by Jenny Colgan
Lorna smiled. Her own mother had tended towards the Findus Crispy Pancakes end of things. The best present she’d ever received was a chest freezer. Lorna had always loved going to the MacKenzies’, Flora’s glamorous, other-wordly looking mother pottering about with steaming dishes on the go; perfect pies turned out of glass tureens; always a little bit of shortbread to go with the warm, frothy milk that came straight from the dairy.
‘I don’t know,’ said Flora. ‘I thought maybe I could try a pie.’
‘When’s the last time you did that?’
Flora laughed.
‘Don’t. I’m sure it will come back to me. Mind you, I thought that last night.’
‘Do you want me to come up?’
‘And cook for my family and show them how much better you are at everything than me? Not likely. They already like you better than me as it is. Are you sure you can’t marry one of the boys and move in and just take over? Come on, everyone fancied Fintan at school.’
Lorna smiled.
‘Not bloody likely. No offence – I love them dearly.’
‘Plus you’re still trying to cop off with that doctor.’
‘Sod off.’ Lorna blushed deeply. She had a huge crush on the local GP: so big, it was actually mean of Flora to tease her about it, and she apologised immediately.
‘Sorry. And I do know what it’s like, I promise. My boss… you might meet him, actually.’
Even saying this much made Flora extremely pink.
‘What?’
‘I think he’s going to come up, try and chivvy Colton along.’
‘You like him?’
‘He’s… he’s attractive. That’s all.’
‘You do! Is he single?’
‘Hard to say,’ said Flora. ‘He always seems to be with a tall, skinny blonde, but I can’t tell if it’s the same girl. Like Leonardo DiCaprio.’
‘Hmm,’ said Lorna. ‘Doesn’t sound like your type.’
‘He isn’t!’ said Flora. ‘In fact, when you see him, tell me how disgusting you think he is.’
‘Okay.’
‘Do you want me to do the same thing with the doctor?’
‘Don’t you dare,’ said Lorna loyally, and Flora laughed.
‘God, it’s nice to meet someone worse than me. Right. I’m off to buy pie stuff. Wish me luck.’
‘Humble pie stuff, more like.’
‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ said Flora.
But as she trudged off, the sun warm on the back of her neck, the breeze lifting her hair, she felt undeniably cheered by spending time with her friend; not a work friend, or a passing friend, but someone she’d known as long as she could remember.
Chapter Fourteen
Flora worked up a sweat marching up the hill carrying her shopping bags, and was hungry again by the time she got home, but with that nice tiredness that comes from exercise and the feeling you always get when you wake up after a bad day – that things can’t be quite as bad as they were yesterday. And there was still no word from London. She wasn’t sure quite what was going on. It was utterly peculiar not being at work and yet not being on holiday either – neither feeling she ought to be filling up her time better nor feeling slightly sunburnt and hung-over (it took Flora about fifteen minutes slathered with factor 50 to get sunburnt, and not much longer to get hung-over).
Bramble looked up as she came in, and his heavy tail beat a rhythm on the old flagstones. Obviously he’d forgiven her for his terrible day. She checked his bandage – it had gone on pristine, but was already getting gnawed. He was going to need one of those cone-shaped collars, she thought. She always thought dogs looked embarrassed in those things.
The house was empty, of course; the boys would be out at all four corners of the farm.
She tuned the internet into Capital FM – which downloaded at a speed that would have made a snail sad – so she could cheer herself up with the London traffic reports. The trains had all been cancelled again. The Blackwall Tunnel was closed. It helped knowing that not everyone was having a fabulous time all the time.
‘And be careful, temperatures will hit the high twenties by four p.m., so it’ll be a sticky commute home for you guys,’ said the smug mid-Atlantic DJ, and Flora rolled her eyes.
She looked around the kitchen. The pots and pans she’d used to absolutely no effect the day before were still sitting in the sink and had been joined by the porridge pot, an ancient brown and orange thing that was only ever used for the morning oats. Flora had the faintest memory of her mother saving up something – was it stamps? – to buy the set of different-sized pans. This was the only one left. Its screws were coming loose.
She followed the line of sunlight that danced in and out of the dirty kitchen windows. This place was utterly filthy. It wasn’t the boys’ fault exactly – they worked hard – but it certainly wasn’t going to get any better on its own. And there was something about mess and dirt that made it hard to relax. Flora wasn’t a clean freak, not by any means, but this was so dispiriting and couldn’t be doing any of them any good. And that was before they all caught amoebic dysentery.
No. It wouldn’t do.
She cracked open the ancient dishwasher and emptied its filthy filter. As it ran through a cycle with the dishwasher cleaner that had obviously never been used, she started washing everything by hand, using a vast amount of the cleaning products she’d gathered up along with the pie ingredients in the supermarket; filling and refilling the sink with hot water and making the creaky old boiler start up over and over again. She didn’t just wash the dirty dishes; she washed every single smeared bit of crockery, piling a load up in the corner to be taken to the island’s sole charity shop. When, after all, did they ever have thirty-five people round who all needed a saucer? How many freebie mugs from fertiliser companies could conceivably be useful?
Then she started scrubbing the shelves, thick with dust and sticky rings; she made herself filthy crawling into cupboards, and swilled bowl after bowl of grey water down the drain. She threw away piles of old advertising leaflets and used envelopes; gathered up bills and bank statements and divided them into piles that she could go over with her father – she would have to get him into internet banking; it would make his life a lot easier. Possibly. Or Innes, at least.
She threw out all the old packets of half-eaten pasta and out-of-date rice – it was amazing they didn’t have mice, truly – and tidied up the contents of the cupboards. She didn’t know what to do with them, but it was nice to know that such peculiar items as cornflour and suet were all in there.
The work was tiring, but it was satisfying to see results as she refilled the mop bucket again and again. Just to be doing something felt like a triumph in itself, lifting her from the slightly panicky morass into which she’d steadily felt herself sinking since she’d known she was coming back. She thought of Jan the night before, out in the hosing rain, putting up tents for poor kids from the inner city. Well, Jan wasn’t the only person who could do good things, she found herself thinking, then realised this was ridiculous.
She’d filled the oven with noxious chemicals – she made a note to dispose of them carefully, in case they got into the duck pond – but it had to be left on for a good couple of hours. She might as well put the kettle on. She was pleased to see it gleaming, having been left to soak in limescale remover. She rinsed it under the tap about a billion times, feeling the satisfaction of watching the little white flakes disappear, then boiled up some water. She’d refilled her mother’s little tins with ‘Tea’ ‘Coffee’ and ‘Sugar’ written on them, although she had vowed to herself that as soon as there was any money – and she’d have to take a look at that with her father too: was there any money? – the first thing she was going to do was get a proper coffee machine so she didn’t have to drink the powdered stuff she’d weaned herself off long ago.
Then she realised that thinking like that made it seem as though she was going to be staying longer than a week.
Which she wasn’t. J
ob done. In and out and home again. Back again. Home again. Ugh. The terminology was confusing.
Reaching up to run a finger along the newly polished dresser top, she knocked over the pile of recipe books that stood there. She had bought her mother lots, whatever was fashionable, figuring that if she spent that much time in the kitchen, she might want to try cooking different things. So there was Nigella, Jamie, anything Flora had thought looked interesting but not too technical or weird. Anything with courgetti spaghetti was absolutely out.
She looked at them now as they cascaded on to the floor. Pristine. Utterly untouched; practically the only tidy things in the room. Her mother – who had always thanked her profusely – must have politely put them up on the shelf then never, ever opened them. Not even for a look.
Flora shook her head, half smiling. No wonder her father said he knew where she got her stubborn side.
As she picked the books up, wondering if she could sell them, she came across an old notebook tucked in between them. The kettle boiled on as Flora stared at it. It was at the same time both new to her – she couldn’t exactly recall seeing it – but on the other hand as utterly familiar as the back of her hand, like seeing a stranger in a crowd then realising she’d known them all her life.
She crouched down, and tentatively picked it up.
It had a dark hard cover with red binding, coming slightly loose, and a matching red bookmark string inside it. There were grease spots on the cover. She opened it up, knowing even as she did so exactly what it was. No wonder her mother had never needed to use any of those other books she’d bought for her.
She had her own recipe book.
Chapter Fifteen
How could she have forgotten? But then Flora had never really thought of meals being designed as such; her mum just cooked, that was all, as natural as breathing. Dinner appeared, steady as clockwork, 5 p.m. on the dot, when the boys got in from the fields or from school; great big slices of apple pie to finish, with farm cream, of course, sluiced out of the old cracked white jug with the blue cows round the rim (which had survived the purge). Puddings and jellies; thick hams and delicate potatoes; and always pie. As a small child, Flora would help her, sitting at her elbow and absorbing everything. She was particularly good at licking the spoon but reasonably good at passing the baking powder and kneading and mixing. As she’d grown older and was studying for exams, she still worked to the rhythm of her mother’s wooden spoon and rolling pin. And here it all was.
She suddenly felt a slight hiccup of excitement.
She poured water into the huge old enamel mug her mother had kept topped up all day long; there were deep brown tannin lines scored into it. It felt a little strange, a little intimate, to be drinking from her mother’s cup. She regarded it curiously, then decided to go ahead, even if it was spooky. She was being superstitious, that was all. She dunked the tea bag and let it steep for longer than she normally would, smiling wryly as she did so. Her mother had liked tea you could stand the spoon up in. Then she took the cup and sat down in her mother’s armchair; the one nearest the fire, the one she almost never used. Sitting down wasn’t really the kind of thing her mother did. It only happened on her birthday, and Mothering Sunday and Christmas Day, when they all made a great fuss of her, imploring her to relax while they fetched and carried and did everything for her.
Flora wanted a biscuit, but there were none; instead she settled back to look at the notebook, this little piece of her mother, years on.
It gave off a faint smell, like a concentrated essence of the kitchen: a little grease, some flour; simply home, built up like a patina across the years, from tiny fingers sticky and desperate to touch the jam (‘HOT! HOT! HOT!’ Flora could faintly hear the echo of her mother’s voice shouting at them all as they jabbered and pushed to get closer to the jewel-coloured liquid she stirred in a huge vat for days in the autumn, filling jars and sending them out to the village fair, the kirk harvest festival and the old and infirm anywhere). She sipped her tea and turned to the first page.
The first thing she saw was a note in her father’s cramped handwriting, the ink faded now. Love you, Annie, it said. Hope you write some lovely things here. And it was dated, faintly, August ’78, which meant it must have been around her mother’s birthday.
Flora squinted at it. It was a notebook – a handsome one – not a recipe book. Why had it turned into a recipe book? What else would her mother have written in there? She smiled as she thought about her father, never the most imaginative of gift givers. But perhaps her mother had loved it anyway.
She turned the page. All the recipes had her mother’s funny little titles and annotations. Here was vegetable broth. As soon as she saw it, she could conjure up the sharp smell of the boiling stock her mother made on a Sunday after the roast; the thick, rich soup that resulted; the steamed-up windows of the farmhouse when she came back from school on dark winter Monday evenings, the warm room lit up and cosy as she sat and did her homework, complaining mightily that all the boys fancied Lorna MacLeod which they did, while her brothers set the table and her mother refilled her teacup, and Flora’s too, and busied herself at the stove.
Over another page and it was another soup recipe, oxtail this time, but the writing was different. With a start, Flora recognised her Granny Maud’s hand – Maud was long dead now; a northern witch, like her mother – a beautiful copperplate inscribed in fountain pen. At the top she’d written, in small flowing letters, a Gaelic phrase Flora couldn’t decipher straightaway; she had to fetch the old dictionary from the sitting room before she could figure it out: ‘It will be of the longest time… until it is as good as mine.’
There was something about that simple, gentle phrase that made Flora smile. As she pulled her legs up under herself – the weather had turned, as it always did, and now rain was slamming gently against the windows – Bramble looked up, then struggled to his feet and limped carefully across the room. He flopped his head and promptly fell back to sleep again.
‘I hope this is you recovering, and not just being a lazy arse,’ murmured Flora.
She didn’t remember Granny Maud that well, as by the time Flora had come along, she’d had rather enough grandchildren and was starting to slow down quite a lot. She’d come and help Annie shell peas and they’d drink tea and gossip in Gaelic, which Flora couldn’t follow, and occasionally Granny would make a slightly sarcastic remark about Flora having her head stuck in a book, which would make Annie narrow her eyes a little and the matter would be dropped.
It had been, though, a straightforward loving relationship, Flora thought. Annie, fourth of Granny’s seven living children, had simply left school at seventeen and married her dad the next day, in a kirk service, wearing a plain white cotton shift, barely a wedding dress at all.
Flora remembered when her friend Lesley had got married. Her mother had practically begged to attend, and had swooned over Lesley’s Empire antique lace and narrow train and wild-flower bouquet, even as Flora and Lorna had rolled their eyes and got drunk quietly in a corner and shown the English friends of Lesley’s nervous-looking new husband how to dance like island girls.
It would have been nice, Flora knew, if she could have got married before she lost her mother. She’d probably have liked that. She’d have liked that so very much. She hadn’t really thought about marriage a great deal; only in the abstract, as something that might happen one day but was a long way off.
She wondered if her mother would have liked to have seen it.
Tears sprang to her eyes. Well. There was no point in crying about something that had never even happened, she told herself sternly, rubbing Bramble’s chin. There had been no wedding; no boyfriend had ever asked her, not even Hugh, and she hadn’t liked anyone enough to be more than slightly upset when they didn’t. That was just how life was. She turned the page quickly.
As she did so, engrossed in the hard-to-make-out spidery handwriting, with its ink smudges, food spots and random Gaelic words interspersed with
the English text (not to mention the strange old imperial measurements she had never even heard of – what the hell was a ‘gill’?), she heard a noise at the door.
She looked up, startled. Her dad was standing there, looking like he’d seen a ghost. Surprised, she let the huge enamel cup drop from her fingers, and they both watched it rattle to the floor, making the most extraordinary noise.
‘Dad…’
‘Jesus,’ he said, putting his hand to his chest. ‘Sorry, love. Sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I didn’t… I just… You look so like her. You just look so like her sitting there. Sorry.’
Flora had jumped up to get a cloth from the sink, where it was soaking in bleach. She mopped up the spilt tea.
‘I was just…’
Her father shook his head. ‘Sorry, lass, sorry. I got… I just got a shock.’
‘Shall I put the kettle on?’
He smiled. ‘That’s exactly what she’d have said if I’d seen a ghost.’
There was a pause. He looked around the kitchen, and his eyes lit up.
‘Oh, well look at that,’ he said. ‘Oh, Flora.’
Flora felt a bit irritated. She didn’t particularly want praise for scrubbing a floor.
‘You’ve made it so much better.’
‘Well, don’t mess it up again,’ she said, her voice coming out harsher than she’d intended.
‘Oh… no. You filled up the tea bin!’
‘I did.’
‘It’s…’ He shook his head. ‘You know, I hadn’t really noticed how disorderly everything was.’
‘Well, maybe try and keep it straight now?’
‘Aye… aye,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell the boys. I just came back to get my…’ He looked confused.