It Started With A Tweet(28)

‘It could have been, if we’d gone to a bloody spa instead of this place,’ I say prodding at a wall, a lump of plaster crumbling into my hand. ‘Why are we here?’

‘Because I’ve bought it.’

‘I know you’ve bought this holiday, but I’m quite happy to pay for something else.’

‘No, Daisy, you don’t understand. I’ve bought this place. The whole of it.’

I stare at my sister in shock for a second. She can’t possibly mean she’s bought a farm. What would she want with that?

‘What are you talking about?’ I say, wondering if my lack of phone is clouding my mind from being able to think clearly.

‘I’m talking about a property purchase. I bought the house, the barns, the land – all of it. Ta da!’ she says, doing jazz hands as if that’s going to make it better. On this occasion, it would take the whole cast of Chicago doing jazz hands to make this place look any better.

‘I’m so lost,’ I say, my head spinning. I let her con me into coming here and putting my phone down a well .?.?. I’m starting to have palpitations.

‘Come and sit down,’ she says, realising that I’m no longer a violent threat, and she leads me into the lounge. She forces me down into one of the rocking chairs and instinctively I start rocking back and forth.

‘It’s a bit dark, can you switch the light on?’ I say, thinking.

‘Much better to use candles,’ she says, bending down to light them again. It looks like we’re about to have some kind of supernatural séance. It might have been fine for the meditation, but now I know that that was all a lie, it feels wrong.

‘It’s a bit creepy,’ I say, thinking that it feels scarier here in the day than at night.

‘Nonsense, it’s totally hygee,’ she says confidently.

‘Hmm, are you sure you’re not just trying to cover up the fact that this place doesn’t have any lights?’ I say, pointing to the ceiling where a bare wire is hanging down from the ceiling in lieu of a light bulb.

‘Maybe – is it working?’ she asks as she sits down.

‘No,’ I say coldly. ‘So do you want to explain to me why you brought me to this place and threw my only lifeline down a well?’

‘OK,’ she says, taking a deep breath. ‘I bought this farm a couple of months ago at an auction. It was a great bargain, I got it for peanuts.’

‘Can’t imagine why,’ I say sarcastically.

She ignores me and carries on.

‘I thought that Rupert and I could turn it into a holiday-cottage business and live up here, as he’s been working so much lately that I’ve barely seen him. I thought this way, if we had another business opportunity, I could tempt him away.’

It’s all starting to make sense now. Why she flinches whenever I mention her husband’s name. ‘I take it he didn’t share your dream?’

‘No, it turned out he was furious,’ she says shaking her head. ‘He thinks I’m totally out of my depth. I’d imagined us coming up here on weekends and painting and fixing away, but what I thought was going to be a fun project, one that was going to bring us closer together, has actually driven us apart.’

I get the impression she’s trying not to cry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my sister properly upset before; she usually has an emotional fortress around her as strong as the Tower of London, but she seems to have sent the Beefeaters off for the day.

‘So why don’t you sell it and be done with it? Surely your marriage is more important.’

‘That’s what Rupert wants me to do but I can’t. I mean, look at it, it’s got so much potential.’

I raise a sceptical eyebrow.

‘I can’t explain why, but I feel drawn to this place, and I want to convince him that I’m right. I’ve already had builders in to do the roof and some of the plastering, and they totally get my vision.’

‘Probably because you’re paying them. Are you still thinking of moving up here?’

‘No, I don’t think Rupert would come, or at least not for the foreseeable future. He made that abundantly clear. What I want to do is turn it into holiday lets, so he’ll see that it was a wise investment. That’s why I need to get it done quickly. All the while it’s standing here empty it’s not making any money and it’s a failure.’

‘Do you think you’ve been watching too much Homes Under the Hammer while you’ve not been working?’

Rosie laughs. ‘I did watch that a lot in the early days. It’s why I started buying properties. I bought a few terraced houses and “flipped them” as they say in America. You know, bought them as a wreck, got the builders in, then I did the cosmetic bits and pieces and sold them on for a healthy profit. Which is how I ended up with the money for this place.’

Huh. I vaguely remember her saying she was buying a small terraced house to rent out one Christmas, but I never heard anything more about it. And there was me thinking she swanned around after her redundancy being a lady that lunched.

I stop rocking. ‘As great as this all sounds, I still don’t understand what it’s got to do with me. How does my detox fit in?’

‘Well, I’d been planning to come up here and start working on the house, and when I saw what a state you were in and how you didn’t have anything to do after being fired, I thought you could come and help me.’