“I’m listening, but I don’t know what you mean about censorship, Mr. Cottage. Of course I feel very sympathetic about your personal troubles, but -”
“Oh, this isn’t just personal, friend, not by a long chalk. Look, let me light a cigarette…” He reached for a packet on his desk, lit up and inhaled, then said, “Look, your firm’s bust, flat, finished! You can’t have it plainer than that, can you? Your fellow director – Keith Barrett, was it? – was all wrong when he said he thought you’d been scooped by another toy firm. We’ve done our research, and you’re all in the same boat, every firm from the biggest to the smallest. The figures prove it. The fact is, nobody’s buying kiddy toys.”
“But these summer season slumps come and -”
Cottage waved a hand in front of him, sneering as he did so.
“Take it from me, this is no seasonal slump, Mr. Timberlane, nothing approaching it. This is something much bigger. I’ve spoken to some of the other chaps here. It isn’t only the toy industry. Know Johnchem, the firm that specializes in a whole range of infant products from prepared strained foods to skin powders?
They’re customers of ours. Their figures are worse than yours, and they’ve got ten times your overheads!
Radiant, the pram and baby carriage people – they’re in the same boat.”
Arthur shook his head as if doubting the truth of what he heard. Cottage leant forward until his nose blurred out of focus.
“You know what it means,” he said, pressing his cigarette down into an ashtray, billowing smoke from his lungs into the screen. “It means one thing – ever since that accident with the van Allen belts a year ago last May, there haven’t been any kids born at all. You can’t sell because you’ve got no consumers.”
“I don’t believe it! I can’t believe it!”
Cottage was fumbling stupidly in his pocket and playing with his cigarette lighter.
“Nobody will believe it until they get it officially, but we’ve checked with the General Register Office at Somerset House, and with the General Registry up in Edinburgh. They haven’t given a thing away – but from what they didn’t say, our figures help us to draw the correct conclusions. Our overseas connections all report the same thing. Everywhere it’s the same thing – no kids!”
He spoke almost gloatingly, leaning forward with his eyes slitted against the lights of the visiphone.
Arthur switched off the vision. He could not bear to look at Cottage or to let Cottage see him. He held his head in his hands, dimly aware of how cold he was, of how he trembled.
“It’s a general bust,” he said. “The end of the world.”
He felt the coarseness of his cheeks.
“Not quite as bad as that,” Cottage said from the blank screen. “But I’ll bet you a fiver that we’ll not see normal trading conditions again till 1987.”
“Five years! It’s as bad as the end of the world. How can I keep afloat for five years? I’ve got a family. Oh, what can I do? Jesus Christ…” He switched off as Cottage began to launch into another dose of bad news, and sat staring at the litter on the desk without seeing it. “It’s the end of the bloody lousy world. Oh Christ…
Bloody failure, bloody…”
He felt in his pocket for cigarettes, found only a pack of cards, and sat staring hopelessly at it. Something rose in his throat like a physical blockage; a salt tingle made him screw up his eyes. Dropping the cards on to the floor beside Jock Bear, he made his way out of the factory and round to his car, without bothering to drop the latch of the door behind him. He was crying.
A convoy of military vehicles rumbled along the Staines road. He threw the car into gear and grasped the steering wheel as it bounded forward towards the road.
Patricia had hardly poured Venice and Edgar their first drink when the front-door bell sounded. She went through to find Keith Barratt smiling on the doorstep. He bowed gallantly to her.
“I was driving by the factory and saw Arthur’s car parked in the yard, so I thought you might like a bit of company, Pat,” he said. “This bit of company, to be exact.”