Promoted: to Wife and Mother

that is open to new challenges and new experiences, and who won’t whine when they’re asked to do something new!’

‘Will all the dolphins and owls in the company be sent to work in the garden as well?’ Perdita asked tightly.

‘No, that wouldn’t be a challenge for them. But they’ll be asked to contribute to the community in some other way. The point of that course was that we learnt something about ourselves and how we can develop as individuals, and we can only do that by stretching ourselves, and challenging ourselves to deal with situations that are naturally uncomfortable for us.’

‘Do panthers have to stretch themselves too, or are they above that kind of thing?’

For a moment Perdita wondered if she might have gone too far. Ed was her boss, after all, and he was unlikely to take kindly to sarcasm, but then he smiled.

‘No, I get to be challenged too. I have to learn to be more intuitive and more open emotionally, apparently. Believe me,’ he said as he got to his feet, signalling that the meeting was at an end, ‘that will be as hard for me as working with teenagers will be for you!’

‘I can’t believe I’m going to have to go and work in some grotty garden,’ Perdita grumbled to her friend that night. Millie’s teenagers were both out and she had seized on the chance to meet Perdita for a drink.

‘It might not be that bad,’ said Millie, who had an infuriating tendency to look on the bright side of everything. ‘Some people find gardening very therapeutic.’

‘This gardening won’t be! Ed wouldn’t be sending me if there was any chance I would have a good time.’ Perdita took a defiant gulp of her wine. ‘No, he wants it to be as tough as possible for me. He wants to crush my spirit, in fact,’ she finished dramatically.

Millie remained annoyingly unmoved at the dreadful prospect of seeing her friend crushed and beaten. ‘I doubt that,’ she said placidly. ‘It sounded to me as if he wanted you to get a bit more experience of dealing with people who aren’t used to doing what you tell them, and I’ve got to say that putting you in with a bunch of teenagers with antisocial behaviour orders is the best experience you could have! If you can deal with them, you can deal with anyone!’

‘Well, I think it’s a waste of time, just like that stupid course,’ said Perdita crossly. ‘Who does Edward Merrick think he is?’

‘He thinks he’s your chief executive,’ Millie said. ‘Oh, and actually, he is! That makes him your boss.’ She pointed a warning finger at her friend. ‘If you had any sense, you’d be sucking up to him, not telling him he’s stupid and refusing to do things his way.’

‘I’ve got no intention of sucking up to Edward Merrick,’ said Perdita, outraged at the very idea. ‘I’ve already given him a bottle of Dad’s best wine, and what does he do? Send me to wallow around in mud once a week!’

Millie eyed her friend thoughtfully. ‘He sounded nice from what you told me about him turning out to be your mother’s neighbour. I got the feeling you were quite taken with him, in fact.’

‘Well, I’m not!’ snapped Perdita, pushing those odd tingles of attraction and her stupid nervousness earlier that day firmly out of her mind.

How could she be taken with a man who’d dangled her perfect job in front of her nose and had then proceeded to send her out to grub around some wasteland and no doubt get absolutely filthy just so he could salve his social conscience? If Ed was so keen to save the world, let him go and dig.

She drained her glass with an air of defiance. ‘He’s my boss, that’s all,’ she said. ‘I don’t even like him.’

Perdita turned up her collar and regarded the wasteland with a mixture of disbelief and distaste. A garden? Here? Surely there must be some mistake, she decided. Or was it possible that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax contrived by Ed and Grace Dunn just to get her out the office on a cold, damp Thursday afternoon and fill her with dismay at the thought of working in this horrible pile of rubbish, mud and old bricks?

Grace had emailed her earlier in the week to suggest that she came along today at half past three for an introductory session, and to wear her oldest clothes as she was likely to get very dirty. Having already sacrificed her favourite boots to Ed Merrick’s notion of leadership training, Perdita had no intention of ruining anything else. Grudgingly, she had invested in a fleece and a pair of rubber boots, and she had changed into her oldest pair of jeans at the office, stalking out to the car park with her fiercest glare in place in case anyone had the nerve to mock her for her change of style. She had managed to get through forty years perfectly well without owning a fleece, and would happily have managed another forty if it hadn’t been for Edward Merrick!

She was so over her attraction for him! He and Grace were probably lurking in that hut right now, sniggering behind their hands at her expression, Perdita thought vengefully as she picked her way towards it through the mud.

She didn’t know whether she would rather it was a big joke or for real. Either way, she was far too busy to be wasting time out in this dump. She liked projects with achievable goals, but the idea of creating a garden here was clearly unfeasible. She couldn’t imagine what Grace Dunn was thinking about. She must be a fool or a fantasist, Perdita decided roundly.

But Grace didn’t look like a fool when she welcomed Perdita into the hut, which was larger and brighter and a lot cleaner inside than it had looked from outside. She was a slight, very pretty woman with luminous grey eyes and a cloud of dishevelled hair, but her handshake was firm and it soon became clear that she had both intelligence and authority in spite of her youth. Eyeing her critically, Perdita thought that Ed had been right. She could only be in her early thirties-very young to be a widow, certainly.

There was no sign of Ed in the hut, which was partly a relief, although that was swiftly replaced by panic as Perdita found herself being introduced to a group of morose youths. What on earth was she doing here? She knew nothing about teenagers, other than what she had learnt from friends like Millie, and that was enough to convince her that the chances of her having anything in common with them were close to nil.

More intimidated than she wanted to admit, Perdita sat on the edge of the semicircle of chairs. She didn’t feel much of a peacock in this company, she thought, eyeing the others from under her lashes. They looked uniformly sullen and truculent, and about as pleased to be there as she felt.

Grace took charge. ‘You’re probably all wondering what you’re doing here,’ she said, ‘so I’m going to show you.’ She unveiled an artist’s impression of a cross between a park and a garden, with separate areas for growing fruit and vegetables, and for adventure playgrounds. ‘You’re here to make this,’ she said.

Perdita could only gape at the picture. ‘No way!’ said a boy next to her, surprised out of his sulky silence, and she couldn’t help nodding in agreement. Maybe she had more in common with teenagers than she thought. At least this boy could see that what Grace proposed was impossible.

But Grace was having none of it. ‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘Our first job is to clear the ground and prepare it in time for planting. It may not seem very exciting, but this stage is one of the most important in the whole project.’

Perhaps realising that they remained deeply sceptical, Grace didn’t waste much time trying to convince them all, and issued everyone instead with a gardening fork and a pair of work gloves. Perdita found herself allocated to clear a patch of ground with a monosyllabic boy called Tom who hid his face behind a fall of tousled hair and apparently communicated only in grunts.

Cleverly, Grace had also pointed out that they would always work on the same area at first so they would be able to measure their progress against the others. What effect this had on Tom was doubtful, but Perdita’s competitive spirit was immediately roused and she immediately vowed that their ground would be cleared faster and better than anyone else’s.

Since she was here, she reasoned, she might as well make a success of it.

The truth was that Perdita didn’t know any other way to tackle a job other than to do it well, and preferably to beat everyone else while she was at it.

She glanced at the boy beside her. ‘Well, we might as well start,’ she said.

Morosely, he bent to pick up a rusty can, but the effort seemed to exhaust him and he stood holding it as if he couldn’t work out how it had come to be in his hand.

‘Look, it’ll take ages if we try to pick up all this rubbish piece by piece,’ said Perdita, exasperated. The ground was littered with broken concrete, rusty metal, tattered plastic, broken bottles and discarded fast food packaging, and she eyed it with distaste. ‘Let’s use the forks to pull it into piles and then try to get rid of it.’

She didn’t care if that was her being bossy. It would be enough of a challenge for her just to get through the afternoon here, let alone try and remember to be inclusive and non-confrontational.