Page 111 of A Recipe for Love
What did Ravi have to be sorry for? ‘How come?’
‘When you came over here. I feel like I put a bit of pressure on you and that wasn’t fair. You’ve got enough going on.’
‘You didn’t put pressure on.’
He heard his best friend clear his throat. ‘Yeah. I did. And, you know, we do need to work stuff out with the business, but we will. And we can muddle through until then. I can send you stuff remotely, or you can come over when you can. It’s all…’ He sighed. ‘We’ll make it work.’
‘Ravi, mate, you don’t have to say that.’
‘Yeah. I do. I talked to Sam and he said I might have been a dick to you.’
‘You weren’t.’
Ravi laughed. ‘I might have to put you on speaker so you can tell him that.’
‘I’ll text him.’
‘Please do. Seriously though, you’re the girls’ godfather and, well, we don’t have that many people.’
Adam understood. He’d never met Sam’s family but they’d reacted badly to their son coming out. Ravi’s family were more supportive but his parents had moved to Mumbai around the time Ravi left college.
‘Like, whatever happens with the business, you’re family. All right?’
‘Thanks mate.’
‘Right. Well sorry if I was a dick and sorry if that was too mushy.’
‘It wasn’t. Thank you.’
‘No bother.’ Ravi paused. ‘I mean we’re partners aren’t we? You don’t give up on people just cos things get difficult. Anyway, if there’s anything we can do for you over there, you let us know. Right?’
‘All right.’
He hung up the phone, and checked the rest of his notifications. The old school WhatsApp group was on fire with chat, started not by Fiona, for a change, but by a classmate who was now a weather presenter on BBC North West. She’d posted a picture of the view from her city centre apartment.
Can’t lie. Woke up craving some open space and some highland air thismorning.
The replies had come thick and fast. Person after person yearning to be out on a boat on the loch, or walking in the hills, or just hanging out in the village pub with nowhere to be and nothing to do.
I’m back in Lowbridge and I sometimes wish I wasn’t.
He hit send before he had time to think or censor himself. He wasn’t likely to run into these people any time soon.
The first reply came almost immediately.
Oh mate. I guess the grass is always greener, isn’t it? I don’t thinkit matters that much where you are. It’s the people who make it home,isn’t it?
The sender, Callum, who Adam remembered as a slightly shy but personable enough lad, added a picture of a woman pushing a tiny red-haired toddler on a swing set in what looked like a suburban back garden.
Callum was right. It wasn’t the place that mattered. It wasn’t the role. It was the people. It was one person.
Adam took a deep breath in. Ravi wasn’t giving up on him. And Flinty hadn’t either. The least he could do was get out of bed. He got up. He got dressed. He headed towards the castle fully intending to make his way to the estate office, sit down with his grandmother and have a proper talk about what happened next.
Instead his feet carried him around the outside of the castle to the gate in the wall that he’d been avoiding since he first came back. The wall that enclosed his father’s pride and joy, the place he’d been happiest in life, the place Adam had always felt close to him, and the place he hadn’t been able to face entering since he’d returned to Lowbridge, not to see his father, but to bury him.
Adam pushed the gate open and stepped into the walled garden.
He was greeted by a riot of life. Adam knew – of course he knew – that gardens had to be tended and maintained to remain in their neat borders and boxes. And he knew that it was summer and that plants needed nothing more than light and rain to grow up with vigour. But, nonetheless, he’d been imagining nothing but cold barren ground, and plants shrivelled and dying without his father’s care. In his head the lifeless abandoned garden was a picture of Lowbridge itself without Alexander there as laird – neglected, not cared for, withering away.
