Lynda has a plan; she is preparing a surprise meal for Robert - coq au vin – followed by a bit of hanky and, if he’s really lucky, some panky as well. She spends all the afternoon trying on various items of clothing and jewellery and bemoaning the fact that her hair hasn’t grown back and that she still has scars from her injuries.
The meal progresses, but it is punctuated by long periods of silence. Robert is quite comfortable with the situation, but Lynda is finding it all a bit of an ordeal and chides herself for hiding in the kitchen and behaving “like a silly girl going on a first date”. Eventually she decides on a plan of action – she will march into the lounge, kiss her husband and drag him upstairs. Never mind dessert; love is on the menu, or, as Lynda puts it “We’ll let our bodies do the talking.”
Yuck! Way too much information! Fortunately for us, Lynda’s cunning plan goes badly awry and, when she suggests to Robert that they could have an early night, nudge, nudge, he assumes she has tired herself out cooking the meal and he says that he could take her up a cup of cocoa. As for letting their bodies do the talking, it seems that all Robert’s body wants to say is ‘goodnight, sleep tight. See you in the morning.’
As seductions go, it could have turned out better and, the following morning, Robert is congratulating himself on showing restraint, as he is convinced that Lynda still needs time before they start thinking about “resuming normal relations”, whereas she is, in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, gagging for it.
All this has put Lynda in a bad mood – never before has Robert ignored one of her euphemisms and she cannot remember ever having been rejected. Oh come on Lynda – surely you must have been. She notices that Robert is looking at her over the top of his newspaper and this annoys her even more. Robert is just being so damn nice about everything and it is driving Lynda mad “The man’s a saint” she says, crossly, and admits to herself that she has been extremely difficult to live with. “I just want to be treated normally” she complains.
In the end, she challenges Robert to write down everything that he doesn’t like about her, which makes me think that the demand for paper will lead to widespread, worldwide deforestation, not to mention terminal writer’s cramp. Go on Robert, drag her upstairs, rip her clothes off and – I’m sorry, dear readers, but my mind is filling up with images that I just know are going to haunt me, so I will stop here before I am ill.
One positive thing to come out of the Lynda episode is that Emma is delivering a cake as part of the surprise for Robert and she remarks on how beautiful Lynda looks. Is the meal for a special occasion? No, replies Lynda – she just wanted to do something nice for Robert. Emma is impressed that she still feels this way after so many years of marriage and Emma resolves to do something similar for Ed when he gets home. So it is that Ed is (we hope pleasantly) surprised when he opens the front door and his wife leaps upon him. Makes a change from a cup of tea.
Emma is having her own troubles (and I don’t mean the format of the Flower and Produce show). Fallon, whose wedding anniversary it is, runs into Natasha. Fallon is having a meeting with Helen, to discuss the possibility of extending the rent reduction period. If not, Fallon fears that she will have to let Emma go, but she’s not giving up without a fight. As Fallon walks off to her meeting, Natasha mutters that she doesn’t much fancy Emma’s chances.
Helen is adamant that the rent reduction holiday is over and Fallon meets up with Alice (I thought she was working all hours at Home Farm?). You will not be gobsmacked to learn that strong drink is taken and Fallon ends up at home, slightly mellow (as the newt) and says that she ought not to open the bottle of champagne that she has bought so that she and Harrison can celebrate their second anniversary. This seems a tad hard on Sgt Burns, but being a policeman, he’s probably used to the odd incident of crushing disappointment.
Emma meets up accidentally with Natasha, who sympathises with her and says that she is sure that Emma’s record will look good on her CV and wishes her all the best for the ‘potential restructuring’ in the future, and that Fallon “has to concentrate on what is best for the business.” It may be that Emma thinks that ‘potential restructuring’ means putting up another shelf in the tearoom, but Natasha is away to host a webinar, organised by a couple of friends of hers, who have brilliant jobs, glittering careers and an idyllic marriage. As Natasha makes ‘got to run, sorry’ noises, Emma is floundering, having belatedly realised that, for ‘potential restructuring’, read ‘potential P45 for Emma’.
Natasha assumed (wrongly) that Fallon would have discussed all the ramifications with Emma. Emma is incensed and all for sending a nasty e-mail to her employer. Her draft doesn’t actually start off with ‘Hello Judas, you traitorous bastard...’ but it comes close. Fortunately, she runs it past Ed before sending and he suggests that she moderates her vitriol by something like a factor of ten. After all, Emma, you never know if you might need a reference to get your job back at the chicken factory.
Eventually, the inevitable happens and Fallon and Emma meet up to talk about the situation. Emma has a big speech prepared about how much she loves her job and how much commitment she has shown to the Tea Room, but Fallon forestalls this by bursting into tears and saying how hard she has looked to try and save Emma’s job and that Emma is a good, true friend.
As Emma says to herself later, this pulls the rug out from under her feet and she devotes herself to dreaming up ideas to generate extra income, sending them to Fallon, who realises that most of them are pie-in-the-sky. These schemes include serving coffee in a lay by, or selling people ‘ingredient boxes’, which allow them to make a meal from scratch. Fallon scotches this latter idea; pointing out that this is essentially what Bridge Fresh offers.
But Emma’s not one to give up and she reasons with Fallon that, while the Tea Room has no shortage of customers, the trouble is that they have no room to accommodate them. But wait! What about the unused bit of orchard next to the Tea Room? You know – the one in which Jill keeps her goats? While the few tables that they have at present are out the front, near the car park, they could add more tables in the orchard and they would be beating people off with sticks. Evening meals too, maybe!
Fallon agrees that this could be a good idea, but Bridge Farm would have to agree – and what if they thought that they could charge for this land, which is doing the square root of sod-all at the moment in generating income? “What we need is someone to broker the deal” says Fallon. Cue the mad (because she married Tom) Welsh lady; Natasha.
Natasha has had a nasty knock to her confidence recently; her webinar was cancelled 15 minutes before she was due to go online (and she was really upset, as she had spent ages getting dressed and made up for it). Added to this, the ‘golden couple’ referred to earlier have hit a bump in the road – not only was the webinar cancelled at short notice, but the couple’s business is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Oh yes – they are also on the verge of getting a divorce. Apart from that, everything is hunky dory.
She thinks that Emma’s idea of using the orchard could be a goer and she’s surprised that it never occurred to her. She’s surprised – I thought that Natasha’s business involved growing fruit trees for her Drinks Empire – what part of the word ‘orchard’ is she having trouble in getting her head round? To be fair, she does describe the plot of land as ‘a field with a few fruit trees’, so perhaps we shouldn’t judge her too harshly.
Let’s hope that the Bridge Farm mob don’t think that they have overlooked a potential revenue stream and that they go along with Fallon’s idea that offering the unused orchard should be included in the rent rise, rather than charging more for the land. I’m sure that, if they raise objections, Natasha could make their lives a misery, although, to be honest, with Tony, Pat and Tom in the family, it is difficult to see exactly just how it could be much worse…
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