2. Chapter 2
‘Ah, good morning to you too, sunshine,’ Cassie said.
She eyed the envelope Lucy had deposited in front of her.
Lucy ambled across to the tea station in the corner of their shared office and flicked the kettle on. She abandoned her near-empty travel mug behind a half-eaten packet of Hobnobs, sighed in the direction of the cheap instant coffee, and wiped her damp, coffee-stained hands on a tea towel.
‘Coffee?’ she asked as she watched Cassie inspect the envelope.
‘What?’ Cassie asked, glancing up. ‘No drugs or booze?’
Lucy grinned as she pulled two mugs down off the shelf. ‘Mmm, sorry. Fresh out today.’
‘Hmph, the service here has really gone downhill. I’ll take the coffee.’ Cassie tapped a tower of papers on her desk. ‘But I’ll be reporting this on my visitor feedback form,’ she said darkly.
Lucy’s eyes lit up at the sight of the stack of visitor comment cards.
‘Ooh, how are we doing?’ she asked. ‘Have we won everyone over to what a great day out we offer?’
Cassie nodded as she thumbed through the feedback forms.
‘Pretty good. A couple of grumbles about people parking inconsiderately—not much we can do about that. One woman is cross that the water in the loo hand basins was too warm for her liking. And my personal favourite.’ Cassie plucked a card from the stack. ‘Someone who felt the old wine cellars were a little dark and cold and asked if we had considered installing central heating.’
Lucy cackled.
‘Okay, but what about the important stuff?’ She splashed milk into the mugs. ‘Any comments about the overall visitor experience? Or recent events we’ve held?’
As Events and Volunteers Manager, Lucy took visitor feedback very seriously.
Cassie peered at a comments card.
‘This woman said she didn’t like the café because they served her tea in a mug, not a teacup—’
‘Cassie!’
Cassie grinned.
‘Yes, okay.’ She shuffled through the cards. ‘Here’s one.’ Clearing her throat, she read aloud. ‘This was our first trip to Dulcetcoombe after my mother, who is a member, said it would be a good place to take the kids. It did not disappoint!’
Lucy grinned and slurped her coffee.
Cassie continued.
‘We did a tour of the house, and the kids loved the Dastardly Dulcetcoombe History Trail. They solved twenty-five clues out of twenty-eight, and then we went to a Green Thumbs Gardening class in the kitchen garden. The kids have planted out their little pumpkin plants and have high hopes they’ll be big enough for Hallowe’en. We’ll be back for the Hallowe’en Light Trail!’
‘Good old Duncan, his little kitchen gardening demos are so popular.’
Lucy smiled as she thought of Duncan, the most dedicated of the garden volunteers.
She watched as Cassie pulled out another card and continued to read.
‘I brought my elderly father on a day out to see the gardens. We were very grateful for the help of your volunteers, who made Dad feel really welcome and tracked down a ride-on electric wheelchair for him to use. The gardens are beautiful, and Dad wants to return soon. Keep up the good work!’
Lucy gave a wobbly smile.
‘Happy families are what it’s all about,’ she mumbled, fiddling with her mug and tipping a Hobnob out of the packet.
‘There are lots saying similar things,’ Cassie said, ‘as well as a few hard-to-read but clearly enthusiastic comments from a group of school kids, and,’ she browsed through, ‘a lady who covered two cards,’ she held them aloft, ‘to let us know she is very unhappy about the size of the jacket potatoes in the café. But that’s not your department.’
‘Oh. I think the jacket potatoes are quite generous,’ Lucy said.
‘Yes, that seems to be the problem,’ Cassie sighed. ‘She found the—and this is a direct quote—girth of the potato off-putting.’
Lucy, who had just taken a swig of coffee, struggled to swallow it as she doubled over laughing.
Wiping her mouth and taking in Cassie’s lips pressed into a thin line, she gasped, ‘How do you not find that funny?’
Cassie sighed. ‘Because I’ve read it ten times already, and this,’ she swept her hands over the sagging pile of visitor feedback cards, ‘is par for the course as marketing manager. You, dear friend, only get the highlights. Or lowlights.’
‘Fair point.’
Cassie sifted through the cards, covered in countless different scrawls and inks. ‘There’s also a card in here somewhere where someone complains that the house and estate are too big and there was too much to see.’
Lucy cocked an eyebrow.
‘Can’t please all the people all the time. Or crazy people any of the time.’
‘You’d know all about that.’ Cassie grinned, sat back, and crossed her arms. ‘What’s this lie you’re on about?’
Lucy puffed out her cheeks and sat down heavily in her chair. ‘That there,’ she nodded at the invitation peeking out of the envelope in front of Cassie, ‘is the invitation to my brother Ollie’s wedding. In barely three weeks’ time.’
‘Ahhh,’ Cassie said.
Lucy ran a hand over her face. ‘And I replied to the invitation months ago saying I’d be bringing a plus one.’
‘Okaayy…’
‘I don’t have a plus one anymore, Cassie. I replied plus one when Dan and I were seeing each other, which, of course,’ she stared into her half-full mug and swirled her coffee, ‘lasted about five minutes, and I haven’t told my family we broke up. I was trying to avoid my mother lecturing me about what I must have done wrong.’
‘Lucy Carmell, that was months ago!’
Lucy shrugged. ‘I know, I know.’ She ran a hand over her face. ‘It’s a three-day wedding, Cass. Three days with my family. I can’t remember when we were last together for three days since we all left home. Which I did as soon as I could.’ She grimaced. ‘Even Christmas is barely a twenty-four-hour affair. I go down on Christmas morning, and I am out of there after breakfast on Boxing Day. That’s as much as I can cope with.’ Her lips twisted. ‘I don’t think my mental health can take seventy-two hours of my mother and my sister. Three days of them enthusiastically telling me where I have gone wrong with my life choices and what’s wrong with my career.’
Lucy’s face fell as she looked around her and Cassie’s beloved office, tucked under the eaves in Dulcetcoombe’s ancient attics, with views for miles across parklands.
‘Or an inquisition to find out what I do to repel men.’
‘Oh Lucy, that’s intense,’ Cassie said. ‘But maybe they’ll be focused on Ollie and the wedding, and you’ll escape.’
Lucy shook her head and swirled her coffee.
‘It’ll be worse. My mother will use it as an excuse to showcase how marvellously my sister Heather and Ollie are doing, and how I am coming up short. Again. Heather has just been made partner at her law firm, and both she and my mother will be telling everyone who’ll listen. And Ollie…’
She thought of her younger brother and took a breath.
‘Well, Ollie is fine. He’s just in his own bubble. If I can take someone with me as my plus one…if they think I have a boyfriend, it’s one thing—one major thing—they won’t bully me about.’
She knotted her fingers together in her lap.
‘I know you say you feel like the black sheep, but are they really that bad?’ Cassie asked.
Lucy nodded. ‘Yes. They are. Mum had—’ she paused and corrected herself, ‘has great expectations for us all. And Heather’s a big-shot lawyer, which mum never stops going on about, and Ollie is a CFO at a big firm in Bristol. Mum lies about what I do.’ Lucy shook her head. ‘She tells her friends I am an executive events planner for a private company. She hates the idea of me working for a charity with volunteers.’ Lucy wrinkled her nose. ‘She thinks they are all old and doddery, despite her being the same age as most of them—and she never stops asking if I am done with my little job yet. Last time I was home, she gave me a business card from one of Dad’s old associates and told me to give them a call as soon as I was ready. They don’t understand what I do and don’t seem interested that it makes me happy.’
‘You know you make a difference here, Lucy.’ Cassie waved a stack of feedback cards at her. ‘To the volunteers, to the local community, to the visitors.’
‘That’s not how my family sees it. To them, I just shuffle about this old place, organise little events for kids and make very little money doing it.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘There’s some truth in that last part. And money is how they measure success. So the prospect of showing up in my fifteen-year-old Volvo, unattached and being told all weekend how I can’t even get that right…’ She let out a weary sigh. ‘Is too much to contemplate.’
‘And besides,’ she sighed again. ‘This is my fourth wedding this year, Cassie. Fourth! Plus, one engagement party, a hen do, and a destination thirty-fifth birthday party.’
‘And a partridge in a pear tree,’ Cassie sang, in an off-key soprano.
‘Exactly.’ Lucy groaned. ‘I’ve spent enough social occasions this year being patted on the arm and told that the one for me is out there somewhere.’ She reached for another Hobnob. ‘Probably in prison,’ she muttered darkly. ‘That’s why we haven’t casually bumped into one another in a local cafe. He gets his coffee from the prison canteen.’
‘Cheer up,’ Cassie said. ‘He might be on probation by now and headed your way.’
‘Tuh, that’ll be my luck. I’ll meet someone who seems charming, but it’ll turn out he’s not interested in my sunny personality—he just wants to chop me up and keep my head in a jar.’
‘At least you’ll have a solid reason to give people when they ask why you’re still single.’
Lucy rolled her eyes.
‘I need to produce a boyfriend from thin air. I cannot tell my family, especially my mother,’ Lucy shuddered, ‘that it’ll just be me. She will have a conniption if I upset her seating plans with only two weeks to go. Something else for me to get wrong. Hence the lie…’
She chewed her lip and looked at Cassie. Cassie gazed back at her, waiting.
‘I am going to find someone to go with me and pretend to be my boyfriend. It’ll be one less thing for them to find fault with, and I’ll have an ally I can escape with if it all gets too much. Is that awful?’ Shaking her head, she answered her own question. ‘No, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable course of action.’
Cassie huffed and folded her arms.
‘Oh yes. I don’t foresee any problem with this at all. No risk of embarrassment or awkwardness or your mother sniffing out that it’s a hoax. I think it’s a watertight plan, and you should press ahead.’
‘Okay, well, thanks for the sarcasm update,’ Lucy said sarcastically. ‘But really, it’s not that big a deal when you think about it. It’s a free weekend away for someone! All they have to do is hold my hand sometimes and look at me adoringly.’
Cassie wrinkled her nose and screwed up her eyes.
‘What’s that reaction for!? It can’t be that hard for someone to fake affection for me—I’m not Gollum.’
She patted down the twisted bun of frizzy hair balanced on top of her head.
Cassie pulled a face, and Lucy glanced down at her faded T-shirt with the little splatters of coffee from the morning and a fresh dusting of Hobnob crumbs.
‘Tuh, well, obviously I will be better dressed and not comfort eating.’ Cassie raised her eyebrows. ‘Okay, I’ll be better dressed,’ Lucy conceded.
Floorboards creaked along the corridor, and Lucy turned towards the door as voices drew closer.
‘Uh oh,’ Cassie said, and ducked behind her computer.
A stout woman in her seventies with tightly coiffed grey hair and bushy black eyebrows, brandishing a leather-bound clipboard, appeared in the doorway.
‘Lucy!’ Dot said in a frustrated tone. ‘There you are.’
She announced this as if finding Lucy in her office, where she spent much of her time, had involved a search of the entire estate.
‘Hello, Dot. Hello, Edward and Anne,’ Lucy said sitting up straight behind her desk as Dot advanced into the room, flanked by her dutiful assistants.
‘How are you all?’ Lucy asked, looking around at the three of them.
Anne, who looked permanently on the cusp of an apology, opened her mouth to answer, while Edward, red-faced and clutching at his chest after being marched up three flights of stairs, raised a feeble hand in greeting.
‘We’re fine,’ Dot answered for all of them.
Anne closed her mouth.
Dot, the self-appointed head of the volunteers, helped Lucy coordinate much of the day-to-day work for the other volunteers at Dulcetcoombe. In fact, Dulcetcoombe owed its survival to the hard work of Dot and the first group of dedicated community activists she had gathered around her over a decade ago. They had worked tirelessly to ensure the council did not sell off the estate to developers after it fell into disrepair and to prove to the timid local councillors that they could turn Dulcetcoombe from a liability into an asset.
Dot was, at the same time, Lucy’s greatest ally and asset and the bane of Lucy’s life. With her exacting standards and brusque communication style, Lucy spent a good deal of every week smoothing over the issues caused by Dot.
Never one to engage in pleasantries, Dot cut to the chase.
‘We’re here about Sticky Dicky.’
Lucy, who had been sipping on her coffee when Dot announced this, spluttered as she tried to swallow.
‘For God’s sake, girl, what’s up with you?’ Dot said, shaking her head.
‘Dot,’ Lucy gasped and held up her hand to ward Dot off. ‘I’ve told you, you can’t call him that.’
Bristling, Dot smacked her clipboard smartly on the desk.
‘The man’s name is Dick. He’s a smelly, sticky-looking chap who never met a flannel he didn’t like. Sticky Dicky is simply a fair description of the state of him. He was giving house tours earlier this week, and I am quite sure…’ she wrinkled her nose, ‘that I was not the only one who could smell him coming.’
Lucy wiped a tear from her eye and mopped at the fresh coffee stain on her top with a tissue she found in her desk drawer. She looked at Dot, entirely unsure what to say next.
‘Dot, as the head of the volunteers, perhaps you could talk to him in the first instance and—’
‘I have. Twice now.’ Dot gave a prim jerk of the head. ‘I’ve been very clear about the standards expected. The man just grins mindlessly at me.’
Lucy could see Cassie’s shoulders convulsing behind her computer screen. Dot followed Lucy’s gaze.
‘I don’t know what you’re laughing at, missy,’ she said to Cassie. ‘You’ll end up with complaints about him on one of those visitor feedback cards you’re so fond of.’
Cassie abruptly stopped laughing and gathered the feedback forms to her chest.
‘Yes, of course. Sorry, Dot,’ she said.
Lucy smiled inwardly.
‘I think he’s got a thing for strong women,’ Anne’s soft voice interjected. ‘He seems to rather enjoy getting told off by Dot.’
Anne’s unofficial role was explaining to irate or trembling volunteers what Dot really meant to say. She was Dot’s compassion filter, arriving in the wake of Dot’s brute words and trying to tease them into something a little more diplomatic and considered.
Anne turned Dot’s, this simply isn’t good enough. You must do better, into, what Dot meant was, how might we improve on what’s already working?
As far as Lucy was concerned, Anne was a wizard, and they’d have more upset amongst the volunteers without her.
Dot dismissed Anne’s comment with a wave.
‘You need to speak to him, Lucy. He needs to be given short shrift and told to buck up his ideas. And if he won’t, then perhaps he is better off volunteering somewhere with different standards. Like March House.’
Dot smirked.
March House was a smaller but long-established historic attraction barely ten miles away across the Yorkshire Dales that had been somewhat eclipsed in recent years as the events and visitor programme at Dulcetcoombe had grown.
Lucy sighed and wondered how it was that her lovely sunny morning now involved finding a way to talk to an eighty-something-year-old man about personal hygiene and presentation.
‘Okay, Dot, I’ll find time to speak with Dick—Richard—about this.’
‘Jolly good. I’ll wait for your report on how you get on.’
Lucy reflected for a moment on the fact that Dot volunteered to work for her and not the other way around. Dot, leather-bound clipboard clutched once more to her matronly bosom, readied herself to leave. She gestured for Anne and Edward to follow her.
‘Do smarten yourself up, Lucy,’ she said, glancing at the faded T-shirt sporting the new coffee stain. ‘You represent Dulcetcoombe, you know.’
Dot spied Cassie feigning interest in a ticketing printout.
‘Cassie,’ she said, then nodded as she turned and marched to the door.
‘Nice to see you, Dot,’ Cassie said, all sweetness and light.
Dot gave one last disappointed shake of the head in the direction of Lucy’s trainers and was gone.
Lucy stared at the doorway and listened as Dot’s brisk voice, listing to Anne all that she had to do today, faded away down the corridor. Edward, his face now a more normal colour, took a breath and scurried after them.
‘Wow,’ Cassie said, descending into laughter. ‘You’ve got bigger problems than dealing with your family at a wedding.’
‘Yes.’ Lucy waggled a finger at Cassie. ‘It seems that I have to talk to Dick about cleanliness.’
‘Hmm, hard to do looking like that.’
Cassie nodded at Lucy’s coffee-tissue splodge.
Lucy glanced down and groaned.
‘I know, pots and kettles and all that. Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow when I’m actually presentable and have a leg to stand on.’
She sidled over and retrieved the cream envelope and card from Cassie’s desk.
‘This,’ she waved the invitation, ‘is a priority. I can’t show up on my own, especially not at this late stage. I’ll never hear the end of it.’
There was a knock at the door, and it squeaked open on ancient hinges.
It was Dick.
‘Hello Lucy, hello there Cassie. Sorry to bother you, but I just bumped into Dot, and she told me you wanted a word? Is now a good time?’
Cassie, who had just bitten into a biscuit, looked like she might choke. She swiveled in her chair and took a sudden deep interest in her wall planner, her quivering shoulders giving her away.
Lucy’s heart sank.
Thank you, Dot, for not even giving me time to prepare what to say.
‘Hi, Dick.’
She smiled brightly at the kindly-faced man. From across the room, she caught a slight whiff as he stepped into the office. Dot did have a point.
‘Why don’t you take a seat in the staff kitchen, and I’ll be with you in a moment?’
‘Certainly, thanks, Lucy.’
He shuffled out.
Cassie swung back around in her chair. ‘So? What are you going to do?’
Lucy sighed.
‘I suppose I’ll have to be direct.’ She scratched her head. ‘Maybe there are some issues he’s having. Perhaps he needs more support at home.’
‘Not about Dick. About that.’ Cassie nodded at the envelope in Lucy’s hand. ‘The wedding.’
‘Well, I am going to do it,’ Lucy said. ‘Find myself a good old-fashioned fake boyfriend.’
Cassie grinned.
‘Fair enough. On your head be it if Mother Carmell finds you out! So, who are you going to ask?’
‘There’s a shortlist,’ Lucy said.
‘Really? How many names?’
Lucy smiled.
‘Just one.’