Gladys was sitting up in bed looking worried as Mandy entered her bedroom. She didn’t look ill but she didn’t look happy either. She’d obviously decided attack was the best form of defence.
“I suppose Ruarc wants to know when I’m coming back to work for him, well he can go and take a running jump. I haven’t been paid for two months and no pay no Gladys is my new rule and I don’t take kindly to him sending people to check up on me.
“I’m not checking up on you,” said Mandy, taken aback at the outburst. “May I sit down.”
Gladys hesitated, nodded and Mandy sat down gingerly at the end of her bed.
“Ruarc said he was worried about you and wanted the know if there’s anything he could do to help.”
Mandy was making it up as she went along. It didn’t sound as if Gladys was coming back to work and the fact she hadn’t been paid for two months made her position, in Mandy’s eyes, seem very reasonable.
“He’s probably more worried about his creature comforts than the motor home business and disappointed I’m not providing them any more,” said Gladys, archly.
“I think your personal relationships are between you and Ruarc,” said Mandy, evenly. “I can only talk about the business.”
“The business is going bust,” said Gladys, aggressively. “It’s been on its last legs for years and the recession is making it go completely belly up.”
“I don’t think you can assume that,” said Mandy. “I’ve made a couple of sales of motor homes, recently, and the new motor home hire and motor home rental options means that people don’t have to find so much money to be able to afford to drive a motorhome away. After all, motor home holidays might even become more popular if people stop going abroad for their holidays because of the economic downturn.”
“Okay,” said Gladys, looking Mandy in the eye, “bottom line – tell me straight – did you get paid this month?”
“I must confess that I did,” sighed Mandy, “but I think only because a rental sale I’d made the day before provided the cash to pay me. Of course, there was a complete lack of any wages paperwork which is an irregular way to go about things.”
“Everything at Ruarc’s motorhome business is irregular, often highly irregular, you just can’t imagine how irregular” said Gladys. “The whole family comes from a gypsy background and they’ve never properly integrated with the rest of society. They have their own way of doing things because they don’t know any better. When they purchased that corner of the old airfield for a motor homes business, we locals thought that they wouldn’t last very long but that was five years ago and slowly they seemed to expand, buying up farmland and building their business, apparently successfully. The local people usually take a long time to accept newcomers, I should know, I’ve lived here all my life. And it doesn’t help that they’ve never made any effort. I only went to work because it was a last resort. It provided me an income for a couple of years but now the business looks finished and there’s nothing else locally in prospect. My husband is only interested in his pigeons and keeping the Benefits Office off his back so he’s as much use as a burst tyre.”
A tear trickled down Gladys’ cheek which she rubbed away defiantly with the back of her hand then pulled the blankets up to her chin as if to keep her safe from a threatening world she couldn’t control and didn’t understand.
“If you won’t come back to work again, I suppose you’ll need to send Ruarc your resignation, together with your reasons why,” said Mandy, feeling the whole visit was looking like a waste of time.
“But I wish you would give the business another chance. I have some ideas that I really think could work and the more people to help bring them to fruition, the more chance they have of success.”
“What ideas?”
“I’d rather not say,” said Mandy, cagily. “Especially if you are not going to be working with us any more. It would be revealing business secrets. I think you have to make a decision about whether you are going to come back first before I can say more.”
Gladys looked at Mandy, as if trying to sum her up.
“I’ll have to think about it,” said Gladys, finally. “Can you see yourself out?”
It was a relief for Mandy to be driving the Nu Rio motorhome back to the sales office. She wondered whether the ideas that were slowly germinating in her head really would be successful and whether the revenues generated would be enough to pay Gladys and herself, especially after Ruarc’s family had taken their slice.
Mandy resolved to approach Ruarc with her ideas for beating the recession and saving the motor-home sales business as soon as she got back.
