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following morning. Only executive directors were invited, which eliminated Bella as well as my mother. Having inherited Hugh’s 20 per cent shareholding, Bella was potentially a power in the land, but so far she’d shown no sign of wishing to exert any influence. She’d given my appointment the sort of disdainful blessing those more credulous than me took for the numbed consent of a grieving widow. But I knew there was a hint of scorn behind the veil.
    The meeting was fixed for eleven o’clock. Determined to start as I meant to go on, I was at the factory by nine thirty, ingratiating myself with the clerks and secretaries. Then I toured the workshops with Reg Chignell, sniffing the glue-flavoured air, shaking hands with the bat makers, listening to their words of cautious welcome. Ethel Langton, who’d been binding bat handles since Grace was a lad, reminded me of some scrapes I’d got into as a student labourer. And Barry Noakes, the misanthropic storekeeper, explained why the cricket bat industry was bound to go down the drain before he reached retirement. I tried to take it all in good part and found it surprisingly easy to do so. After twelve years at the so-called centre of Europe, I was eager to immerse myself in a world where people, profits and products had some obvious and tangible connection. Peripheral or not, Timariot & Small was suddenly where I wanted to be. I’d often talked at dinner parties in Brussels when the nostalgia flowed with the wine of how I missed the culture, language and countryside of my homeland. It was a simple and obvious sentiment, shared by many in the expatriate community. But, standing in the yard between the ramshackle sheds and patched-up Nissen huts that comprised my new and far from gleaming empire, I realized what I’d really missed all along. Just a place to belong. And this, for better or worse, was it.
     
    The office block was a modern featureless structure of brick and glass. But the boardroom, thanks to subdued lighting, wood-panelled walls, gilt-framed photographs of the staff at twenty-year intervals and a presiding portrait of Joseph Timariot in mutton-chop whiskers and top hat, preserved a soothing air of tradition.
    I arrived there a few minutes late, having been detained in the sanding shed by one of Dick Turner’s rambling monologues. Uncle Larry was already in the chairman’s place. He’d agreed to stay on until I—or whoever they’d have chosen if I’d turned the job down—was in post. Catching his keen-eyed glance and dimpled grin, I wished for a moment that he could remain as chairman. He was getting a little shaky, it was true, but there are many things worse than decrepitude. His mind was still razor-sharp. And, with him in the chair, we might at least have pretended to be loyal siblings.
    My brother Adrian, managing director and chairman elect, sat at Uncle Larry’s right hand. He seemed to look sleeker and slimmer every time I saw him, a smooth-talking tribute to the merits of fatherhood, fitness and low-alcohol lager. He’d turned himself, from unpromising beginnings, into a perfect simulacrum of the snappily dressed businessman. I couldn’t help admiring his transformation from the sullen child I’d grown up with. In the process, he’d become just what he wanted to be. Head of the family business. And, by this latest manoeuvre, my boss. Which, if I cared to dwell on it, cast a disturbing light on his eagerness to recruit me.
    Jennifer, who sat opposite him, seemed by contrast less and less ambitious as the years passed. With Hugh gone, she was, at forty-five, the oldest of us. She didn’t look it, thanks to a stylish dress sense and a boyish haircut, but her impish humour was less in evidence than it used to be. An earnestness—a conservatism that would once have horrified her—was extending its stealthy grip. I hadn’t forgotten her colourful youth. Her exotic taste in clothes and boyfriends, glamorized by never specified dabblings in the