It would be hard to exaggerate how much she had wanted this, or for how long. Growing up where she had, in Northamptonshire, just down the road from Country Home, she could remember driving with her parents past that long drystone wall, glimpsing through the trees the glinting waters of the estate’s private lake, peeking through the front gates at the long straight drive up to the Elizabethan manor house, experiencing a little thrill every time, trying to guess what it looked like inside. Hearing a helicopter passing overhead and wondering who was on board. Reading about Home in magazines, as a teenager, imagining what it would be like to work there, to be part of something like that.
There was still a very small part of Jess that worried this was all going to turn out to have been a terrible mistake. That she was going to get to Island Home only to be told they’d looked into her references and discovered her to be an imposter. That as soon as she opened her mouth everyone would immediately know – new haircut and new clothes notwithstanding – that she was just not cool enough to work somewhere like this, would never fit in, was not what they had been looking for at all.
That was certainly the impression she had carried away from her interview.
It had taken place at Covent Garden Home, Jess shifting forwards and backwards in an armchair that was slightly too low for the table, conscious that the straining button on her new blouse was in serious danger of popping open, trying to assume a position that looked relaxed yet eager, attempting to work out what to do with her elbows. All the advice her friends had given her about this interview and all the pep talks she had given herself on the journey felt suddenly irrelevant and absurd when faced with an obviously hungover Adam Groom eating a full English.
Between wincing sips from a Bloody Mary, he had squinted at her printed-off CV for what was evidently the first time, telling her random things about himself whenever he glanced up from his scrappy bit of paper, and addressing her chest throughout. The only mention made of the distance she’d travelled down from Northamptonshire to meet him in person was when Adam remarked that the hotel she currently worked at – The Grange – was just down the road from Country Home. ‘I know,’ she had told him, smiling. ‘I’ve actually applied for jobs there quite a few times . . .’ Eight, to be precise. She would have said more about why, perhaps added something about how much she admired all that Adam and his brother had achieved with Home, what a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity working at the launch of one of their clubs would be, but as she was in the middle of talking, Adam had called the waitress （young, slim, pretty） over to ask for a bit more ketchup, and Jess had trailed off.
All the way home on the train – that long, expensive, unreimbursed train journey – she’d been kicking herself for all the stupid things she’d said, all the opportunities she’d missed to sell herself, all the things she would say to Adam if she was being interviewed again now. All the things she would not have said. Knowing that this had been her big chance and she had fluffed it.
That night she had received a phone call asking her whether she was available to start immediately.
‘Of course,’ she’d told them, not even really thinking until she got off the phone – it was so unexpected, the whole thing – what a bombshell this was going to be to her current employers, her colleagues, her friends. Not until even later did it occur to her that she had never asked why her predecessor had left so suddenly, what kind of arrangements, if any, had been made for the handover.
It was hard to believe that had only been a week ago. The past few days had been manic. Frantic shopping expeditions, the last-minute haircut she was not quite sure about （a feathery shoulder-length bob the hairdresser told her would be easy to manage, but was actually impossible to style into anything other than a bird’s nest by herself）， a moment of panic late the previous evening when it had looked as if her suitcase wasn’t going to close. A couple of days’ induction at Home’s head office in London. The kind of restless night you always have before a big day, waking before your alarm goes off.
And now here she was, having waited on the mainland for the causeway to become passable, crossing it in a chauffeur-driven electric Land Rover Defender with two other new arrivals, both Littlesea locals, all daunted, all trying very hard not to show it. She would surely never forget that first sight of the road emerging from the sea, surprisingly winding, alarmingly narrow, the way the piles of rocks on either side of the track appeared first, then within minutes the wet surface of the road itself was shining in the early afternoon sunlight, clumps of seaweed still stranded across it in inky scribbles, the island a hulking outline on the horizon.