(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
