A Good Man
Copyright© 2011 by Marc Nobbs
Chapter 42: Plans
With Clarissa’s decision made and her fifty-five percent of the voting rights now in favour of the sale, things moved remarkably rapidly.
I was with Clarissa in the library during a free period when she received a text message. She unlocked her phone, read the message, then looked at me with sad eyes.
“That was Mr Williams,” she said, her voice flat. “He’s told the Germans. He said that letters should go out to the other shareholders this afternoon with the formal purchase offer and a voting form.”
“You okay?” I asked.
She shrugged. Then after a lengthy pause she said, “I have done the right thing, haven’t I?”
I nodded. “You have.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
She gave a small nod, then looked at her books. A few seconds later, a small smile crept across her face and she said, “Your girlfriend’s going to be very rich, Paul. How much is fifty-five percent of twenty-five million?”
“You tell me? You’re doing a maths A level too, aren’t you? Or isn’t your mental arithmetic up to it?”
She smirked. “Fifty percent would be twelve and a half. One percent is two hundred and fifty thousand, so five percent is one million two hundred and fifty thousand. The total is therefore...”
“Thirteen million, seven hundred and fifty thousand,” I said, my eyes going wide.
Her smirk turned to a grin. “Think of what we could do with that, Paul?”
“We?”
“Yes, ‘we.’ It’s as much your money as it is mine.”
I shook my head. “It’s not. It’s really not.”
With love in her eyes, she said, “It is to me.” She sighed. “But I’m not thinking about spending it on mad things. I’m thinking about all the good we could do with it. All the people we could help. I want you to help me to help people with it, Paul. Can you do that? Help me to help people?”
“How? How do you want to help?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s why I need your help.”
I nodded. “Okay. I suppose we’d better start thinking of ways we can help. And who we want to help. There are a lot of people who need help. We can’t help them all.”
My shareholder’s 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. I probably should have, but I didn’t.
On Friday, Pete called Clarissa to inform her that he’d received enough acceptance forms for the sale to proceed. She had the speakerphone on, so I could hear what he was saying.
“It might take a few months for the legal formalities to be completed, the money to be paid and then distributed, but to all intents and purposes, it’s done. Liddington-Phipps will soon be wholly owned by WolfgangHaus, and only a monumental disaster can stop it. They’ve seen the books. They’ve done their due diligence. It’s as good as done.”
After ending the call, Clarissa looked at me. She raised her eyebrows and said, “How long do you think it will be before the news spreads, and the shit hits the fan?”
I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
She shook her head. “I think I might be the most hated girl in school next week. Half the girls already hate me for being with you, and they will all blame me for this, too.”
“Well, we’ll just have to educate them. This is for the best. They all need to know that.”
“Did you hear about the meeting last night, Slim?”
I shook my head. “What meeting?”
It was Tuesday lunchtime. As Clarissa and I had expected, the news spread to all corners of the town over the weekend and Clarissa was indeed getting some very dirty looks at school on Monday morning. But no one dared say anything to her.
At least, not while I was there.
“The Workers’ Trust meeting in The Vic,” Billy said. “Everyone was there.”
“Clearly, not everyone was there. I mean, were you there?”
“Well, no, it was, like, workers only. But my old man was there, wasn’t he?”
“So, what happened?” Clarissa asked. “Was everyone really angry?”
Billy shook his head. “That’s not what my dad said. He said the people at the front, you know, like the people that run it, they wanted to have a protest or something. You know to try and stop the sale.”
“And?” I said. “When’s the protest?”
“Oh, there won’t be one. Most people just wanted to know how much of a payout they’re going to get. It could be like twenty-five grand each, my old man says. He says he’s going to take us to Disney World when he gets the money!”
“I heard there was a vote,” Kevin said. “The Trust is like a members’ thing, so they have to vote on stuff like this and then stick to whatever the result is. And I heard it was like seventy percent in favour of selling and taking the money or something. It took three hours or something. The people that didn’t want to sell tried everything they could to persuade the others, but it was no good. Most people don’t care who owns the business. It makes no difference to them. They just wanted the money.”
I looked at Clarissa and knew what she was thinking because I was thinking the same thing.
The only real barrier to the sale had been removed.
“Paul, are you certain we’ve done the right thing?” Clarissa asked that evening. 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, picked up on the uncertainty I had 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 know what would have happened if the company hadn’t been sold. It’s a ... Oh, what’s that phrase that Miss Pattison used the other week? A counter-factual?”
Clarissa nodded. Her eyes were still showing signs of slight panic. “Like a ‘What if... ‘ thing?”
“Exactly. It’s like, what would have happened if I hadn’t been on my break that night at the wedding?”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“Me neither, but it shows you what I mean, right? Neither of us would have any idea what we’d be doing right now if I’d still been carrying a tray at the party instead of sitting on that bench having a Coke.” I paused. “People like Pete can make predictions based on the worst-case or best-case scenarios, but no one can predict for certain. There’s never any certainty in predicting the future. No one can be certain what will happen now that the company has been sold. All we could do was make the best decision we could, based on the information we had and the advice we were given.”
“I suppose.”
“So, did we do the right thing? Yes. I’m sure of it. But the truth is, only time will tell.”
She smiled and nodded, then turned her attention back to the film.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.