Chapter 6

Alan continues

Embracing Change

Our menage de nuef continued for another year during which we made remarkable commercial progress. It was our success in this field that brought the house of cards crashing down eighteen months after our foundation. The pin that burst our bubble was the cruise – it almost deserves a capital letter. Three months before the luxury liner left the quayside in Greenock, Jenn reported her unaudited accounts of our first year. We were all present and someone suggested we celebrate together.

We agreed to close down for two weeks and to holiday together. This idea had a mixed reception until someone suggested that we go on a cruise with Engineering Innovations paying for it. Suites would be booked for Henry and Jenn, Peter and Amanda, Alice and Phil together with George and his current secretary. It was suggested by Jenn that Emily and I could share a suite. Emily poured scorn on that but suggested that we tag along occupying single cabins.

Alice added finding a suitable cruise to her list of duties and I went back to work and would have given the holiday no further thought if it hadn’t been for the undercurrent of excited speculation permeating the very air we breathed. Destination and duration were the two main topics on which I had my own thoughts, although I only voiced them when asked.

We all accepted that the bonus must be realistic which introduced a surprisingly bitter argument: five days in the Med or round the Baltic for free against ten or more days to a more exotic destination using our own money to make up the difference. After several more heated discussions, I was not alone in concluding that we would do better to get as far from each other as possible during the two weeks off. My thoughts were coloured by Emily’s behaviour.

She has been cool towards me since she joined us and, at first, I took her agreement to join in the cruise was a sign that she was ready to forgive me. She had, instead, increased the virulence of her criticism of me allowing others to witness her animosity. “What have you done to upset that lovely girl,” Phil asked, typically taking the point of view that the man was to blame. Even Pete, about as socially inept as I am, remarked on our ‘falling-out’, as he put it.

The first actual break in our united front came, predictably, from Sir George. It began when his current secretary joined a long line of earlier incumbents on the scrap heap. What was different this time, was that instead of appointing another blonde with a bust larger than her IQ, he set his sights on Alice. She had enjoyed the novelty of a lesbian liaison, but she succumbed to the lure of big bucks. “You know I’ve always enjoyed the company of older men,” she explained, waving her hand towards Henry and me. Then she giggled: “And it doesn’t lessen his attraction that he’s mega-rich.”

Philomena moved in with Frances and Anne where she was as welcome in the bedroom as for her contribution to their finances. No one was particularly bothered by that development; all it meant was booking one less suite. Jenn did use the opportunity to raise again the question of destination and duration. George, perhaps planning his eighth or ninth honeymoon, backed her. They bullied the others into sailing on a twenty-one-day cruise from Scotland across the Atlantic to the Caribbean.

That was the final straw for me, so I withdrew from the party. I could just about tolerate being locked up in a tin box with Emily for five days, but three weeks was beyond my endurance. Perhaps deprived of her prey, she withdrew two days later. Nine had been reduced to the three pairs and that remained the status quo until the week before the ship left. I was excluded from the increasingly excited discussions about the epic voyage until the Monday of the week they were due to sail.

On that day I heard two rather different versions of the cause of the problem, although they were agreed that the outcome was disastrous. Amanda and I arrived at the same moment in the car park where she informed me with some heat that I would be pleased that the cruise had foundered. The first cruise in history that was shipwrecked before it set sail. Alice had ruined everything by blatantly seducing Peter on Saturday evening.

Jenn later gave me a more coherent account of the doings at the County Ball which she and Henry attended with Sir George, Alice, Amanda and Peter. George no longer dances much and was happy for Alice to be danced off her feet by other, fitter partners. Amanda enjoys dancing but hadn’t even heard of some of the dances which left Pete as Alice’s chief partner. Things came to a head, as is often the case, during the eightsome reel where Pete literally swept Alice off her feet.

Amanda accused Alice of seducing her boyfriend, almost, she claimed, having sex with him on the dancefloor. George sided with his daughter and the pair left in the limousine that had been hired to take all four home. Henry offered Pete and Alice a lift back to town where Alice had prudently retained her own apartment. She offered Pete a bed for the night.

Hopes of a reconciliation were dashed when Peter and Alice arrived hand in hand on Monday morning. He confided in me that he had been considering leaving Amanda because of her demanding, jealous nature while Alice confided in Jenn (who couldn’t wait to tell me) that George could not manage penetrative sex and hadn’t a clue about oral.

By this stage, Sir George had fully paid for three luxury suites on a liner due to leave Greenock at nine o’clock on Saturday morning. He now had only one couple, Henry and Jenn, to fill them. He decided to take a suite on his own and Amanda claimed the third cabin, also solo. On Thursday, there was a change of plan when George managed to sell one suite (at a discount) to an old business acquaintance. George and Amanda would share his suite. Ironically, that was the day when the bonus was paid into their bank accounts.

The news was all round the office by lunchtime on Thursday which had one unexpected outcome: Emily came into my office and carefully closed the door behind her. She had been cool towards me since the company opened but in the three months since the cruise was proposed, she has only spoken to me on work matters, and sparingly at that. Now she had plenty to say - much of it critical of me.

She pointed out that the moment of agreeing to the cruise was the highpoint of our company ethos. We were a workforce who enjoyed our jobs so much that we wanted to spend our vacations together. “You were against it from the start Alan Stuart and you’ve been a blight ever since. At every step you have blighted the idea. We admire your intelligence but once again your lack of social skills has harmed everyone around you.”