Hemingway’s Chair

white
powder-coated steel hull, let alone the solid teak-strip deck or the
twenty-foot-long polished mahogany boardroom table, would not be sensible.

Thirty-eight
     
     
     
    In the
twenty-five years of her life Geraldine Cotton had rarely done the sensible
thing. If two courses of action were presented to her
she would evaluate them as to what she probably should do and what she probably
shouldn’t do and invariably she chose the latter. She blamed this entirely on
her parents who had devoted two otherwise promising lives to being sensible.
They had made a sensible marriage and bought a sensible house and taken
sensible jobs to which they could drive their sensible cars. They had sensibly
had three children whom they enrolled at sensible schools in the hope that they
would grow up to be as sensible as themselves.
    It
had nearly worked. Geraldine’s sister George, older by four and a half years,
was a Human Resources Officer with one of the most sensible companies in
Britain. She had been married for eight years to an intelligent, hard-working
loss adjuster with an unblemished record of marital fidelity. They had two
delightful children and were planning a third. Her brother Giles was a
geography teacher at a school for largely sensible children in the Thames
Valley. He had recently joined the Ecology Party but, despite this encouraging
trend, had dashed Geraldine’s hopes by becoming engaged to a terminally
sensible girl called Sheila who worked as a Centralised Billing Query
Co-ordinator for South-Eastern Gas.
    Geraldine
had become aware of wanting to do things that were not sensible from the age of
six. She had decided to climb the massive sycamore tree at home as soon as she
was old enough to do so, not just because it was massive but because it
overhung the garden of the house next door. But her curiosity had misfired.
What she had seen Mr Marsden doing to Mrs Marsden through an upstairs window of
the house had so surprised her that she had lost her footing and plunged
through a greenhouse. She was badly cut and very shaken but conscious enough to
be able to tell her parents that Mr Marsden appeared to be a cannibal.
    The
incident had given her an appetite for parental disapproval. This sustained her
through her teens at a mixed boarding school (her choice) where she developed a
passion for rugby football, and afterwards through a diploma course in
engineering at a little-known Scottish polytechnic. From twenty-one onwards she
had had relationships with one or two boys, and several girls. She had been at
various times an actress, an acupuncturist and a television aerial installation
engineer. She was clever, well-qualified and resourceful, but she was still not
sensible.
    Her
job with Shelflife Ltd had come along at the right time. She had just turned
twenty-five. She had made a promising start in fringe theatre in London. But
after a longish run as a rape victim, work had dried up and three months later
she had answered the advertisement which led her to John Devereux and
Shelflife. The prospect of a year by the seaside as a PA with a new
telecommunications company sounded intriguing, appealing and not entirely
probable. The sort of challenge she liked.
    However,
the activities of Shelflife were not quite what she had expected. In fact, they
were becoming murkier by the minute. They had purchased the old post office for
a knock-down price and sold it on to the Nordkom consortium, of which they were
a part, also at a knock-down price, but not quite as knock-down as the price
they’d paid for it. The Mayor of the town had been offered preferential
building contracts in return for preferential treatment of Shelflife’s
submissions to the council. Following revelations at one particularly
unpleasant dinner at Marshall’s flat, Councillor Rudge, the awkward,
independent Chairman of the Planning Committee had been blackmailed into
silence. The support of local bigwigs like Peregrine Harvey-Wardrell had been
bought with attractive share option ‘sweeteners’.
    The
pattern of deceit was becoming remarkably predictable and the one thing that
depressed Geraldine was predictability. This was the only reason she could
think of for not banishing Martin Sproale’s rambling, incoherent behaviour from
her mind. That and the fact that he had clearly ceased to be a sensible person.
     
    A
week after Martin’s spectacular visit to the post office, Nordkom IV came once again to Theston harbour bearing its cargo of