Page 15 of A Recipe for Love
‘I prefer to do the routine tasks first. Otherwise one ends up cherry-picking the out-of-the-ordinary things and the day-to-day can get neglected.’
‘OK.’ Adam let his grandmother talk him through the regular weekly tasks for the running of the estate. He received instruction on logging into the bank accounts and the estate email inbox, all the while doing his very best to ignore the way the grey walls seemed to be pressing in on him. His grandmother sighed pointedly.
‘Look. That damned plumber has re-sent his invoice. And it still doesn’t have the right total. I suppose that idiot girl quite forgot what with…’ She shook her head. ‘With everything else.’
The ‘idiot girl’ of course being Darcy, and ‘everything else’ being the death of her husband. Adam’s father. Veronica’s son. ‘How are you doing?’ he asked her.
‘Very well thank you.’
Adam swallowed back a wince. ‘I mean, how are you doing since Father…?’
‘I know perfectly well what you mean. No point dwelling on things.’
His father had been dead less than twenty-four hours. ‘It’s hardly dwelling—’
‘I need to take you through the accounting.’
‘Had he been sick?’ The question rushed into Adam’s mind and straight out of his mouth.
‘What?’
‘Before… you know, had he been sick?’ Darcy had made it sound quite sudden, but some days it seemed like the sun coming up in the morning was a bit of a surprise to Darcy so he wasn’t sure she was a particularly reliable witness. The idea took shape in Adam’s head that maybe his father had been ill. Maybe there’d been things he could have done, if he’d known. If he’d been here. ‘Had he seen a doctor recently?’
‘He was a man in his fifties. All they ever do is see the doctor. It’s all prostates and backs and weak knees. One doesn’t like to pry.’
As if there was anything his grandmother wouldn’t pry into.
‘I’m sure it was just one of those things,’ she added. ‘As I say, no point dwelling.’ She pulled a hardbacked ledger off the shelf behind her. ‘These are the household accounts, separate from the estate accounts.’
‘This isn’t computerised?’
‘Your father was used to doing it this way.’
Adam scanned the neat columns of numbers. They danced under his gaze. In normal life, in his real life, Ravi dealt with this sort of thing. The figures were written mostly in his father’s slanting scribble, with the occasional oasis of his grandmother’s neat copperplate script. His father would never write in this book again. ‘I can’t do this now.’
His grandmother nodded. ‘Very well.’ She closed the ledger. ‘Perhaps tomorrow. And I suppose we should concentrate on the funeral arrangements first anyway.’
The mention of the funeral brought one of the many thoughts that had crowded out sleep the night before to the front of Adam’s mind. ‘Has anyone let my mother know? I mean I know it’s complicated.’ Boy, did he know. ‘But they were married for a decade.’
Veronica nodded. ‘I sent an electronic mail to the address I have for her. I don’t expect a reply. I presume you have a telephone number.’
‘Yeah.’ Adam’s contact with his mother was minimal. ‘I don’t know if it’s up to date.’
He pulled out his phone. What would he even say to her? The screen flashed with two missed calls, both from Ravi. He fired off a brief text explaining that he was in Lowbridge and would ring when he could, but not explaining why.
His mother was trickier. Adam’s finger hovered over the call button and then froze. He texted instead.
Hi. Just checking you’ve seen my grandmother’s email.
Veronica had already moved on. ‘I’ve already arranged for the vicar – thenewvicar – to come. I don’t know if the girl will want to come to that.’
‘Bella?’
His grandmother frowned. ‘No. Why on earth would she want to come?’
‘To support me?’
That suggestion was ridiculous enough to be met with a simple small shake of the head. ‘I meant the American.’
