do you think they’re doing?’ said Marianne.
‘No idea,’ said Gabriel. ‘With any luck it’s going to go for auction and we’ll find ourselves a new neighbour.’
‘With any luck,’ said Marianne. But as she looked back down the field, she saw several men, unsuitably dressed in office garb and smart shoes, and wondered. They were taking photographs, and making notes, and seemed very animated. She remembered her feeling of foreboding from a few months earlier. She had a nasty feeling they hadn’t heard the last of Old Joe’s farm.
How’s your day been? :-)
Pippa looked at Richard’s text and sighed. How to explain her day so far? After coffee with the girls (the highlight), she’d got home to discover another letter from Dan’s solicitor, gently reminding her she hadn’t responded to the first. She decided Richard didn’t need to know about that.
Fine. Yours? she responded, and instantly a text pinged back.
Boring. Missing you xxx
Oh. Richard often added little comments like that to his texts. She wished he wouldn’t. It made her feel panicky, as if he were forcing an intimacy she wasn’t quite ready for.
Me too x Pippa texted, feeling it was required. The truth was she still didn’t know how she felt where Richard was concerned, and felt guilty about leading him on. But it was nice to have someone kind and gentle who seemed to care for her. Perhaps she should just accept that for now. She felt she was going round in circles, and could never get her head straight about what was the best thing to do.
Pippa sighed. She really ought to deal with this letter; every time she didn’t, it cost Dan (and them) money. She should get on with it. And she would. Later. For now she needed to look through the accounts. The tax year was nearly up and she’d been neglecting them, much to the irritation of their accountant, John, who was practically having a nervous breakdown. The trouble was, everything was in such a mess.
Since Dan’s accident they’d had to scale back the workload, he simply couldn’t do as much as he had done, and even with help from both their dads and the boys at the weekend, it wasn’t enough. In order to manage they’d cut back on the amount of cattle they were rearing, which of course ate into profits. At one stage they’d been able to afford extra help, but after the year they’d just had, coupled with the abysmally low price of milk and the high price of animal feed, hiring any help this year was out of the question. It was an ever increasing downward spiral of financial misery, and she wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to do about it. The trouble was, that for both her and Dan, the farm was a way of life, and not something either of them could give up easily. Hence Dan’s still hanging around to help run it with her, even though he’d moved out.
Pippa felt a familiar feeling of sickness in the pit of her stomach as she looked through the figures again, willing them to be better. She had started having sleepless nights about money, and for the first time since she and Dan had taken over the farm from her parents fifteen years earlier, she was really worried that they might not make a go of things. They’d weathered storms before, but this, this felt different. And she was more and more overwhelmed by the bills which kept coming. She knew she needed to face up to it, but at the moment it all felt too much.
And of course, now that Dan wanted a divorce, they’d have to look at what to do about the farm properly. Which was complicated, as in order to make improvements over the years, they’d borrowed from Pippa’s parents who were silent partners in the business. The way it was going there’d be precious little of the business left, and their investment would be up the swannee. It wouldn’t matter at all if she and Dan were still together, but now they were apart and going to be apart permanently, Pippa just couldn’t see how she was going to be able to buy Dan out, which was her preferred option, and what to do about the farm was hanging over her like a dark black cloud.
There was a ring on the doorbell. Pippa frowned. She wasn’t expecting anyone – the kids were at school, Richard was working in Birmingham at the marketing firm where he was financial director, and Dan was in the fields. She put her papers away and got up to answer the door. A smartly dressed young man in a pinstripe suit was standing on the doorstep – Jehovah’s Witness she thought immediately. He flashed a white toothed grin at her, held up a business card and said, ‘Laurence Fairburne, LK Holdings Ltd. We’re acquiring property in the area and wondered if you’d be interested in selling up?’
‘I hope you sent him away with a flea in his ear,’ said Dan, when he came to pick the children up at the weekend. He stood, framed in the doorway, so tall, strong and dependable. It was still hard to believe that things had changed so catastrophically.
It had taken a while for Pippa to pluck up the courage to tell him about her unwanted visitor. The truth was that, even with all of the ongoing counselling, Dan could still be somewhat unpredictable since his accident, and she never knew what was going to spark off a rage in him, which some idiot from a posh company wanting to buy them out was likely to. Dan’s black moods were the main – the only – reason they’d split up; Pippa had been prepared to live with them but Dan hadn’t.
‘It’s the look in your eyes, that does it,’ he’d said to her once, after the heartbreaking occasion when he’d frightened the boys so much, they’d run away from him. Pippa had tried not to show her horror at his behaviour, but it was nigh on impossible. So she’d tried to preserve passive neutrality ever since. But it wasn’t easy.
‘Of course I did, but I thought you should know,’ Pippa said, returning to the matter in hand. ‘It’s not just that either. Remember those people we saw at Blackstock Farm before Christmas? I’m wondering if they’ve got anything to do with this.’
Dan whistled.
‘You think LK Holdings is looking at buying up all the land round here?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Pippa, ‘but I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t think that guy is going to take no for an answer.’
Her gut instinct at Christmas hadn’t reassured her, and it wasn’t reassuring her now. She had the uneasy feeling they were under siege, and she wasn’t sure she had the strength to withstand the onslaught alone.
‘They can’t do anything unless we sell,’ Dan pointed out, ‘which we’re not obliged to do.’
‘I don’t think it’s quite as straightforward as that,’ said Pippa. ‘We may not have a choice.’
‘Oh?’ Dan looked at her quizzically.
Pippa paused, her heart was racing and she felt slightly sick. It was now or never; time to face up to the inevitable. ‘The thing is, if we’re going to go through with the divorce, it’s time we started to talk about the future of the farm.’
‘I’ll buy you out,’ said Dan. ‘You keep the farmhouse, and I’ll buy the business.’
‘I’m not sure you can,’ said Pippa, the anxious gnawing feeling in her stomach returning. ‘I’ve been looking through the accounts, and to put it bluntly, the business is a mess. We hardly made any money last year, and …’
Her voice trailed off. She so longed for him to turn
