Chapter Fifty-one
Leonie calls me early on a Saturday morning. “You’re still asleep?” She sounds incredulous.
“No, just pressed snooze on my alarm.” I sit up and swing out of bed.
“It’s nearly seven. I thought you’d have been up for ages.”
“The sun doesn’t shine into my bedroom the way it did before.” And some mornings it’s a struggle to find good reasons to get out of bed at all. I keep that last thought to myself.
“How are you?” she asks.
“Busy.” I pad barefoot into the kitchen and start filling the kettle. The narrow window above the sink shows the leaves beginning to turn. It’s October tomorrow.
“I have bad news, I’m afraid,” Leonie says.
Osian?
Water forgotten, it overflows the kettle and cascades over my hand and all over the sink. “Is it…?”
“Yes.” Her voice scares me; I’ve never heard her sound like this. “But not only him. All of us. You, too. Oh my God, Evie.”
The anxiety spills from her words just like the water splashing all over my sink and counter. I turn off the tap and leave the kettle on the side.
“What? Tell me.”
“We might lose everything.” She sounds utterly miserable.
“It started last week. Some men turned up, a couple of them with cameras, and they went around interviewing us and taking pictures of everything. We thought it must be some publicity that Evan had organised. One man came into the café and started asking me how long I’d been open and how much money I made in a week. ”
My heart rate has slowed down a bit; this is not the kind of bad news I’d feared.
“Why?” I ask, going back to refill the kettle and switch it on.
“Alex was in here with the professor – you know how they use The Orange Tree as their office. Anyway, Alex came over and challenged the men. ‘Who are you and why are you asking all these questions?’ Which was when the guy said that he was the real owner of the property.”
“The property? Meaning Kendric House?”
“No,” she groans. “He didn’t mean Kendric House. He meant all of Kendric Park. Everything, including all the land.” Then she asks, “Evie, how much do you know about Evan’s ownership of Kendric Park?”
I cast my mind back to the maps that showed Darling Wood and the riverbank, all the way to the disused mine. “When he first showed me the house, I remember him telling me he’d inherited it.”
“No, he didn’t. It was meant to go to his older brother, Owen Kendric. He wasn’t interested in the restoration because the house was in a terrible state.”
My memory takes me back to the wall of photographs in Evan’s office. Pictures showing Kendric House before the restoration. “It was a dilapidated building with smashed windows, animal droppings a foot deep, horrible grime over everything. Wasn’t it?”
Leonie says, “Yes, that’s why Owen decided to sell it to some—”
“Some property developers,” I say, completing the sentence.
“Yes, I remember Evan said they’d have knocked it down to build hotels or factories.
It was on my first day after we had lunch in your café and he took me through the west wing to show me my apartment.
We talked about it because what a shame to lose all those historic features. ” I spoon coffee into a mug.
“That’s why Evan couldn’t bear to have it torn down. He agreed to a swap. The estate here was valued at just under two million because it was in such bad shape. He gave up his share of the big family house in London’s Belgravia, valued at nearly five mil, in return for Kendric Park and no cash.”
“So what’s the problem?” I stir boiling water into my coffee and go to sit at my small kitchen table. “It sounds as if his brother got the better deal.”
“The problem is Owen has seen all the publicity about the house and gardens. You know Amani and Ricky have been flooding the internet with stuff about the mosaics and the murals and bigging up everything. It’s not her fault – Amani thought she was helping with publicity.
But as a result, Owen says Evan misled him about the true value of Kendric House and that it’s a goldmine now that we’re open to the public. ”
“Not his goldmine.” I can’t believe this. “The value we added? That’s not part of any inheritance.” My voice rises with anger. “He can’t expect to profit from our own hard work. What does Evan say to all this?”
“He was incandescent. We all heard him shouting. ‘This is my house’,” she says, putting on a deeper voice and mimicking Evan’s public-school accent. “‘You have no permission to parachute in with surveyors. I’ll have you arrested for trespass.’”
The thought occurs to me that this sounds a bit like shutting the barn door after the horses have bolted.
“Anyway, it’s irrelevant. He doesn’t need to come again,” she says, echoing my thought. “We all got served with court papers advising us that our contracts were null and void.”
“What?” I swallow a big gulp of hot coffee by mistake and scald my mouth and throat. “He can’t do that.”
“He has done it. And he’s contesting the original division of assets, so Kendric House still belongs to him and any agreements we made with Evan are not valid.”
A cold breeze rustles the yellowing leaves on the tree outside and knifes in through my open kitchen window, raising goosepimples on my arms. “They can’t make that stick, regardless of any squabble over the inheritance. The individual enterprises belong to us. We can prove it.”
“Maybe. But in the meantime, we’ve been served with an injunction against us dissipating income from the house.”
“Dissipating?”
“Frittering away. It means we can’t touch any money from visitors to the house. It has to go into a holding account until they decide who really owns what percentage of Kendric Park and how much of the income should be going to Owen.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can you operate without money? You can contest it in court. No judge would allow him to—”
“Maybe.” She interrupts me with the next blow. “But the damage will have been done. We’re all going to go bankrupt.”
I don’t understand. “What do you mean?”
She pauses to collect herself then says in a calmer voice.
“They’ll just drag it out endlessly. It’s a death sentence because we all need the income to pay costs.
I mean, how am I supposed to run a café and keep it stocked?
They won’t even let me have any of the money the Squad normally pay towards catering.
So either I feed them for free or they have to move, which will bankrupt Raff too. ”
A death sentence indeed. “And Evan…?” I ask, already guessing the answer.
“He’s the worst hit because he has to cover the overheads. Gas, lecky, water and council tax.”
A cold feeling washes down my body. “No electricity means no internet. Which would kill the Hub.”
“All of us who rely on customers for our income.”
“They can’t do that. Surely they can’t,” I repeat mechanically.
“They’ve done it,” she says, sounding utterly hopeless.
All of the partners. Alex hired people to work on the restoration. How much money has he sunk into this? And the professor? The kind man who kept me company in the Hub before Easter, working through the night to collect the stories and histories of the families that lived in the house.
“Evan instructed a solicitor immediately and filed a claim. They argued that until the main case is settled, the businesses have to be allowed to cover our costs and pay staff.”
That makes me sit up. “Thank God.”
“No.” She doesn’t sound hopeful at all. “It’s like fighting an avalanche. They’re burying us under a mountain of papers. Claims and more challenges. Every question we answer they respond with five more.”
Leonie’s voice, flat with despair, stays with me as I get ready for work. A disaster that can’t be avoided.
My old partners. The people who helped me so generously. Don’t they all have bank loans to repay? What’s going to happen to them?
I was lucky; the flat in London makes money so it pays for the massive mortgage. But Raff, Llewellyn, Alex and Osian? They don’t have other property; they’ve sunk everything into Kendric House.
The answer is simple. They can’t survive. Leonie’s right. Regardless of what happens with the legal case, if it drags on long enough everyone will be ruined. If Evan is bankrupt, he’ll lose the house. His brother wins by default.
I don’t know how I get through my session. Weekends are my busiest times with people booking on the potting workshops. To make matters worse, I’d already launched a Grow a Present for Christmas campaign to generate business in the colder part of the year.
This weekend I had six sessions. The last, on Sunday afternoon, was over-booked with enthusiastic amateur gardeners eager to learn about fuchsias, camellias and honeysuckle.
But for all I know I might have been teaching them to boil eggs.
My mind was all the way in the Bannau Brycheiniog.
Even the Welsh words make my heart twist painfully.
The place I loved. The people – not only Osian but his Perllans, for whom Kendric Park was their best hope of finding a way out of a dead end.
And what about Ricky, Rhian, all the lost teenagers who found a home?
As my customers drift out, all of them carrying several potted cuttings, one of them asks, “I’m sure you have a wonderful garden. Do you have pictures?”
“Sadly, no.” I wave her goodbye, wishing I had pictures of Hope Gardens in their summer glory.
Then it hits me.
I haven’t been contacted by anyone. No lawyers, no process servers nor any court papers for me.
Yes, I know I gave up Hope Gardens Enterprise, but didn’t Evan refuse to accept it? He’d asked me to approve renting my apartment to honeymooners and holiday makers. So legally it must still be in my name. Why haven’t the lawyers contacted me?
Could it be something as stupid as they don’t know my address?
I worry about this all night and the next morning in my tiny shower, I ask myself the real question, the one that matters.
Has Evan reregistered the ownership of my business in his name? If not, then I’m still the legal owner of Hope Gardens. If I haven’t been ‘served’, then I’m not subject to the injunction. Am I? Which means… any income from Hope Gardens is mine.
It seems too good to be true. Surely a major legal challenge could never have missed such an important enterprise; they’d have investigated.
Before I know what I’m doing I’ve messaged Leonie to ask Evan.