Читать книгу Ten Steps to Happiness - Daisy Waugh - Страница 12

They had spent the Ministry’s compensation money and a lot more besides rebuilding the park’s crumbling walls, and they’d refurbished the two-hundred-year-old gates at the bottom of the front drive so they could be operated by remote control.

‘That’ll keep the buggers at bay,’ said the General, standing in front of them with his clicking machine, opening and closing them until they broke. (It took two weeks and £950 plus VAT to get them mended.) ‘They won’t be able to get at us now! Ha!’ Nobody was certain if he was referring to unscrupulous news reporters or to the whole human race. It didn’t matter. Either way he was quite right. They’d laid barbed wire on top of the twelve-foot walls. Unwelcome visitors to Fiddleford would need to work hard to find a way in.

A lot had changed since the foot and mouth purge and the estate, if you could still call it that, was less than a tenth the size it had been a year ago. Charlie, like so many other farmers, had realised that if they were to survive at all, there needed to be some radical rethinking, and as a result he’d done many things at Fiddleford which he’d always hoped to postpone until after his father died. He decided to restock only a fraction of the animals he had lost in the cull, and now all but sixty acres of the land was sold, and there were only two cottages remaining; one which Mrs Webber, the old housekeeper, had been promised for life, and the other, at the bottom of the drive, which was still awaiting the arrival of the General. Mrs Webber, sixty-four last summer, now only worked in the mornings, which meant Les Chedzoy was the single full-time employee left. He was useless at his job – at almost everything he did – and not even very pleasant, but he’d been born in a cottage on the estate and he was exceptionally stupid. Much too stupid, Charlie believed, to survive in a world beyond Fiddleford. He lived in the village now, in a small house which, on his retirement twenty-two years ago, the General had given to his father.

In all, after the sale and including the MAFF compensation cheque, Charlie and Jo had raised just enough money for the park walls and the gate, to build one extra bathroom and to do all the most urgent external repairs. Jo had needed to fight to be allowed to spend anything on the inside of the house. (Any highfaluting dreams of kitchen refurbishments and so on had been very quickly disbanded). But she had been to IKEA and bought ten new duvets and duvet covers, which had cheered everyone up, and finally, after Les claimed to have a fear of heights, lugged her increasingly bulbous belly onto a stepladder and repainted most of the upstairs rooms herself. And then that was it. All the money was gone.

The end result was a generally sturdy old house with a mended boiler (but no pilates teacher; no chapel-effect-chill-out-room; certainly no gym in the junk-filled stables), and a phenomenal, unimaginable amount of paperwork. On his solicitor’s advice Charlie was in the process of applying for a myriad of licences and government permits, all apparently necessary if Fiddleford was to operate legally in its new form.

And while they waited…and waited…for government officials to hand out all the licences they insist on inventing, Charlie, Grey and the General had been trying to persuade Jo that they should press ahead and open the refuge anyway. Jo was adamant that they should not. But she too began to lose confidence in the system when, after four and a half months of silence, two letters arrived from the local planning office on the same day. The first, rejecting outright an application, already withdrawn, in writing, twice, to convert the old stables into a gym. The second, saying it had ‘temporarily mislaid’ all documents relating to that same application, and requesting that the application be ‘resubmitted’ at once.

Fiddleford desperately needed an income. Jo, seven months pregnant now, understood that as well as any of them. She understood it even better the day Charlie returned from the local animal feed merchant with an empty trailer, having had every credit card rejected.

‘I think I can persuade them to extend the overdraft a little bit,’ he said drearily, sitting at the unrefurbished kitchen table, his head in his hands. ‘But after that…This is serious. We can’t just talk about it anymore. We’ve got to get some bloody guests.’

That afternoon he and Jo went on a final recce of the house to convince each other once and for all that it was ready. They didn’t choose to comment on the damp patches already beginning to show through Jo’s paintwork. Nor on how most of the landing rugs had worn, in patches, right through to the wood. Nor on the numerous paint splodges which had been left by Jo all over the floor and furniture, nor on the frayed and faded state of all the sofas, armchairs, curtains…nor on the fact that the windows in the bedrooms all rattled and leaked.

By the time they reached the end of the tour neither had managed to speak for several minutes. They paused on the upstairs landing, glanced nervously at each other.

‘It’s not quite what we’d envisaged, is it?’ she said at last.

‘It’s not perfect. Yet. But it will be!’

‘Yes. It will be. As soon as the money starts coming in.’

‘That’s just what I was going to say.’

‘Anyway I like it,’ she said. ‘I think it’s better than perfect. In its own way. It’s got character…’ They both smiled half-heartedly. ‘And if people don’t like it they can fuck off – I mean—No. I don’t mean that, obviously. I mean—’ Jo wasn’t sure what she meant. But the reality of sharing their home with a lot of grumbling, dissatisfied strangers suddenly seemed rather more real and a great deal less enticing than it had this morning. ‘…Anyway,’ she finished lamely, ‘they’re all going to be very happy here. I’m sure.’

‘Dead bloody right, they will be! And if they aren’t, I quite agree, they can just fuck right off again.’

‘It’s exactly what they would do, I suppose,’ she said glumly.

‘Right. And see if we care!’ They both started laughing. ‘Now then. I’ve got exactly…’ He emptied his trouser pockets. ‘…£11.87…Altogether…Oh. How much have you got?’

‘I’ve got £25. But it’s meant to last us until Friday. They won’t let us get any more out until the end of the week.’

‘Fine. Excellent. I think we should drive out to Lamsbury and buy ourselves a bottle of champagne.’

‘Charlie, we can’t.’

‘Of course we can. We’ve got to celebrate. With or without the bloody licences. Fiddleford Manor Retreat is now officially open for guests. So let’s hope they come soon or we shan’t be able to buy the greedy little sods any breakfast.’

It was Messy Monroe, though she didn’t realise it yet, who was destined to be Fiddleford’s first illegal guest. Which is strange because until a fortnight or so before she arrived most of the country had forgotten she ever existed. One of a stream of wide-eyed girls with nice bellybuttons who flit across our television screens, she’d had a stint presenting Top of the Pops about seven years ago. In December 1995 she was voted TV’s Hottest Totty by one of the men’s magazines and she spent the following eighteen months or so capitalising on it, endorsing all sorts of things from Breast Awareness Week to easi-grip toothbrushes. She was given a holiday show to present, which meant everyone got to see her in her bathers, and then five years ago, just when life couldn’t have been looking any better, she made the mistake of falling in love with a pretentious and impoverished novelist.

This one, who was small and softly spoken and who used unnecessarily long words to hide the fact that he was never actually saying anything, made her head spin with an irresistible mixture of lust and mental confusion. He could have chosen to ruin any number of beautiful women’s lives, and in fact he had (and continues to do so). That winter, the winter of 1996, he just happened to pick on Messy.

At the time Messy was a young twenty-five, and in a funny way slightly frightened by her easy success. She had emerged onto the scene three years earlier, from a life of dreary and impoverished oblivion, the daughter of a father she had never met, and a mother who worked in personnel at a shirt factory in Middlesbrough. She’d been surviving in an idea-free zone ever since, surrounded by the sort of spoilt and happening crew who find it embarrassing to use long words at all, let alone use them to say anything confusing, and she hadn’t realised it until the writer came along, but she was bored. She was wilting with boredom – and guilt and bewilderment. Because she was living, after all, the very life that a lot of women have been encouraged to fantasise about.

Enter the little writer, putting on an excellent show of being interested in her mind. They spent almost a year together, just long enough for him to destroy what there ever really was of her confidence. In a series of desperate bids to impress him, she applied to read a degree course in Philosophy (and was rejected). She resigned from the holiday show, refused to cooperate with a Hello! magazine TV Totty special, and sacked her agent. But the little novelist remained unimpressed. Nothing she did, or didn’t do, could escape his soft-voiced disdain. In September 1997, just six weeks before he was due to desert her, Messy produced the only decent thing that ever came out of the relationship, a daughter called Chloe.

She and Chloe went to live in a small cottage in Oxfordshire, where the British public very quickly forgot about her. She looked after her daughter, educated herself to a level where she would never again find herself intimidated by chippy little novelists, and ate. She was fifteen stone, lonely, broke, and Chloe had just turned three when she finally felt desperate enough to start rebuilding her life again.

Messy did the only thing she could think of doing under her restricted circumstances. While her daughter was away at nursery school she wrote a book about being fat, and about what she claimed to have identified as the ‘fat/thin hate divide’. And because she was quite clever and because the book, however silly, was often funny and very frank, and of course because she herself had once been so famous and thin, Messy’s book caught people’s attention. The Secret Revolution: Fatties Fight Back was given an undue amount of publicity, almost all of it negative.

Which brings us pretty much up to date. Fatties had been out for just one week and it was infuriating everyone. Thin people, obviously, because for the first time ever they were under open attack, and fat people because – well, for a myriad of reasons. After all the subject isn’t an easy one, and Messy should never have used the word FATTIES in the title if she wasn’t prepared for a rough ride.

Messy Monroe may be finding it hard, now she’s just like every other female, worrying ‘does my bum look big in this?’ read one of a hundred readers’ letters running in publications around the country that week, but maybe it’s just a problem she has, adjusting to not being a ‘star’ anymore. I’m ‘fat’, as she calls it, and believe me I KNOW I’m fabulous, and I’ve got lots of skinny friends who accept me as I am. So Messy, all I can say to you is, try looking out and seeing the love in this world next time, instead of harping on about fat versus thin!!!

Messy, having hidden away for four years, was now suddenly giving interviews galore, and she hated it. She hated being on show, but the wretched Fatty theme had spiralled into the unofficial Light Relief Topic of the Week, and it was out of her control – or so she felt. The whole thing culminated in an invitation to appear alongside three Very Important Men on the panel of Question Time.

In fact she acquitted herself quite well at first. She came up with something suitably anodyne when they asked her about the effect of September 11th on other terrorist groups, and again when they asked her (as if she knew) about the likelihood of biological warfare on Britain. It was only towards the end, when the questions turned from world war to people’s weight, that she ran into trouble.

‘I for one am very slender,’ announced a sensible-looking woman about three rows from the front, ‘but I have many, many dear friends who are on the larger side—’

‘They’re fat,’ snapped Messy. ‘If you mean they’re fat, then for Heaven’s sake say so.’

‘Rubbish!’ somebody shouted back. Messy rolled her eyes impatiently.

‘Doesn’t the panel think,’ the very slender woman continued, ‘that we have enough hate divisions in this world already, without people like Messy Monroe falsely inventing any more?’

The entire audience, fat and thin, broke into hearty applause. They were angry and frightened, after so long discussing a possible World War Three, and they needed to vent their frustration on an easy target. Messy, with all the adrenaline that was pumping through her, was only fuzzily aware of the audience mood. She was more acutely aware of her own terror, and of the possibility that at any moment she could simply lose her nerve. So she over-compensated and answered the question without any of the conciliatory ramble which served her more experienced panellists so well: ‘Firstly, and most obviously,’ she said, much too aggressively, ‘these divisions are not “invented”. You and your friends may not want to acknowledge them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. My fat friends and I could refuse to acknowledge the WTC attacks. A fat lot of use that would be!’ She paused. It was meant to be a joke. Not an especially funny one, obviously, but not necessarily deserving of the cruel ‘Ver-y Funn-y’ yelled out from the back of the auditorium, which made everyone laugh. She pressed on. ‘You can’t heal a rift—You can’t heal any sort of rift without first identifying the causes. And that’s what my book is doing. Trying to point out that fat and thin people, and especially women, have a deep and very understandable mistrust of one another—’

‘RUBBISH!’ somebody shouted again.

Messy ignored it, and the burst of applause which followed. ‘Which is why,’ she continued, ‘there has been such a strong reaction to my use of the word FATTIES in the title. If people weren’t so jittery about us they wouldn’t take such exception to the word that describes us. Obviously. It’s the same reason we can’t say “coloured” or “negro” or “spastic” or “dwarf”…’

She hesitated, waiting for the jeers to die down. ‘And to illustrate that—’ she said, and faltered. ‘…To illustrate that,’ she began again. Messy had been facing hostility on radio phone-in shows all week, but this was different. Looking around at the angry faces in front of her, and the smug unhelpful expressions of her Very Important fellow guests, she realised she had forgotten what she was going to say. Completely. She tried another tack: ‘For example, I would like to know how many fatties here tonight…How many fatties in the audience—’ What was she meant to say next? She had no idea. ‘How many fatties…’ She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember any words at all. All she could do was repeat herself. And every time she repeated herself, she repeated the word ‘fatty’, and every time she said ‘fatty’ the audience grew more enraged.

It reached a point where one of her Very Important fellow panellists decided to step in.

The eternally marvellous Maurice Morrison, twice married and divorced and also, as it happened, a furtive (but busy) preferrer of teenage boys; multi-millionaire entrepreneur, ex-Marlborough pupil and the government’s brand new Minister for Kindness; slim, attractive, concerned, with a full head of salty blond hair and an Armani-clad well-exercised torso, held up his suntanned, elegantly masculine hand and called calmly for hush.

‘OK, look, come on, guys,’ he said, ‘I think we should appreciate that Messy is entitled to her opinion, and since she’s come on the show to tell us about it, we should at least have the courtesy to listen, yeah? Even if we don’t agree. Becuz, basically—For me, that’s one of the beautiful things about this country. It’s one of the things we’re fighting for right now, over in Kabul! Becuz – here in Britain, OK – we can stand up and say “Listen, guys. You may not agree with me, but this is actually an issue I believe in!”’

By God, it brought the house down.

Messy glowered at him as he peeped across, smiling with encouragement and warmth and a lovely little smattering of diffidence. She didn’t need Maurice Morrison – the last thing she needed was patronising, good-looking Maurice Morrison trawling for admirers off the back of her humiliation. She was furious. Gradually the cheers faded to silence and everyone waited to hear how she would respond.

She could have said so many things. If she’d been even an eighth as efficient at crowd control as Mr Morrison was, she could have turned the whole situation to her advantage. But she wasn’t. She had barely emerged from four years in hiding, she was still battered by a broken heart and the cruel transformation in her looks and general fortune, and the lights were beaming down on her and making her very hot. The whole world, or so it felt, was looking on. She said: ‘Get lost, you phony little creep.’

And that was the end of Messy. Really, she was lucky she wasn’t lynched.

The performance boosted her book sales, but it also set her up as a national target for mockery and general abuse. Over the next two days a lot of inane and cruel things were written about her. One paper found a nutritionist to express revulsion at a picture of sweet, chubby little Chloe sucking on a lollipop. Another paper dedicated a whole page to what they imagined Messy Monroe needed to eat each day in order to maintain her great bulk. Several papers ran Before and After photographs, alongside pseudo serious articles about the stresses of early fame/sex appeal/faded stardom/single motherhood…It was pretty standard stuff, the usual newspaper fodder. It certainly wasn’t an enormous story, what with everything else that was going on.

But it was big enough to catch the eyes of the tabloid scanners at Fiddleford Manor.

‘There’s a bloody great cow here,’ said Grey McShane, slowly lifting his large feet off the kitchen table and laying his paper down in front of him, ‘who lost her rag on the telly a couple o’ nights ago. Have you seen the size of her?’

‘Yes, I noticed her,’ mumbled the General, without looking up. Dressed smartly, as always, in a tweed jacket and old regiment tie, he was sitting in his preferred position for this time in the mid-morning, bolt upright in the worn leather armchair beside the Aga, and surrounded by a sea of downmarket newspapers and magazines. ‘I thought she was rather comely.’

‘No!’ Grey examined the photograph more closely, this time trying to overlook her most obvious weakness. And it was true, she had beautiful long dark shiny hair…and an attractive mouth which curled up slightly at the edges…and round, intelligent, bright blue eyes… ‘But she’s a bloody whale!’

‘Modern girls are too thin, McShane. I thought we’d agreed on that.’

‘Well I know…But there’s a limit.’

Just then Jo came in, waddling efficiently as she tended to these days, now that she was tense and working again, with her large but very neat seven-and-a-half-month bump in front of her and her notorious contacts book resting open in her hands. ‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘Are you discussing Messy Monroe? That’s just who I wanted to talk about.’

‘Aye. Apparently she really hates thin people.’

‘She actually did a couple of P.A.s for us a few years ago. Ha! When she was thin herself. And she was great. Very professional…Because there was that phase when an M.M. P.A. pretty much guaranteed a show in the red tops, wasn’t there? She could charge whatever she liked…Do you remember?’ Grey and the General looked at each other in weary incomprehension, as they often did when Jo started talking shop. ‘Anyway it doesn’t matter,’ she continued blithely. ‘The point is somehow or other I’ve got her number. And that’s what counts. I think we should invite her to come down.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ bellowed Grey. ‘Have you seen the size of her? She won’t fit through the front door!’

‘Well. Short of inviting Osama Bin Laden to stay with us—’

‘Don’t be disgusting,’ snapped the General.

‘…she’s about the only person left anybody can be bothered to hate anymore.’

‘I don’t hate her,’ said the General mildly. ‘As a matter of fact I think she looks delightful…In a largish sort of way.’

‘Well, good. Because I’m about to persuade her to come and see us. She’s going to be our first celebrity refugee. What do you think about that?’

Grey sat back with amusement to observe the General’s reaction to this new autocratic management style. He was amazed, actually, that Jo had managed to prevent herself from adopting it from the beginning. The house had been unofficially ready to receive people for a fortnight now and so far the ‘Guest Selection Board Meetings’, as Jo, back in full professional mode, now insisted on calling the Fiddleford Four’s rather goofy and extremely argumentative confabs, had not been a great success. There had been five meetings altogether, each one angrily and prematurely disbanded because three of the four board members could never agree. On anything. At the last meeting even Charlie, the most tolerant of men, had walked out before the end.

‘What’s that?’ said the General stiffly. ‘The adorable little fat lady? Invited here? Don’t you think we should have some sort of conference about this before you take the law into your own hands?’

Grey McShane chuckled.

‘The meetings,’ said Jo, using her most reasonable voice (also unfortunately the one most guaranteed to infuriate her father-in-law) ‘don’t seem to be getting us anywhere. And the fact is – the fact is – they’re not going to increase our overdraft again. Unless we do something pretty soon, we are seriously going to have to start selling pieces of furniture—’

‘I’m aware of that,’ interrupted the General haughtily and then, uncertain how to continue the argument in the face of such appalling news, repeated himself, before turning lamely towards Grey for help.

Grey shrugged. ‘She’s right, you know. These meetings are a bloody waste o’ time.’

‘Fine,’ he snapped. ‘Fine. Have it your own way. Of course I know you will anyway. Don’t consult me. After all it’s no longer my house…’

‘Och, belt up,’ said Grey good-naturedly. The General pretended not to hear. He picked up his newspaper, opened it at a random page, and managed, apparently, to be instantly engrossed.

Jo and her father-in-law’s relationship had not grown any easier over the past months, in spite of their shared trauma at the hands of the government slaughtermen, their pleasure at the coming baby, and even their shared love of Charlie. Jo had employed all her best, most charming tactics to try to win him round but to no avail. She and the General had argued the very first time they met, and it seemed they were incapable of doing anything else.

Jo tended to lay undue emphasis on the retired General’s utterly irrelevant political opinions (which were always unfashionable and occasionally, it has to be said, quite unpleasant). She took offence to almost every opinion he had. The General simply took offence to Jo. Which was unfair because she had enormous warmth and kindness, and occasionally, when her fashionable opinions allowed it, and she was feeling brave enough, she was even capable of being quite funny. But she was too modern, too bossy, too equal, too clever. Altogether too many things that a fading General would be bound to find alarming.

And now she was living in his house, or rather he was living in hers. She was imposing ridiculous new telephone systems on him, and inviting people he didn’t know to come and stay. Because although the dream of opening a refuge had at least partly been his, the reality of having paying strangers in the house was of course quite different. More so for him than for any of them. And if sharing his old home with a kind but bossy daughter-in-law was difficult, then sharing it with incomprehensible new telephone ‘units’ and a lot of ghastly, self-pitying ‘celebrities’ was likely to be more than even the most open-minded of Generals, could be expected to stand.

Jo was by no means oblivious to these complications and not, in spite of his hostility, completely unsympathetic to them either. But it didn’t alter the fact that she intended to get her way. She hesitated, feeling unsure exactly how to proceed. ‘So that’s agreed then, is it?’ she said, to the back of his newspaper. He ignored her. ‘Um…General? [He had never asked her to call him James]…You quite like the idea of having Messy down here? To stay?…I mean she’s only small fry, I know—’

‘Small?’ bellowed Grey.

‘—but it’s a start, isn’t it? I don’t think we should try to charge her too much, do you? We should probably see what sort of a deal we can drum up with one of the mags. Try to squeeze them for a bit of cash, don’t you think? While we cut our teeth, sort of thing.’ She knew they weren’t really listening, and they knew that she was only pretending to consult them. They didn’t bother to reply. ‘Anyway,’ she said, sounding determinedly upbeat. ‘Ha! Here I am, counting my chickens. She may not even want to come!’ And with that Jo hurried out of the room.

‘Officious little minx,’ mumbled the General quickly, while she was still in earshot.

‘Aye,’ muttered Grey. ‘But she’ll be the saving of this place. Saving of all of us I should think. We’re bloody lucky she puts up with having us around.’

Once again, the General didn’t feel tempted to respond.

Messy Monroe had given up answering the telephone by the time Jo summoned the courage to put in her first call. With all the hacks and their editors, and the PR people and the publishers, she and Chloe had lived the last couple of days to a backdrop of answer machine babble. It just so happened that while Jo (having heard nothing and feeling increasingly desperate) was leaving her seventh unanswered message in two hours on Messy’s machine, Messy was alone in the room, and her brain was lying idle. Which meant the odd snippet of welcome information kept seeping through.

‘…keep calling you and I know what a tremendous amount of stress you must be under…worked with a lot of people in your position…even at the rough end of it myself recently…beautiful media-free sanctuary…isolated old manor house…lovely walks…Chloe to play…very very comfortable and guaranteed reporter-free…’

As Jo spoke there was another knock on Messy’s front door. Another creepy reporter, she assumed, carrying a bunch of flowers and pretending to be her friend. (She was wrong in fact. The creepy flowers were from Jo.) Anyway it was the last straw. She lunged for the telephone.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello!’ Jo couldn’t disguise her relief. She started laughing. Messy had taken her call. She would come and stay. She would bring money with her. Everything was going to be OK. ‘Goodness! Ha ha. Goodness! Messy! Oh! Are you there?’

‘What? Of course I am!’

‘Of course you are. Of course you are.’ Jo took a deep breath. ‘No, I meant to say are you OK?’

‘What? I have to tell you, you probably think I’m loaded, but I spent it all. I spent everything. That’s the main reason I wrote the book. So you’re not going to be interested in me anyway.’

Which took Jo by surprise. She had imagined someone much fiercer, but Messy sounded terrified. Poor thing. The realisation gave Jo’s confidence a welcome boost, and within seconds the slick PR-girl spiel was slipping off her tongue as if she’d never taken a break from using it.

Messy’s financial status didn’t matter, Jo said. She explained – and it was one of the few things the Fiddleford Four had all agreed on – that guests’ rates depended on their ability to pay, and on the income she could draw (and split down the middle) from any exclusive interview deals she arranged. ‘I’ve been a senior partner [only a minor exaggeration] in one of the top public relations firms in London for over ten years. In fact we’ve met. We actually worked together on a couple of P.A.s a few years ago…But perhaps you don’t remember.’

‘Oh really?’ said Messy, trying politely to muster some enthusiasm but still sounding miserable, as she always did when people reminded her of her past. ‘Which ones?’

‘Anyway we can talk about that when you get down here,’ said Jo, realising it wasn’t helping. ‘Messy, I expect the last thing you want to think about right now is giving any more interviews—’

‘Ha! You’re right there.’

‘Exactly. And you see the point of your staying here would be twofold. Partly, just to get a break from the madness, so to speak…’

Messy laughed grudgingly. She knew she was being manipulated, possibly even slightly patronised. But for once she didn’t care. She was so tired of making decisions for herself. They were always the wrong ones. And Jo seemed to know exactly what to say and do. She was making Messy feel better than she had in days.

‘—And partly so I can help you turn this publicity around; launch what I always call a damage-limitation counterattack.’ Messy laughed again. ‘Any interviews you do decide to give would be very, very carefully handled. I can negotiate the deal, ensure we have copy approval, sit in on the interview. And so on. I hate to blow my own trumpet, Messy, but I do have a great deal of experience in this area.’

‘I bloody well hope you do. So who else have you had to stay down there?’

‘One of the most essential components of this sanctuary,’ said Jo (she had prepared this one earlier), ‘is secrecy. Obviously…’

‘Yes. I suppose so.’

‘So though there’s nothing I’d love to do more than to reel off a long list of names, I can’t. I just can’t. Basically, Messy, all I can say is – if you’re not happy with the service we provide then don’t pay us! Simple as that! This operation has got to work on trust. That’s very important. We’ve got to trust you and you’ve got to trust us…’

‘Hm…’ said Messy, pretending she wasn’t already convinced.

‘We can send a car to come and pick you up right away. We could be there in three or four hours…’

‘Hm…’

‘And we’ve just bought a donkey, which might entertain Chloe.’

The car from Fiddleford arrived at Messy’s door seven and a half hours later. Les, the farm hand, had forgotten to take a map and, for reasons known only to himself, had rejected the offer of Charlie and Jo’s more comfortable car and taken instead the old Land Rover, which was filthy and could never go above forty miles an hour. He’d also, poor fellow, managed to get lost four times on the same stretch of motorway before finally taking the right exit.

Messy gabbled jovially as she and Chloe clambered into the Land Rover, fighting their way between horses’ head collars, bits of bind-a-twine, stray potatoes gone to seed, and piles of empty paper sacks. ‘I hope,’ she said, ‘that the state of this car isn’t any sort of indicator of what’s to come!’ The truth was, after such a long wait, she was relieved to see any car at all. ‘You know I hadn’t even taken a number for Fiddlefrom. Fiddleforth. I was beginning to wonder if the whole conversation hadn’t been a dream!’

Les looked at her morosely for a while, only faintly noticing that she had been talking, and certainly not expecting to make a response. Suddenly his face lit up. ‘Well I never!’ he said. ‘But you’re that fat lady off of the TELLY!’

‘Of course I am. Who did you think I was?’

‘I SAW YOU ON TELLY!’

‘Did you watch Question Time?’

‘A few nights back, it was. I don’t know why. A bit like one o’ them quizzie things.’

She’d been without any adult company, brooding solidly, ever since the BBC car had dropped her back at the cottage, and now here was a friendly face. Well, a face. It was all she needed. She couldn’t stop herself. ‘Didn’t you think Morrison was a creep? Or have I lost perspective on this? I mean – honestly, Les. Tell me honestly. Was I being paranoid? Was he exploiting my situation?…I felt so incredibly patronised…’

Les gazed at her long and hard before slowly turning away to start the engine. In the four hours it took to return to Fiddleford he didn’t speak another word. Chloe fell asleep.

It was eleven o’clock by the time they arrived.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Jo nervously, rushing out of the house to greet her. ‘You must be exhausted. Les wasn’t – Les, why didn’t you call? You left the map behind. We’ve been worried to death.’

‘I don’t like maps.’

‘For Heaven’s sake!’ Until she came to Fiddleford Jo hadn’t really believed such stupid people actually existed. She sighed with the usual mixture of boredom and exasperation that overcame her when dealing with Les’s ‘working’ methods. ‘Les, you can’t not like maps. There’s nothing not to like about them.’ She sighed again, and was preparing (professional as always) to deliver an easy-to-understand discourse on the subject, when Grey, Charlie and the General came wandering out to join them. ‘Oh look, here are the others,’ she said with relief. ‘This is Grey…Grey, this is Messy. And Chloe…Who’s actually asleep, poor little mite…’

Grey shook Messy’s free hand without a great deal of interest but then seemed to reconsider, and bent down to scrutinise her more closely. ‘Oh!’ he said, pleasantly surprised. ‘You look much better than you do in the pictures.’

‘Depends which pictures,’ Messy muttered grumpily, but she blushed. It was the nearest thing she’d had to a compliment for a long time. ‘They tend to choose the ugly ones.’ She looked up at him with a smile. ‘You’re not so bad-looking yourself.’

‘Aye,’ he said, relinquishing her hand, gazing at her curiously. ‘It’s been said.’

‘And, er – Messy, this is my husband, Charlie.’

‘Hello, Messy. Welcome to Fiddleford,’ said Charlie. ‘You’re our first guest, as I expect Jo explained. So I hope you won’t be too disappointed if things don’t run perfectly straight away—’

‘And this,’ said Jo quickly, ‘is my father-in-law, General Maxwell McDonald.’

‘Crikey,’ said Messy doubtfully.

The General stepped smartly forward, determined to present a good face, however he might have been feeling. ‘But most people just call me General,’ he said, bowing slightly to avoid eye contact. ‘Well come in, come in, for Heaven’s sake. Somebody get the child to bed and then perhaps Miss Monroe would like a drink?’

They walked together into the hall. Messy looked up at the large gilt chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and then at the magnificent mahogany staircase sweeping up to the landing thirty-five feet above her head.

‘Crikey,’ she said again.

Weighed down by the child and still enormous, even in these vast surroundings, Messy looked very ill at ease standing there. It reminded Jo of the first time she came to Fiddleford, when in spite of all her kneejerk disapproval (of inherited wealth and environmentally unsound houses) this hall had still intimidated her. ‘I know it’s large,’ she whispered apologetically, ‘but we don’t actually heat the rooms we don’t use. And of course,’ (she lied, entirely unnecessarily. But she was nervous) ‘we grow all our own vegetables.’

Messy, who always imagined people were patronising her, buried her face in her daughter’s cheek and pretended not to hear.

‘Chloe’s in the smaller room, next door to you,’ said Charlie as they climbed the stairs together. ‘And there’s a bathroom up at the end. On the left. I’m sorry,’ he turned back to look at her, ‘Jo says it’s absolutely unheard of not to have adjoining bathrooms when you go to hotels these days, but then Fiddleford isn’t exactly a hotel. So I hope you can forgive us.’

‘I must admit,’ said Messy, puffing slightly, not quite keeping up, ‘it’s beautiful. Of course. But it isn’t exactly what I expected.’

‘Oh dear.’ He paused in front of her bedroom door, put down the three large suitcases he had been carrying. ‘What exactly has Jo been telling you?’

Months ago, before they were married, his and Jo’s relationship had nearly ended because of her unnerving inability to distinguish fact from fiction. Charlie knew (to his cost) that when she was working, and she set her sights on something, she was capable of telling any number of lies in order to bring it about. He had watched her in amazement. She lied so automatically sometimes, she didn’t even seem to notice she was doing it.

‘She told me it was a refuge for celebrities.’

‘Oh!’ He sounded relieved. ‘Well it is. Or it will be. But not just for celebrities. Obviously. That would be very unfair. It’s for anyone who’s being attacked, really. For anyone who doesn’t stand a chance to stick up for themselves because whatever they try to do or say it gets drowned out by a sort of mass jeering, or sneering, or general bullying. If that makes any sense. Which I’m sure it does to you, Messy. After your last week.’

‘You don’t need to feel sorry for me,’ she said curtly.

‘No, no. Of course not.’

‘Am I the only guest you’re feeling sorry for at the moment? Or is the tall guy, Grey—’

‘Grey? Oh no. Grey lives here.’

‘He looks very familiar. What’s his second name?’

‘McShane. Grey McShane. You may remember—’

‘The sex offender?’

‘Well, he isn’t actually—’

‘You’ve asked me and Chloe to stay here with a sex offender in the house?’

‘You shouldn’t—’ Charlie made an effort to smile – ‘believe everything you read in the press.’

‘He was convicted. I remember reading about it. He went to prison.’

Charlie shrugged. ‘He has a bad reputation. But that’s the whole point of this place. Who did you think you were going to find here?’ He opened her bedroom door, switched on the light and quickly slid the suitcases inside. He didn’t want to have this conversation. Grey was innocent. If she wanted any more details, she would have to prise them from him – and good luck to her. Because Grey didn’t much like talking about it either. ‘We’ll be up for another half an hour or so, if you want to come down and have a drink,’ he said, backing towards the stairs. ‘You’ll meet Grey. And perhaps you can decide for yourself.’

When she first walked into the room, still carrying her daughter, she was so pleasantly overwhelmed – by the size, the general impression of worn elegance and welcoming, cosy grandeur – she let out an involuntary gasp.

Against the far corner, almost reaching the ceiling and upholstered in the same faded pink flowers as the walls, was a four-poster bed so high off the ground it came with its own set of steps. Jo had put a large bunch of pink and white roses on the table beside the bed, and the room smelled delicious, she noticed: of smoky, polished wood and fresh flowers. There were thick, pale blue velvet curtains already drawn across the two large windows, and to the left of the windows, fifteen or twenty feet from the end of the bed, was an armchair with a little footstool, and in front of the footstool, lit in her honour, a flickering fire crackling in the grate. It was lovely. Like a film set. She didn’t notice the paint splodges, or the damp patch above the bed. It was the loveliest room she had ever seen.

The next-door room, where Chloe was meant to be sleeping, was smaller and more homely than hers, with a two-poster instead of a four, and a large old-fashioned doll’s house in the window bay. ‘Hey-ho, Chloe,’ Messy whispered. ‘It’s not so bad here, is it?’…The little girl slept on. But she would be beside herself when she woke up. She would never want to leave.

After putting the child to bed, changing her own clothes, unpacking their suitcases and finally running out of excuses to delay the moment any longer, Messy braced herself and headed downstairs.

She found everyone in the library, listening with varying degrees of inattention while Jo illustrated some point by reading out loud from a book about natural childbirth. She was sitting in the lotus position, looking flexible, Messy noticed, and exceptionally luminous.

‘“Pregnancy,”’ Jo read, ‘“can be a magical time. Many women feel sensuous, harmonious and naturally creative…These are—” Listen to this, OK, everyone. “These are all primitive expressions of fertility…” That’s what I’m saying, of course. Women are by necessity more in touch with their fundamental life rhythms. Because we have to be. There simply isn’t any choice…’

The General, scowling over a copy of Heat magazine, sat in his usual upright position but with a finger stuck into each ear. Grey McShane lay flat out on a sofa with his eyes closed and a tumbler of gin balanced on his chest. He was smirking. And Charlie was leaning on the mantelpiece, gazing forlornly into the fire.

‘Sounds fantastic,’ he said vaguely, ‘I think you’re probably right. But Jo, come on, be fair. This isn’t exactly Dad’s favourite subject. Or Grey’s, I don’t suppose. Perhaps we could—’

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Jo indignantly. ‘I really don’t see why pregnancy has to be such a taboo subject.’

‘Excuse me,’ murmured Grey, still with his eyes closed, ‘but taboo is not the fuckin’ word. You’ve read that soddin’ book to us every night for a week. It’s been givin’ me nightmares.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t be so squeamish.’

‘Och, bollocks!’ said Grey. ‘I don’t read you books about what it feels like to have a crap—’

‘That is not remotely the same thing—’

Messy, who for the last minute had been standing awkwardly in the doorway wondering how to announce herself, suddenly burst out laughing.

‘Ah, there you are,’ said Jo, clambering to her feet. ‘At last! Come on in. Have you got everything you need? Is the room comfortable?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Messy. ‘It’s the prettiest room I’ve ever stayed in. Everything’s lovely.’

‘Is that correct?’ She heard Grey chuckling complacently. ‘That’s not what you were sayin’ to Charlie, so I hear.’

‘Oh.’ She looked embarrassed.

‘Aye…Is it for yourself or the wee daughter that you’re worryin’, Messy?’

‘No. Neither,’ she said, blushing furiously. ‘I wasn’t thinking anything of the kind. Don’t be disgusting. Can I have a drink?’

‘’Cause, darlin’, you really needn’t worry on either account.’

‘You can be as rude as you like,’ she snapped, ‘but the fact is you’re a convicted sex offender and I had no idea when I agreed to come here—’ She nodded at the vast space where Grey was lounging, watching her insouciantly through his long dark lashes. ‘I had no idea we’d be staying here…’ He smiled at her, an incredibly intimate smile, full of mischief and good humour. She lost her thread. For such a famously evil pervert, she thought, he was amazingly, really amazingly attractive. ‘…With a convicted sex offender,’ she finished weakly.

‘Ha!’ said Grey. ‘And I had no idea that anyone could be so bloody fat!’ He laughed, a low rumble at his own wit, and waited lazily for Jo to step in and smooth things over.

But she didn’t. She’d been doing her breathing exercises when Charlie reported Messy’s concern about Grey’s difficult history, and now she was thunderstruck. All this preparation, all the money they had spent, all the telephone calls, the clever little plans…and this most obvious of problems had never even occurred to her. Grey McShane, however innocent, was going to frighten away all her guests. ‘Grey’s a nice man, Messy,’ she said half-heartedly. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the press.’

‘That’s what I told her,’ said Charlie.

‘After all this is meant to be a sanctuary for—’

‘The universally condemned.’ Grey lingered enjoyably on the words.

‘—The victims of media abuse,’ corrected Jo. ‘You’re going to get all sorts. You’re hardly likely to be meeting Snow White. And I think, you know, that we all have to respect that. As I said to you on the phone, this thing isn’t going to work if we can’t trust each other. We’ve invited you into our home with a lot of trust, OK? And I think it’s only fair for you to trust us in return…’

The General groaned quietly to himself.

‘Och, Messy. Relax, for Christ’s sake!’ said Grey. ‘Do you think these fine people would allow me near this place if I was as wicked as people say I am? Have a drink! Sit that great big fat arse o’ yours on the chair over there, if it’ll take the weight. And if it’s not collapsed in a minute or two I’ll reward you wi’ a nice big glass of gin.’

‘Ha ha ha!’ spluttered the General. ‘I mean as a matter of fact,’ he added hurriedly, to camouflage the snort of naughty amusement with which he had greeted Grey’s rude and feeble joke, ‘you really look quite – petite – in the flesh.’

‘Absolutely,’ Jo lied blatantly. Charlie cleared his throat. ‘Well, maybe not petite, but then you’re so lovely and tall. Anyway! Ha!’ She patted her bump. ‘I mean who am I to talk!’

Messy wavered. They looked so relaxed by the soft light of the fire. And she’d been so lonely for so very long. ‘I’ll have some whisky then,’ she said with a wan smile. She had no idea where she was, and she was already feeling slightly confused as to why she had ever agreed to come. But there was something about the place, about this peculiar mismatch of people, which made her feel less lonely and more relaxed than she had for a long time.

‘Good on you,’ said Grey. ‘And good luck to you, my chubby darlin’. By tomorrow morning you’ll never want to leave our little Eden ever again.’