In Vino Veritas Read Online Free PDF Page A

sat opposite him on the other side of his desk. The table which had been brought in for the meeting on the previous day had been removed immediately after it. With the lack of ornaments and the single picture of the Malvern Hills on the wall, the room had resumed its normal rather bleak spaciousness. He looked at Vanda’s short, expertly cut dark-gold hair, then down at her slim, small-breasted figure and the long legs in the fawn linen trousers. She had always been striking rather than pretty, but she was still a handsome woman at forty-six, he decided.
    When a woman had been your mistress, you were surely entitled to have an opinion on such matters.
    He wasn’t good at assessing other people’s reactions to his words and attitudes. That was probably just as well, for Ms North was wondering for her part why she had ever been enticed into his bed. She was well aware by now that sexual attraction often paid little heed to matters of character, but now she couldn’t even see the physical attraction which had once driven her to this man.
    Beaumont was ten years older than her, and he wasn’t ageing well. The face which she had seen as handsome was now florid, developing jowls and the suggestion of a double chin beneath them. No man could successfully combat thinning hair, but as he drew the ever-scarcer strands which were left obstinately across his pate, he risked looking ridiculous. Well-cut suits could disguise an insistent embonpoint only up to a certain point, a point which her critical eye insisted had now been passed.
    He was a powerful man; she had no delusions about that. And she had long ago accepted the old saw that power was the greatest aphrodisiac. You wanted to investigate men who had power. You wanted to discover how they had acquired it and how they thought of the people whose lives they controlled. It gave them an extra and highly important dimension. It was very easy to persuade yourself that men who exercised power had greater intelligence and greater depth to their personalities than was in fact the case.
    With the benefit of hindsight and that pitiless objectivity with which one examines past sexual mistakes, she saw now that she had invested Martin Beaumont with this kind of mystique. There was really nothing very complex or intriguing about either his power or the way he exercised it. He was a man on the make, with a sharp eye for the main chance, and there wasn’t a lot more to it than that. He had acquired a certain amount of money early in life – she had never found out exactly how – and he had used cunning and ruthlessness to make a lot more. There was no reason to see him as more incisive or more gifted than he was, but she had tended to do that.
    Like many a disillusioned ex-lover, Vanda went too far in her reactions. Martin Beaumont had in fact inherited a certain amount of money as a young man, but he had been shrewd and capable in his use of it. Moreover, he had had both a vision and the courage and the determination to pursue it. When he had conceived the idea of a vineyard in Gloucestershire, it had been both an original and a high-risk notion. He had to produce figures to convince his bankers that it was a commercial proposition, rather than an enthusiast’s indulgence, a hobby which would eventually ruin him.
    Martin had worked very hard in the early years, had ploughed back every penny of the meagre profits into developing the business. Gradually, he had acquired and developed more and more land for viniculture. A sceptical public in what was essentially a rural area had gradually accepted that the vineyard was here to stay. Indeed, the more enlightened locals had eventually conceded that, with all the problems of both arable and livestock farming in the area and the yearly evidence of global warming, there might just be a future for Abbey Vineyards.
    The outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and its sombre consequences in the early years of the new century