The Endless Beach Read online

  “Bring back the real story!” shouted Hebe.

  “Actually, I hate her. She can’t have any cake,” said Flora as Kai ushered her along, picking up her bagful of belongings—which included a pretty pair of spare shoes in a ballerina style that would be rendered instantly useless by the mud of the farmyard in almost any season Mure had to offer and some expensive Chanel lipstick she’d bought to cheer herself up once following a disastrous Tinder date. It felt like another life.

  She was pondering this as they waited for the elevator and then, just when they were nearly out of danger, Margo strode up to her. Flora’s heart sank. Which was ridiculous. Margo had been the closest thing to an intimate Joel had ever had at the company. He had lots of acquaintances but hardly any friends as far as she could tell. He’d had a million girls, which she tried not to think about too much, but very few girlfriends who’d lasted longer than a week or so. He had no family, or at least not the type she would recognize. He may carry on talking to Margo. He might even—and Flora felt a momentary panic at the thought—want to continue working with her once they’d sorted out his move.

  “Hello.”

  Margo looked at her as if she hadn’t recognized her right away. Then she smiled. “Flora MacKenzie,” she said.

  There was a long pause. Where the hell was that stupid elevator? Kai suddenly was very interested in his phone.

  Margo cleared her throat. “So, how’s Joel?”

  Flora again went bright pink. “Um, he’s great.”

  “And is he . . . in Scotland right now?”

  She said “Scotland” like someone might say “Candyland”: a ridiculous and temporary concept.

  “Um, no,” said Flora. “He’s in New York at the moment, working for Colton.”

  At this Margo’s face brightened. “Of course he is,” she said. “I knew he wouldn’t be able to stay in the country for long.”

  She sniffed as the elevator finally arrived and Flora and Kai went to step inside.

  “No, but, he’s, but . . .”

  Kai jostled Flora into the elevator as she stumbled over her words.

  “Very nice to see you,” said Margo, walking on. “Good luck with everything!”

  * * *

  “She’s just jealous,” said Kai, two cocktails later.

  Flora stuck out her bottom lip. “No, she’s just like everyone else! She doesn’t think it’s possible for people to change!”

  There was a delicate pause. Kai had known Joel’s self-obsessed, diffident ways for as long as Flora had.

  “And he has, right? I mean, of course he has.”

  Flora bit her lip. “Yes,” she said stiffly. “Of course he has.”

  Chapter Six

  Flora got home the next day feeling rather chastened. She was pleased to slip back onto the island, into the farmhouse kitchen where she arrived about five seconds after Fintan, who had traveled in rather more style than she had, and straight into an argument.

  When Flora had arrived home months before, the farmhouse she’d grown up in had been a tatty thing, uncared for and unloved since their mother—the center of their home and thus, really, their lives—had died, in the bed they all had been born in.

  Fintan had locked himself away. He was almost unrecognizable these days from the bearded recluse he’d become. Innes, the eldest, and jolliest, had just about run himself into the ground through overwork, trying to hold the farm together. Her father had plowed on, looking neither to right nor left, and that had nearly ended very badly too. Only big, sweet Hamish, who was generally believed to have been dropped on the head as a baby, was relatively unchanged. Although the first thing he’d bought with the money they got from the farm changing hands was a bright red convertible, so who could say?

  Innes and Fintan were arguing about when the Rock was going to open—there was no point in them running the farm ragged for a clientele that hadn’t arrived, and the summer season was bearing down on them at full speed. Fintan was saying sulkily that it had to be right; Innes was sarcastically pointing out that if Fintan and his lover boy ever stopped kissing for long enough they might be able to get something done, which was going down about as well as could be expected, especially when Hamish started making kissy noises.

  “Hi, everyone!” said Flora, putting her bag down on the old kitchen table. Her father, Eck, awoke with a start.

  He’d been taking an afternoon nap. Even stopping some of his work hadn’t been quite enough to prevent him waking at 5:30 A.M., up with the milking, and that would never change now. They had been farming in the MacKenzie family for as far back as anybody knew. It was hard, sometimes, to think that this generation might be the last to do it.

  Innes’s daughter, Agot, who’d just celebrated her fourth birthday, was there too, and now she clambered up and down Eck’s armchair and all over his legs and shoulders. He looked up with pleasure at seeing Flora; partly, Flora knew, because of the distraction she would bring to the only MacKenzie grandchild. And so it proved.

  “ATTI FLOWA!”

  Agot had the famous selkie hair, not just colorless like Flora’s, but a great rippling mane of silvery white. It looked as if it would glow in the dark. She was too a bewitching thing, full of confidence and the absolute belief that whatever she said was very important to everyone. Sometimes Flora caught herself looking at Agot and wondering what happened to girls when they grew up.

  Flora gladly lifted her into her arms. “Hello, my darling.”

  “She’s being a fiend,” said Innes. “Can you distract her please?”

  “I need to test a new recipe,” said Flora. “Agot, do you want to help?”

  “AGOT DO IT.”

  “You can help.”

  “ME DO IT. ALPING.”

  Flora gave her a wooden spoon and took out the absurd tiny apron Colton had had made for her niece for her birthday. It was the same design as Annie’s Café by the Sea—yellow on a pale blue background, like the sun and the pale blue sky—and it made Agot more certain than ever that she actually worked for the organization—or, possibly, owned it.

  “AGOT SPOON!”

  Flora glanced at Innes and wandered across the kitchen. Bramble, the fat retired sheepdog who was snoozing by the fire, got up in case she was doing anything interesting, then went back to his busy day job of sleeping, farting, and looking for pastry.

  “You know,” Flora said quietly, “doesn’t Agot speak quite a lot like a baby? I mean, she is four . . .”

  “CHAN E ENGLISH A’ CHIAD CÀNAN AGAM GU DEARBH!” hollered Agot across the kitchen.

  “Oh yes, sorry,” apologized Flora. She forgot Agot lived on the mainland, she was on Mure so often: English was her second language.

  “Joel still away then?” said Innes, raising an eyebrow. Flora didn’t look at him. It was exactly the wrong question. She didn’t want to talk about it. Yes, he was away a lot. She realized other people saw their relationship as strange. In London, they couldn’t see what he saw in her. On Mure, it was the other way around: people couldn’t see what she saw in this tall, unsmiling, taciturn man. To be taciturn on Mure—it really stood out. There were a few hermit types here and there, of course, one or two more distant hill farmers, some confirmed bachelors.

  But for most, island living meant sharing. Community. Knowing your neighbors when the snow swept down from the high north and the nights were dark and you’d run out of sugar, or you’d lost some sheep on the high crags, or your tractor was stuck in a bog, or you just needed some simple human contact in this world. A cup of tea and a wee dram and the gentle passing of the seasons could heal most things.

  Someone whose head was always in their phone, who zoned in and out, who always seemed in a hurry, was not polite, did not ask after people’s children and didn’t even try to join in with their community—Flora disliked remembering the quiz night. Well. He was definitely seen as not quite right.

  She couldn’t explain—how could she?—how different he was in the small hours of the morni
ng when he clung to her like a rock in a wild sea, their sweat and tears intermingling, far, far out to sea beyond the need of words at all. That wasn’t a conversation she was about to have with anybody. So maybe they would just have to think that he was odd, that he didn’t really care for her. And she would treasure those moments deep in her heart, even though there were precious few of them.

  “Yup!” said Flora. “Gives me a chance to get on with stuff.” Innes nodded and went back to looking at his books. “Eilidh was always desperate to get back to the mainland too,” he said quietly. Eilidh was his ex, mother of Agot, who had fallen in love with handsome Innes when he was studying at the Scottish Agricultural College in Inverness, when there were parties and gigs and all sorts of things going on. But she hadn’t at all acclimatized to a place where the social highlight of the month could be a golden eagle sighting, and they had eventually separated, which had broken both of their hearts. Agot seemed fairly sturdy about the entire thing, but, as Innes had confessed once to Flora after a couple too many whiskies, who knew? He hated being Island Daddy.

  “Where is he?”

  “New York,” said Flora. “It’s minus-twenty apparently. Makes Mure look like the Bahamas.”

  They both listened to the barn door banging in the distance.

  “Does it now?” said Innes dryly. “You should go with him.”

  “He won’t let me,” said Flora. “Says it’s all work and stuff and wouldn’t interest me. Plus I have the Café by the Sea.”

  “Yes, but it can be pretty quiet round about now, can’t it?” said Innes. “I mean, it’s really going to get crazy in the summertime, when the Rock opens up. We’ll all be 24/7. I’ve heard New York is nice in the spring.”

  “‘I’ve heard New York is nice in the spring’?” mimicked Flora. “Oh my God, who are you, Woody Allen? Anyway, I just got back from London. Look at me. I actually smell of London. It’s a town; they have pavements and everything. Ooh, and they have staircases that move. You’d find it quite frightening.”

  Innes shrugged and looked back at the accounts. “No need to be so arsey just because your boyfriend keeps leaving the country every time he remembers that you have a nose like a piglet.”

  “I do not have a nose like a piglet!” said Flora.

  “PIGLETS NICE, ATTI FLOWA,” came a small voice. Looking round, Flora saw that Agot was attempting to pull an old blackened saucepan out of the cupboard that was twice the size she was.

  “Agot!” she yelled, dashing forward, as the entire pile of pots and pans came clattering down on the flagstone floor. Bramble started up from his nap in front of the fire. Their dad started up too, both man and dog glancing round with remarkably similar whiskery expressions.

  “AGOT NOT DO IT!” shrieked the little one, her face red with defiance.

  “It’s okay,” said Flora, starting to pick them up. “Help me?”

  But Agot had fled to her beloved father and had buried her face in his neck as if she had somehow been gravely insulted.

  “You are such a monkey!” said Flora. She glanced over. Agot was slyly peering out of her father’s cuddling arms to see if Flora was looking at her. As soon as she saw that she was, she buried her face again. Flora smiled briefly to herself, pleased it wasn’t she who would be dealing with Agot’s teenage years.

  Fintan came in, carrying a vast bunch of fresh flowers. There were huge peonies, white roses, all sorts of things you couldn’t possibly find on the Scottish islands in March. Flora stared at them as Fintan hummed around and looked for a vase.

  “What are those?” she said crossly.

  “Oh,” said Fintan. “Colton sends them every day while he’s away. God, I love that man.” He set about snipping the stems carefully.

  “Well, that’s not very sustainable,” said Flora, in a mood.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Fintan, arranging them carefully in an old earthenware pot of their mother’s. “I think we are.”

  Chapter Seven

  Oh yes.”

  “This,” said Flora, “is one of the many, many reasons we are friends.”

  She and Lorna were sitting in Lorna’s front room on Saturday night. Flora had brought the food; her experimental leek and cheese twists were absolutely melt-in-the-mouth tremendous, particularly when accompanied by a rich red wine. The weather was throwing handfuls of rain against the windows out of a deep, pure blackness while they sat on a cozy sofa in their PJs and best woolly socks with a roaring fire in front of them and no work tomorrow.

  Flora told Lorna about Jan’s catering request and Lorna burst out laughing, which made Flora feel better immediately.

  “Did she actually say that it would also be a charitable gesture?”

  “It would,” said Flora. “It would be a charity gesture toward the expansion of her gigantic bloody gob.”

  Lorna shook her head. “Some people are never satisfied. Have you spoken to Charlie about everything?”

  “No,” said Flora. “Should I? I mean, that would be dickish, wouldn’t it? Like I somehow was implying he’d settled for second best.”

  “He didn’t,” said Lorna. “He settled for ninetieth best. On Mure alone.”

  “Oh, she’s all right really,” said Flora, feeling bad. She picked up her phone. “OMG.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a message on it from her. Maybe she’s standing outside the door listening to us!”

  “No more wine for you,” said Lorna.

  Flora looked at it. “Oh no. Now I feel bad. She does want us to cater after all—wants me to give a quote.”

  “Who are you competitively tendering with? Inge-Britt making greasy sausage sandwiches?”

  “That’s probably what I’d like at my wedding,” said Flora.

  “She really wants you there to see Charlie and her getting married,” said Lorna.

  “Well, that is totally fair enough,” said Flora. “And it’ll be a good test for when the Rock opens. Then we really will be swept off our feet. Hopefully.”

  She and Lorna chinked glasses.

  “How’s Saif?” asked Flora, which was a question she could only really ask after a couple of glasses of wine.

  Lorna shrugged. “He got excited when he saw a whale.”

  “Oh God, they’re not back?”

  Flora frowned. Her grandmother had always said she had a way with them—part of the daft old family lore she ignored about how the female line were all selkies who came from the sea and would go back there. But it was true in part: she felt an affinity for the great creatures, and worried about them when they were in danger.

  “Anyway,” sighed Lorna. “Apart from that, the usual. Sad. Bit foggy.”

  “He’s foggy?”

  “No, it’s foggy . . . He says it got really cold in Damascus in the winter. But, to quote, ‘You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face at ten o’clock in the morning.’”

  Flora grinned. “I quite like it. It’s just nature telling you to get indoors and be cozy and have a slice of cake and sleep for a long time.”

  “I told him that,” Lorna said. “He said he was going to start prescribing vitamin D supplements to literally everyone on the island. I still don’t think he’s used to the NHS.”

  “Any news about . . . ?”

  Lorna shrugged. “I assumed he’d tell me. But the way he looks out to sea . . . I mean . . . Surely he’d have heard something by now?”

  “It’s such a mess over there. Jesus, his poor family. Wouldn’t he have heard if . . . if they were dead?”

  “They had . . . have two boys, you know,” said Lorna. “Two sons. One of them is ten. At that age . . . you know, if they’re captured by the wrong side. They train them up, you know. Train them to fight. And nothing else.”

  Flora shook her head. It was beyond imagination, the torment of their tall, gentle GP. She had thought Joel and Saif might get on, but when they’d met they had little to say to each other. “God,” she said. “I can’t even think ab
out it.” She sighed. “What do you think he does with his Saturday nights?”

  * * *

  In fact, two miles up the road, Saif was spending his Saturday night like he spent every Saturday night, even though as a doctor and a clinician this was exactly what he would have told himself not to do. Amena had had—oh, years ago now, so many years—a YouTube account they’d uploaded little films of the boys onto for their grandparents. But in fact neither set of grandparents had ever learned to use the Internet, so it had in the end been a pointless exercise and there were only two: Ibrahim’s third birthday, and Ash at four days old. Thirty-nine seconds of the first—a confused, serious-looking Ibrahim spitting over some candles, his long eyelashes casting shadows on his cheek. To Saif’s utter frustration, Amena was behind the camera. He could hear her voice, encouraging and laughing; he could not see her face.

  In the second, the focus was all on Ash, but it was just a baby’s face—just a baby, and his own stupid voice. There was a half millisecond of Amena, as the camera moved up and then what . . . how . . . what had he done? Cut it off, in the full expectation that he would be able to see that face every day for the rest of his life. What had he done . . . ? He watched it. Froze it. Watched it. He glanced briefly at the counter of views. Four thousand nine hundred and fourteen. It was a habit he had to break. He had absolutely no idea how.

  * * *

  “Tell me more about the whale.”

  Flora was refilling their glasses and steering the conversation away from boys, as it seemed to be dangerous territory at the moment.

  “Not sure what type,” said Lorna.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” said Flora. “Call yourself a teacher?”

  “We’re not all sea creatures in human form,” said Lorna. Flora smiled, but her face was pensive.

  “I don’t want another beaching,” she said. “They’re so horrid. Sometimes you’re lucky, but sometimes . . .”

  “I know,” said Lorna. “I think the sea is getting too warm.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t see what kind it was?”