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ran chortling into the next office.
    “Look at this, Henry has finally flipped.”
    Charles England looked up from his desk. “Read it to me. You look as though you’d enjoy a rerun.”
    “You’ll enjoy it, too. Listen.”
    Dear Sir
,
    Like most Englishmen I am interested in the weather and am a regular viewer of the BBC national weather forecasts. Am I alone in noticing that in a typical two-minute bulletin a disproportionate amount of time is allocated to Scottish weather? Understandably, Mr. Fish and his colleagues are weather enthusiasts, and no doubt Scottish weather is richly varied and often more dramatic than ours, but that should not influence the shape of the bulletin. To devote half a forecast to weather of interest only to three shepherds and five fishermen (I exaggerate) while ten million of us in London are lumped together with the
southeast and given a very few seconds is, I suggest, lopsided. True, we do have our own regional forecast, but, presumably, so too do the Scots. My question is: should not the weather that affects the most people be given the most airtime?
    Henry Cage
    London SW7
    “I rather think he’s got a point,” Charles said.
    “Yes, but this is Henry Cage, ex–corporate guru—what’s he doing prattling on about the weather? It’s so … it’s so lightweight, don’t you think?”
    Charles continued to be tolerant.
    “He’s bored probably—and unhappy, too, I would guess. Have you seen him since he left?”
    “Afraid not—miserable people make me miserable, too, so I avoid them.”
    “Maybe we should arrange a lunch?”
    “He’d tell us to fuck off. Why should he forgive us? We took away his company.”
    Henry’s removal from the business had been handled with firmness, if not with finesse. His partners had secured the votes of the two non-executive directors and had the support of the bank and key clients. It was suggested to Henry that he had lost his appetite for commerce and that some of his recent pronouncements at conferences and in the press (not to mention the annual reports) had been eccentrically antibusiness and, frankly, unhelpful.
    Charles had even tried to be philosophical.
    “You, we, started this company because you believed there was a better way of doing business. And no one can say you didn’t practice what you preached. Most of the people in this building are sitting on comfortable nest eggs, solely because the partners distributed the equity so widely in the early days, though I admit there were some of us who, if allowed, would have kept more for ourselves.” His attempt at humor was greeted with silence—his self-deprecation too obviously emollient.
    “But times have changed. If I may say so, Henry, the kind of sixties liberalism that you believe in now feels antique. Legislation has made liberals of us all—minimum wage, equal pay, maternity, even paternity leave, the stake-holding society. The war is won Henry, and yet you go on as though we were still at the barricades.”
    At this point Charles had abandoned any attempt at graciousness. “This has become tiresome, to me personally—and counterproductive to the company commercially. For example, why shouldn’t this company work for British American Tobacco? If we can help them diversify, make them less dependent on tobacco income, isn’t that a good thing, not only for our shareholders but also for society?”
    Henry had stopped listening. They were now on charted territory, the subject of countless board meetings. He knew that Charles would repeat the litany of business opportunities that he, Henry, had forced the company to forgo. It was true; in the short term, his righteousness had sometimes hurt the bottom line, but he had always been willing to play the long game. They, it seemed, were not.
    They had offered him a more than generous severance package, contingent on his going peaceably. He was at an age when he could retire without suspicion, they said. God knows, he had earned a