She was pleased, but still honest. ‘I’m new this week. I started on Monday — and you’re my second inquiry.’
No wonder, I thought, that she’d let me in.
I said, ‘Are all the offices as plush as this?’
‘Yes,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Mr Yorkshire, he likes things nice.’
‘Is he the boss?’
‘The chief executive officer.’ She nodded. The words sounded stiff and unfamiliar, as if she’d only newly learned them.
‘Nice to work for, is he?’ I suggested.
She confessed, ‘I haven’t met him yet. I know what he looks like, of course, but… I’m new here, like I said.’
I smiled sympathetically and asked what Owen Yorkshire looked like.
She was happy to tell me, ‘He’s ever so big. He’s got a big head and a lovely lot of hair, wavy like.’
‘Mustache?’ I suggested. ‘Beard?’
‘No,’ she giggled. ‘And he’s not old. Not a grand-dad. Everyone gets out of his way.’
Do they indeed, I thought.
She went on, ‘I mean, Mrs Dove, she’s my boss really, she’s the office manager, she says not to make him angry, whatever I do. She says just to do my job. She has a lovely office. It used to be Mr Yorkshire’s own, she says.’
Miss Rowse, shaped like a woman, chattered like a child.
‘Topline Foods must be doing all right to have rich new offices like these,’ I said admiringly.
‘They’ve got the TV cameras coming tomorrow to set up for Monday. They brought dozens of potted plants round this morning. Ever so keen on publicity, Mrs Dove says Mr Yorkshire is.’
‘The plants do make it nice and homey,’ I said. ‘Which TV company, do you know?’
She shook her head. ‘All the Liverpool big noises are coming to a huge reception on Monday. The TV cameras are going all over the factory. Of course, although they’re going to have all the machines running, they won’t really make any nuts on Monday. It will all be pretend.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Security. They have to be security mad, Mrs Dove says. Mr Yorkshire worries about people putting things in the feed, she says.’
‘What things?’
‘I don’t know. Nails and safety pins and such. Mrs Dove says all the searching at the entrance is Mr Yorkshire’s idea.’
‘Very sensible,’ I said.
An older and more cautious woman came into the office, revealing herself to be the fount of wisdom, Mrs Dove. Middle-aged and personally secure, I thought. Status, ability and experience all combining in priceless efficiency.
‘Can I help you?’ she said to me civilly, and to the girl, ‘Marsha dear, I thought we’d agreed you would always come to me for advice.’
‘Miss Rowse has been really helpful,’ I said. ‘She’s going to find someone to answer my question. Perhaps you could yourself?’
Mrs Dove (gray hair pinned high under a flat black bow, high heels, customer-relations neat satin shirt, cinched waist and black tights) listened with slowly glazing eyes to my expanding tale of the nutty farmer.
‘You need our Willy Parrott,’ she said when she could insert a comment. ‘Come with me.’
I waggled conspiratorial fingers at Marsha Rowse and followed Mrs Dove’s busy back view along the expensive passage with little partitioned but mostly empty offices on each side. She continued through a thick fire door at the end, to emerge on a gallery around an atrium in the main factory building, where the nuts came from.
Rising from the ground, level almost to the gallery, were huge mixing vats, all with paddles circulating, activated from machinery stretching down from above. The sounds were an amalgam of whir, rattle and slurp: the air bore fine particles of cereal dust and it looked like a brewery, I thought. It smelled rather the same also, but without the fermentation.
Mrs Dove passed me thankfully on to a man in brown overalls who inspected my dark clothes and asked if I wanted to be covered in fall-out.
‘Not particularly.’
He raised patient eyebrows and gestured to me to follow him, which I did, to find myself on an iron staircase descending one floor, along another gallery and ending in a much-used battered little cubby-hole of an office, with a sliding glass door that he closed behind us.
I commented on the contrast from the office building.
‘Fancy fiddle-faddle,’ he said. ‘That’s for the cameras. This is where the work is done.’
‘I can see that,’ I told him admiringly. ‘Now, lad,’ he said, looking me up and down, unimpressed, ‘what is it you want?’
He wasn’t going to be taken in very far by the farmer twaddle. I explained in a shorter version and produced the folded paper bearing the analysis of the nuts from Combe Bassett and the Land-Rover, and asked if it was a Topline formula.
He read the list that by then I knew by heart.
Wheat, oat feed, ryegrass, straw, barley, corn, molasses, salt, linseed.
Vitamins, selenium, copper, other substances and probably the antioxidant Ethoxyquin.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.
‘From a farmer, like I told you.’
‘This list isn’t complete,’ he said.
‘No… but is it enough?’
‘It doesn’t give per centages. I can’t possibly match it to any of our products.’ He folded the paper and gave it back. ‘Your cubes might be our supplement feed for horses out at grass. Do you know anything about horses?’
‘A little.’
‘Then, the more oats you give them, the more energy they expend. Racehorses need more oats. I can’t tell you for sure if these cubes were for racehorses in training unless I know the proportion of oats.’
‘They weren’t racehorses in training.’
‘Then your farmer friend couldn’t do better than our Sweetfield mix. They do contain everything on your list.’
‘Are other people’s cubes much different?’
‘There aren’t very many manufacturers. We’re perhaps fourth on the league table but after this advertisement campaign we expect that to zoom up. The new management aims for the top.’
‘But… um… do you have enough space?’
‘Capacity?’
I nodded.
He smiled. ‘Owen Yorkshire has plans. He talks to us man to man.’ His face and voice were full of approval. ‘He’s brought the old place back to life.’
I said inoffensively, ‘Mrs Dove seems in awe of his anger.’
Willy Parrott laughed and gave me a male chauvinist-type wink. ‘He has a flaming temper, has our Owen Yorkshire. And the more a man for that.’
I looked vaguely at some charts taped to a wall. ‘Where does he come from?’ I asked.
‘Haven’t a clue,’ Willy told me cheerfully. ‘He knows bugger all about nutrition. He’s a salesman, and that’s what we needed. We have a couple of nerds in white coats working on what we put in all the vats.’
He was scornful of scientists as well as women. I turned back from the wall charts and thanked him for his time. Very interesting job, I told him. Obviously he ran the department that mattered most.
He took the compliment as his due and saved me the trouble of asking by offering to let me tag along with him while he went to his next task, which was to check a new shipment of wheat. I accepted with an enthusiasm that pleased him. A man good at his job often enjoyed an audience, and so did Willy Parrott.
He gave me a set of over-large brown overalls and told me to clip the identity card on the outside, like his own.
‘Security is vital,’ he said to me. ‘Owen’s stepped it all up. He lectures us on not letting strangers near the mixing vats. I can’t let you any nearer than this. Our competitors wouldn’t be above adding foreign substances that would put us out of business.’