This time, Daniel got to the door before me. Due to my innate journalistic nosiness, I lurked a few feet behind him in the hallway to see who it was.
‘Ah, hello there!’ A man’s voice boomed. ‘Are we all right to leave our bags here?’
Then, as Daniel stood there looking a mixture of bewildered and incensed, the man wangled his way past him into the house, immediately followed by two women.
‘This is so not what we were expecting!’ One of them, dressed in what I knew to be a £2,000 coat, because I’d been given the exact same one in a different shade, muttered at the other, who scanned the hallway and stairs while unwinding a giant scarf from around her neck.
‘Well, in here’s not as bad,’ the scarf unwinder replied, grudgingly. ‘I mean, at least it’s authentic.’
‘Where do you want us?’ the man asked, who’d come to a stop by the kitchen door.
‘Um, how about back outside on the front step while we establish who you are and what you’re doing here?’ Daniel said, creaking the door open as wide as it would go.
‘Heh, heh! Very funny,’ the man chortled. ‘It’s the Stephe Winbrook party. Two doubles and a single. The other two will be arriving in an hour or so, they’ve got lost somewhere between back and beyond.’
‘I think you might be the ones lost, actually,’ Daniel replied, clearly losing patience. At that point, his phone rang from the study, and he quickly caught my eye. ‘I have to take that. Can you deal with this, please?’ He’d reached his study before finishing the sentence, firmly closing the door behind him.
‘I’m really sorry, but you must have the wrong place.’ Despite me knowing that this was true, I couldn’t help automatically taking the £2,000 coat when the woman held it out to me. You can take the girl out of hospitality…
‘Damson Farm?’ the man asked. ‘It’s taken us hours to get here. This had better be the right place!’
‘Uh, yes, this is Damson Farm. But can I ask why you’re here?’
‘We were invited! Booked the dates with Charlie yonks ago. She guaranteed a special advance rate for a midweek booking. Just the one night, like I said, three rooms. Perhaps you’d better check the system?’
My heart began knocking against my chest. Again, the hospitality in my blood kicked in. I smoothed down my jumper and stuck on my best smile. ‘Certainly, if you’d like to wait through here, I’ll do that right away. Did you say the booking was under Steve Winbrook?’
‘I most certainly did not! Steve!’ He let out a guffaw of laughter. ‘Steve!’ The women tittered along with him, shaking their heads at my preposterous mistake. ‘It’s Stephe. Rhymes with beef. Short for Stephen. With a ph. If you ask Charlie, she’ll remember me.’ He winked, and then winked again in case I’d missed it the first time.
I whipped open the living room door, hurrying in to scoop up a stray beer bottle left over from the night before, and straightening a couple of cushions. ‘Please, make yourselves comfortable.’
‘I already have.’ He gave me a deft full-body scan and winked again.
‘Right, sir.’ I couldn’t force myself to say Stephe. ‘I’ll be back shortly.’
I hurried into the kitchen to check the non-existent system for a non-existent booking, instead grabbing my hair in both hands and frantically whispering a summary of the situation to Becky.
‘Well, you’ll just have to explain what happened.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll do it, if you want.’
I ducked back through to the living room. One woman was perched on the same sofa as Stephe, mumbling into her phone, the other had her head in a cupboard. ‘Excuse me, you said you paid an advance rate? Can I please double check what that was?’
Stephe pulled his phone out and scrolled through it. ‘Two for the doubles, one-five for the single. That’s all meals and activities included. I did double check the offer on the website.’
There’s a website?
‘Right, £200, and £150. I’ll be right back.’
‘No, sweetheart!’ Stephe called after me. ‘Two thousand.’
Crap.
‘We can’t afford to refund them £5,000!’ I whisper-screeched at Becky.
‘Are you even liable?’ Becky was cool as a cucumber. In fact, from the glint in her eye I suspected she might be enjoying herself. ‘If someone who sold you a service has died, surely that’s tough cheese? Isn’t that what holiday insurance is for?’
‘What if that means Hope is now liable?’ I paced up and down, trying to get my head to stop spinning and start thinking. I had a sneaking suspicion that Charlie had taken thousands of pounds off these people, on the back of copious wild promises, without even considering the financial processes involved in setting up a business. If one of those snotty women got wind of this, who knows what the fallout would be? A bad review might be the least of our problems.
‘I think I’m going to have to go ahead and let them stay.’
‘What?’ Becky squealed. No doubt about it, she was loving this.
‘I can pull this off.’ I nodded my head, mentally ticking through a checklist of the basics. ‘We’ve got the bedrooms, I can rustle up some food, pour drinks. Figure out the rest as I go along. I can, can’t I? I mean, I’m not sure I’ve got any other option at this point…’
Clang.
‘That’ll be the remaining guests, then.’ I had to try and get the twinge of hysteria out of my voice.
I re-straightened my jumper, plastered the smile back on and went to greet them.
I was three steps down the hallway when Hope started crying.
So, Daniel emerged from his conference call to find five strangers lounging on his sofas, drinking tea out of his great-grandmother’s best china and eating freshly baked scones with the last of his jam and the cream I’d been saving for a pasta dish.
Becky and I were upstairs frantically chucking clutter into the tiny box room and making up the beds using a mishmash of bedding that we were hoping to pull off as quaint rather than 1980s Argos.
‘We’re going to have to put someone in Charlie’s room,’ I said, when he came and found us.
‘No.’ He scooped Hope off the bedroom floor.
‘They’ve booked two doubles! The only alternative is to squeeze another single in with this one and push them together. But then we’d have to swap this wardrobe for something smaller, and we simply don’t have time to start humping furniture around.’
‘There is another alternative.’ Daniel looked resolute. ‘You can tell them we’ve had an unexpected problem with the drains. Rebook for a later date.’
‘We can’t do that now, they’ve come from London! And they haven’t exactly been impressed so far, they’ll demand a refund rather than trek back up here.’
‘Also, if you put all five of them on this floor, that’s three rooms sharing one bathroom.’ Becky deftly stuffed a pillow into its case. ‘You can’t charge two grand for a shared bathroom. A chipped, mouldy bathroom.’
‘Crap!’ I sank onto the bed, which protested with a loud creak. What was I thinking?
I was thinking five and a half thousand pounds!
We were going to have to keep bumbling on through.
‘They could have your room?’ I said, peeping at Daniel through my eyelashes. ‘Then they can use your en suite.’
‘They could not!’
‘It’s either that or Charlie’s, or we send them away with a refund. Which do you prefer?’
Daniel huffed, puffed and stared at the faded carpet for a few seconds while blinking hard, before resting his head against Hope’s fluff of hair. ‘I’ll start clearing my stuff out. Hope and I will sleep in the study. We can use Charlie’s bathroom.’
I very quickly realised that we needed reinforcements. As well as sorting the bedrooms, clearing out and scouring the bathrooms, we needed to empty the dining room, and then find the time to prepare the three-course meal I presumed they were expecting.
I called the one other person I knew in Ferrington, praying she’d not have to work that evening, and would also for some inexplicable reason be up for getting involved in an unfolding disaster.
‘Course I’ll help!’ Alice laughed. ‘It beats another night on the sofa listening to Jase playing Call of Duty. What do you need?’
My new friends were a revelation.
After showing the guests to their rooms, with an extreme apology about the lack of a bathroom for the single room (the drains excuse came in handy after all) and a promise of a slight discount, I used the guise of the glitch in the booking system to subtly discover precisely what Charlie had promised them.
A locally sourced, organic three-course dinner and breakfast I could manage.
The activities were a whole other matter. The Tufted Duck had not prepared me for what the third woman to arrive described as ‘the lifestyle reconfiguration sessions’.
A bit of googling led Daniel to DamsonFarm.com and a basic stock template website that gave scant details beyond the address and some vague marketing waffle. Charlie had cleverly created the impression of exclusivity and up-scale secrecy, rather than a half-baked shambles that hadn’t made it beyond her notebook. So, at least our guests had no preconceived notion about what lifestyle reconfiguration might look like in reality.
Becky had the best idea of the day so far: ‘I think we need to start with alcohol.’
Once Alice arrived, Becky swapped her fleece for a smart pea-coat Daniel dug out of somewhere and took everyone outside for some local mulled-cider tasting. Local, as in Alice had picked it up at the local Co-op. Mulled, as in I’d thrown in varying amounts of cinnamon, cloves and orange juice and then warmed up the three different brands of cider and decanted them into rustic-looking pitchers I’d found in the pantry.
As Alice and I raced back and forth emptying the dining room, scrubbing the bits that showed and debating whether to go with crockery that almost matched, or to embrace the situation with as random a set as we could put together, Becky held court on the patio outside, lit up by a couple of lanterns Daniel found in the garage and the new living room candles. As the group huddled amongst the weeds around a hastily repurposed side-table, she spouted forth the kind of spontaneous nonsense that had won her salesperson of the year six years in a row.
Pausing to duck her head back inside, Becky accurately assessed the situation as nowhere near ready and announced to the group that they would now be able to take a tour of the orchard and see the apple trees for themselves.
‘What, this cider was made from apples grown here, on this farm?’ I heard the endless-scarf woman ask, as I opened the dining room window to try to let the stench of mildew out.
‘You can’t seriously expect us to go trooping round the filthy countryside in the pitch dark?’ the second man, Simon, said, his voice dripping with derision.
‘Oh, come on man, where’s your spirit of adventure?’ Stephe chortled. ‘We can trust Becky, she’s an expert, after all!’
‘Oh my goodness, Simon, are you in need of a top-up, let me rectify that for you immediately!’ Becky trilled, sloshing another ladle of cider into his mug. ‘Come on, someone grab that other lantern and please, do listen out for the ghost of the Damson Damsel. Don’t forget to bring your drinks with you!’
I don’t know what she did with them, but when they returned nearly an hour later, stiff with cold, designer boots encrusted with mud, cheeks aglow, they seemed in a far better mood than when they’d left.
‘Right, then, dinner will be served at seven-thirty. Take your time freshening up. We’ll see you in the living room for pre-drinks when you’re ready.’
‘Forty minutes?’ I whispered. ‘To prepare a three-course meal from scratch?’
Becky gaped at me. ‘You haven’t started cooking?’
‘We’ve been cleaning, tidying, trying to find five wine glasses that aren’t chipped and enough towels without holes in and a million other things that needed doing. Alice’s been decanting shower gel and shampoo into old jam jars and making fancy labels out of chopped up birthday cards.’
‘Well, we’d better get cooking, then, hadn’t we?’
I grabbed her arm before she marched into the kitchen. ‘This is amazing, Becky. We’ve been friends for less than five hours and I completely love you already, but you don’t have to stay. Alice works in the pub, she’s going to act as server for me.’
Becky glanced over at Alice, her brow furrowed. ‘I’ve never seen you in the pub,’ she said, all trace of perky saleswoman Becky vanished.
Alice nodded, stopping ironing a napkin to stick her hands on her hips. ‘I’ve never seen you in the Boatman.’
Becky inhaled with a gasp. ‘Eleanor, you probably don’t know about all this yet, but she’s a New Sider.’
‘I know all about the feud that happened before either of you were born, I know that Alice is from the New Side, because she gave me a lift to the Co-op. What I’m not sure about is what that’s got to do with my current predicament.’ I went back to furiously slicing the potatoes for dauphinoise.
‘Well… what will people think?’
‘What people? I really don’t think Stephe and Saskia are going to be particularly bothered.’ I handed her a chunk of cheese and a grater. I really didn’t have time for this. ‘Alice doesn’t care, do you?’
Alice, back to ironing, looked up, a glint in her eyes. ‘I won’t tell if you don’t.’
‘Ooh.’ Becky’s eyes darted from side to side as she contemplated this seemingly mind-blowing information, that two women from opposite sides of the same village could spend an evening in a kitchen together. ‘Like a covert operation?’
Alice squirted a puff of steam from the iron into the air, as if making a point. ‘Precisely.’
‘I’ve been to thirty-seven different countries in the past six years, and got up to all sorts of things I hope my mother never finds out about. This is quite possibly the most exciting one yet.’ She stopped mid-grate. ‘Please don’t tell my mum, though, Eleanor. She’s giving me enough grief as it is. Or anyone else! I know it’s stupid and I shouldn’t care what people think. I know the whole New Siders being treacherous, sneaky bottom-feeders is probably a load of nonsense these days, but… well. No offence, Alice.’
‘None taken,’ Alice drawled. ‘Why would I want anyone to know I’m hanging out with what they consider to be a smug, self-important snob? My lips are sealed.’
Becky’s mouth fell open.
‘Although I do have a bit of a blabber mouth from time to time. I mean, we New Siders can’t be trusted, can we? I do hope I don’t accidentally mention to Luke Winter on Friday when he calls in for his pie and pint that you’re open to hanging out with New Siders these days. I’ll try really, really hard to keep my mouth shut, then.’
Becky turned a startling shade of beetroot, almost losing the tip of one finger as the grater slipped.
‘Well, I mean, sometimes these things can’t be helped,’ she muttered, her voice about three octaves higher than usual. She tapped the grater to loosen any cheese stuck to the sides. ‘I guess that’s the risk you take in trusting a New Sider.’
‘Okay, if we can draw the Ferrington politics to a close, we’ve got a sea bass with Prosecco Dauphinoise and seasonal vegetables and a locally sourced honey and damson tart to get sorted in, ooh, twenty-two minutes and counting.’
The kitchen door burst open, and Stephe and Saskia stumbled in. ‘Did someone mention Prosecco?’
It was challenging work getting back into the swing of hosting paying guests. Five was hardly a demanding number, but it can only take one or two requests to turn a straightforward dinner into a stress-soaked slog.
No, we weren’t aware that one of the guests was a vegan (apparently the cream tea earlier was an exception, because they’d had a hard week and deserved a treat). Yes, we could probably rustle up some second helpings (especially when that gave us more time to get dessert sorted). No, none of us ‘gorgeous gals’ were going to squeeze a chair in beside Stephe and tell him all about ourselves.
What we did have was Becky’s party games.
‘How’s it going?’ Daniel asked, wandering into the kitchen once he’d finally managed to settle Hope down, despite the ruckus.
‘The food went down well. Mostly. One of them only ate green beans, but I get the impression that’s all she ever eats.’
‘What’s next?’ He picked up a slice of leftover tart and took a bite, eyes widening with appreciation. I resisted the urge to fan my face with the tea-towel. The adrenaline buzz made everything seem heightened, including Daniel’s manly presence, loitering about taking up half the kitchen. I was feeling flushed with success, all dishevelled and triumphant, and it was teeteringly close to reckless.
‘They’ve been asking what the after-dinner activity is.’
‘So, what have you come up with?’
I nodded my head towards the living room. ‘Becky is about to start, if you want to see for yourself.’
‘I’d love to, but due to unforeseen circumstances I’ve not got my report done for the morning. Looks like it’ll be a long night for both of us.’
He disappeared back into the study, and I slipped into the living room. The guests were all seated around Becky, posed dramatically to one side of the crackling fireplace. Her atrocious fleece was unzipped to reveal an even worse flowery jumper, but no one seemed to notice the unprofessional attire.
‘Damson Farm is a place to dehustle and dehassle, to get away from all those crappy responsibilities and never-ending pressures. This, my friends, is a place where deadlines are dead, to-do is taboo. The only responsibility you have is to be you. The you you always wanted to be. Wild and free. Bold and beautiful. Here, you are an artist, a creator, an original. Your best you.’ Becky paused.
The only sound was Saskia sobbing gently into a tissue while Simon muttered, ‘Give me a break! Or at the very least a decent whisky.’
‘But before you reclaim the real you, we need to lose the boring, money-bags, image-conscious you. So, who’s ready?’
Alice, Becky and I were washing down the last of the tart with a pot of tea when Daniel strode into the kitchen. ‘People are galloping up and down the stairs. Something that sounded distinctly like screaming came from the direction of the conservatory. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were playing hide and seek.’
Becky grinned. ‘One more round and then we’ll calm them down with sleeping lions.’
He shook his head as if mystified, grabbed the final corner of tart and whisked back out.