Pride and Avarice

by Nicholas Coleridge

  At the halfway point of the valley, he turned as he always did to gaze back at the manor. He found himself unable to focus, seeing only the outline of his house and the big white tent alongside it. Cocooned inside the cabin, his brain swirled with insanity and revenge.

  Arriving at the wall of leylandii trees on the boundary of Ross’s property, he crashed through them, toppling several trunks with chain-tracked wheels. Twenty yards ahead was the Italian gazebo in which Dawn had loved to sit with her glass of Chablis on a summer’s evening, and he flattened that too. On and on he rumbled, striking out a lamppost as he passed with the JCB hammer arm, like the tail of a dinosaur loose in a big city. Now he was crossing the wilderness of Ross’s lawn, heading towards the house. He spotted the helipad across the drive, with the reviled helicopter parked dead centre on the letter H. Dropping into bottom gear for maximum thrust, he drove directly into it, knocking it over and flattening the fuselage, then reversing back over it. Now he turned again towards the house. The hollow fibreglass pillars by the entrance disintegrated at first push. ‘Ha!’ Miles muttered grimly to himself. ‘Ha!’ He was steering the JCB up the steps of Chawbury Park, smashing through the front door and into what Dawn had called ‘the reception hall’ and demolishing the horseshoe staircase, when he saw Ross sprinting through from the kitchen, alerted by the noise.

  ‘What the fuck …’ Ross shouted. ‘Miles, for Christ’s sake …’

  But Miles was experiencing a sharp tightening in his chest which quickly travelled to his neck, shoulder blades and arms. He felt nauseous and dizzy, and had the distinct feeling he was about to die. Then he collapsed across the steering wheel of the still-moving vehicle.

  He was still there when the ambulance arrived from Basingstoke and North Hampshire General Hospital, and the paramedics worked to restart his heart before carrying him away on a stretcher.

  70.

  Miles spent eight days and nights in intensive care, followed by a further seven weeks in hospital before his doctors would consider discharging him. His consultant told Davina that he had never before encountered such high or reactive blood pressure, and he was surprised Miles hadn’t suffered a heart attack much earlier, his levels of stress being almost off the scale.

  Davina travelled down to Basingstoke as soon as she heard about the heart attack, and spent virtually the next two months at his hospital bedside. It was Davina who liaised with the doctors and with the medical insurance people, and who organised the rota for the children’s hospital visits. It was Davina, too, who rang Ross and told him how horrified she was about what had happened, and apologised profusely, and said she thought Miles must have had some kind of clinical brainstorm, something must have flipped in his head. She promised they’d pay for every repair to his house, of course, and only hoped Ross wouldn’t prosecute.

  The newspaper coverage was mortifying too, and had to be kept from Miles as he began to recover. The Daily Mail had a field day describing the well-connected multi-millionaire spin-doctor and Tory grandee who’d bulldozed Ross Clegg’s mansion, ‘causing an estimated million pounds worth of damage.’ There had been photographs of both houses at opposite ends of the valley—the Manor and the Park—and pictures of Miles and Davina, and pictures of Ross and Dawn, and pictures of Dawn with James, and lists of all the high-profile guests who’d witnessed the vandalism from the marquee. Had Miles been allowed to read it, he’d certainly have had a second heart attack.

  Davina decided it made sense for her to move back into Chawbury Manor, into a spare bedroom, as a base for her daily visits to the hospital. The surviving gardeners and help at Chawbury were delighted by her return, feeling appreciated again for the first time in more than a year, and Davina was able to reassure them after the shock of what came to be known as ‘the incident’ which had left them shaken and fearful for their jobs. Soon, much of the old routine was re-established at the house, and Davina made a point of inviting the children to stay every weekend or whenever else they came down to visit their father. It was a good feeling having them all home again, in their old bedrooms, and hanging out as a family in the kitchen. As far as Davina was concerned, all Miles’s family feuds and banishments were abandoned. He was hardly in a position to object, in his present enfeebled state.

  The children found it all very difficult. The incident had shocked them, and Sam and Mollie in particular were mortified by the memory of their father in the JCB crushing Ross’s helicopter, clearly visible from the terrace and watched by the 300 guests. Now they were shocked by Miles’s appearance in hospital, grey-faced and propped up on pillows. Sometimes he scarcely seemed to recognise them, or was too tired to talk. When he did speak, his voice was husky and his breathing laboured. It was hard to connect this sad befuddled figure, hooked up to a saline drip and heart monitors, with the Miles of old.

  Davina was glad to have the children there with her, Peter especially, because there were big decisions to be made about Straker Communications. Several of the largest clients, such as Trent Valley Power 4 U and Eaziprint, had immediately sacked their agency after the incident, and of course they’d lost the Pendletons account too following Ross’s successful takeover. Revenues plunged by 70 percent and Rick Partington, Strakers’ MD, warned of further account losses to come. Hundreds of staff had to be let go, three floors in Golden Square stood empty, and it was difficult to envisage what future the business could have. New clients were unlikely to appoint a public relations consultancy whose crazy chairman had bulldozed Ross Clegg’s house. Strakers was a tarnished brand.

  After months of indecision, Davina agreed it made sense to dispose of the rump of the business for whatever they could get for it, and soon afterwards it was absorbed into one of Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP subsidiaries.

  Davina made other important decisions too, the first of which was to call off the divorce. She felt uncomfortable about leaving Miles in his present condition. It was one thing to leave a rich, vain, feuding, unfaithful control freak; another to leave the pitiful convalescent in the hospital bed. After weeks of negotiation with Ross’s insurance underwriters, agreement was reached on compensation for the damage Miles had caused to Chawbury Park and to the helicopter; Davina heard Ross had intervened personally with the insurance company and been very helpful behind the scenes in reducing the Strakers’ contribution. Nevertheless, with Straker Communications out of business and a sizeable compensation bill, Peter and his mother recognised the necessity of cutting back, and they put the Holland Park Square house on the market. Despite the credit crunch, it sold in a matter of weeks for a very good price, and the Strakers would be able to continue living comfortably at Chawbury Manor without problem or anxiety. On the advice of his doctors, they decided to say nothing about the sale to Miles at this point, in case the stress should trigger a relapse. He had been back home at Chawbury for several months now, but suffered a series of minor strokes which affected the muscles in his legs and his face, and it was becoming clear he might never make more than a partial recovery. Certainly all thought of any return to work was out of the question. He spent much of his time these days sitting in a favourite armchair in his study, looking at the newspapers or, more usually, the television. His concentration deteriorated noticeably, and he often dozed off in front of the screen. When the children came to visit, he was docile and benign, but sometimes confused about who was who and what jobs they all did. Both Samantha and Mollie were endlessly patient with him and even moved into the house for a period to help their mother look after him, despite Mollie having her seat in Droitwich and Redditch to nurse as well.

  Old friends like the Mountleighs, the Winstantons and the Nairns rallied round, shrugging off the terrible publicity of the incident, though it soon became clear that Miles wasn’t really any longer up to dinner parties. On the rare occasions he was coaxed out, his speech was slurred from the stroke and he was hard work for the people seated either side of him. Everyone commented on what a complete saint Davina was, the way she cared for him
so unselfishly. After Nigel Winstanton lost his job at Lehman Brothers, when the whole thing went belly-up during the credit crunch, he regularly drove over to Chawbury bringing a good bottle of wine, and sat with Miles in front of the racing on television all afternoon, getting quietly sozzled. When the weather became warmer again, Miles often sat outside on a deck chair watching Davina work in the garden. He seldom so much as glanced at the horizon and the gaping facade of Chawbury Park, unoccupied and shored-up by scaffolding.

  Ross had so much on his plate following the takeover that repairing the house had to be a low priority. The surveyors’ report said much of it was now structurally unsound, Miles having damaged several supporting walls, so it was going to require serious thought. His combined new supermarket group was second in size only to Tesco, and his workload punishing as he sought to integrate the two businesses as well as selling and leasing back all of the Pendletons store sites and properties, and disposing of the Pendletons headquarters building behind the Barbican. ‘We won this takeover by the skin of our teeth,’ he told his Board, ‘now we owe it to our investors to make it work.’ The only person Ross felt seriously sore about was Archie. He found his betrayal of trust unforgivable, and fired him without regret. Nor did it upset him when, soon afterwards, Gemma called an end to her affair and told Archie to leave Roupell Street. No way could she go on living with someone who’d spied on her dad.

  As for Miles, Ross only ever referred to him as ‘that madman.’ ‘I’ll never forget the sight of him crashing through my house in this bloody great JCB. The bloke’s round the twist, there’s nothing else to say about him.’ Whatever downtime Ross could manage, he spent with Serena who played an increasingly pivotal role in his life. In due course, she left Robin altogether and moved in to Holland Park Square and it was tacitly understood they would marry as soon as they were legally free to do so. Ross had always got on well with Serena’s boy, Ollie, and the new arrangement promised to be as painless as these situations ever can be. Both Serena and her son settled quickly into the enormous stucco mansion and, since Serena had made most of the important decorating decisions herself in the first place, very little needed altering for the incoming regime.

  In due course, they discussed the idea of finding somewhere in the country for weekends and holidays. Neither felt comfortable at the prospect of living at Chawbury Park, which anyway remained uninhabitable. Serena also felt it was much too close to Miles, an old association she wished to forget. Eventually, Ross bought a Jacobean manor house in Warwickshire, within easy reach of his Coventry warehouse, which had the added appeal of closely resembling the Jacobean farmhouse in which Serena had grown up as a child.

  Dawn and James married quietly at Chelsea Registry Office, with Hugh, Gemma and Debbie as the only witnesses, and honeymooned in St Lucia which James found much too hot for his taste. Initially very hurt by the hostile takeover of his family’s business, there was at least consolation in having almost a billion pounds in cash in the bank, as did all his brothers. He found it disorientating at first having no office to go in to, and no structure to his days, but he soon became used to it and actually enjoyed leading a quieter life, adding to his picture and sculpture collection. Dawn, in any case, did more than enough for both of them. The combination of her energy and vision for Longparish Organics, bankrolled by her husband’s money, meant that her ventures took off at impressive speed. The farm shop on the estate quickly became a magnet for well-heeled locals and did extraordinary business, despite its astronomical prices. Punnets of organic strawberries and raspberries sold out at ten pounds each, and the Longparish range of reproduction antique and contemporary garden furniture soon required a dozen full-time craftsmen in the workshop. In due course, she opened a vast and deeply chic showroom for the furniture in London, in Sidney Street, as well as the Longparish Organics delis in Notting Hill and Marylebone High Street. Everyone agreed Lady Pendleton had taken Longparish Priory to new levels of comfort and good taste, with the help of decorators flown in from New York and Milan. She threw herself into every kind of cultural philanthropy, and very few museum or art gallery extensions were completed without the names James and Dawn Pendleton being chiselled into the sandstone wall commemorating the benefactors. Every December, on the Saturday before Christmas, the Pendletons gave a large cocktail party at Longparish Priory for all their friends and Hampshire neighbours, and never neglected to include Miles and Davina on the invitation list, and whichever Straker children were at home that weekend.

  Peter, of course, was a household name these days and seldom in Chawbury. Following the worldwide success of The Cormorant’s Cry—a top-five album in the Billboard charts in the States as well as all over Europe—he bought a farmhouse and fifteen thousand acres of hillside in Caithness, and a house on the beach in Mustique. The second album has been a long time in the making, but Sam, who has heard several of the songs says it is as good, if not better, than the first.

  Samantha has been kept on as a face of Freeza Mart fashion and otherwise lives quietly in the country, attending NA meetings and doing a lot of riding. For the first year after her father’s heart attack and strokes, she stayed down at Chawbury to help her mother, but recently has fallen in love with a handsome racing trainer at Lambourne and spends a lot of time over there. Davina is very hopeful it might lead to something. Meanwhile, the racing trainer is having an incredible time in bed, doing things he’d only previously read about.

  Mollie’s political career started to take off, and she was often heard on the radio in her capacity as junior shadow Minister for Education. She won the Droitwich and Redditch seat by the thinnest of majorities, though the swing against Labour in the constituency was well below the national average, entirely thanks to her personal popularity. She was delighted when both Davina and Peter made the effort to come up to the Midlands to canvas for her. Peter, in particular, was a big draw with the voters, being a celebrity. As a Member of Parliament, Mollie was exceptionally hardworking and effective in the constituency, showing up at every event and championing local hospitals and schools. Her sincerity and competence were quickly noticed within the shrunken Labour Party, who deployed her as a voter-friendly spokesperson in numerous situations. Her marriage to Greg was quietly dissolved, but she kept her new love interest firmly to herself.

  As for Archie, he returned home to Chawbury the least frequently of all the children, never quite finding the energy or impetus to leave his dissolute new existence in London. Having been dumped by Gemma and by Freeza Mart, he reverted to his old doorman’s role at Thurloes before gravitating to other, seedier nightclubs. Eventually he found the financial backing to open a club of his own off Leicester Square, drawing a very young teenage crowd, which is said to be doing rather well. He leads an entirely nocturnal life, bloated with alcohol and pasty-faced from lack of sunlight and fresh air, but always with a younger girl on his arm. Gemma told him he could visit Mandy whenever he liked, but he is lazy about it and seldom does.

  Gemma took several months to adjust to life after Archie, but there could be no question of staying with him once she learnt how treacherously he’d behaved towards her dad. Slowly the tentacles of her enduring obsession loosened their grip, and she threw herself into her part-time job at Freeza Mart as well as caring for Mandy, who was dismayed when Archie left Roupell Street so abruptly. She had adored Mummy’s naughty boyfriend who made her laugh. A year or so after the takeover went through, Gemma met one of Ross’s regional managers at an office social, and fell in love. A year later she and Mike married and moved up to Worcestershire, to a house in Droitwich less than half a mile from the house Gemma had lived in as a child. It felt good to be back. Hampshire and London were all very fine, but she felt more at home in the West Midlands, and she hoped Mandy would one day go to her old school, Droitwich Spa High. Many of her school friends were still living in the area, with families of their own, and she and Mike liked to think they’d stay put for the rest of their lives. Almost the only person Gemm
a ever sees these days from her Chawbury years is Mollie, their local MP and Mandy’s godmother, who comes over all the time and is as friendly as ever. If Mollie ever mentioned Archie’s name in conversation, Gemma didn’t even blush, the spell was well and truly broken long ago. And, of course, it was great to see Mollie’s new partner on his frequent visits to the area.

  Mollie and Hugh Pendleton quietly got together eighteen months after she left Greg. It is the happiest of romances, with both of them leading their own lives and spending time together whenever their schedules permit. Hugh used part of his considerable inheritance to start an ecological hedge fund, investing only in green and ethical ventures, which is said to be booming. One day, he and Mollie might get round to getting married, but there’s no hurry, it isn’t even on the horizon at the moment.

  Debbie continued to thrive at Freeza Mart as Managing Director of the hospitality division, overseeing almost sixty budget hotels. All the old Pendletons’s service station lodges were successfully rebranded FM Sleep, and Debbie has been looking closely at several competitor chains, weighing the benefits of taking them over too. She found she relished the mass-market end of the hotel industry, and never regretted not going to work at that splashy resort in the Maldives. It still annoyed her like hell when she discovered Miles Straker had caused her job offer to be withdrawn out of spite, but it no longer rankled, it had been a lucky escape really. She was thrilled when her mother called at one of her revamped motorway lodges with Lord Pendleton, who said he thought she’d done a tremendous job. ‘It looks a great deal better than it did when we managed it,’ he said. Debbie also retained responsibility for choosing the new pop releases to play in the supermarkets. There were now so many stores, including the 700 Pendletons ones, that Debbie has become an influential figure, endlessly courted by the record companies pushing their talent. It tickled her to be included in a New Musical Express list of the 50 most powerful people in the music industry, capable of making or breaking new bands with her selections. As Debbie said, ‘I don’t know the first thing about rock music. I just have the same taste as our customers.’