Page 21 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm
Gemma had said that? Jodie fought to keep the surprise off her face. She couldn’t imagine Gemma coming off that cocky. Gemma was the sweet and kind one who always said the right thing. Jodie was the screw-up. She smiled as brightly as she could manage. ‘Sprout Day might test my abilities a bit.’
‘Is there anything else we can do with them?’ Adam asked.
Bella and Adam were both looking at Jodie. What did she know about sprouts? They were horrible. That wasn’t helpful. They appeared in Christmas dinner like evil little bitterness bombs. ‘Massive Christmas dinner?’ she asked.
Adam glanced at the beds behind him. ‘It’ll have to be really massive.’
Bella half smiled. ‘Maybe you need to stick “Imaginative uses for sprouts” on the to-do list, Gemma.’ She gave her fiancé a quick peck on the lips. ‘We’ll leave you to it. Gemma’s probably chomping to actually get to work rather than tag along after me all day.’
‘I don’t mind.’ Did that sound like she was putting off getting to work? ‘I mean it’s useful finding out where everything is. Efficient really to do all this first.’
Bella chattered all the way back to the castle about plans and ideas for making the estate profitable for the long-term. The cookery school was clearly her baby and where her heart lay but her brain was going at a thousand miles a minute with thoughts about the stables and the walled garden and converting the coach house and opening a tea shop or a pop-up restaurant and offering regular guided tours. ‘That’s tricky with all the community groups though,’ she added.
‘With what?’
Bella sighed. ‘We haven’t even talked about that, have we? The castle also runs as a kind of makeshift community centre. So we have parents and toddlers here on Tuesday and Thursday – in fact I think Nina’s coming over to talk about that this afternoon. Then there’s book club once a month. They bring a little bit in for the room hire and teas and coffees, but mostly we just do it for the community. Make sure the locals know we’re not just another big estate who don’t give a crap.’
Something Pavel had said on the way over rang a bell. ‘Like the Mc… McKenzie, is it?’
‘Exactly. If you tried to hold your meeting there they’d charge you an extra fee for breathing the air.’ Bella pulled a face. ‘Not that any of our groups would stand for that anyway. I’d sort of love to see what the Ladies’ Group would do if we tried.’
‘Who?’
‘Ladies’ Group. They meet here most weeks. AKA the people who actually run the village. You should probably come to that.’
Jodie was instantly picturing a room full of Hyacinth Buckets, pearls clutched, lips pursed, disapproval ready to deploy at the slightest provocation.
‘Seriously, worth starting on the right foot with them. Next meeting is…’ Bella frowned for a second. ‘Not the first week of the month, not a green bin week, not a fish delivery day or the mobile library, but Anna’s sister is visiting at the weekend so… Thursday. At Nina’s house. You’d be very welcome.’
Jodie reminded herself that the Gemma she was trying to be was endlessly amenable. ‘Sounds great.’ She beamed.
‘Good. Tea?’
‘Great.’ Jodie was not a tea drinker. Or a coffee drinker. It was a great social faux pas on her part, she knew, and probably evidence of the extent to which she wasn’t a proper grown-up. Gemma, she thought, loved tea. The Gemma she was creating would be the warm, capable type who was forever popping the kettle on and sorting out other people’s woes over a nice hot brew.
This resolve was weakened slightly by the first sip of sad brown water.
‘Do you take sugar?’
Sugar had to help, surely. Jodie chucked two heaped teaspoons of sweetness into her mug and stirred. It did help. It didn’t help enough to make the ubiquitousness of tea drinking in anyway explicable. ‘Mmmm,’ she murmured. ‘Lovely.’
‘So I guess your job is to take all our mad ideas and impose some order on them.’
Not exactly a formal job description but it was the best Jodie had had so far.
‘And then to work out how we’re actually going to persuade anyone to come and spend money on them,’ Bella added. ‘So organisation, and marketing.’ She paused. ‘And social media.’
‘Right.’
‘And special events.’ Bella grinned. ‘I should have said that first, shouldn’t I? I mean, that’s the actual job title.’
Jodie suddenly felt she ought to be writing things down. She opened her notebook and wroteeventsandsocial media.She knew there’d been more in Bella’s list than that but the other things had already danced out of her head. Things did that. Catching hold of her thoughts was like chasing butterflies across a meadow. Her mother loved butterflies and hated those displays in museums where some mad Victorian had pinned pages and pages of the poor things into a scrapbook. How on earth did they get the butterflies to stay still? They probably gassed them, didn’t they? That sounded awful. Did they make them fly into a box and then fill it with gas, or did they put tiny masks on them like a creepy insect doctor? Jodie had only been under anaesthetic once. She remembered the anaesthetist though. He had blond hair and kind eyes.
‘So what you do you think?’
Bella had been talking to her the whole time, hadn’t she? Jodie had been chasing butterflies and counting backwards from ten and Bella had been talking to her about the actual job she was supposed to be doing. Jodie nodded hopefully. ‘I agree.’
‘Great. I’ve been telling Adam we need to go for it and do something big but he’s nervous about the money. He’s always nervous about money, but I think you have to grasp the nettle.’
