Pride and Avarice

by Nicholas Coleridge

  He felt sick. The news entirely ruined the flight. Every bit of pleasure he would otherwise have derived from his senatorial First Class seat and unlimited Dom Perignon and caviar was instantly curdled. He felt a hideous gnawing in the pit of his stomach, and waves of hot anger coursing up and down his arms. One hundred and five million pounds! Normally Miles was instinctively respectful of anyone who made serious capital, but in the case of Ross it was obscene. Repellent even. He couldn’t imagine what people like the Cleggs would do with so much cash; it wasn’t as though they owned racehorses or collected art, or even had private school fees to pay or a decent garden to maintain. He tried to watch a movie to take his mind off it, but the film about a million dollar bank robbery only made him think of Ross, who’d just become a hundred times richer than the thief in the film. Fresh humiliations occurred to him all the time: he was no longer the richest man in Chawbury. He wasn’t even baby Mandy’s richest grandfather. It was intolerable!

  They landed at Dubai’s International Airport where a white stretch limo had been sent by the Zach Durban organisation to deliver them to the resort. At one hundred storeys, it was the tallest new hotel in the Gulf with an Olympic-sized swimming pool and three helipads on the roof, and a thousand-berth marina at sea level.

  A team of sixteen Straker Communications staff were already installed at the hotel, overseeing the three-day launch celebrations. Tonight, there was a gala dinner on the rooftop for 600 guests; tomorrow a convoy of Land Cruisers would drive the same guests into the desert for sand skiing and quad biking, followed by a lavish brunch at an oasis. They would later be airlifted back to the helipads by a flight of Durban Corporation helicopters.

  Miles had personally approved every detail of the programme, as well as the one hundred and eighty British guests flown in for the opening, plus the several hundred others imported from Hong Kong, Singapore and South Africa. The British contingent comprised a press-friendly mixture of celebrity chefs, television newscasters, Members of Parliament and championship golf and motor racing stars. Following his usual principle of double-networking, he had also included several key clients from other Straker accounts, such as the chief executive of Trent Valley Power 4 U and his wife and kids, and marketing bosses from the sherry company and from Pendletons. Having also included his constituency MP, Ridley Nairn, and wife, Suzie, on the trip, Miles was being doubly cautious about Serena, arranging for his mistress to be given a single room of her own, further along the corridor from his suite.

  Normally Miles would have been in his element. His people had done a good job with the organisation, Zach was satisfied, there were unrivalled networking opportunities at every turn and, furthermore, Serena was on-message. Thrilled to have escaped from her husband and son for a few days, she was prepared to go along with any subterfuge Miles deemed necessary. Miles, however, was far from content. The image of Ross kept playing on his mind. Bumping across the desert in a Land Cruiser he could think of nothing else; making love to Serena, he first lost momentum, then his erection as Ross’s grotesque windfall seeped into his head.

  To make matters worse, other guests on the trip kept mentioning it too.

  ‘I say, your neighbour Ross Clegg’s doing awfully well, according to the newspapers,’ Ridley Nairn said. ‘Do you think he’d be a good prospect for our local Tory Patrons Club?’

  ‘I believe he votes socialist,’ Miles replied.

  ‘Really? Well, perhaps all the filthy lucre will change his mind.’

  Later, Suzie Nairn said, ‘I wish you hadn’t told us not to go to Ross Clegg’s shop opening in Andover, Miles. Everyone’s saying he’s enormous fun and very bright.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so. Let me put it this way, he isn’t exactly someone you’d choose to go on holiday with.’

  ‘But God he’s done well,’ Suzie persisted. ‘Apparently he’s made millions from all his horrid frozen food.’

  To add insult to injury, Serena was flicking through the channels on one of the four plasma TVs in Miles’s suite and there was Ross being interviewed for the business slot on BBC World. He didn’t come across particularly confidently, but there was something solid and self-deprecating about him that was impressive.

  ‘So, what are you going to do with all the money then, Ross?’ asked the interviewer. ‘Any big plans for a celebration?’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but it won’t change anything,’ Ross replied. ‘It’s only on paper in any case. And I have outside shareholders to worry about, there’ll be no time for playing silly buggers.’

  27.

  During the months leading up to the flotation, and for the first five months after it all went through without a hitch, Dawn gave the money hardly a second thought. Ross seldom referred to it, nor altered his routine in any way, and they never felt tempted to behave like one of those lottery winners you saw on TV, firing off champagne corks and buying sports cars. Dawn did, however, enjoy the comforting glow that having £35 million sitting on deposit in the bank inevitably brings, and the knowledge they had double that again in Freeza Mart shares. She fell into the habit of checking the share prices each morning in the newspaper and it was exciting to see it moving up and up, by a few pence every week. In the first six months as a Footsie-traded stock, Freeza Mart increased by 72p. Dawn couldn’t work out what that meant to her and Ross personally, but she knew it was a lot.

  To have become suddenly so wealthy, Dawn found hard to take in. It was too abstract an amount of money. If someone had handed her fifty thousand pounds in cash, she’d have found it easier to visualise and felt a lot richer. One weekend, Ross casually mentioned he’d paid off the mortgage on Chawbury Park and they no longer owed a penny to anyone. At around the same time, he announced he was going to buy a new flat for his mother up in Salford, round the corner from her present place, and he’d like to do something for Dawn’s parents too, if she thought they’d like that. ‘A cruise or a holiday or something. Maybe you could mention it to them, Dawn. We must put it to them in the right way, we don’t want to cause offence.’

  As the months passed and she became more accustomed to it all, Dawn began to think of improvements she would like to make to their home. Ross was so stretched all the time these days, it was hard to talk to him properly; he still did his store visits every Saturday, driving all over the country, and often had to leave again straight after Sunday lunch for a meeting up in town or to catch a plane somewhere abroad. So it was largely left to Dawn to choose the new swimming pool and oversee the contractors from a company named Blue Marine Pools and Leisure whose catalogue she was sent through the post. Unable to decide between dozens of designs in every shape and size, she eventually sat down with Gemma and Debbie and they went for a lotus-shaped liner pool with a pattern of stencilled dolphins on the bottom, which was constantly refilled by an ornamental waterfall at the deep end. They chose to site it directly outside the kitchen window, so whoever was standing at the sink could see what was going on in the pool. With Mandy growing up at the speed she was—her second birthday was looming—it would be safer as well as convenient.

  The contractors from Blue Marine Pools and Leisure, having given so many assurances about their efficiency and high standards, turned out to be shysters. Initially turning up with a lorry-load of Poles, who dug a deep hole and trenches for pipe-work, they then all but disappeared. Dawn spent hours tracking down the foreman on his mobile, and listening to empty promises. Different sets of subcontractors came and went, leaving their tasks half-done. Boilers and filtration equipment never arrived. Dawn was distraught. It worried her, too, that the muddy hole was closer to the kitchen wall than she’d envisaged, but the foreman told her not to worry since the coping stores and paving would make it look different when they were laid.

  Probably the pool would never have been completed at all if Ross hadn’t taken control and got Freeza Mart’s in-house legal team to issue a blizzard of heavy letters. No letter was capable of shifting the hole, however, which had certainly been
dug eight feet too near to the kitchen. For ever afterwards, the pool lapped almost up to the kitchen door; you could step straight off the pedal-bin and into the water. Gemma and Debbie said they didn’t care at all, in fact they preferred it, because people could hand you Cokes and snacks while you were swimming and you didn’t need to get out. But Dawn blamed herself for the disaster, and vowed never again to allow a project to slip away from her control.

  Her second project, which was an all-weather ménage for the horses, she managed meticulously, doing several months of homework and research before even contacting any contractors. She visited several different examples all over Hampshire, and was particularly impressed by the ménage Lady Pendleton had installed at Longparish Priory when the youngest Pendletons had got seriously into their riding. Like everything Laetitia did, it was in perfect taste with a hornbeam hedge around the fenced arena and a stable block with clock tower and mounting block. Dawn decided to model her own ménage as closely as possible on Laetitia’s, though she did seek her permission first. ‘Of course you can. Copy anything you like,’ Laetitia said. ‘I’d be flattered. In fact, I’m sure we have the plans put away somewhere, so you can work straight from them if that would be helpful.’

  When Miles spotted work starting on the ménage, coming so soon after the ghastly swimming pool which he couldn’t actually see from Chawbury Manor because it was on the other side of the house, but he’d heard all about from Mollie (‘Dolphins indeed!’), he swiftly rang the council to see if they’d got planning consent and to his irritation found they had.

  ‘Its awfully predictable,’ he remarked to James Pendleton next time they met. ‘The Cleggs are building for Britain at Chawbury, it’s a non-stop spending spree. Ever since Ross floated the business. They’ve put in this unbelievably naff pool like a country club in Surrey. And now there’s a fancy riding ring going in, can you believe?’

  ‘Ah yes, I think Laetitia’s been helping Dawn with that, giving her some advice.’

  ‘I thought she must have been,’ Miles said, quickly changing tack. ‘It’s all being beautifully done.’

  Although the Pendletons and the Cleggs had by no means become close friends, or anything like it, Laetitia followed up on her promise to invite them to the Basingstoke summer festival, where they watched a performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat followed by supper in the festival restaurant. It had been a pleasant evening, with both couples enjoying the performance and Laetitia feeling they’d done their bit in supporting the local arts community, as well as showing friendship to their new neighbours. Laetitia understood that she and Dawn would never be entirely on the same wavelength, but she liked her brassiness and pluck and obvious desire to learn new things. James, who wasn’t generally comfortable with new people, got on with her well too, and of course Ross and James had plenty to talk about, even though they both did their best to stay off the subject of retail. ‘Now you two, enough,’ Laetitia said once, when she felt the shop talk stepping up a bit. ‘Let’s talk about something we can all join in, shall we?’

  In the car on the way home, James commented to his wife, ‘That man’s very smart. I rather wish he was working for us, not as a competitor.’

  ‘Maybe you should make him an offer, darling?’ Laetitia said. ‘Or buy his company and bring him in to Pendletons.’

  ‘I would too, if I thought there was a chance he’d accept. But he’s not a chap who’d be easy to place, not in a mature business like ours. Too much of an entrepreneur: but he knows what he’s doing, that’s clear.’

  Later that same summer, Ross and Dawn received a second invitation from the Pendletons, this time to buy tickets for a country house opera benefit of The Magic Flute to be held against the backdrop of the ruins of a Palladian country house. Ross was not remotely interested in going, and thought the seats at seventy-five pounds each were way over the top, but Dawn wanted to support it because Laetitia had been so kind to them. So they sent off for their expensive tickets and, several Saturday nights later, found themselves joining a picnic of six local couples around the boot of James Pendleton’s Bentley.

  Ross found the performance very trying. It wasn’t his kind of thing at all, and he found himself quickly drifting off, revisiting the business plan for Freeza Mart’s expansion into Holland. Dawn, on the other hand, adored everything about her first opera: the lovely costumes, the elegant music and setting, it all struck her as very refined and gracious. And James Pendleton was such a gentleman; in both intervals he explained to her what was going on in the plot, all the twists and turns, and showed her where a digest of the story was printed in the programme. So she really did feel, by the end of the evening, that she’d found a new interest and could easily get into this whole culture thing, if she only knew more about it.

  Debbie Clegg’s arrival at Mid-Hampshire College for Further Education made a decisive difference to Mollie’s life there. For a start, it provided her with a permanent friend to have lunch with in the cafeteria and hang out with between lectures. Furthermore, Debbie was much better than Mollie at making friends around college, friends who became part of Mollie’s circle too. It may partly have been their respective choice of courses which made things easier for Debbie. Mollie had combined her A level programme with a social studies and educational diploma, which was a foundation course for teacher training. It was a course which attracted an earnest crowd of wannabe academics and social workers, whom even Mollie conceded were heavy going. Debbie, however, was enrolled on a vocational course in Hospitality and Catering Management, where her classmates were would-be chefs and hoteliers and a lot more fun in every way.

  Mollie and Debbie fell into a routine of catching the bus together into Andover each morning, unless Dawn was willing to drive them in, which she very often did. On those mornings, Mollie would be ready and looking out for the Cleggs in the kitchen at the manor which overlooked the front door, and hurry out as soon as she saw the black Cherokee coming up the drive. Mollie was aware from various derogatory things she’d heard Miles say that the Cleggs had recently come into money. Debbie never breathed a word about it, and Mollie wondered if she even knew. Certainly in the college café, both girls were as parsimonious as every other student, carefully paying for their own coffees and couscous.

  Mollie found it fascinating, as she got to know Debbie better, how different she was in character to her older sister. Mollie had come to like Gemma a lot, and often visited her and baby Mandy on the way home from college, but had long ago realised Gemma was no brain-box. With her sweet, trusting face and passion for high street fashion and celebrity magazines, she was affectionate and ditsy. So far as Mollie could tell, all she did all day was play with Mandy in the living room end of the kitchen, always with the television on in the background. Gemma was a devotee of soaps and reality programmes, regularly texting to vote on Pop Idol and I’m a Celebrity, which Mollie considered a ridiculous waste of money. In summer, Gemma swam in the new pool outside the kitchen window, but otherwise seldom left the house. Mollie noticed she still frequently asked how Archie was, and seemed downcast when told he’d gone to university in Bristol.

  Debbie, by contrast, reminded Mollie of Ross. She had her father’s compact and wiry frame, though you had to say she was pretty too. Unlike Gemma or Dawn, she had no interest in make-up or boys; athletic and sporty, she still rode every weekend and most evenings in summer. She also played netball twice a week for Mid-Hampshire College and went kayaking with the college canoe club. All this was a revelation to Mollie, who hadn’t realised you could do sport at the college at all.

  Despite her multitude of extra-curricular activities, Mollie also saw what a conscientious student Debbie was. At a college at which almost no pressure was placed on anyone to deliver any assignment on time, or even to produce it at all, she was never late with project work. She was impressively well organised with the course notes for her various modules meticulously ordered in multi-coloured files. And she seemed genuinely enthusias
tic about her studies, announcing she wanted to work in a hotel when she graduated, and absorbed by the lectures on portion control, food hygiene and bar management. As the first summer vacation loomed, Debbie said she had written off to several luxury hotels asking for an unpaid holiday job. ‘They probably won’t bother replying, but I may as well try.’

  Mollie was impressed, and also a little jealous since she’d talked about getting a holiday job herself, but Miles had vetoed the idea when he realised it would mean her missing the annual family holiday in Porto Ercole.

  ‘Have you told your parents about your job?’ Mollie asked.

  ‘That’s if I even get one,’ Debbie said, ‘which I most probably wont. But yeah, I have. Dad said no problem, go for it. Mum wasn’t so keen, but she doesn’t like the idea of me working in hotels, period. She says its menial.’

  ‘My dad put the kybosh on me doing a holiday job at all. He’s so weird like that. He rents this villa in Italy every August and we all have to go, there’s no choice, we have to be there the whole time.’

  ‘I heard Mum talking about your holiday,’ Debbie said. ‘Your mum was telling my mum about it and she was really envious. She was on at Dad about it for hours, about how the Strakers go abroad on this big family holiday every year, and how we never go anywhere. She wanted Dad to rent a place too, she got all these brochures of places in Spain and Greece and was going through them. But Dad’s not interested. He’s too busy with all the new stores they’re doing. They had this big barney about it. Mum was saying, ‘What’s the point of making all this money, Ross, if we never doing anything with it?’

  28.

  Each time Dawn saw Laetitia she hero-worshipped her a little more. And since Laetitia had invited her to join a group of ladies committed to bringing cultural events to Hampshire state schools, Dawn had the opportunity to study her on a regular basis.