Dawn sighed. Ross was very difficult, he was such a stick-in-the-mud. As she saw it, they had so many opportunities opening up to them now as a couple—to live nicely and enjoy the rewards—but he didn’t seem bothered. He just wanted to keep his head down, slogging away. It was particularly disappointing since Dawn had another ambitious plan, which she’d not yet dared tell Ross about because she knew he’d be negative. But she was determined to get her way on this one. She’d already started looking into it.
It was when Samantha began dating Dick Gunn, the eighteen-stone group chief executive of private equity investors the Gunn Partnership, who was only two years younger than her father, that Miles and Davina started worrying.
Davina instinctively felt the thirty-two-year age gap was much too big, and wished Sam spent time with friends closer to her own age. She hadn’t met Dick Gunn, but his photograph regularly appeared in the newspapers, and she couldn’t see anything beyond his big blubbery face, full lips and the brutally wide pinstripes of his suits. Sam hadn’t even told them she was seeing him; Miles spotted a paragraph about it in the Evening Standard Londoner’s Diary—‘Gunn’s silver bullet’—with a picture of them together at some party. Sam looked like a waif in tight white jeans and sequinned top, enveloped by Gunn’s enormous bearhug.
At that time, it was impossible to open the financial pages without reading about the Gunn Partnership. Backed by Dutch and Qatari money, they specialised in acquiring underperforming public companies, taking them private, slashing staff and overhead, inserting their own puppet managements, then refloating the businesses a few years later, always at a massive premium. In the past fifteen years, Gunn’s jowly features had been seen toasting the acquisition of web-offset printing companies, office rental businesses, employment agencies, a motorcycle factory, a budget hotel and tavern chain, and a high street fashion retailer. In his many interviews he was invariably described as a ‘larger than life character.’ The photograph most commonly used showed him, massively obese, gnawing at a cold chicken leg in the members carpark at Ascot, during a picnic alongside his silver Bristol.
Miles, it so happened, had twice become indirectly embroiled with Dick, when the Gunn Partnership targeted businesses retained by Straker Communications. Miles had been involved in the defence strategy for his clients, lobbying PMs and ministers and fabricating anti-Gunn stories for the business press. It had, in fact, been Miles who had sourced the photograph taken in the Ascot carpark, intended to project an image of a greedy, self-indulgent corporate raider. It disappointed him when both his clients succumbed to the takeovers, since he’d lost two good accounts as a result.
The idea that his beautiful twenty-year-old daughter was virtually shacked up with the fat asset stripper first irritated and then, as time went by and they were still together, enraged him. What the hell did she see in him? Dick Gunn looked older than Miles himself, a lot older in fact. The thought of this gross businessman copulating with Samantha played on his mind. ‘Is my daughter home, Conception?’ he asked his Filippina maid each morning, as he left the house.
Conception looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m not sure Mr Straker. I think maybe she don’t come home just yet.’
Then Miles would explode, and spend the day finding fault with his secretaries and with every aspect of his business.
One weekend he practically commanded Samantha to come down to Chawbury, so he could see her and speak to her, and with reluctance she consented. But the weekend was not a success. Miles found her elusive, hardly leaving her bedroom except for meals, and unwilling to be drawn on the subject of Gunn.
‘So, Sam,’ he said at dinner, ‘tell us about your new young man. The one we keep seeing you with in the newspapers.’
Sam shrugged and replied, ‘He’s fine.’
‘You don’t think he’s too young for you, then? Your toyboy?’
She didn’t reply.
‘Well, you don’t sound very keen on him. Come on, we’d like to hear about him. Your brothers and sisters are interested, and so are your mother and I.’
It was a rare weekend when all four Straker children were present, home from their universities and jobs.
‘Are we going to be allowed to meet him? You can invite him here to Chawbury, with some other young friends. Make a weekend of it. A young weekend. Everyone bring sleeping bags. Boys in one room, girls in another. I’ll be patrolling all night, of course.’
‘Leave it, dad. It’s not funny.’
‘Aah, the girl can talk. Now you’ve regained the power of speech, Samantha, come on, your parents would like to hear about your suitor. Perfectly normal, natural request. You’re not embarrassed about him, are you? Give us the lowdown. What’s he look like? Is he very handsome, this Mr Gunn? Has he got a car? Has he taken you to meet his parents? Assuming they’re still alive, that is?’
‘Dad, stop it, please.’
‘No, I won’t stop it. And since you seem not to want to tell us anything about him, perhaps you’d like to hear my views on the subject. Which are that it’s utterly disgusting. Revolting. He must be a pervert, a great big man in his fifties, preying on a twenty-year-old. It’s beauty and the beast. I don’t know how you can bear it. Shut your eyes and think of England, I suppose.’
Davina shook her head at her husband, warning him to stop.
‘No, Davina, I’m sorry but I am going to say this. I wouldn’t be a responsible parent if I didn’t. And I don’t approve, Samantha. I thoroughly disapprove. And I don’t want you to go on seeing Mr Gunn.’ He drew a cigar from his pocket and snipped off the end. ‘Do you understand me? You’re to end this right now.’
‘For God’s sake, Dad. Stop being pompous.’
‘I am not being pompous. This is basic morality. And I absolutely mean what I say. You don’t have a job and who’s supporting you? Your father is, thank you very much. And if you persist in seeing this ridiculous fellow, I’m going to stop paying. Lover boy can support you instead, do you understand me?’ Then, turning to his other children, he asked, ‘What do you lot think, then? You’ve all gone very quiet. Are you happy about your sister hanging round with a man almost three times her age. Does it strike you as seemly, Mollie?’
‘Well, I don’t actually think you should judge anyone by their age. We shouldn’t be ageist.’ Mollie could see her father ready to explode, so quickly added, ‘But he doesn’t sound like a very nice or kind person, from what I’ve read about him.’
Miles grimaced. You could trust Mollie to see everything the wrong way round. ‘Archie?’
‘Yeah, well. I haven’t actually met the guy, Dad. But basically he does sound like a bit of an old fart.’
‘Peter?’
Peter shrugged. ‘I think it’s up to Sam.’
Miles scowled. ‘Well, let me make this crystal clear. Far as I’m concerned, it’s going to stop and stop now. And I’m perfectly serious about what will happen if it does not.’
But even as he issued the ultimatum, a devious new plan was forming in his mind.
32.
For eighteen weeks, and without breathing a word about it to Ross, Dawn had been travelling up to London every Wednesday by train, accompanied by Serena. Arriving at Waterloo, they would take a taxi across town to rendezvous with one of the several estate agents that had become her new friends, meeting on doorsteps to be let in and shown round. Generally, they would visit four properties in the morning, then have a quick lunch at one of the restaurants Serena recommended, before catching an afternoon train back to Micheldever.
Dawn regarded these clandestine trips as amongst the happiest and most enlightening she’d experienced. Travelling with Serena was a revelation. Previously, Dawn had always felt an outsider in London. As she confessed, ‘I hardly know the place, I couldn’t find Harrods if you paid me. To be honest, I find it quite scary in town.’ With Serena as her guide, however, everything felt easy and un-threatening. It was like visiting a different city. With Ross, she’d travelled down from Droitwich for the
rugby, and visited the stores along Oxford Street, and her impression was always of too many people, too much traffic, fumes and rudeness. When they’d taken Gemma and Debbie to see Les Miserables, they’d had supper afterwards at an Angus Steak House and been disappointed by how un-glamorous it was in the fabled West End. Serena took her to neighbourhoods she’d never visited before, Chelsea and Kensington, Holland Park and Notting Hill, full of interesting shops and tranquil streets, and big white houses she wouldn’t mind living in herself. It was after one of the fabric-seeking expeditions to choose curtains for the living room windows, when they were rewarding their efforts with a salad and glass of champagne at Joe’s Café in Sloane Street, that Dawn said, ‘I really could imagine keeping a place up in town, Serena. A proper one, I mean, not Ross’s little pied à terre. It’s all very well and good being stuck down in Chaw-bury, and I do enjoy the countryside, but I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself all day when the girls leave home and get their own places.’
‘Maybe you should buy somewhere in London,’ Serena said. The prospect of decorating a second house for the Cleggs held obvious appeal, and the work at Chawbury Park could not be spun out much longer.
‘Ross would never agree. He’s negative like that.’
‘It couldn’t hurt if you looked at a few places though, could it? Just to see what’s out there, get a feel for the market.’
Dawn was dubious. ‘He’s a lovely man, my husband, but so tight with his pennies. And a big place in town would cost buckets, wouldn’t it?’
‘The market is a bit crazy at the moment. But that’s what makes London property such a great investment. It keeps on going up and up. And it’s not going to stop.’
So it was decided that Serena would contact some estate agents she knew, and she and Dawn would start getting their eye in. They agreed there was no point mentioning anything to Ross, not yet anyway, not before they found somewhere perfect with investment potential. Dawn was keen to concentrate the search on the new, prestigious parts of town she’d recently discovered, and favoured a white stucco house over anything redbrick. As she explained to Serena, it was important to have good entertaining space with sufficient room to give a proper supper party. Though she did not say so out loud, she already imagined James and Laetitia coming over one evening for a meal, something she still felt insecure about risking at Chawbury Park.
Dawn was immediately impressed by the estate agents, and a little intimidated by them too. They were all such complete … gentlemen. Tall, pinstriped and endlessly deferential, they stood back to allow her to enter every room ahead of themselves, and tantalised her with stories about the next-door neighbours at each property they viewed. ‘Entrenous, Mrs Clegg, we sold Number 14 to a very senior commercial silk. And the house on your other side we sold to the manager of the Spice Girls.’ And unlike Ross they agreed with her on everything, and congratulated her on her shrewdness in seeking a London property. ‘You’re getting in at exactly the right time,’ they told her. ‘Prices are seriously on the rise, but there’s still plenty of headroom, a long way still to go. But you don’t want to hang about,’ they warned. ‘A lot of our new instructions are being sold even before they reach the market. There’s a lot of Russian and Hong Kong money around.’
The more properties Dawn viewed, the more confident she felt about what she was seeking. She soon realised the majority of London houses are built to identical five-storey configurations, with narrow double-living rooms on the first floor and a warren of small bedrooms on the two or three floors above, with bathroom extensions on the half landings. It didn’t matter whether you were in South Kensington or Belgravia, all were essentially the same. If you wanted generous reception space—and this Dawn desired above everything—you had to go for something a lot dearer. Initially, she was horrified by the prices. She had envisaged paying up to a million—a million pounds, could she really be a lady looking at million pound properties?—but soon realised even two million bought you very little. By the third visit, they were viewing houses priced at 2.4 and then 2.7 million (‘You can always put in a cheeky offer,’ said the estate agents. ‘Though obviously it’s rather a sellers’ market at present, owing to the shortage of good properties in the 2.5 to 3 million bracket.’)
By the sixth week they had nudged up yet further, and were looking at places with three to four million price tags. Having viewed a spectacular white mansion in Phillimore Gardens, just out of curiosity, for which the Belgian vendors were asking five million, it was impossible to readjust downwards; the houses in Edwardes Square and Kensington Square suddenly felt narrow and cramped by comparison, and Dawn couldn’t imagine herself showing Laetitia up such mean staircases to the first floor living room, since they would be unable to walk two abreast.
She shared her misgivings with Serena, who was wonderfully reassuring. They were sitting in the bar of the Berkeley hotel, having just viewed a heavily-gilded up-and-up house in Wilton Crescent, and Dawn felt suddenly confused and overwhelmed by the hunt. Both their principal estate agents, Robert de Vass and Nigel Shuttlebuck, had been so endlessly patient, and shown them round so many gracious homes, Dawn felt it was becoming embarrassing she hadn’t chosen anywhere. In fact, she felt she ought to be buying a place from both of them, she couldn’t bear that they’d put in so much time if they didn’t make a sale. And then there was Ross. It was uncomfortable going behind his back. She could hear him now, his voice in her head: ‘You’ve been looking at houses costing how much? Six million quid? Are you quite mad, lass?’
But then, emboldened by a second kir royale, she reflected: Is six million so very much money? When we’re worth over a hundred. Not for the first time, she recognised Ross’s limitations. He was such a decent, hardworking, caring man, but he hadn’t adjusted to their altered circumstances. Left to himself, Dawn guessed he might never adapt at all, continuing to live in the same house, in exactly the same way as they had before they came into money. What a waste it would be: to have made all this lovely cash and do nothing with it. No, Dawn recognised it was her duty to raise his sights.
Shepherded by Serena, the quest now focused only on homes of more than 6,000 square feet, which alone could provide the desired reception space. With Robert or Nigel (and sometimes both together, since they had joint instructions on many of the largest properties), Dawn inspected stucco palaces in the Little Boltons, Tregunter Road, Dawson Place, Old Church Street, Chelsea Square, Palace Gardens Terrace and numerous others until all blurred into a single entity of tall corniced ceilings, designer kitchens and basement staff accommodation. ‘I really don’t think we could go quite as high as eight million,’ she heard herself apologising to Nigel, after viewing the former Croatian consulate off Chester Square.
‘Totally understood, Mrs Clegg,’ Nigel replied. ‘I believe this one’s under offer in any case to a Mainland Chinese family.’
Just as she was despairing of ever finding anywhere, Robert took them to view a house in Holland Park. ‘I have to warn you, Mrs Clegg, this one needs a lot of TLC. It’s still partitioned up into studios at the moment, but it’s freehold and offered with vacant possession. It’s being disposed of by a charitable trust.’
From the moment they drew up outside the pedimented façade, with its pillared front door set into the middle of a double-fronted stucco-faced mansion, Dawn had a good feeling about the place. However when after much fumbling Robert managed to unlock the stuck door, and they had stepped into a wide dilapidated hall, she almost lost her nerve, instantly deterred by the sagging ceilings and pervading smell of damp and urine.
‘It’s been used until recently as a refuge for battered women,’ Robert said. ‘You’ve got to view it as virgin canvas. Wonderful opportunity. I can’t remember when I last saw an unrenovated house of this size in Holland Park. And, of course, the condition is fully reflected in the asking price.’
Had Serena not been on hand to talk up the potential, and point out the various original features such as the fan-lig
ht above the front door and some badly graffitied marble mantelpieces at both ends of the thirty foot drawing room, Dawn would surely never have given the place serious consideration; the task was too daunting, the condition too far gone. She was particularly put off by three stained mattresses leaning against the wall in the master bedroom, cracked sinks in the corner of every room and the unpleasant smell wafting up from a disconnected lavatory. As they clambered higher to the third and fourth storeys, the staircase lights, controlled by a plastic timer, suddenly went off, plunging them into darkness. But Serena said, ‘Look at the views from up here across the communal garden, Dawn. Stunning. It’s one of the best-kept ones too, Holland Park Square.’
At that moment, as they were gazing onto the lawn and shrubberies from a top-floor window, Dawn said, ‘It can’t be. That looks like Miles Straker down there.’ She peered at the tall, handsome figure striding along the path. ‘It is him. And Davina too, look.’ She could clearly see her dear friend trailing behind Miles. ‘I must say hello.’
She hastened down to the first floor drawing room, where Robert yanked open a jammed French window.
‘Miles, Davina, coo-ee. I’m up here-ere.’
Miles glanced up to see the eager face of Dawn, waving at him from the balcony of the hostel for battered women. Ross had always struck him as a rough diamond, but it was unforeseen that Dawn should have ended up there. Then he spotted the pinstriped figure of Robert de Vass of Knight Frank standing beside her, and a nervous-looking Serena lurking behind them both.
‘Dawny, what a surprise,’ Davina was calling up to her. ‘What are you doing there?’
‘Viewing the property … we’re thinking of buying a place in town.’
‘But that’s wonderful,’ Davina replied. ‘You’ve got to get that one. It’s the nicest on the whole garden. It would be lovely having you so close.’
Pride and Avarice Page 24