The Cafe by the Sea

by Jenny Colgan

  “Oh, it’s a small . . . I mean, you won’t have heard of it.”

  She didn’t want to talk about Mure. Never did, always changed the subject whenever it came up. She lived in London now, where the world came to reinvent itself.

  “She’s from Mure,” said the bearded man proudly. “I knew it. I’ve heard all about you.”

  Flora looked at him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m Colton Rogers!”

  There was a long pause. Joel was looking at her, bemused.

  “You know who I am, right?”

  Flora hadn’t been home for some time. But she knew. She nodded quietly.

  Colton Rogers was the American big shot who’d bought up a lot of the island and was, according to rumors that changed daily, about to concrete over the entire place, turn it all into a golf course, throw everybody off so that he could make it his own private sanctuary, or take over their homes in order to breed wild birds.

  The rumors had been huge and mostly unsubstantiated, mainly because nobody had ever met him. Flora now felt very, very nervous. If he wanted the firm to represent him, what had he done?

  “Um . . .” She glanced at Joel, unsure what he wanted her to do, but he was looking as confused as she felt, drumming a pen against his teeth.

  “Well, people say things . . . I don’t pay much attention,” she said.

  “You don’t, huh?” he said, looking displeased. “You haven’t heard I’m restoring the Rock.”

  The Rock was a tumbledown old croft on the very northern tip of the island, with an extraordinary, unparalleled setting. There had been rumors that conglomerates and moguls were coming in to transform it since Flora had been a little girl.

  “Are you really?”

  “Sure am! It’s nearly finished!” Colton Rogers said proudly. “You haven’t seen it?”

  Flora hadn’t been home for three years. And she’d vowed then never to go back.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve heard about it.”

  “Well, I need your help,” said Colton.

  “Shouldn’t you have a Scottish lawyer? Or Norwegian?”

  “Norwegian?” said Joel. “How far away is this place?”

  They both turned to look at him.

  “Three hundred miles north of Aberdeen,” said Colton. “You don’t get out much, do you? Still doing eighty billable hours a week?”

  “Minimum,” said Joel.

  “It’s no way to live, man.”

  “Yes, well, you’ve made your billions,” said Joel, half smiling.

  “Right, listen,” said Colton, turning back to Flora. “I need you to go up there. Do some work for me. Speak to your friends and neighbors.”

  “I need to tell you, Mr. Rogers, I’m not a lawyer,” said Flora. “I’m a paralegal.”

  “Colton, please. And so much the better,” said Colton. “Cheaper. And I need local knowledge. I know how you lot all stick together. Hvarleðes hever du dað?”

  Flora looked at him in shock.

  “Eg hev dað gott, takk, og du?” she stuttered out. Joel looked at them in astonishment.

  Flora suddenly felt the need to lean on something. She grabbed the back of a chair. She wasn’t sure she could speak. She felt her throat constrict and she was worried that, although she had never had a panic attack before, she might be having one now.

  Memories, crashing in from everywhere. All at once, like the huge rolling waves that attacked the shore, like the crystal winds that swept down from the Arctic and flattened the crabgrass, reshaping the dunes over and over, like a giant’s fist playing in a sandpit.

  And there was a huge hole at the center of it, and she didn’t want to look at it.

  No. No. She was arranging a night out with Kai. She was typing up minutes and thinking of getting a cat.

  She felt everyone’s eyes on her, and wished she could simply vanish, disappear into nothingness. Her cheeks were burning up. How could she say no? No, I don’t want to go home. No, I don’t. Never again.

  “So,” said Colton.

  “What’s the job?” said Joel.

  “Well,” said Colton. “You really need to come and see it.”

  “Oh, she will,” said Joel, without asking Flora.

  “Can I stay in the Rock? Is it done?” said Flora timidly.

  Colton turned his gray eyes on her and she saw why, despite his apparently mild nature, he was such a feared businessman.

  “I thought you were a Mure girl. Don’t you have family there at all?”

  Flora breathed a long sigh.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “Yes, I do.”

  Chapter Five

  There is a legend in the islands Flora comes from, about selkies.

  Technically, “selkie” means seal, or seal person, although in its original language, Gaelic, it’s the same word you would use for mermaid. Selkies lose their ocean shape for as long as they are on land.

  If you’re a woman and want a selkie as a lover (they are notoriously handsome), you stand by the sea and weep seven tears.

  If you’re a man and take a selkie lover and you want to keep her, you hide her sealskin and she can never go back to the seas again.

  Flora often thought this was just a roundabout way of saying, man, it’s so hard to meet people up north, you have to steal a boyfriend from the wild. But it hadn’t stopped lots of people from saying her mother was one.

  And after Flora had left, lots of people had said it about her too.

  Once upon a time . . . once upon a time . . .

  Flora had assumed she would never get to sleep that night. She’d sleepwalked through the rest of the day, even managing to join in with someone’s birthday song, nibble a horrible store-bought cake, and gulp a couple of glasses of warm prosecco, but she’d skipped the after-work drinks and headed home by herself, hoping her flatmates would be out. They all seemed to be freelancers who worked in start-ups, were in and out at odd hours of the day, and viewed her as unimaginably square. Flora liked being unimaginably square. It was better than being the strange girl from the strange island any day.

  As always, she considered cooking, looked at the filthy, borderline dangerous gas stove in the kitchen, and decided against it. She ate a chopped salad on her bed watching Netflix and followed it with half a packet of Hobnobs, which was more or less a balanced meal, she considered. As she ate, she stared at her phone in fear. She should call home and tell them she was coming. She should. Oh God. She was going to have to see everyone. And everyone would be staring and judging.

  She swallowed hard and, like the world’s worst coward, sent a text. Then, like an even worse coward, she hid her phone under her duvet so she didn’t have to read the reply.

  Maybe she shouldn’t stay at home?

  But she couldn’t stay at the Harbor’s Rest, the only other hotel on the island. For one, it was horrible; for two, it was awful; for three, the firm wasn’t expecting to cover her hotel costs; and for four . . . well. It would shame her dad, and the farm.

  So. She was going home. Oh God.

  Some people, she knew, loved to go home. Kai ate at his mum’s about three times a week. That wasn’t an option she had, though. She lay there, wide awake, wondering what on earth she was going to do.

  She blinked. And then she realized somehow that she was asleep, and somebody was trying to tell her a story. Once upon a time, they were saying, and then again, Once upon a time. And she was begging them to carry on, it was important, she needed to know what was happening, but it was too late, the voice faded out and, bang, she was awake again; and it was another morning in noisy London, where even the birds sounded like mobile phones ringing. And the traffic rumbled and rumbled past her window, and she was already running late if she wanted to get into the shower before any of her flatmates and at least get a shot at the hot water.

  She glanced at her phone. Aye was the return message. Not great or welcome or we can’t wait to see you. Just: Aye.

  Chapter Six
<
br />   Geneva. Paris. Vienna. New York. Barbados. Istanbul.

  Flora read the airport departures board with a sense that a hundred percent of everyone else around here was heading for a much more exciting day than she was. And also, although everyone was wearing T-shirts and some of the men were in shorts, she was almost certainly the only person with a parka in her hand luggage in May. She’d even resurrected a Fair Isle hat she’d had for years and been somehow unable to throw away. Just in case.

  She headed toward the Inverness flight with a heavy heart. The last time she had made this journey . . . Well. She wasn’t thinking about that.

  She would just focus on the job. Once she knew what the job was, properly. She’d wanted to ask Joel but had been oddly shy about it, even when Kai had stood over her and instructed her to write an e-mail.

  “Don’t put kisses on it!” he’d said.

  “Shut up!” she had replied, but her very timid message about whether he could brief her any more on the Rogers case hadn’t been deemed worthy of a reply, so she was still in the dark.

  She reckoned Colton Rogers wanted to do something the islanders didn’t like, and he wanted the firm to front it. The problem was—and he didn’t know this—the islanders didn’t like her either.

  Flora sighed, watching London swirl beneath her as they took off, gazing at the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the M25 and wishing, as very few people ever have, that she was in it.

  The second plane ride was bumpy. It was generally bumpy; the plane was tiny—a dozen seats, mostly given over to scientists, ornithologists, hardy walkers, and a few curious tourists. Flora looked down as they sped low over the water. The fleet was out; in one of her last conversations with her father—brief as always—he’d mentioned that their catch was up and permissions were up, but they’d been told to stop killing the seals. She leaned her head against the window. The land had dropped far behind and she was, as always, stunned by how very far away from the rest of Britain the island was.

  It hadn’t felt like that when she was a child.

  Mure, with its little main street and its soft rolling hills, had been her world: her father out in the fields, with the boys as soon as they were old enough; her mother cooking in the kitchen, her long mane of white hair swishing behind her; Flora doing her homework at the old wooden table. The mainland felt like a myth, going on a train an annual treat at Christmas, and everything else moved to the rhythm of the seasons: the long white summers with endless evenings and the door open to the fresh sea breeze; the cozy dark winters when the fire burned high all day in the range and the kitchen was the only warm place to be.

  Flora wondered if anyone would come to meet her at the airport, then told herself to stop it. It was the middle of the farming day. They’d be busy. She’d catch the bus.

  She dismounted last, the tourists stumbling around, and walked through the little tin shed they called an airport.

  The bus was filled with excited early vacationers, joyful that it wasn’t raining, equipped with bicycles and walking canes and guidebooks. The sun was glinting through, even though the morning haar—the sea mist—hadn’t yet lifted, and as they approached the little town, it made the place look as though it was rising out of a cloud of smoke, like a mystery, or a magic trick. The deep green hills sloped down to the bright white sand you found in this part of the world; the long beaches seemed to stretch on forever.

  It was easy to see why the island had been so tempting to the Viking hordes who had claimed it and named it, and whose blood ran in its citizens’ veins even now. No Westminster politician ever visited Mure. Very few Edinburgh ones did. It was a little spot unto itself, up at the very northern tip of the known world.

  As they drew into the harbor, the fog started to lift, revealing the cheerfully painted buildings that lined the port and formed the main street. Closer to them, Flora noted that they looked a little dilapidated, paint peeling from the fierce northern gales. One shop—she searched her memory and remembered it finally as a little drugstore—had closed down and sat empty and sad.

  Stepping off the bus, she felt nervous. What would people make of her? Because she knew she hadn’t behaved well after the funeral. Not well at all.

  It wasn’t for long, she told herself. She was only here for a week. Soon she would be back in the city, enjoying the summer, sitting on the South Bank among the hordes, having bad dates, drinking overpriced cocktails, taking the night tube. Being young and in London. Surely it was the best place in the world.

  Of course the very first person she’d see was Mrs. Kennedy, her old dancing teacher, who’d already been ancient when Flora was a girl but whose eyes were still a piercing blue.

  “Flora MacKenzie!” she stated, pointing her walking stick at her. “Well, in all my days.”

  I am a big serious London paralegal, Flora told herself. I am perfectly busy and professional and normal and absolutely a hundred percent not fourteen.

  “Hello, Mrs. Kennedy,” she singsonged automatically. Flora had sat next to big lawyers in court, taken part in serious cases with very seriously bad people. She wasn’t scared of them. But Mrs. Kennedy was a holy terror. Flora hadn’t forgotten a single step even now, although she could only be prevailed upon to perform at parties when people had had too many drinks to appreciate it, and she’d rather lost the finesse.

  “So are dhu back, is it?”

  “I’m . . . I’m just working,” said Flora, knowing that this piece of information would be round the entire island in less time than it would take her to walk to the farmhouse.

  “Good,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “Glad to hear it. They need looking after.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Flora. “I mean, I’m actually working. Like, I have a job. In London. It’s a big six firm.”

  Inwardly, she cursed. Who on earth did she think she was trying to impress here?

  Mrs. Kennedy sniffed.

  “Oh, would that be right, would it? Well, very fancy and nice for some, I’m sure.”

  And she swept off down toward the little pier as fast as her arthritic legs would carry her.

  Oh Lord, thought Flora. She’d known, after the funeral, that her name wasn’t exactly respected on Mure, but she hadn’t imagined it would be this bad. She felt a sudden flash of homesickness for her horrible little London room and the comforting rumble of the tube, the cars full of nobody she knew.

  The fishermen glanced up as she passed. A reticent bunch on the whole, they nodded at her and she nodded back, feeling conscious of how loud her small wheelie suitcase sounded on the cobblestones. She felt someone come silently to a doorway behind her, but when she turned her head, they’d gone. She sighed.

  Just past the western end of the main street, the road parted and one fork headed up toward the hills. Most of the buildings were concentrated at the eastern end of the port; here, the pathways led to farming country.

  The sun was lying bright on the fields as she walked up the old roadway, pitted and bumpy, toward the house, its sturdy square shape standing out against the hills; its gray stone looking smart in the clear light, belied by its messy interior. Her childhood home.

  As she crossed the muddy courtyard, she took a deep breath. Okay. Calm. Professional. Collected. She wasn’t going to let anyone wind her up. Everything was going to be—

  “SIIIIS!”

  “Oh man, is that Flora? How fat has she gotten? Is she recognizable?”

  “Widen the doors!”

  Flora shut her eyes.

  “Shut up, you guys!” she said, horrified and yet relieved at the same time. If they were being rude to her, they couldn’t be too furious. Right?

  First, her brothers Innes and Fintan came tumbling out of the door, Innes tall and pale like her mother, broad built and handsome. He’d been married, briefly, and spent as much time with his young daughter as he could manage. Next to him was Fintan, slender, dark, and nervous. And finally, behind them, Hamish, who was utterly huge and did most of the heavy lifting.
Innes covered the heavy thinking, more or less.

  Her father wasn’t there, Flora noticed.

  The boys mock-embraced her, and she mock-cuffed them. They were as awkward as she was, she noticed.

  The farmhouse was old and rambling, its dark passageways leading to small rooms here and there. With a good sledgehammer, it could have been absolutely exceptional, with uninterrupted views down to the sea across their own land—sheep and cows were their main concern: hardy little short-tails that weren’t great for eating but produced strong, soft wool that went to the looms of the other islands and the mainland alike, making high-quality knitwear and blankets and tartan; and the cows were wonderful milkers.

  On a good day, both the bright blue sky and the deep green fields looked to be full of little fluffy clouds. Closer to the sea, the land turned sandier, and there was seaweed and a few ropes of mussels.

  Flora took a deep breath before she followed the boys inside.

  For a second, her heart felt heavy. Then, as she stepped into the cold hallway, she was almost knocked over by a huge, hairy, slightly croaky woofing thing.

  “BRAMBLE!”

  The dog had not forgotten her; he was utterly thrilled beyond belief to see her, leaping up and down, weeing slightly on the flagstones, and doing his best to engulf her in his delight.

  “Someone’s pleased to see me, at least,” said Flora, and the boys shrugged, “Yeah, whatever,” then Innes asked her to put the kettle on and she gave him the finger and put her bag down and looked around her and thought, Oh Lord.

  Chapter Seven

  If anything, it was worse than she’d expected.

  The large kitchen was at the back of the house, overlooking the bay; it got any rays of sun there were to catch. Inside, it was as if a clock had stopped. Dust lay on the surfaces; spiders frolicked happily in the corners. Flora put her handbag down on the kitchen table, the same huge table that had seen fights (sometimes physical if the boys were in a mood); Christmases with grandparents and aunts and uncles from all over the island; schoolgirl dreams; tear-stained homework; big games of Risk when the weather stopped anything but basic animal care; canned soup when the storms came and the snow sat and the ferries couldn’t get over; impassioned debates about Scottish independence and politics and anything else that crossed their minds; their father sitting quietly as he always did, reading Farmers Weekly and demanding to be left in peace with his bottle of ale in front of the fire after tea, which was always at 5 P.M. They went to bed early.