The Cafe by the Sea Page 8

  Flora shook her head, half smiling. No wonder her father said he knew where she got her stubborn side.

  As she picked the books up, wondering if she could sell them, she came across an old notebook tucked in between them. The kettle boiled on as Flora stared at the note book. It was at the same time both new to her—she couldn’t exactly recall seeing it—and on the other hand as utterly familiar as the back of her hand, like seeing a stranger in a crowd then realizing she’d known them all her life.

  She crouched down, and tentatively picked it up.

  It had a dark hard cover with red binding, coming slightly loose, and a matching red bookmark string inside it. There were grease spots on the cover. She opened it up, knowing even as she did so exactly what it was. No wonder her mother had never needed to use any of those other books she’d bought for her.

  She had her own recipe book.

  Chapter Fifteen

  How could she have forgotten? But then Flora had never really thought of meals being designed as such; her mum just cooked, that was all, as natural as breathing. Dinner appeared, steady as clockwork, 5 P.M. on the dot, when the boys got in from the fields or from school; great big slices of apple pie to finish, with farm cream, of course, sluiced out of the old cracked white jug with the blue cows round the rim (which had survived the purge). Puddings and jellies, thick hams and delicate potatoes, and always pie. As a small child, Flora would help her, sitting at her elbow and absorbing everything. She was particularly good at licking the spoon but reasonably good at passing the baking powder and kneading and mixing. As she’d grown older and was studying for exams, she still worked to the rhythm of her mother’s wooden spoon and rolling pin. And here it all was.

  She suddenly felt a slight hiccup of excitement.

  She poured water into the huge old enamel mug her mother had kept topped up all day long; there were deep brown tannin lines scored into it. It felt a little strange, a little intimate, to be drinking from her mother’s cup. She regarded it curiously, then decided to go ahead, even if it was spooky. She was being superstitious, that was all. She dunked the teabag and let it steep for longer than she normally would, smiling wryly as she did so. Her mother had liked tea you could stand the spoon up in. Then she took the cup and sat down in her mother’s armchair, the one nearest the fire, the one she almost never used. Sitting down wasn’t really the kind of thing her mother did. It only happened on her birthday, and Mother’s Day, and Christmas Day, when they all made a great fuss of her, imploring her to relax while they fetched and carried and did everything for her.

  Flora wanted a biscuit, but there were none; instead she settled back to look at the notebook, this little piece of her mother, years on.

  It gave off a faint smell, like a concentrated essence of the kitchen: a little grease, some flour; simply home, built up like a patina across the years, from tiny fingers sticky and desperate to touch the jam (“HOT! HOT! HOT!” Flora could faintly hear the echo of her mother’s voice shouting at them all as they jabbered and pushed to get closer to the jewel-colored liquid she stirred in a huge vat for days in the autumn, filling jars and sending them out to the village fair, the kirk harvest festival, and the old and infirm anywhere). She sipped her tea and turned to the first page.

  The first thing she saw was a note in her father’s cramped handwriting, the ink faded now. Love you, Annie, it said. Hope you write some lovely things here. And it was dated, faintly, August ’78, which meant it must have been around her mother’s birthday.

  Flora squinted at it. It was a notebook—a handsome one—not a recipe book. Why had it turned into a recipe book? What else would her mother have written in there? She smiled as she thought about her father, never the most imaginative of gift givers. But perhaps her mother had loved it anyway.

  She turned the page. All the recipes had her mother’s funny little titles and annotations. Here was vegetable broth. As soon as she saw it, she could conjure up the sharp smell of the boiling stock her mother made on a Sunday after the roast; the thick, rich soup that resulted; the steamed-up windows of the farmhouse when she came back from school on dark winter Monday evenings, the warm room lit up and cozy as she sat and did her homework, complaining mightily that all the boys fancied Lorna MacLeod, which they did, while her brothers set the table and her mother refilled her teacup, and Flora’s too, and busied herself at the stove.

  Over another page and it was another soup recipe, oxtail this time, but the writing was different. With a start, Flora recognized her granny Maud’s hand—Maud was long dead now, a northern witch, like her mother—a beautiful copperplate inscribed in fountain pen. At the top she’d written, in small flowing letters, a Gaelic phrase Flora couldn’t decipher straightaway; she had to fetch the old dictionary from the sitting room before she could figure it out: It will be of the longest time . . . until it is as good as mine.

  There was something about that simple, gentle phrase that made Flora smile. As she pulled her legs up under herself—the weather had turned, as it always did, and now rain was slamming gently against the windows—Bramble looked up, then struggled to his feet and limped carefully across the room. He flopped his head and promptly fell back to sleep again.

  “I hope this is you recovering, and not just being a lazy arse,” murmured Flora.

  She didn’t remember Granny Maud that well, as by the time Flora had come along, she’d had rather enough grandchildren and was starting to slow down quite a lot. She’d come and help Annie shell peas and they’d drink tea and gossip in Gaelic, which Flora couldn’t follow, and occasionally Granny would make a slightly sarcastic remark about Flora having her head stuck in a book, which would make Annie narrow her eyes a little, and the matter would be dropped.

  It had been, though, a straightforward loving relationship, Flora thought. Annie, fourth of Granny’s seven living children, had simply left school at seventeen and married Flora’s dad the next day, in a kirk service, wearing a plain white cotton shift, barely a wedding dress at all.

  Flora remembered when her friend Lesley had gotten married. Her mother had practically begged to attend, and had swooned over Lesley’s empire antique lace and narrow train and wildflower bouquet, even as Flora and Lorna had rolled their eyes and gotten drunk quietly in a corner and shown the English friends of Lesley’s nervous-looking new husband how to dance like island girls.

  It would have been nice, Flora knew, if she could have gotten married before she lost her mother. She’d probably have liked that. She’d have liked that so very much. She hadn’t really thought about marriage a great deal, only in the abstract, as something that might happen one day but was a long way off.

  She wondered if her mother would have liked to have seen it.

  Tears sprang to her eyes. Well. There was no point in crying about something that had never even happened, she told herself sternly, rubbing Bramble’s chin. There had been no wedding; no boyfriend had ever asked her, not even Hugh, and she hadn’t liked anyone enough to be more than slightly upset when they didn’t. That was just how life was. She turned the page quickly.

  As she did so, engrossed in the hard-to-make-out spidery handwriting, with its ink smudges, food spots, and random Gaelic words interspersed with the English text (not to mention the strange old imperial measurements she had never even heard of—what the hell was a “gill”?), she heard a noise at the door.

  She looked up, startled. Her dad was standing there, looking like he’d seen a ghost. Surprised, she let the huge enamel cup drop from her fingers, and they both watched it rattle to the floor, making the most extraordinary noise.

  “Dad . . .”

  “Jesus,” he said, putting his hand to his chest. “Sorry, love. Sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I didn’t . . . I just . . . You look so like her. You just look so like her sitting there. Sorry.”

  Flora had jumped up to get a cloth from the sink, where it was soaking in bleach. She mopped up the spilled tea.

  “I was just . . .”
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  Her father shook his head. “Sorry, lass, sorry. I got . . . I just got a shock.”

  “Shall I put the kettle on?”

  He smiled. “That’s exactly what she’d have said if I’d seen a ghost.”

  There was a pause. He looked around the kitchen, and his eyes lit up.

  “Oh, well look at that,” he said. “Oh, Flora.”

  Flora felt a bit irritated. She didn’t particularly want praise for scrubbing a floor.

  “You’ve made it so much better.”

  “Well, don’t mess it up again,” she said, her voice coming out harsher than she’d intended.

  “Oh . . . no. You filled up the tea bin!”

  “I did.”

  “It’s . . .” He shook his head. “You know, I hadn’t really noticed how disorderly everything was.”

  “Well, maybe try and keep it straight now?”

  “Aye . . . aye,” he said. “I’ll tell the boys. I just came back to get my . . .” He looked confused.

  “What?” said Flora, worried. The last thing she needed now was him getting forgetful.

  “My . . . my . . .”

  “Stick? Sandwiches?”

  She made him his tea as the lazy old dogs nudged around him.

  “Ach, no,” he said, smiling. “I thought you might still be out. I thought I might have a wee nap.”

  Flora smiled.

  “Of course you can have a nap, for God’s sake; you’ve been up since five!”

  “I might just . . .”

  The Aga was still warm, of course, as it always was, and he pulled up the other chair—his chair—next to it.

  “Don’t let me disturb whatever you’re doing,” he said gravely.

  Oddly, Flora found she had spirited the notebook away into her bag. She didn’t want to upset him, obviously, by letting him see it. She felt too, somehow, as if this were something private, between her and her mother.

  “Just thinking about dinner,” she said, glancing around.

  “Well, it seems you’ve done a lot already,” said her father.

  She brought him his tea, and he touched her arm when he thanked her for it, and somehow there was something—an air of detente, a thaw—that struck them both.

  Fintan came in next, looking around crossly.

  “Oh right, the cleaning fairy’s been in,” he said. “Showing us the error of our ways, are you, sis?”

  “Why are you being so aggressive?” said Flora.

  “I don’t know. Maybe because you’re stomping around here with a face like a wet weekend because you hate everything about your background and family and heritage? Yeah, maybe that’s it.”

  Flora rolled her eyes.

  “You smell. What have you been doing?”

  “None of your business. Nothing intellectual enough for you, anyway.”

  Eck looked up sharply.

  “Have you been down in that dairy again?”

  “I think it’s going to be something special, Dad.”

  “Well, it’s wasting enough of our time, that’s for sure. And our money.”

  “It doesn’t cost anything to do.”

  “Well, it does, because I don’t have you seeding the lower field.”

  Flora wondered what the hell they were talking about and was about to ask when Fintan sniffed.

  “I suppose there’s no dinner again?”

  “I’ll get Innes to go to the chippy,” said Eck.

  “No!” said Flora, fingering the notebook. “I’m going to do it.”

  They both looked at her and laughed, and Flora’s fragile good mood dissipated almost immediately.

  Chapter Sixteen

  If Flora had had a fantasy about coming home, it might have gone a little like this: everyone would be thrilled to see her, and desperate to hear her stories of life in the glamorous big city. Okay, maybe not the Tinder dating stories, but definitely the others. And her handsome boss would turn up and extol her virtues and she would be incredibly busy and important, taking meetings with Colton Rogers and effortlessly doing his business all round town, instead of hanging about trying to look inconspicuous and fill time.

  Then, over meals the boys all pitched in to make, they would open a local ale and trade anecdotes about their mother, and her near-white hair, and how funny she could be over a sherry at Christmas, and all the stories she used to tell about life on the island—bogles and witches and selkies and pixies—which she thought were comforting and charming and they found bed-wettingly terrifying, and they would laugh and bond and celebrate her life and Flora would basically have put the family back together and they would all thank her sincerely and be very impressed by her amazing work, and then she would go back to London and pick up where she’d left off. Except better and more successfully, and she’d look healthy and well from the open air and good food.

  She looked around resentfully. Her father was already snoozing by the fire, first whisky well on its way. Fintan had disappeared again, God knows where. Oh well.

  She opened the book at pies and took out the ground beef, gently heating the pan and chopping the onion. Unlike yesterday, when she’d panicked and gone too fast and turned up the heat and felt watched and judged and had an absolute disaster, she tried to calm down. Remember what her mother had done. Mix the pastry carefully with cool hands, nothing rushed, as if she’d done it hundreds of times before.

  While the pie was cooking, she heated up carrots and peas for the side, and mashed the locally grown potatoes with a great wodge of butter from the dairy—she added more and more, it was so good—and plenty of salt, until she had the most gorgeous golden mound of fluffy goodness and every single bad carb and fat and salt sin under the sun in a single earthenware bowl, and it was all she could do not to scarf down the lot, and she didn’t even have to call everyone in; they all appeared automatically at 4:55 P.M., summoned by the wonderful smells.

  “I like it, Flora,” said Hamish, and for once the others didn’t disagree with him, simply trading glances.

  “Did you get this out of a packet?” said Innes.

  “Shut up,” said Flora. “And say thank you.”

  Eck looked up in surprise. “This is—”

  Everyone knew he was going to say, “just like your mother used to make,” but nobody wanted him to get to the end of that sentence. Flora cleared her throat and changed the subject.

  “So, anyway, I know I’m repeating myself, but . . . how’s the farm doing?” she said, trying to sound cheery.

  Innes blinked.

  “Why? Are you going to sell us out to Colton Rogers?”

  “Of course not! I was just asking.”

  Eck sniffed.

  Hamish smiled.

  “I like Chloe.”

  “She’s a terrible goat,” said Innes.

  “I like her.”

  Innes sighed.

  “What?” said Flora.

  “Nothing. Just . . . transporting livestock . . . I don’t want to get into it. It’s just. I mean, you must have heard what’s happened to the price of milk.”

  Flora nodded. “Not up here, though?”

  “Oh yes. There’s no escape for us. And trying to sell the cattle on the mainland . . . I mean, the cost of transportation . . .”

  “What about keeping it local?”

  “Where? There aren’t enough shops, there isn’t enough trade, there isn’t enough for us to do here. Haven’t you noticed? Talk to your friend Lorna; ask her how many people are raising their families here these days.”

  He sat back bitterly. Hamish had simply taken the bowl of mashed potatoes and was eating straight out of it with a spoon. Flora would have told him off for it if she hadn’t wanted to do exactly the same thing herself. God, she had forgotten how good real food could taste.

  “How bad is it?” she asked, glancing at their father, who either hadn’t heard or was pretending not to.

  “Really, really bad,” said Innes. He shot Fintan a foul look. “And someone isn’t helping.�
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  Fintan stared straight ahead, chewing and not taking part either. Innes sighed, just as his phone rang. It was Eilidh, his ex. He stood up and wandered over to the big window at the back, where the white sky was fading to a high late blue, but it didn’t hide the fact that they were clearly bickering.

  “Fine, I’ll take her!” shouted Innes finally, ending the call.

  “Agot? Don’t you want to see her?” said Flora before she could stop herself.

  “Of course I do,” said Innes. “But we’re plowing tomorrow. It’s no place for a kid.”

  “She loves the tractor,” said Hamish.

  “I know,” said Innes. “Loves it enough to run in front of it.”

  Innes paced up and down, then glanced at Flora.

  Flora had never looked after her niece before. Agot had been a baby at the funeral. Quickly she banished all thoughts of the funeral from her head. She didn’t really get children per se; they seemed nice enough, if a bit demanding, if her friends who’d had kids were to be believed. Unfortunately, once they had them it was a bit hard to keep up, as they immediately moved out of London, and if you made it out there for a pint, they tended to fall asleep after half an hour or so.

  Eck looked up from his scraped-clean plate.

  “Our Flora could look after her, couldn’t you?” he said, pushing his glasses up. “You’re not doing much else.”

  “Oh, Dad, you know she has a Terribly Important High-Profile Job as a Lawyer,” snarked Fintan, and Flora flashed him a cross look. It wasn’t her fault that she had to wait on a billionaire. But it was aggravating that they obviously thought she basically did nothing, just as they’d always expected, particularly when she knew that back in London there was a huge load of paperwork piling up for her.

  And actually, slightly encouraged by her success in cleaning up the kitchen, Flora had considered tackling the biggest, most horrible job of all: her mother’s wardrobe. She had hoped against hope that her dad might have taken it on himself to do it, but he hadn’t. She wasn’t going to get rid of anything if he didn’t want her to, but it needed a little sorting out.