Page 44 of A Recipe for Love
‘She used to bring me presents from her travels. Stupid gift shop plastic tat that she probably got in Wilkos. But when you’re a kid you don’t know that do you? So I could let myself believe that this stupid key ring was from Marrakesh and this crappy little ornament was from Los Angeles or whatever she said.’
‘What did you do with the presents?’
‘What?’
‘The things she brought you – do you still have them?’
‘’Course not.’ Ridiculous idea. ‘I chucked ’em all out when I realised she wasn’t coming back for me.’
‘Do you know what happened to her?’
Bella shook her head. ‘I’m sure she’s still out there somewhere, getting high and fucking people’s lives up.’ Bella wasn’t sure of anything of the sort. Bella’s mother had always left her. She’d never stayed. She’d never been reliable. But for the first thirteen years of Bella’s life the flipside of that was also true. She’d never stayed, but she always came back. Logically Bella was fairly sure that, if the worst had happened, the news would have made it back to her and her nan eventually. She was less sure, though, which possibility was worse – that her mother hadn’t come back because she couldn’t, or hadn’t come back because she’d chosen to stay away. ‘Anyway, I had my nan and that was enough. More than enough.’ That part was as true as it ever could be. Bella’s nan was a woman worth ten of any other, and she’d taken Bella to places that her classmates in school could only imagine and had instilled in her an energy and a zest for life that she would always be thankful for. ‘I was lucky.’
‘When do I get to meet her?’
‘Soon.’
‘What did she say when you told her you were engaged?’
‘Er…’
‘Bel?’
‘I didn’t want to tell her in an email. We’ll go and see her once she’s back home.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Somerset I think. She’ll be home soon enough though.’ Would she? Summer, for Bella’s nan, kicked off with Glastonbury and then continued in a haze of festivals, extended visits to friends, and impulse visits to goodness knows where. It was perfectly possible that her flat in Leeds would be empty until the autumn. Bella turned her attention out of the window. ‘Do these roads ever get less twisty?’
‘A bit.’
‘A bit?’ That was insane. They were going to be driving for well over two hours, possibly longer if the drivers stuck to a respectful funeral pace.
Adam nodded. ‘We’re driving right across the Highlands. It’s not exactly the M1.’
Bella stared at the continually stunning scenery outside her window. ‘Clearly. That’s OK. I mean I know it’s awful circumstances, but it’s nice to have some time together?’
He wrapped her hand in his. ‘It is.’
The days between the cremation and the funeral service fell into a pattern. Bella got used to not seeing very much of her fiancé during the day. He was up every morning before she awoke and Bella still strongly suspected he wasn’t really going to bed at all, but lying waiting for sleep until she drifted off and then getting up again and going back to work.
The first part of the night was different. That precious hour, between returning to the cocoon of the coach house and sleep overtaking Bella, was their time. That was when Adam belonged to her, and they could sail on waves of pleasure back to Spain or up into the clouds, to any place where it was just the two of them together and the world beyond them had no force. But morning always came and, when it did, Bella had to reckon with more complex feelings. She was worried about Adam, but, if she was honest, she was also jealous. At least Adam had something to do. Bella was at a loss. She wasn’t built for sitting around and waiting for her man to finish work. She wasn’t built for sitting around at all. She knew that people sometimes saw her as flakey. She moved around a lot. She loved to travel, but she always worked. She worked hard and she played hard, so she grabbed any chance to do something.
Which meant she’d done facials with Darcy, who’d been horrified by Bella’s beauty routine of ‘sunscreen, when I remember, and a glass of water in the morning’. Darcy’s reaction was especially mortifying because she’d been lying about the water.
She’d emailed her nan, three times, which was out of character from their once-a-week norm, but all the emails had been vague and non-committal. Having started off not mentioning the engagement or the barony or the castle, it was tricky to casually drop them in now.
She’d walked Dipper until the poor dog looked as though her legs were going to drop off. Together they’d stomped up the road, along the cliff, and around the castle in near endless circuits. Walking with Dipper – simply being in this spectacular, stark, beautiful place – was one of the two thing that were keeping her sane. She’d tracked every shift in the weather, the way the rain made the greens of the hillside deeper and fuller, the way the sky turned dark and heavy before a storm, the way that when the sun broke through it sent glints of light dancing across the sea. A person could spend a lifetime here and never quite see the same view twice.
The other thing keeping her sane was food. She’d cooked every time Flinty had let her, which wasn’t very often, but she’d made endless cups of tea for Adam and Veronica and for anyone else that passed her way. She was about twenty-four hours of boredom away from taking up her flask and walking to the village to press hot beverages on a wider range of innocents.
Which meant that her first Ladies’ Group meeting was unexpectedly genuinely exciting. The idea that she was someone who was excited about drinking tea with a group of practical strangers in a village lounge was concerning, but was it really that different to beers on the beach in Ayia Napa? Just a different demographic and a different drug of choice, she told herself.
Anna’s living room had the sort of homely feel Bella remembered from the very few times she’d been invited to parties with the girls from the new estate at school. Everything was neat and tidy and a little bit floral. It was the polar opposite to her nan’s haphazard decorating style of clashing colours and random ‘treasures’ picked up on adventures.
The bulk of the conversation centred around the fundraising efforts for the community hall. ‘What about a talent auction?’ Anna suggested.
‘We did one last year.’ Nina shook her head. ‘Only made £500, and we had all that business about Terry Halliwell bidding double for Sandra Deakin to come do his cleaning if she’d do it in the altogether.’
