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Understood and made her plans for the summer accordingly, only to have them completely blown out of the water, so that she could spend eight weeks running around after three children. It didn’t bear thinking about.
I need a miracle, she’d told herself.
A visit to the headmistress’s office wasn’t usually seen in that light, but as she came away Dana felt like cartwheeling down the corridor.
‘The Heston girls have got chickenpox and the whole family is in quarantine because none of them have had it—and neither have I,’ she told Nicola jubilantly.
‘Oh, thank heaven.’ Nicola’s face lit up. ‘It would have been awful without you. Now, we can have the best summer ever.’
Oh, yes, Dana had told herself. She would make sure of that—with Adam.
How sure I was, she thought now. And how terribly—shamingly wrong.
The storm had moved away into the distance, with only an occasional faint rumble as a reminder. She left the bed and walked to the window, drawing the rush of air deep into her lungs. She pulled over the solitary chair and sat, resting folded arms on the sill, looking out into the darkness. Still no lights anywhere. No moon. Not even the glimpse of a star.
And yet she could see the summer house as clearly as if it had been floodlit. Or simply imprinted on her mind in every detail.
Wooden, she thought, with a thatched roof and verandah where Serafina’s rattan lounger and footrest stood, because the summer house with its view over the house and grounds was her special place.
Thick wooden shutters over unglazed windows, and a wide door opening outwards. Inside, a small table holding a shallow pottery dish containing an assortment of tea lights. Folding chairs against one wall, and facing the door, an enormous elderly sofa, its once luxurious cushions now shabby and sagging, with an equally ancient fur rug on the floor in front of it.
And when she and Nicola had outgrown their shrubbery den, and Serafina did not require it, they were allowed to play there.
Strict rules applied. It had to be left clean and tidy, they were not allowed matches for the tea lights, and they had to close the shutters—‘Squirrels,’ Nicola had said succinctly—and lock up, taking the key back to the house and its hook in the boot room.
But that had been a small price to pay for all those long ago summer days and endless games of make believe.
And even when their fantasies had changed, they’d still enjoyed the occasional picnic there.
She was looking forward to more of them—perhaps with Adam, but Aunt Joss had other ideas.
‘There’s little to be done about chickenpox,’ she’d said grimly. ‘But I can’t have you kicking your heels here for weeks on end, so Mrs Sansom at the Royal Oak has agreed to take you on to help with the rooms and wait at table, although you can’t work behind the bar. She’ll pay you a small wage and you can keep any tips. Your shift will finish once the lunchtime bar snacks are over.’
Dana had listened, appalled. Even the thought of earning some money of her own couldn’t reconcile her to being Mrs Sansom’s dogsbody for half a day. ‘She likes a big cake for her ha’penny’ as a local saying had it.
Worse, Janice Cotton who’d been the leading bully when she was at the village school was working in the Oak’s kitchen, and would almost certainly be waiting to put the boot in.
And if, by some ghastly mischance, Adam and his friends ever decided on a bar lunch in the garden, she’d have to serve them wearing a hideous pink overall with a bright green oak tree emblazoned on the left breast.
And I thought being an au pair was the pits, she’d groaned inwardly.
But she seemed to have little choice in the matter, so the following morning saw her cycling to the village, where, as bad luck would have it, the first person she encountered was Janice.
‘Well, if it isn’t Miss High and Mighty,’ was the greeting, delivered pugnaciously, hands on hips. ‘Tired of your airs and graces up at the big house, are they? Sent you down here, slumming with us peasants? Sorry if I don’t curtsy.’
Dana made no reply as she parked her bike, reflecting that biting her lip hard might well become a way of life.
And, as she soon discovered, working her fingers to the bone.
Her initial encounter with Mrs Sansom had not raised her spirits one iota. Her employer, in her own much repeated words, ‘liked to run a tight ship’. Her tone suggested that any backslider would soon find they were walking the plank.
The Oak did a brisk bed and breakfast trade and the changeover in its six bedrooms had to be swift and efficient.
