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Chapter 1
Friday, 8 September
‘Sasha, I don’t want you to worry—’
Good grief! As soon as Sasha heard her husband say these words, she immediately panicked and suspected that the news she had been dreading, the news that she’d so hoped for months now would somehow not arrive, was about to come crashing down on their world with this phone call.
‘But…?’ she asked.
‘The absolutely shameless tossers aren’t going to pay,’ Ben said, sounding calmly furious. And so here it was – the disaster they had been trying to avoid for week after incredibly stressful week.
‘Not going to pay?’ she heard herself repeat, as she tried to take this in. ‘Not anything at all? No goodwill gesture, or monthly instalments, or promise of something further down the line?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘and you know how much I’ve tried, and the accountant has tried, but they have basically made the company that owes us the money bankrupt.’
For several moments, Sasha couldn’t think of anything to say, she just squeezed her eyes shut and tried to carry on breathing.
‘Oh my god…’ she managed finally, ‘so we’re not going to get a single penny of the £75,000 they owe us for the work?’
‘No,’ Ben confirmed, and he sounded completely deflated.
Seventy-five thousand! It was an enormous sum for their little business to bear.
They’d been waiting for this money for months. The work – extensive garden design, landscaping, planting and gardening – had been done back in the early spring at a brand-new housing development. It had been the biggest contract they had landed in five years of trading. They’d had to bring in extra people to help and buy new equipment, not to mention all the plants, trees and materials. In short, they’d borrowed serious money on the back of this contract and after months of worry, to hear that they weren’t going to get any of what was owed to them was devastating.
Yes, they did have some other work on the go, but it was very small-scale and now it was September. There was already the hint of a chill in the air, and autumn and winter lay ahead – always a very quiet time for the business.
‘So… so…’ Sasha sensed her rising panic, ‘what are we going to do? You’re absolutely sure there’s nothing more we can do to get the money we’re owed?’
‘Not right now,’ Ben confirmed. ‘Maybe further down the line when they tender for this kind of work again, but not right now.’
‘You’re absolutely sure?’ she had to ask once again because it was far too big a sum of money to just walk away from if there was still any hope at all.
‘I’m going to go and see Jason tonight to sound him out,’ Ben added, mentioning a friend who was an experienced corporate lawyer. ‘And then… I’ll come home and we’ll talk it through. We’ll brainstorm and we’ll start to get over this. I have lots of ideas and I’m sure you do too.’
‘Oh yes,’ she agreed bitterly, ‘my best idea right now is to drive round to their headquarters and throw bricks through their windows. No, even better, smash up their Range Rovers, carefully and thoroughly with a set of golf clubs, using different clubs for different parts of the car, then slash all the tyres.’
‘I know, Sash, I know,’ Ben said, ‘and that would work off a lot of tension, but I don’t see how a criminal conviction would be a massive help to us at the moment.’
‘If anyone deserves a criminal conviction, it’s them! This is just so unfair!’ she protested. ‘Those houses are still for sale! Their companies are still going to make millions. How can they get out of paying our bill?’
‘Clever accounting, apparently,’ Ben said, and she heard the bitterness in his voice. ‘Development companies do it all the time… apparently.’
‘I see,’ said Sasha, ‘and that’s why they’ve picked some little, small-fry company like ours to completely stitch up, is it?’
‘Maybe,’ he admitted.
‘Ben, we’ve got no money left,’ she reminded him. ‘What are we supposed to do about the bills that we need to pay? We’ve had the mortgage on hold for three months; there’s the VAT bill; those final instalments for the rotivator… and… so many other things! What do we do about all that? And there’s hardly any money left in our personal account.’
‘We’ll talk it through when I get home,’ he assured her. And she wondered how he could even be trying to sound so calm, when she felt like running round the room and screaming at the top of her voice.
‘We are so close to our overdraft limits on the business and the personal accounts,’ she reminded him.
‘I know,’ he said.
‘We’ll have to arrange bigger loans… I don’t even know if we can… they’ll want to charge us a lot of interest. And… we’re not the crooks… we’re not even bad at business!’ she complained, really not willing to accept yet what had happened. ‘We’ve been defrauded, Ben! There should be a way to get this money back! We’re just two ordinary people with a small business that will now very likely go…’ Sasha paused. She didn’t want to use the word. She wasn’t ready to accept it. They had done everything, every single thing they could think of to get this money: they had made a beautiful job of the contracted work; they had opened up endless conversations with the development company; they had talked to their accountant at length and at further expense; even filed a claim through legal channels.
They’d borrowed a lot of money to do this work. They’d cut their own personal costs to the bone and still this was now happening. They were not going to get paid. They were very likely going to go bust… broke… bankrupt… all those terrible words. All the words she’d never, ever wanted to apply to them.
‘Sash, I know,’ Ben repeated, ‘but we will sort this out. We will handle it and we will get through it.’
Ben was by nature a charming and delightful optimist. He always wanted to believe that everything could be okay again, that it could still be sorted out and they would get to a better place. He didn’t ever want to join Sasha in the doom spiral. But for weeks now, she had been gripped by the doom spiral. She had been sure they were not going to get the money and she was exhausted with trying to cope with this eventuality and trying to work out a clear and sensible way forward.
They had a cosy little ground-floor flat in a London suburb, which they’d been slowly making their own over the years they’d owned it, and now she regularly woke up in the middle of the night, panicked that they would have to sell it. Meanwhile, Ben remained calmly confident that life could still be breathed back into their mortally wounded company.
‘We’re going to have to borrow some money pretty quickly to keep everything going,’ he told her now, ‘and preferably not from a bank.’
‘I know what you’re going to suggest, and the answer is no,’ she said sharply.
‘Sasha…’ Ben sighed.
‘I’m sure you remember how the conversation went when we were starting up.’
‘But this is different.’
‘How is it different?’
‘We’ve been in business for five years – we’ve had really steady income and we were good enough to win a major contract.’
‘From a bunch of crooks!’ she reminded him.
‘We’ve done the work. It’s in our portfolio and on our website. We’ll win more contracts like that and start to make good money. But we need to keep ourselves going through the winter, so we need a fast and cheap loan, from the people who care about us and can help us.’
‘Ben,’ Sasha began, ‘we are not telling my family about any of this, and we are not going to ask them for money.’
‘We’ve been very unfairly treated,’ Ben said. ‘Why don’t you think you can tell your parents? They will understand… or we can tell your parents… I’m happy to take the lead. I’m happy to take the blame, Sasha, for all of it.’
‘Please, Ben, don’t say that,’ she told him. ‘There is no blame to take. We have a signed contract that they have broken. We made all the important decisions about taking that work on together; we signed for the loans together. We did a great job,’ she added, ‘and… we’ve had some very bad luck.’
Saying it was bad luck didn’t make her feel any better about it. There was a hard, painful knot building in the back of Sasha’s throat. She felt stupid. These people had taken them for a complete ride. She should have known better; she should have researched the company harder; she couldn’t help feeling that she should have done much more to avoid this. But they had been so thrilled to get the contract. It was four times more than any work they’d won before and instead of looking very carefully, they’d jumped in, rolled up their sleeves and concentrated on doing their best work.
‘Sasha, your family will understand,’ Ben insisted, ‘just like mine will. I promise, they will understand, and they will sympathise with what’s happened.’
At this, she’d had to shake her head, even though he couldn’t see her, because wasn’t it totally obvious from everything he knew about her family that they would definitely not understand?
Sasha’s family was all about success. Her father was a success, his father had been a huge success, Sasha’s older sister was a roaring success, her younger brother was a big success too, and they’d all been so proud of her when she and Ben had started their own business and had begun to look as if they were all set to join the family of successes as well. And although their business had been slow and small-scale at the start, the big contract had given her hope that, finally, she and Ben were going to begin earning some decent money too.
‘I don’t want my family to know anything about the situation we’re in,’ she repeated.
‘But it’s going to come out,’ Ben told her, ‘one way or another. And I won’t exactly enjoy telling my family about how things have turned out, but I know they will be really supportive and will want to help in any way they can.’
Of course they will, Sasha couldn’t help thinking, because they’re all really nice and really normal – just like Ben – but not one of them could write the kind of big cheque currently needed to bail Greenhope Gardening out of the hole it was in.
‘Ben, you’ve known my family for twelve years,’ Sasha reminded him. ‘You know them, you know they will be weird and ashamed and awkward about everything, and can’t you just leave this? I don’t want them to know and that is final.’
‘You’re not really close as a family, are you?’ he said, sounding exasperated now.
Sasha didn’t want to hear this. She really didn’t want to do the ‘my family/your family’ discussion, so she told her husband defensively, ‘All families have their stuff, and their issues. We are still quite close…’ But even as she said it, she couldn’t help thinking that surely your family was close or not close – quite close sounded completely unconvincing.
‘Yeah, right,’ Ben almost laughed, ‘as close as the Borgias, maybe, or the Medicis, where family get-togethers are all about power games and stabbing each other in the back.’
‘That’s a complete exaggeration and not true at all!’
‘I think it’s a class thing,’ Ben said. ‘The posher the family, the less they get on.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, let’s not get started with this,’ Sasha warned him.
‘I have a theory about it—’
‘Ben… really?’ Wasn’t there quite enough to be harassed about without Ben having a go at her family?
‘For a start, there’s more money at stake – who’s been given what and who’ll inherit this or that. And then there’s the fact that your homes are so much bigger.’
‘I really don’t think this is very helpful right now,’ she said.
‘Well, if you live in a big, draughty place like Chadwell Hall, and you’ve had a row, you can go and storm off to the library or… I dunno… the east wing. But if you’re growing up in a little two-up, two-down, everyone’s on top of one another, sharing rooms, crammed into the space, and you have to button your lip, patch things up and generally learn a lot more social skills… and I’m not talking about the correct way to hold a dessert fork, darling.’
This pithy home truth and Ben’s comical mock-posh accent stopped her in her tracks and suddenly she wanted to laugh, in spite of herself, in spite of her family, and in spite of everything she and Ben were going through.
‘Ha ha, very clever,’ she admitted, ‘maybe you have a point.’
‘Of course I have a point!’ he said. ‘In fact, I don’t just have a point, I’m right!’
‘My family is awful and snobbish and literally obsessed with money,’ she said, ‘but they’re still my family and you married into us without having a clue—’
‘Yeah… but I got the best one,’ he chipped in.
‘Very nice… but that doesn’t mean I’m discussing any of this with any of them. I will not ask a single one of them for money, because that would be playing their game and admitting defeat and needing their help. I won’t do it ever again and that is final!’
Ben actually began to laugh at this. And the sound of his laughter did lighten some of the awful tension pressing down on her.
‘I’m glad I got the rebel,’ he said, ‘and it may not be making our life any easier, but I admire your stand and your independence, okay, Sash? See you very soon.’
* * *
Then the call was over, and Sasha was left alone in their sitting room. She looked at the banking app on her phone, saw the small amount of money left before they reached their overdraft extension and thought about what she really needed to buy today. The fridge was almost empty, so she had to go to the supermarket to get something for dinner tonight and tomorrow’s breakfast. She remembered that she’d just put through a payment for a school trip for LouLou… and unless some new funds came in very soon, that payment was likely to bounce back. And… oh, good grief… she was supposed to go to Waitrose to pick up the elaborate order of cheeses, port and brandy that she and Ben were bringing to her parents’ wedding anniversary party tomorrow. It was part of the menu and also their present to her parents: a whole stilton, a whole camembert, other special cheeses, quince jelly, bottles of vintage port and good brandy – the works.
Sasha sat on the floor and stared into space, mind whirling. At Greenhope Gardening, Ben was the head gardener, along with two freelance guys he used regularly. Sasha’s role was marketing, admin, plant ordering and collection and person who made all the calls, appointments and follow-ups. Occasionally, she helped with planting schemes and even lawn mowing if Ben was snowed under. She knew that several hundred pounds would come in from this month’s work in ten days’ time. Next month, there were only a few minor bookings.
Really, she knew she should be on the phone, on social media, marketing their little company to the moon. But right now, she was completely winded by the crushing disappointment of the news from Ben, and she had to get out of the house and somehow do her errands.
How the bloody hell was she going to buy the groceries they needed and pay for that cheese and wine order? There was absolutely no question of turning up at her parents’ without it. She tried to imagine her mother’s face if Sasha announced, ‘Oh, I’m sorry… I just forgot to pick those up.’ Not that there was any danger of the guests going hungry if she didn’t bring these luxury add-ons, oh no, this was going to be a full-on, three or even four-coursed event, in a glamorous marquee, with all the trimmings. This was a full fortieth anniversary, pull-out-all-the-stops, blowout extravaganza.
If she was honest, for weeks now, her heart had been sinking at the thought of this big family party. It wasn’t just the cheese, or not being able to pay for the cheese; it was nothing less than out-and-out dread of the whole event. She and Ben were almost completely broke; their business was teetering on the brink because their major customer wasn’t going to pay and there was no prospect of things looking up any time soon, but nevertheless, tomorrow morning, they were going to have to travel up to Norfolk, glam up, put on their best faces, their best possible shiny, sociable sides and endure a full-on family event. She would have to admire her mother’s latest designer outfit, listen to her dad’s complaints about his tax bill, hear about her little brother’s latest property deal and ask how the new high-powered finance job in Switzerland was working out for her big sister. All the while, not admitting to any of the stress and problems raining down on her and Ben’s heads.
Oh dear god.
There was no question of telling her family that she didn’t want to come to the party, and absolutely no question of telling them what was really going on with her. She knew that would just cause an endless amount of disapproval, not to mention torrents of unwanted advice. No, she really could not bear it. She had her pride. And the less her family knew about Greenhope’s disaster, the more she and Ben could keep their dignity intact.
For as long as Sasha could remember, she’d had the feeling that she could never do things the way her family wanted her to do them. She held a different attitude and different opinions from ‘them’. And she could somehow never ‘fit in’ with them. So, at some point in her teens, she’d given up trying. She’d decided that, within reason, she would do things the way she wanted to, rather than trying to live up to the impossible demands and expectations of her family. The result of this was that they always considered her a bit of a rebel – the black sheep. Her parents liked to make out that she’d been ‘impossible’ and a total ‘wild child’ in her teens and twenties, when she knew that, compared to many of her friends, that just wasn’t true. However, she quite enjoyed the ‘rebel’ badge and sometimes had to play up to it.
For a moment, her thoughts turned to her wardrobe, and she mentally ran through possible outfits for tomorrow. One thing she knew was that there was still a sizeable amount of bleach left in the box in her bathroom, so she would make sure that her funky, unruly short bob would have a fresh platinum shine for tomorrow.
Yes, sometimes she just had to play up to her assigned role as the family misfit. Surely that would distract her family’s attention away from the business disaster? At least for a while.
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