In Vino Veritas (5 page)

Jason had a pint waiting for his opponent when he came into the bar. He had never even spoken to Tom Bowles before, but the tall young athlete now confirmed the impression Jason had formed of him on the course: he was a pleasant and friendly young man. Both of them were well aware that Jason would have been heavily defeated in a straight contest without handicaps, so that Tom was not much cast down by his defeat. He had more serious matters to contend with: a county match at the weekend to start with, and after that a move to London and a new job. He had already been proposed for membership at the prestigious Sunningdale Golf Club, a fact which much impressed Jason Knight.

‘You're doing well to get in there so quickly,' he said. ‘I suppose being scratch must help.'

‘And being a lawyer doesn't do any harm. There's a strong legal element at Sunningdale, and a couple of them have proposed me.'

‘What sort of a lawyer are you?' said Jason, trying not to sound too interested.

‘The dull sort. Company law is my speciality. It's nothing like as glamorous as criminal law, but pleasingly lucrative, so far.'

Jason Knight took a long pull at his pint, trying to disguise the fact that he was thinking furiously. This bright young man knew he was a chef, but nothing more than that. Like many bright lads of his age, Bowles was preoccupied with his own concerns and his own progress in life. He was leaving the area and going off to a new job in London very shortly; the probability was that Jason would never see him again. He said slowly, ‘I expect being a lawyer must be like being a doctor – as soon as you say what you do people start asking for advice.'

‘Not really, no. Company law isn't the most riveting subject. As a matter of fact, I'm still wet enough behind the ears to find it quite flattering when people think my opinion is worth having.'

‘Really? Well, a pal of mine has a problem, actually. He's an important person in the firm, a key to its success, and he feels he should have more say in how the business is being run.'

‘Which is understandable. Unfortunately, the fact that he's central to the firm's success doesn't give him any legal standing. Is he any more than a salaried employee?'

‘No. He would like to be.'

Tom shook his head, transformed for a second or two into the dullest of family solicitors. ‘Is it a public company? Could he buy shares?'

‘No. It's a private limited company. There's just the owner and one very junior partner involved. In effect, it's a one-man band, with the owner making all the important decisions.'

Each of them was well aware by now that Knight was talking about himself, but it suited both to preserve the fiction of the mysterious friend, so as to keep the exchange at a less personal level. Tom Bowles said, ‘Is there any chance of your friend becoming a partner?'

‘How would he do that?'

Tom pursed his lips, shook his head sadly, and again looked for a moment like a much older man. ‘Difficult, without the willing acceptance of the big cheese. He could offer to put up capital, when he sees the firm is short.'

Jason shook his head decisively. ‘He couldn't do that. The firm is in perpetual need of capital, but he isn't in a position to provide it.'

‘Then his only option seems to be to persuade the owner that he is so integral to the firm's development that he deserves greater recognition, in the form of a partnership.'

‘And if that doesn't work?'

Tom Bowles grinned. ‘He could try twisting his employer's arm. Tell the boss that he'd take his valuable labour elsewhere unless he got more recognition, in the shape of a share of the ownership. But he'd need to be very confident he was indispensable before he risked that. A friend of mine tried it and was looking for a new job the next day.'

‘I'll pass on what you say,' said Jason glumly.

‘I must be on my way,' said Tom Bowles with a glance at his watch. ‘All the best in the next round of the knockout.'

‘Thanks, Tom. And all the best in the new job and at Sunningdale.'

The bar was quiet at this time. Jason Knight bought himself another drink and sat quietly for a while, digesting the results of their discussion. He told himself not to be disappointed – this was surely what he had expected to hear. He had already known in his heart of hearts what the harsh facts of the situation were.

Martin Beaumont wasn't an owner prepared to listen to reason, to share his power with the man who was steadily building it up for him. If Jason was going to get the share of the business he wanted, he was going to have to use more than mere reason. Something much harsher would be needed.

T
om Ogden's family had farmed this land for almost four hundred years – since the area had been rent by the civil war which had resulted in the death of Charles I and the brief rule of Lord Protector Cromwell.

Tom had watched the spread of Abbey Vineyards beside him with interest – farmers are conservative folk, and a completely new use of land always seems more risky to them than to anyone else. That interest changed first into a vague feeling of unease; this was rapidly followed by the outright apprehension which a small landowner always feels with the spread of a bigger and more prosperous neighbour. Yet Ogden had been glad to sell the highest and least productive part of his land to Martin Beaumont in the early days of the vineyard. The money had enabled Tom to convert the fertile lowland area of his farm to intensive cultivation. He had opted for a new life of his own which to him seemed quite daring enough.

Tom Ogden was now a strawberry farmer, with long rows of plastic cloches stretching away across his fields and an influx of foreign pickers at the height of the season. Both of these developments had brought opposition from different sectors of the local population. This opposition had been accorded full voice in the Gloucester
Citizen
, which had many pages to fill each evening and was delighted to fan local controversy. The issue had then been taken up by local radio, and had even featured on Central Television news. Tom Ogden had been uncomfortable in the face of such publicity, but had affected to treat it with the sturdy indifference farmers customarily accorded to aesthetes and townies.

Tom now had half his fields converted to the increasingly popular ‘Pick Your Own' option for his strawberries. People came out from the towns and villages of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire to pick his produce, often treating the expedition as a family outing. They had caused a little damage at first with their clumsy fingers and clumsier feet, but Tom had soon learned to limit that. The important thing was that they paid almost as much for his strawberries as the retail price in the shops, and far more than he could get from the markets or supermarkets. Children in particular tended to eat energetically whilst they picked, but Tom treated that as a necessary but minor evil, to be set against the lower overheads of selling on site. He was delighted with his profits, whilst his customers enjoyed the warm glow brought by physical exertion and then the flavour of strawberries which could not have been fresher.

On this bright April day, Tom Ogden was looking over the bent backs of his workers, as they weeded the rows and nourished the promising green fruits with a little fertilizer. He imagined the summer scene here, when he would be listening to children's shrill cries to their parents, and congratulating himself on taking what had seemed an adventurous step into this new area of farming.

Ogden went out into the field and exchanged a few words with ‘Spot' Wheeler, his foreman. No one, not even the man himself, was sure how he had acquired his soubriquet. He was Henry on his birth certificate, but he had answered to Spot for so long that no one knew any other forename for him. Spot had rarely ventured outside Herefordshire and had an accent far stronger than even Tom's very noticeable one, so that any Englishman from more than fifty miles away found his speech difficult to follow. Yet, in some strange combination of sign and sound argot, which perhaps even he could not have explained, Spot managed to communicate effectively with the variety of mainly Eastern European workers who came each year to work in the strawberry fields.

Tom Ogden always enjoyed talking to Spot, feeling an affinity with a man who had the same roots as he had, whose family had worked the land as his had for hundreds of years. Though neither of them would have acknowledged it or voiced it, the bond between them was sealed by a sense of rank. Spot Wheeler accepted his lower station as labourer and now supervisor of labour as unthinkingly as Tom accepted his role as owner of the land and thus master of his workers' destiny.

Spot gave his employer a brief report on the progress of cultivation and directed two of his newest workers to a new area with a series of guttural sounds; they nodded and bent anew to their work with the forks. Tom scratched his head, then shook it once again in happy wonderment at his foreman's ability to communicate with his workforce.

It was at that moment that a cloud fell across his world. It was a metaphorical cloud, for the day was golden still with a steady sun, but a cloud nonetheless. Spot Wheeler said suddenly, ‘That chap be 'ere again, Mr Ogden,' and Tom turned to see a figure outlined against the sun at the entrance to his fields. It looked to him for a moment like some great bird of prey, black and ominous against the sky.

‘I don't know why. I've told him often enough there's nothing for him here,' said Ogden, turning his steps reluctantly towards the interloper.

‘Wonderful day, Tom!' said Martin Beaumont, when Ogden got within ten yards of him. He forced the farmer to fall into step with him, turning his path along the edge of the strawberry fields. Tom had been intending to lead him quickly back to the exit and his car. ‘At least the sun and this southerly wind are fine for vineyards. I expect you'd like a little more rain to swell your strawberries. Temperamental crop, I believe. I shouldn't like to rely on them for a living.'

Ogden resisted the farmer's temptation to agree about the weather. It was one of the modern jokes that no season was ever exactly right for the farmer, but he did not wish to agree anything with this man. He said gruffly, ‘Nothing like as temperamental as vines, I should think.'

‘Oh, they're much less difficult than most people imagine, once you get the hang of viniculture. Everyone else is moaning about global warning, but it's helping us. And we've diversified as we've developed, you see, Tom. We've got quite a variety of grapes now, so that something's pretty well bound to do well, even in a difficult season. One of the secrets of success in the agricultural industry, diversification. Now that I've got used to diversity, I shouldn't like to be dependent on a single crop for my livelihood.' He looked sideways over the long rows of plastic cloches and the bent backs of workers in the open areas beyond them. ‘Must be pretty labour-intensive, strawberries. Not a good thing, nowadays, with men likely to let you down the moment they get a better offer.'

‘We've got autumn raspberries as well as strawberries. And I don't have difficulties with labour. The recession's made people glad of a job. It's true it was difficult to get workers, a couple of years ago, but I can pick and choose a bit now.'

‘Really?' Beaumont let his elaborate surprise slide into a grin. ‘Better not let the
Citizen
know that, eh, Tom? They'll be saying you should get rid of these cheap-labour foreigners and employ local labour!'

‘If they do, I'll know where their information's come from, won't I?'

Beaumont made an elaborate show of looking hurt. ‘Oh, it wouldn't be me, Tom. I'm your friendly neighbour, aren't I? But there are always plenty of people ready to make trouble for us chaps who provide the work, aren't there?'

‘These men work hard all day and earn their money. I've no complaints about them.'

‘I'll bet you haven't. Slave labour without union rates. We'd all like a bit of that!'

‘They're not slaves and they're properly paid. It's none of your business, anyway, Beaumont.'

‘Could be, Tom. Could be. In a roundabout sort of way, of course. I'm still willing to pay a good price for your land, you see. Should be music in your ears, that, with the worst recession for eighty years gathering pace, and the price of agricultural land steadily dropping.'

‘The recession's helping my business. More people are prepared to pick their own, in a recession.' Tom felt himself being drawn into an argument he had never intended to have.

‘You'd get a higher price from me than from anyone else, Tom. You're lucky in that your land would fit neatly into my estate, as I've explained to you before. Our vineyards could span the valley nicely, if we took this little tongue of land in, so I'm still prepared to offer you the price I offered last year. That might not be the case for much longer, though.'

Ogden glanced from right to left. Beyond his land, all he could see was Abbey vineyards. His strawberry farm was an obstinate, alien wedge in Beaumont's empire. ‘My family were farming this land for centuries before Abbey bloody Vineyards was even thought of, Beaumont! And we'll be here long after you've gone.'

Martin allowed himself a leisurely snigger, well aware that his derision was only increasing Ogden's fury. ‘Oh, I doubt that, Tom, I really do! In fact, I doubt it so much that I'm prepared to say definitely here and now that it won't happen.'

‘If you get your hands on these fields, it will be over my dead body!'

‘Oh, let's not get all dramatic about it, Tom. We're talking as two friendly neighbours. At the moment, I'm prepared to do you a favour and take over your land at an excellent price. I should hate it if that situation had to change.'

‘I've said all I've got to say. You're wasting your time here, Beaumont, and I don't want to see you again!'