‘Excuse me, what’s this?’ Beatrice asked, suspiciously eyeing the speckled brown discs.
She’d emerged from the princess room tired-eyed and yawning and surprised herself by making it to the breakfast room with ten minutes to spare before service ended for the morning. The unfortunate Gene Fergusson, wearing chefs’ whites, big floppy hat and all, had just set her plate before her on the white linen tablecloth.
‘Thatis the full Scottish. Whit ye ordered.’
He’d presented her plate with a little flourish of the white cloth in his free hand. How different to the ineffectual, flustering man she’d met yesterday. He was clearly in his element making breakfasts. Presumably his runaway wife hadn’t been responsible for the morning food service with him, or doubtless he’d be unable to look at a frying pan ever again.
Beatrice worried momentarily she was about to spoil his composure. ‘No, I mean these things?’ She nudged the unidentified food items with her fork, separating them from the crisp onion hash and curiously square slices of sausage on her plate.
‘That’s yur haggis.’
‘Oh! Right.’
‘Something wrong?’
‘Nope! Nothing wrong. I love a bit of haggis at…’ she peered at her watch, ‘five past eight in the morning.’
Gene chose to be happy with this reply and strolled back to the kitchen, whistling.
The breakfast room windows opened onto the inn’s back garden enclosed by a low stone wall where red crocosmia heads bobbed in the light breeze, scattering the last of the night’s raindrops.
Beatrice gazed out at the dewy, bright morning. She had never been one for breakfast. Even when she’d left home at seven o’clock every morning to get to the Arts Hub across the country in Oxford she had only needed a coffee or three to get her through until lunch but today the plateful in front of her looked so delicious – excepting the haggis – she determined to make a valiant effort with the streaky bacon and buttery field mushrooms.
Gene was back again, pouring her coffee and setting down a rack of hot granary toast, which she set upon immediately with the salty Scottish butter.
‘I’m not normally a breakfast person,’ she remarked to the retreating cook between mouthfuls, but he didn’t seem to hear her, so she looked around at the other diners, all preparing to leave for a day of crafting and summer sightseeing, but there was no sign of Cheryl and Jillian. Beatrice registered a little pang of disappointment before dismissing it as silly. She was, after all, leaving in a few moments. They’d likely never think of her again.
Swirling her spoon in the cup she ran through the journey she would be embarking on today, a reverse of the humid, cramped, seemingly never-ending trek of yesterday beneath grey English clouds and Scotland’s rain-soaked rails.
A splash of coffee spilled in her saucer and the question arose again in her mind, the inevitable, awful question she had been putting off answering for weeks. What exactly was she going to do now?
Slicing into a juicy grilled tomato, rich with the heady scent of the summer greenhouse, she tried to think of the future but found it impossible to picture. There seemed to be very few options open to her. Instead a series of ‘if onlys’ queued up to darken her mood. If only she had a job to go home to. If only she hadn’t hired Helen Smethwick. If only she’d listened to Rich’s warning that her small area of expertise in the arts sector – the place where creativity met with community and charity – was desperately under pressure and would soon collapse in on itself with the weight of underfunding and corporate greed. But she had pressed on, telling him the Arts Hub was her home and she couldn’t imagine working anywhere else.
She sighed, making a start on the delicious triangles of golden fried bread, so greasy and so satisfying as she mopped up the runny yolks of the fried eggs.
She’d thrived on the work. Every week day, and plenty of Saturdays too, for the last nineteen years, there she’d been, at her desk, delegating tasks, calling the meetings, running the joint.
It had started as a graduate job, and it had all felt so easy, walking straight out of uni and into a junior role. Her first task had been helping an alms houses charity write a funding bid so they could run a local food festival in their grounds. Her bosses had been so pleased when she actually won the money and the festival had gone ahead she had been promoted by the end of the year and had bought her first car to celebrate; a second hand, shiny red Fiat, her pride and joy.
Success had come easily, at first. Then, after a couple of years and an ever increasing workload, there was a sudden restructure and she found herself at the head of the organisation: manager of the Oxfordshire Arts Hub, bringing communities and arts practitioners together to put on cool, worthy and creative community events.
Looking back, the Hub had been visionary, inclusive, and wonderful. Back then, the lottery money and the government initiatives felt never-ending and Beatrice had revelled in her team’s successes. They had been a happy bunch. Barely a weekend went by when they weren’t photographed grinning for the local papers opening fetes, helping out at coconut shies and coffee mornings, or dressed up in swanky clothes for community theatre premieres or down at the mall for the opening of artisan pop-up shops – all very much unpaid extras they did for the love of it. They’d supported countless projects, social enterprises and start-ups and Beatrice had managed the whole show, calm and competent, thriving on the buzzing energy of the creative networks around her. It had been great for a long time – until it suddenly wasn’t.
The last thing she’d done in her role was hire Helen Smethwick, her new assistant with HR responsibilities. Her arrival was long overdue; they’d been running on a skeleton staff and goodwill for years. Beatrice hadn’t realised Helen was married to the new head honcho at the council and he had new ideas for money-saving strategies which Helen had every intention of helping him see through, advising him from the inside on what – orwho–could go.
Six weeks after Helen’s arrival the council announced the cuts. The Hub was to lose half its office space and all senior staff were invited to apply for voluntary redundancy. The trouble was, Beatrice was the oldest and longest serving person there. When the cuts came in, her nineteen years of dedication and hard work were rewarded with a long tussle to keep her job, a month’s notice and a four grand payoff last September.
Helen Smethwick had Beatrice’s job now and as far as she could tell from the social media campaigns it was business as usual, only money was tighter and funding harder to come by than ever before. Nothing about it felt fair, but at least the younger staff, people she considered friends, even if their texts were now few and far between, had been protected. That had been some comfort to Beatrice.
Beatrice wasn’t aware she was gulping her coffee and devouring her plateful at an unusually fast pace for her. She was licking her lips and buttering another slice of toast and wolfing the smoky, salty bacon and the herby, savoury sausages, loving every bite, but in her heart she was back at the house she had shared with Rich for so long. She was thinking about the recent endless afternoons at home when there were no job interviews and no emails, no matter how many times she clicked ‘refresh’, and there wasn’t much to do but potter around the house. All her friends were at work at the Hub and they were unlikely to call during the day – at least none of them had yet. So she’d read anything and everything until it was time to cook Rich’s dinner.
It was during these lonely afternoons she wished she had a dog. Dog owners were never stuck for something to do. But Rich was afraid of dogs. He always said he was allergic to them but she knew he was terrified of even the tiniest Chihuahua. She thought for a second that even though she was at The Princess and the Pea Inn in the back of bloody beyond and the Wi-Fi was atrocious, she might have another coffee and try scrolling through slowly buffering pictures of abandoned puppies on the Warwick shelter’s website, something that had become a daily habit back at home lately, but she gave up the idea when she saw the greyed-out bars on her phone.
Every one of those poor mutts had a story sadder than the next. It was the old ones she felt sorriest for, those that were greying and leggy with lumpy hips and slow saunters; the kind of big old dog that still ate its way through a fortune in food and was ancient enough to rack up the vet’s bills. Nobody wanted a dog like that, except maybe Beatrice.
She was sighing and setting down her cutlery on her plate when Gene appeared again.
‘Are you finished there?’
