Daisy Waugh - Ten Steps to Happiness

‘I was thinking, Charlie – don’t you think,’ she said some time later, as they wallowed in the beach hut’s circular sunken bath, ‘we could have a sort of meditation room. With very, very quiet spiritual music playing. And candles. A sort of multi-denominational-non-faith-specific chapel effect. Because people are going to be feeling very troubled when they first arrive to stay with us. They might appreciate a nice, quiet place to sit and think…’

‘It’s an idea,’ Charlie said tactfully. ‘If that’s what you want. But the bedrooms are pretty big, remember. If they want peace and quiet they could just stay in their rooms—’

‘And do you agree, Charlie,’ said Jo, who hadn’t been listening, whose mind had already moved on, ‘I was thinking maybe we could ban anyone who’s been in Big Brother . On principle. Do you think? Or do you think that’s a bit mean and snobbish?’

‘Big brother,’ repeated Charlie vaguely. ‘ In big brother…’

‘The telly programme.’

‘The telly programme…’ It didn’t ring any bells. ‘Anyway, we’re supposed to be open to anyone, if they need us. And if we can fit them in. That’s the whole point.’

‘Quite right. We’ll just have to hope and pray they never realise they need us. I had another idea, though. Lovely idea. We could wire the house so it’s all on the same sound system. With speakers in every single room – can you imagine? So you’ve got music which is really beautiful – upbeat-but-ethereal – and it’s playing everywhere! In the kitchen, the bathrooms, the hall. Everywhere. All over the house. Wouldn’t that be amazing?’

‘So upbeat ethereal in the multi-faith-non-specific chapel?’ he said, smiling lazily. ‘But with the volume turned very, very low?’

‘ Non -faith-specific,’ she corrected. ‘You think it’s a stupid idea.’ She didn’t mind. She had a thousand new ideas for the refuge every day, and so did he. Some of them were practical – they were going to have to build a couple more bathrooms. Most of them were pretty stupid. ‘I think we should employ a pilates instructor, don’t you? Live-in. Nobody will want to go to a retreat which doesn’t do yoga and pilates, however much trouble they’re in.’

‘Grey McShane didn’t seem to mind.’

‘Grey’s different. I love him, but he’s a lunatic. And an alcoholic. And he came to stay when it was still a house and he wasn’t paying.’

‘He’s paying now.’

‘No, but he wasn’t then. Anyway he’s a friend, he doesn’t count…By the way I don’t suppose he mentioned anything to you about moving out did he, before we left?’

‘Not exactly, no. I think he and Dad are both assuming they’re going to stay on and help run the refuge, since it was partly their idea. Dad says he’ll move into the cottage, but I’d be surprised…’

‘Well.’ Jo shrugged. Grey wasn’t a problem. She felt less enthusiastic about sharing a house with her intractable father-in-law, who didn’t like her and never would make any attempt to hide it. But he was old and lonely. He’d lived at Fiddleford all his life. And Charlie, who loved him, was all the family he had left. So he thought she was – whatever he did think. She didn’t care. She thought he was a fascist buffoon. They squabbled virtually every time they spoke, but it was harmless enough. Sometimes she wondered if they both didn’t even enjoy it. Either way she certainly wasn’t going to force him out. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ she said. ‘It’s not like the house isn’t big enough.’

‘Grey wants to pay to put high voltage electric fencing all around the park.’

She smiled. ‘Can’t blame him after what they put him through.’ She sighed. ‘Poor sod. I think we should find him a girlfriend.’

‘And I think,’ Charlie laughed, slowly leaning across the bath towards her, ‘with his track record he’s more than capable of finding one for himself…’

And they lapsed into silence, and through the opened windows the breeze softened, the turtles frolicked, and any thoughts of the past and the future slowly ebbed away…

Accident– an unplanned, uncontrolled event with the potential to cause injury, damage or other loss.

Controlor control measure– an item or action designed to remove a hazard or reduce the risk from it.

Reportable accident– one that must be reported to the appropriate enforcement authority.

Health and Safety First Principles Workbook, Chartered Institute of Environmental Health

Fiddleford Manor lay deep beneath snow. The boiler was broken, the house was freezing, the roof was leaking and there was a policeman at the bottom of the drive. Jo and Charlie had returned from their Mexican honeymoon only three weeks earlier, besotted, euphoric, absolutely one hundred per cent in love. And yet, as she looked out at the frozen landscape and the heavy, grey, endless sky, she thought for the first time of the perspex desk she had left in Soho, and of the low-fat, high-concept working lunch she would have been enjoying at exactly this moment six months ago, and briefly, treacherously, found herself wondering if she might have been better off staying in London, where mass cullings never interrupted the running of things, and where there was always emergency hot water at the gym.

A ludicrous thought, of course. And wrong, too. Jo loved her new life. She loved her new husband – of course. And she loved her old house.

It would have been difficult not to. Fiddleford Manor, built from the warm red local stone nearly three hundred years ago – vast, elegant and mostly held together by ivy – nestled magnificently inside its own landscaped park and, beyond that, a small and unspoilt and entirely unprofitable agricultural estate. There was a rose garden and a small lake with an old rowing boat to one side of the house, and a decrepit Victorian stable yard with its own broken clock tower on the other; at the front the long, wide lawns stretched past one towering cedar tree and the occasional jungle-like rhododendron all the way to the river bank. The house was a mile from the local village, where there was a church and a school and a small shop, four miles from the market town of Lamsbury and thirty-seven miles from the nearest train station, in the neighbouring county of Devon.

But right now Devon, like everywhere else, was out of bounds. The whole world was out of bounds. Ever since the man from Trading Standards had managed to struggle up the drive, with his appalling lilac-coloured office shirt, his appalling ‘Form A’, and his disinfected Wellingtons, it had been against the law for anyone to come on to or off the estate without a licence. And what with everything else that was going on, the entire countryside and every bureaucrat related to it in tailspin, no one had seen fit to grant a licence to the plumber. So the inhabitants of Fiddleford, Jo, Charlie, their difficult friend Grey McShane, and Charlie’s difficult father the General, huddled together in the kitchen, shivering and waiting.

They had been waiting for three days now. Or five days if you counted from the first telephone call, which was when everything really started changing. It came as they were finishing dinner. The General, who was meant – though he still showed no signs of it – to be in the process of moving into a large cottage at the end of the drive, had said, ‘Who the bloody Hell calls at this hour?’ and Charlie had gone off to find out. He came back into the dining room twenty minutes later, looking very bleak.