Chapter 42: Plans

After Clarissa made her decision, things began to move quickly. Before we left his house, Pete told us he’d update the Germans first thing Monday morning and would have letters out to the other shareholders by the end of the day containing the formal purchase offer. My letter was waiting for me when I got home from school on Tuesday. I filled in the acceptance form and put it aside to post on my way to school the next morning.

When I asked Vicky if she had accepted the offer or not, she replied, “Yeah, I have. This has come at just the right time, actually. I need the capital.” I wasn’t sure what she meant by that and I didn’t ask.

On Friday, Pete called Clarissa to tell her that he’d received enough acceptance forms for the sale to go ahead. It might take as long as two months for the legal formalities to be completed but, to all intents and purposes, Liddington-Phipps Ltd was now a subsidiary of WolfgangHaus AG.

As expected, the news spread rapidly through the town. The Worker’s Trust held a public meeting at The Vic to discuss ways of stopping the sale. Civil disobedience was on their agenda. I didn’t go to the meeting, but the word at school the next day was that the only ones that appeared interested in stopping the sale were those that ran The Trust—the rest of members, or a majority of them at least, seemed more interested in how much their pay-out would be after the sale went through, and when they could expect to get it. By the end of the three-hour meeting The Trust had backed down and the only real barrier to the sale was removed.

“Are you sure we’ve done the right thing?” Clarissa asked the evening after The Trust meeting. We were sitting on her bed watching the latest addition to her Rom-Com collection. I was leaning back against the headboard while she sat between my legs, leaning back against me. I had my arms wrapped around her as she held on tightly to my hands.

When I didn’t answer straight away, she twisted around to look up at me. “Paul? Did we—?”

“Yes,” I said, as confidently as I could. But Clarissa being Clarissa, she picked up on the uncertainty I tried to hide.

“You’re not sure, are you?” Her voice showed signs of panic. “Oh, god, I’ve—”

I dipped my head down to kiss her—to shut her up as much as to reassure her. Then I said, “Truth is, Riss, that no-one can really say what would have happened if the company hadn’t been sold. Oh, sure, they can make predictions based on the worst-case or best-case scenarios, but no one can predict for sure. Just like no one can be sure what will happen now the company has been sold. All we could do was make the best decision we could, based on the information we had. So did we do the right thing? Yes. I’m sure of it. But only time will tell.”

She smiled and nodded then turned her attention back to the film.

Easter brought us a two-week break from school. Clarissa and I spent every possible moment together, although it wasn’t all fun and games. We were in the home stretch of our A-Level courses. Courses on whose results our university places depended. Both of us had been offered places at our first-choice university, Westmouth. Emily had also been offered a place there, while Grace had every intention of heading north and was holding a place at Manchester. All of these places were conditional on getting solid B grades in our exams.

My ex-girlfriend Lisa was under even more pressure. She had accepted a conditional offer from one of the Cambridge colleges, and the conditions of her offer were straight A* grades. She was capable of it, but only with hard work.

So our group of friends spent as much time at the school library revising for all we were worth as we did on our leisure activities during our Easter holiday. On our return to school, our teachers were also in revision mode, recapping key points from each topic and providing us with test papers from previous year’s exams so we could practice. Everyone’s focus was on passing those exams, getting our place at university and securing our futures.

That’s not to say that Clarissa and I didn’t enjoy our time alone. We most certainly did. That was the period I discovered that there’s nothing quite like mind-blowing sex and multiple orgasms to relieve stress.