Today, he positioned himself outside on the terrace, just beyond the open drawing room door, through which the guests were being directed having first collected a glass of champagne from the line of waitresses standing with outstretched trays. So they had already passed through the flagstoned hall with its sweeping staircase and family group portrait above the fireplace, and through the drawing room with its many sofas and paint finishes, and then out again onto the terrace where the picture-perfect Straker family awaited, the six of them formed up in their ties and pretty dresses, marred only by Peter’s grubby chinos, and behind them the famous long view of Chawbury valley.
It was shortly after they had all sat down for lunch, and the many waitresses from Gourmand Solutions were bringing out the first course of langoustines and scallops on multi-coloured glass plates, that Miles again became aware of activity on the horizon. Unmistakably, next to Silas Trow’s cottage and the derelict barn, he could see three parked cars. Even at this distance, he could tell they were four-by-fours, Landcruisers or Cherokee Jeeps by the size of them. And there were several people poking about in the outbuildings. Miles found it perplexing. Who were they?
As lunch progressed and the waitresses served a main course of guinea fowl in a wild mushroom sauce with tiny broad beans, he found himself glancing again and again towards the cottage. Each time it was more troubling. He thought he could see two figures measuring out distances with a tape. One of the four-by-fours drove off and later returned followed by a truck from which several men clambered down and strode about purposefully. As soon as lunch was over and everyone had left, he would go over and discover what was going on.
Another of Miles’s skills was being able to conduct several conversations simultaneously, so he kept up a lively discussion with Laetitia Pendleton about the English National Ballet’s forthcoming programme (Laetitia was a trustee), and with her husband about the impact of Wal-Mart’s recent acquisition of the Asda supermarket group, while tuning in to Paul Tanner’s confident broadcast to the table that, in William Hague, the party finally had a leader with the ability to instil sufficient party discipline to win, and how their latest private doorstep polls were consistently registering a six percent uplift over Mori and YouGov. But even as Miles flattered and eavesdropped upon his neighbours and clients, he peered up at the cottage on the horizon.
It wasn’t until well after five o’clock that they were shot of the final guests. Every year, it was the ones you were least happy to have in your house who lingered the longest, and wanted to engage Miles in conversation, often about work-related issues which made it difficult to cut them short. The partner of the marketing boss of Trent Valley Power 4 U—a shocking bottle-blonde with a wedge haircut and evidently the worse for drink—had mislaid her handbag in the garden and couldn’t remember where, and then, having eventually located it, asked, ‘Can I use your toilet?’ and strode into the house for ages, instead of using the Portaloos behind the orangerie, until they worried she might have passed out in the cloakroom. Meanwhile, an adhesive couple from BRA—British Regional Airways—stood by the open door of their BMW making fatuous conversation instead of leaving, and thanking the Strakers ‘for the lovely meal and we must get you over to us one day soon, I’ll give you a bell next week and make a plan.’ Miles shuddered. The downside of these lunches was that there were always people who didn’t understand the ground rules, and wanted to reciprocate. Obviously they’d be stonewalled by the girls at the office, forever if necessary, but it was still an imposition.
Free at last of guests, and leaving the caterers dismantling tables and stacking chairs, Miles strode over to the stableyard. Although he had never so much as sat on a horse until his thirty-sixth birthday, he had recently become a keen rider. The Strakers kept half a dozen thoroughbreds at Chawbury, looked after by a pair of girl grooms from New Zealand. One of their duties was to keep the horses permanently tacked-up at weekends, in case the family should decide on a whim to go riding.
As he approached the stables, Miles saw Samantha, already changed into jodhpurs and riding boots, preparing to set out.
‘Hang on, Sam, I’ll join you. I want to ride over to Silas’s cottage, there’s something going on up there.’
Soon, father and daughter were clattering across the cobblestones on their chestnut and bay mounts, heading past the wall of beech hedges which lined the path to the valley floor. They crossed an ornamental bridge over the Test and entered a wide, springy meadow, more than half a mile long, which Miles had decreed be kept perpetually free of nettles, thistles and ragwort. To this end, the two Chawbury groundsmen spent hours every month, circling the field on quad-bikes, zapping the smallest growth with noxious chemicals.
They were riding parallel to the river and powered up first into a canter, then a gallop. Miles experienced the near-exhilaration he always felt when crossing his own land at full pelt on his own horse, hooves thundering across his immaculate nettle-free acres. At the midpoint of the valley, he slowed and turned to catch sight of Chawbury Manor from the prospect he knew to be its finest. Ten yards ahead, Samantha’s blond hair flowed behind her in the breeze, as she pushed her horse faster and faster. He felt a surge of pride that his eldest daughter was so indisputably attractive and classy … he felt it reflected well upon himself. As a man who had built his reputation and fortune on his ability to enhance the surface of every situation, Miles instinctively understood his own life in the same way. He saw himself riding his thoroughbred horse with his thoroughbred daughter, and the distant prospect of his thoroughbred house, and knew his life must be as near-perfect as it is possible for talent, money and hard work to secure.
Having ridden the floor of the valley, the ground now rose towards a bun-shaped knoll which overlooked Silas’s cottage, and Miles and Samantha slowed to a halt. From here, they could see the whole decrepit property with its subsiding tithe barn and pigeonniere missing half its roof slates, and a fetid, slime-green pond filled with the rotting branches of dead trees. The cottage itself had cascades of bramble clinging to the roof, the garden choked with bindweed. Parked across the track between cottage and barn were two four-by-fours and a builders’ lorry, and men could be seen with clipboards and surveying equipment.
Miles rode down the hill, trailed by Samantha, and reined-in in front of a small group of workmen. ‘Mind telling me what’s going on here?’ He spoke peremptorily, glaring down from his horse.
‘And who’s asking?’ replied one of the men. He was a wiry character in his mid-forties, with a Midlands accent and suede jacket.
‘Miles Straker,’ replied Miles. He announced his name in a tone which implied it should mean something. ‘I happen to own this valley, and I’m asking what you’re all doing up here. This is private property. And where’s Silas Trow?’
The wiry man replied, ‘The old fellow who used to live here? Passed away several months ago, I believe.’
‘Silas has died? No one told me that.’ Miles felt wrong-footed, disliking the sensation of being under-informed; one of his principles in life was that he should always be better briefed than everyone else. ‘And what are you doing here anyway? Isn’t there a foreman or someone in charge?’
‘There’s no foreman, because I haven’t appointed contractors yet,’ replied the wiry man. ‘But you can talk to me. I recently bought this place. Ross Clegg.’ He shot out a palm towards Miles, who found his fingers crushed by the force of the handshake.
Now Miles was seriously confused. Was this bloke in the suede jacket really telling him he’d bought Silas’s cottage, the cottage Silas had as good as promised him, more than once? Why the hell hadn’t anyone informed him about this? Why hadn’t he known Silas was dead? He hadn’t even realised he’d been ill. As for the cottage being on the market, he hadn’t heard a damn thing about it, when he was the obvious purchaser. It was true he’d been travelling a lot recently, in the States, in the Emirates, Tokyo, but that was no excuse. There were such things as faxes and telephones. His furious
mind searched for scapegoats: his secretaries, his housekeeper and, above all, Davina. For heaven’s sake, she spent four whole days a week down at Chawbury, didn’t she? She had the whole of Monday and Friday there, as well as weekends. Why hadn’t Davina known?
Ross Clegg was approaching Samantha to introduce himself. He walked with a slight limp, Miles noticed, one leg dragging behind the other as he crossed the ground. Miles also saw Ross was a more confident man than he’d initially realised; physically he wasn’t much to speak about, but there was an unmistakeable presence.
Ross stuck his hand up to Samantha, towering above him on her horse, and said, ‘Ross … Ross Clegg. And you’re a very lovely sight, if you don’t mind my saying so. Do you often ride by this way?’
Samantha replied in a brittle voice, ‘Actually we live at Chaw-bury Manor. And I do often ride through our woods, when I’m home from school.’
‘Looks like we’re going to be neighbours then,’ Ross said. ‘We’ve got kids more or less your age, so we’ll have to get you all together once we’re in and settled. But that won’t be for the best part of a year probably, when the builders are done and dusted.’
Miles felt a second shock of the afternoon. ‘You’re not building on, are you?’ he asked Ross. He had a sudden vision of a hideous extension on the side of Silas’s hovel, with additional bedrooms and bathrooms.
‘No way, mate,’ Ross replied. ‘We’re doing the job right and bulldozing the place. No good trying to patch up a mess like this, better to start over. That way, at least you end up with something that works for you. This will be our second new-build in five years. Dawn and I built our present property in Droitwich and learnt a lot of hard lessons in the process.’
3.
Miles spent much of the following week in the air, but this did not deter him from his mission. By Monday lunch-time, he had confirmed the intolerable news that Silas’s cottage had indeed been sold from under his nose. It seemed that Silas had keeled over while buying a lottery ticket in Micheldever, been rushed to Basingstoke and North Hampshire General Hospital and never been discharged. His niece, Paula, had given the cottage to First Countryside estate agents to sell, which had stuck up a photograph in the window of their local branch at the laughably low asking price of £65,000. Miles’s exasperation reached new heights. If the ruddy niece had only gone to Knight Frank or Savills, he’d have heard about it for sure, instead of instructing this backstreet auctioneers.
His next priority was to learn everything he could about Ross Clegg. By now, half his office was devoted to the task, his PAs Googling Clegg on the internet and searching the numerous syndicated databases to which Straker Communications subscribed. When Miles landed at JFK, his first act was to call the office for an update. To his dismay, Ross turned out to be Chief Executive and founder of Freeza Mart, a cash-and-carry grocery enterprise in the West Midlands. Before long, Miles’s driver, Makepiece, had been dispatched to collect the statutory accounts from Companies House, which was brought back to Charles Mews South and faxed, page by page, to Miles’s suite at the Four Seasons hotel on Madison and 57th Street, along with an investment report the girls had tracked down. Sitting at his desk before setting out to dinner, Miles studied every page, learning about the twenty-three edge-of-conurbation freezer centres from Coventry to Telford that Ross had established over the past sixteen years, and his plans to expand the business into the south-east with new outlets from Southampton to Basingstoke. This, presumably, was his reason for wanting a home in Hampshire. It irritated Miles that the balance sheet was so clean, with an admirably low debt ratio, and impressive annual growth in revenue and profits. The company had been listed on the AIM small-cap market two years ago. On the evidence of this report, Ross was a resourceful businessman.
By Tuesday afternoon, Miles’s office had got hold of Ross’s planning application, which arrived with the devastating information that it had already been approved by the local planning authority. When this was nervously explained by his senior PA, Sara White, Miles became agitated. But this was nothing to his annoyance when the details of the application, and supporting plans and elevations, disgorged from the fax. The proposed new house was grotesque—there was no other word for it—simply the naffest, least appropriate dwelling imaginable. It reminded him of an overgrown Bovis home, with a pretentious double-height pillared entrance with balcony on top, with plate glass, double-glazed French windows leading from the master bedroom suite. In front of the house was an in-and-out drop-off-point around a circle of lawn like a corporation roundabout, and a pitched roof with dormer windows set into fancy Dutch tiles.
The longer Miles scrutinised the plans, the more angry he became. It was simply unbelievable planning permission had ever been granted. The house was a monstrosity which would blemish the entire valley. Over his dead body would it get built.
He immediately launched a campaign to lobby every person and organisation of influence he could think of. The Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire was written to (Miles’s letter was simultaneously posted, faxed and couriered for maximum effect), as was the High Sheriff, the Chairman of the local authority and six local County Councillors who owed him favours. Each of these blistering missives was copied to the local MP, Ridley Nairn, who received a long letter of his own for good measure, as did Paul Tanner at Conservative Central Office.
A second wave of letters was dispatched the next day, this time to English Heritage, making them made aware that a historic tithe barn was in jeopardy, with copies to SAVE Britain’s Heritage and the Architectural Conservancy Trust. All these letters were worded with great cunning, and did not fail to mention Miles’s connection to several public companies which supported the work of these bodies, or sponsored their awards.
By the next weekend, back at Chawbury from his trip to the States, Miles felt confident the situation could be retrieved from the jaws of disaster. At lunch, he lectured Davina and the children on the importance of cultivating relationships with well-placed individuals, and that through a judicious balance of hard work and discrete networking it was generally possible to achieve everything you wanted. ‘Call it a life lesson,’ Miles declared, as his family sat around the mahogany dining room table.
But Mollie, who was listening to her father’s speech with a disapproving frown, said, ‘I don’t really get what’s so bad about this new house. Other people have to live somewhere. And it’s quite a long way from us in any case, it wouldn’t matter that much.’
Miles regarded Mollie sternly. ‘Have you given any thought to this at all? Have you considered what it would do to the value of our house, having a hideous modern mansion—and that’s doubtless what Mr Clegg calls it, “a mansion”—directly across the valley? It would halve the value, that’s if we could sell it at all. Do you think the kind of people in the market to buy Chawbury would choose to live somewhere with an overgrown council house plonked on the horizon? It would be virtually un-sellable. Blighted. We’d effectively be trapped here for life.’
‘But you aren’t going to move house anyway,’ persisted Mollie. ‘I’m just saying it wouldn’t be such a big thing. I mean, the cottage is there already, and I hardly notice it. That’s all I’m saying.’
Miles shook his head ‘Peter, what about you? I assume you can see what a total ruddy disaster it would be.’
‘Actually, Dad, I agree with Mollie. You’re really over-reacting. You always said you’d modernise the cottage yourself, if you bought it.’
‘I’m beginning to think my entire family is half-witted. Archie, what about you? And Samantha? You’ve actually met this Ross Clegg, the Midlands freezer king. Does he strike you as a welcome addition to the Chawbury “community,” as Mollie would no doubt phrase it?’
‘No way,’ said Samantha. ‘He’s like this really geeky, naff guy? Like someone working in a … garage or somewhere? And he’s, like, disabled or something?’ Samantha had developed a tick of ending every sentence on a rising inflection, which Miles hated and thought she
’d picked up from too much watching of Neighbours. ‘He’s got this club foot thing?’
‘You’ve got to stop him, Dad,’ Archie said. ‘It’ll be such an eyesore if he gets away with it. I reckon it would knock two million off the value of our house.’
‘Thank you, Archie,’ said Miles. ‘Thank God one of my children has a clear brain. As for you, Peter, I want you to conduct some research at the office. In fact, get the whole department on to it. I need a list of every campaigning group for rare mammals, wild flowers … all of them … bats, frogs, newts, I don’t know, anything that might be infesting Silas’s cottage. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t hang about. I need it on my desk by Monday afternoon.’
On Monday morning, Miles received the first batch of replies to his letters, none of which reassured him. All were respectful, all sympathetic, all promised to do whatever could be done within the parameters of what was possible. The Lord Lieutenant, who regularly dined with the Strakers at Chawbury, said he was instinctively on Miles’s side, and so was Philippa who joined him in sending best wishes to them both, but it must be appreciated that planning regulations did not fall under his remit—‘more is the pity!’—but he would do his best to whisper a word into the right ears. Several county councillors replied regretting that Chawbury Manor did not fall inside their wards, and the local councillor inside whose ward Chawbury did fall wrote that if only he had known about all this in advance of the planning decision, he would surely have been able to bring his influence to bear upon the committee. It was generally agreed it is always more difficult to overturn planning consent after the event than it would have been before. To Miles’s irritation, even Ridley Nairn, his constituency MP, whose electoral brochures and quarterly newsletters were designed free of charge by Straker Communications, and then actually posted through Straker Communications’s mail room, replied that he would do what he could, but hoped Miles would understand he could not openly campaign on behalf of his constituents over every individual planning dispute, especially since Miles’s particular area was the least built-up in the constituency. ‘We all need to be wary of NIMBYism,’ he added self-righteously. At a meeting with his lawyers, Miles explored overturning the planning consent on the grounds that he had never been officially informed about the application, but it turned out Chawbury Manor was slightly too great a distance from Silas’s cottage for this to be statutorily required.
Pride and Avarice Page 2