Flora got home the next day feeling rather chastened. She was pleased to slip back onto the island, into the farmhouse kitchen where she arrived about five seconds after Fintan, who had travelled in rather more style than she had, and straight into an argument.
When Flora had arrived home months before, the farmhouse she’d grown up in had been a tatty thing, uncared for and unloved since their mother – the centre of their home and thus, really, their lives – had died, in the bed they all had been born in.
Fintan had locked himself away. He was almost unrecognisable these days from the bearded recluse he’d become. Innes, the eldest, and jolliest, had just about run himself into the ground through overwork, trying to hold the farm together. Her father had ploughed on, looking neither to right nor left, and that had nearly ended very badly too. Only big, sweet Hamish, who was generally believed to have been dropped on the head as a baby, was relatively unchanged. Although the first thing he’d bought with the money they got from the farm changing hands was a bright red convertible, so who could say?
Innes and Fintan were arguing about when the Rock was going to open – there was no point in them running the farm ragged for a clientele that hadn’t arrived, and the summer season was bearing down on them at full speed. Fintan was saying sulkily that it had to be right; Innes was sarcastically pointing out that if Fintan and his lover boy ever stopped kissing for long enough they might be able to get something done, which was going down about as well as could be expected, especially when Hamish started making kissy noises.
‘Hi, everyone!’ said Flora, putting her bag down on the old kitchen table. Her father, Eck, awoke with a start.
He’d been taking an afternoon nap. Even stopping some of his work hadn’t been quite enough to prevent him waking at 5.30 a.m., up with the milking, and that would never change now. They had been farming in the MacKenzie family for as far back as anybody knew. It was hard, sometimes, to think that this generation might be the last to do it.
Innes’s daughter Agot, who’d just celebrated her fourth birthday, was there too, and now she clambered up and down Eck’s armchair and all over his legs and shoulders. He looked up with pleasure at seeing Flora; partly, Flora knew, because of the distraction she would bring to the only MacKenzie grandchild. And so it proved.
‘ATTI FLOWA!’
Agot had the famous selkie hair, not just colourless like Flora’s, but a great rippling mane of silvery white. It looked as if it would glow in the dark. She was, too, a bewitching thing, full of confidence and the absolute belief that whatever she said was very important to everyone. Sometimes Flora caught herself looking at Agot and wondering what happened to girls when they grew up.
Flora gladly lifted her into her arms. ‘Hello, my darling.’
‘She’s being a fiend,’ said Innes. ‘Can you distract her please?’
‘I need to test a new recipe,’ said Flora. ‘Agot, do you want to help?’
‘AGOT DO IT.’
‘You can help.’
‘ME DO IT. ALPING.’
Flora gave her a wooden spoon and took out the absurd tiny apron Colton had had made for her niece for her birthday. It was the same design as Annie’s Seaside Kitchen – yellow on a pale-blue background, like the sun and the pale-blue sky – and it made Agot more certain than ever that she actually worked for the organisation – or, possibly, owned it.
‘AGOT SPOON!’
Flora glanced at Innes and wandered across the kitchen. Bramble, the fat retired sheepdog who was snoozing by the fire, got up in case she was doing anything interesting, then went back to his busy day job of sleeping, farting and looking for pastry.
‘You know,’ Flora said quietly, ‘doesn’t Agot speak quite a lot like a baby? I mean, she is four …’
‘CHAN E ENGLISH A’CHIAD CANAN AGAM GU DEARBH!’ hollered Agot across the kitchen.
‘Oh yes, sorry,’ apologised Flora. She forgot Agot lived on the mainland, she was on Mure so often: English was her second language.
‘Joel still away then?’ said Innes, raising an eyebrow. Flora didn’t look at him. It was exactly the wrong question. She didn’t want to talk about it. Yes, he was away a lot. She realised other people saw their relationship as strange. In London, they couldn’t see what he saw in her. On Mure, it was the other way around: people couldn’t see what she saw in this tall, unsmiling, taciturn man. To be taciturn on Mure – it really stood out. There were a few hermit types here and there, of course: one or two more distant hill farmers; some confirmed bachelors.
But for most, island living meant sharing. Community. Knowing your neighbours when the snow swept down from the high north and the nights were dark and you’d run out of sugar, or you’d lost some sheep on the high crags, or your tractor was stuck in a bog, or you just needed some simple human contact in this world. A cup of tea and a wee dram and the gentle passing of the seasons could heal most things.
Someone whose head was always in their phone, who zoned in and out, who always seemed in a hurry, was not polite, did not ask after people’s children and didn’t even try to join in with their community – Flora disliked remembering the quiz night. Well. He was definitely seen as not quite right.
She couldn’t explain – how could she? – how different he was in the small hours of the morning when he clung to her like a rock in a wild sea, their sweat and tears intermingling, far, far out to sea beyond the need of words at all. That wasn’t a conversation she was about to have with anybody. So maybe they would just have to think that he was odd, that he didn’t really care for her. And she would treasure those moments deep in her heart, even though there were precious few of them.
‘Yup!’ said Flora. ‘Gives me a chance to get on with stuff.’ Innes nodded and went back to looking at his books. ‘Eilidh was always desperate to get back to the mainland too,’ he said quietly. Eilidh was his ex, mother of Agot, who had fallen in love with handsome Innes when he was studying at the Scottish Agricultural College in Inverness, when there were parties and gigs and all sorts of things going on. But she hadn’t at all acclimatised to a place where the social highlight of the month could be a golden eagle sighting, and they had eventually separated, which had broken both of their hearts. Agot seemed fairly sturdy about the entire thing, but, as Innes had confessed once to Flora after a couple too many whiskies, who knew? He hated being Island Daddy.
‘Where is he?’
‘New York,’ said Flora. ‘It’s minus-twenty apparently. Makes Mure look like the Bahamas.’
They both listened to the barn door banging in the distance.
‘Does it now?’ said Innes dryly. ‘You should go with him.’
‘He won’t let me,’ said Flora. ‘Says it’s all work and stuff and wouldn’t interest me. Plus I have the Seaside Kitchen.’
‘Yes, but it can be pretty quiet round about now, can’t it?’ said Innes. ‘I mean, it’s really going to get crazy in the summertime, when the Rock opens up. We’ll all be 24/7. I’ve heard New York is nice in the spring.’
‘“I’ve heard New York is nice in the spring”?’ mimicked Flora. ‘Oh my God, who are you, Woody Allen? Anyway, I just got back from London. Look at me. I actually smell of London. It’s a town; they have pavements and everything. Ooh, and they have staircases that move. You’d find it quite frightening.’
Innes shrugged and looked back at the accounts. ‘No need to be so arsey just because your boyfriend keeps leaving the country every time he remembers that you have a nose like a piglet.’
‘I do not have a nose like a piglet!’ said Flora.