Best Summer Ever

Chapter 2

It was a slow drive out of the village, west towards Wynbrook Manor. Not only because I was feeling apprehensive about how my arrival and subsequent explanation of recent events was going to be received, but also because the verges were wildly overgrown and the road was extremely narrow.

The passing places were riddled with suspension-wrecking potholes and the last thing I wanted was to get tangled up with a caravan on one of the many blind bends. My car was practically on its last legs and a nosedive into one of the dips would doubtless sound the death knell.

Fortunately, luck was with me and I drove through the huge, ornate estate gates and across the cattle grid having met nothing more than a hare, which could easily outpace me. The cattle grid wasn’t necessary as there was no livestock on the estate now, but Algy liked to keep it in place to slow drivers down as they entered his domain.

The manor itself wasn’t open to the public, but there was a large and lucrative pick-your-own fruit farm, managed along with much of the estate, by my friend Nick. Sometimes the gardens, which my dad was responsible for, were available for Open Garden days and other charitable events. The fruit farm, Nick’s place and my parents’ cottage were accessed via the sweeping curve of drive to the left, while the beautiful brick and flint manor and gardens could be found on the right.

I felt a lump form in my throat as I drove along the tree-lined drive. Nothing had changed in the slightest and when the cottage came into view, I had to blink hard to turn back an unexpected tide of tears. It really had been too long since my last visit and even longer since I’d made a solo trip.

‘Mum!’ I called, as I left everything in the car, unlatched the picket gate and raced along the flower-edged path to the back door, suddenly desperate to see her and Dad. ‘Dad!’

There was no reply and the door to the kitchen was locked. I had expected to find them both eating their usual early lunch. Mum was housekeeper at the manor and at midday she and Dad had a hot meal together at home. They maintained that, at their age and given the physical demands of their jobs, they deserved a break during the working day.

They had both been in their late thirties by the time they had me. They’d given up after years of trying to conceive and then about a year later, I unexpectedly landed. They were now bowling towards their mid-sixties, but I’d never broached the subject of them retiring as I knew they were both melded to a life working at Wynbrook forever.

I rifled through my bag for my key and let myself in. As I listened to the ticking of the clock above the row of wooden coat pegs and breathed in the comforting smell of home, a wave of nostalgia flooded over me. The oilcloth-covered table was set for one and there was a note next to it. Apparently, Dad had already eaten and gone back to work and he hoped Mum wouldn’t be too far behind him. There was no time on the note so I couldn’t guess about that.

With one ear listening out for Mum’s potential arrival, I had a speedy shower, pulled on an old floral tea dress I’d left behind in my bedroom wardrobe, properly combed out my hair and headed on foot back along the drive to the manor. It was then long after midday and I wondered what was delaying Mum’s, usually set in stone, lunchbreak.

It didn’t take long to work out.

‘That’s as maybe,’ I heard her say crossly, as I reached the open back door to the manor kitchen via the herb-filled courtyard, ‘but I’m not going until you’ve eaten yours, Algy, so you might as well get on with it unless you want me to waste away like you are.’

‘I’ve already told you, my dear,’ came Algy’s shockingly resigned response, ‘I’ve no appetite.’

‘You said the same thing yesterday,’ Mum exasperatedly said, ‘and the day before that. How do you expect to recover if you won’t eat?’

‘Perhaps I don’t want to recover,’ Algy muttered mutinously, and I felt further taken aback.

He was always so full of life; he could easily have been mistaken as being more or less the same age as my parents when in fact he was well over a decade older. I had no idea what it was that he was recovering from, and again, felt that pang of guilt for not having kept properly in touch.

‘And in the meantime,’ Mum wearily carried on, completely ignoring Algy’s hint that he was giving up on life, which suggested it wasn’t the first time she’d heard it, ‘the place is going to wrack and ruin and filling up with cobwebs and dust because I’m spending all of my time trying to coax you to eat, instead of getting on with the cleaning.’

Tough love! That was Dad’s forte, not Mum’s, so I knew she really was feeling at her wits’ end.

‘Well, no one asked you to, Janet Patterson!’ came Algy’s belligerent rejoinder, which was also completely out of character for him.

‘Knock, knock,’ I said loudly, as I stepped inside and found the pair of them locked in a stand-off, except Algy was sitting.

‘Daisy!’ Mum gasped.

Her hands, which had been planted firmly on her hips, flew to her face at the unexpected sight of her daughter in the doorway.

‘Daisy, Daisy!’ Algy echoed, referring to me as he always had and sounding far happier than he had just seconds before.

I rushed across the huge flagstone-floored kitchen to Mum and pulled her in for a hug that she enthusiastically returned.

‘My darling girl,’ she said, her hands cradling my face when I eventually let her go. ‘What a wonderful surprise. What are you doing here? Is Laurence with you?’ she hopefully added, looking over my shoulder.

‘I was going to wait for you at the cottage,’ I said, hoping to distract her from trying to winkle out the details of my return until she and Dad were together, ‘but I kept getting the waft of this most amazing smell and I just knew it was your chicken soup, Mum.’

‘Would you like some?’ she offered, as eager as ever to feed me as she rushed to the cupboard for a bowl.

‘You can have mine,’ said Algy, sounding mutinous again as he pushed his bowl, with a slightly shaking hand, across the table towards me. ‘Because I don’t want it.’

‘No thanks,’ I said lightly, as I sat opposite him and pushed it back, trying not to let the shock of how much he seemed to have aged show on my face, ‘I’d like a bigger bowl than that. I haven’t eaten for hours.’

Mum ladled out a generous helping of her chicken and tarragon soup from the vast pot on the always-warm Aga and then cut a great chunk of fresh bread to go along with it.

‘Butter?’ she offered.

‘Yes, please.’ I nodded. ‘And why don’t you have some soup too, Mum?’ I suggested. ‘Dad had left you a note at the cottage, saying he’d missed you when he had his lunch, so I know you haven’t had anything since breakfast.’

Algy looked contrite when I said that.

‘I suppose I could,’ Mum agreed, quickly setting herself up. ‘I am hungry.’

The soup was as sublime as I remembered, and Mum and I hadn’t eaten much before Algy also picked up his spoon, as I had hoped he would, and began to slurp. Mum gave me a knowing side-eye, which I didn’t return in case Algy saw and for a minute or two we all carried on eating in silence.

‘So,’ I said, reaching for the butter and a knife, when I’d had almost half of my soup, ‘what’s been occurring here then? I’m afraid I haven’t been in touch as often as I should have been just lately.’

‘Your father and I assumed that was because your new job was keeping you so busy, Daisy,’ Mum said, between mouthfuls. ‘How’s it going?’

The fact that I’d randomly turned up on a Monday was all the answer she should have needed and I felt annoyed with myself for pulling her thoughts back to me when I’d done such a decent job of diverting her before.

‘I took a bit of a tumble while I was out in the garden,’ Algy said, kindly and no doubt, knowingly, coming to my rescue, just like I’d tried to come to his. ‘No real harm done. Just a bit of a bump on the head but everyone seems to think I need treating with kid gloves as a result.’

‘Oh, Algy!’ I gasped, playing devil’s advocate. ‘You had a fall.’

He looked at me and shook his head.

‘I prefer to call it a tumble ,’ he said snootily, as some of the more familiar light started to twinkle in his blue eyes and he readjusted his paisley-patterned cravat, ‘as I’m sure you are well aware because I’ve just described it as such.’ I grinned at that. ‘A fall makes me sound decrepit and I’m not that.’

‘But you will be if you don’t eat your soup up like a good boy,’ I teasingly nudged. ‘You’ll be so weak, you’ll need one of those walking frames to get about.’

‘Daisy!’ Mum admonished, sounding shocked.

‘Can you imagine?’ Algy groaned.

‘Yes,’ I winked.

‘I’ve already got a stairlift,’ he then tutted, sounding disgusted. ‘Had it put in last year.’

‘Did you?’ I clapped. ‘Can I have a go?’

‘Daisy!’ Mum scolded again.

‘Oh, she’s all right,’ said Algy, defending me, just like he used to when I got into scrapes when I was growing up. ‘It’s very slow, but you’re welcome to play on it if you really want to.’

‘Come on then,’ I said, clattering my spoon in the bowl. ‘Let’s go and have a look at it and see what it can do.’

By the time Mum and I walked back to the cottage later that afternoon, I’d been up and down the stairs three times at a snail’s pace and there was some colour in Algy’s previously pale cheeks.

‘You’ve always been able to twist him around your little finger,’ Mum said, linking her arm through mine. ‘I haven’t been able to get him to eat a thing and then you show up and he’s suddenly stuffing his face.’ We’d also had tea and a huge slice of carrot cake before we’d left. ‘ And he’s up to mischief again.’

‘What can I say?’ I laughed. ‘I have a gift.’

‘You have many,’ said Mum, squeezing me closer. ‘I just wish you could find a job where you can put them to good use. I take it you haven’t driven all the way back to Wynmouth on a single day off? You haven’t been with your new employer more than five minutes, so you can’t have accrued some holiday already and where exactly is Laurence?’

The barrage of questions made me realise I wouldn’t be able to put my explanation off for much longer.

‘I’ll tell you and Dad together.’ I swallowed. ‘Look, here he comes now.’

As Dad started work so early during the summer months, he generally finished around four in the afternoon. Well, I say finished, he still went out in the evening to check gates were locked, water the containers and baskets, and close up the greenhouses and cold frames.

Living and working on the estate, like on many other estates up and down the country, was a lifestyle rather than a job. It was a way of life that blurred the work–life balance but was happily embraced by those who took the jobs on and looking around at the beautiful landscape and more immediate surroundings at Wynbrook, I could understand why.

‘Hello Daisy,’ said Dad, stooping to briefly kiss my cheek when I was close enough. He was taller than both Mum and me and broad, too. They were both a little greyer than the last time I saw them, I noticed. ‘Are you on your own? I did think you must be when I spotted your car while I was putting the mower away.’

Laurence, not that he wanted to visit all that often, wouldn’t have dreamt of making the journey to Norfolk in my car. He much preferred his vehicle which offered sleek, air-conditioned comfort to my old banger with its intermittent cooling system, squishy seats and passenger window that had a tendency to open of its own accord. He’d tried to get me to change my little runabout on many occasions, but I’d always resisted.

‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘I’m here alone. But how are you, Dad?’ I asked, wanting to at least get us over the threshold before I told my tale – or the pared-down version of it that I wanted my parents to know.

‘Having a total nightmare,’ Dad groaned, once he’d got his boots off and was washing his hands with a bar of soap at the sink and ruthlessly scrubbing his nails with a wooden nailbrush. ‘A fella was supposed to be coming today to take on the maintenance and running of the cut-flower garden, but he called to say he’s had a change of heart.’

‘Oh no, Robin,’ Mum similarly groaned, as she passed him the hand towel in a well-practised manoeuvre. ‘That’s someone else letting you down.’

‘It is,’ he sighed. ‘So, I’m still no further forward.’

‘The cut-flower garden?’ I frowned, sadly knowing I was about to let him down too. ‘I didn’t know there was one.’

‘It was Algy’s idea,’ Dad explained. ‘I tried to nip it in the bud at the start of the year, but he was insistent. One whole half of the walled garden has been given over to it.’

‘Does the manor need that many cut flowers?’ I asked, focusing on the practicality of the project, rather than my memories of the walled garden.

I knew it was a vast area that Dad was describing.

‘They’re not for the house,’ Mum told me. ‘They’re supposed to be for sale – a scheme to run alongside the pick-your-own fruit farm. Your dad got everything sown, grown and planted up, but now the season is in full swing, he can’t maintain it as well. Not properly anyway, not with so much else to do.’

‘Can’t Theo help?’ I suggested, referring to a Wynmouth resident who was a part-time gardener and part-time potter. ‘I thought he worked here with you regularly during the peak time now, Dad.’

‘He does as a rule,’ said Dad. ‘Well, he did. He’s just gone on paternity leave again.’

‘Him and Wren have got three little ones now,’ Mum wistfully added.

I had known there was another baby on the way as my friend Penny had bought Theo and his partner Wren’s tiny former fisherman’s cottage in Wynmouth ahead of them moving to somewhere bigger before the new arrival came along.

‘So that leaves me on my lonesome again,’ Dad tutted, ‘and getting nothing properly done.’

‘Just like me in the house,’ Mum forlornly added.

I hoped Algy was on the mend now and he’d soon be back on track, but I couldn’t help wondering why he had been so keen to get such a labour-intensive garden project up and running when he knew how difficult it would be to secure seasonal staff. The full-time roles on the estate were always filled, but the seasonal summer jobs, especially those which required some specific skill, were a different matter entirely.

‘Algy was asking after the cat again,’ Mum said as she filled the kettle, now Dad had finished washing his hands.

‘What cat?’ I asked, as distracted as they both were.

‘Have you seen it?’ Mum asked.

‘No,’ said Dad. ‘I haven’t, but in all honesty, I haven’t had time to look for the damn thing.’

‘I didn’t know Algy had a cat.’ I tried again.

‘He hasn’t,’ said Mum. ‘He spotted some mangy feral specimen and started feeding it at the kitchen door, but it disappeared and he’s been fretting over it.’

‘Is the food he’s been putting out still being eaten?’ Dad asked.

‘Yes,’ Mum confirmed, ‘but we don’t know by what.’

‘Maybe you could set up a wildlife camera?’ I suggested.

‘Maybe, Daisy,’ said Dad, pulling out a chair at the table and offering it to me, ‘you could tell us what you’re doing at Wynbrook on a Monday afternoon so soon after starting your new job?’

‘Well, yes,’ I swallowed, feeling the whiplash impact of the sudden change of conversational direction that shone the spotlight firmly back on me, ‘perhaps I could.’

We sat at the table and I squeezed my hands together in my lap while I explained that the job I had started just a few weeks ago hadn’t worked out. It was absurd that I should feel so flustered about telling them at my age, but given that I was also dumping myself back on them as a result of leaving Laurence too, I supposed it was justifiable that I felt a bit on edge.

‘But you said this was the job you’d been holding out for,’ Dad said, frowning.

He sounded confused as he repeated exactly what I’d told him and Mum when I’d been offered the role.

‘You did say that,’ agreed Mum, also tracking back to the conversation.

‘Well,’ I conceded, ‘that’s because I did think it was the one, but as it turned out… it wasn’t.’

Much like Laurence. He wasn’t the one either.

‘What never ceases to amaze me,’ said Dad, looking at me intently, ‘is how you keep getting job offers when you hop from one thing to another within months of starting. I just don’t know how you manage it.’

‘I guess I perform well at interview,’ I said, biting back what I would have once been inclined to say.

‘But badly when it comes to seeing something through,’ sighed Dad, stating what was painfully obvious.

‘Look,’ I said, refusing to get drawn in to raking over old ground, ‘I know you’re both disappointed—’

‘Only disappointed for you, love,’ Mum kindly cut in. ‘We’re not disappointed with you, Daisy. You’re plenty old enough to know your own mind. And if it wasn’t working out…’

Dad said nothing as her words trailed off and I felt a hard lump form in my throat.

‘I do know my own mind,’ I somehow managed to croak. ‘And that’s how I knew it wasn’t working out with Laurence either. We’re not together anymore. We’ve split up.’

I half expected Dad to say that Laurence had probably got tired of waiting for me to catch him up, but he didn’t say anything. They both looked shell-shocked and it was Mum who eventually responded first.

‘Surely not,’ she choked, sounding devastated. ‘You can’t mean it.’

‘I’m afraid I do,’ I told her, though I wasn’t afraid about that at all.

‘Whatever happened?’ Mum asked, as her eyes filled with tears. ‘What went wrong?’

She was every bit as upset as I had known she would be and I felt no inclination to tell her about the scene I had been privy to in Laurence’s office. Even if he hadn’t been playing away, I would have ended things between us, so it wasn’t fair to blame him entirely for the break-up, even if it would have been convenient.

‘So, that explains all the clobber in your car,’ Dad said, before I’d thought up what to say to Mum. ‘I’m guessing you’re planning on being here for longer than just today.’

‘If that’s all right,’ I quietly said.

‘Just tell us,’ Dad then crossly asked, ‘did you give up on Laurence as well as your latest job?’

‘Robin!’ gasped Mum, batting his arm. ‘That’s not fair!’

‘It might be,’ Dad said back. ‘Did you leave him, Daisy? Was it you who ended it?’

‘Yes,’ I sighed. ‘Yes, I left him.’

‘There you are then,’ huffed Dad, his suspicions con- firmed.

‘Oh, love,’ said Mum, blowing her nose on a tissue she’d pulled out from up her sleeve. ‘I’m so sorry. We both are. Can you tell us what went wrong?’

‘I’d rather not go into it all now, but it wasn’t an out of the blue situation. These things happen, don’t they?’

‘Well, they certainly seem to have a habit of happening to you,’ Dad said bluntly, standing up and shoving his hands deep in his trouser pockets.

I had known Dad, as well as Mum, was going to be upset, but I hadn’t expected him to be mean. His attitude almost made me regret my determination not to share what Laurence had been up to. Had it just been Dad I was talking to, I would have told him at that point, but the distressed look on Mum’s face censored the potential flow of words. And actually, given that mine and Dad’s relationship was still in a somewhat fragile state, I knew I would have regretted taking a sledgehammer to it and cracking it completely.

‘So, can I stay?’ I asked, before I had further opportunity to blurt everything out.

Given the current atmosphere I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but I didn’t have any other options. Sofa surfing with either Penny or Nick and becoming a burden to them was far less appealing than squeezing into my childhood bedroom and single bed. At least I could close the door in a room of my own in Mum and Dad’s cottage.

‘Of course you can stay,’ said Mum, reaching over and giving my hands a squeeze.

‘Yes.’ Dad nodded. ‘You can stay.’

‘Sure?’ I asked him.

‘Yes,’ Dad said again.

‘And it’s not all doom and gloom,’ I carried on, latching onto his slightly less belligerent tone. ‘I’ve already got some work lined up. Some shifts in the Smuggler’s to see me through the summer. Will it be all right if I’m here that long?’

‘Absolutely,’ Mum said, nodding. ‘The longer, the better. I daresay you’re more upset than you’re letting on and the best place for you is here while you’re getting used to the change. Having a job already sorted is wonderful. I admire you for getting straight on with things.’

‘I’m starting on Thursday,’ I gratefully told her.

‘You have a couple of days to settle in then.’ Mum smiled again. ‘Just what the heart doctor ordered.’

‘Thanks Mum.’ I sighed, feeling relieved that the hardest part of the conversation had now happened and that I hadn’t spilled the beans on my adulterous ex.

‘You’re sure you don’t want to tell us what caused the rift?’ she asked, tempting me again.

‘Quite sure,’ I firmly said, as much to convince myself as her. ‘I’m still processing it all, to be honest.’

Dad shifted towards the door.

‘Of course you are,’ Mum then said with a heavy sigh, before turning to Dad. ‘Isn’t it good about the pub, Robin?’

‘It is,’ said Dad, rattling the change in his pocket. ‘Come on then, let’s get your stuff unloaded.’

‘Don’t mind your dad,’ Mum said quickly as I went to follow him out. ‘I know he came across as a bit gruff, but he’s doubtless as upset as I am. It’s been a shock. He thought a lot of Laurence.’

‘I know he did.’ I nodded, willing myself not to succumb to tears.

‘He’s just got a lot on his plate at the moment,’ Mum carried on, trying to justify Dad’s largely unsympathetic response to my news.

‘So have you Mum,’ I pointed out, ‘but you’re being far kinder.’

‘He just worries,’ she said. ‘He wants to see you do well.’

‘Funnily enough,’ I told her, swallowing over the lump that was still lodged in my throat, ‘so do I.’