Pride and Avarice

by Nicholas Coleridge

  A second legal challenge against Silas’s niece, Paula, for failing to extract the best price for Silas’s family by using an inferior estate agent, was also a non-starter, since Paula was sole beneficiary of her uncle’s will.

  By the following weekend, Miles was seriously put out. Arriving at Chawbury in the dark on Friday night, he drew back his bedroom curtains the next morning to see a yellow JCB digger on the horizon, and a team of builders laying a temporary access road to the cottage. Later, he thought he spotted a cement mixer and, shortly before lunch, a crane appeared on site.

  After lunch, Miles drove Peter and Samantha across the fields in his John Deere Gator, the green six-wheeled open-topped vehicle he used for buzzing about the estate. ‘We’ll go over for a recce,’ Miles said. ‘I need to know what’s going on up there, I don’t trust that man an inch.’

  Arriving at the crest of the hill, Miles looked down in dismay. In addition to the JCB, there was a demolition vehicle on site with wrecking ball and chain, clearly intent on flattening the cottage. Several workmen in hard hats were sitting about with mugs of tea, and Miles spotted Ross studying the new house plans. A woman in her early forties hung on to Ross’s arm, wearing a beige coat which almost exactly matched her coloured razor-cut hair. Even at this distance, Miles could see her face was suntanned to a shade which didn’t look quite natural, and caked in makeup. She looked ridiculously over-groomed to be standing about in a building site, he reckoned.

  ‘Miles! Miles! Over here, mate, there’s someone I want you to meet.’ Ross was beckoning to catch his attention.

  Reluctantly, Miles restarted the Gator and edged it down the bank to the cottage. Damn it. He hadn’t wanted to speak to Ross. ‘Let’s get this over with and get out.’ he said to Peter and Samantha under his breath.

  This time Ross was wearing a chocolate brown leather jacket, with Levis and a pair of Texas-style rodeo boots. Miles now knew his age was forty-seven, though he looked older: a craggy, lined face, short black hair and the limp when he walked. Jangling at his wrist was a narrow copper bracelet, which made Miles shudder. He disliked all jewellery on men, other than a discreet wristwatch and gold cufflinks.

  ‘I’d like you to meet my better half, Dawn,’ Ross said, introducing the woman in the beige coat. ‘Dawn, this is Miles, our next door neighbour. Well, I say next door, our neighbour from the big place up the valley there. And this is Sam,’ he said, turning to Samantha. ‘Remember I told you I met a beautiful lady out horse-riding? Well, here she is.’ Then, beaming at Peter and grasping his hand, he said, ‘Ross … Ross and Dawn Clegg … we’re the crazy idiots trying to turn this heap of old stones into a home. That’s if it doesn’t bankrupt us first.’

  ‘Peter Straker,’ Peter replied. Instinctively warming to Ross’s friendly manner, he shook hands with the Cleggs. He sensed his father’s disapproval behind him.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Dawn said. Her face, beneath the suntan and makeup, was eager and perky. Like her husband, she had a strong Midlands accent. On her fingers were a multitude of gold rings, and her lips were covered with tan-coloured lipstick outlined with brown pencil. She said, ‘I do love your house, Peter. One of the reasons we bought this plot, actually, was the thought of waking up to that view every morning. Ross and I saw round a few old places ourselves before buying here, but decided they weren’t really for us. Too much upkeep. But a treat to look at.’

  Miles considered some caustic put-down about views being a two-way matter, but Ross was saying, ‘I know all about you now, Miles, I’ve been looking you up. When we met last week, I said I know I know that name, but couldn’t place it, it was driving me mad, so I did my researches. I’m well impressed too. You’re in with all the movers and shakers, so they say.’

  Miles experienced several simultaneous emotions. The first was affront that Ross Clegg had been checking up on him, snooping behind his back like a private detective. The second, fleeting disappointment Ross hadn’t instantly known who he was in the first place. Thirdly, satisfaction Ross now recognised his elevated status.

  ‘I wouldn’t believe everything you read in the newspapers,’ Miles replied, in a superior voice.

  ‘You’re really quite famous,’ Ross went on. ‘When I mention your name to people, they’ve very often heard of you. I’ve been telling folk you’re going to be just across the fields from us. And the kids were very excited when I said you’ve got kids their age. You know what kids are like about moving to a new place. Our lot don’t want to move down here at all. They think southerners are all snobs.’

  ‘Gemma’s the worst,’ Dawn said. ‘She loves it in Droitwich. She turned sixteen last week. Her friends and her school are her world.’

  ‘I’d be the same,’ Peter said. ‘You don’t want to start making new friends at her age.’

  ‘It’s all Dad’s fault,’ Ross said, cheerily. ‘I’m not the most popular bloke in our house at the minute, not with Gemma anyhow. We wouldn’t be relocating if it wasn’t for my job, so Dad’s the bogeyman.’

  Feeling he’d heard more than enough already about the Clegg family and their foibles, Miles revved the Gator and began to edge away.

  ‘Cheerio then, Miles,’ Ross called out.

  ‘See ya later, Miles,’ said Dawn.

  Miles shuddered as he sped off.

  Various new strategies were formulating in his head. But first it was time for Plan B.

  It is remarkable how many conservation groups there are in Britain, Miles thought, especially in the area of animal and flora preservation, and how sweeping are their powers. Having carefully studied the document compiled by Peter and the research department, he knew exactly what to do next.

  Ensconced at his computer, he composed emails to the Woodland Trust, to the Wildflowers Conservancy Trust, the Bat Conservation Trust and the Invertebrate Conservation Trust. Each of these organisations received a different tip-off that a unique habitat of exceptional scientific and environmental importance was about to be destroyed by developers, threatening a host of endangered species. In one e-mail, it was the horseshoe bat and soprano pipistrelle bat which took centre stage. In another, the red-tipped cudweed—filago lutescens—and adder’s tongue spearwort. In his message to the Invertebrate Conservation Trust, Miles warned about palmate newts and salamanders which would disappear were the pond at Silas’s cottage drained and filled-in. The tithe barn was a favoured roosting place not only of the horseshoe and pipistrelle bat, but of serotine bats, all protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, and liable to a fine of £5,000 per bat or six months imprisonment for anyone who displaced them. The meadow around the cottage was the habitat of rare wild flowers and grasses.

  By the following Tuesday, Miles was gratified to learn that all work at Silas’s cottage had come to an abrupt halt, under a blizzard of compulsory inspection orders. Bat experts and pond-life experts arrived at the hamlet in hordes and were setting up hides and observation posts, and wildflower conservationists had successfully served desist orders on both Ross and his workmen.

  That evening in London, at a small dinner he was hosting in honour of the Finance Minister of Abu Dhabi in a private dining room at the Lanesborough Hotel, Miles chuckled to himself. He’d like to see the Freeza King get out of that one.

  There were no two ways about it, if you wanted to take on Miles Straker in his own backyard, you’d better know what you were coming up against.

  4.

  Sitting on the back seat of his dark blue Bristol Continental, Miles speed-read the briefing notes about his biggest and highest-yielding client. His driver, Makepiece, was ploughing through heavy traffic towards the Barbican where Pendletons plc was headquartered.

  Although the Pendletons business was handled day to day by a large team of Straker Communications executives, comprising more than forty people, Miles nevertheless made a point of attending quarterly meetings there himself. He knew the importance of giving ‘face time’ to top clients, and these quarterly sessions, w
hich were known as strategic meetings to distinguish them from the weekly update and monthly review meetings, were by long tradition attended by all four Pendleton brothers, James, Nick, Michael and Otto, who between them controlled 34 percent of the stock.

  Miles did not anticipate any great issues at today’s meeting. The supermarket group was performing well, with a rising market share, which put it within catch-up distance of Sainsbury’s, and only Tesco’s was outperforming them in growth and EBITDA. In recent months, they had put further blue water between themselves and Asda, with Morrisons, Safeway and Waitrose ranked behind that.

  Glancing at the agenda, Miles saw that only item seven—AOB—Any Other Business—was liable to be controversial. He consulted the slim aide memoir he had prepared for that particular item, and which he intended to spring on the meeting as a surprise. He hoped to God the Pendleton brothers would go for the idea, because matters were becoming tedious at Chawbury.

  Makepiece pulled up outside Pendleton Plaza, the steel-and-glass building on Long Wall with its lime green logo in the Pendleton corporate branding. Inside the atrium lobby, Miles spotted an advance party of Straker Communications executives watching out for him, including his managing director, Rick Partington, and the various Straker account directors, managers, researchers and coordinators who serviced the Pendletons business. As he entered the lobby, the Strakers team danced attendance, offering extra sets of briefing notes and agendas in case he hadn’t brought his own, and handing him the plastic name-badge they had obtained in advance from security. Miles thrust the badge into a suit pocket. As Chairman of Straker Communications, he felt he was slightly beyond pinning plastic badges all over himself.

  ‘Morning, Miles,’ said Rick. ‘As you can see, we’re fully represented today. It’s going to be eleven of us and nine of them.’ As a matter of policy, Strakers always preferred to outnumber their clients at meetings, believing it made them seem serious and committed. Miles noticed Peter was on the team today, and wished his son in the baggy army surplus coat was as smartly turned out as the rest of the Strakers delegation. He had hoped that, over time, the Strakers culture would rub off on him, and he’d have started presenting himself better, but with Peter it didn’t seem to be happening.

  They crossed the atrium with its reflecting steel waterfall and concrete tubs trailing with ivy and arrived at a bank of elevators. A pair of enormous paintings by Rothko, comprising squares of maroons and reds, hung opposite the elevator doors with a notice saying they had been loaned by the Pendleton Foundation Trust, part of the extensive collection of contemporary art built up by this generation of Pendletons. In the centre of the atrium was a sculpture of a pregnant woman by Henry Moore.

  In the mirror-lined lift, Miles assessed his reflection from every conceivable angle, concluding he looked gratifyingly good for a man of his age; the grey strands in his otherwise jet-black hair adding distinction. He was reflecting, quite literally, on how much better looking he was than the rest of his senior management team when his eyes settled on Peter, and he winced; for here, multiplied to infinity by the mirrored walls, was the tall, lanky, tousled image of his son, tuned in to a Walkman. For a moment Miles stared in disbelief, hoping he might be mistaken. Was it actually possible any representative of Straker Communications—let alone his own son—could be listening to a Sony Walkman in the lift, in a client’s lift, on the way up to an important meeting with the company’s biggest account?

  Incredulously, he regarded Peter and the plastic headset clamped over his ears. He glared, but the boy was in another world, gazing into space, lips moving with the lyrics. To his father, he appeared so laid-back as to be virtually retarded, his head and shoulders swaying to some internalised beat. Miles glanced about the elevator car, to see which of his subordinates had noticed Peter. If they had, they gave no indication. The other nine Strakers executives were silently watching the digital panel as it charted their progress to the penthouse floor, where the Pendleton family’s suites of offices were located.

  As the lift doors opened with a ping, Miles strode forward, yanked the headphones from his son’s ears, and thrust them into his pocket. ‘Don’t you ever do that again,’ he snapped, before stepping out onto the executive carpet with a swagger.

  The twenty-fifth floor of Pendleton Plaza more closely resembled a gallery of contemporary art than the headquarters of a chain of supermarkets. Ninety years after their grandfather, Wilfred Pendleton, opened a penny store on the Holloway Road selling everything from pumice stones to scouring powder from a trestle stall, the Pendleton family had reinvented itself as passionate supporters of the visual arts in all their forms. Not only had they amassed extensive private collections of post-war paintings and sculpture, but they endowed public collections, sponsored exhibitions, funded scholarships and purchased pictures for the nation. Miles took vicarious pride in all these benevolent activities, having first suggested them himself, two decades earlier, as a means of burnishing the Pendleton image. It was Miles who had first introduced Jim Pendleton, as he still was in those days, to the idea of buying Hockney and Bridget Riley, and later to upgrade to Bacon and Freud, and sculpture by Giacometti and Moore. It was Miles who encouraged James Pendleton to fund the renovation of the foyer of the English National Ballet, as well as their rehearsal space in Hammersmith, renamed the Pendleton Studios. It was Miles who prompted Nick Pendleton, at the time the supermarket became the first retailer to open an aisle devoted to Indian cookery ingredients, to underwrite the Rajput gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and later to commission Richard Rogers to design the Pendleton Gallery of Contemporary Indian and Asian Art in Bradford. When Michael Pendleton, Group Innovations Director (who introduced chlorine gas preservatives to bags of watercress and mixed leaf salads, thus extending their shelf life by three months), began looking for an appropriate project for his philanthropy, Miles advised him to endow the Michael Pendleton Chair of Biotechnology at Cambridge University. And when Otto Pendleton, youngest and hippest of the clan, developed a passion for experimental theatre and mime, it was Miles and Straker Communications that paved the way for the Otto Centre for the Performing Arts in Camden, to showcase the best of Eastern European improvised drama.

  James Pendleton’s PA met the Strakers group at the lifts, explaining that ‘Lord Pendleton is just finishing up a conference call and will join you in a few minutes. He sends his apologies for keeping you waiting.’ They were shown into a large white conference room with steel and white leather chairs; bottles of Pendletons English Natural Spring Mineral Water were arranged down the centre of a bevelled glass conference table, and platters of Pendletons vol-au-vents and mini sandwiches from the chill cabinet range. Mounted on one wall in lime green branding was the new Pendletons slogan, developed through nationwide focus groups by Straker Communications: ‘Making every day just a little bit more special.’

  Already assembled around the conference table were all the Pendletons team bar James, including Nick, Michael and Otto in shirt-sleeves and ties, James’s eldest son, Hugh, who had recently entered the business, and a full roster of marketing, logistics, PR and communications executives. Miles bearhugged his way round the family members, complimented Michael on his tortoiseshell spectacles (‘very Maurice Saatchi, very elegant’) and sat himself next to the empty chair he knew would be James’s. One of Miles’s maxims was that, at presentations, he should always sit directly on the right-hand of the senior client, giving the subliminal impression that they were, in all senses, joined at the hip. It was a Straker Communications policy that, whenever possible, staff should distribute themselves amongst the clients at meetings, and not to allow a confrontational ‘us and them’ configuration on two sides of a table.

  Miles stretched out in his chair and stared critically at the Pendletons slogan, screwing up his eyes as though seeing it for the first time. ‘You know something, Nick,’ he said eventually to Nick Pendleton. ‘I think that’s a very fine slogan we came up with for you. I congratulate you
, really I do. It was the brave choice and the right choice.’ He tilted his head, as if to appraise it afresh from a different angle; then nodded agreement with his earlier judgement. ‘Making every day just a little more special … it says it all, really, doesn’t it? Eight, no, nine short words … encapsulating the Pendletons’ lifestyle promise.’

  Peter, still smarting from his father’s outburst in the lift, felt his stomach clench. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, one thing that made him flush crimson with embarrassment, it was the sight of Miles in full insincere work mode, mouthing platitudes in a room full of people. Gingerly, he looked up from the table at the faces of the others, to gauge their expressions, but none appeared to be grimacing. In fact, they were nodding at everything Miles was saying, plainly delighted to be in the presence of the legendary image guru.

  ‘Well, people seem to quite like it,’ Nick Pendleton concurred. ‘We’ve had positive feedback from staff.’

  ‘It tested brilliantly,’ Miles went on. ‘One of the highest approval ratings we’ve ever experienced in research.’

  Peter rolled his eyes, knowing that last bit wasn’t remotely true.