The Cafe by the Sea Read online

  “FLORA!” said Charlie. “Please, for the love of God, can you have an argument with your boss later?”

  Chapter Forty-one

  They could hear the poor creature before they saw it. With the passing of the storm, the day had turned ridiculously beautiful, the last few dark clouds in the distance pierced by strong shafts of biblical-looking sunlight that bounced across the water, now flat as a millpond.

  The whale was singing, calling loudly to its friends.

  Flora was familiar with the sound from her childhood; as she grew up, it had happened less and less often. But fishing policy over the last few years, however much the local fishermen had decried it, had helped, and now the whales could be heard once more at the high latitudes.

  This poor beast was a cow orca, about fifteen feet long, greasy and heavy of head, its back curved and its dorsal fin flexing up and down on the shore. Thankfully they’d already gotten Wallace the fireman jetting water on her to keep her wet, and her head was up, so her blowhole wasn’t blocked. But they would need to get her back into the waves, which was a tricky job, towing her out far enough to refloat her and stop her from simply getting beached again, doing so without injuring her.

  The RNLI was already out in force, and the expert team was flying in from Shetland, so until then they needed to get her as close to the shoreline as they could manage, and as comfortably as possible: stress could kill her just as surely as being beached could. The police had already pegged out privacy notices all across the beach to stop people from approaching and taking selfies, or children coming down to pat her. The crowd stood at a respectful distance.

  It was usually Flora’s brothers who drove the tractor, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t capable. Her father had taken her into the fields as soon as she could reach the pedals, as he had with the boys, and although she hadn’t been quite as enthusiastic, she’d figured it out pretty fast. She swung up into the cab—of course the keys were there, they always were—then ran into the barn to grab tow ropes, a vast tarp, and anything else she thought they might need.

  Joel grabbed his clothes and dressed at top speed, stopping at the door to be greeted by the sight of her, hair flying behind her, chugging down the hill in a bright yellow tractor. He had not, he thought, met many girls who could do that. He watched her go, but did not follow, and she did not stop or look round.

  Charlie was directing things at the bottom of the hill. They were going to get the whale onto rollers, once everyone was there, and tow her out as far as they could manage. It was a delicate and tricky operation, particularly as the large creature was distressed and thrashing her tail. It was difficult to watch. There was a lot of shouting and disagreement about what was best; some people thought they should wait for the coastguard vet, while others thought that would take too long and they’d lose her. Flora sat in the cab of the tractor for a while, then, feeling like an idiot, slipped down, pointing it out to Charlie, who thanked her. The fishermen were knotting their nets together. Flora watched them, incredibly touched. It would take them a very long time to sort them out again, if they even could. Horribly badly paid, they were sacrificing even this.

  Flora looked up as she saw a small plane begin to circle around the island. Now that the storm had lifted, the experts could come in. And, she supposed, her father and the boys would be back too.

  And Joel would leave, she thought, biting the inside of her mouth to stop herself from crying. She needed to be here, at least until the vote. He most certainly did not. He worked on huge mergers and acquisitions, big, technical court cases that required incredibly specialized expert knowledge . . .

  “Penny for them,” said Charlie. She blinked, and went redder than ever.

  “Um, just worried about the poor creature.”

  “Aye. I know.”

  He looked at her.

  “It’ll be all right. Thanks for the tractor.”

  “What can I do now?”

  “Wait, I suppose,” said Charlie, as the men started to tentatively approach the creature. She was the size of about three adult males, impossible to lift, and making heart-rending noises. Flora was beyond the barrier now and didn’t feel able to walk back.

  As the men heaved and slipped in the sand, trying to maneuver the whale onto the nets, Flora meandered round to the creature’s head. It smelled very intensely of the sea. Its eye was the size of a dinner plate, its huge mouth had a great lolling tongue, and strands of seaweed covered its teeth.

  She never knew what inspired her to do what she did next (although her father and half the island never had the faintest doubt). While everyone else was occupied with moving the creature, Flora crouched down at its head, very softly and slowly, not making any sudden movements.

  “Shh,” she crooned lightly, looking straight into its huge eye. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  The whale continued to thrash and twist in the sand, its tail carving out a great trench. If they weren’t very careful, it would hurt itself. The men jumped back, not wanting to be hit by the great animal.

  Flora ignored all of this.

  “It’s okay,” she said again, gently and soothingly. “Oh, it’s okay.”

  Carefully, slowly, she extended her hand, and laid it on what she supposed was the whale’s cheek, next to its mouth. And as she did so, almost unbidden, an old song of her mother’s came to her, the old mouth music, from a time before instruments, a time at the very birth of music itself.

  Flora, in a bar in London, wouldn’t have performed karaoke at gunpoint. But here, it felt absolutely normal.

  O, whit says du da bunshka baer?

  O, whit says du da bunshka baer?

  Litra mae vee drengie

  She sang, not even noticing the waves crashing or the men shouting, or the lashing of the whale’s tail.

  Starka virna vestilie

  Obadeea, obadeea

  Starka, virna, vestilie

  Obadeea, monye

  And slowly, astonishingly, as the clear evening light broke through the clouds once more, the whale stopped thrashing and lay still long enough for the lads to slip a knot of fishing nets around its belly and, using the tractor, pull the creature carefully out to sea.

  Flora moved with them as Charlie drove, keeping her eyes on the whale all the time, singing as the creature made noises too, but quieter ones, as if it realized Flora was trying to help it; and Flora found herself splashing into the shallow water with it, heedless of getting her second drenching in as many days, and stayed with it until the tractor returned and the lifeboat took up the rope, and it was only then, with regret, that she leaned forward and—without even thinking about it—kissed the animal on the nose.

  Then the boat took up the slack and the whale started to move again, and Flora stayed and watched as they towed it out to sea, and long beyond, when the boat was only a dot on the horizon, disappearing toward the mainland. And as she watched, she thought of the greatness of the animal, and the dancing silver sea, and everything that had happened.

  As Joel stood on the dockside, waiting for Bertie Cooper to drive him to the airport for the delayed evening flight, he watched this amazing girl, this strange foreign girl, in this place where she belonged and he didn’t, and he cursed himself for allowing her to get so close, for making him do what he had sworn never to do, what he had protected himself from all his life. It had been a reckless day, a reckless time. He would leave, return to where he belonged, to a world of tall buildings and important, complicated work. He would seriously consider Colton’s offer of a job in his New York office . . . get back into triathlon training.

  And yet all the way back down south, all he could think about was skin so pale that each time he kissed it, however gently, it left the shadow of a mark.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Everyone involved in the whale rescue ended up back at the farmhouse for some reason. Flora hadn’t noticed Joel down on the beach, and was bereft that he had gone without a word. She tried to explain it to herself, b
ut couldn’t. Was he back at the Harbor’s Rest? Or maybe he’d moved into the Rock. It must be ready. That would . . . She liked that idea. Him waiting for her in one of those beautiful rooms . . . She smiled ruefully. That would be a step up. And it wouldn’t remind her of Inge-Britt either.

  Colton showed up, an arm casually thrown round Fintan’s shoulders. Fintan was weary and dirty after the cattle transport.

  “Is Joel back at the Rock?” she asked as lightly as she could.

  “Oh. No,” said Colton. “He’s gone. It’s not him I need, sweetie, it’s you.”

  Flora told herself she wasn’t going to cry. They’d been interrupted, that was all. She’d talk to him in London and they’d get to know each other properly, and . . .

  Actually, she had no idea what that would be like. None at all. She imagined telling Kai what had passed between them, and it was horrifying. But how could she . . . seriously? They were going to have a relationship? In London? That was actually going to happen? They’d turn up to work together, the senior lawyer and the unremarkable little paralegal. That would totally happen.

  She pushed away the painful thought of how unlikely that was.

  “I’m thinking of recruiting him for my New York office anyway. Or L.A. Can’t decide,” said Colton conversationally.

  Flora froze. She picked up a hot toddy from the stove and sipped on it for a long time.

  “And what did he say about that?” she said tightly, her throat constricted.

  “Oh, you know lawyers,” said Colton. “Can’t get a straight answer out of any of them.”

  This relieved her anxiety a little, but not entirely.

  “You know I can’t stay forever,” she said.

  “Ah, you’ll change your mind,” said Colton.

  “Only for the summer,” she warned. “Until the nights draw in.”

  “That’s what selkies always say,” said Mrs. Laird in passing.

  “Shut up!”

  In the parlor, someone had taken out a fiddle, which was a good sign if you wanted a party, but a bad sign if you hoped that anyone was leaving anytime soon.

  “I can’t . . . That cattle transport?” said Fintan. “I got kicked nine times. Got shit all over me. I’m thirty-two years old and I can’t do this the rest of my life.”

  Flora nodded.

  “It can’t carry on anyway,” she said. “Not like this.”

  “It’s like . . . I’ve found something satisfying. Something that really and truly makes me happy. Finally.”

  “What are you two chittering about?” said Innes. “Also, you’re a total freak, Flora.”

  “Shut up,” said Flora. “You’re just jealous.”

  “That you kissed a fish? Yeah, right.”

  “It’s a mammal, actually, Captain Ignorant.”

  “It’s a mammal, actually, Captain Ignorant,” repeated Innes annoyingly.

  “I thought having a child would make you grow up.”

  “Did you?”

  He grabbed a few bottles of the local ale from the fridge and headed back to his farmer mates.

  “And Innes,” said Flora. “What’s he going to do? After Dad, it was always going to be Innes’s farm. And God, what will we do with Hamish?”

  “Hamish,” said Fintan, “will always be fine.”

  They looked over to the corner where he was sitting, bursting almost comically out of his shirt. He looked too large for the room and was glumly watching the women, some of whom had started to dance.

  “Nobody has to go anywhere. Nobody has to move,” said Fintan. “And our future . . . It could be anything with Colton. There’s no future here, you know it.”

  “Hmm,” said Flora.

  “I mean, with new things . . . It could be amazing. But the farming—we can’t compete, we really can’t. With cheap milk from superfarms. And transporting those animals; you know what that does to our profits.”

  Flora nodded.

  “It’s just a long, slow decline . . . you know it, Innes knows it. Unless we reinvent ourselves.”

  “But this is MacKenzie land,” she said. “And it has been for such a long time. Such a very long time.”

  “I know,” he said. “We need to pick our moment. Let’s feed up Dad.”

  Flora smiled.

  “On it,” she said.

  She was dishing up some vol-au-vents that Isla and Iona had made after studying the recipe book and deciding on balance not just to gather wild mushrooms from the hedgerows and hope for the best, when a tall figure marched into the kitchen. Flora looked up. It was Jan, and she looked utterly furious.

  “Oh good, you,” said Flora. “Um, this is my house, so if you’ve wandered up to be insulting, can I ask that you don’t? Or perhaps leave?”

  She was slightly beyond trying to be nice and reasonable. It hadn’t really gotten her anywhere in the past.

  “I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” said Jan.

  “No, you have a bone to pick with Charlie,” explained Flora, too irritated to care about her tone of voice.

  “Apparently you’ve been touching wildlife,” spat Jan. Her color was high and Flora wondered if she’d been drinking.

  “Um, sorry?” said Flora. “Vol-au-vent?”

  “You touched that whale.”

  “Yes, I did,” said Flora. “It seemed scared and I wanted to make it less scared. So I just kind of patted it a bit.”

  Jan shook her head.

  “Unbelievable.”

  “I wouldn’t pat a whale in a zoo,” protested Flora. “I just wanted to help.”

  “You don’t interfere with the animal kingdom.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly that. You start messing about with animal populations, all hell will break loose. You don’t think we interfere enough in the food chain? That we haven’t already done terrible, terrible damage to almost every species on this earth, particularly whales?”

  “I wasn’t harpooning it. I was soothing it.”

  Jan rolled her eyes.

  “Do you think so?”

  “What would you have done? Left it on the beach to die?”

  “That’s what you’re meant to do! Whales beach themselves for reasons we don’t understand. Maybe she was old! Maybe she was sick! How would you know?”

  Flora felt her skin starting to prickle.

  “Well, I don’t. But it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

  “Oh, people always think they know what the right thing is. They think they know. You sitting here in your posh farmhouse with your posh friends.”

  The idea that MacKenzie Farm could be called posh by anybody who’d grown up in a First World country—and in the richest family on the island at that—riled Flora beyond belief, but she tried to keep calm.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “But I couldn’t have watched it die.”

  “No. Too busy showing off,” said Jan, which truly stung. Flora folded her arms.

  Charlie wandered into the kitchen, his face breaking into a smile when he saw Flora.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Jan whipped around; he hadn’t previously noticed her.

  “Jan,” he said.

  Flora looked at them carefully. What the hell was going on?

  “Um, I’ll just grab a couple of beers.” Charlie moved hastily to the fridge. “Good work today, Flora.”

  Jan practically hissed in annoyance. Once Charlie had left again, she turned to Flora once more.

  “And we’re back together,” she said. “So you can stop eyeing him up.”

  Flora threw her hands up.

  “Oh for God’s sake. I don’t care! There’s . . . there’s someone else.”

  She couldn’t believe that of everyone she could have mentioned this to, it was Jan.

  Jan looked at her.

  “That American guy who thinks he’s it?” she almost spat. “Good luck with that. I heard he was halfway up that Icelandic barmaid.”

  “Thank you,” s
aid Flora pertly, resisting the urge to tell Jan to get the fuck out of her kitchen, and her house, and in fact her life forever.

  Then she checked her phone again, but still nothing.

  Chapter Forty-three

  Joel had squash buddies, drinking colleagues, work acquaintances, and college frat-boy chums who held regular get-togethers all over the world.

  He never spoke to a single one of them. Not about anything real.

  “Where are the newspapers?” he said brusquely.

  Margo looked up. He was being belligerent even by his standards, had been in the week or so since he’d gotten back from Scotland. On the other hand, he’d caught up on his work in record time, which meant a vast amount of overtime for her.

  “Times, FT, Telegraph, and Economist,” she recited, looking at the lobby table. “What’s missing?”

  Joel frowned.

  “I made an addition to the periodicals list,” he said.

  Margo checked her post.

  “Oh yes, here it is,” she said. “Obviously comes out a day or two late.”

  She stared at it.

  “Island Times?”

  “Just covers all our bases,” said Joel.

  “Shall I put it out here?”

  “No, uh, give it to me.” And Joel stalked off to his office with it tucked under his arm, Margo staring after him in astonishment.

  How, thought Joel, how could he not have noticed Flora before? Because all he noticed in his office now was a huge Flora-size hole. He thought he saw her everywhere he went, her pale hair blowing in the wind. Except he was in a hermetically sealed office fifteen floors up, and the windows didn’t open, and the breeze never reached him.

  But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. He’d picked up the phone to Dr. Philippoussis more than once, but he knew what he’d say. Go to her. Tell her.

  But she didn’t fit in his life. She couldn’t. She didn’t know it yet, but she belonged on the island. Communing joyously with that whale, or baking something marvelous, or bantering with her brothers. Her face, so pale and pinched in London, was something else at home. And even if she thought she’d be happy back in the city, he could see deep down that she wouldn’t be.