Power Games

‘But we need to expand!’ Jay exploded. ‘To get into the American market. That’s where the future lies—the mass market. The specialist stuff we do is all very well, but the real market isn’t there. Just look at—’

Bram interrupted, ‘There is a definite market for our products. We’ve built our name and our reputation on what we’re good at.’

‘On what you’re good at,’ Jay retorted furiously. ‘And that’s exactly what this is all about, isn’t it? Oh, you’re happy enough to give me my own office and my own title, even a directorship, but when it comes to giving me any real power, any real support.’ The green eyes hardened with a bitter contempt that Bram’s could never have reflected, causing the older man’s heart to ache with a familiar mixture of exasperation and sadness.

Power, control, recognition—they mattered so much to Jay, and they always had done. The turbulent child whose deliberate and wilful manipulation of Bram’s guilt and pain had caused Bram’s friends to suggest it might be wiser, for his own sake, to distance himself from the possessive demands of his child, had turned into an equally turbulent and dissatisfied adult.

But to suggest to Jay that his intense need for power and control had its roots in the traumatic days of his childhood was like tempting a wild bird of prey with fresh-killed meat.

Jay would swoop on the suggestion with all of his considerable power and force, take it and worry at it and savage it with an avid blood-thirst and single-mindedness that left delicate stomached onlookers nauseated and Bram himself feeling compassion and guilt.

But in this instance he could not, as he had so often done with the much younger Jay, give in. Not to keep the peace, but in the hope that in doing so he would be giving Jay the reassurance he knew his son so desperately craved and equally desperately refused to acknowledge.

‘No, Jay. I’m sorry,’ Bram repeated firmly, ignoring his son’s aggressive and untruthful assertion that his role in the business was that of a cipher only—a job Bram had created simply to keep his son in a demeaning and subservient position.

In fact, if the truth were known, in some ways Bram wished that Jay had chosen a different kind of career rather than joined him in the business.

He was wryly aware that, along with all the physical characteristics, Jay had also inherited the skills that had made him one of the most innovative and skilled computer-program writers of his generation.

But typically Jay had wanted more. Taking his MBA at Harvard had, Bram knew, been a form of one-upmanship on him.

While Bram still felt the most important role he had was to create the programs on which the company’s success was founded, Jay believed that the future lay in expansion and mass marketing.

‘You’re sorry,’ Jay snapped bitterly. ‘I’ve put weeks of work into this project. I’m due to fly to New York tonight to meet with the Japanese and the Americans. How the hell do you think it’s going to make me look when I have to turn round and tell them we’re not interested?’

Now they were getting down to the nub of the matter. It was his pride that Jay was most concerned with, his potential loss of face. Not that Bram hadn’t already guessed that.

‘I shouldn’t worry too much,’ he told his son now with the quiet steadiness that had always deceived the unperceptive into mistaking his apparent lack of aggression for weakness. ‘If I’m any judge, you’ll probably find they’ll assume you’re trying on a bit of brinkmanship. The Japanese, in particular, are very skilled in that particular field.’

Jay frowned. His father was probably right, he acknowledged, and he certainly wasn’t ready to give up his plans for the future of the business, no matter what his father said.

The mood of savage resentment which had swept over him when he realised his father was not going to accept his plans eased, softened by the thought that he could still find a way of changing his father’s mind, of proving that he was right.

As a child he had been aware of the vulnerability of his position in his father’s life, hostile and aggressively suspicious of anyone else’s influence over his father, and those feelings had carried into his adult life. At twenty-seven he was old enough, mature enough to be far more skilful at concealing those feelings and the cause of them, from himself as well as from others, than he had been as a child; just as he was equally adept at denying that his powerful need to gain ascendancy and control over his father sprang from those same deep-rooted feelings of fear.

It was obviously farcical to try to claim to himself or anyone else that his father, at forty-two, might be losing his grip on the company and that he, Jay, had for his father’s own sake, somehow to wrest control from him.

But the computer industry was notorious for its appetite for young supple minds, its hunger for progress and innovation. The future of their business lay with the young, not, as his father insisted, with the traditional markets.

Nor with this latest scheme in which his father had got involved creating programs for improving the quality of life of those who were, in various ways, mentally or physi-cally disabled—’mentally or physically challenged,’ as his father had mildly corrected him during Jay’s recent furious tirade against the potential expense involved if his father went ahead with such a venture.

‘No, I realise there won’t be any profit in it in the immediate future,’ his father had agreed. ‘But shouldn’t we offer to help those who would otherwise live life on the sidelines? And if we are successful there could be considerable profits involved—through patents alone.’

‘And that’s why you’re doing it, is it, Father?’ Jay had challenged him sardonically, ‘Because you’re looking ahead to future profits?

‘Balls,’ he had contradicted flatly. ‘You’re doing it because you’re a soft touch and everyone knows it. Don’t try telling me that Anthony Palliser approached you because he wanted to offer you an opportunity to make money. No, he approached you because he knew no one else in the business would even look at a deal that virtually involves giving away programs we don’t even know if we can write yet. Programs which will have to be individually tailored for each person who uses them.’

‘Programs which will give people who would otherwise not be able to do so, the ability to communicate,’ Bram had told him. ‘Think what that means, Jay.’

‘I am. It’s a complete waste of time and money,’ Jay had insisted.

‘My time and my money,’ Bram had reminded him gently.

His father’s time, his father’s money. They ran through Jay’s life in a twisted skein that rubbed continuously against his soul, chafing and scarring it.

One of his earliest memories of life with his father had been of a woman’s voice, cool and remote, saying impatiently, ‘Bram, for goodness’ sake, think. The last thing you’ve got time for now is the responsibility of a child. We’re on the brink of getting our first real break, of finally making some money, and God knows we need it.’

He had hated that woman then and he still hated her now. A feeling which he knew, for all her cool distance and remoteness, Helena fully returned.

‘What time is your flight to New York?’ he heard his father asking now.

‘Six-thirty this evening.’ He added suspiciously, ‘why?’

‘No reason,’ Bram responded. ‘It’s just that I’ve got a meeting with Anthony at four-thirty—he’s looked out some research material he thought I’d like to study—and I thought you might like to join us.’

‘What for?’ Jay challenged him sourly. ‘Like you said, it’s your time you’re putting on the line—and your money.’

‘Jay—’ Bram started to protest, but the younger man was already turning to leave the office. Despite Jay’s six-foot-two height and the powerful male strength barely cloaked by the conventional dark business suit, Bram was achingly reminded of a much younger but equally surly Jay turning his back on him and stalking off in stubbornness, his shoulders stiff with anger, the power of his emotions making his then much smaller body virtually vibrate with their intensity.

‘He’s manipulating you and you’re letting him get away with it.’ Helena had warned him in exasperation. And of course she had been right—in a sense—but how did you tell a small, furiously angry and bitterly resentful child who still sometimes, two years after their deaths, cried out in the night for his mother and grandparents—a child who you knew used his aggression and manipulation to mask his terrified fear that you, too, might desert him—how did you convince such a child that he had absolutely nothing to fear? How could you deliberately strip away from him the comfort blanket of his stubborn pride by revealing to him that you knew, far from hating you as he claimed, just how much he actually craved your love? How did you tell him that the arms he stubbornly resisted and rejected were, in reality, only too ready to close around him and hold him protectively, safe from the rest of the world and all its hurts?

It had made Bram ache with a throat-closing pity to watch as Jay fiercely rejected any attempt on his father’s part to be physically close with him. To Bram, a very tactile man who had no problems in expressing the emotional side of his nature, Jay’s rejection of the kisses and cuddles he so obviously craved made Bram want to weep.

‘You don’t have anything to feel guilty about,’ Helena had protested when he had tried to explain.

‘Oh, but I do,’ Bram had corrected her softly. ‘After all, I fathered him.’

‘You were fourteen,’ Helena had reminded him. ‘A boy…a child still, yourself.’

‘Yes,’ Bram had agreed steadily. ‘But while that might be an excuse, Helena, it is Jay who pays the price for my immaturity. No child of fourteen can be a parent…a father, in any real sense of the word. In being responsible for Jay’s conception, I have robbed him of his right to a real parent, of being born into a relationship where he was wanted and loved, of having a father who could protect him…give him the security he needs.’

‘You have given him security,’ Helena had insisted. ‘You’ve given him a home, abandoned your own life, your own plans, your own friends because of him. He should be grateful to you instead of…of trying to completely destroy your life.’

‘Helena, no child should ever feel he needs to be grateful to a parent for being loved and wanted. No human being should ever have to grow up under that weight of emotional hunger. I know Jay can be difficult….’

‘Difficult! He’s impossible, Bram. He’s ruining your life. You should put him in a home—have him fostered—for his sake as well as your own….’

What Bram could still see in his adult son and what other people could not see was the fear of a child who believes that he has to earn his parent’s love. What he, as a father, could never forgive himself for was causing that fear.

He had hoped that as Jay matured he would come to recognise for himself what motivated him and see that his fear was needless, that the angry possessive grasp he insisted on keeping over both their lives deprived them both; that allowing other people into their lives could only enrich them both. But this had simply not happened.

And just as Jay had so jealously guarded his relationship with his father and been fiercely antagonistic to anyone else coming into their lives, so now he guarded his own privacy. Bram knew from the brief scraps of gossip that percolated through the office grapevine that Jay was a highly sexed man whom women found dangerously attractive, until they realised that sex was all he wanted from them, and all they were going to get from him.

Inadvertently listening in on a conversation at a dinner party between one of his son’s ex-lovers and her friend, he had heard her say dryly, ‘Physically, Jay is just about the best lover I’ve ever had. He knows all the right moves, all the right buttons to press, but after a while you start to realise that this is all he is doing. It’s as though he’s written a program for sexual success—it’s cold and clinical. I pity the woman he eventually marries. He’s the type who’ll go for some fresh, virginal, up-market aristocratic girl, long on pedigree and short on savvy. He’ll seduce her, marry her, pack her off to a house in the country as soon as he’s got her pregnant and then go back to the real business of his life.’

‘Which is?’ her friend had asked, eyebrows raised. ‘Or need I ask?’

‘Oh, it’s not sex,’ she had been told. ‘No, Jay’s real purpose in life, his real consuming passion, is his relationship with his father…making sure that nothing and no one comes between them.’