A Recipe for Love

Chapter Nineteen

The knock on the bedroom door would have woken Adam up, if he’d actually managed to sleep at all in the last seventy-two hours. Mostly he’d pretended to sleep and when he’d reached the point where it seemed as though he couldn’t get away with that any longer, he’d slipped out of the coach house – where he was resolutely staying – and walked as far as he could away from Lowbridge, away from the village, away from the family, hoping that if he walked and walked he would tire his body enough that he would have no option but to fall asleep. Perhaps he even hoped that if he walked far enough he would walk right back to her.

Flinty pushed the bedroom door open and wrinkled her nose. ‘Oh. When did you last open a window in here?’

Adam had no idea, and an overwhelming desire to tell her to go away, but he knew better than that. He had a strong suspicion that Flinty didn’t consider him too old or too grand to be put on the naughty step if he talked back to her. She put the tray she was carrying on the dressing table. ‘I brought you some tea. I was going to bring you breakfast, but then I thought if I did that you’d have even more excuse to hide in here.’

‘I’m not—’

Flinty’s look silenced him, because he was hiding. Of course he was. ‘You need to talk to them.’

‘To who?’

‘Your grandmother. And Darcy. You walked in, announced that you were selling the estate, had a shouting match with your lassie and you haven’t spoken to anybody since. Have you spoken to her?’

‘Bella?’ Adam shook his head. He wanted to, like he’d wanted to run after his mum and tell her not to go all those years before. But, just like that time, he was terrified that nothing he could say would be enough. And this time, it was all his fault.

Flinty shrugged. ‘Well you can’t avoid everybody. Your mother hasn’t been back in touch?’

Adam wasn’t sure whether that was a statement or a question, but he shook his head. ‘She said she was going back to Lerwick.’

‘Typical.’

‘What?’

‘Well barrelling in, causing all sorts of trouble and then buggering off again.’

‘That’s not fair.’

Flinty raised an eyebrow.

‘She didn’t make me decide to sell.’

‘No, but I’m sure she didn’t discourage it.’

Adam had never fallen out with Flinty in his life. He’d had typical teenage rows with his dad, his grandmother could be impossible to please, and Darcy’s exuberance had clashed with Adam’s adolescent moods more than once, but Flinty had been constant. Always there willing to patch up scraped knees without too many questions asked. ‘It was my decision,’ he insisted.

‘All the more reason you need to be over there explaining and working out what happens next then.’

‘I will.’ He watched Flinty automatically start tidying the space around her, folding his clothes into a neat pile on the chair. ‘Are you cross with me too?’

‘Not my place to be cross with anyone.’

‘But you think I’m doing the wrong thing?’

She smoothed his jeans onto the pile. ‘About selling? I have no idea. But lying about here in bed with your family over there not knowing whether they’re coming or going and…’ She hesitated. ‘Well yes, I think you’re messing things up a bit now.’

That hadn’t been what she’d started to say. ‘What else?’

She shook her head.

‘Say it.’

‘Well, and with your lassie goodness knows where.’

‘She decided to leave.’

‘Oh fiddle-faddle. She did this. I didn’t do that. It’s all nonsense. If you love somebody you find a way to be near them. Life’s too long to live it any other way.’

Adam didn’t reply, which he imagined Flinty would interpret as agreement.

‘Oh by the way, I’m going to take your car out to go to the village. It’s ever so comfortable to drive.’

‘I know.’

‘And all the doors work,’ she added. Flinty passed him the mug of tea. ‘Now get up, get dressed and bloody well start getting on with things.’

Adam hadn’t done what he was told, at least not straight away. In fact for the next few hours he’d done the exact opposite, not out of stubbornness, not even out of a pretence that Flinty was wrong, but out of pure paralysing fear. He’d failed spectacularly at being the laird and he’d failed at being Bella’s partner. He’d promised her a life he couldn’t deliver.

Having made the decision to sell up and walk away, he’d been able to tell himself that things would get easier. He’d been able to tell himself that the decision was an end point.

But of course it wasn’t. It was a beginning of something else for everybody and he was still responsible for working out what that should be.

And now he was responsible for all of that alone.

His phone rang on the side table. He pounced on it, desperate to see Bel’s name on the screen. He swiped to answer anyway. ‘Ravi?’

‘Hi. You OK?’

‘Oh you know.’

‘I just wanted to say I was sorry.’

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 this

morning.

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 think

it 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.

He walked to the centre of the plot, trailing tendrils of green brushing against his legs. Sure. A lot of what was here was not what his father had intended but it was here, regardless of intent or design, and it was thriving – joyously, vibrantly alive. There were tomatoes, bright and red and almost ready to harvest. Runner beans, rapidly going to seed but here and defiantly surviving. He’d missed the asparagus entirely, but that in itself made Adam smile. He warned his dad years ago when he’d first planted it that the asparagus picking season lasted about twenty-five minutes and not a moment longer. The marigolds his father liked to dot between the rows of vegetables were in full flower, loud and bright and full of sunshine.

A pair of sheep ambled through the gateway and started chomping happily on the produce in the nearest bed. Adam didn’t even try to chase them away. This garden had been intended to grow food for the residents of Lowbridge. It felt right that at least some of them were enjoying it now.

Adam turned around, trying to take in the explosion of greens and reds and yellows around him. The garden was alive. With a little bit of care and love it could be wonderful again. It could provide produce for the cookery school. It could work as a proper market garden. It could supply the village store. It could…

Adam stopped. Of course he wasn’t going to do any of those things.

‘What are you doing out here?’ Darcy came from the open gateway, picking her way past the sheep and across the gravel pathways in her wedges. ‘I haven’t been out here since…’ She folded her arms. ‘Well you know.’

‘Me neither.’ Adam held out his arms. ‘But look. Everything he planted.’

Darcy nodded. ‘He was good with things that needed tending.’

‘He was good with all of it.’

Darcy snorted.

‘What?’

‘Well, I mean I loved your dad. I love your dad, but he wasn’t good at everything.’

Compared with Adam, Alexander had been a paragon.

‘I mean he was good at the estate stuff, managing all that side of it, but he hated having to make nice with the parish council and host big dinners and all of that. He only did any of that because he was too scared of Veronica to tell her no.’

That wasn’t true. Adam’s father had been the perfect laird. Organised. A natural manager, but also a genial host, at ease in any company.

‘We had a little code at all those parties. If he mentioned New York or the Mets or, I don’t know, the Statue of Liberty or something it meant he needed me to come and be American at people.’

Adam shook his head. ‘What does that mean?’

‘You know, all teeth and tits and bubbliness so he could sink into the background.’ She smiled. ‘Which was fine. All of this is too much for one person on their own, so we helped each other out.’ She folded her arms across her body. ‘I wish he’d let me help more. I used to be a dab hand with a spreadsheet.’ She smiled. ‘Oh, come on. I know I say I was a model but most models are admin temps most of the time.’

A quiet descended over them, punctuated only by the buzzing of bees between the marigolds and the dull background hush of the waves in the loch.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Adam eventually.

‘What for?’

‘For selling this place.’

‘It’s a done deal then?’

‘I mean I haven’t actually contacted McKenzie yet, but I’m decided.’ He looked over his father’s garden again. ‘I was decided. I’m sorry for not talking to you all about it first though.’

‘Like father, like son,’ Darcy murmured.

‘What?’

‘Making big decisions without talking to anybody. Asking for advice wasn’t exactly your dad’s strong suit either. Like he was fine with my being the social butterfly of the team, but he never talked about anything else that was worrying him.’ Darcy shook her head. ‘I miss him.’

‘Me too.’ Everything at Lowbridge was something Adam wanted to tell his father about. He was telling himself that back in Edinburgh the gap where his father was supposed to be would feel less pointed somehow.

‘He wasn’t good at asking for help though. Those last few months, he was—’ Darcy’s voice broke a little. ‘He was tired. I told him to go to the doctor.’

‘Grandmother said it was a heart attack.’

‘Yeah, but I don’t know. Maybe if he’d asked for help they would have picked something up. Maybe if he’d slowed down and rested more. Maybe if I’d made him.’

‘It wasn’t your fault. He never even told me he was feeling ill.’

‘He wasn’t ill exactly. Just not himself.’ He could see her welling up. ‘I love him so much. Still.’

‘I know.’

‘Where does all that love go? What am I supposed to do with it?’

Adam tried to blink back his own tears.

‘And I’m angry too, but I can’t be angry with him now, can I?’ She wiped her eyes. ‘Why didn’t he go to a doctor or at least say something to me if he wasn’t feeling right?’

‘I don’t know. He always told me everything was fine too, no matter what.’ Adam ought to have known something was wrong.

‘He never wanted to worry anyone. He absolutely hated the idea of letting people down. Especially you.’

‘Why me?’

Darcy took deep breath in and turned to face him properly. ‘Well because of your mom.’ She said it like it was the most self-evident thing in the world. ‘He couldn’t bear the thought of anyone hurting you like that again, especially not him. Whatever happened, so long as it was all right for you, that was enough for him.’

Adam stopped fighting the tears.

‘I wish I could ask him what to do now.’ That was the bottom line. Adam needed someone to tell him if he’d made the right choice, but how could he ask Darcy or Veronica when it was their home? He’d let Bella believe it was her home too, and he’d betrayed them all. ‘But I can’t ask him and I don’t know what to do on my own and whatever I do, I’ll be disappointing all of you. Especially him.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘What do you mean?’

Darcy wrapped her arm around his shoulder. ‘You all get so wrapped up in the duty of the thing. This place is glorious. You and your whole family are so lucky to have it and be a part of it and you spend your whole fucking time worrying that you’re not good enough.’

‘I really don’t think my father worried about that.’

‘Balls. I don’t think any Lowbridge son ever feels up to his daddy’s standard. If you all stopped trying to uphold something from the generation before and got on with how you want to do things now I think everybody would be a lot happier.’

‘Isn’t that what I’m doing? By walking away?’

Darcy sighed deeply. ‘I don’t know. If it’s what you really want, but…’ She looked around the neglected, unkempt, yet still blooming garden. ‘I think you could do amazing things right here, if you just let yourself accept that you’re good enough, and that’s all you need to be.’