Free At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison Page B

shower blew in.
    ‘No thanks,’ said Howard, as he always did, pretending to shut the door on his son where he stood on the mat, only to open it again and usher him in with a grin and a mock bow.
    ‘Where’s Mum?’
    ‘Oh, she’ll be down in a minute, I’m sure. She’s got a bit of a headache. Said she was going to have a nap.’
    While Chris took his coat off and hung it on the newel post, Howard took his son’s bag to the study, where he would sleep. As always when the kids visited he would be back in the master bedroom, with Kitty, something he had mixed feelings about.
    ‘This for us?’ he said, returning from the study with a bottle of Malbec in one hand. ‘Shall we?’
    ‘Oh, just a beer for me, Dad,’ said Chris.
    ‘Right you are. How’s everything?’
    While Howard poured the drinks, Chris began to tell him about the last month: a driver had left, problems with the IT system, and his continuing efforts to woo a new client, an electrical retailer with stores all over the south-west. It wasn’t a move Howard would have made, but then, he wasn’t running the firm any more.
    ‘There’s no money in the south-west, son,’ he’d said when Chris first told him of the plan. ‘It’s all poverty down there, they’re on EU grants, they’re not buying bloody flatscreens. By all means go ahead, but don’t bank on them surviving long.’
    ‘Most of it’s web-based, though, Dad,’ Chris had said. ‘Doesn’t matter where the actual stores are any more. People know the laptop they want, they read the reviews online; if this lot can do it at the best price people order it. Doesn’t matter where they are, or how well established, as long as it’s mainland UK.’
    Maybe he was right. It seemed a saturated market to Howard, electrical; but then what did he know? And it had been part of Chris’s business plan when he took over: twenty new UK clients to fund the container warehouse in Felixstowe he’d leased. The risk of it still made Howard’s heart lurch sometimes, especially the way the country was going; but it wasn’t his business any more.
    ‘We need to offer proper freight handling if we don’t want to be crowded out,’ Chris had said; and he was probably right. ‘If we can hold goods off the ship and get them out direct we can pull in bigger clients. We need to be scaling up, Dad. People aren’t just going to stop wanting stuff all of a sudden. Someone has to get it to them; it might as well be us.’
    ‘What about fuel – have you found another supplier?’ Howard asked now.  There was a diesel tank in the yard that was topped up by a tanker every week, but the cost had been climbing steadily.
    ‘One or two are coming in a bit under, but there’s no guarantee they won’t go up too,’ Chris said. ‘I’m not sure it’s worth changing. Plus we get good credit right now; it could take ages to build up a relationship with someone new.’
    Howard nodded, held his peace. He would have changed supplier, more than once if necessary, kept the cost down month on month. But then, he hadn’t been looking so far ahead; he’d been content for the firm to earn him a good income and pay the wages of his office staff and drivers. Old-fashioned, he knew. But still.
     
    After lunch the three of them put on outdoor shoes and went out for a stroll. He and Kitty had gone for quite a few walks when they’d first moved to the village, but after a couple of months the habit had fallen away.  Yet when the children visited it was a way to offer them something, a last remnant of family as well as a look at the countryside neither of them had on their own doorsteps.
    Chris walked in the middle; Howard put his hands in his pockets and thought about how they used to take him to the park when he was a toddler and swing him between them. It was as though his muscles still retained the memory of the little boy’s weight, as though his hands could still feel the terrifying delicacy of his son’s hand and wrist