Pride and Avarice

by Nicholas Coleridge

  After several months, both parties were issued with forms for the full disclosure of their assets, which ran to many pages. Davina found herself making a list of all her clothes and jewellery, including the few pieces inherited from her mother, with an estimate of the value of every item. Compelled to list her equities, investments, pensions and cash deposits, as well as the value of any UK or overseas properties held in her own name, she realised her net assets amounted to virtually nothing. Miles, meanwhile, was drawing up his own list. Unable to decide whether to transfer most of his money offshore, out of reach of Davina, or whether to list the whole lot and thus make himself look big in the eyes of his lawyers, he decided to wire three million pounds to a bank in Switzerland but disclose the rest.

  As the months passed, Miles had to admit that running Chawbury Manor at arms length was more difficult than he first believed. There was an almost endless list of inconsequential chores to be undertaken, not all of which could be dealt with by Sara and the girls at the office. Maddeningly, Mrs French expected to be talked to on a regular basis, with menus to be discussed and dozens of small domestic queries. Miles considered himself far too busy to sit down in the kitchen with his housekeeper and debate hoover bags and food for the next weekend. Couldn’t she think of them herself? After all, she’d worked at Chawbury for years, she surely knew by now what he liked eating. But he soon discovered Mrs French could not be relied upon to serve meals in the manner Miles expected, or on the correct tableware. When he attempted to give Saturday night dinner parties for their neighbours, continuing life as before, and invited Ridley and Susie Nairn, Johnnie and Philippa Mountleigh and Nigel and Bean Winstanton, he found peculiar navy blue paper napkins set on the table, and the wrong wine glasses and supermarket cheeses still in their plastic wrappings on the cheeseboard. It was extremely frustrating. The obvious solution, which was to brief Mrs French on what he wanted, was not something he was prepared to do.

  Similarly, the house seemed to become less civilised week by week. Nobody any longer unbolted the French doors onto the terrace before his return. The wrong lights were switched on in the drawing room. Fires were left un-laid or laid in the wrong way with fircones (which he detested) instead of kindling. In his bathroom, unpleasant purple soaps appeared on the bathrack smelling of violets and disinfectant. Lilies and orchids, once so pretty in cachepots around the house, and tended by Davina in the Chawbury greenhouse, were replaced by supermarket sprays from Freeza Mart. The downstairs cloakroom ran out of lavatory paper and was replenished with peach quilted toilet roll. Exasperated, he sacked Mrs French and told Sara to interview replacement housekeepers.

  The indoor shortcomings of Mrs French were only part of the problem. Each weekend, Miles encountered displeasing evidence of slackness in the garden too. After heavy storms, fallen branches and twigs were left lying on the lawn by his gardeners, instead of being immediately gathered up and burned. The greenhouses became untidy and borders inadequately weeded. Gutters overflowed with leaves. He spent a great deal of time trying to amuse himself with his boys’ toys, riding around the estate on his yellow JCB excavator or zipping about on his new John Deere utility tractor. Then a problem emerged with the Chawbury burglar alarm which kept going off for no reason and may have been an electrical fault. When Miles told Sara to speak to the utility company, Trent Valley Power 4 U, and get them to sort things out with the alarm people, she reported that the call centre refused to talk to her and could only speak to the named bill payer because of data protection. Furious, Miles was held in a queue by the call centre, then routed through to Bangalore where ‘customer services’ was apparently based these days. When he explained he was a personal friend of Trent Valley Power 4 U’s chief executive ‘who regularly lunches with me’, the Indian functionary had never heard of him nor of Mark’s Club.

  Privately, Miles began to concede Davina may have done more at Chawbury than he’d given her credit for.

  52.

  Through his contacts at the town hall, Greg was able to jump the housing queue and secure a new, much larger council property in a street behind Hammersmith Grove. Originally earmarked for a multi-generational family of Romanian gypsies recently arrived in the UK, Greg pressed the case that as newlyweds with frontline occupations in teaching and politics their need was greater, so he and Mollie moved out of their respective flats and into the Georgian terrace opposite a petrol station. With the aid of local authority grants Greg was so adept at securing, they soon had the place painted from top to bottom, a new gas boiler and hot water system installed, and the loft insulated free of charge by the ratepayer.

  Mollie was delighted with their new home and set about making it as welcoming and comfortable as she could. Although it slightly embarrassed her they had so many empty bedrooms, she secretly hoped they might over time fill them all with happy children. Meanwhile, she planned on inviting several of her pupils from school for sleepovers, if their parents agreed and once the local education authority had completed the necessary checks.

  The one small blot on her happiness was Greg’s rigid attitude to the decorating. She had taken it for granted the furniture from both their flats would be brought to Sudan Road, and the new house reflect a mixture of both their tastes. Greg, however, had other ideas. He insisted only his own furniture—the black leather sofas and Eames chair—be placed in the double sitting room downstairs, and only his own art and memorabilia be displayed on the sitting room walls. When Mollie plugged in one of her ceramic lamps with the starfish pattern, Greg moved it to an upstairs bedroom. When she arranged her framed family photographs on a table in the sitting room, including one of her parents on a wooden bench at Chaw-bury, Greg snapped, ‘Those can’t stay there, it’d give completely the wrong idea.’ It soon became clear there were to be two separate zones in the house—the public area which became a virtual recreation of Greg’s old bachelor flat, and the upstairs floors where Mollie was grudgingly permitted to display her colourful rugs, bedcovers and lamps. A room at the top of the house was allocated to her as a study, where she positioned her desk in front of the window and had a place of her own to do her marking, and to pin up paintings by her pupils.

  No sooner was the house ready to receive visitors than Greg began to entertain. These gatherings, he explained to Mollie, could not be seen primarily as social in intention, and were certainly not frivolous ‘parties.’ Guests were invited strictly for political considerations, being colleagues from the Council, Labour apparatchiks from Millbank and from the Institute for Public Policy Research, left-leaning journalists and increasingly Members of Parliament and their advisors. When Mollie suggested she include some of her fellow schoolteachers and old flatmates, or her brother Peter when he was in town to see his record company, Greg refused. ‘I don’t think that would be at all appropriate,’ he said.

  For the forty or so guests who did show up at these monthly suppers, Mollie had mixed reactions. Some were unquestionably good and well-meaning citizens with all the right progressive ideas, and the fact they were here in her house, eating her food, made her feel virtuous, and reminded her what a fine, idealistic man it was she had married. At these moments, she could see he was right to exclude her staff room colleagues, because they wouldn’t have been sufficiently serious or committed to the cause. She did secretly admit, however, that some of Greg’s new friends were dreadfully pleased with themselves, and she couldn’t say for certain she liked them. It irritated her, too, that the young researchers from Labour Party headquarters, who worked for something called the ‘Instant rebuttal team,’ never remembered meeting her before even though they’d been introduced three or four times. She realised she wasn’t that interesting—not in their terms anyway, with all their talk of ‘Tony’ and ‘Peter’ and ‘Alastair’—but nonetheless, it was annoying. So, over time, she rather gave up trying to make conversation with them, and concentrated on replenishing the food and emptying ashtrays.

  ‘Well, the offer stands if you want to take it up. Y
ou think about it, young man, and let me know.’ Ross had called round at Roupell Street to talk to Archie, having been put up to it by Dawn.

  Archie, for his part, didn’t know what to think. The prospect of working for Gemma’s dad at Freeza Mart didn’t exactly turn him on. ‘What’d I be doing? Stacking shelves?’

  ‘We’d start you off as a trainee in the marketing department, probably. That’s in the same building as me on Southbank. Ten minutes walk from here, which is why I bought this property in the first place.’

  Archie looked sceptical. Working somewhere like Freeza Mart was simply not something he’d considered. It wasn’t the sort of job people did; the people he knew, in any case. He imagined it would be pretty deadly, and you’d be working with grockles. And it wouldn’t be a great reply when anyone asked what you did. Like if some juicy bird comes up at a party, and you had to admit, ‘I’m a trainee at Freeza Mart.’ She isn’t exactly going to leap into the sack.

  On the other hand, Archie realised he had to find something to do. He still had the bouncer job at Thurloes, but it didn’t pay well, and without the allowance from his dad he was perpetually skint. It was so pathetic of Miles cutting him off and not even telling him. The first he’d known about it was when he was badly overdrawn. In fact, if it wasn’t for Gemma doing three days a week temping at Freeza Mart as junior PA to the ops director, they’d be stony broke.

  So this job offer from Ross came at a good moment, and the money wasn’t terrible either. £26,500 a year. You weren’t exactly going to get rich on it, but it was more than he took home from the club.

  He knew Gemma wanted him to accept, but then she would. Anything her dad said she thought was brilliant. It was annoying, the way she hero worshipped him. There’d been a glowing profile of Ross in one of the Sunday supplements saying how clever he was and how the new Freeza Mart in California were performing well, and Gemma had cut it out and stuck it on the fridge. Archie felt undermined. Gemma was meant to be totally obsessed with him—Archie—wasn’t she? Not her dad.

  There again, Ross did seem like quite a decent bloke, you couldn’t really say he wasn’t. He’d always been civil towards him and never brought up that business after the Hospers Ball, when he easily could have done. Under the circumstances, you could say it was quite magnanimous of him to be offering him a job. Over the weekend, he rang his mum and asked her advice, and Davina said she was sure he should take it. In fact, Davina already knew about the job from Dawn, who had first suggested the idea after a yoga session.

  ‘Won’t Dad go ape?’

  ‘Probably your father won’t be very pleased,’ Davina conceded. ‘But I don’t think you should worry too much about that. It sounds like a perfect first job for you, and nice it’s so close to Gemma’s house, you’ll be able to walk to work together.’

  The more he thought about it, Archie felt it would be a good way of getting his own back on Miles, working for Freeza Mart would annoy him so much.

  So, after two formality interviews with the Freeza Mart HR department and with his future head of department, Archie became the 17,272nd employee of his not-quite-father-in-law’s company.

  Archie was surprised, and privately pleased, to discover he was rather good at marketing. He had a natural talent for it, which was hardly surprising being Miles Straker’s son, not that Archie attributed his ability to genetics. Whatever the reason, he quickly absorbed the syndicated research and reams of demographic and quantative data which was the lifeblood of the department. He found it oddly satisfying to be able to compare the Waitrose customer base with, say, the Sainsbury’s customer, and pinpoint the dozens of small idiosyncrasies between them. Freeza Mart’s Director of Customer Development, Barry Shipley, who’d come over from Pendletons, and his deputy, Gill Sweet, who’d previously been at Superdrug, were big advocates of qualitative research and one of Archie’s first tasks was to tabulate responses to 50,000 questionnaires, some conducted face to face, others online, in which Freeza Mart customers were interrogated on their attitude to carbon emissions, destination shopping, plastic packaging and organic versus farmed salmon. A parallel survey invited customers to rank twenty attributes of the supermarket in order of importance. Top came ‘value for money,’ followed by ‘shorter queues at check-out.’ Only slightly behind, in third place, came ‘Ross Clegg’ himself, who scored highly under ‘honesty,’ ‘down to earth’ and ‘understands ordinary families like us.’

  Having never previously worked in an office environment, Archie was half enthralled, half repelled by it. He detested the labyrinth of low-level partitions in which everyone sat with their computers and cuddly toy mascots and photographs of their kids and pets pinned up. He was tempted to stick up a picture of Gemma nude in the bath, or the one he’d taken of her on the furry sitting room rug acting out a Playboy centrefold. But maybe it wouldn’t go down too well, Gemma being the boss’s daughter. His co-workers, he reckoned, were sad sacks. With a few notable exceptions, he regarded them as braindead. In the mornings, they ate bowls of cereal at their desks, before tapping moronically on their keyboards all day; at lunchtime they made pot noodles with boiling water from the kettle, or shopped for groceries at Freeza Mart Metro using their staff discount cards. On the other hand, there were consolations to office life. There were several definite honeys working in Direct Response on the eleventh floor, and Archie liked to wander up and hang out by the water cooler, chatting them up. Competition was non-existent, so they were always receptive. And, he had to admit, it certainly wasn’t a disadvantage having Ross as his mentor. Even though he seldom mentioned the connection, everyone seemed to know he was shacked-up with Ross’s daughter, and indulged him as a result. If he was late completing a piece of work, he never got bollocked, and he was included in meetings he might otherwise not have been.

  When Sharon Turner, who had been in the department four years and was senior to Archie, announced she was leaving to go travelling, Archie got promoted into her job ahead of six other candidates and inherited her office, a glass-walled pod with a door and nine carpet tiles, the size of a telephone kiosk.

  53.

  The sudden death of Laetitia Pendleton in such distressing circumstance made front-page news in every national newspaper. Although prior to the accident she was virtually unknown to the wider public, the fact she was married to ‘billionaire grocer Lord Pendleton,’ combined with the particularly ironic cause of death, meant she achieved overnight fame, provoking acres of comment from columnists and obituarists alike.

  On Day One came the bald facts of the tragedy. Lady Pendleton was shopping in her local Andover branch of the family supermarket when she had slipped on a spillage of concentrated orange juice, cracked her head in an aisle, was concussed, rushed to hospital and never regained consciousness. Despite the best efforts of doctors and neurosurgeons in intensive care, she died seven hours later of a massive brain haemorrhage. A photograph of Lady Pendleton taken six years earlier with Princess Margaret at the anniversary concert was reproduced on several front pages, along with the information that her husband, James, was head of the ‘eight billion supermarket clan.’

  By Day Two, the talents of Straker Communications had been brought into play, and fulsome obituaries appeared in the broadsheets acknowledging Laetitia’s contributions to the cultural community and membership of numerous boards for the visual and performing arts. In every obituary the Pendletons were described as ‘fiercely private’ and it was emphasised how many of the family’s bursaries and philanthropic bequests were made on the assurance of complete anonymity. Several museum directors and curators, in the United States as well as in Britain, remembered how unpretentious Laetitia had been, and the story was much repeated about how she had queued patiently for three hours with the general public to get into the hit BritArt Sensation show at the Royal Academy, when at least eight key pieces were loaned by James and Laetitia themselves; a single telephone call would have enabled her to jump the queue.

  By Day Three, the maca
brely comic aspects of her death moved to the fore, and articles of dubious taste began to appear in the papers. The Daily Express conducted a consumer test on the relative slippiness of various orange juices, from Tropicana and Mr Juicy to Sunny Delight and Pendletons’s own brand concentrate. It emerged that a stack of cartons, being transported to the shelves from the stockroom on a caged trolley, had collided with a freezer unit, causing the fatal spillage. The Daily Mail ran no fewer than five items on the tragedy, including columns by Allison Pearson and Amanda Platell, gossip from Ephraim Hardcastle and an op-ed piece on the advisability or otherwise of wealthy, titled women doing their own grocery shopping.

  By Day Four, the health sections got in on the act, questioning how beneficial orange juice was in a balanced diet. The Evening Standard ran a scare piece suggesting Vitamin C could give you stomach cramps if ingested in too large quantities.

  On Days Five and Six, The Times and Daily Telegraph ran competing two-part serials on the ‘Reluctant Billionaires,’ the Pendleton family, complete with family trees showing how everyone was related, and archive photographs from family weddings. Hugh Pendleton, James’s son, was tipped as a future chairman or chief executive.

  By Sunday, despite Miles’s strenuous efforts, the story took an unwelcome turn with several city commentators taking Laetitia’s death as the impetus for a wider survey of Pendletons’s prospects, and concluding it had lost ground to Freeza Mart. ‘Both in international expansion and dotcom, Ross Clegg has opened up a decisive lead over the third generation, family-owned grocer. How long investors and pension funds will allow this to continue, without questioning the present family management, is anyone’s guess. ‘Would Pendletons benefit from professional outside management?’ posed the weekend Financial Times.