Page 61

Chapter 61

July 2011

‘I need you to go in the attic for me,’ says Georgia.

‘I was going to ask Stan but he had to get back up north to be ready for Hazel coming out of the hospice. She’s been in for a week’s respite care.

’

‘You want me to go up there right now?’ Tess is at the scullery sink, washing the courgettes Georgia had collected from Stan’s allotment that morning.

‘Soon,’ Georgia replies, ‘I’ll be in my office for the afternoon,’ and she disappears up the uncarpeted wooden stairs to the room above the scullery.

Tess sighs. Things have been rather strained since the little box was found.

‘If only Georgia was consistently one thing or another,’ she had said to Fiona just last week.

‘One minute she is chatty and friendly and as soon as I think we are getting somewhere, the shutters come down again and we are back to monosyllables. I can’t make it out at all.

’

‘She has her reasons,’ Fiona had said.

‘I wish she would tell me what they are. We’re going to be living in the same house for the next twenty months, and this is bloody painful.

’

‘I expect she’ll tell you in her own good time.

’

That was last week, and again Georgia had gradually warmed up again.

It was exhausting.

In the continuing absence of a properly functioning kitchen, Georgia has bought an Instant Pot, which does all manner of clever things without the need for a hob.

Tess chops a red pepper into chunks and adds it to the onions in the new appliance.

The recipe she is using is from Sally Soodles’ Spice Company.

Every Thursday a box is delivered by the postman in a special flat package that fits through the letterbox.

Inside is a sheet of instructions and a small flat tin containing a blend of spices.

Tess unscrews the lid and sniffs, trying to work out what is in the mixture.

Cumin, coriander, maybe a bit of cardamom?

She gives up and looks at the label.

Those three plus turmeric and sumac, whatever that is, and there’s a separate little bag of chilli seeds so she can adjust the heat.

It’s a very clever idea.

She sprinkles the spices onto the sautéed vegetables, gives them a stir to encourage the flavours to develop and adds a tin of tomatoes, a vegetable stock cube and some sweetcorn from the freezer, for colour.

She puts the lid on, sets the timer and leaves it to cook.

The big kitchen with its black iron range has become temporarily redundant as a cooking space, and to their mutual surprise, Georgia and Tess are managing perfectly well doing all the cooking and cleaning up in the scullery.

They eat outside, working their way around the garden, following the sunshine from the picnic table in the morning to the garden bench at lunchtime, and later, the chairs under the plum tree, in an effort to catch whatever warmth there is.

They only retreat to the drawing room with trays when the weather chooses not to behave.

Tess’s tentative suggestion that the scullery could be made into an efficient galley kitchen more permanently had initially been met with a dismissive ‘I really don’t think so’, but over the last week Georgia has started to warm to the idea.

She still refuses to lock the back door at night, though.

A few days earlier, to Tess’s astonishment, there had been a visit from an electrician and another from a plasterer and it seems that plans are afoot.

When the electrician did his estimate, she had heard Georgia say, ‘I saw the light switches on Pinterest,’ and had almost gasped, but managed to contain herself at the last minute.