life.’
10
The next week at the campsite sped past as Belinda got to grips with a mountain of things. One of the first things she did, unbeknown to Alain, was to save everything on the office computer to a memory stick and download it onto her laptop. That way, there were no arguments when Alain wanted to work on the computer. It also had the added benefit too that she could work from the comfort of her own room at the auberge of an evening before wandering downstairs to enjoy a nightcap with Fern.
The amount of work that needed organising threatened to overwhelm her a few times, there was so much. Her to-do list was endless: organise five or six local women to clean the cabins, the café and the manager’s house; a team of men to pressure-wash the shower and toilet blocks before painting. Alain took over the job of organising the outdoor teams of workers, leaving Belinda to deal with the teams working inside. In addition, there was the website to bring up to date, pods for the glamping area to source, lots of new equipment to order, not to mention finding staff for the season.
A routine established itself over the course of that week and the days continued to fly by. Every morning, she left the auberge just before eight o’clock, stopped in the village for a couple of croissants and a salad baguette for her lunch. Fern had lent her a cafetière and she’d stocked up on ground coffee from the village shop, instant coffee being one of her personal bêtes noires. By the time Alain strolled in at about ten past eight the coffee was ready. Over a quick coffee and croissant, they caught each other up on how things were progressing and what their individual plans were for the day. At midday Alain disappeared for lunch, leaving Belinda to eat her baguette and deal with her emails. The afternoons followed a similar pattern with them both concentrating on their allotted tasks. Belinda shut down her laptop around four thirty most days, said goodbye to Alain and made her way back to the auberge.
Although there was so much to do, the campsite was definitely beginning to respond to all of the noisy cutting down, pruning back and mowing work that had happened over the last few days.
One lunchtime after everyone including Alain had disappeared for an hour or two, Belinda decided to eat outside in the sunshine. The only noise she heard as she made her way along the path towards the river was the tweeting of various birds. Belinda recognised the call of a blackbird, pigeons cooing away in the tall pines and a chaffinch singing perched amongst the burgeoning branches of an oak tree before hearing a noise that stopped her in her tracks. The whrrr-tapping sound of a nearby woodpecker. A sound she hadn’t heard in years. A sound that took her right back to her childhood home, where it had been a noise that was taken for granted in the background of life.
A picture of the old stone mas that had been home for so long floated, unbidden, into her mind as she walked. A simple two-storey building, it hadn’t been a prestigious place, shambolic described it better. A shelter built long ago by a Breton farmer to house various animals and his family. Down the years, it had been enlarged and converted in a haphazard manner, the cows moved into a separate shelter and their previous accommodation had become the kitchen of the house. Belinda smiled, remembering how her father had done the final conversion and turned the old milking parlour at the back of the house into her bedroom. She’d loved that room, with its view out over the countryside and the field shelter for Lucky.
Lucky. That had been the hardest part of that awful day when her life had fallen apart. Knowing she was leaving the pony. Inconsolable, she’d cried for hours until her mother snapped at her. ‘For God’s sake, Belinda, shut up. I feel like crying too, but it won’t solve anything. Lucky will go to a good home. Your dad will make sure of that.’
Belinda did stop crying eventually, but only because she didn’t have any tears left to spill. Years later, she’d realised her difficult relationship with her mother had started its downward spiral that day with her lack of empathy over leaving Lucky. It was a breach of the mother–daughter bond that had never