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Do You Really Want to Yurt Me?
Daisy Tate
Cold Feet Meets Carry on Camping in this camptastic debut novel, perfect for anyone who ever had to put up their tent in a gale…This is Part Two is a series of four e-serial stories.Is friendship meant to last forever? Charlotte Mayfield hopes so. Especially as she’s throwing some luxury glamping into the mix.After fifteen years of trying to be the perfect wife, maybe Charlotte’s best friends from uni – Freya, Emily and Izzy – can still glimpse the woman she’d once set out to be.Freya is up for it. Could a powwow with her yesteryear besties helps her knock some sense into her useless husband?Emily’s hiding her own crisis from her parents, colleagues and now, her mates. Can a weekend under canvas get her to open up?Izzy’s back from a decade abroad with an unexpected addition, her nine-year-old daughter Flora. She’s also keeping another big secret, one that’s brought her home for good. Will a year of yurts mend two decades of hurts – or are some things, like shower blocks, burnt sausages and no wi-fi, best left in the past…
The Happy Glampers
Part Two
Do You Really Want To Yurt Me?
DAISY TATE
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
The News Building
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain in ebook format in 2019 by HarperCollinsPublishers
Copyright © Daisy Tate 2019
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover illustration © Jacqueline Bissett
Emojis © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Daisy Tate asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008312978
Version: 2019-07-19
Table of Contents
Cover (#u9ca073f0-bec5-5e33-ad61-5ca0a2f72937)
Title Page (#uf963748e-2d5a-5589-bf6f-db0c7471c83b)
Copyright (#u86f0c4d4-9884-5be5-acdf-001b2aa17cac)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Acknowledgements
Are the friends finished with the outdoors for good, or are they ready for another weekend of secrets and unfinished business …? Find out in the next glamptabulous instalments available to buy now! (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
About the Publisher
Chapter 1 (#uf4f1329b-9244-5074-9dc6-199b5a203bc6)
[Text message from Freya]
999!!!! Just got off the phone w/ Charlotte. Oli wants divorce. She doesn’t sound great. We’re off camping in Wales at the weekend. Convinced Lotte to join us. Any chance you girls want to come along too? There for a week and a bit. A friend in need, ladies
[Emily]
Wot? The ass. Does she have friends with her? (Is Izzy on this loop?).
[Freya]
We’re the friends, idiot. You & Izz in the loop. Will send postcode for campsite. It’s easy to find. Drive to Wales, reach ocean, see tents. Will text more deets asap.
[Emily]
Soz. Have back to back surgeries until the end of time. What do you people have against hotels? Surely Charlotte doesn’t want to drown her sorrows on an airbed.
[Izzy]
Oliver’s an idiot.
Van acting up. Maybe next weekend?? How long you staying? Xx
[Freya]
MONTY! Pull your effing socks up! The car won’t pack itself! Charlotte’s defo coming now. Begging Izz and Emms to come along. Izz being vague. Emms is lying about back-to-back surgeries. I know for a fact she was taking time off with Callum.
[Emily]
Well fuck you very much my friend. Have just changed an eighty-year-old woman’s hip into a titanium wonder, thank you very much!
[Freya]
Soz! Obviously intended for Monty. You’re all fabulous and I’ll love you all until the end of time. ESPECIALLY if you come. Izz? You can bring Bonzer. They love dogs as long as you clean up after them #bringpoobags. Emily. Come to Wales! We’re wild camping. Mobile detox! Chop firewood! Catch fish! Get in touch with your inner … ermmm … Chinese person. xxx
[Emily]
Okay, Mao. Thanks for the reminder of decades of enforced labour my grandparents endured so I could have a carefree life staying in HOTELS like a good little Tiger Baby.
[Izzy]
Is wild camping like a rave? Are children allowed? Will have to sneak Luna in even if non-age-appropriate. Have negotiated a truce with van. Will aim for day trip over weekend. Looney has school until then.
[Emily]
Have begged Evil Nemesis Surgeon to cover. No joy. Sorry girlies. Not looking good.
[Freya]
BYO pillow, Izz. Our car will be stuffed to the hilt. BYO tent if you have one. If you want anything beyond lukewarm, cheap plonk bring that, too. ()@£&%)!! Monty bound to forget ice. *deep breath* Emms – please come. I promise to paint your toes. You do remember this is about Charlotte’s husband being a total plonker, right?
[Emily]
Vomit face and Fu Man Chu for nails plz. Will try. No promises. Just read weather report. Major suckage incoming from Ireland. Still time to reconsider and meet in London instead.
[Izz]
Will bring bongos for child-friendly mini-rave. Please can we film Charlotte on the bongos? #PromiseNotToExploitHerGriefForComedicEffect Need snowsuit. Forgot how bloody cold it was here in summer.
[Freya]
Monty???? WTF? Hurry. Up. No sex for a week – not even a BJ if you aren’t back in five.
[Emily]
Freya. Please. There’s only so much we want to know about your private life.
[Freya]
My humiliation is complete.
Charlotte shook away the cloud of washing-up bubbles and stared at her rings.
She should leave soon if she was going to beat the traffic to meet up with Freya. She also should’ve packed. Should’ve baked a cake. Packed a hamper. It was very unlike her not to be prepared. It was also a very unusual day. Her very first as an about-to-be-divorcée.
Oli had waited until she’d gone downstairs to start his packing. A strange courtesy considering he hadn’t really left much to the imagination when he’d explained why he’d been ‘forced to do this.’ As he spoke the words – not in love any more, fenced-in, someone with more drive – Charlotte wondered if the buzzing in her head would ever stop.
It had. But the new sounds were every bit as bewildering. Step, step, step from the chest of drawers to the suitcase. This as she’d gone through the motions down in the kitchen, getting some breakfast together for the pair of them. Breakfast. As if it were just another day. Scritch, scritch went the hangars as shirt after shirt came out of the wardrobe. He’d taken an awful lot of toiletries, judging from all the clatter coming from the en suite. The methodical cadence of it all had put her in a sort of stupor. One she’d best snap out of now that ‘Xanthe and the baby were his priorities’. And the children, he’d hastily added. Charlotte, of course, had now officially been dropped off the list.
She stared at the rings again.
What did one do in this scenario?
Take them off straight away, or feign, as she had the past couple of months, that everything in her life was perfectly perfect?
What a fool she’d been. Believing Oliver wanted to make a go of things.
At least she was getting out of this wretched house for a bit of perspective. It had been her pride and joy when the children were young and she’d bustled about like Doris Day. Now it was little more than a show home for a beautiful but meaningless life.
She glanced out the window to where Oli’s car had been, chiding herself for having been so acquiescent about the whole thing. She’d just sat there and listened. Accepted everything he’d said, as if it would be sheer madness to express any sort of opinion about the fact he’d pulled the grenade pin on her life.
She tried to channel her friends to see if that would help. Freya, Izzy and Emily were all so different but each of them seemed to possess a core strength she herself lacked.
If she had been more like Freya, she would’ve made a proper show of things. Thrown something. Strode out to the recently relaid stone patio after Oli announced his ‘slight’ change of heart and, one by one, dropped the rings into the well with some sort of pithy comment about how they were most likely blood diamonds anyway. Heaven knew he’d sucked her dry.
Emily would’ve quirked an eyebrow and said, ‘Get out your chequebook.’
Lady Venetia might very likely have done the same. Charlotte made a quick note to ring her to say she wouldn’t be coming into the shop this week. Part of her still couldn’t believe her birthday glamping trip that had reunited her with her besties from university had brought her the most unexpected of presents. A new friend and mentor. Lady V sold honey produced from her own hives from a ramshackle hut in the car park of the Sittingstone Estate glampsite, alongside a few suspect baked goods. When she’d suggested to Charlotte that she might like to have a go at redesigning the whole place and turning it into a micro-farm shop, Charlotte had leapt at the chance. It was a proper shop now. The Sittingstone Larder. There was a part of her that wanted to be there right now. Pour the mounting pressure-cooker of unspent emotion into making it even better, but in her heart she knew what she needed most was to see her friends.
She wasn’t entirely sure what Izzy would have done after Oliver had finished his speech (rehearsed, from the sounds of it). Laughed? Told Oli that if his spirit animal was guiding him elsewhere then to go for it?
She hadn’t done any of those things. Of course. She’d sat and nodded and, when Oliver had finished, offered to make up the guest room with fresh sheets, only to end up sleeping there herself as Oli found the room too draughty.
She scrubbed at a plate, suddenly furious with herself for not having left him on her birthday. After the whole mess with the cake (when a somewhat tipsy Freya had hurled it straight into Oli’s face after having heard enough of his patronizing speech), it had taken Charlotte well over a fortnight to get back into his good books. As if a bit of wayward buttercream had wreaked more havoc in their marriage than the stark truth that her husband had impregnated his law firm’s most active Instragrammer, the ludicrously named Xanthe. CheekyLawGirl if she was going for full accuracy. Not that Charlotte had been cyber-stalking her. Much.
She put the dish on the rack and sighed. She felt doubly foolish now. Not acting on that instinct to take her children and go.
She stared at the wrinkled pads of her fingers, then turned them over. She would keep the eternity ring. That was for the children and it wasn’t their fault their father had a changeable heart.
Earlier, when Oli had been hungrily polishing off a bit of toast as if he were popping out for another one of his charity golf weekends (how often had she fallen for that one?), she’d considered hurling the engagement ring out of the window, but had been overcome with panic that a magpie would swallow it and die, leaving a nest full of orphaned chicks unable to fend for themselves. In reality she knew it was well past nesting season. The recent advent of July would’ve seen all the little fledglings out and off into the world by now. Just like her two little travellers. Poppy had gone to the South of France (Cannes!) for language submersion, and Jack was in Namibia for she wasn’t entirely sure what sort of ‘formative cultural experience’.
Would either trip prepare them for parents en route to a divorce? En route … Poppy’s French submersion would definitely come in handy. A mother who sat listening to her husband devalue the last fifteen years of their lives together as ‘non-progressive’ would not.
A question she’d asked herself with increasingly regularity popped into her mind. What would Lady Venetia do?
Her new, slightly formidable friend and mentor had stayed and toed the line when her own husband had strayed, but Charlotte no longer had that option. Lady Venetia had hardly bowed her head and just ‘got on with things’. She’d taken charge of her own life, refusing to pin her happiness to her husband’s. She’d travelled widely. Joined all sorts of clubs. Got a second and then a third degree in subjects that had precisely nothing to do with one another. She’d simply been curious. The same way she’d been curious to see what Charlotte might be able to turn their ‘little snack shack’ into, if given a bit of time and a few resources.
A rather bustling business, as it turned out. The Sittingstone Larder had been transfigured. Once a bit of an eyesore, it was now the very first, bunting-clad piece of magic that visitors to Sittingstone Estate’s glampsite laid eyes on. Gone was the akimbo shed; in its place was a gently greying Sussex barn that Peter the manager – known as Whiffy to everyone on the estate – had found stacked up in bits in one of their much larger barns and carefully rebuilt. They still sold Lady V’s honey, of course. Charlotte had tweaked a few of her own recipes into ‘glampcakes’. There were other items, of course – largely designed for forgetful packers or those who might want to bring a gift home to remember their weekend by. Jams, preserves, pickled onions, cheeses (hard and soft). The village bakery had started making some particularly delicious rolls (sausage and bacon), which the Londoners in particular seemed to be mad for.
Though it had all been a great success, Charlotte could see where she’d gone wrong now. Rather than truly seeing her time at the Larder as a means of expanding her own world, she’d used it as the perfect way to avoid the truth. Her marriage hadn’t stood a chance of weathering the storm.
Now, she supposed, it was time to find if she could.
Before her children returned home, she would need to acquire a spine. Particularly for her poor little Poppy, still stinging from a rather bruising year settling in at boarding school. Oli had brushed Charlotte off when she’d suggested, perhaps, taking Poppy out of the school and keeping her home for another year. As usual she’d demurred, but perhaps now they were getting divorced she would get a bit more say in these things. Or less. She supposed it was up to her how that worked.
She would love to see an end to Poppy’s almost permanently locked bedroom door for endless hours on social media. She hoped she wasn’t being bullied on one of those … what did they call them? Platforms. A shudder jolted through her. Sounded too much like the setting for a public hanging.
