A Merry Mistletoe Wedding (18 page)

‘Ugh, no!' Thea was vehement. ‘I was supposed to have one of those before. I wasn't over-keen even then but it became something that gained its own momentum, like a big snowball. And then when it was all well under way he simply bailed. Moved out and did an absolute runner. In retrospect, as things turned out I'm massively glad that he did but at the time, all I could think about was how much I'd invested – time and effort-wise – into the day itself. I think I'd forgotten that it was supposed to be about
lerve
. This time, I'm not making the same mistake. This time it's the other way round.'

Thea wasn't sure what it was about Sarah that made her offload everything like this. She seemed to exude a calm optimism, a certainty that everything would come right in the end and that there was really nothing to fret about. By the time Sarah turned the car up a narrow lane and through a gateway into a small field, Thea was feeling properly relaxed for the first time in ages. Physical distance from home, from the tensions of both work and family was finally making the worries slip away.

Sarah parked alongside several other equally muddy and hedge-scratched cars.

‘The school is through there.' She pointed to a five-bar gate as they got out of the car and Olly was attached to his lead. The gate was hung with strings of conkers, pine cones, twigs and dry coppery leaves. Pieces of grey-cream sheep's wool were intertwined. ‘The children made them,' Sarah explained as Thea admired them. ‘They collected what was lying around our little woodland area and made “autumn”. Then we hung them on the gate to welcome the season in. Soon we'll take them down and put up a new set of winter strings to take us through to December and January.'

‘What a lovely idea,' Thea said as they unlatched the gate and went through. ‘It's like a nature table but with a message. And … oh, wow!' As the hedge-lined path opened out into a little enclosed meadow edged with low woodland, Thea stopped in her tracks. ‘Yurts! Oh, how fabulous! Are these your classrooms? I mean I knew you had a school but other than describing it as “small and wacky”, Sean didn't tell me any more about it. It's gorgeous!'

‘Welcome to the Meadow School,' Sarah said. ‘And yes, two yurts, one for the tiniest children and one for the older group, though of course they are free to come and go between the two, depending on what activity is on. And they do a lot together anyway, especially when it comes to planting and harvesting.' She indicated two other buildings and a shelter, open at the front and with its roof supported by branched tree trunks. ‘There's a kitchen – the children help prepare the food – and that shelter over there is our outdoor classroom, which gets more use in summer than the yurts do.'

There was a garden area, divided into small plots, and a pair of polytunnels, both – at the moment – lacking their plastic coverings.

‘Do you grow the school food?' Thea asked. How different this was from the stark playground at the school where she worked, enclosed by a wire fence and with only a few shrubs and a couple of trees. Over in the far corner was a big climbing frame with swing ropes on it, ladders and a slide, all looking rustic and hand-made. Two small boys were shinning up a tree alongside and swinging off a rope on to a soft bed of bark below.

‘As much as we can, yes. Obviously there's not a lot going on now and I think the children are a bit fed up with the endless spinach. Honestly, that stuff never knows when enough is enough, does it?'

Thea didn't know. She'd never grown more than a box of salad leaves at home and at school the food arrived in a van and disappeared into the kitchen area without a child ever seeing what happened to it between field, freezer and plate. How lucky these children were here.
This
, she felt certain, was what early education should be about.

‘Right – I see more people are arriving,' Sarah said. ‘Shall we start with a cup of tea?'

‘Sounds good. Where's the kettle? I'll do it, shall I, while you talk to the parents?'

Sarah laughed, ‘A kettle! Oh, bless your sweet urban soul, Thea – we don't have a kettle. We only have enough electricity for very occasional minor use.' She pointed to a whirring little windmill up on a pole. It was a long way from the scale of those on a wind farm. ‘I can run a few lights in the depths of winter but we mostly don't need to. We just finish school earlier instead. For tea and the school hot drinks, we light a fire, boil water. Primitive but effective.'

Thea and Sarah fetched wood from a heap behind the yurt and took it to the middle of the little meadow where a circle of stones marked the edges of a shallow fire pit. Sarah set up a metal tripod and hung what looked like a small cauldron over the flames.

‘Er, I hate to say this …' Thea said, feeling puzzled as she watched small children chasing each other around, ‘but – health and safety? Is this even allowed?'

‘Course it is! We do have to make the usual full risk assessments, same as any other school,' Sarah said breezily. ‘And the children are never near the fire unsupervised, just as the fire itself is never unsupervised, but at the same time they completely understand the rule about not setting foot across the stones. We don't have many rules: just ones about not being unkind to each other or to their surroundings and this one about the fire. If they're not overloaded with complicated instructions I find they don't have any problem with boundaries.'

As the morning progressed Thea wore herself out digging over the beds inside the polytunnels, chatting to parents and children and helping manoeuvre the new covers into place. She couldn't help contrasting it with her job in a regular school. The age range at this one only went from nursery age to eight years but, from what she could see of the kids, they looked lithe and ruddy-faced, well used to the outdoor life. The parents were generally an arty, creative bunch who were keen to have what one of them called an ‘organic' approach to their children's education. Small children worked alongside her, even the littlest of them digging over the earth and pulling out weeds. Playing in the meadow, they swung upside down from low trees in the little area of woodland and nobody told them off or shouted ‘Be careful!' at them. Later in the morning, before they stopped for lunch, Sarah gathered the children round the fire and they sang a song about the colours of autumn, waving sticks with streamers of fabric and ribbon in colours of rust and yellows and deep greens that they'd made during the last week of school before half-term. Thea was enchanted by it all. When the time came to leave, she was almost as in love with the school as with Sean.

‘So that's like a Forest School set-up, really, isn't it?' she said as Sarah drove her back to the stables.

‘Sort of, but full-time, not just for visits. I taught for several years in regular primary education and all the time I was kind of adding up what I felt was missing, what wasn't possible to achieve given the constant SATs and the old national curriculum and one day I thought, you know, if I don't put this together now, this vision, then I never will. I started with one yurt and ten pupils and their brilliant onside parents and it went on from there. You like it?'

‘Like it? It's fabulous. I'm all envy and admiration.'

‘Not too hippie for you?'

Thea laughed. ‘Too hippie? You haven't met my parents! They're here on Saturday. I'll introduce you. They used to be so hippie that they grew ganja in the garden, in among the lupins. They don't now,' she added quickly, ‘not since they graduated to good wine.'

‘I can't leave Emily on her own for long but I need some help here.' Sam, in the back bar of the Fox and Duck near his home, got the drinks in for himself, Jimi and Charlotte and sat down with them at a corner table. ‘Couldn't Rosie come?' he said to Jimi.

‘No, she's taken Elmo to some music rehearsal for a Christmas show. She sends apologies.'

‘No worries. You can pass on the info later.'

‘I wondered what the SOS call was all about. Is Emily still Dagenham?' Jimi asked, sipping his beer.

‘Dagenham?' Sam said.

‘If you're on the District Line, it's near to Barking, sweetie,' Charlotte explained. ‘It means: Is she still loopy?' She made a circular gesture with her finger up by her head.

‘She's way past Barking. She's almost West Ham,' Sam said with a sad smile. ‘No, seriously, she barely even gets dressed. Milly and Alfie have started avoiding her. If they want anything, it's always me they come to at the moment. They're in and out of the office every five minutes. It's hard to get any work done but what can I do? I'll be glad when they're back at school next week.'

‘Oh, poor Emily. She needs a lot of TLC,' Charlotte said, taking a sip of wine. ‘Is this a large?' she asked Sam. ‘It looks a bit of a stingy measure.'

‘You can always have another,' Jimi reassured her. ‘I don't think they'll run out and I'm on the next round.'

‘Phew,' Charlotte said. ‘I'll be able to pay my way again soon but for now I'll have to owe you guys.'

‘Aha – so you got the job you went for,' Sam said. ‘What is it, a panto in the West End?'

‘Er, not exactly. But it is showbiz and it's seasonal so I'm happy enough.'

‘A Christmas show?' Jimi said. ‘We'll have to get a party together and all come and see you. Emily might be up for that, Sam, if we get the tickets, drive her there and just damn well force her out for a couple of hours as a done deal. She'll be OK with all of us, won't she?'

‘I don't know. I suppose if we all go, Mum and Dad as well, then she'll have plenty of back-up in case Ned cries. Or I could stay behind and take care of him.'

‘Well …' Charlotte was looking hesitant. ‘Sorry, but it's not really an actual show that you can kind of
go
to. And besides, it's, er, miles away. Take the children to see a local one. It'll be much better value.'

‘How far away?' Jimi asked. ‘Because I don't mind travelling. And you're looking a bit shifty if you don't mind me saying.' He gave her a nudge. ‘Is it a naughty show? Bit of burlesque? Would Elmo be old enough for it?'

‘Burlesque?' Charlotte spluttered. ‘Burlesque girls these days are all thin pale wobbly things with little bubbly hints of the cellulite to come. They don't let the properly endowed near a stage any more.' She thrust her considerable frontage forward. Sam looked down at his beer. Jimi didn't. ‘So trust me, Jim-Bob, your boy's actually way too old for what I'll be doing,' she said. ‘But enough about me and my job, let's go back to Emily. My suggestion, for what it's worth, is to get her thinking about Christmas and start making all these plans she seemed to want. She likes to be well ahead and have everything planned to the nth degree, doesn't she? That's what I gathered from Thea last year. If she's going to refuse to go to Sean and Thea's wedding then she'd better damn well come up with the alternative at home.'

‘But that's the thing,' Sam said. ‘Milly and Alfie made lists of presents they'd like Santa to bring and she wasn't even interested in that. She just said, “Show them to Daddy,” and waved them away. It's not like her. By now she's usually checking the tree lights and—'

‘Really?
This
early?' Jimi said. ‘But it's not even November till tomorrow. Blimey, you do like to be ahead of the game
chez vous
, don't you? Rosie and I are completely last-minute by comparison. I'm always the one out on Christmas Eve buying spare light bulbs and emergency batteries.'

‘Well, you know Emily,' Sam said, shrugging. ‘Or at least, we did.'

‘And this isn't early,' Charlotte said. ‘Maybe she needs a visit to the Selfridges' Christmas department. It's been open since July – I'm surprised she wasn't there at the door on day one. What you need to do,' she continued, ‘is make it all so easy for her to get to the wedding and to
enjoy
it that she'll simply give in. I mean, think about it – if she's really feeling too washed-out and depressed to get it together here, then simply being put in a car and driven to a Christmas where she doesn't have to do anything at all except lie on a sofa like she is doing now will end up being a top option. But it's got to be no effort. For one thing, last year, because you were going away and you never usually do, you had to lug nearly all the children's presents down to Cornwall in the car – and she told me about the big flap organizing their bikes. What are you getting them this time?'

‘I hadn't thought,' Sam told her. ‘You see, that's usually her department. She decides exactly what is to be bought and I order it and I'm the one who is at home for the deliveries while she is – or was – at work. Same with the food. She's got a file for that. And Delia, of course. Smith, that is. The Christmas food bible,' he added, as Charlotte looked blank.

‘Well, it's not her department this year, is it, because she's not as with us as she normally is. I think you should get Alfie and Milly a Wendy house for the garden. A proper big one.'

Jimi laughed. ‘Yep. Great idea. And that'll need a trailer to get to Cornwall.'

‘No, that's my point, idiot. You don't take it. You only take small presents, easily transportable ones that don't take up half the car. The Wendy house, you get someone to build it for you while you're away, then they've got this big thing to look forward to when you get back. I know a bloke. All I'd need is the key to your side gate.'

‘Emily would go nuts.'

‘But she already has. Have you got a better idea?'

Jimi and Sam looked at each other and together said, ‘No.'

‘Right, that's settled. And I've got a couple of weeks before my shifts … sorry, the
show
gets under way so I'm going to drag Emily out to get something fancy to wear, whether she likes it or not. But before that, Sam, I'm going to come round and babysit when you've made an appointment to see her GP. She can't go on like this. Agreed?'