Epilogue
Eric agreed to sell Rosemount to the Cellars Trust two days before the end of the week deadline, and as soon as the contract came through, Martine offered me a new job: financial director for the charity, with specific responsibility for Rosemount.
It was the quickest yes I’ve ever said.
Lewis, obviously, agreed to stay as the manager, and the rest of the staff barely noticed the change.
Pam became the deputy manager but with more fundraising responsibilities, something she seized upon with real enthusiasm.
Eunice agreed to represent the residents on a special panel set up to prevent any of what Lewis discreetly called the ‘communication issues’ that had plagued Rosemount before.
And Nigel engaged his formidable brain on writing a formal history of the building; much to our consternation, he actually uncovered two genuine Rosemount ghosts, neither of which anyone has yet seen.
I loved my new job. I loved the variety that every day offered, the relationships I built with the residents and their families, the big sweep of forward planning and the nitty-gritty of the daily accounts.
I loved working as part of a team that genuinely liked one another, and I loved seeing that I was making a difference to Minnie, and Stan, and Linda, but also to the people from the town who came to learn how to garden with our new groundskeepers, and the children who brought their school history projects into the library for personal insights.
(Although I will admit to being freaked out the first time they brought a Millennium ‘history’ project in for me to advise on.)
I loved Martine’s projects, and she was bursting with new ideas. She’d meant it when she’d said she didn’t want to be a figurehead: every week she met with me, Pam and Lewis, and always had a notebook of suggestions. Projects, improvements, enrichments, decoration.
Her latest idea was very close to my heart.
‘When I was at university,’ she told the team, ‘the actors in our house would bring home a play to learn and everyone would have to take parts. Just for fun, with a glass of wine, on beanbags. It was a hoot. Can we do that here?’
I said we could. Without the beanbags. There was no way I’d get the occupational therapist to clear beanbags and wine.
‘Do you have a play in mind?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Martine, with a twinkle. ‘I do.’
And that is how we came to be performing a readthrough of Isabella on the Moors, my novel-screenplay-drama, in the library with a tea urn and a selection platter of Pam’s cakes on the table in front of us.
Kay and Martine were seated together, as always, on one sofa, with Eunice and Nigel opposite.
Linda Horrobin, in her wheelchair, was sitting with Bill (not joining in, but happy to be there), with Stan Walkingshaw and Minnie Little and several new residents attending with printed-out scripts for everyone to read along.
Stan had a pair of coconut shells, and was enthusiastically playing the part of several horses.
Tomsk was playing the part of Douglas’s faithful wolfhound, Baskerville, and was snoring gently through his role.
I’d had to write in more parts – a lot more parts – to give everyone a chance to be part of the story, but the main roles were still Isabella, Arthur and Douglas, the broad-shouldered farmer who let the old dogs sleep in his kitchen.
The need for more characters meant I’d written in a lot more of Isabella’s mishaps and intrigues as a portraitist to the local community, and that had meant dispensing with quite a lot of the letters from the boring and self-obsessed Arthur – which was all to the good, I think.
Martine had been the second person to read my script after Gayle and said she adored it.
She adored a lot more things lately; the only time hard-to-please Martine reappeared was when she came into the office with a new idea for something borderline impossible, which Lewis generally made happen.
We’d even discussed the possibility of a collaboration on the sequel.
I looked over at Lewis, who had taken half an hour out of his day to read Douglas’s part.
Jackie had donated a box of unused props from her school’s drama department, and he was wearing a hat and tweed jacket which kind of suited him, although I wasn’t going to tell him, in case he started wearing it all the time.
Nigel was Arthur, whose lines he was droning with some relish, decked out in a cape and a slightly self-important attitude that made me wonder if he’d perhaps met Fraser.
I was Isabella, of course. A woman in charge of her own destiny now, not waiting for anyone else to tell her what to do, who to be, what to look like. The heroine of her own story; the author, not a bit player.
‘Are you ready for me now?’ Lewis tipped his hat and winked.
I winked back.
Maybe I’d tell him about the hat. It actually looked quite hot, in combination with the moustache. A sort of brooding period-drama hotness.
‘Quiet at the back. Ready!’ Martine had appointed herself director. No one had dared argue. ‘And action!’
Lewis reached for my hands, and I took his, gazing into his eyes with a smile that I couldn’t help.
‘My life has had many interesting chapters,’ he said solemnly, ‘but my dear Isabella, this new development is without question, the most unexpected of them all. I had not anticipated such bliss could exist here in Calderbridge.’
He bent forward as if to kiss me, but was interrupted by a sudden flurry of clip-clops, and a wild ‘Neeeeiiiiiigggghhhh’ from Stan.
‘Oh, sorry, turned two pages at once. Sorry, sorry! Carry on!’
And if I wrote myself the best lines, I thought, so what, as the room dissolved into hysterics and, in Tomsk’s case, confused barking. That was the whole point from now on.
My life, my story.
My own happy ending.