Chapter Twenty-One: Verity Crane

The woman in the navy coat had been sitting in reception for forty minutes before anybody thought to ask her name.

It was the last Tuesday in May, a close, grey, humid afternoon with thunder somewhere to the west, and the forty-first floor was nearly empty. Imogen had gone down to the post room. The receptionist was new and extremely young and had been told by a great many people that Mr Ellison was not to be disturbed. So the visitor sat, quite still, on the edge of the long cream sofa, with her handbag upright on her knees and her hands folded on top of it, and looked at the framed photographs on the wall as though she were reading them.

Poppy found her there at ten to four.

She had come up for a signature. She stopped dead at the door of the glass-walled lobby, because there was something about the woman that was wrong, in the particular way in which a familiar tune is wrong when it's played in a different key. She was fifty-eight or so, small and straight-backed, with cropped silver hair and a face like a well-kept school: tidy, firm, a little tired, humorous round the mouth. Her coat was a good one, ten years old. Her shoes had been resoled. And she was looking at a photograph of the company's founding, taken in 1961, of a tall fair man grinning beside a typewriter, with the expression of a person who had seen it many times before in a different frame.

"Can I help you?" said Poppy.

The woman turned. She had very direct grey-blue eyes.

"I should like to see a typed page," she said. "I'm told you've found it. I'm told it says every name, every day."

---

Her name was Verity Crane, and she had been a headmistress for twenty-two years. She said so at once, in the voice of someone getting the facts on the table: she'd run a state primary in Leicestershire until she retired last July, and it was, in her opinion, the only honest job she had ever done. She did not say what her connection was. She sat in the small meeting room on the fortieth floor, with a cup of tea she did not drink, and watched Poppy lay the typed page in its plastic sleeve on the table in front of her, and for a long moment she did not touch it.

Then she put out one finger and laid it, very lightly, at the foot of the sheet, beside a small upright signature in faded blue ink.

"That's his W," she said. "He always made it with a tail. My father used to say it looked like a fish." She withdrew her finger. "May I see it properly?"

"Of course."

She lifted the sleeve in both hands, read it through, and set it down. Then she opened her handbag and took out a flat brown envelope, soft with age, and drew from it a second sheet.

It was identical. It was thin, brown at the edges, typed on the same machine, with the same raised e. It said RULES OF THE HOUSE. It said Every name, every day. And in the bottom corner, where the first page said Lumen & Crane, Easter 1961, someone had written in pencil, in a different hand: Walter's copy. Keep it.

"He kept it in his wallet," said Verity Crane. "For thirty years. It was the only thing in his pockets when he died."

Poppy sat down. She hadn't been aware of standing.

"I saw your film," said Verity. "The Marlowe one. A friend sent it to me, because she knew what it would mean. I watched it on a laptop in my kitchen with a glass of wine. I watched the whole thing, the tree and the gardener and that dreadful old woman with the stick, whom I rather like. And at the end the names came up. All of them. Every one, in the order they'd earned it." She stopped. Her voice, which had been brisk, thinned. "I haven't seen a company do that. In my whole life. I thought, somebody there has read my grandfather. And I wrote to your address on the website. I didn't expect a reply."

"Your grandfather," said Poppy.

"Walter Crane." Verity folded her hands. "The Crane of Lumen and Crane. I don't expect you've heard of him. Nobody has. He isn't in your story, you see. I've looked."

---

She told it simply, the way a teacher lays out a lesson.

Walter Crane had been a copywriter. He'd had a good ear and a bad chest, and he'd spent the war in a Nissen hut writing leaflets about powdered eggs. In 1961 he had met a young man named James Ellison, an account man, charming, ambitious, with a great deal of money behind him, and the two of them had put a typewriter on a folding table in a rented room above a chemist's in Holborn and begun a company. They had named it, in a fit of what Walter's wife later called wild romance, after the first thing they'd sold, a small lamp. Lumen was the lamp. Crane was the man who wrote about it.

"It was his idea, the whole thing," said Verity. "The rules. The names. He thought a firm should be like a village, with everybody known. He wrote them on a Sunday and typed them on the Monday. James Ellison read them aloud at the first staff meeting, in the rented room, to eleven people, and said, Walter and I have decided. And so they had. They'd decided together." She turned the page a quarter turn on the table. "For about thirteen years."

"What happened?"

"Walter fell ill. In 1973. His lungs. The company was growing, and James was very good at the growing, and Walter was in a hospital in Surrey for the best part of a year. By the time he came out there was a new building, and a new board, and a great many people who had never met him." Her mouth was set. "And there was an offer. A very generous one, on paper. For half his shareholding. In cash. It was put to him, rather kindly, in a hospital room, by people in good suits. They said the company needed to be tidy. They said it would be in everyone's interest."

"And he signed."

"In February 1974. In his dressing gown. My father was there. He told me, years later, that he'd thought it was the end of the world. It was not. It was a good deal worse. It was the end of a name." She looked up. "Walter went on a pension and a title. Founder Emeritus. He was invited to the Christmas party. And over the next ten years, one by one, in every history of the firm, every anniversary booklet, every obituary, the rules became James's. James Ellison, who walked the floors. James Ellison, who knew every name." She smiled thinly. "I've got the booklets. I could show you."

The afternoon had grown very dark. Beyond the glass, the thunder had come nearer, and the first heavy drops had begun to slap against the windows.

---

"There was a clause," said Verity.

Poppy had been waiting for something, and now she felt it arrive, like a hand on the back of her neck.

"When he sold the half, there was a provision. My father insisted. It was a small thing, but he was a lawyer, and he thought it would matter. A schedule to the deed. It gave the Crane family certain rights, in the event the company was ever sold outside the family. I've never seen it. It was in my father's papers for years, and then it wasn't, and I assumed it had been mislaid." She paused. "We hold twenty per cent now. The Crane Family Trust. I'm the trustee. I have been for eleven years, and in all that time I've been to one board meeting, in 2015, where I was given a cup of tea and told the numbers looked marvellous."

"You've never been invited back?"

"I've never been told there was one." She said it without heat. "Last autumn I wrote to ask about the schedule. A very pleasant gentleman wrote back. Sir Hugh Aldridge. He said he was dreadfully sorry, but the box had been lost. It had been taken out for review and had gone astray, and he'd had the archive searched. He said archives were such fragile things."

Poppy's mouth had gone dry. She thought of a long grey aisle, and a pale rectangle on a steel shelf, and a typed card in a brass holder. 1974. CRANE: DEED & CORRESPONDENCE. CLOSED.

"It isn't lost," she said slowly. "I think. I mean, it's not on the shelf. But I don't think anybody's looked properly."

"Ah," said Verity Crane.

It was a very quiet sound, and it held a whole life.

---

The door opened.

It was Theo. He had been in a meeting. He had his jacket over one arm and a pen behind his ear, and he'd come, evidently, to find Poppy, because he said "Poppy, I'm so sorry, Imogen said you were—" and then he stopped. He saw the typed pages on the table. He saw the stranger. He saw, quite quickly, the thing in her face.

Verity stood up. She was much shorter than he was, and she did not seem to notice.

"Mr Ellison," she said. "I'm Verity Crane."

"Crane," said Theo.

"Walter's granddaughter."

The room went very still. Poppy watched the blood leave his face, quite slowly, from the top downwards.

"I—" He tried again. "I had no idea. I mean, I knew there was a family. Hugh told me they'd— I mean, I understood there'd been some sort of settlement. Mrs Crane, I'm so sorry. I'd have written. I'd have—"

"Miss," said Verity. "I never married. And you needn't apologise. You'd no way of knowing what you've inherited." She picked up her handbag. "I can see that you didn't know. That's what's interesting."

He held out his hand. It was a good, honest, automatic gesture, the gesture of a man who had been brought up to shake hands, and it hung in the air between them for perhaps three seconds. Verity looked at it. She looked at his face.

"No," she said gently. "Not yet."

He lowered it.

"I have nothing against you, Mr Ellison. I think you're a good man, on the evidence. I've read about you. I think your grandfather was a clever and a charming one, and I think he did a very wrong thing, and that he spent forty years not looking at it." She slid her grandfather's page back into the envelope. "I should like you to come and see me when you know. When you've found out what you've got. Not before. I won't be a courtesy."

"I'll find out," said Theo, in a low voice.

"I hope so." She buttoned her coat. "I'll leave you my address."

---

Imogen was standing in the corridor when they came out. She must have heard. She was holding a stack of folders to her chest, and her face, usually smooth as paper, was working.

"Miss Crane," she said. "I'm Imogen Pryce. I've been here thirty-eight years."

"How do you do."

"I should have said something." It came out all at once. "I was twenty-two. He told me to ask the sofa and I didn't. I never asked. I thought— It wasn't my place. I'd like to say how very sorry I am."

Verity Crane looked at her for a long moment. She was not an unkind woman. She was a woman who had spent a lifetime knowing the exact weight of an apology, and she weighed this one now.

"Yes," she said. "You should have. And so should I." She held out her hand, and Imogen, after a startled second, took it. "I could have come. I was too proud. We were all too proud and too ashamed, and a clever man made use of it. I don't think that's your fault, Miss Pryce. I think it's everybody's."

She went down in the lift, and the doors closed, and for some time nobody in the corridor said anything at all. Theo had gone and stood at the window with his back to them. He had put the pen down on the sill. He was looking out at the rain, which had come down at last, in a grey torrent, over the glinting towers of the City.

Poppy walked her to the street.

It was still bucketing. Verity Crane stood under the glass awning of the lobby, with her bag clutched in front of her, and watched the traffic hiss. She seemed smaller outside.

"I don't know if I did the right thing," she said abruptly. "Coming. I've been a good girl for sixty years."

"I think it was brave."

"It was merely late." She looked at Poppy. "May I ask you something, Miss Whitlock? Since you seem to be the sort of girl who answers?"

"Of course."

"I've had a very generous offer." She said it lightly, with her eyes on the rain. "For the trust's stake. From some very pleasant people, quite recently, who say that, whatever happens, they'd see to it my grandfather's name was restored. They said there'd be a plaque. They said there'd be a premium." She paused. "They agreed with everything I said."

The back of Poppy's neck prickled.

"Do you know," said Verity Crane, "what a man like that wants in return?"

She opened an umbrella, very neat and black, and walked out into the rain, and was gone before Poppy had found a word to say.