The Endless Beach Read online

  Map

  Dedication

  To my cousins Marie and Carol-Ann Wilson,

  for their amazing work in fostering

  babies and children

  Contents

  Cover

  Map

  Title Page

  Dedication

  A Word from Jenny

  A Quick Note on Pronunciation

  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

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Recipes

  Loyalty Card

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Jenny Colgan

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Word from Jenny

  Hello!

  I first wrote about goings-on on the tiny Scottish island of Mure last year and had such a good time doing it I really wanted to go back. There is something very special to me about the communities in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, where it is so very beautiful—but life can be tough up there too.

  Let me quickly get you up-to-date from the last book, in case you haven’t read it—which doesn’t matter, by the way—or just so that you don’t have to rack your brains remembering who is who, because I hate having to do that and I have a terrible memory for names. (I am also saying this as a get-out clause in case we meet and I forget your name!)

  So: Flora MacKenzie, a paralegal in London, was sent up to the remote Scottish island of Mure—where she was raised—to help her (rather attractive and difficult) boss, Joel.

  Reunited with her father and three brothers, she realized how much she had missed home, and, quite to her own surprise, decided to stay and make a go of it, opening the Café by the Sea, which sells the amazing local produce from her family farm, as well as making old recipes from her late mother’s recipe book.

  To absolutely everybody else’s surprise, her boss, Joel, decided to relocate too, giving up his crazy rat race life for something calmer and more grounded. He and Flora are just taking their very first faltering steps into romance.

  They were both working for Colton Rogers, a U.S. billionaire who wanted to buy up half the island, whereupon he (Rogers) fell in love with Flora’s talented cheese-maker brother, Fintan. With me so far? There’s definitely something in the water up there (and dreadful Wi-Fi and long winters, both of which help) . . .

  The other two people you need to know about are Saif and Lorna, both of whom appeared in A Very Distant Shore, the short book about Mure I wrote for the Quick Reads series.

  Saif is a doctor—a Syrian refugee—who endured incredible hardship to make his way to Europe and was granted asylum in the UK, as long as he took his medical skills where they were most needed—the remotest parts of Britain. He has now had no news of the rest of his family for over a year. Lorna is the local primary school head teacher, and Flora’s best friend.

  Okay, I think that is us! Oh no . . . there is one more thing. In my Rosie Hopkins series of novels, there is a baddie who is a social worker, and several social workers wrote to me to complain that they do an underfunded and undervalued job in very difficult circumstances and they didn’t think the portrayal was very fair.

  So I had another look at the character and decided this was a good point. I hope the social workers in this book help mitigate this, and go some way to showing a little of the genuine respect I have for the dedicated people who do this really tough job day in, day out.

  Anyway, I very much hope you enjoy The Endless Beach, and have a wonderful day wherever you are. And if you are on holiday, one, I am very jealous as it is statistically raining where I am, and two, send me a selfie! I’m on Facebook or Twitter: @jennycolgan!

  With love,

  xxx

  A Quick Note on Pronunciation

  As well as saying “ch” like you’re about to cough something up, here’s a quick guide to pronouncing some of the more traditional names that appear in this book:

  Agot—Ah-got

  Eilidh—Ay-lay

  Innes—Inn-is

  Iona—Eye-oh-na

  Isla—Eye-la

  Saif—S-eye-eef

  Seonaid—Shon-itch

  Teàrlach—Cher-lach

  cynefin (n): one’s place of true belonging; the place where one feels most fully at home

  Once upon a time there was a prince who lived in a high tower made entirely of ice. But he never noticed, as he had never seen anything else, nor been anything else, and to him, being cold was simply the way of things for he had not known anything different. He was the prince of a vast wasteland; he ruled over bears and wild things and answered to nobody.

  And wise advisers told him to travel; to take a bride; to learn from others. But he refused, saying, “I am comfortable here,” and eventually the tower of ice grew thick and impossible to enter and nothing grew and it could not be climbed and dragons circled the tower and it became perilous and still the prince would not leave. And many people tried to climb the tower to rescue the prince, but none succeeded. Until one day . . .

  Chapter One

  Even in early spring, Mure is pretty dark.

  Flora didn’t care; she loved waking up in the morning, curled up close, together in the pitch black. Joel was a very light sleeper (Flora didn’t know that before he had met her, he barely slept at all) and was generally awake by the time she rubbed her eyes, his normally tense, watchful face softening as he saw her, and she would smile, once again surprised and overw
helmed and scared by the depth of how she felt; how she trembled at the rhythm of his heartbeat.

  She even loved the frostiest mornings, when she had to pull herself up to get everything going. It was different when you didn’t have an hour-long commute pressed up against millions of other commuters breathing germs and pushing against you and making your life more uncomfortable than it had to be.

  Instead, she would rake up the damped peat in the wood-burner in the beautiful guest cottage Joel was staying in while working for Colton Rogers, the billionaire who owned half the island. She would set the flames into life—and the room became even cozier in an instant, the flickering light from the fire throwing shadows on the whitewashed walls.

  The one thing Joel had insisted on in the room was a highly expensive state-of-the-art coffee machine, and she would let him fiddle with that while he logged on to the day’s work and made his customary remark about the many and varied failures of the island’s Internet reliability.

  Flora would take her coffee, pull on an old sweater, and wander to the window of the cottage, where she could sit on the top of the old oil-fired radiator, the type you get in schools but had cost Colton a fortune. Here she would stare out at the dark sea; sometimes with its white tips showing if it was going to be a breezy day; sometimes astonishingly clear, in which case, even in the morning, you could raise your eyes and see the brilliant cold stars overhead. There was no light pollution on Mure. They were bigger than Flora remembered from being a child.

  She wrapped her hands round her mug and smiled. The shower started up. “Where are you off to today?” she shouted.

  Joel popped his head out the door. “Hartford for starters,” he said. “Via Reykjavík.”

  “Can I come?”

  Joel gave her a look. Work wasn’t funny.

  “Come on. We can make out on the plane.”

  “I’m not sure . . .”

  Colton had a plane he used to get in and out of Mure, and Flora was absolutely incensed that it was strictly for company business and she’d never been allowed on it. A private plane! Such a thing was unimaginable, really. Joel was impossible to tease where work was involved. Actually, he was quite difficult to tease about anything. Which worried Flora sometimes.

  “I bet there is absolutely nothing the stewardesses haven’t seen,” said Flora. This was undoubtedly true, but Joel was already scrolling through the Wall Street Journal and not really listening.

  “Back two weeks Friday. Colton is consolidating literally . . . well . . .”

  Flora wished he could talk more about his work, like he could when she was still in the law trade. It wasn’t just confidentiality. He was guarded about everything.

  Flora pouted. “You’ll miss the Argylls.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a band. They tour and they’re coming to the Harbor’s Rest. They’re really brilliant.”

  Joel shrugged. “I don’t really like music.”

  Flora went up to him. Music was in the lifeblood of everyone on Mure. Before the ferries and the airplanes came, they’d had to make their own entertainment, and everyone joined in with enthusiasm, if not always too much talent. Flora danced well and could just about play a bodhrán if there wasn’t anyone better around. Her brother Innes was a better fiddler than he let on. The only one who couldn’t play anything was big Hamish; their mother had just tended to give him a pair of spoons and let him get on with it.

  She put her arms around him. “How can you not like music?” she said.

  Joel blinked and looked over her shoulder. It was silly, really, a small thing in the endless roundabout that had been his difficult childhood, that every new school was a new chance to get it wrong: to wear the wrong thing, to like the wrong band. The fear of doing so. His lack of ability, or so it seemed, to learn the rules. The cool bands varied so widely, it was absolutely impossible to keep track.

  He had found it easier to abdicate responsibility altogether. He’d never quite made his peace with music. Never dared to find out what he liked. Never had an older sibling to point the way.

  It was the same with clothes. He only wore two colors—blue and gray, impeccably sourced, from the best fabrics—not because he had taste, but because it seemed absolutely the simplest. He never had to think about it. Although he’d gone on to date enough models to learn a lot more about clothes: that was something they had been helpful for.

  He glanced over at Flora. She was staring out at the sea again. Sometimes he had trouble distinguishing her from the environment of Mure. Her hair was the fronds of seaweed that lay across the pale white dunes of her shoulders; her tears the sprays of saltwater in a storm; her mouth a perfect shell. She wasn’t a model—quite the opposite. She felt as grounded, as solid as the earth beneath her feet; she was an island, a village, a town, a home. He touched her gently, almost unable to believe she was his.

  Flora knew this touch of his, and she could not deny it. It worried her, the way that he looked at her sometimes: as if she were something fragile, precious. She was neither of those things. She was just a normal girl, with the same worries and faults as anyone else. And eventually he was going to realize this, and she was terrified about what would happen when he realized that she wasn’t a selkie; that she wasn’t some magical creature who’d materialized to solve everything about his life . . . She was terrified of what would happen when he realized she was just a normal person who worried about her weight and liked to dress very badly on Sundays . . . What would happen when they had to argue about washing-up liquid? She kissed his hand gently.

  “Stop looking at me like I’m a water sprite.”

  He grinned. “Well, you are to me.”

  “What time’s your . . . ? Oh.”

  She always forgot that Colton’s plane left to their schedule, not an airline’s.

  Joel glanced at his watch. “Now. Colton has a real bug up his ass . . . I mean . . . There’s lots to do.”

  “Don’t you want breakfast?”

  Joel shook his head. “Ridiculously, they’ll be serving Café by the Sea bread and scones on board.”

  Flora smiled. “Well, aren’t we fancy?” She kissed him. “Come back soon.”

  “Why, where are you going?”

  “Nowhere,” said Flora, pulling him close. “Absolutely nowhere.”

  And she watched him leave without a backward glance, and sighed.

  Oddly it was only during sex that she knew, one hundred percent, that he was there. Absolutely and completely there, with her, breath for breath, movement for movement. It was not like anything she had ever known before. She had known selfish lovers and show-off lovers, and purely incompetent lovers, their potential ruined by pornography before they were barely men.

  She hadn’t ever known anything like this—the intensity, almost desperation—as if he were trying to fit the whole of himself inside her skin. She felt utterly known and as if she knew him perfectly. She thought about it constantly. But he was hardly ever here. And the rest of the time she wasn’t any clearer about where his head was than when they’d first met.

  * * *

  And now, a month later, it wasn’t so dark, but Joel was still away, busy on one job after another. Flora was traveling today but nowhere quite so interesting, and alas, she was back in the farmhouse.

  There was something Flora felt as an adult about being closeted in the bedroom—in the single bed she grew up in, no less, with her old Highland dancing trophies, dusty and still lining the wall—that made her irritable, as well as the knowledge that however early she had to get up—and it felt very, very early—her three farmworking brothers and her father would already have been up milking for an hour.

  Well, not Fintan. He was the food genius of the family and spent most of his time making cheese and butter for the Café by the Sea and—soon, they hoped—Colton’s new hotel, the Rock. But the other boys—strong, dim Hamish and Innes, her eldest brother—were out, dark or light, rain or shine, and however much she tried to g
et her father, Eck, to slow down, he tended to head out too. When she had worked down in London as a paralegal, they had joked that she was lazy. Now that she ran an entire café single-handedly, she’d hoped to prove them wrong, but they still saw her as a lightweight, only getting up at 5 A.M.

  She should move out—there were a few cottages to rent in Mure Town, but the Café by the Sea wasn’t turning over enough money for her to afford to do something as extravagant as that. She couldn’t help it. They had such amazing produce here on Mure—fresh organic butter churned in their own dairies; the most astonishing cheese, made by Fintan; the best fish and shellfish from their crystal-clear waters; the rain that grew the world’s sweetest grass, which fattened up the coos. But it all cost money.

  She immediately worked out in her head what time it was in New York, where Joel, her boyfriend—it felt ridiculous, she realized, calling him her boyfriend—was working.

  He had been her own boss, sent up with her to work on some legal business for Colton Rogers. But being her boss was only a part of it. She’d had a massive crush on him for years, since the first moment she’d set eyes on him. He, on the other hand, spent his life dating models and not noticing her. She hadn’t ever thought she could get his attention. And then, finally, when they had worked together last summer, he had thawed enough to notice her: enough, in the end, to relocate his business to work with Colton on Mure.

  Except of course it hadn’t quite turned out like that. Colton had assigned him a guest cottage, a beautifully restored hunting lodge, while the Rock was preparing to officially open, which was taking its time. Then he’d shot off all round the world, looking after his various billionaire enterprises—which seemed to require Joel with him at all times. She’d barely seen him all winter. Right now, he was in New York. Things like setting up a home—things like sitting down to have a conversation—seemed completely beyond him.

  Flora had known theoretically that he was a workaholic; she’d worked for him for years. She just didn’t realize what that would mean when it came to their relationship. She seemed to get the leftovers. And there wasn’t much. Not even a message to indicate he was aware she was going to London today, to formally sign her leaving papers.