‘Far from it. Their ideas were rubbish. They were missing the whole point. This business isn’t just about dumping everything in a warehouse and selling the basics at the cheapest price. You have to sell gardening, the garden, as you would an expensive kitchen or good furniture. It’s got to be desirable, a lifestyle.’ And finally she smiled. ‘You’ve got to appeal to the women.’
‘Did you tell them that?’
‘I thought about it.’ She shrugged. ‘They’d have just looked at me in that puzzled way that men do and then carry on as if I hadn’t spoken, but after they’d gone I couldn’t stop thinking about it.’
‘You had no trouble with planning permission? Change of use?’
‘I’d learned my lesson. I had my hair cut, bought a decent suit, turned myself into someone men would take seriously. I put it to the planners that I simply wanted to change the emphasis from growing to selling. Then I went to the bank and showed them my figures, my business plan.’
‘There were no objections from the neighbours?’ he asked, looking across at the solid stone house, the roofs of the Gilbert glasshouses just visible above the fence. ‘Not even from Seth Gilbert?’
‘Not even from him. Maybe he felt sorry for me.’
‘His mistake.’
‘Yes,’ she said. Then, almost to herself, ‘Not his first.’
Even on a Monday morning the car park was busy with people loading trays of plants, bags of compost, all the attractive garden hardware his mother stocked. ‘You could do with more space,’ he said.
‘I’ll have all the space I need soon,’ she said, joining him at the window. ‘You could have the Gilbert house if you wait a few months. It’ll need a lot of work, but it’ll make a lovely family home.’
‘It will?’ He frowned. ‘You’ve been inside? When?’
She started as if caught out in something illicit. ‘Oh, not in decades,’ she said. ‘But Seth’s mother used to throw wonderful parties.’ She flapped her hand across her face as if brushing away a memory that clung like a cobweb.
‘And you were invited to these parties?’ he persisted.
‘I wasn’t always a Hanover.’ Then she arranged her face into a smile and said, ‘Think about the house. It’s time you settled down, thought about getting married. Is there anyone?’ She didn’t wait for his answer, but said, ‘I’m getting broody for grandchildren.’
He’d assumed that the newspaper cutting had been sent by his mother, that she’d seen the photograph and, spotting some resemblance to him as a child, the kind of thing that only she would notice, she’d suspected the truth, had used it as a lure to bring him home. Nothing in her manner suggested it, however, and her face gave nothing away. But then, it occurred to him, it never had. She’d been not so much dull as blank.
‘I’d rather have the barn,’ he replied.
‘The barn?’
‘I’ve always thought it would make a lovely home. I’ve seen some stunning conversions.’
She turned away abruptly. ‘Sorry, Matt, but I’ve already got the plans drawn up to turn that into a restaurant.’
‘A restaurant?’
‘Customers expect more than a cup of coffee and a bun at garden centres these days,’ she said and opened a cabinet, using the desk to lay out a bundle of drawings, an architect’s sketch of how it would look.
‘Seth Gilbert’s agreed to sell?’ he asked, surprised. His agent hadn’t reported that.
‘I’ve put in a fair offer for the whole site, including the barn and house. I’m still waiting for him to come to his senses and accept.’
Satisfied, he said, ‘Maybe he doesn’t consider your offer as fair as you do.’
‘I’m not a charity,’ she replied, ‘but if he chooses to go bankrupt then there’s nothing I can do about it.’
‘Is that inevitable?’ he asked, as if he didn’t already know to the last penny how much Seth Gilbert owed to the bank. He hadn’t wasted the weeks he’d been forced to delay in Hungary. He’d put the time to good use, acquiring documents, information, legal advice, everything he needed to ensure he got exactly what he wanted.
And it was working.
He’d been home less than twenty-four hours and already Fleur had picked up the telephone and called him. And, in her panic, had told him everything he needed to know.
She’d do anything…
He closed his hand to stop it from shaking and made an effort to tune back in to what his mother was saying.
‘…sooner rather than later. You need to have something no one else has, or be able to work on a much bigger scale these days. No matter. I’ll sit him out and buy from the bank when he goes under.’
‘But in the meantime you’ve somehow managed to obtain a set of drawings of the barn.’
She shrugged. ‘A local builder submitted plans to the local council for converting it into holiday cottages. He was happy to sell them to me when he was turned down.’
‘I’ll bet. So that’s Plan A. What’s Plan B?’
‘Plan B?’
‘The fallback plan. I can see that the semi-rural location has a certain charm, but have you considered that you might do a great deal better if you moved the whole operation to the business park?’
‘I don’t want to move. And to have a fallback plan suggests that I’m prepared to lose.’
So much for her denial that she was at war.
‘Well?’ Her father glanced up from the standard fuchsia he was working on as Fleur placed a cup of tea beside him on the staging.
‘What?’
‘What did this new woman at the bank have to say for herself?’
‘Oh…’
The letter, her brief conversation with Matt, an insidious fear that once Katherine Hanover was involved she’d use her money, influence, the power base she’d built up in the community to snatch her son away from her, had driven everything else from her mind.
She couldn’t even remember the journey home.
‘I, um, left the Chelsea stuff with her to look at in detail.’
‘You didn’t discuss it with her?’
Concentrate, concentrate…
‘She’s more concerned about the overdraft. She wants to talk again next week. To both of us.’ Then, because there was no way to shield him from reality, ‘After we’ve come up with a plan to reduce it.’
‘Tell her she’ll have to wait until the third week in May,’ he said, returning to the task in hand, grooming the plant with the tip of a razor-sharp knife before, satisfied, he offered the pot to her for her to look at. ‘Then she’ll see for herself.’
‘Will she?’ The label bore only a number and a date. ‘Is this it?’
‘It’ll be a show-stopper,’ he said. ‘A Gold Medal certainty.’
‘Always assuming that we’re still in business come the end of May.’
Always assuming her father wasn’t living in cloud-cuckoo-land.
‘There’ll be people who’ll turn their noses up at it, no doubt,’ he said.
‘The ones who think that if you want buttercup-yellow you should grow buttercups?’ she said, thinking of the bank manager. ‘We’d still be picking