The Cafe by the Sea

by Jenny Colgan

  “I’ve got plenty to do,” she sniffed.

  “Yeah, injuring the dogs,” said Fintan.

  “SHUT UP, FINTAN!” she yelled.

  He stuck his tongue out at her.

  All eyes were on her. They were, Flora reflected, the only two girls left in the family.

  “Is she toilet trained?”

  “Yes,” lied Innes.

  Flora sighed.

  “All right then.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Once upon a time there was a ship. And a girl was stolen away.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, from far up north where the castles are, to be taken a long way away across the sea. And she did not want to go.”

  “Why not? Why not?”

  But the rustling skirts had gone and the love and the comfort had vanished and she was cold and alone and . . .

  Flora woke crossly in the little single bed, the sun already high across the counterpane although it was only 6:30, her hair rumpled and her eyes sticky. It took her a while to remember where she was. And there was still no word from London.

  Agot turned up at 8:30, deposited by an unsmiling Eilidh, who nodded briefly at Flora and said she’d heard she was “popping in,” as if “popping in” was the worst insult she could devise.

  Little Agot was three, and surprisingly formidable for such a small person.

  “It’s your auntie Flora,” Eilidh said, and if Flora detected some sarcasm in it, well, she was in a sensitive mood.

  “HEYO, AUNTIE FLOWA,” came an unusually loud and deep voice, even muffled by the thumb stuck firmly in her mouth.

  “You two are going to play and have a wonderful time.”

  Nobody in the kitchen looked particularly confident at this analysis. Eilidh handed Flora a huge backpack containing nine Tupperware boxes full of food, various packets of wipes, and, ominously, two spare pairs of underpants.

  “Can you feed her?” said Eilidh.

  “Of course!” said Flora, bristling.

  “Sorry, it’s just . . . I heard you were working.”

  “I can multitask,” said Flora through gritted teeth.

  “Great, great,” said Eilidh vaguely, kissing her daughter—without, Flora noticed, telling her she had to be good or anything—and heading out.

  It was a bright, brisk, breezy morning—rather lovely, in fact, as long as you were wearing a sweater—and normally Flora would have suggested walking Bramble, but he was still a little wobbly on his paw. Instead, she and Agot regarded each other carefully.

  “THIS GRANMA’S HOUSE,” said Agot eventually. Her hair was white-blond, just like her grandmother’s had been. According to Eck, they were the spitting image of each other. It hung long and made her look somewhat otherworldly, like a sprite, swept in on the northern waves from who knew where. Innes kept grumbling that it got in the way and was going to get caught in the farm machinery, and Agot herself complained that raccoons didn’t have long hair, no way, but her mother—whose own hair was a light mouse—was far too proud of her daughter’s crowning glory to have it cut; it never had been, in fact, and the ends were tiny white baby ringlets. Flora expected it to be subject to a few covetous looks from other parents; there were a lot of fair babies up here, but most deepened to red eventually. It looked like Agot would be a sprite all her life.

  “What do you want to do this morning?” she said. Agot looked at her askance, and Flora felt, obscurely, that this was something she ought to know, that she needed some kind of plan.

  “BUT!” said Agot.

  “Yes?”

  “THIS GRANMA’S HOUSE!”

  “I know,” said Flora. She led Agot outside, and they sat down on one of the rocky outcrops at the front of the farmhouse. Out of the wind, the sun suddenly felt hot on her face, and she made a note to put sunscreen on the little girl, whose skin was white as milk.

  “But your grandma, she was my mummy.”

  Agot pondered that.

  “SHE DADDY’S MUMMY.”

  “She was. And she was my mummy too. Daddy and I are brother and sister.”

  “YIKE GEORGE AND PEPPA?”

  Flora blinked and decided it was best to agree with this statement.

  “Yes,” she said. “Just like them.”

  Agot swung her legs against the warm rock.

  “SHE NOT HERE?”

  Flora shook her head.

  “AUN’ FLOWA SAD NO MUMMY?” She asked it entirely conversationally.

  Flora watched the tide beating against the rocks below the lower field.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Very sad.”

  Agot’s face started to crumple.

  “WAN’ MUMMY,” she said in a low voice. You didn’t have to be a child expert to realize that trouble was brewing.

  “It’s okay,” said Flora quickly. “Your mummy is fine. I’m just old.”

  “I’S THREE,” said Agot.

  “That’s right. But it’s okay. I’m a grown-up. I’m . . . much older than three. So. You see. It’s okay.”

  Agot’s thumb was finding her mouth again. Flora cast around quickly for something to distract her.

  “Um . . . do you want to go throw stones?”

  Agot shook her head dismissively.

  “Look at the cows?”

  “I YIKE PIGS.”

  “We don’t have any pigs.”

  Agot’s lip started to tremble once more.

  “Ah. Well . . .”

  “DADDY SAID GRANMA MAKE CAKES,” announced Agot, as if the thought had just suddenly struck her. She looked at Flora craftily. “I YIKE CAKES.”

  “Have you been hanging out with your uncle Hamish?” said Flora.

  And then she thought of her mother’s light lemon cakes, her tiny little fairy cakes, and the heavy fruitcake always sitting on the shelf in the larder.

  She wondered, suddenly, if there was a recipe in her mother’s book.

  “We could go and have a look,” she said, and beaming, Agot jumped up and grabbed her hand in a way Flora found unexpectedly gratifying.

  There were, of course, several cake recipes at the end of the book. Birthdays and Christmas and many happy things. Thinking of Eilidh’s fairly strict boxes of raisins and dried fruit that she’d provided in the backpack, Flora decided that filling Agot up with sugar might be mildly a payback. But here was something she hadn’t made for a long time. And she already had the ingredients. She smiled to see it. Scones. That was it.

  Her mother had circled a note at the top of the page: HOT OVEN COLD BUTTER.

  “WHA’S THAT SAY?” said Agot, who had pulled over a chair from the kitchen table, dragging it noisily across the flagstones. Bramble huffed as if aggrieved.

  “It says ‘hot oven cold butter,’” said Flora. “Because that is what you need when you’re making scones.”

  Agot’s face brightened. “I YIKE SCONES. MAKE SCONES!”

  Everything Agot said, Flora noticed, was short, emphatic, and announced at high volume. Flora looked at the little girl’s contented face and wondered why she herself wasn’t clearer like that. Clearer in her job, with her family; with what she wanted.

  “Hmm, okay.”

  She turned up the oven, cleaned Agot’s sticky hands, then set her to work mixing the flour, milk, and chilly butter.

  A thought struck her. She didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her before. She wondered if the boys had gotten to it first.

  She went into the larder, the cold storage off the main kitchen. The boys didn’t seem to use it much. There were endless cans of beans and fruit—when her mother was young, it was difficult and expensive to get fresh fruit on the island. Annie had loved canned mandarins and peaches and pears. When fresh fruit finally did turn up on a regular basis, she always professed herself disappointed with it compared to the syrupy contents of the cans she absolutely adored—and here they still were.

  And up on the higher shelves—yes! Treasure, glowing in the light coming through the tiny dormer window. P
ink, deepest purple, bright red. Damson. Strawberry. Blackberry. Cloudberry. It was like discovering an entire seam of her mother.

  Looking at the jars, Flora realized that that was it. The very last of the jam; the very last of her mother in those little misshapen bottles, touched by her hands. Much of it had been given away to friends and neighbors, but some had been kept to get them through the winter. A winter she hadn’t seen.

  Flora sat down suddenly and started to weep.

  “WHA’S WRONG?” Tiny sticky hands were grabbing at her, concernedly lifting her hair from her face. “YOU CRYING?”

  “No,” said Flora.

  “ISS,” said Agot, in the manner of one who was very experienced at spotting crying. “YOU CRYING.”

  She paused for two seconds.

  “BETTER NOW?”

  Flora found herself half smiling and rubbed her face fiercely.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am.” She blinked.

  “I YIKE JAM,” announced Agot cheerfully. And Flora thought about it, and looked up at the field of wild raspberry, and thought, well, there was no point in leaving it, after all, and removed a jar, wiping the dust off the top lightly with her finger.

  The scones in Agot’s paws were rather lumpy. Flora, on the other hand, had forgotten the simple pleasure of shaping things and the feel of the dough in her hands, and she cut them out with the little shaped cutter and lined them up neatly on the buttered tray.

  “SCONES!” shouted Agot loudly as Innes came in from the fields for lunch.

  “Oh great!” he said instinctively, then recoiled slightly as she insisted that he try one of her slightly charred offerings. Flora’s, in contrast, were absolutely perfect, and she felt ridiculously proud of herself. Innes even looked at her with a bit of respect in his eyes.

  “Can I have one of each?” he asked tactfully.

  The scones were still warm, and the butter melted on them beautifully, and then came the glistening jam.

  It was, Flora knew, just jam. But with its deep sweetness, the slightly tart edge of the raspberries, came memories of her mother, standing right there, stirring frantically, her face pink with the heat, warning them off if they got too close to the boiling sugar. Jam day was always an exciting rush; a prolonged wait for them to be allowed to try the very first batch, spread on freshly baked bread, with melting butter from the dairy. A jeely piece, her father had called it, and Flora had eaten it every day, coming home from school up the dark track, the evenings getting shorter and shorter until it felt like they were living in the night all the time; but always, when she came in, there it was: that fresh bread smell and the sweetly spreading jam.

  Without speaking, Flora watched Innes go through exactly the same process. He lifted the scone to his lips, but before he took a bite, he breathed in the scent of it and, briefly, closed his eyes. Flora flicked her gaze away, embarrassed that she’d caught him in a moment so personal, one that he clearly hadn’t expected to be witnessed. There was a pause. Then he bit into the scone.

  “Oi, sis,” he said. “I think you could probably sell some of these down at the caff.”

  “Shut up,” said Flora, but she was smiling.

  Agot, meanwhile, had taken full advantage of their distracted attention to wolf down three of the scones—not, Flora noticed, her own. Then she pulled her father down to her level, with a look of something very important to impart.

  “DADDY!” she whispered loudly.

  “What is it, small fry?” he said, crouching down on his hefty haunches.

  “I YIKE FLORA!”

  Flora found herself grinning.

  “AND!” she went on, sticky fingers grabbing at her father’s arm. “AND JAM!”

  “Well, yes,” said Innes. “So you should. Your grandma made this jam.”

  “GRANDJAM!” said Agot, and they both smiled at that.

  “Where’s Fintan?” said Flora.

  Innes shrugged.

  “Dairy, probably. Hides out there all the time these days. Don’t know what he’s doing in there. Nothing good.”

  “Do you think I should take him a scone?”

  Innes smiled ruefully.

  “Peace offering?”

  “Is it that obvious?” said Flora. “Why is he so down on me all the time?”

  Innes shrugged.

  “It’s not just you. He’s down on all of us, haven’t you noticed?”

  He looked at the cooling tray of scones.

  “Better leave nine for Hamish.”

  She made up another couple, and some fresh tea, and headed out, leaving Agot chattering into Innes’s patient ear. Bramble, she noticed, got up too, and followed her slowly. She scratched his head and resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at Innes. This dog was fond of her, and that was that.

  She crossed the open courtyard, through which chickens and ducks roamed. Flora wasn’t fond of the chickens, even though everyone loved their eggs. There was something about their beady eyes, the way they ganged up on the ducks and stole their corn, and triumphantly—and, Flora thought, on purpose—pooed on the farmhouse steps. Occasionally she’d come in the house and find one unexpectedly on the sofa, which caused quite a lot of kerfuffle. Bramble, as useless at guard-dogging as at basically everything, kept very quiet when the chickens arrived; otherwise they attempted to peck at him and chivvy him about. They were very bossy chickens.

  “Move,” she said to them as they eyed her suspiciously. “Come on, out of the way.”

  “DON’T KICK CHOOKS!” came a voice behind her.

  She turned round. Agot was standing there, looking at her severely.

  “YOU DON’T GET NICE EGGS IF YOU KICK CHOOKS,” she said, in a voice that indicated that she had personal experience of this.

  “You’re right,” said Flora. “You shouldn’t kick chooks.”

  Agot beamed, happy to have been correct in her analysis, and Flora continued on her way.

  The dairy was on the right coming out of the house, slightly raised to make it easier to sluice and for the truck to get in and park. Compared to the flat gray elegance of the farmhouse, it was a rather more basic building, with corrugated-iron sides and long lines of machines.

  To the side of the dairy was the wet room, where her mother used to spin butter; they had also occasionally hired a dairymaid to supplement their income in the winter months. Flora hadn’t been in it since she’d gotten back. It had a heavy smell, and chill winds blew in through the gap between the shed and the ground. She hadn’t liked it as a child either; it was so cold and odd, even though she loved the butter as much as anyone else.

  She knocked at the door, feeling, as she did so, how strange that was; it was barely a door at all, just a bit of iron knocked up on hinges.

  “Fintan?”

  Her voice echoed around the dairy. It was empty of cows, of course, done for the morning, then a lad from town took care of them in the evening. Their essence remained, but Flora, after wrinkling her nose constantly for the first day or so, had finally ceased to notice it, or if she did, she found the warm scent oddly comforting.

  There was a pause. Then a suspicious, “Aye?”

  Flora rolled her eyes.

  “Fintan, it’s obviously me,” she said. “I brought you something. If you like.”

  The wet-room door was pulled open a tiny crack. Fintan was wearing a large old sweater covered in holes. His hair was getting seriously long now; it was a bit ridiculous. And his beard was equally unkempt.

  “What?”

  Cold air came out through the gap.

  “It’s freezing in here,” said Flora. The contrast to the sun-trap courtyard was absolutely noticeable.

  “Yeah, it has to be,” said Fintan. “Don’t worry, it’s a farm thing, you wouldn’t understand.”

  He went to shut the door.

  “Fintan. Please,” said Flora.

  He glanced down at the tray she was carrying. She’d put the jam pot next to the plate.

  “Is that . . .?”<
br />
  “I didn’t think she’d mind.”

  “It hasn’t gone off?”

  “No,” said Flora. “She was brilliant at making jam.”

  “She was brilliant at lots of things,” said Fintan.

  There was a pause.

  Then he sighed and relented, opening the door.

  “Well then,” he said, trying to sound casual. “Want to come in?” He looked at the jam again.

  “I’m amazed you didn’t all guzzle it before,” said Flora.

  “I know. It . . . it felt wrong, somehow. To eat the only things we had left of her.”

  Flora paused.

  “I think she’d have wanted us to eat it.”

  Fintan nodded.

  “Yes. I suppose she probably would.”

  “Agot definitely thinks we should eat it.”

  “Well, if Agot thinks so . . .”

  He smiled, took a scone, and ate a large mouthful. Then he paused.

  “That’s exactly how she used to make them.”

  “Well, I used her recipe.”

  He snapped up another scone in one bite. His face contorted for a moment.

  “Amazing. Weird. Amazing.”

  Flora handed over the plate and the cup of tea. She glanced around.

  “What are you doing in here anyway?”

  There was a pause.

  “Oh, well . . .”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” said Flora.

  “No, I want to, but . . . don’t tell Dad and Hamish and Innes.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. They’d laugh at me.”

  “That would make a change from everyone just laughing at me the entire time.”

  “That’s true. So maybe I won’t tell you.”

  “No! Tell me! What is it?”

  Fintan beckoned her in, then closed the door behind them as if expecting to be overheard.

  “I was just experimenting,” he said.

  “What with?”

  “Well, with . . . Sit down.”

  Confused, Flora did as she was told.

  “Right,” he said. “You’re to try this and tell me what you think.”

  The room had a huge, deep sink, metal surfaces, and a hose; it had to be kept spotlessly clean at all times due to the possibility of bacteria entering the milk. Fintan disappeared into a corner and returned with a huge cloth-covered circle; as Flora focused, she saw that there were several of these sitting on the shelves.