by J M Gregson
Instead, she looked at him for seconds which seemed to stretch, with both of them as motionless as if they were fixed in a painting. Then she gave a little nod, turned on her heel, and left without another word. She closed the door behind her as quietly and carefully as he had done at the beginning of their meeting.
Jim Hartley found gardening the best of all escapes. Once you were pruning or mowing or hedge-cutting, you gave all your attention to the precision required to secure the right effect. That made you forget the troubles in your private life.
Digging was best of all. You worked yourself into a steady rhythm, efficient but not too fast – those who went bull-at-a-gate at their digging were soon panting and unsteady. More importantly, their work was poor; you quickly became ragged and uneven, if you didn’t maintain an even pace. There wasn’t a lot of digging at Westbourne, because most of the ground was already thickly planted, but today was an exception.
They were creating a new bed for perennials. Jim would have a major say in exactly what was eventually planted here, but a final decision wouldn’t be taken until the end of the season. He had some firm ideas on the subject, but he was keeping them to himself at the moment. Meantime, the plot had to be marked out precisely and double dug. Then the soil would be analysed and compost and animal manures applied to the new surface, ready for planting in the autumn.
Jim Hartley had pulled rank and told his staff that he would initiate the digging himself. There was no such thing as a menial task in the garden, he always told his workforce: there was simply good work and bad work. Everyone should be prepared not just to try his hand at anything, but to master whatever skill was needed. Jim was secretly proud of his digging. He also knew that if the boss was prepared to take on anything, the rest of the gardeners were in no position to pick and choose which tasks were allotted to them.
He had already dug his first set of sods and his first trench, transferring the turfs and the soil by wheelbarrow to the other end of the plot, where they would be used to fill in the final trench. Now he was putting the next set of turfs face down in the trench he had created and covering them with the soil which had been beneath them. Double digging; men had treated virgin ground like this for centuries and still found no more effective method of intensive cultivation. It was slow and demanding, but it was effective. And he liked the feeling that he was continuing a tradition, that he was doing what many thousands of anonymous labourers had done in centuries long gone.
He worked steadily, finding the rhythm he had sought from the outset, hearing his breathing becoming steadier after the panting which had accompanied his creation of that first and very necessary trench. He was well under way now, settled into the pattern of the work. Now the activity itself rather than the labourer seemed to dictate the tempo. He felt it in his shoulders and his arms, in the steady turning of his waist.
‘You all right there, boss?’
He started violently, almost crying out with the shock. He had been even more deeply engrossed in the digging than he realized. A slim shape stood motionless between him and the sun, little more than a dark outline until his eyes refocused upon it. The Scottish lad, Alex Fraser, the apprentice who was so keen to learn that he sometimes seemed a little too enthusiastic to be true. Perhaps he realized that Hartley could not immediately comprehend his presence here, at the lower extremity of the gardens, for he said, ‘Ye told me to come here at ten. Ye said I was to take over the digging.’
Alex never stepped out of line, always did his best in whatever task he was given. But he never called Hartley ‘sir’, as most of the other juniors did. Jim liked that in him. Jim nodded now. He asked if the Glaswegian had done this before and was told he had not.
‘It’s simple enough.’ Jim explained the principles of double digging, emphasized that although it was slow and demanding, it was by far the best method of getting a deep tilth in new gardening ground. He demonstrated as he spoke, enjoying his own proficiency in the task, finding himself out of breath as he combined instruction with labour.
He climbed reluctantly from his latest trench. ‘Don’t rush it, or you’ll need to keep stopping. Cultivate a slow, steady rhythm; that’s good for the ground as well as for you.’
Jim Hartley left the young man with the bright red hair concentrating fiercely upon his simple task and moved reluctantly back into the activities of the established gardens. Over the multiple hedges of Westbourne, he looked towards his cottage and the problems that it held for him.
Six hours later, Jim Hartley’s wife collected her two children from school. That’s how she was defined nowadays, she thought, that’s how people thought of her: as someone else’s wife.
Julie Hartley wasn’t looking forward to the birthday party to which the children had both been invited. To Julie’s mind, a school day was quite taxing enough, without the added excitements and tensions of a gathering like this afterwards. Children’s parties should be held at weekends or not at all, in her view. To hold one on a Monday evening after school was asking for trouble. There would be childish quarrels and tears before this one was over, if she was any judge.
She had a point. But Julie was not widely noted for her optimism.
She was a pretty woman with long black hair; her dark brown eyes seemed alert to everything around her. She smiled readily, but rarely at length; there seemed always something brittle in both her amusement and her approval. When she had been in college, few of her contemporaries had envisaged her as a wife and mother. She had seemed then too independent and spirited to settle into quiet domesticity before she had made her mark in the world. Of the several men who had passed in quick succession through her life in those days, the least likely candidate for permanency had surely been Jim Hartley. The fresh-faced, powerful young man couldn’t discuss books or films or art or even television, and he had a passion for horticulture which seemed to most of the young people in Julie’s set quite bizarre.
Yet the marriage seemed to have worked. And Julie, against all expectations, was quite certainly a splendid mother. Sam was eight and Oliver was six now; they were boisterous, happy boys, comfortable at home and doing well at school. To all outward appearances, the once mercurial Julie had settled happily into family life, accepting its challenges and coping well with its inevitable problems.
To all outward appearances.
The party was a huge success, despite Julie’s earlier fears for it. The birthday boy’s parents were richer than anyone had realized before this day. They lived in a huge modern house with three acres of grounds and a large swimming pool. On this broiling-hot day, the pool was the star attraction. Released from the disciplines of school, the boys – there were no girls at this celebration, on the strict instructions of the eight-year-old at its centre – splashed, screamed and flung balls and rubber rings to each other in joyful ecstasy.
There was no restriction on the decibels here, because there were no neighbours to disturb. There was that most important of childish requirements for happiness, infinite space. The adults were at hand to control over-excitement and excess, but in this environment there was surprisingly little of either. There were inevitably a few clashes and a few falls, even the occasional tear, but the injured were too eager to rejoin the party to grieve for long, especially with male pride at stake.
Julie Hartley watched her boys happily among the communal chaos, saw how well they fitted in with their peers, and wished suddenly and heartily that she could do the same. In the midst of this noisy and unthinking euphoria, she wondered bleakly how her own situation could ever be resolved.
Peter Nayland tried to see the humour of his situation. He was sure that others would, if he was ever fool enough to reveal the facts of it.
It was a strange thing to feel so vulnerable, when you were surrounded with all the trappings of power. Like all men who make fortunes by dubious means, Nayland had assembled around himself the muscle to repel both his rivals and the enemies inevitably made as he became successful. It was like th
e Swiss Guards around the Pope, he thought; you gathered a small group you could trust, who knew that their mission was both to display your power and standing and to enforce control whenever it was needed.
Peter liked the Swiss Guard comparison, for he had a lively sense of irony. He was an intelligent man, despite the dubious businesses he operated; the idea of the unthinking thug at the head of an enterprise had always been anathema to him. You needed to be well organized, whatever the source of your wealth. You needed to be aware of the competition. You needed to know your markets. You needed to be able to anticipate trends, to foresee what would be popular in two years’ time as well as currently.
Wasn’t it Sam Goldwyn who said that no one ever went bankrupt through underestimating the taste of the public? One of those movie moguls, anyway. Well, in Peter Nayland’s view, no one had ever gone bankrupt through exaggerating the depths to which human sexual tastes could sink. That philosophy, combined with the absence of any sense of morality, had stood him in good stead over the years.
Yet today he felt vulnerable. Not to any threat from his enemies or his rivals, but to a totally unsuspected sentimentality he had discovered within his own being. He called it sentimentality in an attempt to despise it and thus control it. Sentimentality was mawkish and maudlin and could be easily dismissed.
Love was something else altogether. Nayland had a vague idea from his early youth that love was something you should cherish. Ever since he had watched her drive away from him after their last meeting in Stratford, Peter Nayland had been fighting the gnawing suspicion that he might be in love with Alison Cooper.
He’d had plenty of women over the years. He’d even felt quite close to a few of them, without ever considering setting up house with them for the long term. Nor had Ally the sort of Hollywood looks which would blind a man to reality and let his penis rule his brain. She was attractive enough, with her neatly cut dark-blonde hair, the blue eyes which were rarely without a twinkle, and the small, attractive nose which lifted just a little at the end. She’d kept her figure; not only did she curve in the right places but she made you want to stroke those curves. He smiled even now at that thought.
And she was good in bed, was Ally. They were good together. But Peter had been good with others in his time. With the power and money he had now, he could summon women twenty years younger than Ally to his bed – a succession of them in a variety of shapes, if sex was all he wanted.
But Ally gave him more than that. And some unsuspected adolescent streak lurking still within Peter Nayland made him proud of his feelings for her. He might move through sordid channels to make his money, but he was capable of higher sentiments in his own life. He would show those people who thought he was a crude and ruthless money-maker that he was more than that. But first he would show it to himself.
There were certain obstacles, of course, but nothing which couldn’t be easily overcome. He buzzed his PA and asked her to let Chris Horton know that he wished to see him at three p.m. today. Horton wasn’t part of his muscle, nothing as crude as that. He was an expert at acquiring information on other businesses and the people who ran them. Because of Horton’s researches, Nayland went into any meeting better aware of the strengths and weaknesses of his rivals, equipped to strike wherever they were most vulnerable, if negotiation did not secure what he wanted.
When Horton came into his office, Peter Nayland sat back comfortably in his chair. Love would be preposterous in this context. He wouldn’t declare such a weakness to this subtle and efficient man. He said almost casually, ‘I want you to find out all you can about a man called Dennis Cooper.’
Horton nodded and made a note of the name. It was not familiar to him and the boss did not volunteer anything to help him. He looked up and said, ‘Where does this man work?’
‘Cooper works at Westbourne Park, the famous gardens. He lives on the site. He was appointed by the National Trust to run the place and exercise a loose control over other Trust properties in the area.’
If Chris Horton was surprised, he was too practised to show it. ‘Any other details you can give me?’
‘Nothing more at the moment.’ It was all he had been able to pick up from Alison; most women didn’t want to talk about their husbands when they were with a lover. ‘I’m relying on you to provide me with that, Chris.’
He gave him a smile of encouragement, and Horton, a small man with a narrow, inquisitive face, gave him a brief, almost conspiratorial grin in reply. ‘Usual stuff?? Sexual preferences, shagging away from home: financial peccadilloes; lies told or facts concealed in applications for posts; tax evasions?’
Peter nodded. ‘Anything that you can dig up. You might find this one more difficult than most. On the face of it, Cooper’s a pillar of rectitude, operating in a blameless area. A highly meritorious area, some might say. But he’ll have his weaknesses. All of us have.’
Horton looked down at the name and the brief notes he had already made. The smile he offered this time was more malicious, in line with the assignment he had been given. ‘You’re right. Even pillars of rectitude have their weaknesses, sir.’
‘And they crash to the ground even harder when they’re exposed. You’ve got the idea, Chris. But work discreetly. I don’t want this man to know that he’s being investigated. He doesn’t even know that I exist, as yet.’
‘Right you are, sir. It might take a little longer to gather material without his knowing we’re after him. Should I give it priority?’
‘Yes. Top priority. Let me know as soon as you have anything useful on him.’
Chris Horton nodded and left. He wondered why Nayland wanted to dig the dirt on a man like this. Quite different from the people he usually worked on. All the same, if Peter Nayland had him down as an enemy, he wouldn’t like to be in this Dennis Cooper’s shoes.
FIVE
Hugo Wilkinson was thirty-eight, a head chef with a wealth of experience. But he felt like a schoolboy as he waited outside Dennis Cooper’s office.
He had come ten minutes early for the appointment. He planned to say that he needed to be away quickly to ensure that the serving of lunches in the restaurant went ahead smoothly. That would show that he was conscientious.
It turned out to be a bad tactic. He was left waiting on his chair in the outer office for the full ten minutes. Whilst Cooper’s PA worked busily at her PC, Hugo became increasingly nervous. He wasn’t used to nervousness, not in his working life. His hobby caused him plenty of anxiety, but that was another matter altogether.
Chefs were powerful people, and head chefs the most powerful of all. Whatever the official pecking order in a hotel or restaurant, everyone knew that if the head chef walked out the enterprise would be threatened with chaos; his departure would be followed by a plethora of customer complaints. Head chefs were allowed, even expected, to be temperamental creatures. They were given more rope than other employees.
All this passed through Hugo Wilkinson’s mind as he sat on the upright chair in the outer office, crossing and uncrossing his legs. But he remembered his father telling him when he was no more than thirteen that if you gave some people enough rope they would hang themselves. He had an uncomfortable feeling that he might have used his position to hang himself. You had to be more politically correct when you worked for the National Trust than you did when retained by a private employer.
It seemed to Hugo warm and airless here, though the PA in her white blouse and others who arrived and departed seemed cool enough. Everyone who came into the room gave him a curious glance, though none of them spoke to him. Here was another aspect of this business, which he had not considered previously. The junior staff who entered and left this busy anteroom would be surprised to see him here, would speculate to their fellows about seeing the head chef waiting like a schoolboy outside the headmaster’s office. He told himself that they would merely think he was waiting to confer with Cooper about budgets and menus, but that didn’t seem to help much.
He was sweating h
ard when Cooper eventually called him in. The curator did so with a professional courtesy, betraying no sign to any curious watcher that this senior employee was in trouble. His expression changed once the door was closed and the two men took their positions carefully on either side of the big desk. The curator studied him for a moment before he said, ‘As I told you when I asked you to come here this morning, I have received a complaint. Complaints, in fact.’
‘He’s quick to take offence. He doesn’t know how a kitchen—’
‘Complaints from the public, Mr Wilkinson, not the man you insulted. Two visitors came to my office on the day. There have been three written complaints since then. There may well be more.’
Hugo licked his lips. He knew he hadn’t a leg to stand on here. He needed to make the best plea of mitigating circumstances he could and then get the hell out of here. ‘We were short-staffed and under pressure. These things happen.’
‘These things should not happen, Mr Wilkinson, whatever the circumstances. Do you dispute the facts of the case?’
This perpetual use of his title and surname was disconcerting him. Ever since he’d moved in here, he’d been ‘Hugo’ to Dennis Cooper. Now the man was behaving like an old hanging judge preparing to put on his black cap. Hugo wanted this over and done with. He would do anything to accelerate that process. ‘No, I don’t dispute the facts. I called Shoab Junaid a “fucking coon”. I should not have done that.’
He looked up to see Cooper’s reaction, but the curator gave him no relief. Cooper’s face was set in stone. He studied his man as dispassionately as if he had been a specimen under a microscope. Eventually he said, ‘Can you repeat for me the full sentence you used?’
Hugo swallowed. ‘Yes. I believe I said, “For God’s sake move your arse, you fucking coon!”’
Cooper nodded coolly. ‘That tallies with what I have heard from others.’ He leaned forward, earnest and unsmiling. ‘You’re not stupid enough to think you can get away with this sort of thing.’ It was a statement, not a question.