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TRUDIE McTRAVERS – Head of Whispers Wood’s Am-Dram Society, flies very much above the radar with her clashing Lycra and larger-than-life personality.
TUPPENCE McTRAVERS – Daughter of Trudie and Nigel McTravers. Florist, intriguingly referred to as: The Herbalist of Horsham …
MELODY MATTHEWS – Oscar and Bea Matthews’ daughter, her two besties are Persephone Pavey and whichever book she’s reading that week.
PERSEPHONE PAVEY – Gloria and Bob Pavey’s daughter, now planning on plié-ing her way through school.
GERTRUDE – Cow, as in bovine! Prefers chewing the cud with humans over her own herd and is happiest being the village’s nosiest resident.
BEA’s BEES – The honeybees housed in the hives at the clock house. Best known for producing the honey that goes into the copious honey martinis drunk at the clock house.
THE CLOCK HOUSE CHANDELIER – according to Whispers Wood folklore, it has magical properties … Fact!
Chapter 1 (#ulink_d03531f7-aed5-54ec-be20-4fcfc8498a27)
Angry Bird Going Cold Turkey (#ulink_d03531f7-aed5-54ec-be20-4fcfc8498a27)
Gloria
Gloria Pavey forgot every single one of the anger-management techniques she had supposedly mastered over the last twelve weeks and with a look that could, quite frankly, wilt steel, demanded, ‘What do you mean I don’t need to come back next week?’
Her therapist, Fortuna Tempest (or Fort Tuna The Terra Pest, as Gloria referred to her when she was being particularly confronting) simply smiled in the same non-judgemental and now only slightly grating way she’d been smiling for the past three months. ‘We did go over this at the end of last week’s session.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t realise you meant it,’ Gloria replied, her heart thudding. She resumed the melting-metal look. ‘I thought you were testing me to see how I’d react. It’s the only reason I didn’t go full-out Basil Fawlty.’
Fortuna replied with a look of her own that suggested cheating in a counselling session was really only cheating yourself and Gloria could have kicked herself.
The Terra Pest genuinely thought she didn’t need to come back?
But no way could it be this simple.
A person didn’t just decide to change … and voila, next stop she was attending the Nicest Personality of the Year awards.
To combat the fine tremble in her hands she reached up to smooth her chestnut ponytail. The action didn’t help her feel any more in control, so she tried her top Namaste Om Life Hack and breathed out slowly through her nose, trying to think.
Okay.
She supposed she could admit, if she was absolutely forced to, that this pothole-ridden journey into self-awareness had started way earlier than three months ago, so it was hardly as if she was being thrown back to the wolves with no discernible skills.
Seeing Fortuna these last few months was really more of a top-up feature to reassure herself. A bit like adding credit to your pay-as-you-go phone when you already had plenty to get you through the social media scroll that was anytime you had longer than two seconds on your hands.
No, the real process of change had actually begun eleven months before over a game of chess.
To be honest it had been mortifying to discover that the ‘journey to being the best version of herself’, for want of any other annoyingly over-used psycho-babble phrase, was, in fact, just one great big stereotypical quest. All very Bilbo Baggins Hobbit-y and so completely clichéd, that Gloria had considered aborting her journey to being a nicer person on several occasions.
After all, remaining the OG of Bitchville wasn’t completely without its merits.
If you lived for having no friends, that was.
It had turned out though that the minimum requirement in preventing sarcastic side-eye from your ten-year-old daughter (other than not attempting to speak in kid’s vernacular) was to have friends.
Friends meant you were normal.
Liked.
Supported.
And no longer to be worried about.
So Gloria had found herself accepting that most dangerous of life challenges: Metamorphosis.
She even had her very own Gandalph. He was called Old Man Isaac and he was the oldest resident in the village of Whispers Wood, where she lived. No one knew how old he was exactly but everyone agreed he had been dispensing wisdom way before generation X, Y and Z started getting themselves into trouble.
As a direct result of the oldness and the wisdom-dispensing Old Man Isaac was frequently given elder-like status that Gloria had always thought utter tosh, so normally she wouldn’t have been seen dead going into the retired clock-maker’s cottage for fear of anyone thinking she needed advice on anything at all in her life. But then she had nearly knocked the poor man flat on the village green, so what choice did she have but to see him back to Rosehip Cottage and sit with him a while to make sure he didn’t die or anything.
See? Even back then she hadn’t been completely heartless.
Yes, her trademark modus operandi happened to be felling a fellow human with a few choice words but even she knew you didn’t go around knocking the elderly over just because you happened to be in the blackest of black moods.
The obsidian mood was because of her ex-husband Bob, and The Lecture. The Lecture that had been so acutely observed and so unrelenting in its honesty it had stripped her soul and stolen the breath from her body, rendering her utterly incapable of her usual defence: verbal evisceration at ten paces.
Robbed of a blistering comeback she’d fled the scene of the crime. Running blindly into Old Man Isaac had probably been the only thing that could have brought her to a stop that day.
Little had she known then that a mere fifteen minutes later she’d be sipping tea, nibbling on a milk chocolate digestive, staring at a chessboard and listening to the relentless ticking of eleventy-million clocks.
As the minutes had ticked by, instead of looking after Old Man Isaac, it had started to feel a lot more as if he was looking after her. This act of kindness had been the last straw for Gloria, breaching the Hoover dam of her defences so that words started trickling, then spluttering and then gushing out of her as she recounted her ex’s litany of home-truths – all of which stemmed from his going to pick up their daughter, Persephone, from school, and overhearing some of the other kids teasing her.
When she’d worked out the root cause of Bob’s lecture she’d instinctively turned to march down to the school and unleash her Mother Bear upon the teachers and parents of the little offenders, but Bob had stopped her, wanting to give her the facts as he saw them. And facts were that Persephone had been being laughed at for trying to defend her mum, and he was worried it wasn’t the first time.
Slack-jawed, Gloria had flashed-back to herself at Persephone’s age, standing at the same school gates, defending her own mother to her peers. Her chest had got scary-prickly at the memory and the sensation got worse when Bob had asked why the hell their daughter should be put in a position of defending her when, as far as he and everyone else in Whispers Wood could tell, her behaviour was fast approaching indefensible.
At first, while he’d been serving up sentences like, ‘As if Perse hasn’t already had enough to deal with,’ she’d stared at him thinking, and whose fault is that?
Next had come the, ‘Do you really want our daughter discovering that when she’s with me, you’re going through men like they’re going out of fashion,’ she’d also wanted to hurl the words, ‘Again – whose fault is that’ or at least refute the accusation. But all she’d been able to focus on was the gigantic boulder of baggage rising up from the pit of her belly.
By the time he’d got to the, ‘And what about the way you treat everyone who tries to pass the time of day with you? You can’t really want to be this bitter for the rest of your life’ part of his lecture, the boulder in her chest had pushed all the way up to her throat, making it nearly impossible to draw breath.
Then had come the: ‘Because, FYI, calling everyone out on the mess they’re making of their lives, isn’t in any way, masking the colossal hypocritical balls-up you’re making of your own and honestly? Bobby and I can’t stand to see you spiralling like this.’
For the first time in her life, she’d turned from confrontation and started running, eager to escape the boulder of baggage now threatening to unload and bury her under its weight.
In Rosehip Cottage at the end of her confession-vomit, she’d looked up from the chessboard, expecting Old Man Isaac to defend the obvious, which was that of course she was only like this because of Bob and Bobby.
But instead, he’d leaned back in his armchair, steepled his fingers together and asked, ‘Would you be in this state if anyone other than your ex had the guts to tell you to rein yourself in for the sake of your daughter and your personal happiness?’
Rest assured she’d been about to tell him she’d have liked to see even one other person dare to talk to her like that considering no one in Whispers Wood would have the first clue what it was like to have your husband leave you so scandalously.
Because Bob hadn’t just left her for a younger model.
Nope.
He’d left her for an actual model.
A catwalk model.
A male catwalk model.
Called Bobby.
Yep.
A few little walks on the catwalk and Bob had found Bobby literally too sexy for his shirt.
Of course, coming to terms with his sexuality had taken Bob months of tortured soul-searching and on her more charitable days Gloria knew that to be the absolute truth. Unfortunately it didn’t negate the reality of discovering that nine and a half hours A.B.F.C.O (After Bob Finally Came Out) the word on the street, the village green, in the woods, and even in Big Kev’s corner shop, was that she was obviously such a dud as a wife, she’d managed to turn her own husband gay.
And, not that she would ever have admitted it but filling up every corner of her soul had been the question: what if she had?
She knew she wasn’t the warmest of individuals.
That she was more alpha than any other letter of the alphabet.
She favoured cutting the extraneous bullshit, setting goals and driving in a straight line towards them.
How else did Bob think they’d created such a glossy magazine-worthy lifestyle?
But Bob uttering the words he could never take back had attacked the very security she’d attached to that magazine-worthy lifestyle, and worse. Someone being in love with her turning out to be a big fat lie and all the confidence that came along with that simply snuffed itself out.
Then, Bob and Bobby choosing to live their lives just down the road while quietly and respectfully taking every care not to throw their relationship in her face? Well, she defied anyone to understand just how much worse that made it all.
But it had.
So very, very much.
In the intervening three years they’d found a way through for the sake of their daughter and in all the shared custody pickups and drop-offs not once had Bob commented negatively, sarcastically, or carelessly about how she was choosing to deal with the fallout from their marriage ending.
Until that afternoon.
When he’d seen his daughter bravely defending her and all his deliberately withheld assumptions for the sake of peace had tumbled out of his mouth as critical assertions.
The biscuit Gloria had been eating turned to stone in her mouth as it occurred to her that her appalling behaviour had ceased being a completely justifiable coping method and become instead rather an effective way of showing the whole of Whispers Wood that she possibly wasn’t woman enough to rise above what had happened.
The weight of shame in that sat in her throat along with the bit of biscuit.
It seemed no matter how much you worked to set your life up perfectly so that you got to enjoy living it, life happened and things changed.
But if she didn’t?
Couldn’t?
What kind of example was that to set for Persephone?
As if recognising her shields were only at thirty percent Old Man Isaac had leaned forward, and quietly stated, ‘I have to tell you Gloria we’re all a little worried about you.’
She’d wanted to sneer, ‘How very dare you.’
She’d managed to hold her tongue but not the snort of laughter from slipping out. But then she’d felt a rogue tear slipping down her cheek and the next thing she knew, she’d looked down at the chessboard, tipped over her King, and whispered, ‘I concede.’
That afternoon, she’d gone home and downloaded the Headspace App to every device she owned, bought herself a warehouse-sized supply of self-help books and decided she’d play chess with Old Man Isaac once a week and if he wanted to talk about how she could go about putting some changes in place, she’d soak up the strategizing.
Naturally, she also started a man ban, which wasn’t actually that difficult considering the meagre offerings provided by the online dating service she’d used.
With hard work and determination gradually the anger that had sat so close to the surface twenty-four-seven, started feeling more … well, less.
Sure, sometimes, someone would go and ruin her best of intentions by saying something so monumentally stupid that the needle on her ‘sarcasmometer’ spiked straight to eleven and words would come out of her mouth like they had used to. Sans filter.
Slowly but surely though she’d started to trust that a cutting remark wasn’t always the best opening. Sometimes (cue Eastenders dun, dun, duns …) a smile was.
People stopped holding their breath or assuming the brace position when they were around her.
And then last year Emma Danes had moved all the way from Hollywood to Whispers Wood to run Cocktails & Chai at The Clock House on the village green and Gloria had her perfect opening to start making amends for what she’d put the residents of Whispers Wood through.
The tearoom/bar was to open alongside the new day spa, hair salon and co-working office space in the old building which had once belonged to Old Man Isaac until Kate Somersby had been persuaded to return to the village and have a go at turning the grand Georgian house into her dream business.
With The Clock House set to become the heart of the community once more, what better way to repay the residents of Whispers Wood for giving her a chance to come good, than by working for them, Gloria had thought.
Community Service, she’d decided to call it.
Fast-forward eight months working part-time at Cocktails & Chai and quest to become a better, more pleasant, less angry person – tick box.
Until, that was, last Christmas, when Emma Danes had gone and ruined everything by asking Jake Knightley to marry her.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_3e2f7739-c37d-5874-83c1-3c11278f8050)
Fortuna Favours The Brave (#ulink_3e2f7739-c37d-5874-83c1-3c11278f8050)
Gloria
Incessant wedding talk!
That’s what had brought Gloria to Fort Tuna the Terra Pest.
Every day since Emma and Jake’s engagement Gloria had felt snippets of her former snarky-self seeping through the puncture wounds left by Whispers Wood’s specialist chosen ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ subject.
Emma was her boss and her friend and the thought of ruining that friendship or losing the job she’d come to love over being driven mad because everything was bloody ‘weddings’ this and bloody ‘weddings’ that …
Admittedly not from Emma and Jake, which, okay, was a little weird but, hey, there was a secret comfort in the fact that if the very people who were engaged weren’t talking openly about when they were getting married, maybe that meant they wouldn’t actually get around to getting married. Which would definitely cover the whole, Why Would You Even Want To/Need To feels that Gloria had discovered she was experiencing in spades.
Ugh.
