The Great Allotment Proposal (7 page)

For Emily that had shaken her base instinct for life: You did it by whatever means possible.

If that was a mistake – the traipsing round after the money and the lifestyle – then that meant things could have been different. And if they had been different, would they have been better?

Giles Fox had been the holy grail. Rich, successful, famous. And, ten years older than her, he would protect her, keep her safe. As her mum had said, eyes bright, Emily would never want for anything. Except, as she soon discovered, love. But that had never been on the tick box agenda. Along with being treated like an adult. Never quite being allowed to feel part of the crowd. Part of his gang. Her mum was on the phone from France telling her to go for it, get to LA, move in with him ASAP, while Enid – in retrospect her main touchstone to reality – was saying,
‘Calm down,’
telling her to watch what she was doing and who she was doing it with. To be careful. But what was the point of telling that to a wilful seventeen year old – headstrong, beautiful and broken-hearted – with the reins to her own life at an age where any little steer of rationality was going to be determinedly ignored.

That’s what she’d thought lying in bed last night. That’s what had rolled over and over again in her mind till she finally dozed off in a hazy half-light of early morning.

Now, as she stood looking at the women next to her, all she could think about was friendship. Friendship grown here, on Cherry Pie, gave the impression of having roots sturdier than any of the ones she’d forged in her normal day-to-day life. They were the bloody bindweed of relationships.

It was only then that she remembered they were doing all this for Holly. Their friend. And for Enid. A woman with a personality as big and strong as Emily’s, who she had butted heads with and refused to listen to but who she would now like to go back to and say, ‘
You were right.’

She couldn’t let Jonathan turn it into some miniature Chelsea Flower Show. The Cherry Pie Show was loved
because
it was haphazard and bizarre. Because people knitted tea cosies and felted little animals and baked cakes that didn’t quite come out as hoped. Because there was a prize for the ugliest vegetable as well as the best.

When she’d been living on Cherry Pie as a teenager, the show hadn’t been held at the primary school. It had been in a marquee on Montmorency land. Bernard had thrown the doors open, stalking round proudly as he tasted pineapple upside-down cakes, judged the dog show and handed rosettes to the vegetable prize-winners. It was the Cherry Pie Show that had inspired Jack and Wilf’s disastrous festival.

She thought of the photograph of them all pinned above Jack’s bed.

‘You want somewhere to hold the Cherry Pie Show?’ Emily shouted just as Jonathan was about to step off his orange box, the new plans a fait accompli.

He paused and glanced at the voice, surprised. ‘I’m sorry, did someone say something?’

Emily moved herself to the side of the group so she was standing alone for the crowd to see her. ‘Yeah, I said something,’ she said, suddenly feeling everyone’s eyes on her, big and wide like cows at a fence.

Emily wasn’t rustic, she wasn’t homemade jam and handmade quilts, she wasn’t a cup of tea and a slice of vanilla sponge, she wasn’t community, she wasn’t tradition. But she
was
suddenly about friendship. About the things in her past that had made her happy. The things that, being here, she was remembering. The things that when she took hold of them made her feel like her feet were on the ground rather than scurrying through the air at a rate of knots. ‘I said, do you want somewhere to hold your show? Somewhere big enough so that everyone can be a part of it?’

Jonathan shook his head and said, ‘Sorry, Emily but there just isn’t anywhere.’

‘There is somewhere, Jonathan,’ she said, thinking maybe, Enid, this is how I tell you that you were right. ‘There’s my bloody house. You can have your show there. And we’ll make it the best goddamn show you’ve ever had.’

She heard Martha laugh, deep and husky. Jonathan looked puzzled, as if trying to work out how he could quash this new option. Annie clapped her hands together with delight. And Jane smiled, nodding at Emily, almost to say well done, to say that she was proud of her.

‘It’ll be the
Great
Cherry Pie Show,’ someone from the crowd shouted.

‘Exactly!’ said Emily. ‘The Great Cherry Pie Show.’

Chapter Ten

After the meeting, everything suddenly got a bit more serious. Emily got her assistant to talk to a man about a marquee, Annie designed the poster – all bunting, cherries and rosettes dotted around the scrolled
Great Cherry Pie Show
lettering. Holly called from France to say that her and Wilf would be back the weekend of the show but they didn’t think their ice cream van would make it. It was arranged that the Dandelion Cafe would cater the event with one stall selling cherry pie and tea and another, run by Ludo the cafe chef, would be a big barbecue with a suckling pig and all sorts of tapas. Barney from the pub would get some barrels in and The Duck and Cherry would decamp for the day into the grounds of Mont Manor. But, most of all, people started preparing in earnest. The bakers among the island decided whether to make a lemon drizzle or a coffee and walnut, the young photographers got snapping and the quilters knuckled down to their wall-hangings – a perennial favourite of the competitions. Most babies on Cherry Pie Island had a quilted wall-hanging in their nurseries purchased from the show.

The tension at the allotment increased dramatically. Not only were they competing against each other, there was now a clear divide between Jonathan’s horticulturists and Emily’s amateur gardeners. The latter being the majority; Emily had become a mini-celebrity of a different kind now. No longer the revered famous person suspected of causing mayhem where ever she went, she was now the saviour of the everyman. She had given to the community and expected nothing in return. Now when she walked through the allotment in her Hunter wellies and designer shorts, she got big waves of hello and a couple of free courgettes.

The girls’ allotment now had a schedule. Annie would water and hoe every Monday and Wednesday after work. Emily had Tuesdays and Thursdays. Jane would do the weekends. And Friday was on rotation. The sole aim was no longer just to keep everything alive, there was now a desire to grow something of merit. Something that they could display on one of the competition tables. Something that might prove them worthy. Something that would do Holly and Enid’s memory proud.

Tuesday Emily had to dash home from the office midmorning ahead of the launch party of her new Cherry Blossom fragrance because she’d forgotten the notepad with her speech and her shoes.

It was another scorcher of a day. The party was being held on a roof garden overlooking St James’s Park and her assistant had come back from a morning recce to tell her that the paving stones up there were steaming – scalding her foot when her flip flop slipped off. Emily had spent most of the morning refreshing her weather app to see if any cloud cover was due, trying to track down some giant sun umbrellas, and ignoring a great email hullabaloo about the article Faye Starkey had written post Emily’s interview walkout. She hadn’t read it. She didn’t want to read it. She wanted it to go away and not ruin her party. But her PR company wanted her to agree to an interview with a rival magazine that would lay the truth bare, which Emily had no intention of doing. She was reading the email as she walked in the front door of Mont Manor, feeling the immediate relief of the cool inside compared to the belting sun outside.

Winston was up a scaffolding rig painting over the giant spray-painted skull on the hall wall while Radio Two was booming over the deafening thuds of the kitchen demolition. ‘You’re home early,’ he called down.

Emily kicked off her shoes and dumped her bag. ‘I’ve got to pick some stuff up,’ she shouted over the noise.

Winston nodded, then turned back to dip his brush in the white paint before pausing and saying, ‘Just want to say, my mrs showed me the article this morning and I was horrified. Trash. I want you to know that I think it’s trash. Me and the mrs both think that. Says she’s never going to watch a Giles Fox film again.’

Emily smiled. ‘Thanks, Winston. I appreciate it. Although I’m not sure Giles had anything to do with it so I wouldn’t want your wife missing out on his films.’

‘I’ll tell her that, nice of you to say.’ Winston raised his brush at her and then carried on with his painfully slow painting.

Emily went through into the living room where she’d created a makeshift desk in front of the big French windows. She tried not to look around too much when she walked in – the luminous-pink carpet and pineapple wallpaper made her wince. Somewhere else she might have thought it was OK, avante-guard trendy, but not here. When Bernard had owned the manor, this room had been the yellow room. Buttercup paint and pale-cream curtains. Polished wood floorboards and a giant marble fireplace that their dog would stretch wide in front of in winter, Christmas lights twinkling around the big gold mirror above. Every room was known as its colour. Never the living room or the study, but the red room and the green room. Her plans for redecoration were based on exactly that.

Sitting down, she tried to concentrate on an email thread about the huge umbrellas and jugs of cucumber water that would be available alongside the Aperol aperitifs, but the urge to find and read the article was niggling her.

It would be better if she read it, she thought. But it would only upset her.

She bit her fingernail and thought about what someone else might do. She thought about Enid. She was always about facing things head on. She’d been the one to push her to tell Jack about Giles. To come clean and get it all out in the open, even if it meant sending a letter because there was no internet and the phone was always engaged or the line dead. Emily had just wanted to ignore it all and start her new life. Better to just up and leave, she had thought. Jack wasn’t exactly making much contact with her. But Enid had almost stood over her as she wrote.
Clear up after you, Emily. The worst thing you can do is leave someone without answers.

She had written to Jack to tell him about Giles and her impending move to LA. Jack had written back a note that said,
I thought something like that might happen.

No fight, no tears, no upset. Just that she had behaved the way he’d expected.

And Emily had suddenly seen herself, momentarily, through his eyes, through Enid’s eyes, and she had hated it. So just as quickly she had glossed over that vision and packed her bags for Hollywood where, she discovered, no one really cared about what was underneath, as long as the surface was shiny enough.

It was only recently that Emily was starting to see beneath her surface and like what was there. What she was really scared of about this article was that it would mess that up. That the comments and observations would get under her skin and she wouldn’t be able to shake them away. She would see them every time she looked in the mirror.

Don’t read it.

She searched the magazine name and immediately saw a picture of herself in one of the little boxes on its cover. She shut her laptop.

People would mention it at the launch, she thought. They would mention it the way Winston had mentioned it.

All the other pieces that had come from the press junket had been published already. Light and whimsical stuff that she had been completely in control of, batting away comments with funny little quips and charming them with stories of youthful summers frolicking in the cherry orchard.

She opened the laptop.

Where’s a Hunter without her Fox?

Emily sighed, put her chin in her hands and started to read.

Emily Hunter-Brown says she’s fine. OK, Em, we’ll play along. She’s not looking for romance (yet hang on a sec? Isn’t her new signature scent ‘Cherry Blossom’? And what did she wear in her hair at her engagement party? You guessed it!), she’s completely forgiven Giles (but she hasn’t called to congratulate him on his new baby), she’s not broody (yet she’s just bought a six-bedroom house?).

‘Honestly, I’m very happy for him,’ she says of Giles, lowering her head and looking up through tear-flecked lashes. When I question her further, she comes back with her trademark, husky ‘That’s private.’ Yet I can see the turmoil behind her eyes.

I ask why she’s suddenly so serious. Where’s our fun, wild Emily gone? She claims she’s growing up – hence the blue highlights, gone, and the dumped Rolling Stones roadie
–
but we want to tell her that growing up doesn’t have to mean boring, sad and lonely. Bring back our Em with her crazy brand of cool.

Not only that, we’re worried about you, Emily. Alone in that big new house of yours. We worry that you’re building a bubble around yourself away from reality. We worry that we’re losing you to a fantasy past. We don’t want to utter the words Havisham, but if we don’t, someone else will.

So we’ve done the only thing we felt we could do…

We’ve called in the Fox.

‘Oh god.’ Emily covered her eyes with her hands and read the last bit through the cracks in her fingers.

And even we had to catch our breath when Giles said that he too was worried. (OMG, Mr Fox, we LOVE you.) He urged her to get in touch and told us to tell her that he’s always there if she needs him. (We can hear Adeline screeching from here!)

Read into that what you will. Butterflies fluttered in our tummies.

So please, Emily, if you’re reading this, call Giles. It may be the most important call you ever make. You say you’re OK, but we simply can’t believe you.

‘Bollocks.’ Emily slammed the laptop shut. ‘Giles, you snake,’ she said then, closing her eyes for a moment, realised that he probably hadn’t even spoken to them.

‘Everything all right, Emily?’ Winston called from the hallway.

‘Fine thanks, Winston.’ She pulled her hair away from her face and tied it up with an elastic band.