‘It’s quite a strong piece, actually,’ he’d said. ‘We’re going big with it tomorrow. Clegg comes over very robustly.’
‘Well, I hope you haven’t allowed it to be one sided,’ Miles said. ‘We’ll be disappointed if it lacks balance. All previous reporting of the takeover has recognised the logic of a Pendletons victory.’
‘That’s just it. To be honest, Miles, you’ve done such a fantastic job on Pendletons’s behalf, the other side haven’t got a word in so far. Which is what makes this piece interesting, it gives the opposing view. I think a lot of readers will have sympathy for some of the stuff he says, too.’
‘I still suggest you’re very careful. Why not fax the piece over to us, so we can correct and rebut any factual errors?’
‘I’m sorry, Miles.’
‘I’m not talking about interfering with editorial integrity. Just ensuring it’s one hundred percent accurate. Are you saying you’re happy to print without checking the facts? I’m offering to protect you from potential litigation, that’s all.’
But the editor was obdurate. ‘It’s been libel read and the lawyers haven’t flagged any problems. Ross is having his say, that’s all. The small entrepreneur versus the might of the big supermarkets, nothing very new, but he speaks up well for himself, and we’re running it as is. Our journalist liked him, so it’s a friendly piece, but professional and balanced.’
For the next two hours, Miles had moved into overdrive, searching for different means of getting the article pulled. He had rung the business editor of the paper, threatening to limit future exclusives from other Straker Communications clients if the Clegg interview ran; he rang the group editor-in-chief, who was a regular lunching partner, expressing his concern that an inaccurate and biased article was about to be published, and could he stop it; later, when that failed, he rang the proprietor of the newspaper, Lord Rothermere, who was playing tennis at home in Dorset, and explained how annoyed the Pendleton family would be if the article ran, and reminding him the supermarket spent more than seven million pounds a year on advertising in his newspapers and colour supplements. He added he had it on good authority that Ross Clegg and the female journalist had forged an unhealthily close friendship which went beyond normal professional conduct, and he could see this whole business ending up before the Press Complaints Commission, and this was merely a heads-up before it was too late.
Eventually, Miles had to concede that none of these stratagems had worked this time, which upset him even more, since he hated to pull strings at the highest level and still fail. He knew he never would have bothered if it wasn’t for Silas’s cottage.
So it was in belligerent mood Miles drew up outside the Spar shop in Middleton to buy the papers. Even entering the run-down premises with its narrow aisles of packet soups and pot noodles, and shelves of cheese dippers and Sunny Delight, filled him with disdain. It amazed him a prosperous county like Hampshire, full of investment bankers and well-paid corporate lawyers, could still support such a poor-persons shop. On the floor in front of the counter were piles of newspapers supervised by a Bengali granny in mittens and housecoat, who was busy inserting random colour magazines into random papers. And there, right before his eyes, was The Mail on Sunday with an eye-catching panel printed above the masthead on the front page: ‘Exclusive: Freeza Boss Clegg on why he chooses independence. Financial Mail, page 1.’
Miles returned to his car with an armful of papers, pushed back the seat and turned to the business section. The first thing he saw was a big photograph of Ross—an annoyingly good one, this time—and a quote in bold type saying, ‘They’ve tried everything to blacken my name, even claiming I’m a cripple.’ Miles shuddered. He was accustomed to consuming media at top speed, and could take the temperature of an article by tasting half a dozen random paragraphs. Often he never read more, having confirmed whether it was a positive or negative piece. Today, he spotted the danger in every line. From the opening paragraph, Ross came across as a blunt, honest, hard-toiling Englishman. The journalist, who clearly fancied the pants off him, banged on about his humble roots—son of a steelworker who lost his job in a plant closure—and how, after a string of casual jobs, Ross had started the tiny business which had grown into Freeza Mart employing 1,300 people. Devastatingly, he described how he’d contracted polio as a boy, through poor sanitation in the terrace where he grew up, and how he’d battled this for years, never letting it beat him, and eventually overcome it, though it had left him with a limp. ‘Contrary to certain reports,’ Ross was quoted as saying, ‘the limp has never affected me in any way at all. I don’t think I’ve taken a day off in twenty years, and I don’t know how many other CEOs can say that. But I’ll tell you something about my disability if you can call it that: it’s a perpetual reminder of what life was like before I found success with the business, and what life is still like for many of our customers. When you live up where I do in the Midlands, surrounded by the people who shop in our stores, and manage on very limited budgets many of them, I can still identify with them. Our customer base is a world away from the Pendletons’s customer down south, and even down there, where it’s much more prosperous, they only engage with the top end of the market. I don’t know how they’d get on up here, not knowing the customers like we do. I remember my old mum coming back from the shops when I was a kid, having not been able to buy something because she was a penny or two short, so we had to go without, and that made a big impression on me, and that’s why we’re always looking to bring down our prices. If we can knock a few pence off washing powder or a six-pack of beans, I think how chuffed mum would have been. When I look at what Pendletons are charging for everyday items, you think they’re having a laugh. A quid for an iceberg lettuce? What planet are you living on, mate? I don’t know how they get away with it, half the time.’
Miles drove slowly home to Chawbury, frowning and preoccupied. His instinct for corporate relations, and the likely consequence of every shift in public perception, made him fear the worst.
There was no doubt about it, Ross had pulled off an astoundingly effective PR counter-attack, and Miles had an uneasy feeling the Pendletons takeover bid had just hit the buffers with a shuddering jolt.
7.
It was twelve weeks later that Ross’s great building project began in earnest. With the takeover offer withdrawn, Freeza Mart assured of its independence, and the bat and wildflower police reluctantly sounding the all-clear, Ross was impatient to get on.
Every weekend, Miles glared furiously from his terrace through binoculars as work got underway. One Saturday morning, the remainder of Silas’s cottage was swept away as though it had never existed. In its place was a muddy hole, corralled by cement mixers and diggers. Soon foundations began to appear, followed by the first storey of bricks; bricks which Miles instantly identified as being too red and too new-looking and entirely inappropriate for the area. He was horrified, too, by the house’s footprint; in sheer footage it was three if not four times larger than the cottage it replaced. ‘It’s going to look like some red brick university. Disgraceful it was ever allowed.’
‘Please don’t exaggerate, darling,’ Davina said. ‘It really isn’t so bad. And they’re planting lots of trees for screening, Dawn told me, we really won’t notice it in a couple of years.’
‘I can assure you, I’ll notice it. I notice it every time I open the damn curtains. I can hardly bear to look in that direction, actually. It’s totally spoilt the view, even worse than I imagined. If you can’t see it, you must either be blind or wilfully unobservant. I can even see it from the bathroom. I was having a bath this morning and could see those ghastly brick walls on the horizon, it’s ruined my morning. Anyway, when do you see Dawn Clegg? She’s not been here, has she?’
‘She was at Philippa Mountleigh’s. At a girls’ charity thing to raise money for disabled gun dogs.’
Miles felt grumpy at the thought of Mrs Clegg at the Lord Lieutenant’s house. That woman was like broken glass, she g
ot everywhere.
‘Then I ran into her in the chemist,’ Davina said. ‘She’s always very friendly. She’s offered to help with the Macmillan Hospices.’
‘I’ll bet she has. That would be right up her street. Won’t she just love getting in with all her smart neighbours?’
‘Darling, I wish you’d stop going on about the Cleggs in this nasty way. You’ve really got it in for them, it isn’t fair. I can’t think why you’re being like this.’
‘If you’ll just step over to the window,’ Miles replied, holding back the heavily-interlined curtains with their hand-blocked pattern of poppies, ‘you’ll see precisely why I’ve got it in for them. Come on, come here, I insist you look.’ Davina reluctantly approached the drawing room window, fearing a trap, and Miles gestured triumphantly across the valley. ‘What do you think of that, then? Now tell me those aren’t the ugliest things you’ve ever seen. Like something you’d expect to find in Florida.’ The object of his derision was a pair of white fibreglass pillars, twenty foot high, the second of which was being winched into position on either side of the front door of the Clegg mansion.
‘I agree I probably wouldn’t have chosen them,’ Davina conceded. ‘But chacun a son gout. And the trees will hide them.’
‘I was coming to those, you can see where they’ve just planted them, down at the bottom of the field. Leylandii! We should have guessed, of all the trees they’d go for them. In five years they’ll be sixty foot tall, a ruddy great wall of sickly-green fir. Like living in suburbia.’
Davina slipped away to see how lunch was coming along. She knew her husband when he was like this, there was nothing you could say or do. Better to hide away in the kitchen and talk to dear, sensible Mrs French, who had cooked for the Strakers for four years.
Miles fetched his field glasses from his study and adjusted the focus. He had noticed the first double-glazed plate-glass windows starting to go in, and was thinking how unbelievably naff they looked.
8.
Shortly after the schools broke up for the Christmas holidays, eighteen hundred of England’s finest privately educated teenagers began clamouring for tickets to the Macmillan Hospice Ball, colloquially known as the ‘Hospers’ ball. The Hospers, held annually at the Hammersmith Palais in London, was a notorious snogathon at which every red-blooded fifteen-, sixteen- and seventeen-year-old felt they must be present. For weeks before, from all the poshest boarding schools, pupils were terrorising their mothers to get hold of tickets. Davina Straker had been on the mailing list for ten years, since Peter had first started going to it, so had no difficulty in securing tickets for Archie and Mollie. Peter, of course, was well beyond the Hospers these days, and even Samantha would have been too old for it this year had she been around, and not away in Thailand on her gap year.
Shortly before the ball, the Strakers drove up to London to spend a few days in Holland Park Square for Christmas shopping, dentist visits and parties. It was a particularly hectic time of year for Miles too, who attended as many client Christmas parties as he could squeeze in, often going to three or four in a single evening. His driver, Makepiece, and senior PA, Sara White, planned the most efficient route around London, rationing twenty-five minutes for each event, enabling Miles to connect with all his top clients. Tonight he would put in face-time at the Trent Valley Power 4 U party in Claridges ballroom, the British Regional Airways party in the River Room at the Savoy, Michael Spencer’s ICAP cocktails downstairs at George Club and finally dinner at Harry’s Bar with Davina and his arms dealer client. As usual, with a long night of client relations stretching ahead, Miles felt exhilarated at the prospect of such condensed, high-powered networking.
Archie, meanwhile, was preparing himself for the Hospers. His bedroom at the Holland Park Square house was right at the top on the sixth floor, opposite Mollie’s room, with a shower cubicle shoehorned into a former airing cupboard in-between. First he had taken a shower and washed his hair, then coated it with gel which he smoothed behind his ears in an oily slick; he then changed into his dinner jacket and bow tie and slipped four miniature bottles of vodka into his jacket pocket. The Hospers was a strictly no-alcohol event, with only bottled water and juice on offer, so all Archie’s friends turned up with private supplies. In any case, Archie was meeting up with ten mates from his year at school in a pub before the ball, so they should be well tanked-up before they arrived.
Across the corridor, Mollie looked despairing at her clothes, hating them all and wishing she didn’t have to go to this horrible party. She had been at the Hospers last year and loathed it. The whole thing had been a total meat market. All round her, wherever she’d looked, people had been getting off with each other—kissing complete strangers, it was so sick—everyone, that is, except her. Nobody had spoken to her all night, let alone asked her for a dance or a snog, which she would have refused in any case unless she really liked and knew the person. What had made it so embarrassing was that half her class from school had been there, all looking amazing, and about five boys each were clustered round them, but nobody gave her a second glance. So she’d stood around pretending she didn’t care, wishing she was anywhere else, preferably home in bed. She was sure it would be exactly the same tonight, all over again. She’d told her mother she didn’t want to go, but her father insisted, saying everyone went to the Hospers, it was a rite of passage. Morosely, she squeezed into the brown outfit she’d worn at the summer lunch party.
Gemma Clegg, meanwhile, was blow-drying her hair with the complimentary hairdryer in her bathroom at the Thistle Hotel in West Kensington. She was in a state of intense excitement, this being one of her first-ever visits to London, her first time staying at a London hotel and her first big night out. Her mother had heard about the Hospers Ball at hospice committee meetings in Hampshire, and realised Gemma was the only teenager not going. Lots of the other mothers had said what fun it was, and how it was a wonderful way of meeting people, so Dawn bought a ticket and agreed to chaperone her to London. As a great treat, they were sharing a bedroom at the Thistle, which actually had three stars and all kinds of luxurious extras in the room, such as tea and coffee-making facilities, and sachets of sugar and saccharine and mini-cartons of UHT milk laid out on a tray. In the bathroom was free bubble bath and body gel, and a comb and sewing kit which Gemma had already transferred into her washbag.
Scrutinising herself in the mirror for the twentieth time, she still couldn’t decide what to wear. Sometimes she liked the velvet skirt and white Zara top, sometimes the purple Miss Selfridge dress with sequins. Each time she’d made a definite, final decision, fresh doubts erupted. She couldn’t decide whether the black skirt made her look fat. The white top left three inches of tummy on display, and now she wished she hadn’t eaten that mozzarella-and-salami-melt panini on the train. If only she’d brought the orange skirt with her, except it didn’t go with the red boots.
Already slightly unsteady after three pints of lager at the Duke of Hamilton up the road from the Hammersmith Palais, Archie arrived at the party. There was an awkward moment at the door when the ball marshals, deployed to exclude drunken teenagers, tried to bar Archie and his friends, but somehow they’d blagged their way through, and now he was in the thick of it. Whenever he looked he saw boys he knew from school—literally dozens of them—and girls he instantly fancied hanging about in little groups, waiting to get picked up. Archie reckoned he could identify the different schools just by looking at them: swotty, butch girls from Wycombe Abbey; pretty, eager ones from Downe House with plenty of midriff on show; posh, arrogant Heathfield babes; leggy, sporty Cheltenham Ladies; grubby, streetwise Godolphin and Latymer girls; sexy, neurotic Paulinas; giggly country-bumpkins from Tudor Hall; then all the various St Mary’s dolly-birds, stir-crazy from their convents and horny as hell. That, anyway, was what Archie reckoned as he weaved between hundreds of micro-skirts and glinting braces on white teeth. From the corner of his eye he thought he spotted Mollie skulking miserably behind a pillar, so he tu
rned sharply away. No way was he wasting the Hospers Ball on looking after his weird sister.
Gemma felt out of her depth. It wasn’t that she was finding it difficult to talk to people. Loads of boys kept coming up and saying hi, but she wasn’t doing well keeping the conversation going. No one had heard of her school, Droitwich Spa High, and they hadn’t heard of Droitwich either. They kept thinking she’d said Norwich or Dulwich, wherever they were.
Mollie wanted the room to swallow her up. Surreptitiously glancing at her watch, she realised only an hour and a quarter had passed, nothing like half way, barely a third. She found a concrete staircase beyond the cloakroom which led up to a dark balcony above the dance floor, and as she stared down at the thousands of people dancing and laughing and clutching onto each other, it made her feel so lonely and bereft, she could have wept. On the dance floor, the boys had removed jackets and ties and were leaping about with whoops of wild laughter, holding bottles of water. Many of the girls were dancing together, still in packs, before being picked off one by one by increasingly raucous boys. Mollie had resolved to stay hidden-away up here for the remainder of the party, where nobody could find her, when she heard strange slurping noises close by, like the sound a suction plug makes when covering a bath hole. To her horror she realised she was surrounded by snogging couples, draped across benches or clamped together on the floor, like a class in mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Flustered with embarrassment, she retreated downstairs, resuming her position behind the pillar.
Archie had already snogged three different girls when he spotted Gemma. He knew he’d seen the face before, but it was the red plastic boots which brought it back: the girl from that drinks party. He didn’t think she looked too happy tonight, but she was red-hot-sexy, and this time he’d go for it.
Pride and Avarice Page 6