Matthew’s business career had not been conspicuously successful. Indeed, it had been a dismal failure: each time his father had set him up in a new enterprise it had not lasted long.
If, then, there were secrets to business success, he was not party to them. His last business before the gallery had been a travel agency, which had failed as well, largely due to the incompetence of the two members of staff whom Matthew had employed and whom he had not had the courage, nor the business acumen, to dismiss. One of these employees had made a series of bad mistakes, usually of a geographical nature, but also, occasionally, of a linguistic one. One client had been sold a package holiday to Turkey, in the belief that it was Greece, and another who was travelling to Strasbourg and who wished to be booked into the Hotel de Paris there, had unfortunately been booked into the Hotel de Strasbourg in Paris. This sort of thing happened all the time.
Matthew had, in fact, tackled the young man about his geographical ignorance.
“Did they teach you geography at school?” he had asked, after one particularly awkward geographical mix-up (involving 62
a confusion between British Columbia in Canada and the Republic of Colombia).
“What?” asked the young man.
“Geography,” said Matthew. “You know – the world. Maps.
Where things are.”
The young man shook his head. “Dunno,” he said. “Don’t think so.”
“Clearly not,” said Matthew. “Tell me: which do you think is further south – India or Australia?”
The young man shook his head. “Difficult,” he said. “Not sure.”
Matthew had sighed, and left it at that. And the travel agency had limped on, and then collapsed, and he had gone back to his father apologetically and reported the failure.
Matthew’s father had not been surprised. “You’ve got to be tougher, son,” he had said. “You have to have a clear business plan and then stick to it. Set targets. Beat them. Look for ways of cutting costs. Businesses can’t be left just to tick over. They go under if you do that.”
Matthew had nodded. The problem was that he was not very good with people. He was too soft. He paid them too much and he could never bring himself to criticise their performance. He was not cut out for business. And that was well understood by his father, who had come to the realisation that even if the best thing for his son was to find him a business, that was no more than a facade – a sinecure, in other words. So when he heard that one of the tenants in a building he owned in Edinburgh, a gallery, was going to close, it seemed the perfect opportunity. Matthew could run that. He need not make any money, as long as he did not make too much of a loss. Perhaps a loss of fifteen to twenty thousand pounds a year would be about right, although he could carry much more than that, if need be. To Matthew’s astonishment, at the end of the first quarter’s trading, the gallery appeared to have made a modest profit. He had arranged an appointment with his accountant, a man who acted for one of his father’s companies, and they had gone over the accounts together.
“I must say that is amazing,” said the accountant, pointing to
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the balance sheet which he had prepared for Matthew. “I’m quite astonished. You’re showing a profit.” He said this, and then immediately felt embarrassed. It was tantamount to saying that he expected Matthew to fail – which of course he did.
Matthew had not noticed the slight; he looked at the figures.
“According to this, I’ve made eleven thousand pounds in three months. Are you sure there’s no mistake?”
The accountant smiled. “We’re very careful about that. And I’ve checked the spread-sheets. You’ve made just over eleven thousand, as it says there. Profit. But remember, trading goes in cycles. A good quarter doesn’t make a good year.”
“But even if I made no more this year, that’s still a respectable profit . . .” he tailed off, and then added, “for me.”
The accountant nodded. “I’ve told your old man. I hope you don’t mind. He’s been quite chirpy over the last few weeks, I think. This news cheered him up even more.”
Matthew barely took in this news about his father, so ecstatic was he over the gallery’s success. And the news from Pat, that she was going to stay in Edinburgh and could continue to work part-time while at university, had boosted Matthew’s spirits. In fact, he realised that Pat had had a great deal to do with this profit. She was good at sales. She knew the ten secrets of retail, even if she did not know that she knew them. He must talk to her about that.
Having opened the gallery that morning, and having switched on the lights that illuminated the paintings, Matthew sat back in his chair and browsed through an auction catalogue that had arrived the previous day. There was to be a sale of Scottish art at Hopetoun House, and it occurred to him that now was the time for him to start buying. With that eleven thousand pounds’
profit behind him he could go to the bank and get a line of credit for the expansion of his stock. Not little, frippery things, but big paintings. A Hornel perhaps.
He was thinking of this when he heard the bell which sounded as the front door opened. It would be Pat. He looked up. It was not. It was his father.
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Matthew greeted his father warmly. Although they had not always been on the easiest of terms, particularly in the days of Matthew’s earlier business failures, they had come to understand one another, and with that understanding had come a comfortable and undemanding relationship. Matthew’s father, Gordon, came to appreciate the fact that even if his son was a bad businessman, he was honest and well-meaning, and would not
