of opening a new nursing home to add to the five existing homes. Over the years, Henry bought a number of properties that he considered would be suitable for an expansion of the business. Looking back, I can see that until he had a stroke when he was in his late seventies, he had lost none of his vitality. He was opening a new enterprise every two years on average before then.

He set up an organisation that was – and still is – too big for our requirements. It is clear that he wanted eventually to expand to ten or more homes in Scotland and another five or six in Northern England. There is a holding company that controls Black Sheep UK, the organisation that operates our existing five nursing homes. Black Sheep Properties holds the real estate that includes the homes, staff housing and potential homes leased out until required. Apart from about ten per cent of shares owned by employees, the businesses belong to Great Aunt Harriet, Kirsty and me.

After his stroke Henry kept the existing nursing homes ticking over but he clearly considered this to be a temporary halt to expansion while he recovered. His property portfolio is managed by a chartered surveyor with Kirsty and me as co-directors acting directly for our parent company in the Cayman Islands. Matthew Gilchrist, the manager, has continued to add properties as well as managing and leasing the existing estate.

Acting on my advice, Aunt Harriet had sold our home in Dundee. A group of local businessmen had taken advantage of Henry’s death to organise a take-over coup. It would have needed a major battle to keep the home and make it profitable and I knew that the lease was almost up on what looked to me like a more promising building. It was across the Tay, close to St Andrews and had been the mansion of a jute magnate.

He had added to the original Jacobean house in early Victorian times and had created a park extending from the house to a Grecian Temple more than a mile away down an avenue of beech trees. It must have been magnificent in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it was still impressive to stand on the terrace and look down the avenue.

The temple was partly ruined and many of the trees had succumbed to old age and winter storms, but the view was still worth seeing. During the nationalisation frenzy of the fifties, part of the estate had been purchased to improve the main road through the park between the house and the temple so there was no longer direct access to it from the house. As part of the improvements to the main building, I had had the temple made safe and arrested further decay. It would, I felt, provide pleasure to our guests.

Jenny has done a wonderful job on this project, first with a comprehensive feasibility study and lately keeping tight control on the costs. She and I had fallen out over the money spent on the temple and I had finally had to order her to do the work I had planned. It may have been this defeat that drove her to a close study of all the papers relating to everything from the original deeds of the house to the contract with the furnishers. It is, after all, the job of an accountant to be careful with money but it is my job to consider the wider benefits.

Whatever drove her, she spotted a loophole that had been missed by everyone else including the top-quality solicitors we employed. When we sold the property in Dundee we signed a conventional exclusion clause: we agreed not to open a home within eighty miles of the business we had disposed of. Jenny spotted that the temple and much of our land on the far side of the public road from the house, was within the forbidden zone.

She was jubilant and took as her right the praises heaped on her by me and, rather less enthusiastically, by the solicitors who had missed the snag. She was a bit condescending to them, but she made the fact that I had not seen the difficulty an excuse to condemn my stewardship not just of this project but of the whole Black Sheep operation. I could, I thought at that time, afford to indulge her petty triumph.

I might have been able to laugh off her opinion of my competence if Kirsty and I had still been on good terms, but we had been fighting a lot recently. Our physical attraction was as great as ever, but our philosophies were poles apart. Her doctoral thesis is on the psychological problems of aging and at first this seemed likely to be a means of drawing us closer; I was, after all, dealing with the day-to-day difficulties of keeping old folk interested and mentally active.

The trouble began when I told her anecdotes of my old people and she sought to generalise their experiences to fit her theory. She tended to rub off the rough edges of my tales, dismissing as idiosyncrasies the parts that I considered central; for me the essence of aging happily was that the individuality should not be lost. I thought she was advocating a ‘one size fits all’ approach to aging and she accused me of having no overall strategy. I felt that she was beginning to lecture me as if I was a class of rather backward students and she, I think, simply became bored with the domestic details of my guests.

We are both very involved in our lives, and we found ourselves either arguing or sitting sullenly silent. We didn’t even have domestic problems since our flat was entirely maintained by the nursing home and our meals were provided by the chef.

I suppose it was inevitable that our problems became political. Kirsty was trying to find solutions to the problems of the whole aging population while I was presiding over an elitist group of pensioners. If money could solve a problem then my clients had the solution piling up in their bank accounts. Her pensioners were having to overcome problems of basic survival before they could consider finding a class that would teach them contract bridge to keep their minds alert.

Of course, I appreciate that all pensioners are important but the problems of adjusting to aging are complex and money is only one strand. My attempts to justify our existence were dismissed as rampant elitism; I gave up arguing against the accusation that because the cost element does not matter to us, we are unfitted to explore the underlying problems.

I was reflecting on all this while I drove back from a meeting with solicitors at the village next to our new property. Jenny’s discovery had caused a certain amount of panic, a great deal of head scratching and no sensible ideas. Our solicitors were in favour of challenging the issue in court. The basis of the argument would be that the temple did not form an essential part of the project and so could not be relevant. So far as I could understand the argument it was rather like the off-side rule in football: was the temple interfering with play?

It seems to be in the nature of lawyers to solve a problem by building it up into a full-blown crisis. My view was that if we didn’t want the temple, we should give it away. We had spent about five thousand on repairs and it cost us a few thousand more to convey the temple and the land up to the road to the nearest village. They were the only ones that actually used the place for picnics on summer Sundays and other more private assignations after dark. Today we had handed over the deeds. The lawyers were not altogether happy because the court battle they sought would have ended up costing millions, much of which would have ended in their pockets, but surely, I thought, Jenny will appreciate my acumen.

We were all socialising in the village pub when I got my answer.

“What kind of General Manager gives away his assets?”

When I got back to Glasgow I had had enough. I sneaked in the back door so I wouldn’t have to chat to Cedric who had taken Jenny’s place at the reception desk. I went straight to my office and sighed at the height of the pile of papers in my in-box. If Cedric had been with me, he would have gone straight to the bar and poured a substantial glass of scotch, but I rather despised people who needed alcohol as a crutch.

I had reluctantly taken the top document from the pile when the office door opened after a perfunctory knock. Our chief nurse, Karen, has a right of access to me day or night but she only ever arrives unannounced when there is some crisis.

“You’ll have to come at once. La Bouchard is having hysterics, and we can’t quieten her.”

I suppose my sigh may have been audible, for Karen gave me a disapproving look before she turned and led the way along the corridor. Karen had been one of my chief supporters at first, always ready with friendly advice and encouragement. Two years ago, we would have walked side by side – arm in arm, more than likely. Now she was walking a pace ahead of me with her back rigidly expressing disapproval.

Madame Heloise Bouchard is a fairly recent arrival in the home. She is ninety-six and her body is not strong. Her mind, however, is like a steel trap and she has no hesitation in voicing her opinions in a disapproving whine. She has been with us for three years and in that time she has fallen out with all our other guests. She has become a great friend of Aunt Harriet’s, a mere stripling at only ninety-four, with the pair of them setting a new moral tone for the home.

When we reached La Bouchard’s room, Karen opened the door and preceded me. Madame was in bed and our chief medical officer was encouraging her to drink one of his potions. Also in the room were Aunt Harriet, Jenny and Dani, Madame’s nurse. The doctor handed the cup to Dani and came towards the door. The old lady followed him with her eyes until they lighted on me when she gave a scream and made feeble gestures waving me away.

The doctor grabbed my arm in passing and towed me out the room shutting the door on the uproar inside.

2. Madame Bouchard

I left wondering what was going on. All the doctor could tell me was that he was called to the woman having hysterics.

“I would have given her a shot to calm her but there’s so little flesh left I couldn’t have found a place to put the needle. The drink will quieten her, but it will take longer to work. She looks fragile but she’s strong enough to go three rounds with Ali if you get her back up!”

When I got back to my office, I have to admit that I looked at the bar but turned instead to the cabinet holding the confidential files. Only the doctor and I have the combination since the files contain not only highly confidential factual information but also considered opinions by the staff in the home. Considering how short a time she has been with us Heloise Bouchard has impressively filled her file.

She started life as Louise McVey, the only child of a Glasgow solicitor by his second wife. Married at seventeen she had one child and was pregnant with another when her husband joined up at the very start of the Second World War. He divorced her immediately after the war. She went to the United States in 1974 where she married Emile Bouchard. He had died about five years ago and she had returned to Scotland shortly after.

I went to see her soon after she came to us and asked if I could join her for dinner, a custom of mine from the time I took the job. I was very conscious that I knew next to nothing about pensioners in general and rich pensioners in particular. Chatting over dinner is a good way to get to know each other. Mostly I eat with a group in the dining room, but I also make a point of eating with the clients who can’t or won’t use the communal facilities.

“Why?” was her immediate response. “Why would a young man want to eat his meal in the company of a done old woman?”

I explained my philosophy as best I could.

“Good God! Listen Sonny, it’s bad enough living my life without telling it as a bedtime story to a wee boy hardly out of diapers.” There is a slight American nasal intonation to her speech that makes her voice sound disapproving even when she is talking to Great Aunt Harriet, her special friend.

I stood up and said ‘OK’.

“What do you mean, ‘OK’? You ask, I refuse, and you just shrug and walk away. What kind of CEO are you?”

By this time, I had no wish to be in her company for dinner or any other reason but she somehow persuaded me to ask her again and this time she graciously accepted. She talked well once I became accustomed to her belittling of everyone in her stories – and her audience!

Her father was fifty when he met her mum. His wife had died some years before, and his two sons were at boarding school. Her mum had come to see him professionally after her father died. It seems that the courtship and marriage were based on mutual misunderstanding. In his professional capacity he was a competent and sympathetic man such as a recently orphaned girl could admire. His sympathy ended at his own front door where he took it off with his overcoat, but she was neither clever enough nor experienced enough to anticipate the shock of this discovery.

On his side he saw a pretty, modest young woman with a becomingly serious outlook on life. He could not have guessed that it was only the shock of her father’s sudden death that had sobered her. She was a flapper, giddy and in love with the gay life of dances and parties. She became pregnant with Louise before he realised her true character but when he did, he stoically met his obligations while contriving not to utter another word to his new wife.

You understand that this is all unsupported testimony. Even at twenty-one I had an inkling that she was putting a considerable bias on her account of life. When her father died, her mum tried to re-join the flapper community but in eight years the world had moved on. The great depression had taken the stuffing out of the roaring twenties.

Louise and her mum didn’t seem to have suffered financially but she shrugged off any questions about the source of their prosperity. Since she complained about every other aspect of her life, I deduced that that there were ample funds to keep them in at least modest comfort. She was seventeen when she met a thirty-five-year-old accountant and married him. Their first child was born in 1937 and she was pregnant with their second son when war was declared. His life, she told me, had been blighted by his father’s decision to go to prison during the First World War rather than fight, so he joined the army at once to atone for his father’s failings.

This was the start of a time of great hardship for Louise. It certainly must have been difficult to give birth then bring up two boys in a time of war but, as before, she didn’t seem to suffer financial deprivation. She stressed that she had to go out to work as well as be father and mother to her sons, but the hardship was centred on her lack of a social life.

“You don’t know you’re born nowadays. We had rationing, and not enough men to go round. There comes an age when boys need a man to explain certain things to them. You wouldn’t have survived. After all you got this place handed to you on a plate and I suppose you think all you need to do is hold your hand out and someone will fill it with candies.”

I wanted nothing except to escape from the whinging voice complaining about me and her past in almost equal measure. Her husband fought in North Africa before crossing to fight his way up Italy. It wasn’t clear whether he ever came home on leave but if he did it left no impact on his wife. She worked unremittingly during the war ensuring that her sons were well cared for and well educated.

She sacrificed her life to them although I felt that she had probably kept a careful account of everything she had done for them and expected them to spend their lives paying her back. She had no social life, not that she would have dreamed of going out without her husband. It was so easy for a respectable married woman to lose her reputation, especially in wartime.

She didn’t like me to ask questions because, she said, it broke the thread of her story. It took me a while to find out that what it really did was to force her to cover up the lies she had already told me.

“How did you get to America?” I asked her one evening when she was relatively mellow.

“Emile – he liked me to call him Hank – came over with the American troops. He was a major and it was his job to give treats to the local children. He walked into my nursery one day and my heart just flipped.”

It wasn’t clear if she meant that she owned a nursery or simply worked there.

So, this woman who had no social life began a torrid affair with an American officer. He was so good to her darling boys making sure that they were baby sat while she was out dining and dancing. She was at pains to deny that it actually was an affair although she slyly hinted at a physical passion that she had not previously experienced despite having two kids. It was true love and beyond the power of mere mortals to deny. Hank left after VE day to return to New Orleans.

“He wanted me – desperately wanted me – to go with him but, of course, I had to deny him. ‘What God has joined together’ I reminded him, ‘let no man put asunder’.”

This piece of noble self-sacrifice got an unexpected reward. Her husband had been left to help administer a small town in Umbria where allied troops were treated as saviours. Stores of food and wine, hidden from the Germans, were brought out and the warm nature of the local girls encouraged the soldiers to search out their hidden secrets. Louise’s husband only remained long enough in Britain at the end of the war to be demobilised before he returned to a young lady in Umbria where he eventually became mayor and father of six bambini.

Madame Bouchard made his departure sound like the worst sort of desertion, but she later complained that her sons often visited their father in Italy despite, as she said, everything she had done for them. They attended his funeral and were photographed at the graveside comforting their stepmother – the slut! – and her brood.

By the time Louise was divorced, Hank had married his childhood sweetheart and he had tenure at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. He wrote to her once to tell her of the impending nuptials shortly after he got home but then she heard nothing for almost three years. Then he wrote to ask her forgiveness for making the biggest mistake of his life in marrying anyone but her. From that time on for thirty years they conducted a passionate correspondence until his wife died. He had three grown children, and her sons were well established in life although not, according to her, above tapping her for a few pounds when they felt the need.

When the call came, she flew to New Orleans and married Hank, who now wished to use his christened name of Emile. At his suggestion, she became Heloise and by mutual consent they started pronouncing their surname ‘Boo-shar’. It was, apparently, his greatest regret that he had never managed to visit France, the land of his ancestors. Like the hard-wearing material, his family was de Nimes.

Heloise prospered in Oklahoma. As the wife of a full professor, she was a person of some importance in a university town with a permanent population of fifty thousand. She did not get on well with his children although she did let it slip that they had been friendly enough at first to attend the wedding in Louisiana.

Although raised in the Church of Scotland she found an urge to enjoy the poetic mysticism of the Roman Catholic Church (I’m quoting). I’ll bet she knew more about the ritual than the priest!

Emile had been left with about ten thousand dollars when the estate of his first wife was wound up. Heloise took charge of this and his salary and started to make money. She was so good at this that by the time she had been in Oklahoma for ten years she was able to send a million dollars to each of her sons. She discovered that she was a gambler: in fact, she was that rarest of creatures – a gambler that made money.

Her two main preoccupations were the stock market and poker. She studied the markets and trends before investing but when she had made up her mind she was prepared to back her decisions with her entire bank roll. She told me that there were times when she was within days of losing everything. If she thought a share would increase in value, she would buy more than she could afford planning to sell them for a profit before settlement day when she had to fork out hard cash. She could also make a profit if shares dropped in value as she anticipated.

She told Aunt Harriet that her flutters on the markets since she joined us were bringing in more than the cost of her room in our nursing home and we’re not cheap, I promise you! Her poker playing was, she insisted, just for fun but the little friendly game she organised when she came to us took more than five hundred pounds from the staff and residents who played against her until I enforced our rules against gambling. She only played out about one hand in five but when she did decide to play, she carried on raising the stakes until she had risked every penny.

I must give her credit: she never complained when a gamble failed but woe betide her next opponent! Her fit of hysterics was completely out of character, and I didn’t blame Karen for bringing it to my attention at once. All I could do until she calmed down was to sit and wait. In the meantime, I could get on with the paperwork in my in-tray.

It was Harriet that barged in this time but, unlike Karen, she didn’t bother to knock. She was accompanied by Cedric who made straight for the bar and poured a couple of large drinks. Aunt Harriet marched up to the desk and loomed over me like a domestic thunder cloud.

“Well, what are you going to do about Heloise? You can’t just sit there, you know.”

“I’ll be happy to help but you forget that I don’t know what has upset her in the first place.”

“If you had waited instead of running off you would know.”

This looked like settling into a very silly exchange of insults, so I gestured to a chair and waited until she had swallowed half her drink. When she put the glass back to her lips, I asked Cedric if he knew what was going on.

“La Bouchard’s lawyer visited her this afternoon. He wants her to give him power of attorney over all her assets.”

“Don’t call her that! Her name’s Heloise and she deserves a bit more respect than she gets around here.”

Cedric smiled apologetically but said nothing. He lost his virginity to Harriet when he was a student and has adored her ever since. I suspected that he had used the term Harriet objected to so that her wrath would be diverted from me. When he is playing chess, he will slip in an innocuous looking move that turns out to be a match winner fifteen or twenty moves later.

So far as I remember, Heloise’s lawyer is the son of her old family solicitor, and he has represented her since she returned from the United States. He must be well aware that her mind is sound and there is no immediate risk to her health although she is certainly frail. There must be more to the story.

Being a rather pricey place to live we tend to have a lot of contact with our clients’ lawyers. Her man is young and a bit of a trendy dresser. He was perfectly reasonable when I talked to him about the complaints Heloise had made about our treatment of her. Looking back, I think he has a low opinion of his employer.

All Harriet knew was that Heloise was very upset.

“Why did she scream when she saw me?”

“Her lawyer convinced her that you were plotting to con her out of her fortune.”

This set off an alarm bell in my mind. It is the custom in some establishments like ours to put a bit of pressure on the clients to remember the home in their Wills. Jenny had recently raised the subject at a board meeting, going so far as to suggest that we could promise better treatment on earth if they rewarded us once they had safely reached heaven. Aunt Harriet was not as opposed to the idea as I was, I remember.

“And his solution was for her to give him control instead?” was my angry retort.

I was tempted to suggest that the lawyer and I should challenge La Bouchard to a game of poker with the winner getting control of her assets. She would wipe the pair of us out!

3.Senile Decay

I let Cedric and Harriet have another drink and then I chased them away so I could deal with the problem of Heloise. What I really wanted to do was consider Jenny: she’s a gifted accountant but her war on me is harming the business. In the meantime, I had to solve a problem that had ramifications far beyond the case of Madame Bouchard. It will be fairly easy, I think, to prove her mentally competent but some of our other guests have habits that could easily be misconstrued if you were a greedy relative seeking to inherit early.

Karen was rather less than helpful when I called to ask her to send Dani to my office.

“She’s had a hard day. I can send her in before her shift tomorrow.”

“One of your patients had hysterics today. Dani is her nurse and knows more of what went on than anyone else.”

“Harriet told you what went on – or I can spare you a few minutes in another hour.”

“Unless Dani is in my office within five minutes, you can consider yourself suspended from duty pending a review of your competence.”