Cecelia Ahern - How to Fall in Love

I felt awkward, standing between Lavinia and Adam at the graveside. Lavinia was wearing large black bug-eyed glasses and a severe black coat that looked like something from the Victorian era. Her blonde hair was perfectly coloured and coiffed, her forehead unnaturally wrinkle free, her lips nicely plump and freshly injected. Her husband appeared significantly more aged than she. They were actually the same age, but recent problems and the looming threat of imprisonment had reduced him to a grey-haired, white-faced old man. The children stood beside him, ten and eight, their faces showing little sign of grief for their loving grandfather, because that man did not exist to them.

In the distance the cameras continued to snap. Click click click. Paparazzi and news photographers were competing for the best photo of the disgraced businessman who had returned to Ireland to bury his father-in-law. People like Lavinia frightened me. Cold, calculating, emotionally stunted, undefeatable, they were cockroaches skilled in survival, even if it meant destroying their adversaries in the process, even if those adversaries were their nearest and dearest. Their thinking was unnatural, their ‘love’ unnatural. Having seen her in action, I shared Adam’s conviction that his sister was involved in the Ponzi scheme, yet somehow she had convinced her husband to fall on his sword and absolve her. It was a calculated move that had nothing to do with guilt and penance and everything to do with the legal block on Lavinia receiving her inheritance until she’d been working at the company for ten years.

I had read my piece as Adam had asked and when the Mass came to an end Lavinia had lifted her chin and looked down her nose at me.

‘Lovely reading. Very moving,’ she’d said with a smirk, as if the very idea of her being moved by anything other than a court order amused her.

The funeral, the whole day, was nothing other than awkward for me. I’d been rudely ignored by some while others had offered sympathies for a loss I couldn’t feel. Old women with pinched, sympathetic faces had clasped my hands and squeezed them in an effort to convey their understanding of my pain, when the only pain I felt was in my fingers and knuckles as a result of their iron grip on me.

As the coffin was lowered into the ground I felt a shift in Adam’s bodyweight, I felt his shoulder shake, his hand go to his face. I knew he’d want this moment to himself but I couldn’t help it, I reached out and took his free hand in mine. He looked at me in surprise and I realised his eyes were completely dry. He was grinning from ear to ear, his hand trying to cover his smile. I looked at him in shock, my eyes widening, warning him to stop. People would see, cameras were pointed at him, but knowing this only made me want to laugh too. Laughing as his father’s coffin was being lowered into the ground and earth was tossed on top had to be the number one most inappropriate moment, but that just made the laughter all the harder to suppress.

‘What was that about?’ I asked as soon as the crowd began dispersing and we were free to make our way through the well-wishers to the car. There was no limousine for the family; Lavinia and Adam had no intention of sharing a car. As chief mourner, Lavinia rode in the front car with Maurice and the children, while Pat, silent as usual, drove Adam and me in his dad’s car, which was now nominally Adam’s though Lavinia had announced her intention to challenge that.

‘I’m sorry, it was just a thought that came into my head.’ He smiled again, a laugh bubbling under the surface. ‘I’m not going to pretend to be sad, Christine. I mean, I am genuinely sad that my father has passed away. It’s a sad day, a sad thing, but I’m not going to mope around, acting like my world has fallen apart. And I’m not going to apologise for that. Believe it or not, you can be a fully functioning human being after the death of a loved one.’

I was surprised by this display of strength. ‘So tell me what you found so funny as they lowered your father’s body into the earth for eternity?’

He bit his lip, and shook his head, the smile forming on his face again. ‘I was trying to remember him. I was trying to recall something moving, a moment we shared together. It’s a big deal, seeing your father lowered into the ground, I was trying to feel the loss, honour him … I thought having an appropriate memory would be fitting for the moment, respectful.’ He laughed again. ‘But all I could think about was the last time I spoke to him. The last time I saw him, you know, in the hospital.’

‘Of course I remember. I was there.’

‘But you weren’t. After I was released by security and they took everyone out of the room, he and I spoke. I wanted to make sure he knew I hadn’t done what Nigel accused me of. It was important to me that he knew that.’

I nodded.

He smiled. ‘He didn’t believe me. And he said …’ He started laughing again and I couldn’t help but join in. ‘He said, “I don’t like that bitch. Not at all. Not one bit.”’ He could barely get the words out, he was laughing so hard. ‘And then I left,’ he squeaked, forcing the last words out.

I stopped laughing, not finding it funny any more. ‘Who was he talking about?’

He managed to stop laughing for a split second to squeeze the word out, but then collapsed again into wheezy hysterics. ‘You.’

It took me a while to see the funny side and the more I didn’t laugh, the more he laughed, the more hysterical he became and the more contagious his laughter became to me. Pat had to drive around the estate for ten minutes so Adam could compose himself before joining the funeral-goers, and by that time his eyes were red raw from laughter and he looked like he’d been crying.

‘I don’t really get why it’s so funny,’ I said, wiping my eyes as we made our way up the steps to the mansion.

I could hear the rumble of polite reserved conversation inside. It seemed the whole of North Tipperary had turned out, and the Taoiseach’s aide de camp was present; my dad had been right about the Basil family’s connections.

Adam stopped on the stairs and gave me a look, a peculiar look that made my stomach go all funny. He looked as if he was going to say something but the door was pulled open wide and Maureen greeted us with a panicked look.

‘Adam, there are gardaí in the drawing room.’

Adam said he’d called it the bad news room when he was growing up, and the name had stuck with him. The wood-panelled room had been the parlour of the original house, before the building was extended three thousand times in every direction. It was the room in which his mother had learned she had cancer, it was the room she’d died in, and while mourners gathered across the hall to mark Dick Basil’s death, it was the room where Maurice Murphy, husband of Lavinia, was arrested by the guards before being led to a waiting patrol car and driven to the station for questioning, and it was where the family would subsequently learn that he was being charged with eleven counts of theft and eighteen of deception for the sum of fifteen million euro. The remaining five million could not be taken into account as Mr Basil had refused to press charges and now was dead and buried, silenced for ever.

22

How to Solve Will and Inheritance Disputes in Eight Easy Ways

‘I don’t understand why she has to be here,’ Lavinia said, neck tall and chin high as though she had an invisible brace on which prevented her from assuming the posture of a normal human being.

I squirmed in the leather couch. I completely agreed with Lavinia; why I was there was beyond me too. It felt inappropriate to be present at such a private affair – the reading of Dick Basil’s will – but Adam had insisted on me being there and I had gone along with it even though I wasn’t sure why. For all I knew, he was worried he might feel an uncontrollable urge to leap out the window or cut himself with the letter opener or do some damage with the eighteenth-century poker in the fireplace if he didn’t like what he heard when the will was read. I still wasn’t sure what exactly he wanted to hear; I don’t think he was too sure either. All along I’d assumed that the worst thing for Adam would be ending up as CEO of Basil’s, which was why I’d tried to figure out ways to relieve him of that duty. But as soon as Lavinia came into the picture, he suddenly declared he wanted the job. Now he was on a mission to ensure she had nothing to do with the company. It was as if the minute she showed up he realised he cared. It wasn’t only duty, or a sense of rising to the occasion and doing what one must, it went deeper than that. Basil’s was in his heart. It was a part of his make-up as much as his flesh and bones were. It had taken losing it for him to realise that.