The School of Starting Over Read online

  The School of Starting Over

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Epilogue

  A Letter From Lisa

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  The School of Starting Over

  Lisa Swift

  For Nana

  Chapter One

  Plip. Another chunky droplet landed in the metal pot by Nell’s knee.

  There was a spray of splashback from the now almost full pot. She blinked it out of her eyes and shuffled out of range.

  What even was the pot? What the hell was it supposed to be for? Nell had found it in a cupboard in the kitchen. It was squat and made of brass, with an ear-shaped handle attached to each side.

  Casserole dish? Chamber pot? Spittoon?

  Anyway, whatever its intended purpose, right now it was finding gainful employment as a rain-catcher: one of several pots, pans and bowls she’d salvaged from the kitchen to catch the drops invading her new home via the hole-ridden roof.

  ‘Well, Colin,’ she said to the sheep lying contentedly at her side, resting one hand on his warm fleece, ‘here’s another fine mess I’ve got myself into.’

  She jumped as her phone vibrated in her pocket.

  ‘Dad. Hi,’ she said when she answered, trying not to grimace.

  ‘Well then?’ he demanded in his usual gruff tone. ‘How is it?’

  ‘It’s… great. Like I said, loads of potential.’

  He snorted. ‘Yeah, I get it. In other words, it’s a dump.’

  Nell winced. ‘I prefer the term “fixer-upper”.’

  ‘Are you going to invite me over to have a look now you’re moved in, then? Or am I still banished?’

  ‘Not yet. Wait till I’ve done it up a bit first.’

  ‘You can’t do it all on your own, can you? At least let me get a look at that dodgy roof.’

  ‘Dad, please. I want to do it myself. I need to.’

  ‘If you’d just hung on a bit before laying out your bloody life savings on some half-derelict barn in the arse-end of nowhere, something was bound to have come up round here,’ he told her sternly. ‘You know me and Leanne have got room for you for as long as it takes to sort yourself out with something.’

  He didn’t say ‘I told you so’, but Nell heard it all the same.

  They’d had this conversation a dozen times. Her dad was wilfully oblivious to the fact that she’d rather be anywhere than living back with him and his wife.

  First there’d been the break-up with Shawn, and having to move out of the flat they’d been sharing in Manchester, with all the stress, heartache and misery that comes when a long-term relationship ends. Then, hot on the heels of that little life-changer, she’d had to leave her job at the school where she’d been working. At twenty-eight, Nell Shackleton had found herself suddenly single, homeless and unemployed. Rock bottom, she’d told herself: the only way from there is up, right?

  Except, she realised, it wasn’t quite rock bottom. Real rock bottom would only come if she let herself weaken and agreed to move back in with her dad. That would be too big a step back; a return to the safe, closeted world of childhood. If she wasn’t going to let this break her, Nell needed her next step to be forward.

  ‘And does our Freddie know you offered me his room?’ Nell asked her dad. She couldn’t imagine Freddie would be any too pleased at arriving home from uni for the holidays to discover his big sister kipping in his bed.

  ‘Freddie’s grand on a camp bed in the box room. He’s only home every few months anyway.’

  ‘Dad, look, we’ve talked about this,’ she said gently. ‘It’s kind of you to offer, but I’m an adult. I need to make a fresh start.’

  ‘You could’ve made a fresh start here. Lots of good schools around Leeds.’

  ‘What I mean is, I need to stand on my own two feet. I can’t expect you to look after me whenever life drops me on my backside, can I?’

  ‘Breaking off a two-year engagement right before the wedding is a bloody long drop, love,’ he muttered.

  ‘Well, it’s done now anyway. Deeds are signed. For better or worse, I’m here.’

  ‘You’d have been better off staying put in Manchester, where there’s decent jobs. There’s nowt for you in the country but rain and horse shit.’

  ‘I like the country. And I’ve got a decent job – at least, I will have from Monday.’

  ‘Hmm. You’re a clever girl, Nelly. You’ll be wasted in some tiny village school with a bunch of inbred farmers’ kids.’

  ‘It’s not All Creatures Great and Small, Dad,’ she said impatiently. ‘There’s more to rural life these days than cousin marriage and cow-fisting.’

  He sighed. ‘I don’t mean to talk this new start down, pet. I know you’re excited about the house and the job and everything. You seemed to make the decision in a hell of a hurry after splitting with Shawn, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s a good job,’ she said, snuggling against Colin’s warm fleece. ‘And Humblebee Farm was a bargain. I’m a homeowner now – that’s something, right? How many single women in their twenties are on the property ladder?’

  ‘Hovel-owner, more like.’

  ‘I’m not like you, you know. I’m a country girl at heart.’

  He scoffed. ‘You’ve never lived in the country in your life.’

  ‘Yeah, but I always wanted to.’ She flinched as a blob of rainwater landed on her nose, brushing it off with her thumb. ‘This is my dream, Dad. Be happy for me, please.’

  ‘I worry about you, that’s all,’ he said with another sigh. ‘Is the place even habitable? I thought you said half the slate had come down.’

  ‘The bedroom and kitchen are fine. The living room…’ She glanced around at the pots and pans dotted across the stone-flagged floor, catching water. ‘Well, I’m sure I’ll have it fixed up in no time. Got to go, Dad, I need to save the battery till I can get to a power socket.’

  ‘Don’t forget Monday, will you?’

  ‘Monday?’

  ‘Leanne’s birthday,’ he said, with a trace of exasperation.

  She flinched. ‘I know, I hadn’t forgotten. Card and flowers are on their way.’

  ‘You will give her a ring too, won’t you?’

  ‘Can’t I text?’

  ‘Nell, I think your stepmother should be worth more to you by now than an emoji and a couple of kisses.’

  ‘It’s just… I never know what to
say to her.’

  ‘Well “happy birthday” would be a good start,’ he told her sternly. ‘Don’t let me down, Nelly.’

  She sighed. ‘I won’t. Bye, Dad.’

  When she’d stashed her phone away, she pushed herself up from the floor, rubbing her buttocks to try to inject some feeling back into them.

  She could lie to her dad but not to herself. Truth was, she was ready to cry.

  When she’d first come to look around Humblebee Farm, an old farmhouse out on the moors that rolled high above the little Yorkshire village of Leyholme, it had been a glorious day in August. The air had been heavy with the scent of clover, the moors purple with new-blooming heather. The estate agent – and this guy had been a born estate agent – had used words like ‘idyllic’, ‘charming’, ‘ramshackle’…

  Well, Nell was only human. Bloody hell, there’d been roses around the door, for God’s sake – actual pink roses, climbing over the stone front like they’d escaped from a chocolate box. She’d been swept away on a tidal wave of romance and air-castles that was just too delicious to resist.

  The house had previously been the property of a retired farmer, Ted Preston. As he’d grown old he’d sold off his land to the other farms peppered through the hills, but Farmer Ted had stubbornly stayed living in his farmhouse until the very end, apparently unconcerned as it fell into disrepair around him. After his death the place had been inherited by some great-nephew, a Londoner who just wanted it off his hands. Nell had thought he must be mad to let it go for such a low asking price and snapped it up right away before he changed his mind.

  Best of all was that she knew it was the last place Shawn would ever have wanted to live. He was a townie through and through, wrinkling his nose at anywhere you couldn’t get a sushi platter and an Uber. On the day the sale had completed, Nell had felt an infinite amount of satisfaction at the idea of living anywhere Shawn would have hated.

  Not so much earlier this evening though, when her taxi had dropped her off at the end of the dirt track that led to Humblebee Farm, suitcases in hand, in the middle of a torrential autumn downpour.

  With the sky a glowering charcoal, the farmhouse was no longer idyllic. It felt bleak and forbidding. The roses around the door were long gone, just a mess of black, ugly briars clawing at the lintel. As the taxi pulled away, Nell almost had to stop herself from chasing after it with cries of ‘Don’t leave me!’

  And the inside – sweet Jesus, the inside.

  The kitchen wasn’t so bad: no hot water or electricity, but there was a working gas cooker, a kettle, even a few tins in the cupboards. The bedroom was grim and cold, but dry. But the living room… ugh. Bare, sodden with rainwater, with a pile of soggy kindling next to an open fire she knew she had no chance of lighting.

  And then there was her new roommate Colin, a friendly Swaledale sheep who’d barged in through the broken back door and seemed to be claiming squatter’s rights. She’d tried to shoo him out at first, but when the clouds exploded into thunder and lightning she’d taken pity on him and told him he could stay till the storm was over. Actually, she was kind of grateful for the company. Good old Colin.

  She carried a couple of pans of rainwater through to the kitchen and tipped them down the sink, set a tin of beans with pork sausages to warm on the hob for her tea and returned to the living room to put the emptied pans back in position.

  Nell sighed as she sank back down to the bare floor.

  ‘Oh God, Colin,’ she whispered, resting her head against him. ‘I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.’

  * * *

  ‘Got a surprise for you,’ Xander’s mum Anne told him when he stumbled into the kitchen on Monday morning, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

  He smiled uncertainly. ‘What?’

  ‘Here.’ She opened the fridge and whipped something out with a flourish. ‘Ta-da! Not for now, obviously. We can have it with our tea later, celebrate your first day, and then you can take what’s left for the staffroom tomorrow.’

  Oh God. She hadn’t. She hadn’t… baked.

  ‘You really didn’t need to do that,’ he said, meaning every word.

  ‘Of course I did,’ she said, beaming as she put it down on the table. ‘It’s not every day your son becomes a headmaster, is it?’

  ‘Headteacher, Mum. We don’t really call them headmasters these days.’

  Xander fished his glasses out of his dressing gown pocket so he could see the cake more clearly. It was shaped like a mortar board, white icing spelling out the message Congratulations on your promotion, Alexander! #ProudMamaBear #AllGrownUp #Blessed.

  He was starting to rue the day he’d helped her set up that Instagram account. The woman was a hashtag junkie.

  ‘Well, headteacher then, if that’s the PC thing now,’ she said. ‘And the youngest Leyholme’s ever had to boot. Don’t tell me that’s not worth celebrating.’

  ‘Third youngest. And I’m only acting headteacher.’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s close enough.’

  ‘Mum – it’s a lovely cake, thank you. But you do realise this is only temporary? I’m the caretaker head, that’s all. I just have to keep things running smoothly until Jeremy’s back on his feet.’

  ‘They still picked you, didn’t they? Out of everyone?’

  Oh right, out of everyone. If you didn’t count the three other staff members he knew had turned the job down before him. Normally it would fall to the deputy head, but as luck would have it, she was off on maternity leave. Xander – quiet, unambitious Xander Scott, who’d been perfectly happy teaching Year 3, thank you very much – had been dead-man’s-bootsed by the school governors into a position no one else had wanted. He didn’t want it either, but a sense of duty and general inability to say no had forced him to accept. It hardly seemed like an occasion that called for cake.

  He looked up into his mother’s proud, hopeful eyes and forced a smile. ‘Yeah, Mum. They picked me.’

  ‘Of course they did,’ she said, ruffling his dark hair. ‘They know talent when they see it.’ Her expression brightened. ‘And maybe Jeremy won’t get back on his feet. Then the job could be yours permanently.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Oh, don’t sound so scandalised. I don’t mean I wish him dead or anything awful,’ she said, waving a hand. ‘But a heart attack, that’s not good, is it? High time he started putting himself first – took early retirement and spent some time with the grandkiddies. He’s fifty-nine, and if you ask me he looks every day of it.’

  ‘He’s a very competent head.’ And rather him than me…

  ‘Well, so will you be. More than competent. Exceptional. You know they put that on your school report once? Exceptional. I’ve got it upstairs in Dad’s bureau.’

  Xander winced. ‘You kept my old reports?’

  ‘Of course I did. They’re in the bottom drawer with your nana’s premium bonds.’

  He could remember a few choice phrases from those reports himself. It hadn’t been all exceptionals. ‘Could be so much more if he only believed in himself,’ his Year 10 class teacher had observed mournfully. And from his Biology teacher: ‘Alexander would do rather better if he spent more time properly studying the reproductive system diagrams and less time doodling beards on the testicles’.

  Thanks, Mr Allen. Actually, he’d learnt quite a lot about reproduction while he’d been adding the beards. Well, the theory, anyway. It had taken him a fair while longer to get to the practice.

  ‘It doesn’t work that way anyway,’ Xander told his mum. ‘If Jeremy retired, the school governors would have to advertise the post. And they’d get a lot more experienced applicants than me.’

  ‘Well, experience isn’t everything, is it? The parents know you, the staff respect you – what stranger can say that? You’d walk into it.’

  He smiled. Only his mum, of everyone in the world, could have such blind, unshakeable faith in his abilities.

  ‘I’m glad you think so,’ he said.

  Anne p
ut the cake back in the fridge and opened the cupboard above the cooker. ‘So what do you fancy for breakfast, clever clogs? Croissants? Toast? Cereal?’

  ‘I’ll make it.’

  ‘No, let me, I like looking after you. The novelty of having you home hasn’t worn off yet.’

  ‘Mum, please. I’m thirty-one, for Christ’s sake. I feel about five when you run round after me.’

  Her face crumpled and he sighed.

  ‘I mean, I’m grateful, course I am,’ he said in a soothing tone, standing so he could give her a hug. ‘It’s good of you to put me up till I get myself sorted out. But I don’t want to be treating the place like a hotel, do I? Bad enough you won’t take any rent.’

  She smiled. ‘When you were a teenager, me and your dad were forever telling you to stop treating the place like a hotel.’

  ‘And I learnt my lesson, you see?’ He guided her by the shoulders to a chair. ‘Here, you sit down. I’ll make us both breakfast.’

  ‘So what’s on the agenda for your first day then, Mr Scott?’ she asked as she took a seat.

  ‘I just want to project vibes of “new boss, same as the old boss” really, reassure staff and parents it’s business as usual while Jeremy’s recovering. I think everyone’s still in shock, with it being so sudden.’ He grabbed a box of muesli and poured out a couple of bowlfuls. ‘Oh, and there’s the new Reception class teacher starting today as well. A Miss Shackleton.’

  * * *

  As he brushed his teeth after breakfast, Xander couldn’t help remembering a naff joke his dad had told him when he was small.

  A mother goes to wake her son for school and finds him crying.

  ‘I don’t want to go to school,’ he sobs. ‘The children hate me, the teachers hate me, everyone hates me. Please don’t make me go, Mummy.’

  ‘But you have to go to school,’ his mother says. ‘You’re the headmaster!’

  Xander spat his toothpaste into the sink, feeling a strong urge to vomit. He leaned over the toilet, retching, but nothing came up.

  Christ almighty. What had he let himself in for?

  Chapter Two

  Nell reached up to pat some flyaway strands of hair back into place. Her first day in a new job and she was walking round with a giant ginger bird’s nest on her head.