Page 14 of A Recipe for Love
‘I don’t mind.’
‘Really.’ Flinty took the cups off her and opened a high cupboard above the sink. ‘Veronica – Lady Lowbridge – she does have a good heart. She’s just not very warm and cuddly, if you know what I mean.’
Bella felt she knew exactly what Flinty meant. ‘She’s not like my grandma.’
‘Was she more pockets full of Werther’s Originals and spoiling her grandkids?’
Bella almost laughed out loud at the image. ‘Noooooo. More of a lifelong rolling stone.’
‘You were close to her?’
‘My mum wasn’t really around when I was growing up.’
Flinty nodded. ‘Ah well, good you had somebody then. Have you told her about you and Adam?’
Actually no. ‘I will. Soon. Next time I call.’
Flinty didn’t reply.
‘So what else can I do?’ Bella needed to be busy. She needed to roll her sleeves up. Her absolute dream would be a full crate of potatoes that needed scrubbing and peeling and chopping – something mindless that she could lose herself in. ‘I know my way around a kitchen.’
‘Not my kitchen you don’t.’
No. Of course. No point treading on toes when she’d only just arrived.
Flinty turned back towards her. ‘Sorry. Not my kitchen, is it? Going to be yours soon, so you can knock yourself out. One of the few things Veronica and Darcy have in common is that they don’t really get involved in here. I mean Darcy would live on her smoothies given the chance, and Veronica…’ She trailed off.
‘What?’
‘Well, she’s had fifty years of food being something that appears in the accounts and on the table. I don’t think she has the faintest idea, any more, what happens to it in between.’ Flinty looked around. ‘Anyway I think I’ll be doing trays for lunch today, so not much to help with. You got here very late last night. You should rest.’
Bella didn’t point out that Flinty had got here just as late and she hadn’t had the chance to nap on the journey. This kitchen was clearly Flinty’s domain, and that was something Bella could absolutely respect.
‘You could go for a walk?’ Flinty suggested. ‘Or explore the house a bit more.’
‘The house?’
Flinty looked at her blankly. ‘Big stone thing you’re standing in.’
The castle. Why did nobody else seem to have noticed that they lived in a massive blooming castle?
The surroundings of the estate office were utterly familiar to Adam but, at the same time, strangely alien. As a small child this room had been Father’s space. If Father was in here, he was not to be disturbed. Even as a teenager, using the office as a cut through from the back stairs to the main castle had felt illicit. He still, instinctively, hesitated in the doorway, as if he was expecting his father to grumble that he was busy, and for Flinty to come dashing down the corridor and chivvy him away with promises of biscuits in the kitchen.
His father’s chair wasn’t there. His father had always had a strange leather-backed thing that looked for all the world as though someone had bolted an old fashioned dining chair onto a set of wheels and plonked it behind the desk. But the chair his grandmother was using was new, a standard black office chair that could have come from any catalogue anywhere in the world. ‘Where’s his chair?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘His chair? The leather one?’ Adam shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Of course it didn’t matter. It was just a chair. Chairs broke. People bought new ones. Things changed. Things kept on changing.
His grandmother took her seat, what seemed to be her seat, in his father’s place, behind the desk, and gestured to the seat opposite her. Dipper padded into the office and bounded up to the desk. She sniffed the carpet beneath the table, sniffed Veronica, and finally Adam. He held his hand out to his father’s beloved dog. She nuzzled for a second, before turning away. He clearly wasn’t the master she was looking for.
‘Shall we get on then?’ his grandmother asked. ‘You need to learn the ropes.’
‘Not today?’
‘No better time.’
He’d known she was going to say that. Veronica Lowbridge was a woman incapable of putting things off. If a task needed doing, the task got done.
