Page 62 of My Kind of Happy

Chapter Nineteen

‘The Kiwi Wants a Wife!’ Ethel had repeated it several times, hooting with mirth. ‘She’s got gumption; I’ll give her that. Flying to New Zealand to be on a TV dating show! Whatever will they think of next?’

Nina did have gumption and guts. Whatever else I might feel about the bombshell she’d dropped on me earlier, I couldn’t help but admire her bravery.

‘She has dreamed of marrying a farmer her whole life,’ I explained. ‘She’s dying to do some travelling and when the opportunity came to meet a panel of farmers on the other side of the world, all looking for love, she thought it was too good to be true. And the fact that she’s basically getting a free holiday thrown into the bargain made it irresistible.’

My head had been reeling after the events and revelations of the day. So instead of going back to Pineapple Road straight away, I’d wrapped up a bunch of roses for Ethel and called into her care home. It was a warm sunny evening and we were taking a gentle stroll in the grounds, heading vaguely in the direction of the lake. As before, Ethel had shunned the wheelchair we’d been offered and was using her walking frame. It was slow going but I didn’t mind; I needed Ethel’s company far more than I needed the exercise.

Scamp, normally one to take off at speed at the first sight of water, was plodding along between us, gazing up adoringly at Ethel every few seconds. It seemed that, like me, he was prepared to compromise his normal pace just to be near her.

‘Sounds like a peculiar sort of television programme to me,’ she said. ‘Shipping in women from another continent. Still, it’s all in the name of love, I suppose.’

‘Or TV ratings,’ I said sceptically. ‘Apparently the contestants have to undergo a variety of rural challenges to see who’s cut out for an isolated life with one man and ten thousand sheep.’

Once Lucas had slipped away, Nina had closed the shop and the two of us had sat in the back to talk. She was fluttery and nervous, bursting with excitement about her news, but scared to death about my reaction to it and she so wanted me to be OK with it.

It had been Lucas who’d spotted it on Twitter and had pointed it out to her half-jokingly. A TV researcher had posted a request for women who wanted a date with a difference. After a couple of glasses of wine, they’d tweeted the researcher back and got some more information. Lucas had egged her on to apply immediately.

‘To put this into context, Fearne,’ Nina had said, solemnly. ‘My love life was and still is barely alive at all, I couldn’t see how I could ever make the shop pay, I was overworked, underpaid and lonely and I just wanted to run away from everything.’

When the invoice came from the landlord for the next quarter’s rent it was the final straw. She filled in the online application form and sent it off to be a contestant on The Kiwi Wants a Wife. It was to be filmed this summer, which would be winter in New Zealand. She figured that even if she didn’t get matched with a farmer, it would be a way to get some time to herself and figure out what to do next with her life. The deadline came and went and she heard nothing, so assumed she’d been unsuccessful. It felt like her escape plan had failed and she felt worse than ever.

‘Then Kelly got a new job and left me and I had to do the flowers for Rosie’s wedding on my own. I was on the verge of a breakdown.’ She paused and smiled. ‘I told myself if I could just get through the wedding, I’d come in the following Monday and prepare the shop for sale. And then who should turn up but Fearne, my fairy godmother, with her big kind heart and positive attitude that made me believe in myself again.’

‘Oh.’ I’d stared at her stunned that that was the impression I’d made. ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’

She squeezed my arm. ‘I couldn’t believe my luck; I’d got another chance to get the business back on track and met someone who not only listened and cared, but rolled up her sleeves and got stuck in.’

Her words had made my chest swell with pride. She’d gone on to tell me that out of the blue she’d received a phone call from the production company last week and had been asked to attend an audition in London yesterday. It had gone well and before she’d even made it back to Derbyshire on the train, she got a call to say she’d been successful. She had forty-eight hours to confirm her place in the show and if she accepted, she’d be leaving Barnaby for New Zealand in two weeks.

‘I’d never have accepted a loan from you if I’d known this was going to happen, and I’ll pay back every penny of it, I promise.’

I’d dismissed her concerns. ‘I’m not worried about that. I’m more worried about running a florist’s on my own when I’ve barely been in the business for a month.’

Nina hadn’t pleaded exactly, she’d merely asked me to consider it, but her body language would have put a starving puppy to shame.

There was a bench just ahead and Ethel guided us to it now, sinking down with an ooph.

‘What happened to meeting a nice young man at the local dancehall?’ she asked me, baffled.

‘Different times,’ I said wistfully, thinking how nice it would be to do just that. ‘Nowadays, farmers in small communities struggle to meet partners, apparently.’

‘They never seem to have that problem in The Archers,’ said Ethel.

‘Because they ship new characters in to spice things up,’ I laughed. ‘But I guess if you grow up in a small farming community, you all know each other from childhood so there’s none of the spark you get when you first meet someone. And if there’s no spark, there’ll never be a flame.’

My mind slipped back to the first time I’d seen Sam. There’d been a tiny spark then, on my side at least, which had lit me up from the inside right until he’d snuffed it out with the mention of a wife.

‘Tommyrot,’ said Ethel. ‘There wasn’t a spark between George and me to begin with. He was the quiet boy in my class at school, quietly lovely, I used to think. For a long time, I didn’t pay him any attention.’

Quietly lovely. Like Sam, I thought with a pang. I had to stop thinking about this man who was a husband and a father. And besides, my heart was still too fragile at the moment to start a new relationship. The old adage of better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all didn’t work for me. The fear of losing someone else from my life was far greater than my need to fall in love.

‘Don’t tell me you went for the bad boys?’ I pretended to be shocked.

Ethel’s eyes twinkled. ‘Not bad exactly, just a few years older and more worldly-wise.’

Laura and I had once vowed that we’d never go out with any boys from our year at school because whether they admitted it or not, they’d always remember us with spots, or braces or those dodgy few weeks when we didn’t wash our hair because someone told us it would make it really shiny but what actually happened was that we stank and no one would sit by us in assembly.