by Jenny Colgan
But at least the weather allowed him to feel something other than dread, and he let it scour out his head. When he was chilled to the bone—and exhausted—then, he felt clean. And empty. And ready for another day in this half-life—an eternal waiting room.
And he was thinking this when he saw it, and he threw up his arms in surprise.
Lorna saw this happen from the other end of the beach, and her brow furrowed. It was not like Saif to be enthusiastic. If anything, you had to work pretty hard to draw him out. Life on Mure was chatty—there was no way around it. Everyone knew each other and everyone used gossip as the lifeblood of their community. It wasn’t unusual to know the goings-on and whereabouts of three generations of Murians at any one time. Of course, everyone was a millionaire in America or doing fabulously well in London or had the most brilliant and amazing children. You just accepted that as a given. Still, it was nice to hear, regardless.
But Saif never, ever spoke about his family. It was all Lorna knew that he had—or had had—a wife and two sons. She couldn’t bear to ask anything more. Saif had landed on Mure stripped of everything—of possessions, of his status. He was a refugee before he was a doctor: he was something pitied—even, in some quarters (until he stitched up their injuries and tended to their parents), despised for no reason. She couldn’t bear the risk of upsetting him, of taking away the last bit of dignity he had left, by prying.
So when she saw him waving, the bright empty Mure morning full of whipping clouds and promise, her heart started to beat faster immediately. Milou caught on to her excitement and bounded cheerily up the beach. She ran to keep up with him, arriving panting—the Endless was always much longer than you thought it was; the water played tricks on your concept of distance—and trepidatious.
“Look!” Saif was shouting. “Look!”
She followed his pointing finger. Was it a boat? What was it? She screwed her eyes up.
“Oh. It’s gone,” said Saif, and she looked at him, puzzled, but his gaze was still fixed out on the water. She stared too, trying to get her heart to calm down. Just as she was about to ask him what the hell he’d been going on about, she saw it: a ripple at first, not something you could be sure of, then, straight out of the blue, a huge body—vast, vaster than it had any right to be, so big you couldn’t believe that it could possibly propel itself. It was like watching a 747 take off—a huge, shining black body leaped straight out over the waves and, with a vibrant twist of its tail, shaking off the droplets of water, plunged back underneath.
Saif turned to her, eyes shining. He said something that sounded like “hut.”
Lorna squinted. “What?”
“I don’t know the word in English,” he said.
“Oh!” said Lorna. “Whale! It’s a whale. A weird . . . I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
“There are many of them here?”
“Some,” said Lorna. She frowned. “Some normal whales. That one looks weird. And it’s not good for them to be so close to shore. One got washed up last year and it was a heck of a palaver, remember?”
Saif didn’t understand whether a “heck of a palaver” was a good thing or a bad thing, and did not remember, so he just kept looking. Sure enough, after a few moments the whale leaped again, and this time the sun caught the droplets dropping from its tail like diamonds, and what looked bizarrely like a horn. They both leaned forward to see it.
“It’s beautiful.”
Lorna looked at it. “It is,” she said.
“You do not sound so happy, Lorenah.”
He had never been very good at pronouncing her name.
“Well,” she said. “For starters, I’m worried about it. Whales beaching is a terrible thing. Even if you can save them once, sometimes they just do it again. And the other thing . . .”
Saif looked at her quizzically.
“Oh well, you’ll think this is stupid.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“For Murians . . . on the island, I mean, they’re seen as unlucky.”
Saif frowned. “But they’re so beautiful.”
“Lots of beautiful things bring bad luck. So we’ll welcome them in,” said Lorna, her eyes fixed on the horizon. “We need Flora. She can handle these things.”
Saif looked doubtful, and Lorna laughed. “Oh, it’s just silly superstition though.”
And the whale leaped again through the breaking waves, so strong and free, and Lorna wondered a little why she didn’t feel joyous; why she had, unexpectedly, an ominous feeling in the pit of her stomach, quite at odds with the blowy day.
Chapter Three
Flora alighted at Liverpool Street from the airport and came up from the warm bowels of the subway, reflecting, briefly, how shocking London is when you’ve been away and aren’t used to it; how there are more people, probably, on the railway concourse than live on her entire island. Then she realized that she’d been standing on the escalator a microsecond too long because somebody barged into her and made a loud tutting sound.
It seemed very strange to her that she’d only been away a few months, as the London commute used to feel as natural to her as breathing. Now she couldn’t imagine why anybody would put themselves through this if they didn’t absolutely have to.
Now, this morning was something she was not looking forward to. Not at all. It was ridiculous: all she had to do was go in, pick up her stuff, sign some forms for HR to tell them she was leaving, and promise not to work for any more high-flying law firms in the next three months, which wouldn’t be difficult, seeing as there weren’t any high-flying law firms on Mure. There was no high-flying anything. That’s what made it so nice.
So she shouldn’t be nervous. But she was. The trouble was, Flora couldn’t help herself remembering, now she was back in London. She remembered what it was like here, when Joel was constantly dating ridiculously beautiful models; when he used Tinder and hook-ups and all sorts of things Flora had never been particularly good at; when you would never, in your wildest dreams, have put a senior partner—a handsome senior partner too—together with some pale paralegal.
Flora was unusual looking, she knew, but not traditionally lovely. Her hair was a very pale strawberry blond, almost fading away to nothing, and her skin was white as milk. Her eyes were the color of the sea; they changed almost constantly from gray to green to blue. She was the product of generations of island folk and Vikings.
But she wasn’t like the gorgeously, beautifully made-up Instagram girls of London, with their amazing clothes—everyone in Mure just wore a fleece every day—and blow-dried hair—there was never any point in doing this in Mure, for windy reasons. Here, everyone seemed so self-assured and busy and rushing and glamorous. And she felt herself shrink. Whereas Mure felt like her home, her place to be. It didn’t, however, stop London from making her feel like a failure.
Focus, Flora told herself. Focus on the good stuff. Their life together. She blinked.
There was no doubt that being with someone as driven and tough as Joel was, as her best friend Lorna said, difficult. A pickle. He had grown up in foster care, in and out of other people’s homes. Flora wasn’t exactly sure he’d ever managed to properly attach to anyone. She worried, genuinely, how much it was her he loved, how much her family—she and her three brothers adored each other, mostly through the medium of slagging each other off—or how much the island itself, with its calm atmosphere, where everyone knew one another. That it gave his anxious heart a berth, which was all very well. But Flora wondered if that was enough; if she, herself, was enough.
Because they had worked together, in this building, for four years, and he’d never noticed her. Not once. Never even known her name. Even though she’d spoken to him several times, when he first called her up to discuss Mure, he’d acted as if they’d never met before. Kai, her best friend in the office, had found it absolutely astounding that they had gotten together. And Kai was someone who cared for her. What on earth the rest of the office must be thinki
ng she couldn’t bear to imagine.
She steeled herself. In, out and it would be over. And she could get on with the next, massive stage of her life, whatever it was going to be.
Chapter Four
Fintan MacKenzie, the youngest of Flora’s three elder brothers, blinked awake to the sight of his boyfriend, Colton Rogers, stretching in the sun.
“What are you doing?” groaned Fintan. They’d been finalizing possible whisky suppliers for the Rock the night before—the development was coming on at an extremely leisurely pace—with fairly predictable results, and the early spring sunshine coming through the huge paned windows of the hotel room was messing with his head.
“Sun salutations!” said Colton bouncily. “C’mon, join me?”
Fintan put his head back under the covers. “No thanks! Also, you know, that is not your most flattering angle.”
Colton grinned and carried on. “You won’t say that when you see how bendy it makes me. Come on, get up. I’ve got green juice and green tea on the go downstairs.”
“The only thing green around here,” complained Fintan as he headed off to the bathroom, “is me. What have you got planned today?”
“Seeing my lawyer this morning to go over a few things,” said Colton.
“Is that the weird American guy?” shouted Fintan from the bathroom.
“Weird guy would suffice,” said Colton, “seeing as you are talking to an American. Anyway, you should know. Isn’t he marrying your sister?”
Fintan groaned and popped his head out of the bathroom. “Don’t ask me, for God’s sake. Flora is a law unto herself. And anyway, marrying? Really?” He made a face.
“What have you got against marriage?” said Colton, stretching himself out again like a cat and bending his back.
“Only that it’s for idiots,” said Fintan. “Look at Innes.”
Innes was the eldest MacKenzie brother, who had married the beautiful Eilidh. It had ended badly, she had raced back to the mainland, and now he saw his gorgeous, willful daughter, Agot, not nearly as much as he would like.
“Mmm,” said Colton. He changed position and didn’t say anything more, and there was a slightly odd silence between them. Then Fintan disappeared into the shower and promptly forgot all about it.
Colton kissed him when he got out.
“That’s your ‘going away for ages’ kiss,” grumbled Fintan. “I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” said Colton, a smile playing on his lips.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Well, now I’ve got that tame lawyer working for me . . .”
“Can we stop talking about him please?”
“ . . . I thought I’d go, maybe close down a few things—make it easier for me to spend more time here.”
“Seriously?” said Fintan, his face lighting up. Colton looked at him for a while, just enjoying the effect it had. “That would be awesome,” said Fintan.
“I know,” said Colton. “I’m going to . . . well. I have some ideas.”
Fintan embraced him. Then he looked up. “Can we still go to the Caribbean in February though?”
“Yes.”
Chapter Five
Adu on reception smiled happily to see Flora, and she was grateful to see a friendly face.
“You’re back!” he said.
“Oh, no, I’m off,” she said. “I’ll turn in my pass later. I’m leaving.”
Adu looked surprised. “You’re leaving the firm?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
“To . . . um. I’m running a café in Scotland now.”
Adu blinked. “But this is . . . this is the best law firm in London.”
Flora tried to smile. She tried to make herself think of all the punishing hours she’d put in here, the early mornings, the late nights, the endless tedious paperwork she really hated. She’d done everything her mother had wanted her to do—gotten a degree, gotten a career—and then, she’d been forced to go home, thinking she didn’t want to—and realized she’d loved it all along. It was the strangest feeling.
And somehow, in an awful way that sometimes felt like a betrayal, it also had set her free.
It wasn’t Adu who worried her. It was Margo, Joel’s high-powered assistant, who had protected him from the outside world and run his life and diary with exceptional ruthlessness. Suddenly Flora wished they hadn’t decided that it would have been ridiculous for them to turn up together. She wanted Joel there, his quiet presence calming her, her amazement every time she felt him by her side, as if every hair in her body lifted when he entered a room, like a sunflower gravitating toward him. She knew, deep down, it wasn’t right to be so amazed, to be so bowled over.
She had handed him her heart in her hands without truly knowing whether this quiet, enclosed man could be trusted with it. But it had gone; it had flown from her as if it had always been his, regardless of what he wanted to do with it. She sighed. Maybe she wouldn’t see Margo. Maybe she wouldn’t see anyone.
* * *
“SURPRISE!”
Flora blinked. Her old desk, situated in an open-plan space and now occupied by a slightly insultingly young-looking girl called Narinder, was covered in balloons, and standing behind it, looking jolly, was her best work friend, Kai. Never one to let things pass undercelebrated, he had covered her desk with cakes and bottles of fizz, and everyone she knew (and many she didn’t: things moved fast at the firm, but who cared when cake was involved?) was standing round, looking pink and cheerful.
“Hooray!” shouted Kai. “You’re making it out of here alive!”
Everyone cheered, and Flora also went pink. “Och, I’m only . . . I mean, I’m in the middle of nowhere,” she muttered.
Kai said, “Listen to you, you’ve gone all Scottish and you’ve only been away five minutes.” He popped a cork and poured fizz into plastic cups, and more people arrived every minute. Flora had kept her head down and worked incredibly hard for the four years she’d spent there, and she was touched by how many people came up to thank her for what she’d done or to say how much they’d miss her.
“See?” said Kai. “You think no one ever notices you.”
“Come on, serve free cake and they could be saying bye to a pencil sharpener,” said Flora, but she was pleased nonetheless.
One older woman, one of the senior lawyers, whom Flora had always looked up to as almost impossibly suave and glamorous, took her aside. She was on her second glass of fizz.
“Tell me about Mure,” she said. “Are there jobs there?”
“Well, tourism mostly,” said Flora. “Catering, always. Farming if you like. It’s not easy up there to make a living. Doctors and teachers always welcome.”
The woman nodded. “It was my dream, you know,” she said. “To move away. To make money here, then go somewhere beautiful where I could . . .” She smiled. “This sounds silly, I know. But where I could set myself free.”
Flora nodded. She knew what she meant.
“You could,” said Flora. “You could go anytime. It’s not expensive to buy a house or anything. The people are nice. And there are lots of English people there,” she said, encouragingly. “I mean, we have shops and everything. Well. Three shops. Okay, forget what I said about the shops.”
The woman smiled sadly. “Oh, I’m too old to start over now, I think. Everything I know is here, and, well . . . But you doing it . . . amazing. I think it’s amazing. I look at your Facebook.”
“Oh,” said Flora.
“And it’s so beautiful and . . . well. I’m jealous. That’s all.”
And she patted Flora on the arm, rubbed briefly at her eyes, and sashayed off on her amazing high heels, which cost more than Annie’s Café by the Sea turned over in a week. Flora watched her go.
“So,” said Kai. “There’s something else people want to know.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “Spill!”
Flora blushed. “What do you mean?”
“Shut up! You know exactly what I mean.”
Flora’s skin was so pale that she couldn’t possibly hide a blush. She went scarlet.
“Seriously,” said Hebe, an incredibly beautiful girl with polished skin and long braids. She was pretending to be joking but Flora didn’t think she was really. “I mean, why you? I mean, obviously you’re awesome and everything . . .”
Her voice trailed off.
“Who are you talking about?” said a voice. It was Narinder, her replacement.
“She somehow pulled Joel Binder,” said Hebe in the same tone of voice. “Basically, she held him hostage on an island until he gave in.”
“That’s it exactly,” said Flora, determined not to take the bait.
Narinder shook her head. “I never met him.”
“You never did?” said Kai. He Googled the company’s home page and brought up the picture of him. It was an image Flora knew incredibly well—his smart suit, the thick, curly brown hair, the horn-rimmed glasses, the strong jaw and slightly disconnected expression. It was all him. She couldn’t deny what she felt for him. Couldn’t downplay it.
“Look at her!” said Kai. “She’s off in a dream. Are you choosing wedding dresses?”
“No!” said Flora furiously. “Shut up! I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why, is it over already?” said Hebe. “Has he definitely resigned too?”
“He’s coming in next week,” said Flora defiantly.
“Are you a hundred percent sure about that?”
Kai sensed the situation was getting a little out of hand. “Come on,” he said, steering Flora away. “Early lunch. Bye, everyone. Tell my clients I’m on it.”