Discovering Natalie in eavesdropping range by the pantry offered little in the way of surprise; she faded from view and was next seen gathered around Mother Whitelaw’s rather good Georgian tea service, which when Paul was in jail had represented, in his mind, if not the good life, then the unconfined life; and once he’d heard it appraised in the spinning portrait of value called “the estate,” he immediately concluded it would be even handsomer in cash form than it had been during its two hundred years on an Edinburgh sideboard before Sunny Jim swept it to the Rockies on the wings of his credit card. When in unlamented down-and-out days Paul had suggested to Evelyn that she possibly gather it unto him, she cried “Never!” and thus differentiated herself from her own sister, who at the behest of a discomposed main man would’ve jogged off with the whole kit and kaboodle.
“Good afternoon, Natalie.”
“Paul.” She seemed unable to fathom his warm and admiring gaze. Alice Whitelaw got up to fill the teapot, trailing a cloud of Joy perfume behind her. When the spring-loaded door to the kitchen quit flashing, Paul said to Natalie, “Stop by later and I’ll throw a good one into you.”
“Give it a rest, Paul.”
Paul parted the drapes absentmindedly. “Around eightish would be good.” Then, to Alice, who’d just returned with the exaggerated difficulty meant to highlight her hospitality, “I hope you’ve packed plenty of warm things, Mrs. Whitelaw!”
“Nice black English breakfast,” said Alice Whitelaw. “Yes, I have, Paul, all I’ll need.”
“You’re going to Alaska, you know.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Icebergs, igloos, killer whales with the big fin.” He sailed on, completely twisted in Natalie’s view but merely baffling in her mother’s. “In a ship with a casino, four ballrooms, six restaurants and a putting green, you will be insulated from the very worst of the people who wish to take such a trip.” And hopefully all memories of Papa in his final days, the dribbling fuckwit who’d once ruled them with such might and incomprehension.
“I don’t know about that. I wish to be on this trip. Paul, I hope to be disoriented by comfort and services. I don’t want to suffer, but I don’t want to be around here before I can make sense of things.”
“What do you mean ‘sense of things’?”
“Just what I said. We’re not having the easiest time of this, Paul. And we hear quite frequently from the employees. Maybe you can see our point of view.”
Paul was aware of the discontent but thought, I’m going to kick ass and take names. “Of course I can,” said Paul with surprising mildness. “I find it very awkward, and I hope that by running things profitably and intelligently that I will win your confidence.”
“As a businessman,” Alice Whitelaw said, “you already have it.”
Paul was not about to go digging around about what other areas might lie in Ma Whitelaw’s omissions when it was far better to pour tincture on her remark and treat it like blanket approval. At all events the bottom line was the bucks.
While Natalie watched in amazement, he beamed like Howdy Doody and stated his gratitude. He said nothing whatsoever about what it was to be chained to the bottling plant for as far into the future as he could see, or to go through life as an ex-convict in a Paul Stuart Canadian twill suit and a hundred-dollar shantung tie. What chance was there of persuading her that he had a stain which no money could reach, and which was perhaps not entirely visible to someone heading for an Alaskan cruise in a haze of thousand-dollar-an-ounce perfume?
Aware of their gazes crossing somewhere in front of him, Paul felt rather hemmed in and took a geographer’s note of the form and movement of altocumulus clouds through the garden window, some starting to stream in from the north. He knew perfectly well that he would forever feel the gust of his predatory urges. To stay the course, he wasn’t anxious to dance with the devil; he wanted to find smaller, more efficient bottling plants, to hog the franchises, the relationships, the new containers, to get both the kids and the tavern rats, to score with the celebrities who visited each summer, big Hollywood guys who were willing to put their name on some pork-and-bean microbrewery just to be part of things in the West. And all for what? So Mother Whitelaw can see a hundred and give him a watch? He didn’t think so. Even this house, which he now wanted out of fast, was deader than a federal correctional facility, where life, after a fashion, ran riot. At least there you could sleep and not fear waking up crazy in the way that marked his first days of freedom, a fear that ended only when fortune gave him a going concern and the family that depended upon it. There was some poetry here.
He rattled off a few hopes for plant expansion, alluding to a simple and remunerative harvest of opportunity, and had managed to create an atmosphere of fiscal security by the time he bade Mrs. Whitelaw good-bye. Natalie silently raised a hand in sardonic farewell, and Paul drove to the bottling plant, noting with satisfaction that his name had been applied to his parking space. When he got out of the car, he could smell the fresh paint; he looked up at his factory and smiled.
On Monday, freed from the mood of resentment surrounding Mrs. Whitelaw and Natalie — a true horn dog! — he felt entirely relieved and happier still as he walked around the plant among his workers. He found his erstwhile brother-in-law, the “vice president of sales,” as per Paul’s spontaneous invention, talking with the maintenance supervisor, Herman Schmitz, who wiped his hands on his shop apron in the unlikely event that the boss wanted to shake hands. “Herman,” said Paul, stepping back a bit, “I am very aware that the one thing we don’t bottle around here is water.” He said “water” with an aspect of astonishing sourness. He had been raised by a mother for whom water was almost the only subject. Amidst the violent tinklings and forklift rumbles of the thriving bottle plant, Herman seemed unable to reply, and so Stuart butted right in.
“Well, Paul, we have such good water in our area. Even at that, we treat it with ferrous sulfate, hydrated lime and chlorine, then run it back through the filters. It’s crystal pure.”
“Our area” is what particularly stuck in Paul’s craw, the very idea of drinking water without the messages, interactions and fairly binding deals that ensued once you got the stuff into a bottle. “It may be that we have good water, but thinking like that drives no business. We are encircled by a very remunerative world of designer water, Stuart. So, anyway: floor space.”
“How’s this?”
“Floor space. Do we have the space for a small plant?”
“We cou—”