worse.
During the afternoon some trivial thing would irritate him beyond all
reason, he would yell at his staff, and his stomach would ball into a
knot of pain which made him incapable of thinking at all.
He would go home and take too many pain-killers.
He would sleep, wake with a headache, eat dinner, take sleeping pills,
and go to bed.
At least he could look forward to bedtime.
He rolled over, yanked open the drawer of the bedside table, found a
tablet, and put it in his mouth. Then he sat up and picked up his cup of
tea. He sipped, swallowed, and said: “Good morning, dear.”
“Morning.” Ellen Hamilton sat on the edge of the twin bed, wearing a
silk robe, perching her cup on one slender knee. She had brushed her
hair already. Her nightwear was as elegant as the rest of her large
wardrobe, despite the fact that only he ever saw it, and he was not
interested.
That did not matter, he surmised: it was not that she wanted men to
desire her only that she should be able to think of herself as
desirable.
He finished his tea and swung his legs to the floor. His ulcer protested
at the sudden movement, and he winced with pain.
Ellen said: “Again?”
He nodded. “Brandy last night. Ought to know better.” Her face was
expressionless. “I suppose it has nothing to do with yesterday’s
half-year results.”
He heaved himself to his feet and walked slowly across the expanse of
oyster-colored carpet to the bathroom. The face he saw in the mirror was
round and red, balding, with rolls of fat under the jaw. He examined his
morning beard, pulling the loose skin this way and that to make the
bristles stand up. He began to shave. He had done this every day for the
last forty years, and still he found it tiresome.
Yes, the half-year results were bad. Hamilton Holdings was in trouble.
When he had inherited Hamilton Printing from his father it had been
efficient, successful and profitable. Jasper Hamilton had been a printer
fascinated by typefaces, keen on the new technology, loving the oily
smell of the presses. His son was a businessman. He had taken the flow
of profits from the works and diverted it into more businesses–wine
importing, retailing, publishing, paper mills, commercial radio. This
had achieved its primary purpose of turning income into wealth and
thereby avoiding tax. Instead of Bibles and paperbacks and posters, he
had concerned himself with liquidity and yields. He had bought up
companies and started new enterprises, building an empire.
The continuing success of the original business disguised the flimsiness
of the superstructure for a long time. But when the printing complex
weakened, Hamilton discovered that most of his other businesses were
marginal; that he had underestimated the capital investment needed to
nurse them to maturity; and that some of them were very long-term
indeed. He sold forty-nine percent of his equity in each of the
companies, then transferred his stock to a holding company and sold
forty-nine percent of that. He raised more money, and negotiated an
overdraft running into seven figures. The borrowing kept the
organization alive, but the interest rising fast through the decade ate
up what little profit there was.
Meanwhile, Derek Hamilton cultivated an ulcer.
The rescue program had been inaugurated almost a year ago. Credit had
been tightened in an attempt to reduce the overdraft; costs had been cut
by every means possible from cancellation of advertising campaigns to
utilization of print-roll off-cuts for stationery. Hamilton was running
a tight ship now; but inflation and the economic slump ran faster. The
six-month results had been expected to show the world that Hamilton
Holdings had turned the corner. Instead they demonstrated further
decline.
He patted his face dry with a warm towel, splashed on cologne, and
returned to the bedroom. Ellen was dressed, sitting in front of the
mirror, making up her face. She always managed to dress and undress
while her husband was out of the bedroom: it occurred to him that he had
not seen her naked for years. He wondered why. Had she run to seed, the