‘You’re going to fix it, aren’t you, Flores?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Flora soberly. ‘I seriously don’t know where his head is. He’ll be back soon. And meanwhile, I don’t dare look at the accounts.’
‘Just send Jan another invoice.’
‘I would,’ said Flora, ‘except I know exactly what will happen: “Ooh, Flora, I know you’re so jealous of our amazing happiness but I would have thought you could have spared a thought for penniless orphans, blah, blah, blah …”’
‘Can’t you talk to Charlie on his own?’
‘Oh God, no, he’s terrified of me now, like I’m suddenly about to cast my womanly wiles and try to ensnare him, like I totally didn’t do last time. Gah.’
‘Maybe it’s Mure,’ said Lorna. ‘Maybe it’s being on this island makes our love lives totally suck.’
‘Has to be,’ said Flora. ‘Can we go drinking on a school night more? I mean, if you can pay …’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes,’ said Flora. ‘Yes. It really is that bad.’
Chapter Twenty-eight
Saif had had a flurry of checks. A woman had come to check the house, and as he looked at it through the eyes of a stranger – the first person apart from Mrs Laird who had stepped over the threshold since he’d moved in the previous year – he realised how unsuitable it was for children: still full of the last occupant’s heavy dusty furniture; an ancient creaky fridge; no television.
He tried to cheer up the bedrooms upstairs by ordering some stencils from the mainland – boats and rocket ships, who knew what boys liked? But they made the old sofas with their antimacassars and the damp, sagging beds somehow look rather worse. The woman, however, simply checked a bunch of boxes on a form and said nothing either positive or negative. Evidently he had passed as he soon got an email requesting that he present himself at an address in Glasgow on a certain date – and to expect to book lodgings for a fortnight. His young, rather ditzy-seeming locum had arrived from the mainland, and tried to slip away without anyone noticing. He also tried to sleep at night, a million questions swirling around his head. It was not, he thought morosely, the best of times to fall out with his only friend, who also worked with small children every day. But his pride stopped him from calling her – he never called her anyway; their relationship was much more casual. To call her felt like it would be crossing a line. And his thoughts were so overwhelming he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
At last the day came.
He tried to slip into Annie’s Seaside Kitchen without attracting attention – which is actually quite difficult when you are a six-foot-one Middle-Eastern man on a small Scottish island where you are one of only two doctors.
‘Hello, Dr Saif!’ chorused Iona and Isla as he walked through the door. He looked nervously around for Flora – he was reasonably sure Lorna would have told her everything – but she wasn’t out front yet. She was still finishing off some chive and herb focaccia out the back with the expectation that in today’s mild but windy weather something that could be eaten by the harbourside but wouldn’t blow away might be just the ticket, and trying to balance the accounts, which was an upsetting job at the best of times.
‘Um … can I have some kibbeh?’ he said. He had absolutely no idea that Flora had finally got wise to the falafel catastrophe and put the hot spiced lamb sandwich on the menu purely for him. It had never even occurred to him. Now they had become instantly wildly popular in the village and were beginning to be seen as quite the speciality, excellent lamb being something Mure had no shortage of.
‘Of course!’
The bell tinged, and old Mrs Kennedy and Mrs Blair came in together, quite flustered.
‘That whale is back! Look! It’s not safe!’
‘It’ll block the ferry.’
‘Flora, you need to do something!’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Flora immediately.
Iona immediately grabbed her phone.
‘I’m going to stick it on my Insta.’
‘It always just looks like a blob,’ said Isla.
‘Well, I’ll zoom in then. Whale selfie.’
‘It’s not a whale,’ said Mrs Kennedy seriously.
‘Okay, well why did you just say, “The whale is back”?’ said Iona petulantly, shuffling with the camera on her phone.
‘It’s a narwhal,’ she said. ‘It’s very wise, very rare, very beautiful, and absolutely is going to overwhelm this entire island before they sort it out.’
‘What do you mean?’ Saif couldn’t help himself asking.
‘Oh hi, Saif. Now, I really am having a terrible bit of trouble with my …’
Saif was used to this kind of thing and brushed it off.
‘Make an appointment with Jeannie … I mean, why will we be overwhelmed?’
‘Tourists,’ tutted Mrs Kennedy, as if tourism wasn’t the lifeblood of absolutely everything they did. ‘Everyone wants to see one. Then the authorities will want to tow it away. Then the Greenpeace campaigners will turn up.’
‘What do they want with it?’
‘They don’t know either. I think they just like their pictures being taken next to it. Flora, just go talk to it.’
‘It’s not like that!’ said Flora. ‘I’m not a seal! And you’re being … seal-ist!’
‘All the women in your family can talk to whales.’
‘Is this true?’ said Saif.
‘Yes, Man of Science, it is,’ said Flora, rolling her eyes. ‘Do you want coffee?’
‘Yes please.’
Flora passed him his customary four sugars. ‘I need to catch the ferry,’ said Saif. Flora blinked. She wanted to ask why but didn’t dare.
‘The ferry won’t go if it’s in its way,’ said Mrs Blair.
‘I am trapped,’ said Saif, trying to sound casual but actually panicking. His meeting in Glasgow was at 4.30. He had to make this ferry – he had to – and it had to be on time. He hadn’t slept a wink. He had spoken constantly out loud to Amena as if she were there, but he’d felt stupider than ever. He was terrified. He wished Lorna and he were still friends, that she could come with him; he knew what she was like with children. But of course she didn’t speak Arabic and the children would be even more confused, and, no, that was a terrible idea too. Oh God, why couldn’t they have found his wife?
But no. This was his to do alone. But on what should be the happiest, most amazing day of his life – the day he had dreamed and dreamed would come when his babies would be returned to him – he was filled with terror and foreboding. If he said the wrong thing, would they refuse to let him take them? Would they think they’d been radicalised? Surely not – they were only little.
As a rule, he tried to avoid the sensationalist headlines – most people on Mure read the local news and little else. The passing crazes of Edinburgh and Westminster and Washington meant little to people whose lives were measured by the changes in the weather and the length of the days, not Twitter and politics and shouting on television debates.
But still, he knew it was out there: ugly, ill feeling that infected people whether they wanted it to or not; every terrible tragedy; every spitting, postulating right-wing and left-wing and all sorts of crazy given air time. He just kept his head down, tried to do his job as well as he was able. And of course, as people got to know him they knew what was more or less intrinsic to human beings: everyone was pretty much all right, just bumbling along trying to make the best of it like everybody else, although he disliked it when people felt the urge to point out to him that he was all right, you know? Because he knew it meant ‘for one of them’, however kindly said.
He accepted his coffee and bade everyone a good morning.