The Happy Glampers. Daisy Tate
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rooms, seven entrances and four, very grand, storeys. There were sprawling lawns, a blooming rose garden and lashings of wisteria shifting in the light breeze like … bunting.
Her wedding ring caught the light as she turned the car down the long, shaded avenue signposted for the glampsite. Ridiculous, oversized thing. Had she been so blinded by its beauty all those years ago that she’d been unable to see what her future held? Worse perhaps. She hadn’t wanted to see it. If she’d just opened her eyes she would have noticed the horrid predictability of it all spooling out in front of her. Too many golfing weekends. A pied à terre in London. An affair with a junior partner. It was all so obvious it was almost gauche. How could he? And to find out on this weekend. The one solitary weekend she’d hoped to show off her life to her dearest friends.
She glanced into the rear-view mirror to the back seat where her children remained blissfully unaware of any discord. Perhaps she shouldn’t have agreed with Oli when he’d decided, for the pair of them, that bothering the children with the ‘whole silly mess’ would be the wrong thing to do. Fair enough for the weekend, but they weren’t innocent babes in arms. They were young adults. Young adults who knew having an affair was the wrong thing to do.
She looked into the mirror again. Two bent heads. Two sets of noise-cancelling headsets. Hardly a word passed between them the entire journey. Perhaps they already knew. Perhaps, like Oli, they too had tired of her. Bundling them into the car today, you’d’ve thought she was slinging them into Guantanamo rather than putting them up in a five-star yurt. She was doubly horrified to catch Oli slipping them fifty quid each to play along.
She glanced at her children again, completely oblivious to the estate’s glorious setting. One weekend with her friend’s children rather than their mates, she silently groused. Was that so big an ask? To talk with someone for a change? Play a board game instead of devoting all of their attention to their phones?
Before climbing down from the car, she guiltily closed the search engine on her own phone. Googling her husband’s not-so-new fancy woman in lay-bys probably hadn’t been the best way to salve her wounds.
After one more scan in the boot for the bunting, Charlotte’s eyes fell on the shiny new shoebox. A ridiculous pair of cream-coloured canvas Diors that Oli had given her for ‘being so reasonable.’ She hadn’t been able to bring herself to put them on. In all honesty, she didn’t want a pair of completely impractical shoes, even if it was her fortieth. Technically, she’d tick that box tomorrow, but he’d suggested she treat the entire weekend as her birthday, seeing as he’d cast a shadow on things.
Shadow? More like an apocalypse, obliterating sixteen years of her very nearly perfect life. Other than that? He was right. A jolly birthday weekend was exactly what she needed. What else could crush the urge to lash out at him with his pointless shoes and ask him over and over again, Why? Why, when I’ve been so true to you?
She left the shoes untouched. The Charlotte Mayfield she’d taught herself to be kept the peace, put on a brave face, and didn’t – wouldn’t – spoil it for anyone else. Later, quietly and privately, she’d sift through the wreckage and see what was left. Then, perhaps, she’d wear the Diors through a particularly fetid puddle.
She tapped on the side door and gestured for her son, Jack, to open the window.
‘Darlings. How’bout you pop out and give me a hand unpacking the boot?’
Charlotte’s blond, blue-eyed son – a picture of his father if ever there was one – looked at her with a stony expression. ‘Mum. I’m knackered. I’ve been at school. All. Week.’ He abruptly changed tack (another Oli trick). ‘You do it best anyway. We’d only get it wrong.’ She looked across to where her daughter Poppy sat staring out of the opposite window, avoiding her gaze and looking glum. Nothing.
‘You’re right. It’ll be easier on my own,’ she chirped, too brightly. ‘You two can have a wander around the site, how about that?’ Jack rolled his eyes and Poppy continued to ignore her. Charlotte pushed down the knot of anxiety in her stomach. She’d absolutely adored being a mother when they were little. The only time she’d felt pure, unconditional love, and the hope that she had a chance to give her children the childhood she’d only dreamt of having. Teens, it turned out, were harder to please.
Charlotte felt the knot surge up into her throat where it threatened to erupt into a sob. She took a deep breath, easing it back down into place. There was a party to organize. Something she was very good at, despite the lack of bunting.
So! She began loading up her arms. Anytime now her friends would be arriving and she’d be taking her first stab at behaving as if everything was perfectly perfect. Friends she’d admittedly lost touch with over the years but, if she was being really honest, Freya, Emily and Izzy were the closest friends she’d ever had. And they were her friends rather than the guests who came with Oli’s stamp of approval. That was a bridge she wasn’t quite ready to cross.
Cake tins up to her chin, she headed towards the ‘Starlight Tucker Tent’. The vast open-sided kitchen and lounge area didn’t, as advertised, have a view of the sky, but she supposed landed gentry could call their idyllic glampsite features whatever they fancied. The plus side, she supposed, of being born to ‘shoulder the burden of their forebears’.
Burden or not, the Sittingstone Glampsite was everything she’d hoped it would be. Three yurts, a pair of bell tents, and the tree house. The air smelt of warm meadow grass. The sky was a pure, deep blue. She couldn’t have asked for a better bank holiday weekend. Apart from the whole adulterous-husband thing.
Relishing the unexpected cool under the canvas-roofed structure, she unloaded her tins onto the butcher’s block made out of an old cable spool. If they’d been alive, or invited, her parents would’ve howled with derision. Cast-offs from the sparky? Get off!
Charlotte gave her head a little shake. Her parents had been masters of mocking the haves on behalf of the have-nots. Though they’d been gone some five years now – her father from a heart attack, her mother not long after when pneumonia forced her to pick between alcohol and antibiotics – she could still hear their commentary about her own life choices, the thick Sheffield accent piercing right through to the quick of things. Serves you bloody right for thinking you were better than everyone else. Which, of course, stopped her from pulling out her iPhone and triple-checking the status on her Ocado delivery.
Instead she marched purposefully back to the Land Rover after commandeering a rather fetching lavender-coloured wheelbarrow called ‘Felicity’ and continued to unload the car.
A while later, Jack sloped into the kitchen and waved his phone at her. ‘Muuuum. Dad’s texted.’
‘Oh?’ She’d thought he might back out entirely. Leave her to save face on her own.
‘He’s checking out the pub up in the village. “Taste-testing the local brew”.’
‘Oh! Right. Well.’ That was something. She popped the sausages she’d picked up from her favourite farm shop in the pristine, empty refrigerator.
‘Muuuum. There’s nothing to do here.’
‘Of course there is, Jack.’ She reached out to give him a hug, but he’d already walked away to examine some board games tucked up on a high shelf. He’d outgrow his father in a year or so.
He dropped the boxes onto a table with a despondent groan. Monopoly and the like had clearly outgrown their lustre. Goodness. If Charlotte had been brought to a place like this for a bank holiday weekend at their age she would’ve thought she’d died and gone to heaven! Her children were behaving as if they’d been asked to weekend in the bowels of purgatory.
‘How about going down to the river?’
‘Pffft.’ The ‘no clue what fifteen-year-old boys liked to do’ variety. ‘I wish this place had clay shooting. Or quad bikes. Why didn’t you pick the Alps or something interesting for your birthday? Did you know Jago’s mum and dad booked, like, a whole island