Pride and Avarice
Page 22
Once a month, a select committee of women congregated at Longparish Priory to discuss which opera or ballet companies, poets or theatre groups might be invited to perform in inner-city secondary schools in Basingstoke and Southampton, where pupils might otherwise never be exposed to the higher performing arts. It was an initiative about which Laetitia was determinedly passionate, seeing it as her personal vehicle for ‘giving back,’ as she put it. ‘If we can inspire one single pupil to consider a career in the creative arts, we will have more than justified our efforts,’ she liked to say. Although her initiative was, by intention, kept totally separate from the many cultural programmes sponsored corporately by Pendletons, Laetitia was nevertheless shrewd about inviting many of the same artists, already supported by a Pendletons bursary, to perform pro bono for her culturally-deprived school kids.
Dawn was thrilled when Laetitia asked her to join the group, and struck by how different it was from her other charitable committee meetings at Stockbridge House. Laetitia’s group was at once more intense and more elegant. At Philippa Mountleigh’s house, the cheerful and profane county women regularly arrived late for meetings, or needed to leave early, and devoted much of their time to local gossip and eating Philippa’s chocolate digestive and ginger nut biscuits. At Laetitia’s meetings, which were held in the library at Longparish Priory with pads and pencils laid out in readiness, none of the committee would have dared arrive late, nor stray from the businesslike agenda. Invariably charming and self-effacing in everyday life, Laetitia became rather serious when chairing her committee. And the members themselves, comprising a mixture of smart neighbours and worthy representatives of county education and arts trusts, would not have risked introducing a flicker of levity. At the conclusion of each meeting the Pendletons’ butler, Lagdon, always appeared with a tray of glasses of champagne and a jug of elderflower cordial, and elaborate canapés made by the Pendletons’ chef. None of the committee felt it quite appropriate at midday in midweek when they had to drive themselves home to choose a glass of champagne, so each took a glass of elderflower. Dawn, longing for champagne, found it torture. Nor did she feel she could take more than one of the exquisite canapés, so most of the tiny foie gras on fried bread squares and miniature oeufs en gelés went back to the kitchen uneaten.
The meetings gave her a chance to study the house, which fascinated her more and more. There was a serenity and perfection to Longparish Priory and Dawn noticed everything, and tried to work out what it was that made it feel so gracious. For a start, there were flowers everywhere, in the hall, in the library, in the drawing room, that was surely part of it; six or more cachepots and vases on every surface of orchids and lilies, and bowls of hyacinths and silver jugs filled with white roses. The entire house was infused with the scent of flowers. And everything was so clean, without a speck of dust or a glass ring on any surface. And the modern paintings, some of which Dawn was gradually coming round to, were beautifully framed and lit. Until now, she had preferred elaborate frames around pictures, old fashioned and fancy and gilded bright gold, but here the mounts and frames were simple and unfussy. Another thing she noticed were the little sculptures everywhere on the tables and bookcases. There were some really modern ones made out of bronze, but also Greek and Roman statues of heads, and even some without heads, all mingled together. It was quite effective, she decided, though she didn’t know what Ross would make of it, he hated bric-a-brac.
Everything at the Pendletons’ was so nicely done; even if it was just her and Laetitia sat there for a coffee, a tray was brought in with a cloth on it and a percolator and china coffee cups, and little jugs of cream and milk—you got given the choice—and little silver bowls of sugar cubes, brown sugar crystals and sachets of sugar substitute on a saucer (Laetitia never took sugar). And upstairs in Laetitia’s bathroom there were six bottles of Floris on a glass shelf and the whole room was so pretty and fresh, with a lovely rose fabric on a little chair, all smelling of rose geranium bath essence. Where Laetitia and James kept their shampoos and toothpastes and the usual bathroom gunge, Dawn had no idea. She thought of her own master bathroom with its half-used Silvikrin and Pantene bottles, and the big plastic toothmugs full of old toothbrushes, and Ross’s roll-on deodorants and aftershaves all over the place, and it felt like a different planet.
Arriving home after each meeting, she found herself increasingly dissatisfied with Chawbury Park. Seeing it now through what she thought of as Laetitia’s eyes, she knew she’d have done the place differently if she was doing it again today. Even the features she’d been particularly pleased with, such as the pearl grey and silver-veined kitchen worktops and the carpets they’d chosen for some of the rooms—all the rooms in fact—now seemed not quite right. She would like to have invited James and Laetitia over for a meal, but felt uneasy about what Laetitia would make of their place. One morning, waking abruptly, she found she’d been dreaming about the Pendletons perched on the black leather settee in the day room, eating supper from a tray with the TV on, and the thought of it made her cringe.
The next time she was up visiting Davina, she found herself starting to look at the Manor more critically too. She noticed the many similarities between Davina’s style of decorating and Laetitia’s style, for instance the wide floorboards covered by old rugs, and the flagstoned hallway with its big, worn slabs. When she had first visited the Strakers, she’d considered the flagstones cold and gloomy, and would have covered them over completely with fitted carpets had it been her own place. Growing up in Solihull, the idea of fitted wall-to-wall carpets underfoot had been the ultimate luxury, and in their previous home in Droitwich she had finally achieved that ambition. But now she found herself regretting the fitted carpets at Chawbury Park, and even the marble floor in their hall.
At the same time she felt the Strakers’ house, which had hitherto struck her as impossibly posh with its glazed-chintz curtains and settee covers and paintings everywhere, was less perfect than she’d remembered. The ceiling in the drawing room in which she and Ross had had their distressing encounter with Miles and Davina, after Archie had got poor Gemma pregnant, appeared to have lowered by a couple of feet, and the walls moved closer together. In fact, Chawbury Manor seemed to have shrunk. And the bookshelves in Miles’s study were full of leatherbound sets by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, which didn’t look like they’d ever been read, whereas the Pendletons’ floor-to-ceiling bookcases were filled with novels, biographies and the stout white spines of art volumes.
When she attempted to explain some of this to Ross, and how she wished now they’d laid flagstones in the hall rather than marble, he became quite annoyed. ‘Well, you chose marble. That’s what you said you wanted, love, and it cost an arm and a leg. And very nice it is too. No way are we ripping it all up, so you can forget about that.’
Dawn loved and admired her husband dearly, but sometimes he was exasperating. He was so stubborn and work-obsessed, he didn’t see things half the time; it was all work, work, work, Freeza Mart, Freeza Mart, Freeza Mart. Recently she’d realised there was so much more to life, and Ross just didn’t get it.
Driving back from Longparish Priory with Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at full blast on the CD (Dawn was educating herself on opera, mugging up on the ones the committee was bringing to inner city schools), she had a brainwave. The business of the decoration of Chawbury Park, and the various mistakes she’d made, was getting to her, and Ross was completely unsympathetic. If she so much as mentioned changing anything at all, he was instantly opposed, claiming to like everything exactly as it was and refusing to alter a single thing.
Dawn’s brainwave was that she wouldn’t bother saying anything to Ross, she’d just go for it and get the job done anyway. She was sure he’d be chuffed when it was finished. And it wasn’t as if they couldn’t afford it. Furthermore, she knew exactly the person to help her: Serena Harden, who she’d heard was desperate for decorating jobs, and people said was very professional in her approach.
After the coffees, they went outdoors and walked round the outside of the house, where Serena had thoughts on how the windows might be improved. She was particularly helpful about the velux windows in the roof and the plate glass panorama windows onto the lawn, which had been the devil to install and required eight workmen. She had an idea that traditional sash windows could be built off-site and simply slotted in, with minimum fuss or reconstruction.
Dawn led her to the pergola at the end of the lawn, which was her favourite place to sit with a white wine, since it offered views up the entire valley. Serena was very interested to see the Strakers’ house from this particular angle. Naturally she was careful not to overpraise it to her new client, whom she’d quickly sussed had the potential to keep her in work for months and months, if not years. She had liked Dawn from the first moment they’d met, but seeing her today, in this new relationship, she realised she lacked confidence, and was jaw-droppingly unsophisticated. As such—and having a very rich husband—she promised to be a welcome client indeed.
‘That’s Chawbury Manor up there on the hill,’ Dawn said, noticing Serena’s line of vision. ‘I think you met our friends the Strakers at Mandy’s baptism.’
Serena agreed that she had indeed met the Strakers.
‘Davina’s become a very close personal friend,’ Dawn couldn’t resist saying, anxious to impress her smart new decorator. ‘I’m in and out of the manor all day long.’
The turn of the conversation began to make Serena feel uncomfortable, since she knew Miles’s opinion of the Cleggs. In fact, she had been wondering how to tell him she was working for Dawn, and whether she even needed to. It embarrassed her, too, that she’d been there when Miles had placed the derogatory story with Nigel Dempster about Gemma’s baby.
‘Davina’s such a lovely lady,’ Dawn went on. ‘We co-chaired a garden function at the manor last year, you know. And then there’s Miles, such a brilliant man, everyone says.’ She looked briefly troubled. ‘Well, I can’t say I know Miles as well as I know Davina. I find him a little bit difficult, to tell the truth.’
Serena, who had her own reasons to agree, smiled noncommittally. ‘All men are tricky, some of the time.’
‘Tell me about it,’ agreed Dawn, who was already worried about Ross’s reaction to her covert house makeover, before it had even begun.
29.
Having obtained his Doctorate from the London School of Economics, Greg considered what he might do next. His first thought had been a career as an academic, which he was well placed to pursue, having obtained a First in his degree course and kudos for his PhD. His analysis of the Vietnamese economy in the decades following the war of 1963–75 was enthusiastically received by his tutors for its depth of research and pervasive anti-American sentiment, and he could certainly have found tenure at half a dozen universities had he wished. Greg was certainly tempted. He called on contacts at Birmingham Aston University and at Leeds, both of whom encouraged him to put his name forward. Something, however, made him hesitate; he saw too easily how an academic career might unfold—the scholarly papers and, if he was lucky, a book meanly published by a university publishing house, and the lectures and tutorials with students who were seldom enthralled by the subject they had chosen.
He toyed with entering the research department of an investment bank, and actually called on the Human Resources department at Goldman Sachs (you could not call it an interview since he had not formally applied, but the fearsomely smart Dutch woman he talked to was not discouraging, saying his research credentials in South East Asia could well be useful to them). However, when she mentioned the starting compensation would be in the region of £55,000, which was almost triple the starting salary for an academic, Greg backed off, refusing to sell out and become a cog in the wheel of an über-capitalist organisation.
He moved into a flat in Hammersmith with two ex-college mates, and took a part-time part-paid job at the local Labour headquarters on Greyhound Road, stuffing mailers into envelopes and helping establish a website for the borough council Labour group. Despite identifying his co-workers in the office as both incompetent and insufficiently committed, he nevertheless became absorbed by the political manoeuvring around the constituency party and council, in what was an intensely marginal seat. During the dark days of Thatcherism, Fulham and Hammersmith had been won by the Tories, though they had been swept out during the glorious 1997 counter-revolution by New Labour. The council, however, remained under Tory control by a majority of three seats. Greg considered this a scandal of gerrymandering, since it was only the prosperous wards around Parson’s Green and the newly gentrified streets off Hammersmith Grove and Brook Green which had swung it for the Conservatives; in the past, these brick terraces would have been solidly occupied by the working class they’d been built for, Labour voters all, and it was the capitalist pressure of rising house prices that had skewed the demographic mix of the neighbourhood; that, anyway, was the gist of Greg’s nightly harangues to his co-workers in the pub at the end of Greyhound Road. Greg had the answer to everything, being able to spot a big business or media conspiracy a mile off.
As far as his family was concerned, Greg was content to keep them at arm’s length. Ross did his best to stay in touch, regularly ringing his son from the car on Saturday mornings when he was driving between store visits. In fact, these calls were a source of tension between them. Ross would listen to the ringing tone in the flat, leaving it to ring on and on until it was grumpily answered by a half-asleep flatmate. ‘You couldn’t still be in bed,’ Ross would tell Greg. ‘I’ve been up five hours already. I’m on the dual-carriageway between Chester and Stoke.’
Which was all it took to set them off: almost by reflex, Greg would mutter disparagingly about profit-driven capitalism, and Ross become testy, and the conversation would be riven with antagonism. When Greg first left the LSE, Ross invited his son to live with him in Roupell Street—there was a second bedroom and it would save on rent. Greg declined and it irked Ross at the time, who couldn’t see the sense. Now he felt relieved. On the infrequent weekends when Greg consented to come down to Chawbury, there was generally a flare-up between father and son, or between Greg and Dawn, or sometimes all three: Greg had an ability to make both parents feel prickly. He could not visit Chawbury Park without criticising its size and amenities. Noticing Ross had installed a home car wash with power spray and several different settings, he was sarcastic: ‘I see you don’t have time to use a bucket and sponge.’ And he was fierce about the swimming pool, with all the oil and chemicals it took to maintain it.
But the largest part of his contempt was reserved for the Strakers on the hill. He knew Miles was an influential Tory (‘One of their inner circle of spin doctors, not that they’re a patch on our lot’) and made a point of glaring up the valley at the manor, and grimacing.
The fact that h
is parents’ own house was 1,700 square feet larger than the Strakers’ place was just one of the inconvenient crosses he had to bear in life.
Mollie left Mid-Hampshire College at the end of her course announcing she wished to become a schoolteacher. Specifically, she wanted to teach in the state sector helping kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, and she had already sussed out the various teacher training colleges which would be her next step.
Miles was instinctively opposed to his younger daughter’s choice, having long-held opinions about the quality of comprehensive teachers who were perpetually off sick and refused to supervise sport, even assuming there were any playing fields left after dynamic New Labour had sold them all off. (‘New’ Labour was another phrase he never used without metaphorical inverted commas.) On the other hand, he had agreed to join a Tory think tank on education, with a brief to bolster manifesto policy, and it occurred to him that having a daughter actually working at the sharp end, out in the field, would boost his credentials. And so he did not discourage her, and even agreed to pay her share of the rent on the flat she planned to take with three other trainee teachers in Olympia, which Miles chose to call West Hammersmith since it sounded better. If truth be told, it rather suited Miles to have Mollie safely billeted in a student flat in Olympia, and not parked in Holland Park Square with him, where she would doubtless have been more underfoot than her elder sister whom Miles scarcely clapped eyes on from one week to the next. Recently, on a Monday evening, when Davina was safely down at Chawbury, and Conception out at some Catholic church service at St Francis of Assisi in Pottery Lane, and Samantha God knows where with the beau of the moment, Miles had done something he’d never previously risked, namely making love with Serena in the Holland Park Square house in his and Davina’s own bed. Afterwards he regretted his recklessness, because it had crossed a line. But Serena had become available to join him at late notice for dinner in London and, afterwards, feeling suddenly horny, he had rung Claridges to see if they had a room, and then the Berkeley, and drawn a double blank. Both hotels were full to capacity for Chelsea Flower Show week. Feeling uncomfortable ringing hotel after hotel from the back of the car, with Makepiece driving them and no doubt listening to every word, and Serena resting her hand on his cock through his trousers, Miles had said, ‘Just drop us at Holland Park Square please, Makepiece. Mrs Harden will get a taxi home later, so don’t bother waiting round.’ Thus they had ended up in the marital bed in the bedroom with three sash windows overlooking the communal garden, which was something Miles had vowed never to allow to happen. Straight after he’d come, he’d wanted to ring a cab and kick her out, already worrying how he’d be able to extricate her in the morning; he had a breakfast meeting to go to, and Conception was up and about by eight in any case. One of her first duties was to arrange the morning newspapers on the hall table. For someone ostensibly so holy, Miles considered Conception a beady little gossip, who might easily consider it her duty to report any overnight guest to Davina. His discomfort increased further when Serena insisted on having a leisurely bath in the marital bathroom next morning, making free with Davina’s toiletries and giant loofah.