eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Hailed by The New Yorker as "wickedly enjoyable," Nicholas Coleridge's newest novel is a sharp comedy of manners about two powerful men engaged in a bitter rivalry. Their feud rages from the boardroom to the bedroom as old money takes on the new
Gazing from his magnificent Chawbury Manor, Miles Straker has it all. But when noveau riche Ross Clegg buys and builds on the land adjoining his country estate, ruining his perfect view, Miles is irate. Even worse, Ross is quickly taken up by the country gentry, who admire his success and his down-to-earth manners. But Miles is a dangerous enemy and he vows to take the Clegg empire apart piece by piece. A rich read full of wit, Pride and Avarice is sure to be Coleridge's biggest selling book to date.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429954341 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2011 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 496 |
| File size: | 595 KB |
About the Author
NICHOLAS COLERIDGE is managing director of Condé Nast in Britain. He has written four previous novels.
Nicholas Coleridge is managing director of Condé Nast in Britain, the magazine publishing house that includes Vogue, Tatler, House&Garden and Vanity Fair. His bestselling novels, including The Adventuress and A Much Married Man, have been published in twelve languages. He lives in England with his family.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Miles Straker, resplendent in his favourite lightweight summer suit and myopically patterned silk tie, stepped outside onto the terrace and surveyed the scene. He took it all in, noticing everything ... the perfection of his herbaceous borders, the David Linley garden gate in finest limed oak which stood at the head of the yew walk, the view along the Test valley, surely the finest in all Hampshire. He drew a deep breath of satisfaction, knowing that he, and he alone, had created ... all this, this English arcadia ... which only taste and energy, and advice from exactly the right people, and a very great deal of money constantly applied, could make possible.
For a moment he stood there, amidst all the activity of the lunch party preparations. Waiters and waitresses from the catering company were spreading tablecloths on the two dozen round tables in the marquee and laying out cutlery and wine glasses, and florists were arranging armfuls of flowers bought that morning at Covent Garden; two gardeners up ladders with lengths of twine, shears and a spirit level made final adjustments to the yew hedges; further glasses, for cocktails and champagne, were set-up on tables outside the orangerie for pre-lunch drinks.
He stared along the valley, spotted the cars parked on the horizon, and frowned. How very odd. They were parked up by old Silas's cottage — a couple of jeeps and two other cars, it looked like — and Silas never had visitors. Miles hoped they would soon leave. He didn't like the way the sunshine bounced off their bonnets.
Inside the tent, he saw his wife, Davina, in conversation with the event organiser examining some detail of the table setting. Miles wondered whether his wife looked quite her best in the summer dress she had put on, or whether he should send her inside to change into an alternative one.
Sensing they were being observed, Davina and the event organiser, Nico Ballantyne of Gourmand Solutions, spotted Miles on the terrace and hurried over to him. Miles often had that effect. People instinctively recognised that he was far too important and impatient to be kept waiting.
'There you are, darling,' said Davina anxiously. 'Nico and I were discussing whether it would be better to have salt flakes or salt crystals on the table. The salt cellars are red glass.'
'We rather felt crystals could be nicer,' Nico said, in a tone which left the door open for dissent, Miles being the paymaster.
Miles considered the question. 'I think flakes actually.' And so flakes it was.
Miles Straker was regarded, certainly by himself but by a good many others besides, as the most attractive and charismatic man in Hampshire. At the age of fifty-three, he was fit, handsome, socially confident, abominably smooth and, above all, rich. As Chairman and Chief Executive of Straker Communications, the public relations consultancy he had founded twenty-five years earlier, he was also widely viewed as influential. You had only to look at the roster of his clients (and he mailed out an impressive glossy brochure every year, to as many as four thousand neighbours and opinion formers, listing them all) to get the measure of his reach. His corporate clients included Britain's third largest supermarket group, second largest airline, an international luxury hotels chain, an arms dealer, an energy conglomerate, a Spanish sherry marque and, pro bono, the Conservative Party. In addition, he was privately retained by half a dozen Footsie 100 Chairmen and CEOs, either to enhance their public profile or else keep them out of the newspapers altogether. It was rumoured that the royal House of Saud paid Miles a stupendous annual retainer for presentational services, as did the Aga Khan Foundation. But Miles would never be drawn on these special arrangements, if they did in fact exist.
From Monday to Friday, the Strakers lived in a tall, white stucco house on a garden square in Holland Park, which they had owned for eleven years. If there was a faintly corporate feel to the place, and particularly to the large taupe-and-nutmeg coloured drawing room with its many L-shaped sofas, this was because Miles regularly used the house as somewhere in which to hold work-related receptions, which had the additional advantage of enabling him to write-off most of the expensive decoration against tax. Each morning, Miles was collected at 6:50 a.m. precisely from the house to be driven to one of the three hotel dining rooms he used for breakfast meetings with the great and the good, before being dropped at the mews house behind Charles Street, Mayfair, which was his corporate headquarters. For as long as he had been able to afford it, Miles had made a rule of maintaining an independent office above the fray, private and secretive, rather than sitting himself in the same building as his 900 London-based employees. 'I probably have the smallest office in London,' was his boast. 'There's scarcely room for the seven of us to squeeze in together: that's me, the three girls, two analysts, and my driver.' Needless to say, Miles's own senatorial office, within this toytown Regency townhouse, occupied virtually all the available space.
But it was the country house in Hampshire which he felt best reflected his stature and gravitas. Seven years after buying the place from the Heathcote-Palmers, whose ancestors had built the house almost 300 years earlier, Miles liked to imply that his own family had been settled there for rather longer than they had. This was put across in many subtle ways, such as the leather framed black and white photographs of Chawbury Manor dotted about the Holland Park house, and in the Charles Mews South office, and a tasteful engraving of Chawbury on the letterhead of the country writing paper, and the substantial conversation pieces hanging in both the country and London entrance halls, showing Miles and Davina and the four Straker children painted in oils on the terrace, framed by lavender beds and yew hedges, with the trophy house looming ostentatiously behind them.
It was generally agreed that Chawbury Manor was one of the loveliest setups in the county; not only the house itself, with its Georgian proportions and knapped-flint-and-brick Hampshire architecture, but for its crowning glory, its views. It stood at the head of a steep private valley, almost a mile long, bounded its entire length on one side by mature woodland, and on the other by rolling downland. The floor of the valley, through which the river Testmeandered, was overlooked by the several raked and balustraded terraces of Chawbury Manor, and grazed over by a flock of rare Portland sheep.
From the wide top terrace, which opened out from French windows in the drawing room, the television room and from Miles's own wood-panelled study, you could see the full pitch of the valley, and it was here, when the Strakers entertained, that guests gathered for drinks before lunch or dinner, exclaiming at the view.
'Is this all you?' people would ask, staring into the distance.
And Miles replied, 'Actually it is, yes. Our predecessors used to finish at the fence just before the far wood, but fortunately the wood came up a few years ago and we were able to buy it. Which makes one feel much more secure, with all these alarming changes in planning regulations from the ghastly Michael Meacher.'
'Now tell us about that pretty little cottage? Now what's that all about?'
The cottage was a tiny flint-and-lathe labourer's hovel on the horizon, surrounded by a tumbledown barn and several other semi-derelict outbuildings, including an ancient pigeonniere. At such a distance from the manor, it was impossible to see the cluster of buildings very clearly, because they melded into the fold of the hill. And yet you could never look down the valley without being aware of them. The cottage acted as a picturesque eye-catcher in landscaped parkland.
'Well, as a matter of fact that's the one and only thing that isn't us. I hope it will be one day. I have an understanding with the old boy who lives there that he'll offer it to me first and to no one else.'
'So it is still lived in? It looks rather abandoned.'
'I think only about two rooms are habitable. He's a strange old character who lives there, the place is collapsing round his ears. Silas Trow, his name is, looks about a hundred and ten. It's reached by an unmade track from the Micheldever road. God knows how he manages out there. Collects his weekly GIRO and that's about it, I think.'
'What'll you do with the cottage when you get it?' people often enquired. 'It has so much potential.'
Then Miles would shrug. 'Well, Davina always says she wants it for her painting studio. We'll see. There are any number of uses we might put it to.'
In the back of Miles's mind was the prospect of one day installing one of his mistresses there, once it had been repaired, as a weekend trysting place. Too risky, too reckless, too close to home? Perhaps. But he thrived on risk. He assumed Davina had known for years about the existence of other women and long ago accepted it, but perhaps she didn't; it wasn't exactly something he could ask her.
CHAPTER 2
The Straker summer lunch party was held on the second Sunday in June for the sixth year in succession. Strictly speaking, it was a corporate event, and certainly every last penny of the cost was written off against tax, including several disputable elements, such as the entire annual upkeep of the garden, which would have raised questions from the Inland Revenue had it been presented to them in quite that way. Certainly the raison d'être of the party was to entertain clients and would-be-clients of Straker Communications, and the invitation list bristled with the Chairman and Chief Executives and their wives of the largest accounts, as well as more favoured and presentable marketing directors. As Miles reviewed the guest list for the final time, he saw that four senior representatives from Pendletons, the supermarket chain, had accepted to come today, including his neighbours Lord and Lady Pendleton of Longparish; James Pendleton being one of the four Pendleton brothers, family shareholders of Strakers's biggest client. Also on the guest list were the managing directors of British Regional Airways, Trent Valley Power 4 U, Eaziprint — the photocopy to digital services conglomerate — and several strategically useful executives from Unilever, Allied Domecq and Compaq. Miles doubted some of these guests would be a social asset at the party, and they were to be seated as unobtrusively as possible at the extreme edge of the tent; he was confident they would already be sufficiently flattered to be invited down to his private house, given his reputation and profile. Miles nevertheless made a point of memorising all their names, for it was a matter of pride that he should acknowledge every guest personally, and he would not tolerate name badges at Chawbury Manor.
The client side taken care of, the Strakers liked to embellish their lunch parties with as many of their more glamorous neighbours as possible, as well as acquaintances from further afield who would raise the game. So the local Conservative MP, Ridley Nairn, was there with his wife, Suzie, as were half a dozen senior Tories from Central Office for whom Miles was one of three favoured advisors. A deputy chairman of the Party, Paul Tanner, with whom he breakfasted every six weeks at The Ritz, had been invited with his third wife, Brigitte, and would sit at the top table with James and Laetitia Pendleton, along with several of their jollier and more prominent neighbours. In the interest of political balance (for Miles could never allow his company to be exclusively associated with the Conservative interest, given the way things stood), a couple of known Labour donors were invited, including the home-micro-curry tycoon, Sir Korma Gupta, whom Miles anticipated would shortly become a client.
Shortly before the arrival of the first guests, when he had satisfied himself that everything was perfectly ready, Miles mustered his wife and family in the hall for a final pep-talk. Whenever they gave a large party, he insisted all four children be present and prepared to pull their weight entertaining the guests. Today, he ran his eyes over them and grimaced. Davina at least now looked more appropriate, having changed into something pretty and flowery, and Samantha was undeniably attractive, despite the four inches of midriff on display and a sulky expression. Six foot tall, with straight blond hair and the best legs at Heathfield, Samantha at seventeen was a source of mild anxiety. She was also stunningly pretty, spoilt, petulant, and Miles's favourite child. Today, she made no secret of the fact she'd rather be up in London at her friend Hattie's party, than doing her bit at the Chawbury lunch.
'For heaven's sake, Peter, can't you put a tie on? And those chinos are grubby. You can't possibly wear them for lunch.' Miles glared at his eldest child.
Peter at twenty-three was the only one to be working for his father at Straker Communications. Not for the first time, Miles wondered whether his son was cut out for the business of public relations. But, then again, there seemed to be nothing else he had any aptitude for, so they had created a job for him in research, which kept him out of mischief.
'Surely I don't need to wear a tie, Dad? This is Saturday lunch. No one wears ties.'
'Nonsense. Look at Archie, he's got a tie on. In fact, one of mine if I'm not mistaken. Did you take that from my dressing room?'
'Just borrowed it, Dad. I'll put it back.'
'You'd better.' But Miles looked approvingly at the son who reminded him most of himself. Archie was quick, bright and extremely attractive to girls. He was also glib and unscrupulous but, unlike his father, had not yet learnt to conceal these attributes behind a carapace of sincerity.
'As for you, Mollie, haven't you got something less funereal to put on?' He stared critically at his plump youngest daughter, with her plain, serious face and droopy brown skirt and top. 'I thought you said you'd buy something new for today?'
'I did. This is new.' Mollie had travelled into Basingstoke especially, but found the shops in the High Street scarily trendy and hard-edged, and bought the first thing that looked neither obtrusive nor sexed-up, without trying it on.
'Sam, haven't you got something you can lend Mollie? There must be something buried in that heap of clothes on your bedroom floor?'
'Da-ad,' replied Samantha. 'Get real. As if she'd fit into anything of mine.'
The discussion was cut short by the crunching of tyres on gravel outside, and the arrival of the first guests.
One of Miles's great skills as a host — in fact, great skills in life — lay in his ability to greet newcomers with an overwhelming show of warmth and enthusiasm. He was a grasper of hands, a hugger of both men and women. When he shook hands with a client, he gripped their palm and held onto it for longer than was quite comfortable, while maintaining a glittering eye contact. His pleasure at meeting and re-meeting people of importance — and people of only tangential importance to his life — was remarkable, something he had first learnt, then assiduously practiced over many years. Not naturally tactile, even with his family, he had exerted himself, realising that if he could establish this first impression with conviction, it would carry him more than half the distance. The advice he gave in his professional life, for which he billed so handsomely, was strategic and clinical, but he understood the importance of 'connecting' with the world, and these extravagant greetings were their outward manifestation.
Today, he positioned himself outside on the terrace, just beyond the open drawing room door, through which the guests were being directed having first collected a glass of champagne from the line of waitresses standing with outstretched trays. So they had already passed through the flagstoned hall with its sweeping staircase and family group portrait above the fireplace, and through the drawing room with its many sofas and paint finishes, and then out again onto the terrace where the picture-perfect Straker family awaited, the six of them formed up in their ties and pretty dresses, marred only by Peter's grubby chinos, and behind them the famous long view of Chawbury valley.
It was shortly after they had all sat down for lunch, and the many waitresses from Gourmand Solutions were bringing out the first course of langoustines and scallops on multi-coloured glass plates, that Miles again became aware of activity on the horizon. Unmistakably, next to Silas Trow's cottage and the derelict barn, he could see three parked cars. Even at this distance, he could tell they were four-by-fours, Landcruisers or Cherokee Jeeps by the size of them. And there were several people poking about in the outbuildings. Miles found it perplexing. Who were they?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Pride and Avarice"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Nicholas Coleridge.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.