When the doorbell rings, I don’t respond until I hear Izz saying, ‘She’s through there, isn’t speaking or anything. I don’t know what to do with her,’ and I wonder who she’s referring to until Patrick strides into Izz’s living room, his face all concern, and I realise it’s me they’re worried for.
‘Margi, hey,’ he says, sitting me upright as he slots in beside me on the sofa. ‘Come here.’
He pulls me to him, tight in his arms. The closeness overwhelms me completely. It’s so long since anyone’s held me, and he’s so big and warm and safe.
I let all my tears fall, for our gingerbread grotto and all our hard work, and for our village hall, and for Mum and Dad and the legacy they handed me, now crushed under rubble.
I hear him saying to Izz, ‘We should have said something about the cloakroom leak, got a real plumber in. If they find out I fixed that first leak, we could be held responsible for the roof coming down.’
When I try to speak and tell him it’s not his fault, I find my voice won’t work properly, and he shushes me gently, telling me to rest.
He rocks me, his steady hands stroking my hair, and I close my eyes and sink into him.
Having had four hours’ sleep on Izz’s sofa and woken up with Patrick gone and a splitting headache that took three espressos to shift, I find myself wondering if the term ‘emergency meeting’ isn’t a little over the top, actually.
‘We need some answers,’ Izz insisted, and I was so over-caffeinated and still wrapped in the sensation of having been rocked to sleep in Patrick’s arms that I found myself going along with anything she said.
I wasn’t fully sold on the idea of a meeting, not until we went back to look at the village hall taped off in the cold afternoon light. I suppose it did spark a little fire in my belly. It’s not like I can leave Wheaton while the fate of the building is uncertain, can I?
Mum would be hopping mad about all this, not with me, but with the council for just blockading the place, for not organising a big community clean-up like it’s the blitz, and especially for not offering any kind of sympathy for the loss of our exhibit.
I daren’t ring her, though. She’d have a few motivational words for me, no doubt. She’d want me to kick up a fuss, to call theMidlands Todaynewsroom, alert the papers, rally some support. Only, we tried all those things last year, and the year before that, and nobody bothered to turn up. To give it its due, theWheaton Parish Newsletterdid run a feature about the opening of the display last year – it saidNewlyweds’ Sweet Sensationand there was a picture of me and Don in our wedding clothes cutting the ribbon across the hall entrance and a crowd of schoolkids and their mums waiting to get in – but that was as far as we ever got with attention-grabbing headlines.
‘There’s local interest pieces and then there’s very, very local stuff,’ the BBC intern on the line had told me years ago now.
If they didn’t send any reporters out to see our glorious gingerbread grotto in all its sparkly splendour, they’re hardly going to send a camera crew to look at it when it’s been flattened.
Anyway, the meeting had taken Izz all morning to arrange. She was the one who phoned round everybody.
When Lucy said she was up for causing a bit of a ruckus, there was no backing out for me, so here we are, occupying the school gymnasium.
The unfortunately named Mrs Slaughter, the school receptionist, was easy to inveigle. I knew she would be. We’ve always got on – and dropping in a big box of chocolate seashells and a decent bottle of wine every December in return for the school letting us use the car park has not been forgotten, it seems.
She even dug out the council regulations – she’s their secretary too; quite our woman on the inside – and has set the book on a desk open at the page that states that any member of any established local interest group or committee is entitled to call an extraordinary meeting of the relevant members of the council, and at short notice too, should there be any of the following: natural disaster affecting the community; evidence of crime, corruption or a safeguarding issue; or if the council is deemed to be in breach of its commitment to local groups as outlined in their ‘community cohesion framework’, section 12, part C.
‘But will they come?’ I ask her, and my voice echoes through the school gym.
‘They have to,’ Mrs Slaughter says. ‘Rodney Carruthers is going to join us by Zoom because he’s at his second home in Salcombe for the winter.’
I reckon she’s secretly enjoying this. Mrs Slaughter is cheesed off with Leo for what he’s done to Patrick and, let’s just say, she’s no fan of Scrimengor’s either, and I know she’ll be a stickler for the rules, firm but fair, and not one member of the council would dare test her knowledge of the rule book.
A glance at the clock tells me it’s six p.m. Still nobody’s here. We turn at the sound of soft footsteps, my heart lifting.
‘Oh, it’s you, Bobbie,’ Mrs S says, as my heart sinks at the sight of the muscly boot-camp instructor in neck-to-knee Lycra.
‘I’m just setting up,’ they say. ‘What’s all this?’ They point at the eight chairs laid out in front of the desk on the little raised area which the school ambitiously calls its stage.
‘Council meeting,’ I say.
Bobbie bites their top lip, not even pretending they’re fine with this. ‘I’ve paid for the hall from half-six till eight.’
‘We won’t be long, I promise,’ I say, and Bobbie harrumphs at me.
‘They’re coming!’ Lucy calls from the hall’s swing doors where she’s been keeping watch.
‘Is Patrick there?’ I say. I want to thank him for this morning, for being a friend when I needed comforting. For having such strong arms and being so good at holding me in them, but of course, he’ll be at work. Probably for the best, in case I actually did say all those daft things and make everything awkward yet again.
Before Lucy can answer, she’s propelled into the hall by both doors flying wide open and a very annoyed Mr Scrimengor, accompanied by the guy in the suit who pinned the notice on the lamppost early this morning, and behind them, Sully Scrimengor in a white bakers’ overall, leaving a light trail of flour from his boots. Following all of them is Leo Bold with his jaw fixed hard and his tie knot loosened.
