Pride and Avarice

by Nicholas Coleridge

  Shortly before midday, the enormous Gunn motor yacht, Gunnslinger II, glided into the bay beneath the villa and dropped anchor. Seen from above where the Strakers were keeping watch from the terrace, the yacht seemed almost obscenely large, with two expanses of wooden deck and three tiers of windows, including the portholes of the crew accommodation at the waterline, and a pair of speedboats suspended above the stern from davits.

  ‘Oh God, look, they’ve got jet skis too,’ Archie said. ‘Those amazing new sort, which go twice as fast. Wicked.’

  ‘Is that a Jacuzzi on the top deck?’ Miles said, sounding pained. ‘That really is rather gross.’

  Samantha, who envisaged spending a lot of time in the Jacuzzi in the coming week, ignored the jibe.

  The crew were preparing the tenders to ferry the Gunn party to the jetty, and Davina, counting the number of people transferring into inflatable boats, said anxiously, ‘There’s an awful lot of them. I hope we’ve enough lunch for everyone.’

  As the Strakers descended the cliff steps to greet their guests, Miles surveyed the Gunn party, which seemed to consist of at least fifteen people. Dick himself was clearly visible, his vast gut bursting over a pair of knee length Villequebrun swimming trunks, with a pattern of red and white starfish and shells. He was bare chested but wore a safari hat and reflecting sunglasses. Two members of crew helped him in and out of the rib, which lowered noticeably in the water when he stepped in. As the boats neared the jetty, and Dick began the complicated business of clambering up the metal steps, you saw he had a holster round his waist containing a brace of mobile phones.

  Arriving on dry land, he lumbered over to Samantha and enveloped her in a bear hug. ‘Whoa, you’re looking juicy, sex goddess.’

  Sam giggled. ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘Why not? It’s what you are. We’ve needed you on board, there’s been a serious shortage of acceptable skirt.’

  The rest of the Gunn party was forming up on the jetty. Several seemed to be mini-me versions of Dick, with fat stomachs and Villequebrun swimwear, and turned out to work with him in private equity. There were several women too, predominantly blondes, in leopard print swimsuits and bikinis. Also in tow were a couple of small children, a boy and a girl, introduced as Dick’s kids by an ex-wife. Most of the visitors appeared to know Sam, greeting her with kisses and hugs.

  Miles began to feel irritable as this procession of strangers gave all their attention to Samantha, while ignoring him. Normally Miles was the first focus of attention at any gathering, and he resented being sidelined. In particular, he would have expected some respect from Dick who, having greeted Sam, became involved in protracted discussion with his yacht’s Captain, then picked up a phone call. By the time they’d climbed back up to the villa, Dick was sweating, and Miles feeling testy.

  Chairs had been set out in a semi-circle on the terrace for drinks, and Maria and Immacula prepared plates of crostini and bruschetta which Archie and Mollie handed round. Peter, assisted by a surly Fabulo, was in charge of dispensing Bellinis and wine.

  Dick plonked himself in a chair in the centre of the circle, surrounded on both sides by his acolytes, so Miles and Davina were relegated to the perimeter, which annoyed Miles even more. He reminded himself to remain calm; he needed Dick on side.

  Picking up a chair and moving it closer to the principal guest, he asked Dick, ‘So how’s summer been on board?’

  ‘Sybaritic. Done sweet FA except drink and eat with this bunch of reprobates,’ Dick replied, indicating his posse of mates. Still shirtless, his hairless chest fell in small bunches of fat, like half-inflated balloons; in order to sit down, he yanked up his swimming trunks above the knees, revealing swollen, fatty kneecaps. ‘We did manage one interesting deal. We’ve bought out Third Capita, the business relocation people, and are going to try and do something with that basket case.’

  ‘How long have you had the yacht?’

  ‘The current one? This is its second summer on the water. It took forever to build. I had to sue the shipyard in Hamburg, threaten to. It goes well though. A few niggles, nothing major. Bathrooms too small, that’s been the biggest fuck-up. I’m suing the designer.’ Then, turning his back on Miles, he called out, ‘Hey, Sammy, over here, darlin’, and sit on my lap.’

  Sam perched on his fat knees, and Dick said, ‘Go on, jiggle about a bit, sweetheart. Give us a knee trembler.’ The Gunn acolytes cheered her along.

  ‘The last time we had lunch guests arrive here by yacht was the Pendletons,’ Miles said. ‘James and Laetitia.’ He didn’t want Dick to think they were unaccustomed to visits from yacht owners, and the Pendletons were many times richer than Gunn.

  ‘They charter, don’t they, the Pendletons? It’s not their own yacht. I’m particular like that, I prefer my own spec.’

  Miles had a hideous premonition of what life would be like with Dick as his son-in-law. Until that moment, he had never given a minute’s consideration to what he expected in Samantha’s future husband, since it still seemed impossibly far off; but, instinctively, he had hoped for some bright, well-spoken, keen young man, full of respect for his successful father-in-law. Instead, he was faced with this gross asset-stripper, who was all but stripping Sam of her assets in front of him.

  Lunch was called in the loggia, and they took their places at the long wooden table. Miles took care to position himself next to Dick, awaiting the optimum moment for the conversation he needed to have. On Miles’s other side was a nut-brown blonde in a leopard-skin bikini. Close-up, her skin showed signs of advanced skin damage, with wrinkles and sunspots.

  ‘I’ve been hearing about your cruise,’ Miles said to her. ‘Are you an old friend of Dick’s?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m Sybilla, Dick and I were together for four years,’ the girl replied. ‘On and off.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I was two before Sam,’ she said matter-of-factly, compressing a handful of Parma ham in her fingertips.

  Surveying the dynamics of the lunch party, Miles wasn’t sure it was going well. The Gunn visitors and Straker family seemed alarmingly unintegrated, each group sticking to its own. Davina was working hard on her neighbour, Dick’s corporate lawyer, and Peter was talking to Dick’s six-year-old daughter, but elsewhere it all felt distinctly sticky. The Gunn group, accustomed to high living on the yacht, seemed dissatisfied with the food and company, and were talking noisily amongst themselves. A man in a Hawaiian shirt said, ‘Where’s the fucking caviar? This is the first meal in a month with no caviar.’ Bridling, Miles noticed Dick’s hand resting on the crutch of Sam’s bikini. The moment had come. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, turning to Dick. ‘You’re in the market for takeover prospects, I might have an idea for you.’

  Dick looked interested.

  ‘Freeza Mart,’ Miles continued. ‘Worth a serious look. Growing exponentially, but doing so despite weak management. That’s Pendletons’s internal analysis, in any case.’

  ‘This is Ross wasisname’s show, right?’

  ‘That’s it. Clegg. Perfectly nice guy, but no genius. Lives locally to us in Hampshire. Anyway, point is, if you got in there, took the business private, ditched Ross and inserted first-rate management, you could clean up.’

  ‘Isn’t Ross any good, then? I heard he was.’

  ‘God, no. Less than useless. Devotes most of his time to personal self-promotion. Obsessed with his own PR.’

  ‘Really?’ Dick’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘You must have seen him in the Evening Standard guide the other day. The 1000 Most Powerful Poseurs, some nonsense like that. He adores that kind of thing, laps it up.’

  ‘You could be right,’ Dick replied, ‘but I’m not convinced there’s enough cost to take out. We took a look at the grocery sector recently, and my research people reported Freeza Mart was one of the most tightly managed.’

  ‘I’m surprised. Ross has been buying ten-million-pound houses for himself like there’s no tomorrow.’

  ‘That may be so.
But we’d need to believe we could enhance margins by five to six points or it’s not worth doing.’ He pronged several pieces of prosciutto and mozzarella on a fork, and crammed them into his mouth. ‘In fact, if we were going to take a run at the grocers, we’d more likely go after Sainsbury’s or Pendletons. There’s more fat on both of them … art in the boardroom, all that crap.’

  Miles’s heart fell. Across Dick’s fat knees, he could see Dick’s fat fingers probing the bottom of Sam’s bikini, and his daughter’s long brown legs extending endlessly under the table. Now Dick was whispering something into Sam’s ear, and she smiled eagerly. Then, before pudding and coffee could be served, Dick stood up, scraping back his chair.

  ‘Ok, team,’ he announced to the table. ‘Team Gunnslinger—back on board. We need to leave right away if we’re going to make Capri by dinner. The table’s booked for nine thirty.’ Then, turning to Miles, he said, ‘That was great, old man. I like your place. I might buy somewhere round here myself. Sam’s joining me on the boat if you don’t mind, I’ve sent her to collect her stuff, not that she needs bring much.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible,’ Miles said firmly. ‘Samantha’s on a family holiday, and I have her return air ticket from Rome to London.’

  ‘Not an issue. She can fly back in my plane with me, there’s plenty of room. It’s only me and the kids using it.’

  34.

  For two hours every Thursday morning, though it felt much longer, Ross endured the visits to his office of his presentational coach, Megan Miller of Megan Miller Associates. It had been Freeza Mart’s corporate PR company that first recommended the appointment of a presentational coach, and directed him to Megan. Ross initially resisted the idea vehemently, saying he didn’t need or want any fancy-pants consultants telling how to dress and speak, and anyway he didn’t have the time, and he’d prefer to be judged on his company results than his party manners. But following a couple of challenging interviews in the business sections of the Sunday newspapers, when he didn’t feel he’d got his message across clearly enough, and found he was battling against a lot of negative spin from competitors, Ross changed his mind.

  ‘Ok,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it a try. But if they tell me to start wearing a pink bow tie and aftershave or dressing from some poncey gents outfitters, I’m chucking it in right away.’

  Not long afterwards, he had his initial appraisal with Megan. A one-time newsreader with Granada television, who still made periodic appearances on screen, Ross was immediately impressed by her, and by her sexy tortoiseshell glasses. Megan explained her role would encompass everything from media training for TV and print interviews, to helping Ross position himself as a coherent brand.

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean then,’ Ross asked, sceptically.

  ‘It’s all about building up a story around you,’ Megan said. ‘Right now, I don’t know much about you at all, nor do the public. You’re basically an unknown quantity.’

  ‘That’s just how I like it,’ Ross said. ‘Our customers aren’t interested in Ross Clegg. They want to know our tuna and sweetcorn are consistently less dear than Pendletons’s tuna and sweetcorn, and our household essentials cost less than the same product at Asda.’

  ‘Wrong,’ replied Megan. ‘Well, you’re absolutely right about value, of course, and that’s what you do best. I can’t help you with that, it’s the meat and potatoes of your business. But you’re mistaken if you think shoppers aren’t interested in you. Or, anyway, that they wouldn’t be interested if they knew who you were. People know who owns Topshop, right? They know—or some of them do—the guy who runs Marks & Spencer, he’s always in the papers. And everyone knows Richard Branson.’

  Ross made a face. ‘Listen, Megan, let me make one thing clear. I don’t want to be Richard Branson, thank you very much, or anything like him.’

  Megan laughed. ‘Point taken. I won’t morph you into Branson. Shame. I was about to tell you to grow a beard and get bigger teeth. Just kidding.’ Then she turned serious. ‘I don’t actually want you to change at all, I want you to be yourself. That’s once we’ve agreed what yourself is. My job is to talk to Ross Clegg about Ross Clegg, establish his character—the bits that tell a story, and work it up into something. Give you some definition for your media profile It’s an editing process. Focusing on the essence of the man.’

  Ross shrugged. ‘Well I’ve got to warn you, Megan, you’ve not got a lot to work with. I’m not a particularly fascinating bloke, you know. I didn’t row for England or win a gold medal in the Olympics or anything, before coming into this business.’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘Nothing. That’s just it. This is all I’ve done. I set up Freeza Mart when I was twenty-four years old, that was the first store in Droitwich. It was only small—tiny compared to the superstores we’re putting up today. Fifteen hundred square feet. You could have fitted ninety of them inside our new Paddington Basin store, and fortty-nine into the new Selly Oak one.’

  ‘How long was it before you opened your second branch then?’

  ‘The second store? Two years. That was in Redditch. We’d have done it quicker if it wasn’t for Dawn having our first kid. That’s Greg. He was almost born on the shop floor, literally. Dawn was serving a customer and filling their plastic bags—it was all plastic shopping bags then, before we got into this eco business—and suddenly the baby started coming. I had to shut up store, into the car, and we just made it to the hospital. Another ten minutes and I’d have been delivering him myself in the car park, we were that close.’

  ‘So your wife worked with you at Freeza Mart?’

  ‘Dawn was our first employee. Not that the business could afford to pay her anything, it couldn’t pay either of us, come to that. We lived off the food that was past its sell-by. I shouldn’t say that, should I, not in an interview. The health and safety people will be down on us.’

  ‘Actually, I think you should say it. It’s a good story. Use it next time.’ She made a note in her pad. ‘Were either of your parents in retail?’

  ‘Retail! Well, they wouldn’t have used that word for a start. They’d not have known what it meant. My mum helped out at the local haberdashers, when they were busy, and my nan worked there too, but my father was a steel man, in the old Dudley works for twenty years until they shut it down. I often wonder what he’d say if he saw some of the new Freeza Mart stores. It’s a shame he’s not still around. I can hear him now: ‘Forty different varieties of yoghurt?’ I’m sure he never ate a yoghurt in his life. The choice today, people take it for granted. We’ve got 70,000 product lines in Paddington. Three hundred and sixty different cheeses. In our first shop, we only sold cheddar and Dutch Edam—the one with the red waxy rind, remember that? And cheddar slices, pre-cut with plastic leaves in between. They were very popular, people put them in sandwiches in their lunchbox. That’s something else you don’t see, lunchboxes. People prefer to buy a sandwich from our grub-on-the-run bakery.’

  ‘I have to ask about the limp.’ Megan said. ‘Sorry. But people do ask. Polio, wasn’t it? I think I read that somewhere.’

  So Ross told her about his childhood affliction and the three years of hospital visits and blood tests it had taken before he was finally diagnosed free of it, and how it had prevented him from playing any sport. ‘Not as a youngster. I had to stand by and watch my mates but could never join in, it was a very frustrating time. I was determined to beat it. There was this gym in the community centre with weight machines—they were still quite a novelty back then—and I worked on my upper body strength. Since my legs weren’t strong, I reckoned I’d work on the top half. Which is why, to this day, I have this over-developed torso—don’t worry, I’m not about to show you—and then these stick-like legs, one of them anyway.’

  ‘Can you manage any sports? You look fit.’

  ‘No squash, no jogging, nothing like that. But I swim regularly. And don’t laugh, Dawn’s been getting me into the horseback riding. O
ur younger daughter, Debbie, she’s always been mad keen, and Dawn rides out most days, when she’s able to. And recently I’ve been giving it a go. Just hacking out, nothing too clever. I hadn’t appreciated what good exercise it is. The first few times I was so stiff I could barely walk afterwards.’

  ‘That’s down in Hampshire somewhere, right?’

  ‘We built a place in Chawbury. Small village, nobody’s heard of it. I needed to relocate south when we expanded the business out of the West Midlands.’

  ‘Chawbury? Doesn’t Miles Straker have a place there? I went to a big lunch a few summers ago. I’ve done media training for some of his clients.’

  ‘That’s right. Miles and Davina. They live across the valley from our place. Dawn sees more of them than I do, and our daughters are good mates.’ Ross looked thoughtful, and Megan sensed that there might be more he wasn’t saying. Then he went on, ‘By coincidence, we recently bought a place up in town, which is right across from them too. Over in West London.’ He shrugged. ‘I’d probably not have bought the place; it was Dawn’s idea. She’d seen this house—far too big for us really—and I was dead set against.’