Chapter 10 #2
I’d been doing this job long enough that I didn’t have to try very hard to resist asking who the rest of them were and why he—having just inherited a fortune, a peerage, and a dung beetle charity—wasn’t one of them.
“Who—” began Rhys Jones Bowen.
I clapped my hands. “Let’s get to the meeting.”
* * *
At exactly ten o’clock, Dr. Fairclough walked through the door of the meeting room/hot-desking area/Barbara Clench’s old office.
At exactly one minute past ten we were all sitting down while Alex started trying to load Dr. Fairclough’s PowerPoint.
Eight minutes later, while Alex was still trying to load the PowerPoint, Dr. Fairclough said, “Perhaps we can do without visual aids for now.”
“Nearly there.” Alex switched on the projector to show the room his desktop wallpaper, which was apparently the Twaddle coat of arms: argent, on two bars wavy azure, two fish rampant gardant. “Just trying to find the file. I knew it was important, so I moved it this morning for safekeeping.”
“Thank you for joining us,” Dr. Fairclough continued, addressing herself almost exclusively to the earl, who was eating a Jaffa Cake with an expression of epic unimpressedness.
“I’m Dr. Fairclough, head of the Coleoptera Research and Protection Project, and I wanted to take this time to outline for you some of the vital work we do here at the Coleoptera Research and Protection Project and how it contributes to the ecological and agricultural stability of the British Isles. ”
Behind her, Alex had finally found something to show us. Unfortunately, what he’d found was a selfie he’d taken in Mustique with Miffy, his heiress It-girl wife.
Dr. Fairclough glanced briefly over her shoulder, then back at the earl. “Geotrupidae…” she began, and my heart sank. No successful fundraising pitch ever began with the word Geotrupidae. “… are an integral part of—”
“I’m going to stop you there,” said Saint.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” returned Dr. Fairclough.
He finished his Jaffa Cake, swung back his chair, and thunked his boots on the table. “I just don’t want to waste your time. Truth is, bugs were the old man’s thing, not mine.”
“Bugs,” said Dr. Fairclough, “as you call them, are everybody’s thing, for reasons I am about to explain in some detail.”
My heart stopped sinking, but only because it had hit the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Pitches that began with the word Geotrupidae had a marginally higher success rate than pitches that included the phrase I am about to explain in some detail.
“Look”—Saint gave the kind of dismissive hand wave that only the terminally overprivileged could give—“I appreciate everything you’re trying to do, but you’re not going to convince me that beetles are more important than schools, hospitals, or a cure for cancer.”
I bit my tongue incredibly hard. Because once somebody played the schools, hospitals, and cures for cancer card, it was very hard to get them back onto the importance of dung beetles without ever so slightly implying that they were up their own arse.
The thing is, ten seconds’ thought would tell you that CRAPP’s annual operating budget, translated into school, hospital, and cure-for-cancer money, would buy you half a classroom, one clinic bed, or a tenth of a drug trial that would almost certainly go nowhere.
But it was funny how few people reacted well to being told that their grand plans to solve the world’s problems were glorified vanity projects.
And although it was unfair of me to judge, I had a feeling that Saint was an absolute sucker for a glorified vanity project.
If only we had one to sell him.
“Cancer,” said Dr. Fairclough, “is an umbrella term describing a set of distinct but related conditions that are highly unlikely to be responsive to a single treatment.”
I somehow succeeded in not slamming my face flat onto the table in front of me.
“What she means,” I tried, “is that cancer already attracts a lot of research funding, and if you want your money to make a real difference, smaller charities like ours can do proportionally more with the same resources.”
“I understand what you’re saying.” Saint was nodding in that indulgent but unyielding way I saw a lot in this job. And not normally from people who wound up as donors. “But, cards on the table, I’m finding it very hard to get excited about insects who eat shit.”
He had me there. CRAPP’s whole funding model relied heavily on people who were the exact right combination of environmentally conscious and charmingly eccentric.
“Excitement,” I tried, very much aware it was a desperation gambit, “isn’t strictly required to patronise a charity.”
Saint nodded again. It was a slow, deliberate nod that said I hear you but was lying about it.
“I’ve got a profile,” he said. “A platform and property. I know I could be a real advocate for the right movement, but right now, there’s a whole lot tied up in”—he made that dismissive, encompassing gesture again—“this.”
For the first time since Saint had walked through the door, Alex found a space of sympathy with him.
“Oh now, when you put it like that, it is a bit of a sticky wicket, isn’t it?
Fellow can’t have all of a fellow’s cash tied up in one investment.
Why, only the other day I was saying to Miffy, ‘Miffy,’ I was saying, ‘do we really need two houses in the Maldives? What if something comes up and we wind up short on readies?’”
“See,” said Saint, whose antiestablishment credentials were only slightly dented by his taking Alex’s spare-villa probs as completely normal, “he gets it. And you’re all going to have to get it because at the end of the day, it’s my decision.”
“Of course,” I said and was honestly thankful that Saint cut me off before I could get to a but with no follow-up.
“I’m a fair man,” Saint concluded, demonstrating that fairest of all fair instincts, a strong desire to tell people how fair he was. “I’ll give you a year to wrap things up, find new jobs, all the rest of it. It’s a tough economy, and I wouldn’t want to be an arsehole.”
“Jolly considerate of you.” That was Alex, who had apparently forgiven Saint for his oikishness now he was demonstrating an appropriate level of entitlement and arrogance. “Still, bit rough on the old man’s legacy, don’tcha think? I mean, Hilary did love his beetles.”
“Fuck his legacy. You know what he told me when I said I was dropping out of Oxford to take my band on the road?”
“What?” I asked with instincts honed over several years of being professionally required to pay attention to rich people’s bullshit.
“He said, ‘That’s not the sort of thing de Lancys do.’” Saint frowned into the past with the intensity of a man who’d been carrying a grudge for forty years. “Financed it myself in the end. Had to sell my Bentley.”
Alex looked horrified. “Oh, I say.”
I was ninety-nine percent sure this was fucked no matter what happened, but my job was all about living in the one percent. “That was really wrong of him,” I tried, “but if you’re doing this just to get back at your dead father, then—I don’t know, is that the kind of person you want to be?”
Saint got up from the table with a slow forcefulness that you really had to be a sixty-something-year-old independently wealthy anarchist to pull off. “Yeah,” he said. And walked out.
We stared at the remaining Jaffa Cakes for, I don’t know, a while.
“Well,” said Rhys Jones Bowen at last, “that could have gone better.”