Appleby Farm (42 page)

‘Hey, Eddy, looking good.’ I meant the hut, not his rear end, but once the words were out of my mouth, I didn’t feel that I could correct myself. I gave Buddy a tickle under his chin and he padded back to his spot in the corner.

‘A right pig of a job this has turned out to be,’ grunted Eddy. He had his head in the log burner and his voice echoed through the flue hole in the top. ‘I’ve cut the ’ole in’t roof for the chimney in’t wrong place.’

‘Oh dear.’

I pressed my lips together to keep a laugh from escaping. Eddy didn’t like us to think he was enjoying his new job too much. The truth was a different matter: he loved the shepherd’s hut so much that on a fine day, he’d taken to eating his lunch out here, sitting on a camping chair and drinking beef tea from a flask.

And who could blame him? The hut looked amazing. The furnishings weren’t in yet, although they were ready and in storage in the shed, but the kitchen was finished, the interior had been decorated and the tiles around the log burner were in place.

I’d toyed with the idea of plumping for an array of Cath Kidston-style colourful prints, but in the end had taken my colour palette from the view out of the hut windows: wood panelling for the walls, soft greens and dove greys for the fabrics, and I’d found a gorgeous range of enamel storage tins in pale blue for the kitchen. The effect was gentle, calming and extremely relaxing, which was exactly what I wanted my guests to experience when they stepped inside.

It didn’t seem to be working for Eddy, though.

‘Can’t we just shunt the log burner up a bit?’ I asked timidly.

He withdrew his head and scowled at me. He had black streaks down his face and looked quite menacing. ‘I’ll have to,’ he muttered, ‘but it won’t be symmetrical then.’

I was saved further debate about the importance of a symmetrical fireplace by a sudden wheezing at the door of the hut. I turned to see Auntie Sue, dressed in Uncle Arthur’s anorak and wellies, red-faced, wide-eyed and completely breathless.

‘Ooh, is the buyer here?’ I gasped.

Now that the cattle had all passed their TB test with flying colours, the Hereford herd was up for sale again, and the lady from Gloucestershire who we’d had to cancel in May was still interested in buying them. She was due at the farm that morning.

I glanced quickly at Eddy. That might explain why he was even more of a grump than usual. I rested a sympathetic hand on his shoulder and he patted it.

Auntie Sue shook her head, still panting. ‘Freya, lass, it’s your friend Anna on the phone. She says there’s been a flogger on the interweb and we’ve had thousands of smacks!’

My eyebrows shot up. ‘Is Anna still on the phone?’

Auntie Sue nodded. Her grasp of the internet was still a bit patchy and due to her breathlessness I wasn’t sure if this news was good or bad.

‘Thanks, Auntie Sue,’ I yelled, jumping down from the hut and racing across Clover Field to my new office.

I scrambled up the wooden steps to the loft above the milking parlour. The office wasn’t quite finished, but it had electrics, a phone line, a desk and chair, and my wall planner, so the plastering and flooring could wait for the moment.

‘Anna!’ I dropped into my chair and took a deep breath. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Oh my God.’ Anna’s voice was fizzing with excitement. Phew. The smacks must be of a good variety, then.

‘Did you know you’ve had a YouTuber with three million subscribers to her channel at the tea rooms?’ she shrieked. ‘From BRIGHTON! All THE top vloggers are in Brighton.’

‘No,’ I laughed, ‘I didn’t know any of that. But it’s a good thing, I take it?’

Come to think of it, the last hen party we’d had in was from Brighton. It must have been one of them. Waif-like little things, immaculately groomed and incredibly demure. Not one of them looked like they might be online A-listers.

‘Well, she only vlogged from the tea rooms and stuck pictures of some cows on Instagram and this morning alone, you’ve had fifty thousand hits on your website!’

Anna continued to look after our website for us, add news, update the menu, that sort of thing. Her company also hosted it on her server, whatever that meant.

‘What does that mean for us?’ I asked.

Anna squealed with delight. ‘It means the Appleby Farm Vintage Tea Rooms have arrived, Freya. It means you’ll need to make more scones because your bookings are going to go through the roof, baby!’

‘Really?’

‘And, more good news …’ Anna paused dramatically. ‘I’ll be seeing you soon. Charlie’s bringing me to Tilly and Aidan’s wedding.’

‘Oh, Anna!’ I squealed. ‘I’m so pleased. No, actually, I’m more than pleased. This is brilliant!’

‘Seriously?’ she asked, sounding worried. ‘Because the last thing I’d want to do is—’

‘Anna, stop,’ I insisted. ‘Charlie is a love and so are you. I’m thrilled. Really.’

I did my happy dance round the office, she joined in in Kingsfield and we ended the call whooping with joy to each other. The phone rang instantly. I took a booking for a twenty-first birthday party. It rang again. Could we host an office party? Another hen party? Afternoon tea for fifteen? I switched the answer phone on and looked out of the window. The car park was busy – not just with the family hatchbacks and mumsy four-wheel drives, but with cute little Fiats and Minis.

I hurried to the tea rooms and had to push my way through the throng to the counter. Lizzie and Mum, cheeks flushed, looked at me with relief. I grabbed an apron and joined them.

‘Yes, please?’ I beamed at the person at the head of the queue. ‘What can I get you?’

As soon as I’d had a chance I’d brought them up to speed with our YouTube début and the excitement of that and the evident increase in business had produced just enough adrenalin to see us through the day. By closing time the three of us were completely worn out and as soon as Lizzie switched the sign from open to closed, we collapsed in a heap.

‘Best. Day. Ever,’ declared Lizzie, from her spot on the floor where she’d slid down the glass doors. ‘Lots of today’s customers were potential brides, you know. Your vintage company idea is going to fly, babes – I mean, boss. Hey!’ she said suddenly. ‘We could have a vintage festival here next year; we could be the vintage Mecca of the North West!’

‘Right now I’m more concerned with cakes.’ I frowned. I was leaning on the counter, surveying the sparse remains in the food cabinet. ‘Auntie Sue is so busy packing for their move that she’s only just keeping up with normal demand.’

‘I’ll help,’ said Mum, scooping a pile of crumbs from the table in front of her into a napkin. ‘I’ve wanted to suggest it for ages, but I didn’t want to tread on Sue’s toes. And if we’re going to be baking more that gives me the perfect excuse to order a new oven.’

I clasped my throat, horrified. ‘You aren’t thinking of getting rid of the Aga, are you? A farmhouse kitchen needs an Aga.’

I pictured a basket of snoozing kittens in front of it and mentally added kittens to my growing list of the menagerie I planned on introducing to Appleby Farm at the earliest opportunity.

‘No, it can stay; we’ll need the extra capacity. But I thought we could get a large stainless-steel professional oven. I’ve always dreamed of one of those. The Aga is lovely, but I get the feeling it’s in charge of me rather than the other way round. And if we continue to attract a younger crowd like today, I thought we could try a few more current recipes.’

Lizzie wrinkled up her nose. ‘What. Like buns?’

Mum laughed and shook her head. Her hair was pinned up in an elegant chignon and she looked just as well-turned-out now as she had at ten o’clock this morning. My heart squeezed with pride. Not just because she was so pretty but because she had adapted from her life as a banker’s wife in a luxurious Parisian apartment to a waitress in my tea rooms at a tumbledown farm in northern England, seemingly without a murmur. There was a lot more to my mum, I realized shamefully, than I’d given her credit for.

‘No, Lizzie,’ Mum replied, ‘like macarons, or individual lemon tarts or a tiramisu slice.’

Lizzie winked at me at the mention of tiramisu and I shot her a warning look.

‘That would be amazing, Mum, if you would.’ I sighed gratefully. ‘We might even have to source another supplier if things continue like this, as long as they follow our recipes for consistency.’

‘Ooh,’ Lizzie’s eyes lit up, ‘we could do an Appleby Farm Vintage recipe book!’

‘You and your ideas, Lizzie,’ I laughed. ‘No wonder I’m shattered. I can’t keep up.’

Lizzie got to her feet, hugged us all goodbye and set off for home. She was still living in a room at the White Lion and for once I envied her the tiny uncomplicated space. As soon as my parents moved in in a week or two they were transforming the whole middle floor of the farmhouse into a master suite with bathroom and dressing room. And the new downstairs reception room and bathroom hadn’t been finished yet. The place would be in chaos right up until Tilly and Aidan’s wedding and my head spun just thinking about it.

I must have sighed out loud because Mum appeared at my side and put her arm round me.

‘Darling,’ she said gently, ‘as your mother, who loves you very much, I can’t help noticing a distinct lack of social life, not to mention boyfriends.’

I laughed softly and leaned my head against her. ‘I’m fine, Mum, honestly. Getting the business off the ground and being able to pay you and Dad back is my number-one priority at the moment. A social life can wait for now, as can men.’

Mum pressed a kiss into my hair and I felt the tension ease from my shoulders.

‘Never put your career before love, Freya. Your job will never love you back, never share memories with you when you’re old, never give me a grandchild to spoil rotten.’

‘I’m not making a choice to be single, Mum; it just hasn’t happened.’

‘Do you know, I gave up my career for your father?’

I shook my head.

‘I’d just finished a cordon bleu cookery course in Manchester and had accepted a trainee position at a pâtisserie in Paris starting in three months’ time when I met him.’

‘Mum!’ I pulled away to stare at her, amazed. ‘Why don’t I know this?’

‘I thought you’d be appalled.’ Her hand fluttered to her pearls and she twisted them into a knot. ‘Equal opportunities and all that. Such an old-fashioned thing to do these days. Different in the seventies, of course.’

‘A pâtissière?’ I marvelled. No wonder she was so flippin’ brilliant in the kitchen!

‘Your father was doing well at the bank at the time and was in line for promotion. There was no way he could have come to Paris with me. He said that even though we’d not been together long, we would have to stop seeing each other, that I already meant so much to him. He couldn’t bear to fall in love with me, only to have his heart broken when I left. So I wrote and told them I wouldn’t be coming.’

‘Poor Dad,’ I said, thinking that there was a side to him, too, that I hadn’t been aware of. My spine was tingling at the thought of such love between them, but there was something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on …

‘We got to live in Paris in the end, of course, and now it appears I’m about to become a pâtissière,’ Mum continued happily. ‘So I’m getting my career after all. A little belatedly.’

‘I’m glad for you,’ I said, kissing her cheek.

I suddenly thought of Harry and his reason for ending our kiss.
You mean too much to me
… His words echoed my dad’s from decades ago. That was it! That must be why he couldn’t kiss me, because he thought I would be moving on again and leaving the farm. But unlike my mum, I wasn’t going anywhere. He had thought I was off on a new adventure. But my new adventure was right here. That had to mean we still had a chance. Didn’t it?

It was moving day. December. Not the ideal time of year to have your kitchen door propped open, exposing the house to the Cumbrian elements, but Auntie Sue’s dream bungalow was ready and the pair of them wanted to get themselves settled before Christmas. I was glad we’d decided to close the tea rooms for the day; the removal men had arrived at seven thirty this morning in an impossibly big lorry that almost filled the farmyard and had been tramping in noisy procession backwards and forwards to the house ever since.

‘Should I make more tea, do you think, lass?’ worried Auntie Sue. ‘Or offer the men some shortbread?’

Auntie Sue had been packed since last week, which meant her sole occupation this morning was to fret and flap.

I handed her a pair of scissors instead and led her outside. ‘Why don’t you go outside and pick yourself a bunch of winter foliage to arrange in a vase when you get to the bungalow?’

‘Good idea,’ she said breathily and disappeared into the shrubs, muttering about skimmia and euonymus and whether the birds had left her any berries on the holly. I sighed with relief. Flower arranging always calmed her down.

The lights were on in the tea room. I had taken on a new part-timer, Rachel, and she had come in to do some cleaning and tidying while we were quiet. She lived locally and arrived on her horse for work, which I thought had to be the best form of commuter transport ever. Lizzie was touring vintage shops to pick up last-minute props for Aidan and Tilly’s wedding; we still needed something vintage for the wedding favours and I wanted a quirky way of presenting the seating plan. Mum and Dad had disappeared for a couple of days to a hotel.

‘To give Sue and Arthur some space,’ Mum had said, ‘otherwise it will look like we’re hovering.’ She also confided that she’d planned to do some serious furniture shopping although, wisely, she had kept Dad in the dark about that part of the itinerary.

Goat was taking advantage of my parents’ absence to decimate the first floor and no sooner had Auntie Sue and Uncle Arthur removed their toothbrushes from the bathroom, than he and another man began swinging lump hammers at the internal walls to make way for the new master suite.

By lunchtime the lorry was packed up and the removals men were ready to go. One of them guided the driver as he reversed all the way down the farm track and trundled off the short distance to the bungalow. The builders stopped work for their lunch break and I sent them over to the tea rooms out of the way. Almost at once a welcome peace reigned over the farm.