Chapter 15

15

I managed a full two hours of sleep. Becky finished off the ‘entertainment’ with hot chocolate and buttery crumpets and I finished clearing up. The guests retired just before midnight, with the promise of a packed day of activities to come. I then sped ten miles to the nearest twenty-four-hour supermarket and loaded up a trolley with food and drink. I also chucked in some patterned notebooks with matching pens and about twelve different magazines. Arriving back at the farm around two, I spent an hour planning the next day, followed by another hour having an imaginary conversation with Charlie about how on earth I’d ended up running her lifestyle reconfiguration retreat. If anyone needed a lifestyle reconfiguration, surely that was me?

     When the guests bumbled downstairs for breakfast at eight, I had kicked into action mode. The breakfast table was laid, a fire crackled in the grate and the kitchen was a bastion of organised efficiency. I was wearing a sleek charcoal dress that was the essence of respectable hotelier. After her disturbed night in the study, Hope was crotchety and disgruntled, but Daniel had taken her out for a walk before a work call at ten.

     Chock-full of creamy cinnamon oat-milk porridge, smoky homemade beans on rye toast and a dozen eggs (the green-bean eater enjoyed a bowl of berries while the ‘vegan’ snarfed up the spare portion of eggs), the guests gathered in the living room for the first activity.

     I took another emergency trip to Charlie’s bathroom (the only one available to me at that point) to stare hard at myself in the mirror, channel something of my previous badass persona from the page to my actual personality, and grit my teeth until I was at almost no risk of bursting into tears, and then headed downstairs.

     ‘Right, who’s up for some vision crafting?’

     ‘Vision what-ing?’ Simon asked, glancing up from his phone.

     ‘Ooh, yes,’ green-bean-and-berries said. ‘Is there a prize for the best one? Do we get a grade?’ Her eyes went round with excitement. ‘Or a certificate?’

     ‘Absolutely not,’ I replied, hastily continuing after her face plummeted. ‘As you’ve already heard, Damson Farm is about you being you. It’s your vision, your craft. How can any of us judge or critique, or grade someone at being their best selves?’ I waved my hands around, trying to remember how Becky managed it the evening before. ‘Here, we don’t even judge ourselves!’

     ‘So, to repeat, what exactly are we going to be doing?’ Simon asked, not even bothering to look up this time.

     ‘We are going to be considering four questions that are vital in the quest to reconfigure our lifestyles to become our best selves. Who we were. Who we wanted to be. Who we ended up being, and who we want to become. Some of you here have spent the past ten years running yourselves into the ground chasing what you’re supposed to want. Meanwhile, your dreams are asking, “What happened to opening that café in the Alps? Where are the dogs we were going to rescue? You promised me we were going to learn the cello, try an open-mic poetry night, sit in the garden with a book and do absolutely nothing all day.”’

     ‘So. Once again.’ Simon offered me a hard stare. ‘What crap are we going to be wasting our time on this morning?’

     ‘Um, cutting out pictures and taking the other craft stuff and sticking it on these plant pots. Then you’re going to plant a seed, take it home and watch it grow, surrounded by your new vision.’

     ‘Ooh, that’s actually really symbolic,’ Saskia said. ‘I love cutting and sticking! It was my best subject at school.’

     ‘I’m missing a board meeting for this,’ Simon droned, raising his eyebrows at Stephe.

     ‘Come on, old chap, we’re here now. Might as well get your money’s worth,’ Stephe said.

     ‘Oh, just one more thing,’ I added, grabbing a bowl off the mantlepiece and holding it out. ‘It’s a no-phone activity.’

     Simon sighed. ‘Well, there’d better be some decent booze.’

     By lunchtime, the dining room table was a snowstorm of paper snippets, soil and pipe-cleaners. Hope had thoroughly enjoyed sitting in her highchair helping Simon create his vision pot, which had ended up covered in pictures of penguins, white glitter glue and hundreds of tiny foam snowflakes.

     ‘I just, you know, always loved penguins,’ he explained, chin wobbling. ‘Growing up, my bedroom was covered in posters of them. I adopted a pair of emperor penguins at the zoo, and they’d send me updates. I’d write back, and go and see them twice a year, and I swear they knew it was me. Peter and Penelope. Then, I dunno, exams and uni and work and before I knew it, we’d completely lost touch. Did you know,’ he paused for a monstrous sniff, ‘gentoo penguins mate for life. The male penguin finds a nice nest site, picks his woman, takes his turn when it comes to looking after the chick. A proper dad. A proper family. That’s all I wanted!’

     Simon wrapped his hands around the plant pot, tears threatening in his eyes.

     Of course that was the moment Daniel poked his head round the door. ‘I’m on my lunchbreak, so I can take Hope.’

     He walked around the table, picked up his daughter, plucked a pink feather out of her hair and a snowflake off her cheek and left without any comment on the mess everywhere.

     To my monumental relief, the doorbell rang to announce my crew had arrived. I showed Becky into the dining room, with an apologetic shrug, and hustled Alice into the kitchen to start prepping an organic, locally supermarket sourced, Damson Farm lifestyle-reconfiguring version of a kids’ party buffet.

I had never felt so exhausted. By the time they left, our guests had trooped back to the orchard to cover the basics of beekeeping with Becky, spent an hour baking honey bread, then lain on cushions on the living room floor and relearnt how to breathe before eating an afternoon tea incorporating the honey bread. While doing this, they had so often snivelled and grabbed each other’s hands in moments of revelation about how their life in central London resembled a hive, that by the time they left it felt strange not to have constant chatter playing on a loop in the background.

     Hard work I can manage. Emotional breakdowns and deeply personal outbursts I was not equipped to handle.

     I dread to think what Nora Sharp would have made of it all. To my utter relief, for reasons I might begin to untangle once I’d had a decent night’s sleep and a glass of wine, the guests had seemed to love it – Simon even commented on how the décor in the bedrooms and the decrepit bathrooms had been the perfect metaphor for his crumbling, neglected real self.

     Even better, the ridiculously large tip meant I could pay my team. Becky refused it at first, until we agreed that she’d spend it on a secret Old Side, New Side and No Side night out, somewhere in Nottingham where no one would spot us.

     ‘That was the most fun I’ve had in ages,’ Becky said, opening the sole remaining bottle of Prosecco.

     ‘That’s what you call it?’ Daniel asked, who had joined us for a late dinner of leftovers.

     ‘Compared to farting on about pharmaceuticals to people who mostly just want you to go away and let them get on with saving lives, it was fantastic!’

     ‘Fun or not, it was a bloomin’ success!’ Alice said. ‘Two thousand pounds each for that!’

     ‘Charlie would have absolutely loved it,’ I added. ‘Seeing her dream come to life, even if it was completely last minute, chuck-it-all-together and hope for the best…’ I had to stop talking and close my eyes.

     ‘To Charlie,’ Becky said, holding her glass up.

     ‘To Charlie.’ We all chinked our glasses in a toast, and for a brief moment it felt as though she was almost sitting here beside us.

     ‘So, when’s the next one?’ Becky asked, after following our reflective pause with a long drink.

     ‘Um, never?’ I said, my eyes on Daniel.

     He looked at me steadily across the table. ‘Giving up on your dream so quickly? On Charlie’s dream? Is that what your vision pot says?’

     ‘You would really be up for doing it again?’

     Daniel thought about this. When he was thinking a crease appeared between his eyebrows that a stupid, self-sabotaging part of me wanted to stroke until it softened away.

     ‘With proper planning, some reconfiguration of the farmhouse, sensible activities that people actually want to do… I don’t think anything’s happened in the past two days to make me change my mind.’ The hint of a smile creased at the corners of his mouth. ‘You sort of blew me away, to be honest.’

     A flush of bashful pleasure cascaded up my neck and face like a scarlet tidal wave. Becky waggled her eyebrows at me.

     ‘All three of you did. You were brilliant. We couldn’t have done it without you.’

     Ah, right. Of course. All of us blew him away.

     ‘What d’you mean, “we”?’ Alice asked, tossing her hair over one shoulder. ‘I think your contribution consisted of grumbling, hiding in your study and eating the last of the honey bread.’

     On that note, we called it a night.