Stranger Passing By

‘Yes,’ whispered Maureen, ‘he’s right. Please, Crystal, sit down. It won’t do us, or you, any good at all.’

Brent Akerman got to his feet. ‘Not threatening, Miss Rose,’ he grated, ‘intending. Thank you for your intervention. I think your colleagues have provided the answers to your queries.’

Crystal was on her feet again. ‘A management buy-out,’ she exclaimed, ‘that’s what we want!’

‘It’s the management, Miss Crystal,’ Brent Akerman clipped, with a mocking curve to his lips, ‘who intend to close the chain. Don’t you mean an employee buy-out?’

If his words had been intended as a put-down, he had succeeded. Cheeks hot, hand shaking a little as she smoothed back her hair, Crystal subsided, not completely sure as to just what had come over her. It must have been a side to her character that had been lurking below the surface for years, undisturbed and unprovoked, completely unknown even to herself, until that man, the man who stood on that platform so confidently, had prodded it awake.

More, she thought with dismay, he had prodded awake feelings within herself which she hadn’t been aware of before and which, even as she gazed up at him, were making themselves felt only too plainly.

Maureen nudged her gently. ‘That’s good, that’s very thoughtful,’ she murmured.

‘What is?’ Crystal asked, coming, a little bewildered, out of her dream.

‘Aren’t you listening, dear? You really should be. They’re giving us six weeks’ pay over and above our notice, so that we can keep paying our bills and try and find other employment at the same time. And,’ Maureen paused for effect even as Brent Akerman talked, ‘they’re giving us a very generous sum as redundancy pay.’

‘In addition,’ the chief executive concluded, ‘we will do our best at Worldview to absorb back into the company, or into one of its subsidiaries, as much of the workforce as we can.’

‘How’s that for consideration?’ Roger whispered in her ear. ‘If they can find me only part-time work it’ll help to fund my studies.’

Brent Akerman’s hand waved to the long, laden tables that stretched down one side of the room. ‘Having completed the unpleasant part of this meeting, I invite you all to help yourselves to the food provided.’

The platform party of three filed off, and as they did so Brent Akerman put his hand to his mouth to cover a wide, shuddering yawn. So he’s bored to his core, is he? Crystal thought resentfully, following the others as they beat a path to the consumables. A small bar had been provided as a thoughtful postscript by the regretful, if unrelenting, Worldview management.

Crystal discovered that she was hungry, having had no time even for a scratch meal before leaving home. As she filled a plate and forked the delicious savouries into her mouth, others, doing likewise, joined her.

Maureen picked at the food on her plate, her mind plainly on other things. ‘However will I manage without a regular wage coming in?’ she asked the company in general.

‘Find another job?’ Crystal asked gently. She, like all the others, knew about Maureen’s semi-invalid mother, who lived with her.

‘At my age? And within cycling reach of my home, the way the shop is?’ Maureen shook her head.

‘Heaven knows,’ Ted Field commented worriedly, ‘how I’ll manage to keep going financially. What did you have in mind,’ he turned to Crystal, ‘when you suggested a buy-out?’

‘Yes,’ a rounded fair-haired young woman took him up, ‘have you got access to a gold-mine or something?’

Crystal recognised her as the girl who had spoken to her in the cloakroom after the prize-giving dinner a fortnight or so back. Shirley Brownley, she recalled, was the young woman’s name.

‘I wish I had, Shirley,’ Crystal responded, drinking a mouthful of wine. ‘But we could raise a loan, couldn’t we?’

‘Anyone around here,’ said Roger, grinning, ‘got a friendly bank manager?’

‘Or a rich daddy?’ asked Ted. ‘And I do mean father—nothing else,’ he added as the others laughed.

‘Mine’s with my mother in Denmark,’ Crystal declared, ‘staying with old friends of the family. Anyway, he took early retirement and he’s anything but rich.’

‘Oh, dear. So that’s that idea knocked on the head,’ said Shirley.

‘Let’s try again,’ Crystal urged. ‘What about savings? Couldn’t we all pool them and—?’

‘Mine are non-existent,’ said Ted.

‘Mine are sacrosanct,’ Roger averred. ‘They’ve got to tide me over financially until I get my degree. Especially as I’m now about to get the push.’

Most of the others seemed to be entirely in agreement with him.

‘Mr Akerman did promise,’ Crystal ventured, ‘that those who weren’t offered positions in the company’s other subsidiaries would receive good redundancy pay. How about—?’

‘Using that?’ An older man shook his head. ‘I’ll need mine to help pay the mortgage and keep the bailiffs at bay.’

‘Me, too,’ chorused many of the others.

There the conversation tailed off, the group dispersing to help themselves to more of the food and fill their glasses with the surprisingly good-quality wine. This last, Crystal calculated, with unaccustomed cynicism, Worldview had surely provided not only to soften the blow of dismissal, but also to keep reality from bursting in before the doomed employees reached home.

Hunger appeased, she wandered somewhat despondently away from the crowd, finding herself in the open air and standing at the edge of a softly illuminated paved area set about with wrought-iron tables and chairs.

Other guests sat under the evening sky, some alone, others in cosy twosomes, plainly at one with the world, secure in their jobs and their ways of life. Unlike, Crystal reflected, herself and her colleagues, who had just been informed of their impending loss of employment and plunge into near-poverty, if not actual destitution.

Losing the job she loved and the salary that went with it was a double blow. It was money she needed to enable her not only to eat but also to pay the rent of the old but cosy two-bedroomed end-of-terrace cottage she lived in.

‘Miss Rose.’ Her name wafted, a mere whisper, on the cool evening air. ‘Over here, Miss Rose.’ Crystal swung towards a shaded corner of the wide patio from which the voice had come.

A figure half reclined against a plinth that supported the statue of a somewhat scantily robed woman rising with dignity and proud beauty towards the darkening sky.

The height of the man, the width of his shoulders, the elegant suit, not to mention the fine shape of his head and slightly indolent pose, told Crystal at once who he was. But should she go at his bidding? Her feet made the decision for her.

‘Yes?’ was her whispered answer as her closer proximity to him allowed her to survey the features she had come to know so well through their constant appearance in her dreams.

He seemed to have no answer to offer, except to hold out the dish of savouries he had selected from an assortment of edibles that rested on the statue’s standing area. It was so reminiscent of the first time they had met that laughter tugged at Crystal’s throat, and a brilliant grey-eyed smile echoed her amusement.

‘I’m full, thanks,’ she answered his gesture, but, as before, the dish was proffered again, so she accepted, and wondered at the strange improvement in the taste of the titbit on that of those she had eaten inside. It wasn’t that the quality was better, she was sure of that. It was...what was it? The time, the place and the man standing there that had imbued the savoury with the flavour of nectar?

Should I, she found herself wondering, in view of the unhappy circumstances that now prevailed, really be on such—well, friendly terms with the top man? Wasn’t she in danger of letting her colleagues down?

‘You—you haven’t just returned from a trip abroad, I suppose?’ she queried, accepting—as before—the paper napkin he offered.

He nodded, consuming another portion of the mini-meal as if he could not appease his hunger fast enough.

‘I thought I recognised the signs,’ she commented with a smile, which he returned, with a devastating effect on her pulse-rate. ‘Your dislike of airline food?’

‘Full marks for an excellent memory.’ A sliver of salmon atop a bed of lettuce on a finger of toast was demolished by a crunch of formidable white teeth.

‘Where—where from this time?’

He swallowed, licking his fingers then using a paper napkin, looking vaguely round for a waste-bin. Crystal took the scrunched paper from him, depositing it on a plate.

‘Japan,’ he just got out before another colossal yawn enveloped him. For a couple of seconds his eyes closed. Allowing himself a mere moment for recovery—his stamina, Crystal found herself thinking, must be remarkable—he reached across the plinth for a wine bottle.