B= Folly

"Folly"

"Your little town has become quite popular now; what were you thinking
about when you filled it ? "

"As is on record, I began my writing career working on trashy soaps.
Cursed gems, plastic surgery, that sort of deal. I had a fondness for
that sort of accelerated plot. I wanted to couple that with some sort
of dignity and decay, something like Faulkener writing the Bold and the
Beautiful. Of course, I'm way off, but that's where I was
aiming."

"So what about the people ?"

"The main thing about the people of Moreover is this. They're built for
stories. They all have flaws, quirks, and most of all, they all have
secrets. But yet, none of them realise that everyone is is scared too,
so they all stay anxious that the town will judge them badly if the
secrets get old. Some of them have held on too long to ever let them go
now. "

Extract from interview with Frank Naples,
Esquire magazine, March 1999

It would have been simpler for Glad Moore to have driven the van as far
as he could up the Cliff, there was something of a road that went about
a quarter of a mile farther than he had parked. But that would have
defeated the point.

Things were supposed to be hard. That was why he loaded up five of the
pinkish white granite blocks up into the wheelbarrow and began pushing
it up the hill. Glad didn't wear gloves, though he had a pair that
would have been suitable. They were up at the easternmost point of the
Cliff, near the folly he had been building. The calluses he had
developed near the base of each finger, little livid kisses rough to
the touch, he looked at with a sense of pride. For once, he was living
as a man.

Without his eyebrows, Glad would have been a handsome man, regarded as
a fine catch by the women of Moreover. He was in any event, the town
was not filled with idiots and they knew the value of comfort and
wealth. The eyebrows were a bit much. They did not sit right on his
face. He had the face of a doctor in a television drama, kind and
clipped; but then above the cornflower-blue eyes were these thick
glowering eyebrows, transforming his entire character by hairy
accident.

The eyebrows were something he'd inherited from his father, together
with a sixty per cent stake in the Company. His father was now a spent
and broken man, who spent his days carefully cutting out South America
from cheap atlases, assembling the elephantine continent in neat rows.
Glad's brother Ice had also acquired the eyebrows but had dealt with
them harshly with nail-scissors, cutting them back into an acceptable
shape. Their sister was more fortunate, in that regard at least,
Frances Lynn could be said to be blessed.

There was a sharp bend in the road just as the Cliff really began to
steepen and Gladstone had to really set to work to move the heavy
barrow up and around. The road would come to an end soon and the ground
was not suitable for the barrow. He would have to transport each stone
by hand over the chopped shale and clumped grass up to the top, where
the folly needed feeding. Five separate trips, then back down with the
barrow to fetch more blocks.

He would not start the build until he was weak from carrying. Then he
would rest for a while, sit on the grass and look out at the dancing
sea, those little puffed-wheat islands of yellow and grey; the skinny
lighthouse out on the rocks with its barbershop stripe. The fishing
boats flopping on the waves, men hauling at nets.

Sometimes, but not often, he would look at the town below. Observe the
way that the houses and shops of the Knot crowded together, each almost
leaning on its neighbour for comfort or to share gossip; the more open
space around Callaghan Square, the rusting ships and pale-painted
boathouses around Brindberg's Jetty. The moss, watermelon and mint
beach umbrellas spiked into the sand, markers that stayed permanent as
flags on the moon. Were there flags somewhere in America, lost for
generations now, that showed the first claims made on the land ? Bold
reds and oranges of Spain, now faded and worn, the cloth more like
leather.

He never felt that he belonged to this town; though the town mostly
belonged to him. Before his father had become a map-snipper, he had
been a force in the town. James Moore had been the man who had taken
his grandfather's wealth, sunk into factories and turned it into wealth
that knitted itself, that grew without machines or men. Investment.
That was what had built the Moore fortune. The fortune that Glad had to
wear like a tie that had been pulled sharply and tightly into place by
a mother's hand. It would never actually choke him, but it always felt
an inch away from doing so.

It was stupid. He was not cut out for business, although in another
sense, that is exactly what he was, a blank sheet of paper that had
been shaped and trimmed by his father's design.

Glad had grown up with balance sheets and judging the worth of material
goods. He had felt the cold of the tailor's tapemeasure under his
armpits as a child, so he could be fitted for business suits and attend
meetings before he even reached his father's midriff. He would sit in
on the meetings, attentive, on a chair plumped up with cushions. When
James Moore got serious and took out his cuff-links, rolling up his
sleeves to show porridge-grey arms, Glad would do the same.

He was a quick study. What got past James at these meetings never got
past Glad. It was he who urged his father to move from fabrics to
plastics, from plastics to electronics.

And all this time, he had watched his brother do whatever he pleased,
which was most often painting. At first with an envelope shaped white
metal tin, bone-dry squares of blues and yellows; later with white
slug-like tubes of oils, with names that Glad didn't know. How can you
tell which are blue from the names, he had asked. Ice had said, how do
you know what to buy.

Father had never minded what Ice sought to do with his life. He had
made it quite clear that Ice was a disappointment, merely by virtue of
his later arrival. Twin boys would have been the best, but he had no
patience for repeating what he'd taught Gladstone.

While Ice painted and Frances did whatever it was she did, Glad and his
father announced the closure of the smaller of the two factories in the
town. It was making a loss and had to be shed, James declared. It was
cheaper to ship textiles in from Singapore or Korea, move the rugs and
sweaters across the ocean that pay people in your own town to make
them. In any event, James said, it was an embarrassment to the family
to be employing people, it was cheap and grubby, a throwback to his
grandfather's generation. He had only kept the factories going out of a
sense of history. Glad opposed his father in this, the first real
business dispute they had had. He did not prevail. The factory
closed.

It was after the strikes and demonstrations, and the tipping of his
father's car by disenchanted workers, that his father had lost his
nerve, shut himself away to tremble and play with scissors. Glad had
never thought that men could have strength against the engine, to tip
something so heavy as the Mercedes, its paintwork the same colour as
the inside of his wedding cake.

He remembered the crack of the window, a sharp sad noise like his
brother breaking up the frozen edges of the lake with a stick, his
father pressing the horn imperiously and confidently saying, "They'll
tire in a moment. "

He remembered the tipping, how for a moment the car and the two men
within it had rested at an odd angle, how father had held firm to the
wheel and glared at the crowd, rather than clutch his son.

This was when Glad, aged just twenty, had needed to take control of the
business. Father, although shot, could see this and signed over
majority control to him, the rest to be split between Ice and Frances.
Glad called in his advisors and listened as they told him that the
factories were baggage, like swimming the Mississippi with steamer
trunks. Streamline they said, goodbye he said.

The textile factory reopened and Glad allowed both factories to nibble
at the fortune. What was fortune compared to the health of the town ?
What the factories lost, the investments elsewhere could recoup.

His stomach for it had gone though. The games of jumping numbers,
scanning accounts and ledgers and seeing what could be shed, trimmed,
sold off were no longer games. Every dollar earned felt like he was
pulling it out of another man's pocket. He had seen etched on faces
what these games meant. He did what he could with investment, playing
safe, trying to pull companies through with his business sense, rather
than going for the quick easy money.

The odd thing was, that Ice who had been deliberately kept away from
the business side of things, had been so keen to taste it, so full of
suggestions and ideas. Glad tried so hard to keep him away from it,
money and its fearful weight. There was talk that Ice could become a
real painter, people said he had talent. But when father broke down
(the second time, the first had been a mere warm-up) it was Ice that he
wanted to talk to. Ice he spent time with. He had no time for Gladstone
and to be fair, Gladstone had no time for him. There was much to be
done with the business. He wanted to take on more people at the
factories, work out a profit-sharing scheme (there was no profit, but
he would lie to his worker's benefit).

What did they talk about, in that room together ?

Finally, Gladstone had needed some help and had to yield to his
brother's urgent requests to get involved. He watched him carefully and
saw that Ice had that edge that he himself had never really had, even
before the car. Ice could glance at a company and see how he could
strip it, bed it and leave it without a pang. He could lay people off
without ever thinking. Glad wanted to spend less and less time trading
and Ice wanted to spend more and more, with his shaped eyebrows and
bullying lawyers.

The folly would help. This was to be his salvation, his mark.

He reached it finally, at the crest of the Cliff; still holding the
block close to him. It was a circular tower, hollow and now at waist
height. He had pegged out stakes and string to keep the shape, to keep
it true. From up here, he could see everything. He could see that the
glassy sea continued, stretched on beyond what any man could see. Maps
showed him that there was land on the other side, but it was hard to
believe. He could see the whole town at dizzying angles, the statue of
the bear, the church, the two factories built into an L-shape with
their royal blue roofs. But best of all, he knew that the town could
see what he was adding.

Folly. A Victorian idea, taken up by rich landowners. They had paid to
construct them, to leave their mark. A demonstration almost that they
had such wealth that they could build something of no purpose. This
wasn't the point for Glad - he was looking at it the other way, as a
symbol that riches don't equate with common sense.

Since he began constructing the folly, Glad hadn't spoken to anyone in
the town. What little business he did could be done by e-mail, Ice had
taken on more and more of his role.

He ate his breakfasts each morning at Cotton's Diner, a place that
reminded him of kinder times. He sat in a booth with tan leather seats.
This place was a perfect selection, since Annie Cotton, the waitress
was deaf and it was accepted custom that diners would make their
selection by pointing to the items on the menu. Nobody else came to
talk to him. People either thought of him as the son of the man who
wanted to close the factories, or as the man who might do it yet.
Nobody wants one man to have that much sway.

Annie would come over to him and wait there, so still and pretty, as he
pointed on the laminated menu to a fried-egg sandwich or a bowl of
chilli. She would lick the end of her pencil with a small, stiff tongue
and write the order down, tearing off the page and pegging it up for
her mother to begin cooking. He had begun to come here again with the
newspapers, to check what was happening in the world, but had soon
stopped caring.

Now he came to Cotton's with sketches, papers on which dimensions of
stone blocks were scribbled and little pictures of how each layer of
the folly would go up.

Not speaking was odd. His tongue became an unwanted organ, sitting
heavy and useless in his mouth; a slab of rare steak instead of a
curling, flickering flame.

Glad knew that his brother was stronger, more grasping. The guilt sat
on him as real and heavy as one of his stones, placed on his
breastbone. He knew that he wouldn't be able to resist, the weakness
had caught him. It had finished his father and it had finished him. He
had just limped on a little farther. A time would come when Ice would
come to him, with a brace of suited advisors by his shoulders and tell
him that the factories had to close. That good business sense demanded
it. He no longer felt he had the spirit to resist.

He had his own lawyer and his own doctor. They had assured him that it
was watertight. When the moment was ready, his sixty per cent share in
the Company would be split equally between every factory worker. He
couldn't face down Ice alone, but the workers would always work to keep
the factories open.

Sometimes, when he went to spend time with father, not to talk, just to
watch his eyes and lay a hand on his shoulder, he would see the shapes
of South America laid on the table, twenty or thirty lined up. He would
pick one up, and see that it had Cairo or Seoul on it instead of Rio or
Buenos Aries. His father knew the shape so well, he could cut it from
an entirely different continent.