Page 39 of Summer At Willow Tree Farm

After about an hour, all the enthusiasm and excitement had begun to wane, as tired children whined for attention. Toto and Josh appeared to demand their supper and Maddy and Jacob disappeared upstairs as everyone else began to pack up their kids and head home.

‘Don’t worry, Art will come around. Especially when he sees how brilliant this is gonna be,’ Annie commented as she left with the now exhausted Freddie snuggled in her arms.

Once everyone had gone and Toto and Josh had been sent to bed, Ellie helped her mother put the used coffee mugs and plates into the industrial dishwasher. But Art’s intervention kept running through her head.

He’d managed to cast a shadow over what had been an otherwise energising and exciting evening full of potential for the future.

The man was the anti-karma.

‘Don’t be angry with him,’ Dee said, as she loaded the last of the cutlery and set the machine.

‘Angry with who?’ Ellie scooped the cake crumbs off the table, refusing to meet her mother’s eyes.

She really didn’t want to think about Art and his shitty attitude because it was totally destroying her happy buzz. And reminding her of the distance between her and her mother. That absolutely did not bother her. She wasn’t a teenager any more and she was not about to get into another pissing contest with Art over her mother’s affections. He’d already won that one, but apparently he didn’t even have the good grace to be magnanimous about it.

Dee rested cool fingers on the tight muscles of Ellie’s forearm. ‘Art’s not good with change.’

The justification spiked Ellie’s temper. ‘Art’s also not good with people generally. And me in particular.’

And she’d never done anything to deserve it. Not nineteen years ago and certainly not now.

‘He can be difficult when he feels threatened,’ her mother continued, as if this was still all about Art. ‘He had to deal with so much when he was younger. And I suspect it was the only way he could cope.’

‘Like what? What exactly did he have to cope with that gives him the right to be an arsey prick for the rest of his natural life?’ Because she really wanted to know now. She’d been so pathetically grateful for her mother’s support. But why should she be? Didn’t she deserve at least a little support from her own mother?

Why had her mother alw

ays protected Art? Why was she still excusing his behaviour even now? Her mother didn’t know the full extent of what had happened between the two of them back then, and Ellie certainly didn’t intend to enlighten her, because neither of them would come out of it looking good. But she was not about to let Art treat her like that again.

‘I got some of it out of Laura,’ Dee said, not disputing that Art was an arsey prick. So you’re OK with that, are you, Mum? ‘And some of it in confidence from Art. And the rest I can only guess at,’ Dee continued, being annoyingly cryptic. ‘But you mustn’t take his manner to heart. It’s just his way.’

She so would take it to heart, because she had been the one tonight taking the direct hit. But she could see there was no mileage in arguing the toss with the president of the Art Dalton Fan Club. Her mother had declared on Art’s side when she’d made the decision to stay at the commune and become Art’s surrogate mum instead of coming home to London to be Ellie’s real mum.

The futile resentment burned the back of her throat, but she forced herself to ignore it.

Ultimately, she’d survived without her mother, she and her father had muddled through on their own.

She heaved out a sigh and tried to take stock.

She’d made progress with Dee in the last two weeks. She didn’t want to revisit all those old resentments. It was ancient history now. And anyway, her mum wasn’t the one with a case to answer here. Dee wasn’t the one who had comprehensively tried to screw her over tonight for no good reason.

‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’ve had to deal with more than a few difficult clients in my time.’

Although dealing with a budget-busting change in the entrée from salmon to scallops twenty-four hours before a banquet for five hundred accountants at the end of a team-building weekend didn’t seem quite as daunting right now as corralling six foot two of hard-arsed macho diva.

‘I can handle Art Dalton,’ she finished.

Or she would be able to, once she’d given him a crash course in why not to piss on Ellie Preston’s parade.

*

Dee watched her daughter leave the kitchen, the temper in her stride a welcome change from the nervous tremor in her fingers at the start of the meeting. She picked up the cloth Ellie had left on the table, rinsed it at the sink and draped it over the tap.

You can’t smooth over everything, Dee. Sometimes you just have to let bad things happen and then deal with it the best you can.

Pammy’s words rang in her head, the way they had a million times since that summer. Sentiment mixed with loneliness in the pit of her stomach making her feel tired.

She could go and warn Art that Ellie was on the warpath, but she wasn’t sure he deserved the heads-up. He had been out of order during the meeting.

---