He munched for a moment; his moustache went up and down and his eyes of china-blue stared out of the window at the sunset sky. “He wants to take it over.”
“The laundry?”
“As a going concern. And he being our nearest relation, so to speak, I’d as soon he had it as anybody else. Other things being equal.... Wish I knew what to ask him for it. I don’t want to ask him too little. So I said I didn’t care to discuss things at a funeral. Said he’d better come along to-morrow. Their place isn’t doing well. It’s got sort of embedded in Walthamstow. It would pay him to get out and let the land go for building. He hasn’t got very much money.... But he wants this place. He reely wants this place.”
His blue eyes were the eyes of one who sees visions.
“I don’t know if they taught you about making companies at the School of Economics. I’m a child at all that sort of thing. He talks about partnership or a mortgage or something like that, but what we want—what we want is a limited company. And what we want is something like debentures only rather more like preference shares. We want it so that whatever he draws out of the business we’ve got to draw out more. Otherwise the company can cut away the security for your debentures by paying too much dividend on the ordinary shares. He’ll have the ordinary shares. Him and his wife. I don’t say he’d do such a thing deliberately, but he might very easily be led into doing it. He’s got to be looked after. We want to fix it so that if he pays more on his shares than we get on our shares we’d get our interest levelled up. It’s all very difficult and complicated, Christina Alberta.”
Christina Alberta regarded Mr. Preemby with a new and deepening respect. She had never heard him make such a speech before at meals, but then he had never before been free from interruption and correction.
“We’ll have to have it fixed up properly by our solicitors,” said Mr. Preemby.
“We shan’t be badly off,” he continued, helping himself to cheese.
“There’s a mortgage or so we’ve got and some houses at Buckhurst Hill. It’s a curious thing, but your poor dear mother had a sort of faith in my eye for house property. She often let me guide her. And I always had a feeling for making some sort of reserve out of the business.... Very likely Sam Widgery will take over most of the furniture of this house. It’s a bigger house than his....”
“Where do you think of going to live, Daddy?” asked Christina Alberta.