The Cafe by the Sea

by Jenny Colgan

  “Shall we go eat?” said Colton, and they picked up their drinks and followed him into the restaurant. “You are my very first guests.”

  “We’re honored,” both Joel and Flora said at the same time, then glanced at each other.

  Here, after the cozy, gleaming bar, things were quite different. It was formal and very quiet and it felt extremely odd to be just the four of them in the restaurant. Flora picked up the brand-new, very stiff, and fancy menu.

  Here at the Rock we want to give you a very special dining experience . . . a dimension of sensory explosions, the primary tastes of extraordinary love and creativity, said the introduction, which Flora correctly interpreted as evidence that it would all be very, very expensive.

  Everything was “curated”: there were “orchards” of fruit and “symphonies” of vegetables, and “intensities” of oysters and sardines. Fintan looked in total agony. Flora smiled widely to help him out.

  “Colton, maybe you should order for us?”

  “What d’ya think, though?” he kept saying, looking around. There were stags’ heads lining the walls and the carpet was tartan.

  “I’m sure it’s going to be lovely,” said Flora. “It is fancy, though. Is this what you like to eat?”

  “No,” he said. “I prefer steak.”

  He ordered the chef’s tasting menu, and a couple of bottles of wine Flora couldn’t pronounce, but she found she was quite happy to go along with someone else’s choices. Plus, there was always the possibility that Joel’s tongue would loosen after a few glasses. Might she get to know him a little better? Maybe that exterior was all for show, and he was one of those people who was lovely underneath. She imagined saying that to Kai—oh, once you get to know him, he’s really nice. Works at an animal shelter in his spare time, but doesn’t like anybody knowing about it.

  The first thing to go wrong was the bread. It professed to be freshly baked, but patently wasn’t. And the butter came in a little floral pattern, hard from the fridge. Fintan blinked twice.

  “They’ve bought in this butter,” he whispered to Flora.

  “Stop whispering,” said Flora. “It’s a restaurant. Of course it’s got to buy in stuff.”

  “Well, outside it looks like it pretends it’s making it. And read this guff in the menu: ‘All our ingredients are sourced as close to the very heart of our island as possible.’ There’s ten dairy farmers on Mure,” said Fintan crossly, “and I tell you what, none of them put their butter in airy-fairy little baby flowers like this.”

  “What’s that, guys?” said Colton, leaning across the oversize table. The lighting was so subtle she could barely make him out. They were basically eating in the dark.

  “Nothing,” said Flora quickly.

  “Well—” said Fintan.

  “No! Shush!” said Flora.

  “So how did it go today?” asked Colton.

  “Ah,” said Flora, glancing at Joel.

  “You can put in a new schedule and a new proposal,” said Joel, opening his briefcase. “I’ve got the paperwork all done and ready for you to sign before I leave. Scots law isn’t much more complicated. It’s a solid proposal, just to move the wind farm behind the next island. It has some cost implications for maintenance, but ought to save on keeping the island’s unique heritage for visitors and future generations, yada yada yada.”

  “Okay, good work,” said Colton, scanning it. “So I just need to get this past the council, right? And how did that go?”

  Flora took another gulp of wine. It was absolutely delicious.

  “Well,” she said. “There are a few issues.”

  “Such as?”

  “Everyone’s bothered about the pink house.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The pink building. On the main street. You’ve left it empty.”

  Colton looked confused.

  “Here?”

  “Yes, here!”

  “That’s mine?”

  Flora looked at him, aghast that someone could buy a building and not realize they’d done so.

  “Apparently so,” said Joel.

  “Damn,” said Colton. “What else?”

  “Staff?” said Flora. “There’s lots of island teenagers who might come home if there was more work here that wasn’t milking.”

  Fintan made a sarcastic noise but Flora ignored him.

  “But really,” she said, “what it boils down to is this. People don’t know you. They don’t know who you are. They think you might be Donald Trump or something, and that if they let you get away with this, the next step will be something really terrible.”

  “But I’m trying to protect the place.”

  “Then protect everyone here,” said Flora simply.

  “Huh,” said Colton.

  He turned to Fintan.

  “I mean, you live here full-time, right? What do you do, then?”

  “I’m a farmer,” said Fintan resignedly, knocking back more wine.

  “Yeah? You don’t look like a farmer.”

  “What, because I’m not chewing a stem of hay at the dinner table?”

  He sounded prickly and defensive and Flora knew it was because he felt out of his depth.

  “No,” said Colton. “Are you always this aggressive?”

  “Seen Braveheart too many times?” said Fintan. “Scared of the violent locals?”

  “Fintan! Shut up!” hissed Flora.

  She turned to Colton.

  “Sorry, sir. That thing they say about not being able to choose your family . . .”

  “Yes, well, you certainly didn’t,” muttered Fintan, who Flora belatedly realized had drunk quite a lot of wine already.

  There was a pause.

  “That’s enough,” said Flora, and Fintan, she could see, realized immediately he’d gone too far.

  “Sorry, sis,” he said. Then he looked round the table, rubbing the back of his sunburned neck with his hand. “Sorry, everyone.”

  The waiter brought them something he called an “amusing bouche”; with an odd kind of strangled laugh, he uncovered a large tray with four tiny little ramekins of oysters swimming in some kind of congealing jelly.

  “What’s this?” said Colton, a little grumpily.

  “It’s oyster surprise de la mer,” said the waiter proudly. It certainly did look surprising.

  They all prodded it. Flora had grown up eating wild oysters, either straight from the shoreline, or sometimes her mother would stick them by the fire until they smoked themselves and their shells popped open, and she and her brothers scorched their fingers, but they didn’t care, as the smoky, salty deliciousness inside was too good to wait for.

  This was just a lump of horrible fish jelly, surrounding another fish jelly. Fintan didn’t even pick up his fork.

  “What is this?” he said. “I didn’t understand that wee guy the first time.”

  “Well . . .,” Colton began, then shook his head. “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  After the ramekins were removed, they all took an unenthusiastic shot at the asparagus and anchovy mousse. Conversation was definitely slowing. Fintan was blinking in disbelief.

  “But why?” he kept saying, his face going pink. “Why?”

  “Well,” said Colton, who looked aggrieved and not unlike a man who was not happy to have been denied a steak. “I just said I wanted to recruit the best and my people got on it and—”

  “That’s what happens when you want something done?” said Fintan. “You have to get people on it?”

  “Well, yeah. I’m quite busy.” Colton smirked.

  “Telling people to get on things,” said Fintan.

  There was a pause.

  “Yeah, and . . .”

  “What?”

  “And now some prawn marmalade,” said the waiter. Fintan waved him away irritatedly.

  “So you came here into our community and decided that someone else who wasn’t ever here should make decisions about us?”

  “He’s meant to
be one of the top experimental chefs in the world,” said Colton.

  “Yes. Experiments in horrible things,” said Fintan. “And why does it say ‘locally sourced’? Excuse me, waiter. Why does everything here say ‘locally sourced’?”

  Joel, Flora noticed, was watching all this with a wry smile of amusement. He seemed to be almost enjoying himself, for once, or engaged, at least. Why, oh why, did she find horn-rimmed glasses so incredibly attractive? Had she always thought this or was it just because he wore them? His eyelashes were so long they were brushing against the glass. She wondered briefly, taking a sip of wine, what would happen if, while Fintan and the waiter appeared to be having an argument, she simply slid her foot . . .

  No. No no. No. She was at work.

  She took another swig of wine.

  “Um . . .” The waiter looked hot and embarrassed. It was bad enough having the boss in. “Well,” he said. “We use local salt.”

  “Which salt?”

  “Hebridean rock salt.”

  “The Hebrides are two hundred nautical miles from here.”

  The waiter coughed.

  “I believe that counts, sir.”

  Fintan blinked.

  “So you’re telling me you just sprinkle salt on everything.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And that magically turns it into ‘locally sourced.’”

  “It’s a key ingredient, sir.”

  “I don’t believe ‘locally sourced’ is a legal term,” observed Joel drily.

  “Hang on,” said Colton. “So I’m telling my friends and clients and customers that what we’re getting here is the very best of Scottish produce . . .”

  Fintan pushed his plate away and took another swig of his wine, which he had been drinking like beer because he normally only drank beer.

  “Sorry, can I have a look at the cheese board?”

  The waiter’s blink rate was now through the roof.

  “Um, I’ll see . . .”

  “You won’t see,” said Colton. “You’ll bring it.”

  The waiter disappeared, and the maître d’ replaced him, looking pink and sweating in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature.

  “Is there a problem, Mr. Rogers, sir?”

  “We don’t know,” said Colton. “That’s why we need the cheese board.”

  A trolley was rolled in with what was clearly a selection of chilly, recently unwrapped bought-in cheeses, including a suspiciously industrial-looking white Cheddar. Fintan sniffed them in turn.

  “Know your cheese?” said Colton, amused. He’d watched Fintan slugging down the wildly expensive Bordeaux he’d ordered.

  “Yes,” said Fintan. He cut himself a slice of each, and chewed them slowly.

  “How much does your cheese plate go for?”

  “Twenty-one pounds,” said the waiter. “You get four for that.”

  “You’re ripping people off,” said Fintan flatly. “This isn’t . . . this isn’t the real deal.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of pasteurized cheese . . .”

  “Yeah. It’s crap.”

  “In the States, it’s illegal to sell unpasteurized cheese,” said Colton. “Filthy European habit.”

  “How many people does cheese kill every year?” said Fintan. “I’ll tell you how many: none.”

  “What about listeria?”

  “Yup, that’s why we have nonety-none people hospitalized every year with listeria,” said Fintan.

  “I was wrong about you,” smiled Colton. “You do know your cheese.”

  Colton, Flora noticed, had angled his entire body toward Fintan, and was watching him with an air of sly amusement.

  She realized suddenly that she hadn’t speculated at all on Colton’s sexuality, had assumed he’d be one of those men who trailed a flock of expensive ex-wives. She had absolutely no idea if he was married, had a girlfriend, what. She wondered if Fintan had noticed, and glanced at Joel.

  To her total surprise, he caught her eye and gave her the tiniest of grins. She instantly tugged her head around and stared straight ahead.

  “So you can suggest better?” Colton was saying to Fintan.

  “I make better,” said Fintan. “We have better butter, better fishing, far better oysters . . . I mean, you name it. Mrs. Laird in the village, her bread is a million times better than this. Flora can outcook anything here. And we have much, much better cheese.”

  Colton eyed him for a second.

  “You make better?”

  “Christ, yeah.”

  “Show me.”

  Fintan shrugged.

  “I’ll send some over.”

  “No. Show me now. Have you got some on your farm?”

  He clicked his fingers at the maître d’.

  “You’ll need to send someone.”

  Fintan got up to go.

  “No, no, you sit down. Someone else will do it.”

  A member of the catering staff hurried out of the kitchen, and Fintan told him where to find the various types of cheese, and to take the butter out of the fridge—but the stuff in the cow dish, not the paper, he explained, as if he didn’t believe the waiter would know the difference between real and bought butter. The man practically scurried out of there as if his job depended on it, which it did. The maître d’ explained that the chef wouldn’t come out to speak to them: he was too scared. Colton sighed, ordered gigantic whiskies all round, and they headed back into the bar to wait.

  Joel hung back and walked with Flora. She couldn’t help her heart leaping. She could smell a tinge of something expensive—lime cologne—and even though he had obviously shaved that day, a distinct hint of stubble was already noticeable along his tight jawline. Her senses felt so finely attuned to him, to every tingly iota, to the very aura that surrounded his body, that she forgot about everything else: the restaurant, the island, the job, the fact that he was her boss. How could he not notice how she felt? Or was he so used to it from every woman? Or perhaps he simply didn’t care.

  “Unusual strategy,” he observed as they moved through.

  “I know,” said Flora. “Sorry, do you want me to take him home?”

  He turned to her.

  “Is he gay?”

  “No,” said Flora.

  She paused.

  “I’ve been away for a while.”

  Joel blinked.

  “You don’t know if your own brother is gay?”

  “It’s not the kind of thing I’d . . . Do you have siblings?”

  Joel had drunk too much of the good wine, and eaten too little of the bad food; he didn’t mean to blurt out what he said next, and he cursed himself as soon as he did.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Flora stopped abruptly. Joel froze.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” she said.

  “I mean, no,” said Joel. “I mean, even if I did, it wouldn’t matter.”

  “I didn’t say it mattered,” said Flora. “I said that I . . . I’m not a hundred percent sure.”

  Joel nodded and walked on ahead of her, moving toward the large picture window as she stared, confused, at his back and toward the landscape beyond.

  Outside there was a gentle fog rising, rendering everything softer and more mysterious. The water was still absolutely perfectly flat as a pond; it looked less like the sea and more like a gentle pool of smoke. The long, flat, familiar outline of Mure rose up behind them in pastel shades of green and brown, the little lights of the harbor just visible around to the right.

  Joel glanced at his watch.

  “This place is nuts,” he said. “It’s ten P.M. and it looks like eleven o’clock in the morning. I can’t sleep at all. When does it get dark?”

  “It doesn’t,” shrugged Flora.

  “What are you guys, like, Finland?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “We’re far farther north than that.”

  He turned round to look at her, bathed in the strange white light from the window. Once
again, he noticed, her eyes were the color of the sea, even though the sea he was looking at now was gray from the mist, not green as it had been the other day. It was as if her eyes changed with the water. It was so strange.

  Flora was feeling strange, but not for that reason. She was watching Colton, who’d headed out the front door and lit a large cigar out on the wooden deck, and was now offering one to Fintan. Fintan paused for a couple of seconds—Flora was reasonably sure he’d never had a cigar in his life, but what did she know?—then accepted, and they moved to sit on one of the expensively hand-hewn wooden benches, with the expensive cashmere blankets strewn over them. Little candles in jam jars fluttered everywhere, even though their lights weren’t needed; and the air was heavily scented with something that smelled amazing but was in fact designed to keep the gnats away.

  “It’s like Avalon,” Joel was saying, turning back toward the sea view. “Like a mirage, like the entire thing will fade away at any minute.”

  “I think you’re confusing us with the cell phone signal,” said Flora, and was rewarded with a hint of an extremely rare smile. But he didn’t take his eyes off the floating horizon.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Bertie dashed back with the boat as fast as he could; the waiter was utterly terrified that he’d upset Mr. Rogers. To Innes and Eck’s bemusement, the young man had crashed into the dairy and basically grabbed everything he could find. Glancing around, Innes had added Flora’s leftover fruitcake and oatcakes to his haul, along with various jars from the larder.

  When they saw him rushing back up the lit path, Joel and Flora left the house and joined Colton and Fintan on the terrace. It was chillier now, but braziers had been lit, so it felt cozy instead. The music had been turned off, and there was nothing to be heard except the low cooings of birds, who seemed to know it was night time even if nobody else did, and a barking noise from the water.

  “Are there dogs here?” said Joel, glancing around. The others laughed.

  “Seals bark too,” said Flora.

  “You’re telling me I’m listening to a pack of barking seals?” said Joel. “Seriously, man, this place is completely made up.”

  They all watched as, marching like a slightly tipsy toddler, a grouse proceeded slowly along the red carpet behind the waiter. Then, suddenly, they all burst out laughing.