The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [88]
Back in the clubhouse, the secretary found that the conversation had not returned to the likely winner of the President’s Putter, the seeding of the Ladies’ Handicap Cup, or who might be prevailed upon to sponsor the Youth Tournament that year.
“They seemed in a jolly enough mood when I passed them on the sixteenth hole earlier this morning,” the club captain informed the colonel.
The colonel admitted to being mystified. He had known both men since the day they joined the club nearly fifteen years before. They weren’t bad lads, he assured the captain; in fact he rather liked them. They had played a round of golf every Saturday morning for as long as anyone could remember, and never a cross word had been known to pass between them.
“Pity,” said the colonel. “I was hoping to ask Masters to sponsor the Youth Tournament this year.”
“Good idea, but I can’t see you pulling that off now.”
“I can’t imagine what they thought they were up to.”
“Can it simply be that Philip is such a success story and Michael has fallen on hard times?” suggested the captain.
“No, there’s more to it than that,” replied the colonel. “This morning’s little episode requires a fuller explanation,” he added sagely.
Everyone in the club was aware that Philip Masters had built up his own business from scratch after he had left his first job as a kitchen salesman. “Ready-Fit Kitchens” had started in a shed at the end of Philip’s garden and ended up in a factory on the other side of town that employed more than three hundred people. After Ready-Fit went public, the financial press speculated that Philip’s shares alone had to be worth a couple of million. When five years later the company was taken over by the John Lewis Partnership, it became public knowledge that Philip had walked away from the deal with a check for seventeen million pounds and a five-year service contract that would have pleased a pop star. Some of the windfall had been spent on a magnificent Georgian house in sixty acres of woodland just outside Haslemere: He could even see the golf course from his bedroom. Philip had been married for more than twenty years, and his wife, Sally, was chairman of the regional branch of the Save the Children Fund and a JP. Their son had just won a place at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
Michael was the boy’s godfather.
Michael Gilmour could not have been a greater contrast. On leaving school, where Philip had been his closest friend, he had drifted from job to job. He started out as a trainee with Watneys, but lasted only a few months before moving on to work as a rep with a publishing company. Like Philip, he married his childhood sweetheart, Carol West, the daughter of a local doctor.
When their own daughter was born, Carol complained about the hours Michael spent away from home, so he left publishing and signed on as a distribution manager with a local soft drinks firm. He lasted for a couple of years until his deputy was promoted over him as area manager, at which decision Michael left in a huff. After his first time on unemployment, Michael joined a grain-packing company, but found he was allergic to corn and, having been supplied with a medical certificate to prove it, collected his first redundancy cheque. He then joined Philip as a Ready-Fit Kitchens rep but left without explanation within a month of the company being taken over. Another spell of unemployment followed before he took up the job of sales manager with a company that made microwave ovens. He seemed to have settled down at last until, without warning, he was let go. It was true that the company profits had been halved that year, while the company directors were sorry to see Michael go—or that was how it was expressed in their in-house magazine.
Carol was unable to hide her distress when Michael was let go for the fourth time. They could have used the extra cash now that their daughter