sake,’ Vivienne protested. ‘How on earth am I going to do that? Can’t we get our diaries together and work out a time for us all to go?’
‘Best idea I’ve heard all day,’ Shaz concurred, refilling the glasses.
As Vivienne watched and joined in the bubbling excitement she pushed at her chest again, as though the pressure might disperse the ache. She really ought to eat something before downing the champagne, or she’d have another dizzy spell. She reached for a smoked salmon hors d’oeuvre and popped it into her mouth. Delicious, heavenly, so she tried another.
Shaz was asking her something, but for some reason Shaz’s voice seemed to be coming through water. It bobbed back to the surface with sudden clarity as she said, ‘Vivi! Are you all right?’
Vivienne laughed. ‘Of course,’ but the room was dipping away and lurching back as though she were on a ship in a storm, and when she tried to lift her glass she found she couldn’t move her arm. Everything hurt, she realized, her whole body, and the pain was clenching so hard into her chest …
‘Vivienne!’ someone shouted. She thought it was Saanvi.
‘Oh my God!’ Hands were closing around her arms. ‘She’s fainting. Get her some air …’
Vivienne’s face contorted as she tried to breathe. ‘I don’t … It’s …’ she gasped.
‘Her lips are blue … Oh Jesus! Vivienne!’
‘Help! Someone. We need help.’
Vivienne was still trying to breath.
‘Let me through. I’m a doctor, clear some space.’
A man’s face came into view, blurred and dark and moving close.
‘Call an ambulance,’ he barked. ‘Do it now. What’s her name?’
‘Vivienne.’
‘Vivienne,’ he said urgently. ‘I’m going to lie you down …’
She was trying to listen, even to laugh, because this was funny wasn’t it, or embarrassing … It couldn’t be real, but it hurt so much …
‘Deep breaths,’ he was saying, moving her roughly to the floor. ‘Come on Vivienne, you can do it. In, out. In, out.’ His fist was banging into her chest.
She tried. In … The noise was awful. Rushing, ripping, breaking … ‘Mum,’ she murmured weakly.
‘In, out.’ The world was going black. He was still banging her chest … ‘Stay with me,’ he shouted angrily. ‘Vivienne. Stay with me.’
Summer 1984
It was a crackpot idea.
Everyone had said so.
Friends, families, even Shelley and Jack, whose plan it was, thought they were crazy, but hey ho, they’d gone ahead and done it anyway. Why not? They’d spent holidays at Deerwood Farm as far back as when they were knee-high to tadpoles, as Shelley’s uncle Bob used to call them. They’d continued to come as teens, helping out in the barns, running wild and loving every animal as if it were a pet – and every mouthful of Aunt Sarah’s home bakes as if they were the very best in the world, which they were.
Even when Jack and Shelley had started going further afield for their holidays they’d continued to count those halcyon summers at the farm amongst their happiest memories. The place was as special to them as any place could possibly be, for it was at Deerwood that their childhood friendship had blossomed during their teenage years into an embarrassed and fumbling romance, and was also where Jack, aged fourteen, had first asked Shelley to marry him. (He’d asked several times after that and she’d always readily accepted. It was just something they used to do every now and again for the sheer joy of it.) Jack even swore Deerwood was magical, and Shelley, whose aunt and uncle owned the farm, had earnestly assured him he was right.
Jack had grown up in the semi next door to Shelley on a shady, red-brick street in Ealing. They’d been best friends forever, so it was no surprise to anyone when they’d married as soon as their uni days were over. By then Jack was a qualified veterinary surgeon, and Shelley was already teaching at a West London primary.
With a little help from Jack’s parents they’d scraped together a deposit for a two-bedroomed house in Brentford, and their first child, Hanna, was born a year after they moved in. Their second, Zoe, came along eighteen months later on the same day that Princess Diana gave birth to Prince William. They were happy, blessed, had little to complain about, with Jack’s popularity as a vet growing and Shelley’s role as a full-time mum keeping her occupied, if not entirely satisfied.
Then Uncle Bob died, four years after Aunt Sarah, and to Shelley and Jack’s amazement it turned out that Deerwood Farm, together with Bob and Sarah’s meagre savings, were now theirs.
‘Why didn’t Bob leave it to you?’ Shelley asked her father, still reeling from the unexpectedness of it that was already turning into something that felt vaguely like excitement. ‘You’re his brother.’
‘I’m no farmer,’ her father chuckled, ‘and Bob knew that.’
‘Well you can hardly say that I am either,’ Shelley pointed out. ‘Or Jack.’
‘Ah, but Bob knew you loved the place, and that’s what would have mattered to him and Sarah. I’m sure she was behind the idea, and when Jack decided to become a vet it would have made up her mind. Having said that, there are no conditions attached to the inheritance. You can sell it if you like and use the money to get a bigger house, or put it aside for the girls’ education.’
Jack and Shelley looked at one another, not needing words to know what the other was thinking, but not yet ready to confide those thoughts in anyone else.
Less than six months later they were in the depths of the rolling countryside, the proud new owners of a rambling, draughty, leaky farmhouse, several ramshackle barns, half a brick shed (the other half had collapsed like an old drunk into a pile of desolation around its own feet); seventy-five acres of untended fields with any number of streams passing merrily or sluggishly through them; ancient woods that Shelley and Jack remembered playing and camping in but were now filled with bindweed and brambles; and heaven only knew how many miles of unkempt hedgerows, rotting gates and clogged ditches. Added to this were five batty sheep of varying ages (breeds yet to be determined, four ewes and a vasectomized little runt of a ram); ten cheery hens very generous with the eggs, three Aylesbury ducks also generous with the eggs (so they were told, yet to see any); a hamster that they’d brought with them and an ageing border collie called Todger whom everyone instantly adored and who was swiftly renamed Dodger (soon to be known as Dodgy). There was also a lot of machinery they had yet to identify, an ancient tractor with a missing steering wheel, a broken trailer, a 1960s Land Rover with more miles on the clock than the clock had numbers, a few dozen bundles of very useful wire fencing, and enough furniture inside the
