“Anyway, it’s irrelevant. He doesn’t need to come again,” she says, echoing my thought. “We all got served with court papers advising us that our contracts were null and void.”
“What?” I swallow a big gulp of hot coffee by mistake and scald my mouth and throat. “He can’t do that.”
“He has done it. And he’s contesting the original division of assets, so Kendric House still belongs to him and any agreements we made with Evan are not valid.”
A cold breeze rustles the yellowing leaves on the tree outside and knifes in through my open kitchen window, raising goosepimples on my arms. “They can’t make that stick, regardless of any squabble over the inheritance. The individual enterprises belong to us. We can prove it.”
“Maybe. But in the meantime, we’ve been served with an injunction against us dissipating income from the house.”
“Dissipating?”
“Frittering away. It means we can’t touch any money from visitors to the house. It has to go into a holding account until they decide who really owns what percentage of Kendric Park and how much of the income should be going to Owen.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can you operate without money? You can contest it in court. No judge would allow him to—”
“Maybe.” She interrupts me with the next blow. “But the damage will have been done. We’re all going to go bankrupt.”
I don’t understand. “What do you mean?”
She pauses to collect herself then says in a calmer voice. “They’ll just drag it out endlessly. It’s a death sentence because we all need the income to pay costs. I mean, how am I supposed to run a café and keep it stocked? They won’t even let me have any of the money the Squad normally pay towards catering. So either I feed them for free or they have to move, which will bankrupt Raff too.”
A death sentence indeed. “And Evan…?” I ask, already guessing the answer.
“He’s the worst hit because he has to cover the overheads. Gas, lecky, water and council tax.”
A cold feeling washes down my body. “No electricity means no internet. Which would kill the Hub.”
“All of us who rely on customers for our income.”
“They can’t do that. Surely they can’t,” I repeat mechanically.
“They’ve done it,” she says, sounding utterly hopeless.
All of the partners. Alex hired people to work on the restoration. How much money has he sunk into this? And the professor? The kind man who kept me company in the Hubbefore Easter, working through the night to collect the stories and histories of the families that lived in the house.
“Evan instructed a solicitor immediately and filed a claim. They argued that until the main case is settled, the businesses have to be allowed to cover our costs and pay staff.”
That makes me sit up. “Thank God.”
“No.” She doesn’t sound hopeful at all. “It’s like fighting an avalanche. They’re burying us under a mountain of papers. Claims and more challenges. Every question we answer they respond with five more.”
Leonie’s voice, flat with despair, stays with me as I get ready for work. A disaster that can’t be avoided.
My old partners. The people who helped me so generously. Don’t they all have bank loans to repay? What’s going to happen to them?
I was lucky; the flat in London makes money so it pays for the massive mortgage. But Raff, Llewellyn, Alex and Osian? They don’t have other property; they’ve sunk everything into Kendric House.
The answer is simple. They can’t survive. Leonie’s right. Regardless of what happens with the legal case, if it drags on long enough everyone will be ruined. If Evan is bankrupt, he’ll lose the house. His brother wins by default.
I don’t know how I get through my session. Weekends are my busiest times with people booking on the potting workshops. To make matters worse, I’d already launched a Grow a Present for Christmas campaign to generate business in the colder part of the year.
This weekend I had six sessions. The last, on Sunday afternoon, was over-booked with enthusiastic amateur gardeners eager to learn about fuchsias, camellias and honeysuckle. But for all I know I might have been teaching them to boil eggs. My mind was all the way in theBannau Brycheiniog. Even the Welsh words make my heart twist painfully. The place I loved. The people – not only Osian but hisPerllans,for whom Kendric Park was their best hope of finding a way out of a dead end. And what about Ricky, Rhian, all the lost teenagers who found a home?
As my customers drift out, all of them carrying several potted cuttings, one of them asks, “I’m sure you have a wonderful garden. Do you have pictures?”
“Sadly, no.” I wave her goodbye, wishing I had pictures of Hope Gardens in their summer glory.
Then it hits me.
