Christmas on the Island Read online

  Map

  Dedication

  Dedicated to the memory of Kate Breame,

  (1979-2018), with love from all

  of your FFF family.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Epilogue

  Recipes

  Lanark Blue Scones

  Black Bun

  Shortbread

  Loyalty Card

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Jenny Colgan

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  ‘Beware the snow dancers. They are beautiful, and pale, and oh they can dance; and you will think they are going to carry you away. They arrive with the tinkling of bells, and swirl and swish and you will run out to dance with them, and they will surround you, and beckon, ‘Come with us, child—you can dance for ever more.’

  And many is the lost child who chased and ran, as the flakes swirled and laughed and moved on, leaving them frozen by the shore, craving their distant bells forever, as they heard stories of ice mountains and deep ice kings.

  And sometimes the child is entirely engulfed; is taken and lost by the snow dancing and never seen again. And perhaps they are happy dancing in the frozen ballroom of the Deep King. But perhaps they are not. So. Best not to risk it, la.’

  Chapter One

  In winter, the mornings are very dark on Mure, the tiny island high up off the coast of the north of Scotland, halfway to Iceland (or, it occasionally feels like, to the North Pole when the west winds blow in).

  Beautiful; cosy, stark and astonishingly clear when the clouds lift – but the nights last a long, long time.

  Dogs of course don’t really care that much about whether it’s dark or not. They just roughly know when it’s time to get up and start working on their very heavy schedule of ‘snuffling’, ‘hoping for a morsel’ and ‘mmm, stink!’

  I wouldn’t tell you that it’s absolutely obligatory to have a dog if you live on Mure, but I can’t see any good reason why you wouldn’t, and nor would any of the island dwellers. It’s safe, there are few cars – and those there are don’t travel very quickly along the pitted farm tracks.

  There are exciting moors to run across and coves and beaches to swim in, and lots and lots of sticks, and seals to wuff at, and sheep poo to roll in, and lots of other dogs to play with, and cosy fires to flop in front of when you have finished gambolling, and barely anyone uses a lead and you’re allowed in the pub. Mure is paradise for dogs.

  Many people agree with the dogs’ assessment of things.

  The farm dogs sleep in the barn, with the gentle heat of the cows blowing over their flanks, and warm hay beneath them. On the MacKenzies’ farm – which is up a small hill off the southernmost tip of the island, just along from the high street, with its pink and yellow and red shops, brightly painted to counteract the low winter skies and bring cheer in the darker months – they snooze there, contented, sheep dancing in dreams that make their paws twitch.

  All except Bramble, oldest and most beloved of the sheepdogs. He’s been retired for years, but nobody begrudges him his spot: as close to the wood-burning stove in the old farmhouse kitchen as a dog can technically be without actually being on fire. He snuffles and snores a great deal and tends to like to be up and about early, which Flora, who lives there, thinks is ridiculous: seeing as he is an old dog and sleeps twenty hours a day, then surely some of those hours should be between five and seven in the morning?

  Although, to be fair, Flora is up early too as she needs to get to work, down in the Seaside Kitchen on the main street. It’s an extremely short commute.

  Along the high street, the gift shops are yellow and peppermint green, the chemist is a faded blue, the beauty salon a brand-new fuchsia nobody likes and the fishmonger is a pale orange. Then there is the old, peeling, black-and-white Harbour’s Rest, the hotel which acts as a bar and rites-of-passage point: weddings, funerals, birthday parties, anniversaries. It is somewhat carelessly presided over by Inge-Britt, an Icelandic girl, who doesn’t have a dog as she likes a lie-in in the morning, even as her pint glasses are growing sticky on the unwiped tables.

  And two doors down from there, in palest pink, is the Seaside Kitchen. Flora came back to the island a year or so ago, to work on a lawyering job. She had been raised on Mure and left for the bright lights of London, many years before. She had thought she would never return. She’d dreaded doing so.

  But in the way that life will often throw things at you that you will never expect, the job didn’t entirely pan out and instead, she fell back in love with the land of her forebears, as well as the lawyer who had brought her back there, Joel Binder.

  Joel. Well. He’s a difficult one. Flora loves him regardless (and possibly a tiny bit because) of this. Flora is, let us say, very much up for a challenge.

  So she pushes herself out of bed, because she knows if she doesn’t get up first, her father will, and she can’t bear the thought of his old, arthritic feet crossing the freezing flagstones of the kitchen before she has a chance to fuel up the stove and put the kettle on to boil. He can get up when he hears the whistle.

  She pulls the tangle of hair out of her face. She is unusual to look at, Flora, although not for the islands: generations of intermingling blood between Celts and the Vikings means that she has the palest skin imaginable, white as the foam on the waves; hair that is not blonde, not brown, but almost colourless; pale eyes that change with the weather from blue to green to grey.

  In London she faded into the background. Here she is a part of the wild foaming sea; the pale cliffs; the white seabirds and seals. She looks like part of the landscape.

  Sleepy old Bramble is all bounce at this time of day, huge tail knocking off anything left on low chai
rs, as Flora embraces his warm hairy tummy, gets the kitchen started and hauls herself off to the shower. Joel isn’t here right now: he’s in New York, coming back for Christmas, and for certain reasons, Flora is not displeased about this, in the dark, quiet early hours of this morning.

  They bounce down the street together, Flora and Bramble, Flora full of what she needs Isla and Iona, the two pretty young island girls who work in the café with her, to do that day: cakes, pies, pasties – and hand out fruitcake as fast as they can. She started making whole fruitcakes back at the beginning of November, as a good Christmas cake needs time to mature, then selling them by the slice. And she took the risk of making one every day, unsure – particularly as the ingredients were expensive and hard to source on the island – as to whether this would pay off, or if they’d be left with dozens of unwanted fruitcakes in January.

  Anyway, since the beginning of December (which was only the week before now) they had absolutely gone like the clappers. Some people were having a piece every day, and Flora was thinking of putting a quota system in place, just for the sake of their arteries. Even with the cost of the ingredients – all of which were absolutely top class – and the famous Seaside Kitchen discount card (a necessity so she could raise prices for tourists and summer visitors – the only thing that could keep them running through the winter without penalising the much lower-paid workers who lived there all year round) – it was still a very good money-spinner, and she would keep making a new one every day which would still give them three weeks’ marinating time.

  Bramble would get as far as the door of the Seaside Kitchen and no further, even though he tried his damnedest. He knew the score. Flora led a very tight ship as far as cleanliness was concerned. Inge-Britt would have let him in at Harbour’s Rest to snuffle around the tables for old peanuts, but she wasn’t awake yet.

  So Bramble trotted patiently, every day, off on his rounds.

  Mrs MacPherson was clucking up the high street with Brandy, her highland terrier, as she always did, first thing. She’d told Flora after seventy you never slept and Flora had tried to smile sympathetically while wondering exactly how much Mrs MacPherson would sleep if given half a chance. On Mondays, when the café was shut, Flora didn’t get out of bed until lunchtime, and if Joel was there, she’d try and get him to take the day off too and, well, that tended to lead to other things . . .

  . . . but she wasn’t going to think about that now.

  Bramble said good morning to Brandy by politely sniffing the other dog’s bottom, then carried on his way to the newsagent, where Iain, who ran it, would hand him the previous day’s papers. That day’s papers didn’t arrive until the first morning ferry at 8 a.m., which didn’t bother Flora’s father at all. He took a paper every day but maintained they were all rubbish, so it hardly mattered when the news arrived.

  Iain’s dog, Rickson, lay down in the back of the shop. He growled lazily. He’d spent too many years going on paper rounds with other dogs who barked at him and protecting Iain from wee lads who wanted to shoplift penny sweets and so he was, frankly, just a bit grumpy. As was Iain, to be fair. They made a good couple.

  Bramble gave Rickson his customary wide berth, as Iain patted him on the head and handed over the Highland Times. Then he trotted confidently back up the high street, passing Pickle, Mrs McCrorie’s horribly over-spoiled Jack Russell, who only ate roast chicken, Mrs McCrorie liked to announce to everyone, much to the horror of the village. Dogs on Mure were working dogs on the whole; they existed as part of the farms and homesteads. It was still in living memory for many islanders when chicken was a rare luxury for the locals: you were far more likely to eat seal (as many still did), and fish was the staple diet day to day.

  Bramble didn’t stop past the harbour, where Grey, the pale-eyed northern huge bugger of indeterminate origin – a stray who had somehow wound up on Mure from a Russian fishing boat (legend suggested he was a shaved wolf) and had hung around the docks until the fishermen had adopted him and now gave him the scraps even the birds didn’t want – looked up from his ceaseless scanning of the horizon; he huffed back down again as he saw it was only Bramble, nails clacking on the ancient cobbles, his head held high with the newspaper in it, proud of his daily duties.

  Nor did Bramble head up towards the Endless Beach, which started on the northern end of the high street, just in front of the old manse currently inhabited by Saif Hassan, one of the island’s two doctors (the other being more or less useless), a refugee from Syria, and his two little boys, Ash and Ibrahim.

  Saif was aware that Christmas was incoming – one could hardly avoid it, between the television adverts and the incomprehensible non-stop onslaught of missives from the school regarding tea towels and calendars and something called a pantomime which even repeated googling had given him absolutely no insight into.

  But the boys were in a state of excited frenzy about it all, and given they had had a two-year separation, he wanted to give them a wonderful Christmas, just as soon as he had figured out what that was meant to consist of exactly.

  Further up the beach, if Bramble had not been quite so lazy, he may also have encountered Milou, with his owner, Lorna MacLeod, out for a blow before school, even as there was only the merest hint of pink on the horizon this late in the year. Lorna stayed well away from the old-manse end. Her year-long crush on Saif was useless because he was still in love with his wife, even though he had no idea where she was – trapped somewhere on the winds of war, or dead, or worse. Nobody knew.

  She looked back on that year with huge nostalgia now. Once upon a time, before the boys had returned even, he would meet her here on the beach, where he was usually to be found before the working day, waiting for the ferry to come in; waiting for news of his family.

  And she would be walking Milou, and they had fallen in to talking, and become friends – real friends – and both had looked forward to those early mornings, sometimes windy or sharp with cold, sometimes so beautiful you could see a million miles across the world and the sky was a vast canopy above them that went on for ever; days so pure and glorious that it was impossible to believe, in the splashing of the tide and the peeling of the gulls, that anything bad could ever happen out there, beyond the wide island horizon.

  Anyway. Before, when they were friends, she had made the ghastly error of revealing her hand – and that had not gone well. Not at all.

  So Lorna stayed away from Saif’s end of the beach now. And anyway, he was busy, raising the two boys who came to her school and who were slowly, very gradually beginning to fit in with their fellow playmates, shedding their tentative accents and nervous dispositions – Ash at least.

  The half-starved little souls who had arrived, petrified, without a word of English in the cold springtime were now transformed. Good, decent Mure food, much of it from the MacKenzie farm, had filled them out; Ib had grown two inches and looked more like his father every day. So. That was good, she supposed. That was how she had to think about it. Good things were happening. Just not, she thought a little gloomily, to her.

  The water was too cold even for Milou this morning, which was very rare, and Lorna turned up the hood of her parka and turned back to the harbour. There was no busier time at the school than Christmas. She had a lot to get organised.

  * * *

  Bramble padded across the adjoining road that led to the Rock, Colton Roger’s grand project, which at the moment was in a state of some neglect, certainly not helped by Bramble cocking a leg and taking a long pee all over the cornerstone.

  Colton was a brash American who had arrived on Mure determined to coat it in wind farms and turn it into a profitable proposition, but had ended up rather falling for the place just as it was, and building his life there.

  Colton’s dogs were ludicrous: purebred huskies, made for show rather than bounding across snowy wastes, which meant they were inbred, blue-eyed and quite alarmingly stupid, not that it really mattered as they weren’t called upon to do anything more stren
uous than stand outside his gravelled drive gates like large white statues, and to be more or less in the vicinity when Colton needed to tell people how much he’d paid for them.

  That had been before Colton had got sick. He had a nasty cancer, and was being nursed by his husband, Flora’s brother Fintan.

  The house staff paid attention to the dogs; Fintan had no thoughts for anyone other than Colton. So far, Colton’s unofficial prescription of palliative care consisted of as much morphine as he could source – which as a billionaire was quite a lot – and as much fine whisky as he could drink – again, quite a lot – which meant he was pretty sleepy a lot of the time. Fintan had more or less given up work to care for him, but actually there wasn’t much to do; there were nurses for the tricky stuff so Fintan just had be there when Colton stirred, to try not to be more than a hand’s grasp away.

  It was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do in his life.

  Bramble marched steadily onwards, back up the hill towards the farmhouse, loftily ignoring Bran and Lowith, two of the younger sheepdogs who were allowed to joyously bounce around on the hillsides all day but absolutely did not have in-front-of-the-fire privilege. When little Agot, Flora’s niece, had been very small, she’d never had to be warned to stay back from the fire: Bramble would simply nudge her out of the way without preamble. As a result, tiny Agot had learned to cuddle in under Bramble’s warm fur, like a huge slightly smelly blanket. Although she was four now, she hadn’t ever got over the habit, and Bramble hadn’t ever minded.

  Bramble loped up the muddy track, the winter frost crackling across the fields, the puddles solid and the air so shockingly clean it caught in your throat, and nudged open the old farmhouse door and padded across the old worn flagstones, paper still in mouth. Eck, Flora’s dad, was at the kettle and turned round slowly – cold mornings these days meant he felt like an old engine; it seemed to take him for ever to get moving. Bramble lifted his head up obligingly so Eck could take the paper from his jaws, and the toaster popped up at exactly the right moment with some of Mrs Laird’s wonderful bread, just in time to be spread with the glorious butter Fintan made on the farm and a quick sit-down with tea by the fireplace – one slice for Eck; one slice for Bramble, who chomped it up efficiently as they sat in peaceful early morning contemplation together, and another day on Mure began.