Chapter 24
— Gwendolen Remembers
Gwendolen came to Vienna on the morning train, carrying a small bag and a lifetime of memories, and I met her at the station, and we held each other for a long time, as old friends do when they have not seen each other through a hard season. She was eighty now, her hair white, her step slower than it had been, but her eyes were as sharp as ever, and her memory, she told me with a smile, was better than most people's filing systems. She had known Nelson and me since before the company existed, since the days when we were young and hopeful and had more plans than money. She had been there at the beginning, and Octavia had asked to speak to her, because her memory of those early days, and of Nelson's promise, would matter at the hearing.
We sat in my flat that afternoon, with tea and the logbook on the table between us, and Octavia asked her to tell the story of the company as she remembered it. Gwendolen did not hurry. She began with the first boat, not the Wachau Queen, but a smaller craft Nelson and I had hired for a summer, to test whether anyone would pay to see the Wachau Valley from the water. She remembered the arguments, the laughter, the nights when Nelson had spread charts across our kitchen table and talked about a line of boats, a proper company, with Vienna at its heart. She remembered the day we bought the Queen, and the day we bought the Star, and how Nelson had said, standing on the quay with his arm around me, that these two boats would never be sold, that they were the heart of the fleet, and that they would stay with the family for as long as the family lasted.
Octavia asked her about the partnership agreement, and Gwendolen nodded, because she had been there when it was signed. She remembered the solicitor's office, the two of us signing, Nelson saying that the fleet could not be sold without both founders' signatures, because that was the only way to protect it from a bad day, or a bad decision, or a person who wanted a quick profit. She remembered Nelson's words, almost exactly, she said, because he had repeated them more than once, at home, and at company dinners, and to anyone who would listen. The boats were not just assets, he had said. They were a promise, to the river, and to the people who worked on it, and to the future. Gwendolen's voice did not waver as she said it, and I saw Octavia write the words down, carefully, as if they were evidence, which they were, in their way.
She spoke about Nelson's death, too, and about the promise I had made at his bedside, though she had not been there for that, she said, and she would not pretend she had. What she knew was what came after: how I had kept the company going, alone, through hard years, how I had refused offers to sell the Queen and the Star, even when money was tight, even when buyers had come with generous cheques. She remembered one offer in particular, from a company in Budapest, a large sum, and how I had turned it down without hesitation, because Nelson had promised, and I had promised, and some things were not for sale. That memory mattered, Octavia said, because it showed a pattern, a lifetime of protecting those boats, which made Landon's claim that I would have agreed to sell them cheaply seem absurd.
Gwendolen also remembered Landon as a boy, and as a young man, and she spoke about him with a sadness that I shared. She had watched him grow up around the boats, she said, and she had hoped he would love them as we did. But he had always seen them differently, as money, as property, as something to be used. She did not say this unkindly, and she did not exaggerate. She simply remembered, and her remembering was steady and fair, and Octavia listened, and wrote, and asked gentle questions that let Gwendolen tell the truth in her own time. When Octavia asked whether Gwendolen would be willing to say all this at the hearing, in front of the panel, Gwendolen said yes, without hesitation, and she said she would be proud to do it, for Nelson, and for me, and for the river.
After Octavia left, Gwendolen and I sat together as the light faded, and we talked about old times, about Nelson, about the early cruises, about the people we had known who were gone now. She told me she had kept a box of old photographs, and she had brought some of them, pictures of Nelson and me on the Queen, young and laughing, pictures of the Star on her first voyage, pictures of company picnics on the riverbank. We looked through them together, and I felt the past come back, not as pain, but as strength. Gwendolen remembered, and because she remembered, the hearing would hear not just documents, but a life. The company had not begun with a balance sheet. It had begun with two people, and a promise, and a river. Gwendolen had been there, and she would say so, and no cover story could erase that. She had kept every promise she ever made to us, and I knew she would keep this one too, standing before the panel and speaking plainly, as she always had.