Page 40 of Coming Home to Roseford Villas
All the same, he might just call Aunt Vi after work. He was curious to see who’d made the offer on Roseford Villas, and what Vi’s feelings were about it. Maybe it was the last, final flare of hope in his chest, but he needed to be sure Bryan and Vi weredoing the right thing in accepting the offer. As he waved his security pass at the barriers that led to the lift that would take him to yet another day in the glass box inside the building that had become his prison, he tried to tell himself that he wouldn’t start googling small business mortgages in his lunch hour. There was no point, unless a miracle happened.
47
Rory didn’t take long to unpack her carful of possessions. In the end, she’d been very selective about what she’d chosen to keep. It had felt rather cleansing, sorting everything out that had constituted her life in the flat share with Alex, and as she knew the gatehouse had a fully equipped kitchen, she’d opted not to split the pots and pans. She had brought her Bodum cafetière with her, though, and as she sipped a cup of strong coffee and toyed with the arrangement of her books on one of the many floor-to-ceiling bookcases in the small lounge of the gatehouse, Rory felt a sense of contentment washing over her.
As she’d driven through the centre of Roseford, she’d looked at the shortbread-coloured stone buildings, and the pops of colour outside them from the winter pansies in hanging baskets and flower tubs, and felt the reassuring sensation of having made the right decision. She’d explored the village a great deal when she’d been living here in the summer, but she was looking forward to taking more time, now that she was a proper resident. She’d even bought herself a new pair of walking boots, so she could get out and about as the winter set in properly.
Arranging her workspace enhanced this feeling of rightness. She’d written most of her novel in the chalet but sitting at the antique mahogany desk in the small study that would just about have served as a second bedroom on the first floor of the gatehouse really made her feel like a writer.
The first week flew by, and at the end of it, Rory was itching to get started on the workshop she was teaching at Halstead House. She’d taken the materials that Stella had used for a few of her courses and adapted them to something she felt more confident delivering. Stella was a renowned journalist and had developed her reputation as a writer of excellent literary non-fiction over the years during her long collaboration with Roseford Hall, but her teaching style and her areas of expertise were quite different to Rory’s. Using Stella’s notes as a template, Rory had spent a blissful week overhauling them to suit her own methods, and, when she’d presented her ideas, Stella had been over the moon with the results. Stella had advertised the course at the beginning of September, and it had sold out swiftly: if Rory hadn’t stepped in to run it, Stella would have done it herself, but she was pleased to hand over the reins to her friend. Stella’s trust in her made Rory feel a whole lot more confident about what she was going to be teaching. And, to add icing to the proverbial cake, Stella had set up an extra-special guest to address the course attendees on their last day. Rory knew, if she was being totally honest with herself, that the ‘special guest’ was probably the reason most people had booked onto the course, but everyone had to start somewhere. She’d begun submitting her novel to literary agents, and although none had as yet asked to read the whole thing, she lived in hope.
As dawn broke on day one of ‘Writing the perfect romance novel: a course by Rory Dean, romance writer’, Rory awoke feeling a combination of excitement and terror. Had she and Stella over-egged the pudding by creating this course? Would noone turn up for the first couple of days, and suddenly there’d be a crowd for the special guest on the third? No. She couldn’t think that way: it would all be fine. If she could teachMacbethto a thirty-strong class of bored, bolshy teenagers on a rainy Thursday afternoon in a damp classroom in York, she could teach an excited group of adults with literary aspirations how to write a novel!
A couple of hours into the course, she was feeling a lot less sanguine. All of them, it appeared, had much more experience of the ups and downs of writing novels than she, with her one, mostly finished book, had. The six guests, all of whom showed remarkable knowledge of the traumas of the novel-submission process, had reacted with polite but sceptical responses to her first morning’s seminar, titled ‘Bringing your romance to life: drawing on real emotions to tell fictional stories’. Although they hadn’t said as much, Rory couldn’t have felt more out of her depth if someone had rubber stamped ‘IMPOSTER’ on her forehead.
‘It’s no good, Stella,’ Rory moaned as she had a cup of coffee in Stella’s private living room during the break session. ‘They’re looking at me as if I’m the biggest fraud this side of Robert Maxwell! I don’t think I can pull this off for another two days.’
‘Oh, don’t be so daft!’ Stella replied stoutly. ‘What this group needs most of all is time to write. You’ve been teaching grumpy teenagers to do that for over a decade. I know you might be lacking the commercial success at the moment, but you’ve got expertise in spades. You have to believe in yourself, Rory, because no one else is going to unless you do first.’
Rory smiled. Stella always knew what to say to put things into perspective, and while she still felt odd about calling herself a fully-fledged writer, there was no arguing with her years of classroom experience. ‘Thanks for the pep talk, boss!’ she said, draining her coffee cup. ‘I’d better get back to it.’
‘You’ve got this, Rory Dean!’ Stella replied. ‘Get back out there and teach your heart out.’
With this encouragement ringing in her ears, Rory raised her head and plastered on a self-assured smile. Half of conquering the classroom was the illusion of confidence: something told her that teaching at Halstead House needed exactly the same thing.
48
It was no good. Leo couldn’t stop thinking about that blasted offer on Roseford Villas. He had enough self-awareness to know that he’d always been the kind of person who wanted something the moment it became unobtainable, but this time he was sure it was more than that. He looked impatiently at the clock in the office, willing the hands to move faster so that he could give his aunt and uncle a call. He’d decided he couldn’t wait until the evening to speak to them, and he was itching to get off the Microsoft Teams call he was tied up in and just phone them. He was finding it increasingly difficult to keep his mind on the job. Words onscreen blurred before his eyes, and more than once he’d drifted off during the meeting, only coming back to the virtual room when Andrew Palmer called his name, the second time with more than a trace of impatience.
‘Er, sorry, Andy,’ Leo replied quickly. ‘I was just looking through Section 4a again – thought I’d double-check a possible discrepancy.’
‘And is there one?’ Andrew had asked, the irritation in his voice still evident.
‘One what?’
‘A discrepancy?’
Leo’s face felt hot with the lie. ‘Er, no. No, there isn’t.’
Andrew Palmer’s sigh was almost imperceptible over the Wi-Fi. ‘Well then. Can we proceed?’
Leo nodded, and then, gratefully, put his microphone on ‘Mute’. He tried to keep his expression carefully neutral, but the sight of his own, still slightly flushed face staring back at him from a corner of the screen filled him with even more embarrassment. He hated virtual meetings, and the fact that the company had taken to scheduling them more and more was yet another reason why he knew he was very definitely in the wrong place.
Somehow, he managed to get through the rest of it without disgracing himself further, and as he hung up the call, he leaned back in his chair. He still had a truckload of work to move off his desk before he could escape for a coffee, which he felt like he needed more than ever, but he wasn’t getting far with it.
It came as no surprise when there was a knock at his door just before eleven o’clock. Not waiting to be called in, Andrew strode through, and sat on the other side of Leo’s desk.
‘Have you got a minute, Leo?’
Sitting up a little straighter, Leo heard Andrew’s tone of voice and his heart began to race. ‘I’m sorry about zoning out in the meeting earlier, Andy. I’ve not had much sleep for the past couple of days. It won’t happen again.’
To Leo’s surprise, Andrew’s expression softened. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said gently. ‘I haven’t come to carpet you. These things happen, and even the client knows the minutiae of contract law is enough to send anyone to sleep, sometimes.’
Leo’s back relaxed a little. But he’d been in the corporate world long enough to know that a quiet voice didn’t always mean a pleasant outcome. He waited for the bomb to drop.
‘You’ve been working here just over two months now, Leo,’ Andrew continued. ‘That’s pretty much your probationary period, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ Leo replied. ‘End of this week, and I’m through.’
