by Jenny Colgan
‘You never knew,’ said Joel quietly, gazing steadfastly at his whisky glass. She was so shocked she barely heard him, but when she realised he’d spoken, she was struck by something: she’d never heard him speak gently before. To anyone.
‘Half my friends are gay,’ she stuttered.
‘And it never even crossed your mind?’
‘Things have been… complicated with my family,’ said Flora. Joel raised an eyebrow.
Colton and Fintan came back up from the beach, still giggling slightly.
‘This is,’ said Colton, arriving back at the wooden table, ‘possibly the strangest business dinner I’ve ever had.’
‘We haven’t really discussed any business,’ said Flora, looking at Fintan’s flushed face.
‘What are you talking about? It’s obvious,’ said Colton. ‘This was a pitch, right?’
‘What?’ said Flora.
‘Local suppliers,’ said Colton patiently, as if she was an idiot. ‘You guys are going to do it? Reopen the pink house? Hire as many folk as you want. I’m in. It’s a good plan. I like it. Can you get moving before the council meeting?’
‘What?’ said Flora.
Fintan put out his hand to stop her.
‘Sure,’ he said.
‘I suppose I’d better have an opening party,’ said Colton, looking around. ‘Ugh. I hate parties. But I can knock off meeting everyone at once too. Great.’
Fintan glanced at his watch and his face fell.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘I’ve got milking.’
Colton blinked.
‘But it’s early,’ he complained, glancing at the light horizon. He looked at his watch. ‘Oh yeah,’ he added. ‘Huh. Will you look at that. Normally I’m bored by now.’
Fintan smiled awkwardly.
‘Right, shall we go, sis?’
‘But…’ said Flora, feeling slightly fuddled in the head. What was happening?
‘Okay,’ said Colton. ‘Sort out the pink house. Organise the party. Lobby it up. Then we’ll be good to go.’
‘But…’ said Flora again. She felt pressure on her left shoulder. It was Joel, manoeuvring her towards Bertie and his little boat.
‘This has been great,’ said Colton. And he stuck out his hand to shake Fintan’s, and held on to it for rather too long.
Chapter Twenty-seven
There was white all around. The sky was white; the sea was the palest grey, reflecting the strange light straight back until it felt as if she was sailing across a blank page, the ripples in the waves sentences stretching out behind her. She was on a ship, an old creaking sailing ship, its bare masts high – where were its sails? Someone was missing. Who was it? Stop! she found herself shouting. Stop the boat! Stop it. But nobody was listening, and they powered on. Someone had gone over the side, and she wanted to reach them, but the ship was going further and further away, and she was shouting, but nobody could hear her and nobody would stop…
It was probably – no, certainly – the whisky, but Flora woke bolt upright at 3 a.m., her mouth dry, from a strange white dream of ships and ice and cold. Her thin duvet was half thrown off; the house freezing.
She’d protested all the way home in the boat, and Joel and Fintan had, absurdly, ganged up on her and told her they’d discuss it the next day.
The first thing she noticed was her phone blinking. She rubbed her eyes, pulled a blanket round her trembling shoulders and picked it up.
It was work: memos, plans, a flurry of ideas, from Joel. But it was the middle of the night.
Aren’t you asleep? she texted.
He replied immediately.
It’s BROAD DAYLIGHT. How can anybody sleep in this?
Flora thought nothing of it. She’d been accustomed to going to bed in bright sunlight since she was a child; and conversely, of course, going to school in the pitch dark in the winter months.
Draw the curtains? she suggested.
They’re dirty.
Flora felt for him. The Harbour’s Rest was pretty grim, after all.
Why couldn’t you stay at the Rock?
Apparently they’re still finishing the bedrooms.
Seriously, could they have been worse?
That’s a very good point. I should have pushed it. Three walls would have been better than this.
Flora smiled at her phone.
A bit of salt spray aids a restful night.
That’s an island saying, is it? I might suggest to the landlady that a bit of cleaning spray aids a restful night.
Oh come on. Admit it. It’s not so bad here.
I never said it was.
Joel was enjoying their conversation. It felt strange just to be chatting like this, especially late at night. Not after anything. Not a booty call. He frowned. She wouldn’t think… No. She couldn’t. She was the office junior, right? It was clearly professional. It was just she was easy to talk to. And Christ, he really couldn’t sleep.
He jumped up and paced the room. The peeling wallpaper was making him depressed, but outside it looked unearthly and rather beautiful.
Is it safe to take a walk here?
Be careful of the wild haggis. They can be tricky. But you can run away from them; they have one leg shorter than the other from stomping round and round hills.
Hahaha.
Flora looked at the message, feeling suddenly excited.
Where are you going for a walk?
I thought I’d start at Broadway, then head up to the shopping district, then maybe stop off to eat in Chinatown…
Hahaha.
Joel pulled on his overcoat. He felt restless.
Dunno. Harbour? Everything’s shut.
It’s 3.30 a.m.
There was a long pause. Finally Flora typed:
Would you like me to come down?
He squinted at his phone. He normally… Well. He did well without company. The lone wolf, Dr Philippoussis called him. He looked out again at the pale water.
If you like.
She scrubbed her face, grimaced at her hair and plaited it back so it fell over her shoulder, then stuck a bunnet on it. She hauled on her jeans, a striped T-shirt, a fisherman’s jumper and some big boots. She absolutely did not look like someone out to seduce anyone, she told herself sternly. Well, maybe another fisherman. Certainly not her slick hot London boss who she was meeting in the middle of the night. No.
And actually that was quite far from her mind as she headed for the stairs. What she really wanted to discuss was Colton’s mad idea that she and Fintan were going to somehow take over his catering. This needed to be nipped in the bud sharpish.
She drank a large glass of freezing water to flush the whisky out of her system, then made up a flask of strong coffee. Bramble had perked up as she walked into the kitchen, and Flora nodded to him that he could come along. She stepped out of the farmhouse into the bracing freshness of the morning air, even though morning, technically, was several hours away.
Never busy at the best of times, at this hour Mure felt like the moon; it felt like everyone else on earth had simply disappeared, that it was the very end of everything. A light haar was still lying on the land, giving a dreamy quality to every shape looming out of it: the hilltops swathed in bottomed-out clouds; the telegraph poles vanished; the freshness of the air changing to dankness as you walked through great banks of mist.
Flora saw him before he saw her, standing by the harbour wall, staring out to sea. He looked utterly out of place in his well-cut coat and smart shoes; like an astronaut washed up on a strange shore he didn’t understand, who had found everything he had been sure of in his life completely alien to him.
Bramble whined enquiringly, and Flora bent down. ‘He’s all right,’ she whispered, rubbing the dog’s soft ears. ‘It’s okay.’ Please like dogs, she thought, crossing her fingers.
Bramble, soothed, shot off across the cobbles of the harbour.
Just at that moment, Joel turned round, to be greeted by a huge, slightly muddy,
overenthusiastic dog leaping up on his expensive clothes. He nearly toppled over, trying to both push and welcome the dog at the same time, then turned to see Flora laughing a few feet away, the fog settling around her like a living thing.
‘Yes, all right, very funny. Thanks for having me attacked by a carthorse,’ he said as she approached.
‘BRAMBLE!’ she shouted. ‘Come here, you bad dog.’
Bramble totally ignored her, as usual, and bounded off to have an early-morning dip. Joel looked down at his muddied trousers.
‘I wonder if Colton will cover my dry-cleaning costs.’
‘We’ll get Fintan to ask him.’
He looked at her and smiled. She looked so different from the girl he’d hardly noticed in the office. In the big old jumper, no make-up, just the pink of her cheeks, her hair tumbling out from underneath the cap, and those strange watery eyes.
He looked at what she was carrying.
‘Is that… is that a flask?’
‘It might be.’
‘Are we going fishing?’
‘Do you want coffee or not?’
Joel smiled.
‘I want coffee more than anything in the entire universe.’
‘I thought you’d have been calling room service to get it for you.’
‘They have room service?’
‘Not normally,’ said Flora, thinking privately that Inge-Britt might prove amenable in this case. ‘Maybe if you asked nicely.’
‘I always ask nicely!’
She gave him a look and he was taken aback.
‘Well, for New York,’ he admitted grudgingly.
Flora poured him a cup, sweet and hot. He took it appreciatively, and even said thank you, and they sat on the harbour wall and looked at the low rising sun.
‘I can nearly see it, you know,’ Joel said, gazing at the horizon. ‘I can see what Colton sees in this place. It’s like… it’s not like anywhere else.’
The haar had lifted now, and the colours of the dawn were fading in and out of the clouds, giving a striped effect to the water, stippled pink and gold and yellow beneath the eerie white sky.
‘It’s not,’ agreed Flora.
‘You look at home here.’
Flora shrugged.
‘Well. I’m not. Look. The project…’
‘I know it’s irregular,’ said Joel.
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘I was thinking… Did you read my notes?’
‘No,’ said Flora. ‘I was asleep. Do you never sleep? Are you Batman?’
A thought struck her.
‘That would explain a lot.’
Joel smiled.
‘Really?’
‘I didn’t read your notes.’
‘Well,’ said Joel. ‘Basically, this is a PR job. If you could organise something like – say – a pop-up shop in that pink building. Get local people on his side. Plus the party. Plus selling your cheese or whatever the hell it is that Fintan wants to do. I mean, that would swing it, wouldn’t it? Convince people that he’s got the best interests of the island at heart. Then it goes our way. Then we take millions of dollars from his future business. I’m being frank with you here.’
‘I see that,’ said Flora. She sighed. ‘But I have a job! A proper one, not running a shop.’
‘That is a proper job,’ said Joel. ‘And also, I have a load of paralegals. Most of whom could handle your briefs.’
He looked out to sea.
‘But I don’t know anyone else who can help out our potentially biggest client.’
‘Seriously?’
‘It’s only for a few weeks – when will the council decide? You can leave after that; that’s what a pop-up means. I just think it would mean a lot to the firm.’
Bramble came bounding back up, covered in salt and water.
‘Come on,’ said Flora. ‘Let’s walk the Endless.’
‘The what?’
‘The Endless. The beach.’ She jumped off the wall. ‘It’s not really endless.’
Joel followed her up and over the headland at the bottom of the harbour wall, where the houses petered out. At the crest of the headland, as Bramble hopped about sniffing for rabbits, he stopped.
The beach ahead went on for miles. The sand was purest white, the pale sea gently lapping at its edge. In the light remnants of the sea fog, you couldn’t see where it ended; it faded into infinity. The world was nothing but this glorious beach, completely and utterly empty, as if nobody else had ever stood there. Bramble made pawprints in the virgin sand.
It was a combination of absolutely no sleep and a lack of contact with London, but for some reason, it took Joel’s breath away. As if this was the first time he’d looked up. The air felt burstingly fresh in his lungs; the smell of coffee on the salted wind; the breeze ruffling the dog’s hair. He felt… he didn’t know what he felt. A kind of strange freedom. Something new.
He took a step forward.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Jesus. It’s like… it’s like we’ve discovered it.’
‘You have,’ said Flora simply.
‘It’s… it’s just…’
He was lost for words. Bramble was cavorting about, leaping high in the air and desperately snuffling around for sticks. Flora went to help him, then turned to look back at Joel, who was still transfixed. She felt strange all of a sudden; she’d been so desperate for this moment – the two of them alone; him talking to her, looking at her, for once. And yet now here he was, and she felt… Well. He looked suddenly small, standing on the Endless – almost humbled. She was curious about him: what kept him so locked up, so very tight? Had he lost someone too?
But those thoughts led her, once more, and always on Mure, to somewhere she didn’t want to be; to the hand to which she’d entrusted her own, the first time she’d walked the Endless and heard the stories: of Vikings, wreckers, fairies… all the old, old tales of the isles.
She screwed her face up. She was so tired of it, running through her head over and over again. So weary.
Bending over, she found a stick on the ground, the perfect size for throwing. Kicking off her boots and rolling up her jeans, she hurled it as far as she could, then, in the bright clear air of the everlasting morning, ran as fast as she could, side by side with the dog, splashing through the gentle waves. It was the best way she knew to get rid of her thoughts, to chase away the dreams of the night; to escape the clutches of this island and the ridiculous thing that had happened to her. Just run, and never look back.
The beach unfurled in front of her until she was far out of reach, until she could no longer hear Joel calling after her, and she and Bramble collapsed on the sand, and the dog licked her face anxiously, and she buried her face in his fur until she felt more herself again, and began to wander back along the beach, slowly, out of breath, but somehow fuller, more alive than she’d felt for some time.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said as she reached Joel. ‘Sorry. I just felt a bit of an urge…’
Oddly, Joel had very nearly followed her. Cast off his shoes, run as if he could outrun wolves. He’d come extremely close to trying to catching her up… and then grabbing her, pulling her down on to the sand; both breathless, hot, sweating…
He had buried the thought at once. She was a junior employee, and as far as he had a personal life at all, it was never getting remotely near work.
They looked at each other for a moment. Then Flora caught her breath and straightened up, and they set off again, more sedately now.
‘It’s different in the summer. Mobbed. As teenagers we’d light fires here and get up to all sorts of mischief.’
‘I bet you did.’
‘What was it like where you grew up?’
There was a pause. Joel looked out over the clear water and sighed. He even considered, for a moment, telling her.
‘It was…’
The treacherous thoughts meandered back into his head. He wondered what that cool, clear skin would feel like. The porcela
in whiteness of it; the delicate freckles here and there. He wondered what look she would get in those ocean eyes.
Then he looked around at the alien landscape. And he thought, why not? He thought: Dr Philippoussis would approve.
Because he was tired. Tired of bars and late nights working and stupid office politics and hot girls who wanted to be taken to the best restaurants but refused to eat anything when they got there. Tired of who had the best office, the newest client, the most expensive road bike, the most ridiculous holidays, the hottest table in a nightclub, the coolest apartment, the best-looking girlfriend. It went on and on and he didn’t know how it ended, he never had; he didn’t even know, now that he was here, what it was for. There was a friendly dog, and a windswept girl, and nothing else as far as the eye could see. And he wasn’t just tired from staying up all night. Three a.m. was nothing to him. He had never slept. Never.
He almost told her.
Then the damn dog jumped up at him again.
‘BRAMBLE!’ shouted Flora. ‘Oh God, I am so sorry. So sorry. There must be a way of getting the mud off.’
Bramble was going nuts. Flora eventually got him back under control. She looked sideways at Joel. She had felt… what? Something. As if he was on the brink of saying something. But she hadn’t been able to tell what it was. And now, it seemed, the moment had gone.