For reasons that he didn’t want to examine, Will hadn’t felt the need to inform his family that he had a severely traumatised rescue dog on the premises. Instead, he reached for a ledger on the coffee table, the top one in a teetering pile of accounts books, and with a deep sigh, opened it at the first page.
There were rows of neat figures in his grandmother Maureen’s precise hand. Will sighed again. Maureen Bloom, though everyone called her Mo, had died just over a year ago and nothing had been right since. Mighty Mo. By the time he was thirteen, Will could rest his chin on the top of her head, but though she was four feet eleven in her stockings (‘Nonsense, I’ve five feet and half an inch’) she had all the presence of a giantess. Saying that someone was larger than life and that their smile could light up a room were hackneyed clichés unless someone was talking about Mo Bloom, and then it was gospel truth.
She was the sun around which the rest of the family were happy to satellite. Gentle and kind but equally a woman not to be trifled with – even well into her seventies and with an artificial hip, she’d given chase to a man who came in for a bunch of red roses and tried to do a runner without paying.
‘Never trust a man who buys red roses,’ she’d panted when one of the fishmongers round the corner had apprehended the villain by upending a bucket of slimy, fishy water over him. ‘That’s a man who’s been up to no good.’
She doted on her grandchildren: Will, Rowan, and later Sage, and even later than that, on Sam and Harry, Rowan’s twins. She was also adored by her customers, but not half as much as she was adored by her husband Bernie. Bernie and Mo had only spent three nights apart in sixty years. Those were the three nights that Mo had spent in the Alexandra maternity hospital giving birth to Amaryllis, Will’s mother, whose one act of rebellion in life was insisting that she’d rather be called Mary, if it were all the same.
So, when Mo died of stage four pancreatic cancer, diagnosis to death being three short terrible weeks, it was like a light going out. Without her, life was full of spiky edges that couldn’t be gently filed down. In the shop downstairs, even the flowers had lost a little of their brilliance, their fragrance.
Bernie had been a shadow without his Mo, though he’d tried to put a brave face on like he still put on his three-piece suit and came to work, but he’d lost his spark, the twinkle in his eyes. Maybe that was why he’d died peacefully in his sleep three weeks after they’d buried Mo. With Bernie gone too, the heart and soul had been irrevocably ripped out of the family.
Mo’s size two shoes were too big for Mary to fill. Ian, Mary’s second husband, Sage’s dad and Will and Rowan’s stepfather, wouldn’t even attempt to walk in Bernie’s shadow. Rowan had her own family to worry about and Sage was only eighteen and numb with grief at the sudden loss of her doting grandparents. It was left to Will, back from New York with problems of his own and a repeat prescription for anti-depressants, to try and fumble his way through the many problems that Bernie and Mo instinctively knew how to solve.
The financials currently being the most pressing. Before she’d fallen in love with Bernie and joined the family firm, Mo had worked in the accounts department of a holiday company. She’d taken over the bookkeeping of Blooms’ and had kept careful track of each penny that went in and out of the business for nearly six decades.
Mary had tried to keep up since she’d been gone, even though she preferred narcissi and nasturtiums to numbers. Added to that, their accountant had retired just after Mo had died. Mary had forgotten to file their accounts at Companies House and ended up having to pay a fine. Will, against his better judgement and also because he was used to dealing with figures that had a lot more noughts in them, had said, ‘OK, all right, I will take over the accounts but only until you find a new accountant.’
Now, he dispensed with the last ledger to be lovingly compiled by Mo, in favour of this year’s ledger, which Mary had started with great gusto in January and abandoned in February. But she had shoved a lot of receipts and figures scrawled on odd scraps of paper into the book instead. Just to show willing.
Tomorrow Will was going to take the whole mess to an accountant in Camden Town who came highly recommended. He would probably have to bring Blossom with him too. Though how he was going to coax her out from under the table for a thrilling appointment with an accountant, when she wouldn’t even go out for a wee, Will didn’t know.
Then, as if on cue, he heard the faint scrabble of claws on his wooden floor and Blossom suddenly emerged from under the table. Will didn’t dare to even twitch an eyelash as she navigated the lounge by sticking as close to the walls as possible until she reached the door, left the room and sat down by the front door.
Will got to his feet and followed. Her head swivelled to throw Will an imploring look – the first time she’d made eye contact with him since she arrived.
‘Do you want a walk?’ he asked softly, which was a redundant question as she so obviously did.
On the console table in the hall was a raggedy rope lead left by Dreadlocks, poo bags and a packet of treats. Will scooped them up and then – he couldn’t believe he was doing this – dropped to his hands and knees and crawled over to where Blossom was patiently waiting.
He didn’t want to loom over her and send her retreating back under the table, so it was best to approach her on her level. Still, he felt her flinch as he tried to attach the lead to her collar and inadvertently brushed her fur.
‘Sorry, Blossom,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll try and keep my hands to myself.’
But she was up and walking, gingerly picking her way down the stairs. When he opened his front door, Will prayed that no one in the florists would notice them. God was obviously smiling down on him, because nobody was standing in the open shopfront where buckets of flowers were displayed around a vintage bike that Bernie had used for deliveries when he was a lad.
Will thought that Blossom would cock her leg at the first lamp post, but no. None of the trees they passed were suitable either as she walked determinedly alongside him, her tail tucked between her legs.
‘Come on, Blossom, you must be desperate,’ Will muttered a little desperately himself, but it wasn’t until they came to a grass verge that Blossom squatted down (apparently only male dogs cocked their legs) and peed for England. She did it with an extremely beleaguered look on her face, so Will turned his head to give her some privacy.
It wasn’t until they came to a third grass verge that Blossom deigned to have a poo. Will was so relieved himself that he didn’t even mind having to deploy a poo bag.
They were equidistant from Alexandra Palace and its parklands and an old railway line turned nature trail which led to Highgate Woods, and from his research, Will had ascertained that Staffies needed up to an hour’s exercise every day, but Blossom had other ideas. She did an abrupt one-eighty turn, tangling them both in her lead, and pulled in the direction they’d come from.
As soon as they got back to the flat, she dived for her safe space under the table, and with a resigned sigh Will went to dig out some old towels and blankets. If that’s where Blossom was happiest, then at least he could make her comfortable.
This went on for two days (Will had had to postpone his meeting with the accountant) with little progress made apart from Blossom appearing in the hall with a cautious look on her face when Will jiggled her lead. But on Friday morning he and Rowan were meeting the head of events at a venue in Shoreditch, and he could hardly leave Blossom on her own for hours. Nor could he take her with him, so he had only one option . . .