The Endless Beach Read online

  “Don’t worry,” said Fintan. “You have nothing to feel bad about.”

  Flora didn’t think that was true for a moment. But she stuck a smile on her face and did her best.

  To be fair, Jan looked nice. Okay, she hadn’t dyed her hair, so it was short and rigidly quite gray, or removed her glasses. But it was the first time Flora had ever seen her out of a fleece, and for sure, she had the most tremendous legs. She wore a chic, straight, knee-length dress that showed them off nicely and a slightly 1980s-style but somehow appropriate white jacket. No veil, but she looked like herself. Charlie of course was in his kilt, as were the other men, with a black tie for once and a Bonnie Prince Charlie short black jacket with a black waistcoat underneath it.

  Flora ducked out of sight as he came into view, back in the kitchen like Cinderella, while the plates with the hot canapés on them were rolled out—scallops, and neatly cut venison, and little haggis bonbons, piping hot with a horseradish cream. Inge-Britt, the manager of the Harbor’s Rest (and one-time amour of Joel’s, which Flora tried uncomfortably to forget and Inge-Britt, who had a fairly healthy Icelandic attitude toward this kind of thing, already had genuinely forgotten), was laying out glasses of ordered-in prosecco, some of which had been poured too early and was already going flat—although Flora didn’t like to mention that.

  Flora squinted at the crowd coming through. There really did seem to be an awful lot of people . . . Jan had been insistent that there was catering for a hundred people, which was plenty, obviously, but there were far more than Flora had been expecting showing up.

  Not only that, but there were lots of children. Jan had definitely not mentioned children . . . Many of them, Flora assumed, were part of Jan and Charlie’s outreach groups that they ran together, taking children from the mainland in difficult situations out on adventure holidays. While this was an entirely laudable aim and a wonderful thing to do, Flora sometimes wished that Jan didn’t show off her moral virtue quite so regularly.

  But the problem with these children was they couldn’t wait for a buffet. They didn’t know they were meant to hold off until everyone had a drink and was settled and organized so the speeches could begin and everyone could behave reasonably. They went straight to the heaving buffet table and immediately began stuffing their faces with whatever they could find.

  “No!” said Flora, horrified, as her lovely display was being ruined before the guests had even gotten in to see it.

  She came out of the kitchen, not even caring that she hadn’t cleaned up or put some lipstick on. The boys, startled, looked up at her guiltily and a hush fell on the room. Jan turned round with an expectant look on her face. Flora immediately felt herself blush bright pink.

  “Um. I mean, hello. Would you like to wait until everyone is here and everyone can start the buffet together?”

  She put on her most ingratiating face and was aware of how fake her voice sounded. In fact, she sounded like she’d been chasing away hungry children from food. This was not really the look she’d been after.

  Jan bustled over, a pitying smile on her face. “Not to worry, Flora . . . Everyone here is our guest.”

  Flora tried to pull her aside. “But . . . but we’ve only got food for a hundred guests! You said a hundred!”

  The room was now absolutely packed, and the boys had gone straight back to stuffing their faces.

  Jan tinkled a little laugh Flora hadn’t heard before. “Oh, it’s hardly difficult, what you’re doing, is it? It’s lovely to welcome all our friends to celebrate our marriage . . .”

  Charlie came up behind Jan, grinning nervously and looking rather sweaty.

  “Oh . . . yes . . . Congratulations,” said Flora. “I’m very . . . I’m really pleased for you.”

  Jan tightened her grip on Charlie’s hand proprietorially. “Well, of course you would have to say that,” she said. She looked around. “I see the American appears to have left.”

  Flora blinked. There were even more people slipping in through the door, including a few disreputable Harbor’s Rest drinkers that she was reasonably certain wouldn’t have received an invitation in a million years. “So, anyway . . . Do you know how many you’re expecting?”

  “Flora,” said Jan. “This celebration is important in our community. It’s important to all of us. Obviously you moved away from the islands.”

  And then I moved back, thought Flora mutinously.

  “But for those of us who’ve always stayed here, who believe in the island as our home . . . this is an important day for all of us.”

  “So . . . how many?”

  “Everyone is welcome,” said Jan. She glanced over at the rapidly diminishing buffet table. The boys were throwing vol-au-vents at each other and crumbs were getting underfoot. “Oh, dear, it’s looking a little thin.”

  And she glided across the floor as if the situation were nothing to do with her.

  * * *

  Flora turned, grabbed Isla and Iona into the kitchen, and hooked Fintan, who’d been heading over for a gin and tonic.

  “Everything,” she hissed. “We get everything we’ve got in stock.”

  Fintan frowned. “Well, she’s not having the ageing range.”

  Fintan had started to lay cheese down, like wine, in preparation for the Rock reopening. It was extraordinary stuff, really beautiful, and Flora sometimes wished they could sell it on the open market. It would make a fortune.

  “Anything,” she repeated. “Anything that’s in the freezer, anything lying about, and everyone start baking. The quickest thing—Iona, you do sandwiches. Run down to the Spar.”

  She was sad; up until now they’d used the best of everything.

  “Buy up whatever ham they have. All the cucumbers.”

  She thought about the local shop’s cucumbers. They could be a little tired, to say the least. Cucumbers had to travel a long way to reach the Northern Isles.

  “Put loads of butter on everything. Oh Christ,” she moaned. “We won’t have time to make any more bread. See what Mrs. Laird has.”

  The girls, to their credit, worked at lightning speed with what they had. They found every piece of fruitcake—Flora stockpiled them for the kitchen, did them in huge batches. They also found a vast pile of frozen gingerbread Flora had forgotten she had, and ended up microwaving it into a pudding and adding custard. They scraped every crumb out of Annie’s Café by the Sea and served it up to an increasingly drunken and demanding crowd, even stooping, eventually, to ransacking Inge-Britt’s stock of chips simply to give Jan’s guests something to eat.

  Finally, after what seemed to Flora about twenty hours of rowdy people and dancers and bar bores and singers, and after the speeches were made, the cake was cut, and the free bar was shut, there was not a crumb to be found, and people, sensing the main affair was over, started to drift off.

  In the kitchen, the girls were working like Trojans washing up, and Fintan had pitched in like a good one. Flora was flat out, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, sweat on her brow. She looked around. There wasn’t a scrap left; they’d even used the sausages Inge-Britt served in the morning, and the eggs, to make a last-minute frittata they’d cut into slices. There wasn’t a single thing left untouched. The mess, though, was everywhere.

  Flora wanted to weep. She barely knew what people had eaten. All the lovely, delicately handmade little cakes and hors d’oeuvres she’d had ready at the start had been shoveled carelessly into the mouths of boys who couldn’t have cared less what they were eating. People had been looking around with hungry looks on their faces until they got drunk enough not to care or were happy enough with a bag of chips. The idea of anyone wanting to book her after this was unthinkable. Plus they’d spent all their petty cash in the local shop and probably owed Inge-Britt money for the chips.

  As the straggling members of the wedding party headed outside to watch Charlie and Jan go to pick up the night ferry to the mainland—they were going to Italy, Flora had heard Jan say a million times—Flo
ra laid her exhausted head against a doorframe and let a tear run down her cheek. Then she told herself not to be so silly, there were still hours of clearing up to do. And she didn’t even want to think about the envelope that had been pushed into the kitchen by Jan’s taciturn father.

  It would contain, she knew, a check for the precise amount that they had agreed on in advance—to feed a hundred people. It would be nowhere near enough to cover the extra food and extra hours or the use of Inge-Britt’s kitchen. The wedding was meant to make them money—launch them. Instead, all that people would remember were the empty plates, the messy sandwiches.

  Oh, there was no point, she told herself. No point in worrying about this or dwelling on it too long. Perhaps she had been getting complacent; the Café by the Sea had been running so well she had taken a weekend off. She had taken her eyes off the prize and forgotten what it was actually like to run a catering situation, day after day. Well. Now she knew. She rolled up her sleeves and filled the sink, and tried to chalk it up to experience. But her teeth were definitely gritted.

  * * *

  There was a quiet knock at the swing doors of the kitchen. Flora glanced up wearily. There wasn’t, truly, a single soul she was terribly desperate to see at that precise moment, and that in itself made her sad. The woman standing there was a stranger, although Flora had glimpsed her in the wedding party. She was wearing a flowery dress and white sandals; she had thick glasses and long black hair and an apologetic look.

  “Um, hello?”

  “I don’t work here,” said Flora. “You need Inge-Britt. Hang on.”

  “No, no,” said the woman. She had a Glasgow accent. “I just wanted to say . . . I’m so sorry . . . I’m the youth worker. With the boys. I’m so sorry—I realized when I came in what they’d done to the buffet . . . I was caught behind them at the church.”

  “That’s okay,” said Flora. “They did quite a lot of stamping, though.”

  “They were over all week doing Outward Bound and they just had such a wonderful time, and I was meant to be escorting them back when they found out about the wedding and just pestered and pestered to be allowed to stay.”

  She looked down.

  “You know . . . they get so few happy events like this, some of them. A lot of them, they barely go out at all. And there certainly aren’t a lot of weddings in their backgrounds. Some of them.”

  At this, Flora felt absolutely stricken with guilt. All she’d thought about was the boys making a mess of her lovely spread. She had forgotten completely about who they were, and where they’d come from. She tried to think about what they would be like teasing Charlie, who, despite his size, was the softest lump ever to walk the earth, and the hope in their little faces and how on earth you could turn that down.

  “I meant to come out and control them, obviously.” The woman twisted her fingers nervously. “But I got caught up in the pews, and one of them had to go to the loo and by the time I’d showed him, the rest had kind of pelted down the street and . . . I’m really sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” said Flora. Weirdly, just saying that, and getting the apology, did somehow make it feel a bit better.

  The woman glanced around. “Do you want me to send them over to help clear up?”

  “Oh gracious, no,” said Flora. “No. I want them to enjoy their holiday.”

  The lady smiled. “They’re on the same ferry over as Jan and Charlie, so I don’t know how much of a wedding night they’re going to have.”

  Flora grinned. “I’m glad they managed to come.”

  “So are they,” said the woman. “Thanks for being so understanding. I thought you’d be writing furious letters to the council demanding my head on a platter!”

  “I would not be doing that,” said Flora. “Although I might have served it if I’d thought of it earlier. Do you want a cup of tea? Or, sod it, there’s some leftover prosecco here . . .”

  Kind Inge-Britt had secreted away a bottle for her.

  The woman looked guilty. “Oh, I shouldn’t. I’ve got to see the boys back . . . okay. Half a glass. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “I shan’t. Where are they?”

  “They’re all early for the ferry. Charlie’s arranged a kickabout match for them on the green.”

  Flora shook her head. “On his wedding day?”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “He is,” said Flora, musing. “He really is.”

  They sat together in the kitchen.

  “Can I ask you something?” said Flora.

  “Sure.”

  “These kids . . . They’re in foster care, aren’t they?”

  “Some of them . . . Some of them are sometimes with a parent. Often the best situation is when you can get them with a grandparent.”

  “What makes foster care places fail?”

  “Aggression usually. If there are other children in the family, and the child can’t handle sharing the attention . . . sometimes they lash out if that’s all they know.”

  Flora frowned. This didn’t sound like Joel at all. He could be distant, but she couldn’t imagine him being violent or having uncontrollable rage. If anything, he was far too controlled.

  “Any other reasons?”

  The youth worker took another sip from her glass. “Well,” she said. “Sometimes kids just don’t fit. It’s not their fault. Trauma at home knocks them off-kilter, but they’re a little unusual to begin with. Asperger’s syndrome can be difficult to place. Or, weirdly, sometimes the opposite. A lot of our foster families come from lower to middle incomes. We had a child once who was a genius, more or less: unbelievably clever, really unusually good at math, a bit of a prodigy. We couldn’t settle him in foster care at all. Either his foster family thought he was too snotty or showing off or they just didn’t know how to deal with him.”

  “How is he now?” said Flora, breathless. This was more like it.

  “He was lucky. We found him a scholarship, parachuted him out of the foster care system. To boarding school.”

  “Wouldn’t he be lonely there?”

  The woman looked sad. “That’s the deal with my job,” she said gently. “They’re all lonely, dear. So lonely. Something a child should never know how to be.”

  She got up to go and poured the last of her glass down the sink.

  “One more question!” said Flora. “I have a friend. A friend who . . .”

  And she explained the situation with Saif and his boys.

  “It will probably be fine,” said the youth worker. She handed over her card. Her name was Indira, Flora saw. “But, any problems, you call me, okay? I won’t forget you feeding the five thousand today. I owe you one.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Saif didn’t mean to yell. He had never been the yelling type. But Lorna was so damned enthusiastic, as if this was a school project, not his life.

  Lorna hadn’t been able to think of much else, was desperately full of ideas of what they would be like and how it would be, and what she could do to welcome them, and how troubled they would be—would they be violent? Brainwashed? So traumatized they upset the other children? She would have to work out a strategy for dealing with the other children—she would possibly need help from refugee resettlement groups, which meant people coming from the mainland—and, gosh, it was exciting, of course it was, but so complicated too.

  So she was spilling over with plans and thoughts when she went to meet Saif that morning for an early walk. It was a windy day and fun to feel blown down to the Endless Beach, the breeze waking her up, making the waves dance—although going back would be harder—only to find him there, staring out to sea, his face absolutely set in stone.

  He had turned round slowly, and it was only then that she realized his eyes were full of rage.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I trusted you!” he shouted furiously. He was brandishing something; he’d obviously expected to see her. “I trusted you with the biggest . . . I trusted you with my entire life. My
life and my family’s life in your hands. And . . .”

  Lorna felt her heart drop to her stomach, that awful way when you begin to suspect that you have made a terrible, terrible mistake.

  “What?” she said, trying to sound breezy but hearing the tremor in her voice.

  “You tell everyone! You tell everyone on this island now and they know!”

  “I didn’t!” said Lorna, panicking. She’d told Flora, but she’d sworn her to secrecy, hadn’t she? “I didn’t!”

  “Joel! He knows!” He showed her the e-mail. Lorna read it in silence.

  “Flora guessed!” said Lorna. “I didn’t tell her.”

  “And now she tells everyone!”

  “It will only be Joel.”

  Surely, thought Lorna to herself. Please. But she could understand the impulse completely—the joy of spreading good news, for once, was powerfully strong. Of course Flora wanted to make people happy and rejoice in something good happening—for Saif, for the island, for the world—out of the desperately awful situation.

  “There is no such thing as ‘only’ here,” said Saif, who found the tight-knit community very like the world he had left behind in Damascus with its extraordinary combination of it being both delightful and infuriating that everyone knew about every step of your life before you’d even taken it half the time. “It will be in the papers and in the grocer shop and whispered round my office and you will turn my children into zoo animals before they even arrive and you will give me no chance to prepare and we will be overrun . . .”

  “Overrun by people who mean well—who care,” said Lorna, stung. “Who want to do the best for you and your family. Why is that a problem? Joel is offering you free legal advice! I want to make the school ready and appropriate for the boys. Everyone will want to help!”

  Saif shook his head. “No,” he said. “Everyone wants to gossip and be nosy and find out what it was like and poke at the little brown boys. And take pictures and talk about them.”