Ten Steps to Happiness
(in a Safe and Healthy World)
Daisy Waugh

Extracts from the Health and Safety First Principles Workbook and Food Safety Principles Workbook reproduced with the kind permission of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health.

Extracts from Health and Safety Executive Catering Information Sheets and Workplace Health, Safety and Welfare, a short guide for managers reproduced with the kind permission of the Health and Safety Executive.

Extracts from the UK Department of Trade and Industry’s website on home safety, the insert to the Department of Education and Employment’s leaflet DL170. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995. What Employers Need to Know, and Health and Safety: Towards a Safer Workplace are Crown copyright material and reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland.

For Peter de Sales La Terrière with love

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Excerpt

MISSION STATEMENT

Author’s note

(Step Minus One)

(i) UTILISE A SAFETY-FIRST ENVIRONMENT

(ii) SECURE TIME-BOUND PROGRAMME OF IMPLEMENTATION

(iii) PRIORITISE END-PRODUCT-RELATED GOALS

(iv) SUPPORT AND DEVELOP APPROPRIATE PROCEDURES

(v) OUTSOURCE NON-HIERARCHICAL INTERPERSONAL NEEDS

(vi) TARGET IDENTIFIABLE HAZARDS

(vii) TACKLE AND DEMOLISH NEGATIVE-OUTCOME VENTURES AND SITUATIONS

(viii) INITIATE ZERO-TOLERANCE STRATEGY TO CONFRONT ADVERSE BEHAVIOURS

(ix) ACTION A FULL AND FRANK ASSESSMENT OF CORE VALUES

(x) CO-OPT REALISABLE RESOURCES TO OPTIMISE TASK EFFECTIVENESS

Acknowledgements

Ten Steps to Happiness

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

MISSION STATEMENT

(i) To acquire, facilitate and maintain:

 an anxiety-and stress-free, healthful being-state in no less than 10 (ten) self-existent increments, the causal effect of which shall enable and release feelings of increased personal confidence, thereby leading to dynamic rebranding and repackaging of integrated learned responses to all living experiences.

YES!!

because HAPPINESS is achievable!

Author’s note:

TO MAXIMISE EFFECTIVENESS AND ENJOYMENT OF THIS SIMPLE, STEP-BY-STEP PROGRAMME PARTICIPANTS ARE FIRST INVITED TO…

(Step Minus One)

•…CONJECTURISE AN OPTIMAL CONTEXT

February 2001

Imagine a moment of perfect happiness with no past and no future and no thoughts of time ebbing away. With no thoughts of anything. No conscious thought at all. An instant of perfect happiness. Soft breeze. Soft sea. True love. True laughter. Giant turtles. And so on. These moments come once in a while to the very, very lucky. Of course they don’t usually last for long.

Jo Smiley and Charlie Maxwell McDonald, on the fourth day of their honeymoon, were lying in the moonlight on a small, empty, private beach in Mexico, only recently disturbed from their canoodling by the sound of a giant turtle dragging its hefty weight across the sand towards them. Its progress was slow and they watched it for ages before Charlie said – whispered, quite seriously, as if it were some new discovery:

‘It’s definitely coming towards us.’

Jo started giggling because they’d been watching intently all this time. There had never been any question where it was headed.

‘Why? What’s so funny?’ he murmured, turning to look at her, and then because he loved her, and he loved her laughter, starting to laugh himself.

The turtle stopped still. Silence.

‘Oh. Now we’ve frightened it,’ said Jo.

‘Or it thinks it’s frightened us. Either way we should set its mind at rest.’

Slowly they stood up and tiptoed back to their hut. It was a magnificent hut. Booking into this simple-looking corner of Paradise had been the most extravagant thing Charlie had ever done. He had imagined that his elegant, metropolitan wife, who until recently had been thriving in the luxurious world of Public Relations, would have been disappointed with anything less.

But he underestimated how much she loved him. Jo Smiley knew all about creature comforts, as fine-looking, highly effective, well-connected thirty-one-year-old London PR women are prone to. Jo had spent a lot of time and clients’ money in some of the smartest restaurants and hotels in the world. But that was all in the past now. And anyway it wasn’t the point. She would have been happy with Charlie anywhere. Anywhere. To have found a companion like Charlie; unworldly, unpretentious, tall, dark, funny, wise, kind and handsome (of course) was without doubt the greatest luxury of all.

In fact when Jo looked at Charlie and imagined the bucolic life which lay ahead of them she felt light-headed with hope for the future. The house they would be living in was beautiful; crumbling and uncomfortable and an insatiable swallower of cash, but it was lovely, and destined shortly to be lovelier still. When they returned to England she and Charlie were going to set to work restoring it. She and Charlie were going to build a dream-place together. Not only that, they were going to make it pay.

So when they weren’t watching tortoises or doing all the other things which enhanced their perfect happiness, they were talking about the future of Fiddleford Manor. It had been home to Charlie’s family for over two hundred years and now it was theirs and to keep the roof from caving in and everything else from falling apart, they were turning the house into a business. They were going to open the place up as a refuge for anyone in hiding from an angry public, or a baying and bullying press.

Jo envisaged a stream of tearful popstars, politicians and football managers knocking at the Manor door. She envisaged comforting them in a newly refurbished kitchen. With green tea, and Cristal champagne (if they wanted). And home-made flapjacks, perhaps. She envisaged Fiddleford Manor becoming a part of modern mythology, a perfect haven where no media was admitted and where suffering celebrities had to plead to be allowed in.

‘I was thinking, Charlie – don’t you think,’ she said some time later, as they wallowed in the beach hut’s circular sunken bath, ‘we could have a sort of meditation room. With very, very quiet spiritual music playing. And candles. A sort of multi-denominational-non-faith-specific chapel effect. Because people are going to be feeling very troubled when they first arrive to stay with us. They might appreciate a nice, quiet place to sit and think…’

‘It’s an idea,’ Charlie said tactfully. ‘If that’s what you want. But the bedrooms are pretty big, remember. If they want peace and quiet they could just stay in their rooms—’

‘And do you agree, Charlie,’ said Jo, who hadn’t been listening, whose mind had already moved on, ‘I was thinking maybe we could ban anyone who’s been in Big Brother. On principle. Do you think? Or do you think that’s a bit mean and snobbish?’

‘Big brother,’ repeated Charlie vaguely. ‘In big brother…’

‘The telly programme.’

‘The telly programme…’ It didn’t ring any bells. ‘Anyway, we’re supposed to be open to anyone, if they need us. And if we can fit them in. That’s the whole point.’

‘Quite right. We’ll just have to hope and pray they never realise they need us. I had another idea, though. Lovely idea. We could wire the house so it’s all on the same sound system. With speakers in every single room – can you imagine? So you’ve got music which is really beautiful – upbeat-but-ethereal – and it’s playing everywhere! In the kitchen, the bathrooms, the hall. Everywhere. All over the house. Wouldn’t that be amazing?’

‘So upbeat ethereal in the multi-faith-non-specific chapel?’ he said, smiling lazily. ‘But with the volume turned very, very low?’

‘Non-faith-specific,’ she corrected. ‘You think it’s a stupid idea.’ She didn’t mind. She had a thousand new ideas for the refuge every day, and so did he. Some of them were practical – they were going to have to build a couple more bathrooms. Most of them were pretty stupid. ‘I think we should employ a pilates instructor, don’t you? Live-in. Nobody will want to go to a retreat which doesn’t do yoga and pilates, however much trouble they’re in.’

‘Grey McShane didn’t seem to mind.’

‘Grey’s different. I love him, but he’s a lunatic. And an alcoholic. And he came to stay when it was still a house and he wasn’t paying.’

‘He’s paying now.’

‘No, but he wasn’t then. Anyway he’s a friend, he doesn’t count…By the way I don’t suppose he mentioned anything to you about moving out did he, before we left?’

‘Not exactly, no. I think he and Dad are both assuming they’re going to stay on and help run the refuge, since it was partly their idea. Dad says he’ll move into the cottage, but I’d be surprised…’

‘Well.’ Jo shrugged. Grey wasn’t a problem. She felt less enthusiastic about sharing a house with her intractable father-in-law, who didn’t like her and never would make any attempt to hide it. But he was old and lonely. He’d lived at Fiddleford all his life. And Charlie, who loved him, was all the family he had left. So he thought she was – whatever he did think. She didn’t care. She thought he was a fascist buffoon. They squabbled virtually every time they spoke, but it was harmless enough. Sometimes she wondered if they both didn’t even enjoy it. Either way she certainly wasn’t going to force him out. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ she said. ‘It’s not like the house isn’t big enough.’

‘Grey wants to pay to put high voltage electric fencing all around the park.’

She smiled. ‘Can’t blame him after what they put him through.’ She sighed. ‘Poor sod. I think we should find him a girlfriend.’

‘And I think,’ Charlie laughed, slowly leaning across the bath towards her, ‘with his track record he’s more than capable of finding one for himself…’

And they lapsed into silence, and through the opened windows the breeze softened, the turtles frolicked, and any thoughts of the past and the future slowly ebbed away…

Accident – an unplanned, uncontrolled event with the potential to cause injury, damage or other loss.

Control or control measure – an item or action designed to remove a hazard or reduce the risk from it.

Reportable accident – one that must be reported to the appropriate enforcement authority.

Health and Safety First Principles Workbook, Chartered Institute of Environmental Health

(i) UTILISE A SAFETY-FIRST ENVIRONMENT
Spring 2001

Fiddleford Manor lay deep beneath snow. The boiler was broken, the house was freezing, the roof was leaking and there was a policeman at the bottom of the drive. Jo and Charlie had returned from their Mexican honeymoon only three weeks earlier, besotted, euphoric, absolutely one hundred per cent in love. And yet, as she looked out at the frozen landscape and the heavy, grey, endless sky, she thought for the first time of the perspex desk she had left in Soho, and of the low-fat, high-concept working lunch she would have been enjoying at exactly this moment six months ago, and briefly, treacherously, found herself wondering if she might have been better off staying in London, where mass cullings never interrupted the running of things, and where there was always emergency hot water at the gym.

A ludicrous thought, of course. And wrong, too. Jo loved her new life. She loved her new husband – of course. And she loved her old house.

It would have been difficult not to. Fiddleford Manor, built from the warm red local stone nearly three hundred years ago – vast, elegant and mostly held together by ivy – nestled magnificently inside its own landscaped park and, beyond that, a small and unspoilt and entirely unprofitable agricultural estate. There was a rose garden and a small lake with an old rowing boat to one side of the house, and a decrepit Victorian stable yard with its own broken clock tower on the other; at the front the long, wide lawns stretched past one towering cedar tree and the occasional jungle-like rhododendron all the way to the river bank. The house was a mile from the local village, where there was a church and a school and a small shop, four miles from the market town of Lamsbury and thirty-seven miles from the nearest train station, in the neighbouring county of Devon.

But right now Devon, like everywhere else, was out of bounds. The whole world was out of bounds. Ever since the man from Trading Standards had managed to struggle up the drive, with his appalling lilac-coloured office shirt, his appalling ‘Form A’, and his disinfected Wellingtons, it had been against the law for anyone to come on to or off the estate without a licence. And what with everything else that was going on, the entire countryside and every bureaucrat related to it in tailspin, no one had seen fit to grant a licence to the plumber. So the inhabitants of Fiddleford, Jo, Charlie, their difficult friend Grey McShane, and Charlie’s difficult father the General, huddled together in the kitchen, shivering and waiting.

They had been waiting for three days now. Or five days if you counted from the first telephone call, which was when everything really started changing. It came as they were finishing dinner. The General, who was meant – though he still showed no signs of it – to be in the process of moving into a large cottage at the end of the drive, had said, ‘Who the bloody Hell calls at this hour?’ and Charlie had gone off to find out. He came back into the dining room twenty minutes later, looking very bleak.

‘MAFF,’ he said simply.

Nobody spoke.

‘They’ve found a case of foot and mouth at Tom Shattock’s place. They’re sending a man round here in the morning.’

His father groaned.

‘But, listen, you never know.’ It sounded very hollow. ‘We might be fine…We might be absolutely fine.’

‘Poor old Shattock,’ murmured the General. ‘And it’s definite is it? Confirmed case?’

Charlie nodded. ‘Plus there’s another one suspected. It’s definite all right.’

The morning after that, while a Ministry vet inspected their cattle, Charlie led the lilac-coloured Standards man into the library. He’d wanted to know the exact whereabouts of every livestock animal on the estate: for ‘future reference’, he said; ‘in the event of evidence leading us to suspect…’ But they both knew what that meant. Charlie had been as helpful as he could. Or as he could bear to be.

He listed everything. Every single one of their 542 sheep, including the pregnant ewes, the three-day-old lambs, the seventeen rare and precious Dorset Horns. He told the man about his prize-winning dairy herd, and about his magnificent Jersey bull. He even mentioned his beloved twin sister Georgie’s billy goat which since her shocking death (in a riding accident a year and a half ago) had been bought a nanny companion and allowed to roam freely among the animals.

‘And that’s it?’ said the lilac man, clicking the top of his stainless steel pen and slipping it neatly into his lilac pocket. ‘Nothing else? No pigs?’

‘No.’

‘No new calves unaccounted for?’

‘No. None I haven’t mentioned.’

Lilac man offered a measly smile: ‘No nasty surprises lurking in forgotten corners anywhere? It’s a sizable estate.’

Charlie averted his eyes. He was a rotten liar, and he hated lying, but there were two animals he’d left out, whose existence at that particular moment was causing his body to break out in a cold sweat. Caroline and Jasonette, an ancient couple of Highland cows, had been wandering the park at Fiddleford ever since he and his twin sister were ten. They had been delivered, all those years ago, as a birthday surprise from their mother: twin calves, one for each of her twins. He and Georgina used to spend hours with them during the holidays, lounging around on their hairy backs, taking them on picnics (or taking picnics on them). They pinned photographs of their cows on their bedroom walls at school.

Once, when the twins were still small, and the cows were still calves and the sun was always shining and his twin and their mother were still alive, someone had left the front door open and both animals had been discovered looking bewildered, side by side in the middle of the hall. Their mother (the General had been away at the time, or it never would have happened) hadn’t yelled about the valuable paintings or the boring Japanese urn on the side table. She’d behaved as if everything was completely normal, as if the two little calves were making a perfectly ordinary social call.

She opened the door to the drawing room, since it was ‘nearly drinks time’, and invited the calves to come in. They followed her, the way calves do. The children had fetched bowls of milk from the kitchen, and the five of them had stood about beneath the portraits of disapproving soldiers, while Mrs Maxwell McDonald conducted a jolly conversation with all of them, exactly as if she had been entertaining the local vicar. Charlie and Georgie thought it was the most topsy-turvy thing they’d ever seen. They thought they would die from laughing. And the calves had looked so sweet and confused in the middle of that big drawing room, and their mother had looked so happy. It was one of the last memories they had of her before she fell ill. She must have died less than a year later…

Charlie looked out of the library window over the frozen hills to where the village lay, and the church, whose tower he could see, and the churchyard where his mother and sister lay side by side…He looked back at the lilac-coloured penpusher, with his measly lilac-coloured grin.

‘Nasty surprises?’ he said coolly. ‘At Fiddleford? Certainly not.’

The Ministry vet checked in with Jo and Charlie at the end of the same day. He’d not completed his inspection yet, he said, and he would be back first thing in the morning to finish off.

‘No signs yet, though,’ he said. ‘So fingers crossed.’

It gave them false hope. They all four drank too much that night. And then in the morning the vet returned and within minutes he’d found one of the heifers was limping.

She could have trodden on a sharp stone. More than likely, she had trodden on a sharp stone. Or one of the other cows might have kicked her. Or she’d woken up feeling stiff. It could have been any number of things. But the people from the Ministry weren’t willing to take the risk. Later that night came the official confirmation. There would be no need to take further tests. The limp was evidence enough. Death warrants had been signed and the slaughtermen were booked for Wednesday morning.

Since then, time for everyone at Fiddleford had been passing abnormally slowly. Jo wandered the house with her notebook, making obsessive and pointless notes about facilities which might be required for her future paying guests. Grey and the General, for lack of tabloid newspapers to argue over (their favourite – almost their only – pastime for several months now), were reduced to watching housewives’ television. Charlie, meanwhile, dealt with the animals, the farm workers, and the people from MAFF.

On Monday evening he telephoned the Ministry to inform them that the heifer’s limp had disappeared. On Tuesday evening he called again to inform them there were still no signs of infection among any of the other animals. But it was too late. That night the last of the animals were herded together into outhouses. The pyre was already built, and the sheep crushes and the cattle stocks lay waiting.

The snow turned to sleet that evening, and a cruel wind blew. Grey McShane, in a futile attempt to lighten everyone’s spirits, had lit a fire in the dining room. There was no food in the house, since the garden was covered in three feet of snow, and nobody was allowed out to go shopping. But Grey found an ancient tin of spaghetti at the back of the larder, which he plopped into a saucepan and burnt and then, with absurd fanfare, carried through to the dining room.

He doled out a plateful to Jo, who looked at it for several minutes and then suddenly leapt from her chair and ran out of the room. Charlie found her vomiting over the kitchen sink.

‘Are you all right?’ he said.

‘I’m fine. Completely fine. You go back in.’

‘Was it the spaghetti, do you think?’

She laughed.

‘Oh Christ, Jo, I’m so sorry. This must be awful for you.’

‘It’s fine. Please. Never mind me. I’m fine…I’m fine.’

‘We could get a licence and you could go and stay in London until it was over.’

‘Certainly not!’ She made an effort to smile, but the smile turned into a retch. ‘Oh, God—’ She retched again. ‘I think I’ll go upstairs.’

Jo ran to her bedroom and only just reached the basin in time. She stood there for a while, recovering, thinking, examining the splashes of vomit at her lovely, Mexican-tanned feet. She straightened up, wiped her mouth and, before she could change her mind yet again, headed over to the wardrobe and pulled out the testing kit which had been languishing there, driving her crazy, since the day before the MAFF people first called.

Afterwards she didn’t quite know what to do. Call her mother? No. Anyway she was away in El Salvador, taking artistic holiday snaps. Burst in on Charlie – and Grey and the General – in that freezing cold dining room? Definitely not. Have a bath?

There was no hot water for a bath. She decided to go straight to bed. She took off her uncomfortable urban clothes (skintight jeans @ £125, stripy cashmere jersey with pointless zip and hood), which were so incredibly ineffective in her new rural life, and replaced them with a pair of pyjamas and every jersey she could find in Charlie’s cupboard.

She lay awake for what felt like hours after that, trying to persuade herself it was real, trying to feel what she was meant to feel – fulfilled and magical and womanly and blessed, trying not to feel terrified of how her life, which until she met Charlie had always been so painstakingly well structured, seemed so quickly to be slipping out of her control. But then somehow she must have fallen asleep because she woke with a start at about three o’clock to discover that Charlie still hadn’t joined her.

Out on the icy landing she could find no sign of him either. The house was quiet. The vast, stone-floored entrance hall beneath her was shrouded in black. She bent over the banister and thought she saw a faint crack of light coming from beyond the back lobby, and then suddenly, from the same direction, she heard the muffled sound of something large crashing to the ground.

‘…Charlie?’

The house was old – especially the back part, the part where the noise was coming from. Among her many strengths (her warmth, her determination, her well maintained contacts book and, though she felt far from beautiful that night, her delicate elfin good looks), Jo was a practical woman, not remotely given to superstitious anxieties. But she was terrified.

‘…Charlie?’

No response, just a distant shuffling, followed by a long, low moan.

‘…Charlie!’

Slowly, carefully, in almost total darkness, she followed the sound as far as the back lobby, where she paused for a moment. She could hear breathing very clearly now: heavy, quick-fire, phlegmy breathing, like a sleeping giant. The back lobby led on to the kitchen, and beyond that to the pantry and the boot room, and from there to the stairs which went down to the cellars. The thin stream of light was coming from the cellars, somewhere Jo and her notebook had not bothered to venture before.

Tentatively, she walked down the steps and found herself in a large, dank room cluttered with what looked like pieces of rotting furniture. There was a room on either side of her, both of them in darkness, and in front of her, a miserable, decaying corridor. She could hear the noises coming from beyond it: the breathing, someone hammering and then Charlie, ‘It’s OK, girl. It’s OK. Take it easy. Just a bit of noise. I’ll be done in a sec.’

Which was when she finally saw them. Dwarfing the corridor and the small room at the end of it, dwarfing Charlie: two old Highland cows, covered in cobwebs and flakes of rotting paint, puffing after their strange exertions.

Charlie looked up. ‘Jo!’ he said. ‘It’s—How are you? I thought you were asleep.’

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she asked.

‘What? Me? Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Shh! You’ll frighten the girls.’

‘The girls?’ Gingerly, to ensure that she wasn’t dreaming, she edged forward and put out a finger to touch one of them. It responded with a friendly grunt and by wiping its damp nose on the sleeve of her outer jersey. She snatched her hand away quickly. ‘Charlie, they’re not girls, they’re cows. What are they doing in the cellar?’

‘Jo…You’re wonderful.’

‘What?’

‘I’m just saying—’ He hesitated. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’

‘Are you hiding them?’

‘Please. Mind your own business.’

‘What if they’re infected?’

‘They’re not infected. They’ve been nowhere near any other farm animals for almost twenty-five years. But I’m going to let them work out their quarantine down here, just to be sure.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Charlie. We’ve got to get these cows back in the shed where they belong—’

‘They’re not going anywhere.’

‘Apart from anything else it’s not—I mean they’re probably not going to make it through the winter anyway. It’s not worth it.’ Charlie glared at her and, without another word, turned back to his hammering. He was trying to fix a plank over a large air vent, but every time he hit the nail, chunks of wall fell out. She watched him for a while. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be—’ She paused to think of the right word, but all she could come up with was ‘realistic’. She decided not to fill the gap.

‘You must be freezing,’ he said over his shoulder.

‘I’m fine, Charlie, my darling. That’s not really the point.’

‘I know it isn’t.’ He turned back to face her. ‘The point is I’ve got to get this place soundproofed before morning. So please. Seriously. I love you and everything. But either give me a hand, or – go away.’

She looked at the old cows, so gentle and decrepit, their heads and necks still bobbing rhythmically from the trouble of getting down the cellar stairs, flakes of paint the size of saucers hanging off their enormous horns. She looked at Charlie, so utterly in earnest. A year ago, in her more black-and-white days, she might easily, at this point, have decided to bring in the police. That night she didn’t know what to do. The cows couldn’t do any harm, working out their quarantine down here in the cellar, and the idea of getting them out again, and then tomorrow of watching Charlie lining them up for the stocks…

‘By the way, Charlie,’ Jo said sulkily about a minute later, sounding absurdly, self-consciously casual. They were squeezed between the cows and the decaying wall, trying together to fix the soundproofing plank without causing the whole rotten cellar to disintegrate. ‘I’m pregnant. Already. OK?’ (She was embarrassed; it was embarrassingly quick.) ‘I only mention it because we’d better not get caught. I mean I’m definitely not going to prison over this.’

The extermination process was a long and horrible one, beginning before dawn had properly broken, and not ending until dusk on the following day. First to be slaughtered was the dairy herd. It took seven men five hours to dispatch them. Les, the Fiddleford farm hand, would set each one on her journey, steering her the hundred-odd yards through the snow, down the steep path, to the makeshift stall where Charlie stood ready to slip her head into a brace. She would be injected with sedative and then led from the stocks to the land in front of the pyre, as close as possible to the body of the cow which had preceded her, where she would be shot in the head.

Nobody spoke much. The animals rolled in, the animals rolled out, the bodies piled up. The Ministry people had seen it all before. They’d been doing it every day for weeks, which isn’t to suggest that they were enjoying themselves. But it was a job with an hourly rate. It wasn’t their twin sister’s billy goat who was waiting in the yard to have its brain scrambled.

Grey McShane shuffled out to the killing fields just before noon, by which time the slaughterer’s regulation white body suits were soaked in blood. He should have been wearing one himself. One had been left by the back door for him. But Grey was not fond of orders.

In fact he was wearing a Prada suit which had lost its buttons and a pair of the General’s old gumboots. He was carrying a bottle of gin, as he always did, and his big black coat was dragging in the mud behind him. One of the Ministry men hurried across the field to intercept him.

‘It’s strictly no access without the suit,’ he said, inadvertently wiping the blood from his cuff across his nose and forehead. ‘I’m sorry, sir. Someone should have told you. The clothes will have to be burnt now.’

‘What clothes?’

‘The er—suit. Everything. Sorry. Regulations.’

‘Aye,’ muttered Grey distractedly, walking politely around him.

Having offered Charlie his help, and been greatly relieved when it was rejected, Grey had intended to play as supportive a role as he could in the proceedings, but from inside the house, as far away from the smell of blood as was supportively possible. Looking at the carnage, the rows of bodies, the white-suited men with their disinfectant sprays and bloodstains, the sound of the gun, he was finding it very hard to stay focused. He wished he could turn back, but a crisis was developing and he needed Charlie’s help. He took a deep swig at the gin to stop himself from vomiting. He looked back at the Ministry man. ‘Where is he, then?’

‘Who?’

‘Where’s Charlie?’

‘Charlie?’

‘Charlie,’ he said coldly, ‘is the man whose animals you’re in the process of exterminatin’. Charlie Maxwell McDonald.’ Grey glanced disconsolately around the field. ‘Where the fuck is he?’

‘He’s round the corner, by the stocks. But you really can’t—I must insist—’

Grey, thirty-eight years old that summer, had been quite famous once, when he was thirty-seven. Like his friend Jo, he was a refugee from London, from the successful people’s party circuit, but unlike Jo, who’d thrived in it for ten years or more before she pressed the ejector button, Grey McShane had lasted only a matter of weeks. An enormous, miraculously handsome Scottish ex-jailbird, alcoholic and former tramp, he was ‘discovered’ by a handful of fashionable opinion makers, drunkenly reciting his own poetry outside a well-known theatre in Islington. Not long afterwards, Phonix Records had hitched itself onto the McShane bandwagon and offered him an unheard of £1 million contract to make an album of his poetry. The marketing people proclaimed him a genius, a voice for a disenfranchised generation, a living embodiment of a modern generation’s pain. And Grey was one of the few people who had never believed them. Anyway the contract was withdrawn soon afterwards, when Grey was wrongly denounced as a paedophile, at which point (for about a week) he became the nation’s most hated figure, hounded and jeered at on the front of every newspaper. Nobody was surprised when, a week or so after that, the geniuses at Phonix suddenly came to the conclusion that Grey wasn’t a genius after all.

That was back in October. He’d been hiding out with his friends at Fiddleford ever since, the living inspiration for Charlie and Jo’s new business venture, a lonely, private figure who insisted on paying over the odds for his board and lodging, and who so far displayed no signs of ever planning to leave. He was bad-tempered, lazy, reckless, argumentative, funny, brave and, when he thought someone deserved it, heroically loyal. The General adored him. Charlie and Jo, both several years his junior, often suggested that he find somewhere else to live, but they no longer expected it and in fact they would have been quite sorry to see him go. He had been instrumental in bringing the two of them together, and now, as he picked his way through the carcasses, swallowing his own bile and dodging the bossy men in suits, he was about to fight for their interests once again.

‘Ah. There you are, Charlie,’ he said. ‘At last. How’s it goin’?’

‘Hi Grey,’ muttered Charlie, without looking up. There was a cow’s head lodged between his forearms. He was watching intently while a vet emptied his syringe into the vein beneath her tail. A moment later Charlie released the cow and stood back, patting its fat, healthy rump for the last time as it was ushered away. Grey leant towards Charlie. ‘Something’s come up,’ he whispered. ‘You’re needed at the house.’

‘Is it Jo?’

‘Excuse me,’ interrupted the vet, ‘but you need to be wearing one of the suits down here. Someone should have told you.’

‘I know that already,’ said Grey helpfully. ‘I’ve come to fetch Charlie.’ He looked back at the space where Charlie had been standing. ‘…Charlie?’

Grey didn’t catch up with him until they reached the boot room door. ‘It’s nothing to do with Jo, you silly sod,’ he panted irritably. ‘Calm down. It’s yer bloody cows.’

‘Cows? What cows?’

‘Och, for God’s sake! You woke the whole bloody house last night. What bloody cows do you think?’

Just then, from almost directly beneath them, came an unmistakable, ground-shaking bellow. Charlie removed his cap and tugged with embarrassment at his dark hair. ‘Oh. Those cows,’ he said feebly. ‘Has anyone else heard, do you think?’

Grey chuckled. ‘The General and me have bin ignorin’ it all morning, shouting at each other to pass the marmalade, pretending there’s always cows bellyaching through the kitchen floor at us. I swear they’ve been making the fuckin’ windows rattle…I don’t know about Jo, though. I haven’t seen her.’ Grey looked as tactful as he could, but he, like Charlie, had known Jo in the olden days, when she was as priggish as all her fashionable friends. Ex-friends. She was much more laid-back recently, but there were times when she still reverted – especially when she was under pressure.

‘Oh. No. Don’t worry about Jo. She helped me,’ said Charlie. He looked at Grey and smiled slightly. ‘Jo’s fine. Has anyone else heard?’

‘I don’t think so, no. Mrs Webber’s not in today. I checked. Anyway she’s totally deaf. Have you noticed? She can’t hear a bloody word.’

‘What about Les?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Mr Tarr?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have any of the MAFF people used the lavatory?’

‘Fuck, I don’t know. What do you think? I’ve been standing guard here all mornin’? If they had they would have said something. So I suppose not.’

There came another earth-shattering groan from beneath them. ‘Aye,’ said Grey matter-of-factly. ‘It’s happenin’ about every couple a’ minutes. It’s pretty constant. Sometimes they just keep goin’ on. Did you not think about the soundproofing? What were you bloody doing down there all night?’

Neither of them had the faintest idea how many sleeping pills each cow needed but since Grey had only twenty left, they gave ten to each. They ground them into bowls of warm milk and Charlie took them down to the cellar while Grey and Jo – whom they’d found wandering the boot room with her notebook – kept guard and each other company at the back door.

The cows looked resentful, bewildered and slightly mad when Charlie found them. They were covered in sweat and a thick layer of ceiling plaster, which rained onto them every time their vast horns knocked against any of the walls. But they drank the milk without any trouble and Charlie stayed with them talking, reminiscing. They seemed to draw comfort from the familiar sound of his voice.

After a while Jo grew worried that the MAFF people would be missing him, and decided to go down and fetch him out. She found him sitting on one of the straw bales they had carried down together the previous night. He was leaning his long legs against the rump of one of the animals, holding his dark head in his hands, deep in thought. He looked so sad it stopped her in her tracks. She watched him for a moment, unsure how to break the silence. She felt like an intruder.

‘Which one was yours, Charlie?’

He looked up slowly, with a faint smile of welcome. ‘This one,’ he said, nodding at his feet. ‘Jasonette. At least, I wanted to call her Jason. But Georgie said…you know…Jason was a boy’s name…’ He fell silent.

‘Jasonette…’ Jo smiled. ‘You know you should probably get back out there, Charlie,’ she added gently. ‘They’ll be wondering where you are.’

‘I know.’ He didn’t move. ‘I just—it sounds ridiculous, but I don’t much want to be there when they kill…I should never have told them about the bloody goat.’

‘You had to. He’s been living with the other animals. If they were infected—’

‘Which they bloody well aren’t.’

‘Yes, but for all you knew he was infected, too.’

‘He could have been down here now…’

Jo went to sit on the bale beside him. She put an arm around him and they sat together for several minutes without speaking, watching as the animals’ eyelids grew heavy. Charlie was lost in his grieving, and Jo could do nothing for him except sit with him and wait. She had never known Charlie’s sister but he spoke about her so often she sometimes forgot they’d never actually met. Strong-minded, bold, friendly and incredibly hearty, Georgina Maxwell McDonald would have been the sort of girl Jo disliked on sight not so long ago. Now, living in a house with three men, and already far less troubled than she used to be by what passed for urban hip, Jo wished that she and Georgina could have been friends. Sometimes (which she kept to herself because she knew it was absurd) Jo even found herself missing her. At that moment, sitting beside Georgina’s mourning twin and feeling hopelessly inept, hopelessly impotent, Jo didn’t care how absurd it seemed. She missed her sister-in-law, or the sister-in-law she imagined, more than she had ever missed anyone, alive or dead.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she burst out. ‘It must be so awful for you. I wish I could…’ and to her dismay she started crying.

‘Hey,’ he said, laughing slightly and giving her shoulders a squeeze. ‘Hey…’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Oh, I know you are, Jo…thank you…’

And they fell silent again, neither noticed for how long. Suddenly Grey (whose natural impatience had been kept in admirable check until then) yanked them rudely back to the moment.

‘Jesus fuckin’ hell, I’m freezin’ my arse off out here! Are they not asleep yet? I can’t hear a soddin’ sound!’

The cows slept all that afternoon and all night and most of the following morning. By the time they started getting restless again it was lunchtime and most of the work was already done. But there were still half a dozen Ministry men hanging around and the pyre was yet to be lit. Charlie, Grey and Jo met up in the cellar to decide what they should do next. They had run out of sleeping pills and the cows had rejected the litre of vodka mixed with milk and golden syrup. Jo produced a small bottle of Rescue Remedy and was arguing about how to get the drops onto the animals’ tongues when Jasonette’s right horn sent the bottle flying.

‘Well, fuck that,’ said Grey. ‘That’s fucked that then, hasn’t it?’ He made the animals jump.

‘Will you stop shouting,’ snapped Charlie.

‘Charlie, calm down. He’s only trying to help.’

‘Well. He’s not succeeding. He’s scaring the girls.’

‘Och, sod off.’

‘Yeah, Charlie,’ said Jo. ‘Actually I second that.’

The humans were growing as tetchy as the animals, and the animals were growing tetchier and noisier with every minute. Nobody noticed the General until he was standing right beside them.

‘EXCUSE ME!’ They all jumped. ‘Sorry to butt in,’ he said dryly, ‘but we may have a small problem. The fellow from Trading Standards has just called. He’s been in touch with the BCMS, whatever that may be. Or the BC something else. Anyway he seems to think there may be a couple of beasts up here which we haven’t accounted for…I told him it was nonsense, of course, but I’m afraid he’s like a dog with a bone. He’s on his way over.’

When he arrived the four inhabitants of Fiddleford were standing in a line at the end of the drive waiting for him. The plan, in as much as they’d had time to form one, was first and foremost to keep him away from the house. It was decided that the General, as soon as things looked dangerous, would discombobulate by feigning some sort of health attack; Jo, who didn’t like long walks, would rush him into the house and then Charlie and Grey, with an air of repressed panic and polite martyrdom, would insist on pressing on with the business, leading him on a circuitous route to the furthest end of the estate. When the man was looking exhausted, blue with cold, faint with boredom and regret at ever having returned to Fiddleford, they would direct his attention to a mound, a little hillock, a snow drift, anything which looked appropriate, and tell him they thought (though they couldn’t be certain what with the snow, and after so much time had passed) it was the place where the cows had been buried eleven years earlier.

It was a ludicrous plan and it didn’t work. Obviously. Because the first thing the man wanted to do, after expressing wholly unfelt regret for disturbing them once again, was to go to the lavatory.

‘Lav’s blocked,’ said the General, squaring his shoulders, refusing to break the line. ‘Sorry about that. Pipes are frozen. Have to go behind a tree…I think—Charlie, didn’t you bring a trowel with you, just in case the fellow came up with something like this?’

‘Certainly did,’ said Charlie, producing one from his back pocket.

‘Oh goodness, not to worry.’ Mr Coleridge gazed longingly between their heads at the handsome building behind them. ‘Isn’t there, perhaps, a functioning toilet I could use upstairs?’

‘No toilets,’ said Charlie. ‘Sorry.’

‘Ah well, never mind. I shall just have to store it up…’ He rubbed his soft white hands together and shivered. ‘Perhaps a cup of tea then? I won’t take up too much of your time. It’s just a simple matter to clear up, as you know. I’m sure it’s nothing. A minor oversight.’

‘Tea’s run out,’ said Jo. ‘Anyway it’s a diuretic. It’ll make you worse. Why don’t you let Charlie and Grey quickly take you off to where the poor old cows are buried? That way we won’t be wasting your time – and goodness knows you must be busy. And then if you get caught short along the way—’

Coleridge frowned. He didn’t like to be outside for any longer than he needed to be and he had absolutely no intention of spending his afternoon trudging through the snow in search of illegally buried animals. ‘This probably isn’t the time to mention it,’ he said, ‘and of course I realise the Act doesn’t, strictly speaking, apply to me. But you should be aware that you are in fact legally obligated to provide workers with a functioning toilet as well, of course, as the usual facilities for making hot beverages. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act. 1974. I only mention it because I wonder how the others are managing. Or perhaps you have provided alternative arrangements…’

Jo opened her mouth to say something appropriately soothing, but the General didn’t give her a chance to speak. He had yet to learn what a powerfully efficient ally he had in his annoying new daughter-in-law, so at the mention of unfulfilled legal obligations, he panicked.

‘Aaarrrggh!’ he cried, clutching his heart melodramatically and staggering forwards.

Immediately and with surprising elegance, Mr Coleridge lunged to catch him.

‘Quickly!’ he shouted, gripping the General’s shoulders. ‘Don’t just stand there! Let’s get him inside the house!’

The General struggled ineffectively for escape, but the man from Trading Standards was not to be put off. Transferring the General into one tight arm, he used the other to loosen his patient’s tie.

‘Get your hands off me, you filthy bugger!’ shouted the General. ‘…Help! Someone!…Charlie! Get this bugger off me!’

Mr Coleridge’s own father-in-law had died from a heart attack right in front of him only two years earlier, and it had been horrible. Whatever the General chose to call him he would do everything he could not to repeat the experience. Amid loud protestations from all four of them, Mr Coleridge lifted the General off his feet and carried him back into the house. Short of knocking the man unconscious, which was more or less out of the question, there wasn’t much they could do to stop him.

‘He needs,’ puffed the lilac hero, after he’d gently laid the General onto the drawing-room sofa, ‘a cup of hot, sweet tea. Don’t you think?’

‘I’m perfectly bloody well all right,’ spluttered the General, puce with rage. ‘Bit of wind, that’s all. And if you touch me again, you officious little bugger, I’ll have you up for assault. Is that clear?’

Lilac Man nodded phlegmatically. ‘I tell you what, though,’ he looked playfully across to Jo, ‘I could use a nice cup of tea myself!’

Just then, from the back of the house, came the unmistakable rumble they had all been dreading. Charlie, Jo, Grey and the General froze. They looked across at Coleridge in trepidation. They waited…

‘Mrs—Maxwell McDonald?’ wheedled Coleridge doggedly. ‘Or failing that a coffee would be super.’

The rumble continued. Was he deaf?

‘Smiley,’ said Jo quickly. ‘The name is still Smiley. In fact. And of course you could have tea, if we had any. But we don’t.’ She paused. The cows were in full voice now, and in unison. It seemed to her that they were getting louder every second. ‘But why are you asking me as opposed to anyone else? We’re all as capable of making cups of tea as each other. Or we would be. If there was any tea. Which as I say there isn’t…Isn’t that right, Charlie?’

‘Mmm? Oh, absolutely. The thing about tea…’

Slowly, at last, the man from Trading Standards held up a finger and frowned. ‘Shhh,’ he said. ‘What’s…that…?’

Charlie clapped his hands together and stood up. ‘So,’ he shouted. ‘Who has sugar? Dad, I know you do. I know you do, Grey. You don’t, do you, Jo. And I don’t either. So the single remaining mystery, on the sugar front, is you, Mr Coleridge. Mr Coleridge, are you a sugar man?’

‘Shhh!’

‘Do you have sugar, Mr Coleridge?’

‘Shhh! Please. Be quiet—’ Still with one finger aloft, he headed into the hall. Charlie followed him.

‘I hate to be rude,’ said Charlie, padding unhappily after him, ‘but the back of the house really is out of bounds. I thought I explained. We can’t just have people trespassing…Mr Coleridge? Please! Where do you think you’re going?’

Mr Coleridge broke into a jog. As Jo had done two nights previously, he followed the by now thunderous noise through the back hall, past the boot room to the cellar door, where he paused and turned victoriously towards Charlie.

‘I have reason to believe—’ he said smugly.

‘What? Reason to believe what?’ snapped Charlie. The cows lowed again, more quietly this time, as if they were settling down at last, now that it was too late, and Charlie looked at him with hopeless desperation. ‘Mr Coleridge,’ he said quietly. ‘Please. Why are you doing this?’

‘For reasons of health and safety—’

‘But they’re in quarantine down there! They couldn’t be healthier or safer!’

‘We’re not talking about the health and safety of your animals, Mr Maxwell McDonald. We’re talking about the health and safety of the community at large. For which, at this moment in time, I am currently responsible.’

‘They’ve had no contact with any livestock for over twenty years, Mr Coleridge. And they’re in quarantine. Please…What harm can they do down there? Can’t we at least test them? Can’t we test them first? And if they’re carrying the disease—Which they aren’t…’

‘My job, as you know, is simply to make a note of all livestock on the premises, and that is what I have come here to do—’

‘But what harm are they doing? What harm can they possibly do?’

‘For reasons of health and safety—’

‘This has nothing to do with health and safety! You know as well as I do the cows are no threat to anyone down there.’

‘For reasons of health and safety,’ he said steadfastly, ‘I must ask you to open that door.’

‘Not me,’ said Charlie. ‘Open it yourself. But watch out. They’ve been known to attack strangers.’

Coleridge hesitated for a second. Highland cows are always gentle, and Charlie’s were the most gentle of all. But Coleridge didn’t know that. He knew only that they were hefty, and horned and very hairy…He considered retreating to fetch reinforcements, but then they might hide the cows somewhere else, somewhere he might never find them. He couldn’t risk it. Plus he had the law on his side, and a delicious, intoxicating sense of his own efficiency. Mr Coleridge garnered all his courage, thought briefly of whom he might sue should anything go wrong, took the few steps to the cellar door and opened it.

The animals had somehow managed to break out of their makeshift stable at the end of the corridor and were standing in the middle of the main room, surrounded by broken bottles and in a large pool of what at first glance looked like blood but was in fact some of the General’s best wine. They greeted Coleridge with a long, low wail of pitiful bewilderment.

Coleridge quickly summoned the vets, the slaughtermen and two of the pyre operators who could be spared, now that the fire was lit. They all looked on (or stood guard) while Charlie coaxed the animals up the cellar stairs again.

‘I am sorry,’ said Mr Coleridge as they passed him – and in his own humdrum way he meant it. ‘I’m sure you will understand, once the heat of the moment is passed, so to speak. I’m only doing my job. Please don’t run away with the impression that I’m enjoying this.’

Charlie shrugged. ‘At least if you were enjoying it,’ he said, ‘there would be some point to the exercise.’

He led them through the back yard, across the yard beyond, to the steep path which led to the bottom field. Grey, the General and Jo walked silently beside him, and, like a gaggle of official mourners, the law enforcers followed close behind. It was dark by then, and their slow journey was lit by the snow’s reflection of the flames from the distant pyre. As the three old friends shuffled along, the one leading the others to their execution, the animals kept up their mournful wails of protest, and Charlie chattered to them incessantly. They were his childhood companions, his link with the past. In their gentle, affectionate souls he felt that a small part of his mother and his sister were living yet, and he felt that his mother and sister were watching him on this long slow walk, and that with every step he took, he was forsaking them.

The cows seemed to have no sense of what was about to befall them until they came to the point, over the brow of a small upward slope, where for the first time the smell of roasting flesh hit their nostrils, and the full, loathsome scale of the burning pyre and the great pile of carcasses which lay illuminated at its base became clear for all to see.

After that the cows wouldn’t move. They were transfixed. Nothing Charlie, or Grey or Jo or the General, or the pyre builders, or the slaughtermen, or the vets said or did could make them take another step. After a while Mr Daniels, the burly senior slaughterman, made a point of looking at his watch. ‘We can’t stand about ’ere fur ever,’ he said. ‘We shall have to kill ’em as they stand.’

‘No,’ said Charlie.

‘But they ain’t movin’ nowhere, Mr Maxwell McDonald. We shall be ’ere all night.’

‘You’re not killing them here,’ said Charlie. ‘You’re not. They need…’ He cast around for something, anything, to delay the moment. ‘They need to be tranquillised first.’

‘With respect,’ said one of the vets, ‘you’re only prolonging the process. They don’t need to be transquillised. As you can see they’re quite calm. They need—’

‘Don’t tell me what they need,’ said Charlie. ‘Don’t fucking tell me what they need.’ He rested his head on Jasonette’s shoulders and all the humans fell silent, looking at him.

Mr Daniels nodded at his assistant and stepped forward, his bolt gun at the ready. The two of them walked around the side of the animals and came to a halt at their heads.

‘Sedate them,’ barked the General suddenly. ‘Why don’t you sedate them?’ Something in his voice made Jo look across at him. There were tears rolling down his face.

‘The longer we stand here,’ the senior vet tried his best to sound as patient as he wished he could feel, after so much killing, ‘the more alarmed they’re going to become. Go on, Mr Daniels. Please. Continue. Get it done.’

Mr Daniels held up his gun and Jasonette stood there, waiting, offering him her large furry temple. ‘We’ll be doin’ ’em a favour, you know,’ he muttered disapprovingly. ‘Old beasts like this. They’re better off dead.’

Charlie leapt at him. Before he had time to think, before anyone had time to stop him. Charlie had never in his adult life hit a single soul, but there was a crack as his fist struck the slaughterman’s jaw. Mr Daniels lurched backwards, blinked in surprise, and immediately lurched forwards again to wreak his revenge. And then Jo, until that point strangely anaesthetised by the horror, sprung suddenly to life. Head down and yelling, she lunged for Mr Daniels’ burly chest.

‘No!’ cried Charlie, trying to catch her before she got hurt. ‘No, Jo, don’t!’

Daniels looked from one to the other in confusion. It distracted him for a second, long enough for Grey, 6′4″, fearless and frightening without even trying to be, to step up between them.

‘Leave it,’ he snarled, glowering down at Daniels. ‘Leave it.’

They eyeballed each other. Daniels hesitated. ‘They’re only a couple of fuckin’ cows,’ he said, retreating with a surly shuffle. And with that, and with Charlie and Jo both restrained by the pyre builders, and the animals standing alone, helpless but not entirely oblivious, he took his gun, took aim and fired.

Bang.

Bang.

They were almost dead. The assistant slaughterer bent over the bodies and inserted his serrated rod into the bullet holes, twisted. With a final jerk, a final grunting, hiccupping moan, Caroline and Jasonette departed.

‘As a gesture of goodwill,’ Mr Coleridge said, ‘I shan’t be making a detailed report about the incidents surrounding this case. Suffice to say, Mr Maxwell McDonald, that all livestock on the Fiddleford estate has now been duly recorded.’

FIRE SIGNS

Since 24 December 1998 the older, text-only ‘fire exit’ signs should have been supplemented or replaced with pictogram signs. Fire safety signs complying with BS 5499 Part 1:1990 already contain a pictogram and do not need changing.

Safety signs in the catering industry. Health and Safety Executive Catering Information Sheet No 16

(ii) SECURE TIME-BOUND PROGRAMME OF IMPLEMENTATION
Autumn 2001

They had spent the Ministry’s compensation money and a lot more besides rebuilding the park’s crumbling walls, and they’d refurbished the two-hundred-year-old gates at the bottom of the front drive so they could be operated by remote control.

‘That’ll keep the buggers at bay,’ said the General, standing in front of them with his clicking machine, opening and closing them until they broke. (It took two weeks and £950 plus VAT to get them mended.) ‘They won’t be able to get at us now! Ha!’ Nobody was certain if he was referring to unscrupulous news reporters or to the whole human race. It didn’t matter. Either way he was quite right. They’d laid barbed wire on top of the twelve-foot walls. Unwelcome visitors to Fiddleford would need to work hard to find a way in.

A lot had changed since the foot and mouth purge and the estate, if you could still call it that, was less than a tenth the size it had been a year ago. Charlie, like so many other farmers, had realised that if they were to survive at all, there needed to be some radical rethinking, and as a result he’d done many things at Fiddleford which he’d always hoped to postpone until after his father died. He decided to restock only a fraction of the animals he had lost in the cull, and now all but sixty acres of the land was sold, and there were only two cottages remaining; one which Mrs Webber, the old housekeeper, had been promised for life, and the other, at the bottom of the drive, which was still awaiting the arrival of the General. Mrs Webber, sixty-four last summer, now only worked in the mornings, which meant Les Chedzoy was the single full-time employee left. He was useless at his job – at almost everything he did – and not even very pleasant, but he’d been born in a cottage on the estate and he was exceptionally stupid. Much too stupid, Charlie believed, to survive in a world beyond Fiddleford. He lived in the village now, in a small house which, on his retirement twenty-two years ago, the General had given to his father.

In all, after the sale and including the MAFF compensation cheque, Charlie and Jo had raised just enough money for the park walls and the gate, to build one extra bathroom and to do all the most urgent external repairs. Jo had needed to fight to be allowed to spend anything on the inside of the house. (Any highfaluting dreams of kitchen refurbishments and so on had been very quickly disbanded). But she had been to IKEA and bought ten new duvets and duvet covers, which had cheered everyone up, and finally, after Les claimed to have a fear of heights, lugged her increasingly bulbous belly onto a stepladder and repainted most of the upstairs rooms herself. And then that was it. All the money was gone.

The end result was a generally sturdy old house with a mended boiler (but no pilates teacher; no chapel-effect-chill-out-room; certainly no gym in the junk-filled stables), and a phenomenal, unimaginable amount of paperwork. On his solicitor’s advice Charlie was in the process of applying for a myriad of licences and government permits, all apparently necessary if Fiddleford was to operate legally in its new form.

And while they waited…and waited…for government officials to hand out all the licences they insist on inventing, Charlie, Grey and the General had been trying to persuade Jo that they should press ahead and open the refuge anyway. Jo was adamant that they should not. But she too began to lose confidence in the system when, after four and a half months of silence, two letters arrived from the local planning office on the same day. The first, rejecting outright an application, already withdrawn, in writing, twice, to convert the old stables into a gym. The second, saying it had ‘temporarily mislaid’ all documents relating to that same application, and requesting that the application be ‘resubmitted’ at once.

Fiddleford desperately needed an income. Jo, seven months pregnant now, understood that as well as any of them. She understood it even better the day Charlie returned from the local animal feed merchant with an empty trailer, having had every credit card rejected.

‘I think I can persuade them to extend the overdraft a little bit,’ he said drearily, sitting at the unrefurbished kitchen table, his head in his hands. ‘But after that…This is serious. We can’t just talk about it anymore. We’ve got to get some bloody guests.’

That afternoon he and Jo went on a final recce of the house to convince each other once and for all that it was ready. They didn’t choose to comment on the damp patches already beginning to show through Jo’s paintwork. Nor on how most of the landing rugs had worn, in patches, right through to the wood. Nor on the numerous paint splodges which had been left by Jo all over the floor and furniture, nor on the frayed and faded state of all the sofas, armchairs, curtains…nor on the fact that the windows in the bedrooms all rattled and leaked.

By the time they reached the end of the tour neither had managed to speak for several minutes. They paused on the upstairs landing, glanced nervously at each other.

‘It’s not quite what we’d envisaged, is it?’ she said at last.

‘It’s not perfect. Yet. But it will be!’

‘Yes. It will be. As soon as the money starts coming in.’

‘That’s just what I was going to say.’

‘Anyway I like it,’ she said. ‘I think it’s better than perfect. In its own way. It’s got character…’ They both smiled half-heartedly. ‘And if people don’t like it they can fuck off – I mean—No. I don’t mean that, obviously. I mean—’ Jo wasn’t sure what she meant. But the reality of sharing their home with a lot of grumbling, dissatisfied strangers suddenly seemed rather more real and a great deal less enticing than it had this morning. ‘…Anyway,’ she finished lamely, ‘they’re all going to be very happy here. I’m sure.’

‘Dead bloody right, they will be! And if they aren’t, I quite agree, they can just fuck right off again.’

‘It’s exactly what they would do, I suppose,’ she said glumly.

‘Right. And see if we care!’ They both started laughing. ‘Now then. I’ve got exactly…’ He emptied his trouser pockets. ‘…£11.87…Altogether…Oh. How much have you got?’

‘I’ve got £25. But it’s meant to last us until Friday. They won’t let us get any more out until the end of the week.’

‘Fine. Excellent. I think we should drive out to Lamsbury and buy ourselves a bottle of champagne.’

‘Charlie, we can’t.’

‘Of course we can. We’ve got to celebrate. With or without the bloody licences. Fiddleford Manor Retreat is now officially open for guests. So let’s hope they come soon or we shan’t be able to buy the greedy little sods any breakfast.’

It was Messy Monroe, though she didn’t realise it yet, who was destined to be Fiddleford’s first illegal guest. Which is strange because until a fortnight or so before she arrived most of the country had forgotten she ever existed. One of a stream of wide-eyed girls with nice bellybuttons who flit across our television screens, she’d had a stint presenting Top of the Pops about seven years ago. In December 1995 she was voted TV’s Hottest Totty by one of the men’s magazines and she spent the following eighteen months or so capitalising on it, endorsing all sorts of things from Breast Awareness Week to easi-grip toothbrushes. She was given a holiday show to present, which meant everyone got to see her in her bathers, and then five years ago, just when life couldn’t have been looking any better, she made the mistake of falling in love with a pretentious and impoverished novelist.

This one, who was small and softly spoken and who used unnecessarily long words to hide the fact that he was never actually saying anything, made her head spin with an irresistible mixture of lust and mental confusion. He could have chosen to ruin any number of beautiful women’s lives, and in fact he had (and continues to do so). That winter, the winter of 1996, he just happened to pick on Messy.

At the time Messy was a young twenty-five, and in a funny way slightly frightened by her easy success. She had emerged onto the scene three years earlier, from a life of dreary and impoverished oblivion, the daughter of a father she had never met, and a mother who worked in personnel at a shirt factory in Middlesbrough. She’d been surviving in an idea-free zone ever since, surrounded by the sort of spoilt and happening crew who find it embarrassing to use long words at all, let alone use them to say anything confusing, and she hadn’t realised it until the writer came along, but she was bored. She was wilting with boredom – and guilt and bewilderment. Because she was living, after all, the very life that a lot of women have been encouraged to fantasise about.

Enter the little writer, putting on an excellent show of being interested in her mind. They spent almost a year together, just long enough for him to destroy what there ever really was of her confidence. In a series of desperate bids to impress him, she applied to read a degree course in Philosophy (and was rejected). She resigned from the holiday show, refused to cooperate with a Hello! magazine TV Totty special, and sacked her agent. But the little novelist remained unimpressed. Nothing she did, or didn’t do, could escape his soft-voiced disdain. In September 1997, just six weeks before he was due to desert her, Messy produced the only decent thing that ever came out of the relationship, a daughter called Chloe.

She and Chloe went to live in a small cottage in Oxfordshire, where the British public very quickly forgot about her. She looked after her daughter, educated herself to a level where she would never again find herself intimidated by chippy little novelists, and ate. She was fifteen stone, lonely, broke, and Chloe had just turned three when she finally felt desperate enough to start rebuilding her life again.

Messy did the only thing she could think of doing under her restricted circumstances. While her daughter was away at nursery school she wrote a book about being fat, and about what she claimed to have identified as the ‘fat/thin hate divide’. And because she was quite clever and because the book, however silly, was often funny and very frank, and of course because she herself had once been so famous and thin, Messy’s book caught people’s attention. The Secret Revolution: Fatties Fight Back was given an undue amount of publicity, almost all of it negative.

Which brings us pretty much up to date. Fatties had been out for just one week and it was infuriating everyone. Thin people, obviously, because for the first time ever they were under open attack, and fat people because – well, for a myriad of reasons. After all the subject isn’t an easy one, and Messy should never have used the word FATTIES in the title if she wasn’t prepared for a rough ride.

Messy Monroe may be finding it hard, now she’s just like every other female, worrying ‘does my bum look big in this?’ read one of a hundred readers’ letters running in publications around the country that week, but maybe it’s just a problem she has, adjusting to not being a ‘star’ anymore. I’m ‘fat’, as she calls it, and believe me I KNOW I’m fabulous, and I’ve got lots of skinny friends who accept me as I am. So Messy, all I can say to you is, try looking out and seeing the love in this world next time, instead of harping on about fat versus thin!!!

Messy, having hidden away for four years, was now suddenly giving interviews galore, and she hated it. She hated being on show, but the wretched Fatty theme had spiralled into the unofficial Light Relief Topic of the Week, and it was out of her control – or so she felt. The whole thing culminated in an invitation to appear alongside three Very Important Men on the panel of Question Time.

In fact she acquitted herself quite well at first. She came up with something suitably anodyne when they asked her about the effect of September 11th on other terrorist groups, and again when they asked her (as if she knew) about the likelihood of biological warfare on Britain. It was only towards the end, when the questions turned from world war to people’s weight, that she ran into trouble.

‘I for one am very slender,’ announced a sensible-looking woman about three rows from the front, ‘but I have many, many dear friends who are on the larger side—’

‘They’re fat,’ snapped Messy. ‘If you mean they’re fat, then for Heaven’s sake say so.’

‘Rubbish!’ somebody shouted back. Messy rolled her eyes impatiently.

‘Doesn’t the panel think,’ the very slender woman continued, ‘that we have enough hate divisions in this world already, without people like Messy Monroe falsely inventing any more?’

The entire audience, fat and thin, broke into hearty applause. They were angry and frightened, after so long discussing a possible World War Three, and they needed to vent their frustration on an easy target. Messy, with all the adrenaline that was pumping through her, was only fuzzily aware of the audience mood. She was more acutely aware of her own terror, and of the possibility that at any moment she could simply lose her nerve. So she over-compensated and answered the question without any of the conciliatory ramble which served her more experienced panellists so well: ‘Firstly, and most obviously,’ she said, much too aggressively, ‘these divisions are not “invented”. You and your friends may not want to acknowledge them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. My fat friends and I could refuse to acknowledge the WTC attacks. A fat lot of use that would be!’ She paused. It was meant to be a joke. Not an especially funny one, obviously, but not necessarily deserving of the cruel ‘Ver-y Funn-y’ yelled out from the back of the auditorium, which made everyone laugh. She pressed on. ‘You can’t heal a rift—You can’t heal any sort of rift without first identifying the causes. And that’s what my book is doing. Trying to point out that fat and thin people, and especially women, have a deep and very understandable mistrust of one another—’

‘RUBBISH!’ somebody shouted again.

Messy ignored it, and the burst of applause which followed. ‘Which is why,’ she continued, ‘there has been such a strong reaction to my use of the word FATTIES in the title. If people weren’t so jittery about us they wouldn’t take such exception to the word that describes us. Obviously. It’s the same reason we can’t say “coloured” or “negro” or “spastic” or “dwarf”…’

She hesitated, waiting for the jeers to die down. ‘And to illustrate that—’ she said, and faltered. ‘…To illustrate that,’ she began again. Messy had been facing hostility on radio phone-in shows all week, but this was different. Looking around at the angry faces in front of her, and the smug unhelpful expressions of her Very Important fellow guests, she realised she had forgotten what she was going to say. Completely. She tried another tack: ‘For example, I would like to know how many fatties here tonight…How many fatties in the audience—’ What was she meant to say next? She had no idea. ‘How many fatties…’ She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember any words at all. All she could do was repeat herself. And every time she repeated herself, she repeated the word ‘fatty’, and every time she said ‘fatty’ the audience grew more enraged.

It reached a point where one of her Very Important fellow panellists decided to step in.

The eternally marvellous Maurice Morrison, twice married and divorced and also, as it happened, a furtive (but busy) preferrer of teenage boys; multi-millionaire entrepreneur, ex-Marlborough pupil and the government’s brand new Minister for Kindness; slim, attractive, concerned, with a full head of salty blond hair and an Armani-clad well-exercised torso, held up his suntanned, elegantly masculine hand and called calmly for hush.

‘OK, look, come on, guys,’ he said, ‘I think we should appreciate that Messy is entitled to her opinion, and since she’s come on the show to tell us about it, we should at least have the courtesy to listen, yeah? Even if we don’t agree. Becuz, basically—For me, that’s one of the beautiful things about this country. It’s one of the things we’re fighting for right now, over in Kabul! Becuz – here in Britain, OK – we can stand up and say “Listen, guys. You may not agree with me, but this is actually an issue I believe in!”’

By God, it brought the house down.

Messy glowered at him as he peeped across, smiling with encouragement and warmth and a lovely little smattering of diffidence. She didn’t need Maurice Morrison – the last thing she needed was patronising, good-looking Maurice Morrison trawling for admirers off the back of her humiliation. She was furious. Gradually the cheers faded to silence and everyone waited to hear how she would respond.

She could have said so many things. If she’d been even an eighth as efficient at crowd control as Mr Morrison was, she could have turned the whole situation to her advantage. But she wasn’t. She had barely emerged from four years in hiding, she was still battered by a broken heart and the cruel transformation in her looks and general fortune, and the lights were beaming down on her and making her very hot. The whole world, or so it felt, was looking on. She said: ‘Get lost, you phony little creep.’

And that was the end of Messy. Really, she was lucky she wasn’t lynched.

The performance boosted her book sales, but it also set her up as a national target for mockery and general abuse. Over the next two days a lot of inane and cruel things were written about her. One paper found a nutritionist to express revulsion at a picture of sweet, chubby little Chloe sucking on a lollipop. Another paper dedicated a whole page to what they imagined Messy Monroe needed to eat each day in order to maintain her great bulk. Several papers ran Before and After photographs, alongside pseudo serious articles about the stresses of early fame/sex appeal/faded stardom/single motherhood…It was pretty standard stuff, the usual newspaper fodder. It certainly wasn’t an enormous story, what with everything else that was going on.

But it was big enough to catch the eyes of the tabloid scanners at Fiddleford Manor.

‘There’s a bloody great cow here,’ said Grey McShane, slowly lifting his large feet off the kitchen table and laying his paper down in front of him, ‘who lost her rag on the telly a couple o’ nights ago. Have you seen the size of her?’

‘Yes, I noticed her,’ mumbled the General, without looking up. Dressed smartly, as always, in a tweed jacket and old regiment tie, he was sitting in his preferred position for this time in the mid-morning, bolt upright in the worn leather armchair beside the Aga, and surrounded by a sea of downmarket newspapers and magazines. ‘I thought she was rather comely.’

‘No!’ Grey examined the photograph more closely, this time trying to overlook her most obvious weakness. And it was true, she had beautiful long dark shiny hair…and an attractive mouth which curled up slightly at the edges…and round, intelligent, bright blue eyes… ‘But she’s a bloody whale!’

‘Modern girls are too thin, McShane. I thought we’d agreed on that.’

‘Well I know…But there’s a limit.’

Just then Jo came in, waddling efficiently as she tended to these days, now that she was tense and working again, with her large but very neat seven-and-a-half-month bump in front of her and her notorious contacts book resting open in her hands. ‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘Are you discussing Messy Monroe? That’s just who I wanted to talk about.’

‘Aye. Apparently she really hates thin people.’

‘She actually did a couple of P.A.s for us a few years ago. Ha! When she was thin herself. And she was great. Very professional…Because there was that phase when an M.M. P.A. pretty much guaranteed a show in the red tops, wasn’t there? She could charge whatever she liked…Do you remember?’ Grey and the General looked at each other in weary incomprehension, as they often did when Jo started talking shop. ‘Anyway it doesn’t matter,’ she continued blithely. ‘The point is somehow or other I’ve got her number. And that’s what counts. I think we should invite her to come down.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ bellowed Grey. ‘Have you seen the size of her? She won’t fit through the front door!’

‘Well. Short of inviting Osama Bin Laden to stay with us—’

‘Don’t be disgusting,’ snapped the General.

‘…she’s about the only person left anybody can be bothered to hate anymore.’

‘I don’t hate her,’ said the General mildly. ‘As a matter of fact I think she looks delightful…In a largish sort of way.’

‘Well, good. Because I’m about to persuade her to come and see us. She’s going to be our first celebrity refugee. What do you think about that?’

Grey sat back with amusement to observe the General’s reaction to this new autocratic management style. He was amazed, actually, that Jo had managed to prevent herself from adopting it from the beginning. The house had been unofficially ready to receive people for a fortnight now and so far the ‘Guest Selection Board Meetings’, as Jo, back in full professional mode, now insisted on calling the Fiddleford Four’s rather goofy and extremely argumentative confabs, had not been a great success. There had been five meetings altogether, each one angrily and prematurely disbanded because three of the four board members could never agree. On anything. At the last meeting even Charlie, the most tolerant of men, had walked out before the end.

‘What’s that?’ said the General stiffly. ‘The adorable little fat lady? Invited here? Don’t you think we should have some sort of conference about this before you take the law into your own hands?’

Grey McShane chuckled.

‘The meetings,’ said Jo, using her most reasonable voice (also unfortunately the one most guaranteed to infuriate her father-in-law) ‘don’t seem to be getting us anywhere. And the fact is – the fact is – they’re not going to increase our overdraft again. Unless we do something pretty soon, we are seriously going to have to start selling pieces of furniture—’

‘I’m aware of that,’ interrupted the General haughtily and then, uncertain how to continue the argument in the face of such appalling news, repeated himself, before turning lamely towards Grey for help.

Grey shrugged. ‘She’s right, you know. These meetings are a bloody waste o’ time.’

‘Fine,’ he snapped. ‘Fine. Have it your own way. Of course I know you will anyway. Don’t consult me. After all it’s no longer my house…’

‘Och, belt up,’ said Grey good-naturedly. The General pretended not to hear. He picked up his newspaper, opened it at a random page, and managed, apparently, to be instantly engrossed.

Jo and her father-in-law’s relationship had not grown any easier over the past months, in spite of their shared trauma at the hands of the government slaughtermen, their pleasure at the coming baby, and even their shared love of Charlie. Jo had employed all her best, most charming tactics to try to win him round but to no avail. She and the General had argued the very first time they met, and it seemed they were incapable of doing anything else.

Jo tended to lay undue emphasis on the retired General’s utterly irrelevant political opinions (which were always unfashionable and occasionally, it has to be said, quite unpleasant). She took offence to almost every opinion he had. The General simply took offence to Jo. Which was unfair because she had enormous warmth and kindness, and occasionally, when her fashionable opinions allowed it, and she was feeling brave enough, she was even capable of being quite funny. But she was too modern, too bossy, too equal, too clever. Altogether too many things that a fading General would be bound to find alarming.

And now she was living in his house, or rather he was living in hers. She was imposing ridiculous new telephone systems on him, and inviting people he didn’t know to come and stay. Because although the dream of opening a refuge had at least partly been his, the reality of having paying strangers in the house was of course quite different. More so for him than for any of them. And if sharing his old home with a kind but bossy daughter-in-law was difficult, then sharing it with incomprehensible new telephone ‘units’ and a lot of ghastly, self-pitying ‘celebrities’ was likely to be more than even the most open-minded of Generals, could be expected to stand.

Jo was by no means oblivious to these complications and not, in spite of his hostility, completely unsympathetic to them either. But it didn’t alter the fact that she intended to get her way. She hesitated, feeling unsure exactly how to proceed. ‘So that’s agreed then, is it?’ she said, to the back of his newspaper. He ignored her. ‘Um…General? [He had never asked her to call him James]…You quite like the idea of having Messy down here? To stay?…I mean she’s only small fry, I know—’

‘Small?’ bellowed Grey.

‘—but it’s a start, isn’t it? I don’t think we should try to charge her too much, do you? We should probably see what sort of a deal we can drum up with one of the mags. Try to squeeze them for a bit of cash, don’t you think? While we cut our teeth, sort of thing.’ She knew they weren’t really listening, and they knew that she was only pretending to consult them. They didn’t bother to reply. ‘Anyway,’ she said, sounding determinedly upbeat. ‘Ha! Here I am, counting my chickens. She may not even want to come!’ And with that Jo hurried out of the room.

‘Officious little minx,’ mumbled the General quickly, while she was still in earshot.

‘Aye,’ muttered Grey. ‘But she’ll be the saving of this place. Saving of all of us I should think. We’re bloody lucky she puts up with having us around.’

Once again, the General didn’t feel tempted to respond.

Messy Monroe had given up answering the telephone by the time Jo summoned the courage to put in her first call. With all the hacks and their editors, and the PR people and the publishers, she and Chloe had lived the last couple of days to a backdrop of answer machine babble. It just so happened that while Jo (having heard nothing and feeling increasingly desperate) was leaving her seventh unanswered message in two hours on Messy’s machine, Messy was alone in the room, and her brain was lying idle. Which meant the odd snippet of welcome information kept seeping through.

‘…keep calling you and I know what a tremendous amount of stress you must be under…worked with a lot of people in your position…even at the rough end of it myself recently…beautiful media-free sanctuary…isolated old manor house…lovely walks…Chloe to play…very very comfortable and guaranteed reporter-free…’

As Jo spoke there was another knock on Messy’s front door. Another creepy reporter, she assumed, carrying a bunch of flowers and pretending to be her friend. (She was wrong in fact. The creepy flowers were from Jo.) Anyway it was the last straw. She lunged for the telephone.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello!’ Jo couldn’t disguise her relief. She started laughing. Messy had taken her call. She would come and stay. She would bring money with her. Everything was going to be OK. ‘Goodness! Ha ha. Goodness! Messy! Oh! Are you there?’

‘What? Of course I am!’

‘Of course you are. Of course you are.’ Jo took a deep breath. ‘No, I meant to say are you OK?’

‘What? I have to tell you, you probably think I’m loaded, but I spent it all. I spent everything. That’s the main reason I wrote the book. So you’re not going to be interested in me anyway.’

Which took Jo by surprise. She had imagined someone much fiercer, but Messy sounded terrified. Poor thing. The realisation gave Jo’s confidence a welcome boost, and within seconds the slick PR-girl spiel was slipping off her tongue as if she’d never taken a break from using it.

Messy’s financial status didn’t matter, Jo said. She explained – and it was one of the few things the Fiddleford Four had all agreed on – that guests’ rates depended on their ability to pay, and on the income she could draw (and split down the middle) from any exclusive interview deals she arranged. ‘I’ve been a senior partner [only a minor exaggeration] in one of the top public relations firms in London for over ten years. In fact we’ve met. We actually worked together on a couple of P.A.s a few years ago…But perhaps you don’t remember.’

‘Oh really?’ said Messy, trying politely to muster some enthusiasm but still sounding miserable, as she always did when people reminded her of her past. ‘Which ones?’

‘Anyway we can talk about that when you get down here,’ said Jo, realising it wasn’t helping. ‘Messy, I expect the last thing you want to think about right now is giving any more interviews—’

‘Ha! You’re right there.’

‘Exactly. And you see the point of your staying here would be twofold. Partly, just to get a break from the madness, so to speak…’

Messy laughed grudgingly. She knew she was being manipulated, possibly even slightly patronised. But for once she didn’t care. She was so tired of making decisions for herself. They were always the wrong ones. And Jo seemed to know exactly what to say and do. She was making Messy feel better than she had in days.

‘—And partly so I can help you turn this publicity around; launch what I always call a damage-limitation counterattack.’ Messy laughed again. ‘Any interviews you do decide to give would be very, very carefully handled. I can negotiate the deal, ensure we have copy approval, sit in on the interview. And so on. I hate to blow my own trumpet, Messy, but I do have a great deal of experience in this area.’

‘I bloody well hope you do. So who else have you had to stay down there?’

‘One of the most essential components of this sanctuary,’ said Jo (she had prepared this one earlier), ‘is secrecy. Obviously…’

‘Yes. I suppose so.’

‘So though there’s nothing I’d love to do more than to reel off a long list of names, I can’t. I just can’t. Basically, Messy, all I can say is – if you’re not happy with the service we provide then don’t pay us! Simple as that! This operation has got to work on trust. That’s very important. We’ve got to trust you and you’ve got to trust us…’

‘Hm…’ said Messy, pretending she wasn’t already convinced.

‘We can send a car to come and pick you up right away. We could be there in three or four hours…’

‘Hm…’

‘And we’ve just bought a donkey, which might entertain Chloe.’

The car from Fiddleford arrived at Messy’s door seven and a half hours later. Les, the farm hand, had forgotten to take a map and, for reasons known only to himself, had rejected the offer of Charlie and Jo’s more comfortable car and taken instead the old Land Rover, which was filthy and could never go above forty miles an hour. He’d also, poor fellow, managed to get lost four times on the same stretch of motorway before finally taking the right exit.

Messy gabbled jovially as she and Chloe clambered into the Land Rover, fighting their way between horses’ head collars, bits of bind-a-twine, stray potatoes gone to seed, and piles of empty paper sacks. ‘I hope,’ she said, ‘that the state of this car isn’t any sort of indicator of what’s to come!’ The truth was, after such a long wait, she was relieved to see any car at all. ‘You know I hadn’t even taken a number for Fiddlefrom. Fiddleforth. I was beginning to wonder if the whole conversation hadn’t been a dream!’

Les looked at her morosely for a while, only faintly noticing that she had been talking, and certainly not expecting to make a response. Suddenly his face lit up. ‘Well I never!’ he said. ‘But you’re that fat lady off of the TELLY!’

‘Of course I am. Who did you think I was?’

‘I SAW YOU ON TELLY!’

‘Did you watch Question Time?’

‘A few nights back, it was. I don’t know why. A bit like one o’ them quizzie things.’

She’d been without any adult company, brooding solidly, ever since the BBC car had dropped her back at the cottage, and now here was a friendly face. Well, a face. It was all she needed. She couldn’t stop herself. ‘Didn’t you think Morrison was a creep? Or have I lost perspective on this? I mean – honestly, Les. Tell me honestly. Was I being paranoid? Was he exploiting my situation?…I felt so incredibly patronised…’

Les gazed at her long and hard before slowly turning away to start the engine. In the four hours it took to return to Fiddleford he didn’t speak another word. Chloe fell asleep.

It was eleven o’clock by the time they arrived.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Jo nervously, rushing out of the house to greet her. ‘You must be exhausted. Les wasn’t – Les, why didn’t you call? You left the map behind. We’ve been worried to death.’

‘I don’t like maps.’

‘For Heaven’s sake!’ Until she came to Fiddleford Jo hadn’t really believed such stupid people actually existed. She sighed with the usual mixture of boredom and exasperation that overcame her when dealing with Les’s ‘working’ methods. ‘Les, you can’t not like maps. There’s nothing not to like about them.’ She sighed again, and was preparing (professional as always) to deliver an easy-to-understand discourse on the subject, when Grey, Charlie and the General came wandering out to join them. ‘Oh look, here are the others,’ she said with relief. ‘This is Grey…Grey, this is Messy. And Chloe…Who’s actually asleep, poor little mite…’

Grey shook Messy’s free hand without a great deal of interest but then seemed to reconsider, and bent down to scrutinise her more closely. ‘Oh!’ he said, pleasantly surprised. ‘You look much better than you do in the pictures.’

‘Depends which pictures,’ Messy muttered grumpily, but she blushed. It was the nearest thing she’d had to a compliment for a long time. ‘They tend to choose the ugly ones.’ She looked up at him with a smile. ‘You’re not so bad-looking yourself.’

‘Aye,’ he said, relinquishing her hand, gazing at her curiously. ‘It’s been said.’

‘And, er – Messy, this is my husband, Charlie.’

‘Hello, Messy. Welcome to Fiddleford,’ said Charlie. ‘You’re our first guest, as I expect Jo explained. So I hope you won’t be too disappointed if things don’t run perfectly straight away—’

‘And this,’ said Jo quickly, ‘is my father-in-law, General Maxwell McDonald.’

‘Crikey,’ said Messy doubtfully.

The General stepped smartly forward, determined to present a good face, however he might have been feeling. ‘But most people just call me General,’ he said, bowing slightly to avoid eye contact. ‘Well come in, come in, for Heaven’s sake. Somebody get the child to bed and then perhaps Miss Monroe would like a drink?’

They walked together into the hall. Messy looked up at the large gilt chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and then at the magnificent mahogany staircase sweeping up to the landing thirty-five feet above her head.

‘Crikey,’ she said again.

Weighed down by the child and still enormous, even in these vast surroundings, Messy looked very ill at ease standing there. It reminded Jo of the first time she came to Fiddleford, when in spite of all her kneejerk disapproval (of inherited wealth and environmentally unsound houses) this hall had still intimidated her. ‘I know it’s large,’ she whispered apologetically, ‘but we don’t actually heat the rooms we don’t use. And of course,’ (she lied, entirely unnecessarily. But she was nervous) ‘we grow all our own vegetables.’

Messy, who always imagined people were patronising her, buried her face in her daughter’s cheek and pretended not to hear.

‘Chloe’s in the smaller room, next door to you,’ said Charlie as they climbed the stairs together. ‘And there’s a bathroom up at the end. On the left. I’m sorry,’ he turned back to look at her, ‘Jo says it’s absolutely unheard of not to have adjoining bathrooms when you go to hotels these days, but then Fiddleford isn’t exactly a hotel. So I hope you can forgive us.’

‘I must admit,’ said Messy, puffing slightly, not quite keeping up, ‘it’s beautiful. Of course. But it isn’t exactly what I expected.’

‘Oh dear.’ He paused in front of her bedroom door, put down the three large suitcases he had been carrying. ‘What exactly has Jo been telling you?’

Months ago, before they were married, his and Jo’s relationship had nearly ended because of her unnerving inability to distinguish fact from fiction. Charlie knew (to his cost) that when she was working, and she set her sights on something, she was capable of telling any number of lies in order to bring it about. He had watched her in amazement. She lied so automatically sometimes, she didn’t even seem to notice she was doing it.

‘She told me it was a refuge for celebrities.’

‘Oh!’ He sounded relieved. ‘Well it is. Or it will be. But not just for celebrities. Obviously. That would be very unfair. It’s for anyone who’s being attacked, really. For anyone who doesn’t stand a chance to stick up for themselves because whatever they try to do or say it gets drowned out by a sort of mass jeering, or sneering, or general bullying. If that makes any sense. Which I’m sure it does to you, Messy. After your last week.’

‘You don’t need to feel sorry for me,’ she said curtly.

‘No, no. Of course not.’

‘Am I the only guest you’re feeling sorry for at the moment? Or is the tall guy, Grey—’

‘Grey? Oh no. Grey lives here.’

‘He looks very familiar. What’s his second name?’

‘McShane. Grey McShane. You may remember—’

‘The sex offender?’

‘Well, he isn’t actually—’

‘You’ve asked me and Chloe to stay here with a sex offender in the house?’

‘You shouldn’t—’ Charlie made an effort to smile – ‘believe everything you read in the press.’

‘He was convicted. I remember reading about it. He went to prison.’

Charlie shrugged. ‘He has a bad reputation. But that’s the whole point of this place. Who did you think you were going to find here?’ He opened her bedroom door, switched on the light and quickly slid the suitcases inside. He didn’t want to have this conversation. Grey was innocent. If she wanted any more details, she would have to prise them from him – and good luck to her. Because Grey didn’t much like talking about it either. ‘We’ll be up for another half an hour or so, if you want to come down and have a drink,’ he said, backing towards the stairs. ‘You’ll meet Grey. And perhaps you can decide for yourself.’

When she first walked into the room, still carrying her daughter, she was so pleasantly overwhelmed – by the size, the general impression of worn elegance and welcoming, cosy grandeur – she let out an involuntary gasp.

Against the far corner, almost reaching the ceiling and upholstered in the same faded pink flowers as the walls, was a four-poster bed so high off the ground it came with its own set of steps. Jo had put a large bunch of pink and white roses on the table beside the bed, and the room smelled delicious, she noticed: of smoky, polished wood and fresh flowers. There were thick, pale blue velvet curtains already drawn across the two large windows, and to the left of the windows, fifteen or twenty feet from the end of the bed, was an armchair with a little footstool, and in front of the footstool, lit in her honour, a flickering fire crackling in the grate. It was lovely. Like a film set. She didn’t notice the paint splodges, or the damp patch above the bed. It was the loveliest room she had ever seen.

The next-door room, where Chloe was meant to be sleeping, was smaller and more homely than hers, with a two-poster instead of a four, and a large old-fashioned doll’s house in the window bay. ‘Hey-ho, Chloe,’ Messy whispered. ‘It’s not so bad here, is it?’…The little girl slept on. But she would be beside herself when she woke up. She would never want to leave.

After putting the child to bed, changing her own clothes, unpacking their suitcases and finally running out of excuses to delay the moment any longer, Messy braced herself and headed downstairs.

She found everyone in the library, listening with varying degrees of inattention while Jo illustrated some point by reading out loud from a book about natural childbirth. She was sitting in the lotus position, looking flexible, Messy noticed, and exceptionally luminous.

‘“Pregnancy,”’ Jo read, ‘“can be a magical time. Many women feel sensuous, harmonious and naturally creative…These are—” Listen to this, OK, everyone. “These are all primitive expressions of fertility…” That’s what I’m saying, of course. Women are by necessity more in touch with their fundamental life rhythms. Because we have to be. There simply isn’t any choice…’

The General, scowling over a copy of Heat magazine, sat in his usual upright position but with a finger stuck into each ear. Grey McShane lay flat out on a sofa with his eyes closed and a tumbler of gin balanced on his chest. He was smirking. And Charlie was leaning on the mantelpiece, gazing forlornly into the fire.

‘Sounds fantastic,’ he said vaguely, ‘I think you’re probably right. But Jo, come on, be fair. This isn’t exactly Dad’s favourite subject. Or Grey’s, I don’t suppose. Perhaps we could—’

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Jo indignantly. ‘I really don’t see why pregnancy has to be such a taboo subject.’

‘Excuse me,’ murmured Grey, still with his eyes closed, ‘but taboo is not the fuckin’ word. You’ve read that soddin’ book to us every night for a week. It’s been givin’ me nightmares.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t be so squeamish.’

‘Och, bollocks!’ said Grey. ‘I don’t read you books about what it feels like to have a crap—’

‘That is not remotely the same thing—’

Messy, who for the last minute had been standing awkwardly in the doorway wondering how to announce herself, suddenly burst out laughing.

‘Ah, there you are,’ said Jo, clambering to her feet. ‘At last! Come on in. Have you got everything you need? Is the room comfortable?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Messy. ‘It’s the prettiest room I’ve ever stayed in. Everything’s lovely.’

‘Is that correct?’ She heard Grey chuckling complacently. ‘That’s not what you were sayin’ to Charlie, so I hear.’

‘Oh.’ She looked embarrassed.

‘Aye…Is it for yourself or the wee daughter that you’re worryin’, Messy?’

‘No. Neither,’ she said, blushing furiously. ‘I wasn’t thinking anything of the kind. Don’t be disgusting. Can I have a drink?’

‘’Cause, darlin’, you really needn’t worry on either account.’

‘You can be as rude as you like,’ she snapped, ‘but the fact is you’re a convicted sex offender and I had no idea when I agreed to come here—’ She nodded at the vast space where Grey was lounging, watching her insouciantly through his long dark lashes. ‘I had no idea we’d be staying here…’ He smiled at her, an incredibly intimate smile, full of mischief and good humour. She lost her thread. For such a famously evil pervert, she thought, he was amazingly, really amazingly attractive. ‘…With a convicted sex offender,’ she finished weakly.

‘Ha!’ said Grey. ‘And I had no idea that anyone could be so bloody fat!’ He laughed, a low rumble at his own wit, and waited lazily for Jo to step in and smooth things over.

But she didn’t. She’d been doing her breathing exercises when Charlie reported Messy’s concern about Grey’s difficult history, and now she was thunderstruck. All this preparation, all the money they had spent, all the telephone calls, the clever little plans…and this most obvious of problems had never even occurred to her. Grey McShane, however innocent, was going to frighten away all her guests. ‘Grey’s a nice man, Messy,’ she said half-heartedly. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the press.’

‘That’s what I told her,’ said Charlie.

‘After all this is meant to be a sanctuary for—’

‘The universally condemned.’ Grey lingered enjoyably on the words.

‘—The victims of media abuse,’ corrected Jo. ‘You’re going to get all sorts. You’re hardly likely to be meeting Snow White. And I think, you know, that we all have to respect that. As I said to you on the phone, this thing isn’t going to work if we can’t trust each other. We’ve invited you into our home with a lot of trust, OK? And I think it’s only fair for you to trust us in return…’

The General groaned quietly to himself.

‘Och, Messy. Relax, for Christ’s sake!’ said Grey. ‘Do you think these fine people would allow me near this place if I was as wicked as people say I am? Have a drink! Sit that great big fat arse o’ yours on the chair over there, if it’ll take the weight. And if it’s not collapsed in a minute or two I’ll reward you wi’ a nice big glass of gin.’

‘Ha ha ha!’ spluttered the General. ‘I mean as a matter of fact,’ he added hurriedly, to camouflage the snort of naughty amusement with which he had greeted Grey’s rude and feeble joke, ‘you really look quite – petite – in the flesh.’

‘Absolutely,’ Jo lied blatantly. Charlie cleared his throat. ‘Well, maybe not petite, but then you’re so lovely and tall. Anyway! Ha!’ She patted her bump. ‘I mean who am I to talk!’

Messy wavered. They looked so relaxed by the soft light of the fire. And she’d been so lonely for so very long. ‘I’ll have some whisky then,’ she said with a wan smile. She had no idea where she was, and she was already feeling slightly confused as to why she had ever agreed to come. But there was something about the place, about this peculiar mismatch of people, which made her feel less lonely and more relaxed than she had for a long time.

‘Good on you,’ said Grey. ‘And good luck to you, my chubby darlin’. By tomorrow morning you’ll never want to leave our little Eden ever again.’

ACCIDENT REDUCTION

There are large numbers of non-fatal accidents in and around gardens. These involve mainly those under 65, and 60% of the victims are men. The question of falls in the context of the garden will be difficult to reduce. It will be difficult to reduce cuts and abrasions except where specific activities are involved. The use of protective gloves while gardening may help.

From GARDEN SAFETY, Home Safety Network, UK Department of Trade and Industry’s website on home safety

(iii) PRIORITISE END-PRODUCT-RELATED GOALS

The following morning Charlie had yet another early meeting with his solicitor, so he left before anyone else was up. Afterwards he was ambling down Lamsbury High Street back towards his car, worrying about this and that. Worrying mostly, on this occasion, about the council’s announcement that it needed to inspect the Fiddleford water supply (from a private spring. They might choose to declare it illegal), when he was startled by the nearby sound of shattering glass. He looked up to see the greengrocer’s shop window had been smashed and the obvious culprit – a feeble-looking red-headed boy barely in his teens – belting away from the scene of the crime, hurtling blindly along the pavement towards him. Instinctively Charlie stretched out an arm and grabbed him.

‘Fuck you. Leave me a-fuckin’-lone,’ shouted the boy, in a rich West Country accent. He was twisting helplessly. ‘Bloody…fucker! I’ll fuckin’—’

It soon became clear that everybody in Lamsbury knew the boy by name. A crowd very quickly gathered to gloat at his captivity – something, Charlie got the impression, they had been wanting for a long time.

He was standing there holding the boy, wondering what to do next and actually feeling slightly uncomfortable about his role in the proceedings, when a middle-aged man – one of many already mustered around the action

– dashed right through the crowd and skidded to a halt in front of them. ‘Now we’ve got you,’ the man panted happily. ‘And no law here neither.’ At which, and to Charlie’s astonishment, he delivered a fast, efficient thump to the middle of the boy’s face.

The crowd gave a spontaneous cheer.

‘Hey!’ said Charlie. ‘He’s half your size. What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘He’s a pain in our backsides and he knows it. Don’t you, Colin Fairwell?’

Next thing Charlie knew, a man from the vandalised greengrocer’s shop had stepped forward to thump the boy again, and once again Lamsbury High Street was voicing its approval.

‘Do that one more time,’ said Charlie, ‘and I’m letting him go.’

‘Anyway I don’t fuckin’ care,’ said Colin Fairwell, smiling defiantly from behind a large bubble of blood. ‘I don’t fuckin’ care about none of you.’ The bubble popped, leaving a scarlet spray across his cheeks and forehead.

‘You’re not allowed down this street, you little bugger. Next time we see you down here, we’re going to belt you ’til there’s not a breath in your puny, pathetic little body, do you hear?’ The man from the greengrocer’s thumped him yet again.

‘Oh no,’ said Charlie sadly, reluctantly doing as he’d promised and letting the boy go. ‘Really. You can’t do that.’

In a flash, before anyone had even thought of recapturing him, the boy had ducked under Charlie’s arm and run for it. They could all hear him laughing as he disappeared around the corner of Market Street, but nobody bothered to go after him. They knew from experience they wouldn’t catch him. Colin Fairwell looked pale and feeble, but he ran very fast.

‘Silly sod!’ shouted a woman with low-slung bosoms. She pulled a can of baked beans out of her shopping trolley and flung it haphazardly after him. But he was long gone. A few people watched as the tin plopped onto the pavement and rolled slowly into the gutter but most of them had already started to wander away. Colin Fairwell’s destructive and apparently motiveless outbursts were a fairly regular feature on Lamsbury High Street. It was his entrapment which had caused so much excitement. By the time the police arrived only Charlie and the greengrocer were left.

‘It’s that bloody Colin Fairwell again,’ said the greengrocer, absently wiping some of Colin’s blood from his thumb knuckle. ‘When’re you goin’ to lock that bugger up and throw away the key?’

The policeman shook his head sympathetically. The boy was a bane on the existence of the entire town. He was forever wandering alone into the shops, randomly knocking over displays and smashing things, and then running away. Nobody knew why he did it.

‘Attention, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said the policeman amiably. ‘’Is mum’s a nutter, in’t she, David? In ’n’ out o’ the nut’ouse, poor ol’ thing. And God knows where ’is dad is.’

‘Bein’ frank with you, Carl, I’m not one of these ones ’oo cares too much why someone’s doin’ somethin’.’

‘I know you aren’t, David.’

‘I’m more interested in gettin’ the little buggers to stop. He should be scared, walking down here. But he’s not, Carl. That’s what’s so strange. The more we ’ave a go at ’im the worse he seems to get. And we all do, mind. We all ’ave a go.’

‘I know you do, David. I know.’

‘We don’t put up with ’im down ’ere. Anyone catches sightin’ on ’im, we’re after ’im. We ’ad Margaret throwin’ her beans at ’im this afternoon.’ David shook his head in bewilderment. ‘But he just gets worse…’

The boy was cowering behind the van next to Charlie’s car when he next encountered him. His face and clothes were covered in blood and across his cheeks his tear tracks were outlined in red. He was sitting on his haunches, scribbling with a stone on the tarmac around his feet and he looked so small, huddled up like that, Charlie wouldn’t have noticed him if it hadn’t been for the muttering.

‘Colin Fairwell?’ said Charlie, looming over him. ‘We meet again.’

Colin Fairwell’s head shot up. ‘How d’you know my name?’

‘Everybody knows your name,’ said Charlie. ‘Everybody in Lamsbury. You heard them. They want to lock you up and throw away the key.’

The boy turned back to the marks he was making on the tarmac. ‘So why d’you let me go then?’

‘I didn’t like the way they were bashing you.’

‘Did you like the way I was bashing the shop window?’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Charlie hesitated. He wasn’t sure what to do next. What he wanted to do was to go back to Fiddleford and set to work on a ruse to keep the water inspectors at bay. He wanted to talk to Mr Gunner about the fishing licences, and, more urgently, he needed to talk to Jo (preferably without Grey or the General present) about how quickly she could rope in more paying guests. But the boy looked so pathetic crouching there: wretched and friendless and bloodstained. With a mother in the nuthouse. And a streetful of angry shopkeepers waiting to beat him up if he ventured out of the car park again. Charlie couldn’t quite bring himself to walk away.

‘Look, er—’ he said irritably, making a point of examining his watch. ‘D’you want a lift somewhere? I’m going out towards Fiddleford, if you know where that is…I can drop you off at your – mother’s. Place. Or something. Is she there? I can drop you off at home if you want. Where do you live?’

‘No thanks,’ Colin said drearily.

‘What’re you going to do then?’

The boy shrugged.

‘Well, come on, buck up,’ said Charlie. ‘What’re you going to do? You can’t sit here muttering to yourself all afternoon. And you certainly can’t go back out that way…’ He indicated the car park’s only exit, which led directly onto the High Street. ‘Shall I drop you off at school, perhaps?’

The boy laughed suddenly, a blast of genuine mirth which took Charlie by surprise. ‘I’m better on Lamsbury High Street, thank you very much,’ he said. ‘But you can take me down Fiddleford if you like.’

‘I don’t like. That’s not what I was offering.’

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