The Cafe by the Sea

by Jenny Colgan

  When Flora had left, she had been perfectly happy to leave that table behind, with its timeless rhythm of her mother’s stews and casseroles and roasts and soups and breakfasts and plowman’s lunches. Her brothers grew ever bigger and noisier, but life never changed, never moved on. The boys stayed at home, more or less, the dinners kept appearing, and Flora had felt so stifled, stifled by the pheasant that popped up around November, by the same chipped blue and white mugs on the mantelpiece, the spring daisies and the Christmas peonies.

  She had flown, not wanting to be weighed down as her mother was by the seasonal thrum of being a farmer’s wife; the endless staring at gray skies and wheeling birds and dancing boats.

  Now she looked at the table, piled high with dirty cups and old newspapers, and felt the grains of her life written into it, unerasable, simply there.

  When her mother had come home for the last time, the boys heaved one of the beds out of the spare room downstairs into pride of place by the big window in the kitchen. The legs squeaked on the heavy flagstones, but at least that room was always warm and cozy, and she could see everything that was going on. Nobody said, as they carried it in, what it was: a deathbed.

  The previous day, Flora had returned, flying up from her probationary year alone and practically friendless in a scary new city, horrified at the speed of the diagnosis her mother had kept from her own family all year.

  Saif, the local GP, had popped over that morning to make sure she was organized with drugs—it was only palliatives now, painkillers. There was meant to be a strict regime as to when she could take them, and how many. Both the local nurse and Saif quietly asked Flora not to quote them on this, but to give her as many as she wanted, whenever she wanted them.

  Numbly, Flora had nodded her head, as if pretending she understood, as if she had the faintest idea what was happening, staring at them in horrified disbelief. Then she had stood, shoulder to shoulder with the boys as they brought her mother home for the last time.

  That evening, her mother had woken up, or seemed to, briefly, as the sky was beginning to turn a fulsome pink, and Flora sat next to her and gave her some water, although she was close to choking, and her medicine, which relaxed her mother right away, up to the point where she was able to stroke Flora’s hand; and Flora leaned her head against her mother’s and they breathed together, in, out, and everyone came over; and who even knew exactly when the last breath came or who noticed it first or how it was taken, but it came; in the place where she had taken nearly every breath she ever took, and they were incredibly grateful to have her there, at home, not connected to things that beeped, or in a sterile ward, or surrounded by people shouting and trying useless maneuvers, but where the old blackened kettle on top of the oven was still set to whistle; where Bramble’s tail slowly thumped a rhythm on the rug as it always did; where the ancient pile of unused keys—the house was never locked—sat in the bowl with mysterious bits and bobs of screws and handy things; where the curtains that Annie had made herself when she’d first moved in there still hung, so many years ago, a young bride full, Flora imagined, of cheer and hopefulness: orange flowers on a blue background, which had been fashionable, then hideous, and were now on the point of tipping back into being fashionable again.

  There had been babies on the rug in that room, then children tearing around, the endless comings and goings of the farmhands; how many vegetable soups, and apple pies; how many scraped knees, and tears wiped away, and muddy footprints in various sizes of Wellingtons; how many birthday cakes—chocolate for Fintan and Hamish, lemon for Innes, vanilla for Flora—how many candles blown out and Christmas presents wrapped; and how many cups of tea . . .

  And it had all vanished in the blink of an eye when Flora had been twenty-three years old, and she had run away as far and fast as she could; couldn’t bear to think of it, never ever wanted to come back; wanted nothing of a life that had been ripped from all of them; didn’t want to assume the mantle of the family’s pain, come home as they’d all expected. As the entire island had expected.

  She stood there now, in the dark, dusty, unloved kitchen, braced herself on the back of the chair, and simply let the tears flow.

  Chapter Eight

  She heard her father—or rather, his dog, Bracken, woofing hello at the intruder—before she saw him, and rubbed her face quickly.

  Eck MacKenzie had always been strong looking. But his blue eyes were sinking now; there were broken veins on his cheeks from decades of high winds on the moorland, and his hair was thinning under his omnipresent tweed bunnet.

  “Flora,” he said, nodding.

  They had spoken, of course, since the funeral. But only briefly. She’d invited him down to London and he’d said, “Aye, maybe, maybe,” which they both knew meant never, never.

  “You’re no back to stay?”

  Flora shook her head. “But I’m working up here,” she said eagerly. “I mean, I’ll be here for a bit. Maybe a week?”

  He nodded. “Aye.” Her father’s ayes, she well knew, could mean many things. This one meant, well, that’s fine as far as that goes.

  After that, everyone stood around. If Mum had been there, Flora thought, she’d have been bustling, making tea, thrusting cake on everyone whether they wanted it or not, making everything cozy and nice and not strange.

  Instead, everyone looked a bit awkward.

  “Mm, tea?” said Flora, which helped a bit.

  They sat around the kitchen table bleakly. There was almost no food in, and everything felt like a gap.

  “So, how’s work?” said Fintan eventually, as if it had to be dragged out of him.

  “Uh, good,” said Flora. “I’m up here to talk to Colton Rogers.”

  “Good luck with that,” snorted her father.

  “That bastard!” said Innes.

  Uh-oh, thought Flora.

  “Hang on. He’s nice!” she said.

  The boys exchanged glances.

  “Well, we wouldn’t know,” said Fintan.

  “He doesn’t have anything to do with the local people,” said Innes. “Doesn’t employ us, doesn’t buy from us.”

  “He’s building some fancy-pants place over on the north of the island,” said Fintan. “For rich idiots to fly in by helicopter and have ‘experiences.’”

  “Idiots,” said Innes.

  “And he gets arseholes up here to hunt grouse. They come in the Harbor’s Rest and behave like English wankers,” said Fintan.

  “Well, I expect you’re very friendly and give them the benefit of the doubt,” said Flora.

  “Not nice people,” said Hamish, shaking his head and giving a biscuit to Bramble, who was standing there, poised for exactly that eventuality.

  Her father wasn’t even at the table with them. He was sitting by the fireside, stoking up the grate and sipping a large glass of whisky, even though it was early in the day. Flora looked at him, then back at her plate.

  “Are you guys eating . . . I mean, are you looking after yourselves all right?” she asked.

  “We tidied up for you coming.” Fintan frowned.

  “Seriously?” said Flora.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Fintan was on the defensive immediately.

  “No, no, I was just saying . . .”

  “We eat sausages,” said Hamish, frowning. “Also sometimes bacon.”

  “You’ll kill yourselves!”

  Her father was looking thinner. Flora wondered if he was eating much at all, or if it was all just whisky. It had been three years; surely they must be starting to get over it.

  Not that she was.

  “Yeah, thanks for the life advice you’ve flown all this way to give us, Flora,” said Innes. “We’ll just stop working twelve-hour days . . . How long is your working day again?”

  “It’s plenty long,” snapped back Flora. “And I commute.”

  “Do you cook?”

  “No. But there’s M and S, and Deliveroo . . .”

  Flora looked at thei
r faces and decided this was not the time to attempt to explain Deliveroo.

  “So,” she said, glancing around, “how’s the farm doing?”

  There was a very long pause. Innes stared at his plate.

  “Why? You going to come back and lawyer it up?” said Fintan shortly.

  “No,” said Flora. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Not well,” said Innes shortly. “Not all of us are pulling our weight.”

  “What do you mean by that?” said Fintan.

  “You heard.”

  “I do my bit.”

  “You do the absolute bare minimum. Thank God Hamish picks up your slack.”

  “I like cows,” said Hamish.

  “Shut up, Hamish,” said Fintan. “You like everything.”

  Without looking at him, Flora passed Hamish her last biscuit. He ate it in two bites.

  “How are things, Dad?” said Flora.

  “Och. Fine,” said her dad without turning round. He kept staring at the fire, Bracken’s head in his lap.

  “Right,” said Flora. “Great.”

  Innes switched on the TV. This was the only new thing in the house; it was huge, and tuned to Sky Sports 9, which showed the shinty. He turned it up loud and handed round a bag of horrible, greasy sausage rolls he’d brought up from the village. And Flora sat and watched in silence with the others, the gap inside her so vast and hollow she could hardly breathe.

  Chapter Nine

  At 9 P.M., Flora got a message from Colton Rogers’s office that he would be busy tomorrow and wouldn’t be able to see her after all, which was even more useless. She texted Kai about it, who got back to her straightaway.

  Hey babe. How is it?

  Are they thrilled you’re back?

  Well this will cheer you up. Joel is concerned about what’s happening. He’s coming up.

  Get some sleep.

  Eventually Flora gave up on the shinty and went to bed, but she couldn’t sleep. She felt the slightly musty pillowcase under her head, the thin duvet, the sagging mattress, and wondered when the last time anyone had slept in here was. It wasn’t as if her father particularly encouraged guests. Why would he when everyone he knew in the world, more or less, lived within walking distance? And with a large family, the house had always felt full and lively enough anyway, if anything, too noisy.

  Now she could hear a tap dripping in a distant sink. She frowned, realizing that it had dripped when she had lived here, that nobody had thought to fix it for years.

  She missed, suddenly, the noisy streets of east London: the shouting, the parties and occasional fights that erupted on hot nights, the sound of police helicopters whomping overhead; all the things that normally made her stressed and irritated now felt familiar. Here, there was so much silence, apart from that damned tap. A faint drift of wind in the seagrass. No cars, no neighbors, no music, no people. It felt completely empty, like the end of the world. She felt utterly alone.

  Oddly, it also felt like her first night in London had: starting a new life, everything strange. But then she’d felt enthused, full of possibility and hope and excitement. And even though she maybe hadn’t gone as far as she might have, she’d done it. She’d been building a life for herself, trying, working hard. Controlling her own destiny.

  Only to end up right back here where she’d started. She’d shed plenty of tears for her mother. But these were just for herself.

  She listened to the tap, hating it, and at 3 A.M. got up to try and turn it off, without success. As she tiptoed through the kitchen, the dawn already well under way, Bramble looked up hopefully with a flap of his tail on the flagstones. She paused for a second, checking the damped fire in the grate. When she headed back to the bedroom, Bramble got up silently and followed her, and she let him. She climbed back into the slightly chilly bed, and he crawled up on top of her and arranged his large bulk around her legs. His heavy warmth felt very pleasant, and as his breathing slowed, so did hers, and eventually she fell asleep.

  She woke up as though she’d been given an electric shock as the boys headed out for milking. Joel! Joel was coming!

  She had plenty of work to do but couldn’t settle. The house felt oppressive and the sun was shining; she wanted to make the most of the lovely day and get rid of some of her excess energy, so she called her old school friend Lorna. They weren’t the same school year, but that never mattered in Mure. There were only two classes: wee and big.

  And now Lorna had returned to become first a teacher and now headmistress at the local elementary school. It was the school holidays, so she was free for once.

  Lorna, a sweet-faced, russet-haired girl who worked like a fiend, had been very good about the fact that Flora barely contacted her (apart from the occasional like on Facebook) while she lived her exciting London life, then expected her to be the receiver of all her woes when she turned up on the island. Flora had offered to buy the coffee, and Lorna prepared herself to listen politely to her complaining about how undrinkable it was compared to whatever fancy stuff she was used to in London.

  When she saw Flora, though, she was so shocked by the absence of her customary sparkle that she put all that out of her mind.

  “Come on!” she said, grinning. “It can’t be that bad to be home!”

  Flora attempted a smile.

  “Everyone’s giving me sideways looks, like I’ve betrayed them,” she said.

  “You’re imagining things,” said Lorna. “And they’re worried about the boys, up there alone on that farm. It’s strange.”

  “It’s not my fault, though.”

  “I mean, you’d think one of them would be married off by now.”

  “Well, you couldn’t marry Hamish,” said Flora. “He can’t find his own head with both hands.”

  Lorna sighed.

  “I know. Shame—he’s such a hunk.”

  “And Innes gave it a shot.”

  “Have you seen Agot yet?”

  Agot was Innes’s daughter. He had custody at funny times, as his ex, Eilidh, had moved back to the mainland.

  “No, not yet.”

  Lorna smiled.

  “Why? What?”

  “You’ll see,” said Lorna. “Can you ask Eilidh to send her to my school, please? The rolls are horrifying.”

  “I know,” said Flora.

  “Too many people are leaving. Going off to find jobs.”

  “I saw the empty shops.”

  Lorna grunted as they carried on down the path from the farm.

  “Come on,” she said, gesticulating toward the harbor, where the seagulls were swooping to see if anything was left behind from the previous night’s fish and chips, and light was bouncing off the waves. The forecast had been ominous, but in fact a quick bout of rain had appeared to clear everything away. It was strange, but it sometimes happened like that: the mainland, all the way down to London, would be cold and gray, but the weather front missed them completely, leaving them in bright, clear sunlight. You wouldn’t swim in it, but you could definitely sit outside (in the sun, with a sweater on). “How bad can it be on a day like today?”

  “I know,” said Flora. “Sorry. It’s just . . . you know.”

  “I do,” said Lorna. She had lost her mother too. Sometimes, Flora thought, it was enough just to be with someone who understood.

  “How’s your dad?”

  “Shit.”

  “Mine too.”

  Flora kicked a stone.

  “Argh. You know when they said I had to come here for work . . . honestly, I got such butterflies in my stomach. Such nerves. Because it’s here, all the time. And it’s turning me into a misery. I hate it. I hate being grumpy all the time. I’m sure I’m a fun person really. I’m sure I used to be.”

  Lorna smiled.

  “To be fair, you’ve always been quite irritating.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Anyway,” said Lorna. “It’s okay, you know. It’s okay to grieve. You’re meant to. It’s a period of adjustment.” />
  Flora sighed.

  “I like it in London. I’m too busy to grieve there. I don’t actually have to look around and see her all the time, or think about her or be interrogated about her.”

  They’d reached the Harbor’s Rest, cheerfully run by a tall Icelandic girl called Inge-Britt. It dealt mostly with tourists, didn’t have to worry about repeat visits, and cleaned its cutlery accordingly. They ordered coffee and sat down in the shabby lounge.

  Lorna looked at Flora.

  “Is it really so awful being back here? I mean, plenty of us . . . we live here all the time. It’s nice. It’s fine. Some of us like it.”

  Flora stirred her coffee. A faintly gray scum rose to the top from the powdered milk.

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t mean I’m different or special . . .”

  “Your mum thought you were.”

  “Everyone’s mum thinks they are.”

  “Not like yours. ‘Oh, Flora did this! Flora got this in her exams!’ She always wanted more for you.”

  Lorna paused.

  “Are you happy down there?”

  Flora shrugged.

  “We should have had this conversation at night. With wine instead of . . . whatever this is.”

  “I’ll go halfers on a custard bun with you.”

  “Shall we ask for it without a plate? Might be cleaner.”

  Bun carefully divided, Flora thought again.

  “I feel I didn’t fit in here. Then I went away and I don’t fit in there. So I don’t know. Why is it so easy for you?”

  “Ha!” said Lorna. She’d always loved teaching. She’d gone to teacher-training college on the mainland and had a wonderful time, then she’d been perfectly happy to come home again, where her friends and family were, eventually (to be fair, there wasn’t a lot of competition for her tiny posting) becoming headmistress of the island’s little elementary school. Its falling roll was a worry, and she’d like to meet a nice man, but apart from that . . . “No,” she admitted. “It’s no bad.”