I whirled around, sending a plume of water into the air that landed with a splash on my boots. Paula was picking her way across the soft green turf towards me in her court shoes. My heart sank as swiftly as her heels in the grass.

‘Sure.’ I put down the watering can. As long as the word isn’t ‘P45’. Thank goodness I’d only been singing quietly. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Can you spare me five minutes?’ she said with a jerk of her head. ‘My office.’

And without waiting for an answer she spun on her heels and marched back towards the main building so fast that her flesh-coloured tights made a zipping noise where her thighs rubbed together.

‘I’ll just tidy my tools away,’ I called after her.

‘Now you’re for it.’ Alan looked up from his clipping, knocked his cap back off his forehead and winked. ‘Another one bites the dust, eh?’

‘Don’t joke.’ My stomach swooped. ‘I really need this job.’

I’d worked for my dad as a tree surgeon before moving to London, but there’d been nothing like that on offer locally when we’d come south last December so that Harvey could set up his own personal training business in the capital. ‘Let’s follow the money and move to London,’ he’d said, grabbing my hands, his eyes gleaming with pound signs. ‘I’ve got a mate with a flat we could rent.’

Everyone in London could afford personal trainers, he’d reckoned. Punters were cash-rich and time-poor and would be falling over themselves to hand over said cash to be put through their paces. It would be a piece of low-fat, low-sugar cake to set up his own fitness consultancy down south. In fact, he’d said with a swagger, he’d probably have to take on staff within the first year. And it would do me good, he’d added in a tone laced with mock rebuke, to finally cut the apron strings and stand on my own two feet.

I’d been so proud of his ambitions and his self-assurance that I’d been swept along with it, not really thinking through what I’d do when I got to London. As it turned out, the streets hadn’t been as richly paved with gold as he’d assumed and it had been impossible to find enough wealthy clients to make ends meet so when the gym he’d joined advertised for staff, he took the job to tide him over. He was still there. And the tiny flat that his friend had rented to him as a stopgap was scarcely more than a bedsit and, although Harvey insisted on paying for it himself, I suspected the rent was triple what my sister Evie and her husband Darren’s mortgage cost for their three-bedroomed house in Fernfield. Needless to say, we were still there.