The Cafe by the Sea Read online

  Map

  Dedication

  To nurses. Because you’re amazing.

  Epigraph

  hiraeth (n): a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home that maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost places in your past

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Word from Jenny

  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

  Recipes Bannocks

  Jam

  Steak and Ale Pie

  Apple and Frangipane Pie

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Jenny Colgan

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Word from Jenny

  Hello! If this is your first book of mine you’ve read—hello, and welcome! I really hope you enjoy it. And if you’ve read my books before, a huge and heartfelt thank you; it is lovely to see you again and, wow, you’re looking great, did you change your hair? It totally suits you.

  Welcome to The Café by the Sea! It’s the strangest thing that often you can go away on holiday to lots of different places, but not spend much time getting to know your own country very well (I know as I type this that my dear friend Wesley will be sniffing and rolling his eyes, because we have been friends for over twenty years and not once have I visited him in Belfast). Anyway, moving swiftly on: when I moved back to Scotland last year after decades of living abroad, I decided to rectify this.

  I’d never really spent time in the Highlands and Islands before, being a “lallander” by birth (which means being from the south of Scotland), so I took every opportunity to visit and explore, and I will say that I fell in love with the Islands straightaway.

  The vast white beaches; the ancient strange monuments; the flat, treeless places (trees often can’t grow in the strong winds); and those endless summer nights when it never gets dark. Lewis, Harris, Bute, Orkney, and particularly Shetland, one of the strangest and loveliest places in the UK as far as I’m concerned, all cast their own particular spells.

  I wanted to set a book up in the very far north, but here, I have made up an island that is kind of an amalgam, as there is nothing worse than writing about a real place and getting it wrong and everyone gets really very cross with you. Trust me, I have learned this from bitter experience .

  So, Mure is a fictional place, but I hope it carries the essence and the feel of those amazing islands of the far north, which are so strange and beautiful and wonderful to me—although of course, to the musically-voiced people living there, they are simply “home.”

  Here you’ll also find traditional recipes for pies and bread, which I love to make and hope you’ll enjoy trying out—you can let me know how that goes at @jennycolgan on Twitter or come find me on Facebook! (I am theoretically on Instagram but can’t really work it.)

  I so hope you enjoy The Café by the Sea. It is a very personal book to me as, after a long time away, last year I finally came home to the land of my birth, as Flora does—and found that it had been waiting for me all along.

  With love,

  Chapter One

  If you have ever flown into London—I did originally type “You know when you fly into London?” and then I thought, well, that might be a bit presumptuous, like hey-ho, here I am flying about all the time, whereas the reality is I’ve always bought the cheapie discount flight that meant I had to get up at 4:30 A.M. and therefore didn’t sleep at all the night before in case I missed the alarm and actually it ended up costing me more to get to the airport at an ungodly hour and then pour overpriced coffee down myself than it would have done just to buy a sensibly timed flight in the first place . . . but anyway.

  So.

  If you’ve ever flown into London, you’ll know that they often have to put you in a holding pattern, where you circle about, waiting for a landing slot. And I never usually mind it; I like seeing the vast expanse of the huge city below me, that unfathomable number of people busying away, the idea that every single one of them is full of hopes and dreams and disappointments, street after street after street, millions and millions of souls and dreams. I always find it pleasingly mind-boggling.

  And if you had been hovering over London on this particular day in early spring, then beneath you you would have seen the massive, endless sprawl; the surprising amount of green space clustered in the west, where it looks as if you could walk clear across the city through its parks, and on to the clustered, smoky east, the streets and spaces becoming ever more congested; the wheel along the river glinting in the early-morning sun, the ships moving up and down the sometimes dirty, sometimes gleaming water, and the great glass towers that seem to have sprung up without anyone asking for them as London changes in front of your eyes; past the Millennium Dome, getting lower now, and there’s the shining point of Canary Wharf, once the highest skyscraper in the country, with its train station that stops in the middle of the building, something that must have seemed pretty awesome in about 1988.

  But let’s imagine you could carry on, could zoom down like a living Google Maps in which you don’t only go and look at your own house (or that might just be me).

  If you carry on down farther, it would pretty soon stop looking so serene, less as if you were surveying it like a god in the sky, and you’d start to notice how crowded everything is and how grubby it all looks, and how many people are shoving past each other, even now, when it’s not long past 7 A.M., exhausted-looking cleaners who’ve just finished their dawn shifts trudging home in the opposite direction from the eager suited and booted young men and women; office jockeys and retail staff and mobile phone fixers and Uber drivers and window cleaners and Big Issue sellers and the many, many men wearing hi-vis vests who do mysterious things with traffic cones; and we’re nearly at ground level now, whizzing round corners, following the path of the Docklands Light Railway, with its passengers trying to hold their own against the early-morning crush, because there is no way around it, you have to stick
your elbows out, otherwise you won’t get a place, might not even get to stand: the idea of possibly getting a seat stops miles back at Gallions Reach, but you might, you might just get a corner place to stand that isn’t pressed up against somebody’s armpit, the carriage thick with coffee and hungover breath and halitosis and the sense that everyone has been somehow ripped from their beds too soon, that even the watery sunlight tilting over the horizon in this early spring isn’t entirely convinced about it, but tough, because the great machine of London is all ready and waiting, hungry, always hungry, to swallow you up, squeeze everything it can out of you and send you back to do the entire thing in reverse.

  And there is Flora MacKenzie, with her elbows out, waiting to get on the little driverless train that will take her into the absurd spaghetti chaos of Bank station. You can see her: she’s just stepping on. Her hair is a strange color, very, very pale. Not blond, and not red exactly, and kind of possibly strawberry blond, but more faded than that. It’s almost not a color at all. And she is ever so slightly too tall; and her skin is pale as milk and her eyes are a watery color and it’s sometimes quite difficult to tell exactly what color they are. And there she is, her bag and her briefcase tight by her side, wearing a raincoat that she’s not sure is too light or too heavy for the day.

  At this moment in time, still pretty early in the morning, Flora MacKenzie isn’t thinking about whether she’s happy or sad, although that is shortly going to become very, very important.

  If you could have stopped and asked her how she was feeling right at that moment, she’d probably have just said, “Tired.” Because that’s what people in London are. They’re exhausted or knackered or absolutely frantic all the time because . . . well, nobody’s sure why, it just seems to be the law, along with walking quickly and lining up outside pop-up restaurants and never, ever going to Madame Tussauds.

  She’s thinking about whether she will be able to get into a position where she can read her book; about whether the waistband on her skirt has become tighter, while simultaneously and regretfully thinking that if that thought ever occurs to you, it almost certainly has; about whether the weather is going to get hotter, and if so, is she going to go bare-legged (this is problematic for many reasons, not least because Flora’s skin is paler than milk and resists any attempts to rectify this. She tried fake tan, but it looked as if she’d waded into a paddling pool full of gravy. And as soon as she started walking, the backs of her knees got sweaty—she hadn’t even known the backs of your knees could get sweaty—and long dribbling white lines cut through the tan, as her office mate Kai kindly pointed out to her. Kai has the most creamy coffee-colored skin and Flora envies it very much. She also prefers autumn in London, on the whole).

  She is thinking about the Tinder date she had the other night, where the guy who had seemed so nice online immediately started making fun of her accent, as everybody does, everywhere, all the time, then, when he saw this wasn’t impressing her, suggested they skip dinner and just go back to his house, and this is making her sigh.

  She’s twenty-six, and had a lovely party to prove it, and everyone got drunk and said that she was going to find a boyfriend any day, or, alternately, how it was that in London it was just impossible to meet anyone nice; there weren’t any men and the ones there were were gay or married or evil, and in fact not everyone got drunk because one of her friends was pregnant for the first time and kept making a massive deal out of it while pretending not to and being secretly delighted. Flora was pleased for her, of course she was. She doesn’t want to be pregnant. But even so.

  Flora is squashed up against a man in a stylish suit. She glances up, briefly, just in case, which is ridiculous: she’s never seen him get the DLR; he always arrives looking absolutely spotless and uncreased and she knows he lives in town somewhere.

  As usual, at her birthday party, Flora’s friends knew better than to ask her about her boss after she’d had a couple of glasses of prosecco. The boss on whom she has the most ridiculous, pointless crush.

  If you have ever had an utterly agonizing crush, you will know what this is like. Kai knows exactly how pointless this crush is, because he works for him too, and can see their boss clearly for exactly what he is, which is a terrible bastard. But there is of course no point in telling this to Flora.

  Anyway, the man on the train is not him. Flora feels stupid for looking. She feels fourteen whenever she so much as thinks about him, and her pale cheeks don’t hide her blushes at all. She knows it’s ridiculous and stupid and pointless. She still can’t help it.

  She starts half reading her book on her Kindle, crammed in the tiny car, trying not to swing into anyone, half looking out of the window, dreaming. Other things bubbling in her mind:

  a)She’s getting another new flatmate. People move so often in and out of her big Victorian flatshare, she rarely gets to know any of them. Their old mail piles up in the hallway amid the skeletons of dead bicycles, and she thinks someone should do something about it, but she doesn’t do anything about it.

  b)Whether she should move again.

  c)Boyfriend. Sigh.

  d)Time for Pret A Manger?

  e)Maybe a new hair color? Something she could remove? Would that shiny gray suit her, or would she look like she had gray hair?

  f)Life, the future, everything.

  g)Whether to paint her room the same color as her new hair, or whether that would mean she had to move too.

  h)Happiness and stuff.

  i)Cuticles.

  j)Maybe not silver, maybe blue? Maybe a bit blue? Would that be okay in the office? Could she buy a blue bit and put it in, then take it out?

  k)Cat?

  And she’s on her way to work, as a paralegal, in the center of London, and she isn’t happy particularly, but she isn’t sad because, Flora thinks, this is just what everyone does, isn’t it? Cram themselves onto a commute. Eat too much cake when it’s someone’s birthday in the office. Vow to go to the gym at lunchtime but don’t make it. Stare at a screen for so long they get a headache. Order too much from ASOS then forget to send it back.

  Sometimes she goes from tube to house to office without even noticing what the weather is doing. It’s just a normal, tedious day.

  Although in two hours and forty-five minutes, it won’t be.

  Chapter Two

  Meanwhile, three miles to the west, a blond woman was shouting, loudly.

  She was gorgeous. Even annoyed and spitting after a sleepless and exceptionally energetic night, her hair roughed up and tumbling about her shoulders, she was still leggy, clear-skinned, and utterly beautiful.

  Outside there was the low hum of traffic, just discernible through the triple-glazed glass of the penthouse apartment. The early-morning clouds were low, settling on the thrusting towers of the City skyline and over the river Thames—it was an incredible view—but the forecast threatened a damp, muggy day, hot and uncomfortable. The blonde was yelling, but Joel was simply staring out of the window, which didn’t help matters. She’d started out nice, suggesting dinner that night, but as soon as Joel had made it clear he wasn’t particularly interested in dinner that night, and that in fact three meetings was probably very much enough possibly for his entire life, she’d turned nasty pretty fast, and now she was shouting because she was not used to people treating her like this.

  “You want to know your problem?”

  Joel did not.

  “You think that you’re all right underneath. That that makes it okay to behave like an absolute bastard all the time. That there’s a soft side to you somewhere and you can turn it on and off at will. And I’m telling you, you can’t.”

  Joel wondered how long this was going to take. He had a psychiatrist who generally wasn’t as direct as this. He wanted a cup of coffee. No: he wanted her to leave, then he wanted a cup of coffee. He wondered if looking at his phone would speed matters up. It did.

  “Look at you! All you are is how you behave. That’s it. Nobody gives a crap what’s going o
n inside you, or what you’ve been through. All you are is what you do. And what you do is a disgrace.”

  “Are you done?” Joel found himself saying. The blonde looked like she was going to hurl a shoe at him. Then she stopped herself and began to pull on her clothes in an affronted silence. Joel felt he shouldn’t look, but he’d forgotten how gorgeous she was. He blinked.

  “Screw you,” she spat at him. Her skirt was incredibly short. She was very clearly going to be doing the walk of shame on the tube home to west London.

  “Can I get you an Uber?” he said.

  “No, thank you,” she replied stiffly. Then she changed her mind. “Yes,” she said. “Get me one now.”

  He picked up his phone again.

  “Where do you live?”

  “You don’t remember? You’ve been there!”

  Joel blinked. He didn’t know London very well.

  “Yes, of course . . .”

  She sighed.

  “Shepherd’s Bush.”

  “Of course.”

  There was a pause.

  “What goes around comes around, Joel. You’ll get yours.”

  But he was already up, heading for the coffee machine, checking his e-mails, getting ready for the day. Something was nagging at him about a case but he couldn’t quite remember what it was. Something good. What was it?

  Seven hundred miles due north, the men were coming down from the fields, stretching their muscles, the dogs scampering around their feet, rabbits scattering before them, the wind blowing in off the water as fresh as lemon sorbet under the soaring bright white sky. The first of the morning’s work done, they were looking for breakfast, as below them on the stones of the harbor the fishermen hauled in the catch and sang in the clear morning light, their voices carrying up the hillside and into the open air:

  And what do you think they made of his eyes?

  Sing aber o vane, sing aber o linn

  The finest herring that ever made pies

  Sing aber o vane, sing aber o linn