Honeycote (2 page)

At the far end of the village, Mickey passed the Honeycote Arms, the very first of the brewery’s tied houses to have been purchased by his great-grandfather when he’d first hit on the idea of changing from farming to brewing. The pub was looking tired and ramshackle, in need of love and attention, though not even the peeling paintwork could detract from the loveliness of the mellow stone from which it was built. Nevertheless, it was hardly a good advert, and Mickey averted his gaze as he walked past. Apart from anything, he didn’t want to get into conversation with Ted, the landlord. He didn’t feel like exchanging niceties.

A little further up the road a sturdy set of pillars were topped by a wrought-iron arch proclaiming the words
HONEYCOTE ALES
. The driveway continued for a hundred or so yards before dropping steeply down into a bowl in which the brewery nestled.

Had it not been contained within this bowl, the tower of the brewery would have dominated the village, hanging over it as if to remind the inhabitants of its importance. As it was, the steeply pitched lead roof with its trademark weathervane could only just be seen from the main street, if one knew where to look. At the bottom of the drive there was a cobbled courtyard, surrounded on three sides by the brewery buildings. The heart of the operation was the tower in the centre, four storeys high, with the malthouse to the left and the offices to the right, behind which were further outbuildings, garages and stables, mostly now defunct. A pair of lorries painted with the green and gold Honeycote livery were parked up in front of the entrance to the cellar, awaiting barrels of beer to be taken to the brewery’s ten tied houses. They were mostly small country pubs, all within a five-mile radius of Honeycote, scattered along the nearby border between Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. They probably consumed less beer in a week between them than one town centre theme pub on a Saturday night.

It was in this rare moment of calm that Mickey was able to survey his legacy. In a couple of hours’ time the place would be a hive of activity, as the giant steam engine that powered everything burst into life and another day’s brew would begin. Soon the air would be filled with a rich, malty fug that could be smelled as far as the village – an enticing vapour that encapsulated years of tradition and know-how. It was all very well, he thought, being handed a business like this on a plate, but he hadn’t inherited his great-grandfather’s pioneering spirit, nor his grandfather’s long-sightedness and careful planning, nor his father’s efficiency and capacity for hard work. Which was why he was in such a mess now.

He stopped and looked into the room that served as a common room-cum-canteen for the twenty or so staff he employed – nothing grand, but somewhere warm they could boil a kettle for a cup of tea, have a fag or chew on their sandwiches. He noticed a couple of balloons stuck on the wall and a banner proclaiming ‘It’s a girl!’, and remembered that one of the young lads who drove for them had had a baby the week before. Mickey was reminded all too clearly of his responsibilities. Another mouth to feed, albeit indirectly.

As he approached the entrance to the offices, he looked at the brass plaque commemorating the brewery’s centenary forty-nine years before. There had been a huge village party to celebrate – free beer for everyone (of course), a pig roast, music, dancing, fireworks – all paid for by Mickey’s grandfather. Each Honeycote pub had built a huge beacon, and there was a point, high on Poacher’s Hill just outside the village, where each fire could be seen twinkling.

Mickey calculated that if they could limp through another eighteen months, they could celebrate a hundred and fifty years purveying ale, but he strongly doubted there would be any cause for celebration. If there were to be any fireworks, it would be the outrage caused by mass redundancies – for he wasn’t the only one whose family had been dominated by the brewery for generations. He had a couple of young lads working for him whose grandfathers had worked for his own grandfather. In some ways, Honeycote Ales was a big extended family in itself. Brothers and sisters, fathers and sons, husbands and wives had all trooped up the lane from the village to take their place shifting barrels, cleaning pipes, answering phones.

He heard someone whistling and realized he wasn’t alone. It was Eric Giles, the engineer, whose front teeth had been knocked out in a village hockey match and never replaced, but who, according to local legend, had the body of a god under his boiler suit. Eric had learned to tend the steam engine in the boiler room from his own father, and could turn his hand to mending anything. He loved his work, adored the engine, and Mickey knew he could bank on Eric’s loyalty well past his retirement. He was in there now, checking the engine over, polishing her up, happy as anything. It made Mickey envious, and for a moment he fantasized about swapping jobs. Until it occurred to him that he wouldn’t have a bloody clue how to go about Eric’s work, and that Eric would probably make a far better job of running the brewery than he was.

It was with a heavy heart that he climbed the stone steps to his office and slid the key into the lock, for his problems at the brewery were only the tip of a rather large iceberg…

2

Miss Cowper laid down her biography of Nelson and sighed. Until now, she had found the intimate minutiae of the tactician’s life utterly compelling, but she had read the same page three times and all that was going through her mind was the contents of the e-mail she had received earlier that afternoon.

In all her days as headmistress of Redfields, she had never encountered such
froideur
. She could, just about, have accepted receiving the news in a letter: the matter was indeed delicate and personal and she could appreciate Mr Sherwyn not wishing to discuss his private life over the telephone. But an e-mail that had obviously been typed by his secretary? She imagined the scenario: ‘Irene – book me a table for lunch at Eduardo’s. And confirm tomorrow’s flight: make sure I’ve got a window seat. Oh, and e-mail Mandy’s headmistress – tell her Mrs Sherwyn and I have split up…’

And now it was up to Miss Cowper to tell Mandy. Initially, she had felt inclined to refuse Mr Sherwyn’s request to break the news to his daughter, but as he had indicated that he would be out of the country for the next few days, she was left with little alternative. Half the girls at the school were boarders, so, being
in loco parentis
, Miss Cowper often found she had unpleasant news to dish out, but it was usual in the event of a divorce or separation for the parents concerned to take their daughter home for the weekend while they told her themselves, and a special, kindly eye would be kept on that pupil when she returned. Mr Sherwyn’s request was a first, and Miss Cowper reflected that it might be harder to explain to Mandy why her parents had chosen not to tell her in person than to tell her they had separated. A few white lies would be necessary; she certainly wasn’t going to present the facts to Mandy in the bald, ugly manner they had been presented to her.

Miss Cowper was proud of Redfields. She’d managed to transform what had been a less than mediocre girls’ school into a huge success story. She’d turned it round in the past five years, doubling the number of boarders and also attracting an impressive quota of day girls in a catchment area of up to thirty miles. And although it would never have the kudos of Cheltenham or Malvern, Redfields boasted a happy, healthy environment that turned out happy, healthy girls with the confidence to achieve their ambitions, even if they weren’t heading for rocket science. But she sometimes wished the parents would leave everything up to her. She’d make a perfectly good job of bringing their daughters up if only they wouldn’t interfere.

She ran her eye down the list of Mandy’s classmates. One of them would have to be told in advance, to give the poor girl a shoulder to cry on and take her off for an illicit cigarette, to which the all-seeing headmistress would for once turn a blind eye. Sophie Liddiard. She was sensible; unlikely to gossip to the other girls before Mandy chose to tell them herself. She lifted the phone that connected her to the school secretary and debated a tot of Dutch courage from the handsome decanter that housed the sherry she dished out to visiting parents. Afterwards, she promised herself. She needed all the wits, tact and diplomacy she could muster for the task in hand.

Later that afternoon, when everyone else had been dispatched off for compulsory games (Miss Cowper was a stickler for fresh air and exercise, even for the sixth-formers), Mandy Sherwyn and Sophie Liddiard sat on the huge stone sill of the mullioned window that dominated Mandy’s study bedroom. A half-demolished box of Maltesers lay between them and Robbie Williams was playing just loudly enough so as not to attract attention – music was forbidden until after six.

Sophie sighed as she reached for another chocolate and looked down at the tops of her legs. If black opaque tights were supposed to be slimming, why did her thighs look so enormous? She looked enviously at Mandy’s colt-like limbs strewn carelessly in front of her, and carried on listening in round-eyed sympathy to the details of her meeting with Miss Cowper.

‘Apparently mum’s gone to Puerto Banus to recuperate. Fornicate, more likely. There’s a slimy bloke at her health club who’s got an apartment there.’ Mandy shuddered at the memory of the man, leathery and drenched in aftershave, endeavouring to put his hand up her skirt on more than one occasion. She’d solved that problem by wearing snow-white, skin-tight shorts that gave the creep even more idea of what he was missing but nothing to hide his hairy hand under.

‘That’s awful. Aren’t you upset?’ Sophie, who always found it very hard to hide what she was feeling, was intrigued by Mandy’s matter-of-fact manner. If Miss Cowper had just told her that her parents had split up, she’d be hysterical, she knew she would. She could feel tears welling up just imagining it. But Mandy merely shrugged and bit a Malteser in half neatly, surveying its honeycomb interior. She looked up at Sophie gravely with her baby-blue eyes. Sophie wondered if she dyed her eyelashes – they couldn’t be natural, surely.

‘With any luck she’ll bring me back some shoes. They’ve got great shoe shops over there.’

Sophie thought, with a seventeen-year-old’s grasp of psychology, that Mandy was studying the Malteser too intently to be convincing and was probably devastated deep down. She decided not to probe too deeply. After all, she didn’t really know her well enough to go delving into her innermost feelings: Mandy had only joined Redfields in the sixth form and even after eighteen months this was probably the first time they’d had a one-to-one conversation, privacy being a rare commodity at Redfields. If she wanted to pretend everything was fine, then Sophie wasn’t going to push it: she’d just make sure Mandy knew there was a sympathetic ear if she needed one.

Mandy, however, wasn’t pretending. She’d let a few tears trickle out in front of Miss Cowper, primarily because she knew it was expected and it didn’t do to let your headmistress think you were in any way odd. Also, something deep down inside told her that it was a tiny bit sad that she wasn’t able to care, and the crocodile tears had relieved that feeling. At least the emotional display would make Miss Cowper feel she’d done her job properly. She’d shown such genuine concern that Mandy had been touched. If it had been her own mother making a perfunctory attempt to comfort her, Mandy knew she’d have been suffocated by the fumes of Poison dabbed on her perpetually racing pulse points.

She and her parents lived what Miss Cowper, being a historian, would have dubbed a
laissez–faire
existence. Mandy knew she got in the way of her mother’s pursuit of sport (both vertical and horizontal) and her father’s moneymaking, but didn’t want to spend time with them any more than they wanted to spend time with her. She threw herself into the whirlwind regime that her mother organized to keep her out of the way during the weekends and holidays – tennis, ballet, riding, photography, gymnastics, even, one half-term when her mother was particularly desperate to dispose of her, dried flower arranging – thus becoming an accomplished and self-sufficient child. She was as overjoyed as her parents were when they hit upon the idea of sending her away to board for her A levels. As her father had driven out of the school drive, waving his hand with its bejewelled pinkie out of the car window, she had felt an overwhelming sense of relief. Perhaps now she’d have the chance to settle down and make some friends. Her peripatetic lifestyle had made her adept at making acquaintances but not at forging deep friendships.

She’d been an object of envy amongst the other girls when they’d learned of her curiously independent and sophisticated lifestyle. They’d all have died for their own self-contained suite with satellite TV, charge cards for Kookai and Warehouse, and an account with a cab firm that would take her anywhere she wanted. But they didn’t understand it was all a meaningless pay-off, or why she was almost deliriously happy at Redfields. At least here she was somebody. The recognition she’d received after winning the inter-house tennis match still made Mandy glow with warmth inside. No hollow parental praise, no empty reward in the form of a crisp twenty-pound note from her father, but genuine back-thumping congratulations and glee. She was beginning to realize what it meant to have her own identity, and that it was up to her to make what she would of her life.

‘What about your dad? Won’t he be upset?’

Mandy shook her head, a rueful smile playing on her lips. ‘He’ll be too busy flogging bathrooms to notice, I expect. Anyway, they’ve never really liked each other, my parents.’

Sophie was inwardly appalled. Only a minute ago, she’d have given anything to be as thin as Mandy. But not now. That was too high a price, to have parents that thought so little of each other. Her own parents adored each other – you only had to look at them. She was excited at the prospect of breaking up for the Christmas holidays the next day, and spending nearly four long weeks at home. She and her younger sister Georgina were day-girls, but their home was nearly twenty miles away and the travelling was a drag. She sometimes wished they boarded, but she knew her parents wouldn’t be able to find the extra money for the fees. She suspected they were struggling as it was, and if it hadn’t been for Georgina’s hefty sports scholarship they might have found themselves at the local comprehensive.