‘Good morning,’ I say to everyone. ‘How’s it going?’
Lucas leans on his spade. ‘OK. We’ll be done soon.’
‘Excellent. I’ll go and get the tea ready.’
‘Cool.’
‘After break, Alan might need you to give him a hand with mending Sweeney and Carter’s fence. It’s been knocked over again.’
‘No worries.’ Lucas, too, is unusually sunny-natured today. There must be something behind it but I don’t know what. Hopefully I’ll find out, but you can never tell with Lucas. Even though I think he trusts me now, he still likes to hold his cards very close to his chest.
Another new thing is that once a week, I have a volunteer coming in to do arts and crafts with the students and she’s due in later. I don’t know what Anna has planned for them, but at some point we should make Christmas cards and decorations – bunting and stuff, I suppose – to adorn the barn for our open day. Time is of the essence and I guess we need to make a start on it before Christmas has been and gone. There are plenty of holly bushes on the farm if she wants to do something with a natural feel. It’s nice that the kids have some indoor activities to occupy them when the weather is bitterly cold and it’s not so easy to let them loose on the farm. They also have regular, structured lessons every afternoon – maths, English, history – which they are, to a man, less keen on.
‘I’m going to put the kettle on,’ I say to Penny. ‘Want to come down with me?’
‘I’ll wait here,’ she says and stands a little bit closer to Lucas, who is oblivious to her presence. Poor Penny, I think. I’m not sure her adoration is returned.
‘I’ll see you later. You know where I am if you want to chat.’ Then to Lucas, ‘Ten minutes for tea.’
He nods and then turns to finish supervising the kids. It makes me smile to see him organising them so efficiently. They don’t play him up like they do the grown-ups. Lucas is seen as very much on their side.
As I leave them to complete their task in the barn and head to the workshop, I dwell further on Christmas. It’s rushing up with alacrity and I don’t even know what Shelby’s plans are for the holidays. We haven’t had that discussion yet. I can’t see him wanting to spend it in my caravan, as cosy as I find it. He has a beautiful home not far from the farm: Homewood Manor. But it terrifies me. It’s like a palace. I’ve only been there a few times – reluctantly at that – and it’s very fancy. The place is filled with expensive furniture, tasteful paintings and things that look as if they might smash easily. I always feel as if I’m making it untidy just by being there. The air inside is still and smells of nothing, so I’m always aware that my natural and unavoidable eau de farmyard is somewhat amplified. It’s not somewhere I can relax and I know that Shelby finds it difficult to understand my reticence.
He’s filming today and they’re under great pressure, he tells me. As well as the daily episodes to shoot, there is to be a feature-length special that will air on Christmas Day and the schedule is tight. He finds it difficult to grab a few minutes to call me, but he does so when he can.
Today, I hope it doesn’t run too late as he’s promised to have supper with Lucas and me. I’m always on tenterhooks as, if he cancels – especially at the last minute – it can send Lucas into a terrible sulk. Unfortunately though, more often than not, Shelby’s either too late to eat with us or he doesn’t come back to the farm at all, preferring to stay in a hotel near the set where Flinton’s Farm is filmed.
I only went to the set once – that was more than enough. It’s like a proper little village to look at – except there’s nothing behind the façade. Lucas would say the same about his dad – that’s he’s all image with very little sincerity behind the front. I like to think that I’ve seen a different side of Shelby. Between you and me, I think he’s growing tired of the celebrity life. Its shallowness doesn’t give him the comfort and support that he needs. He likes to escape the pretence of Flinton’s Farm and come back to an actual, down-to-earth farm. I think that’s why we’re together, though I might not be the best judge of this. I’m not like the usual, high-maintenance, starry women he’s used to. Far from it. Instead, I hope that I can offer him an alternative type of life. However, while he’s terribly supportive of us financially, I have to admit that he doesn’t much care for getting his hands dirty. The problem is that he’s massively allergic to anything with fur, fluff or feathers. I do think that if the animals didn’t make him sneeze and sniffle he’d love to spend longer here and get more involved with the mucky end of it all, but Lucas doesn’t believe it for one minute. He thinks that Shelby simply wants to drift about feeling benevolent. Even though he’s made great progress since he came to the farm, Lucas’s relationship with his father still hangs by a thread. Shelby daren’t put a foot wrong. Even the slightest word out of place and Lucas reads far too much into it. But I’m working on them both and, hopefully, one day they’ll be fully reconciled. I have my fingers crossed when I say that.
Chapter Seven
I’m pleased to say that I’m not the only one at Hope Farm who has found love. Bev and Alan, who works here too, have recently become an item. They’re also an unlikely pairing.
In contrast to Bev, Alan is the strong, silent type. He does all kinds of jobs for me, particularly ones that involve heavy lifting or a hammer. I’d like to say that he’s become chattier now that he and Bev are madly in love, but conversation is still a strange bedfellow for him.
I swing into the workshop and he pauses in his sawing when he sees me. ‘All right?’
‘I’m fine. You?’
Alan nods.
He used to be quite scruffy in an ageing-hippy kind of way. Now love has found him, he has the air of the older Kris Kristofferson with either a flowing, freshly shampooed mane or a neat plait. Today is a neat-plait day. Before they were a couple, the main source of entertainment for Bev and me was to guess which band T-shirt that he’d be wearing each day. Now he and Bev dress in identical outfits from the merch stand, so Lucas and I have taken over the mantle of daily guessing. This isn’t so much fun for Lucas as, apart from the Sex Pistols, he’s never heard of any bands prior to 2001, which pretty much rules out most of the bands that Alan and Bev know. You’d think that this would increase my chance of winning, but that’s yet to materialise. This is mainly due, as I’ve said, to the fact that I don’t have, and never have had, a telly, so I am woefully ill-informed about popular culture in general. Hence the embarrassment when Shelby and I first met as I’d never actually heard of him, despite his character, Farmer Gordon Flinton, being a long-standing fixture on our screens.
Alan breaks into my musing to state, ‘Horses have done the fence again.’
‘Yeah. I’ve just been up there. Lucas is mucking out the barn, but he can give you a hand with it when he’s done.’
The tiniest inclination of the head says that’s a good idea.
‘What are you making?’
‘Manger for Baby Jesus.’ Taxed by our exchange, Alan returns to his sawing.