In a funny way, seeing Neda had fired Lorna up too. She had to stop with this ridiculous pining: Flora for once was right. She was going to go to this barbecue on Sunday and she was going to dress up and have fun and stop feeling like a dowdy spinster schoolmarm.
And Flora was right about another thing: come Sunday, the weather was once again kind. The rest of the UK had been battered by the storms, but they had passed through and now the country was bathed in a funnel of high pressure, and the sky was a deep and cloudless blue. Already, the teenagers swigging cider by the harbourside were turning a deep shade of pink for skin unused to the bright rays of a sun that never set.
Lorna took a bottle of Prosecco from the fridge. She wore a pretty flowered dress she’d bought for a wedding down south three years ago – if she breathed in and stood up really straight, she could still get into it – and she curled her red hair round her shoulders and put on lashings of mascara and some light lipstick. As she looked in the mirror, she reminded herself: she was a young woman. She should enjoy it. Especially on a beautiful day like today.
It seemed that the MacKenzies had invited pretty much everyone to the engagement barbecue. To be fair, when you got weather like this, which was quite rare, you just wanted to follow the smell. There were the Morgenssens, all the dairy boys, who got precious few days off and were going to make the most of this one, so they were already quite far into the local ale. The boys had pulled hay bales out so everyone could sit around the farm courtyard, and had set up not just the underused barbecue, but they had dug a pit too and covered it in woodchips Fintan had set smoking the night before. Innes had sniffed and told him he was just showing off, but Fintan was adamant. If they were throwing a party, they were going to do it right. And just as well, as everyone brought engagement gifts, properly gift-wrapped and everything.
Fintan tried not to show how touched he was. In public, he was defiant that this would be the first gay wedding Mure had ever seen. Deep down, he was as keen to be accepted as anyone ever was. It was all right for Colton, who didn’t give a toss what anyone thought about him, and hadn’t grown up here. But being welcomed meant a lot to Fintan, who, more than almost any of the MacKenzies, desperately missed their mother’s comforting ear. She would have had a good time today, he thought, looking around: the musicians tuning up; the beer cold in the bins full of ice; dogs and children already starting to lark through; Flora’s spectacular chocolate mousse chilling in the fridge.
Innes came over. ‘Mum would have liked this,’ he observed, and Fintan started.
‘Yeah,’ he said. Innes passed him an already open bottle of beer, and they toasted.
Saif wasn’t sure what time to show up and what to bring. He didn’t really get invited to many social events on Mure – partly because he kept himself to himself and didn’t join the golf club or the pub quiz team; partly because he was foreign; but mostly because he’d seen absolutely everyone’s private parts, and nobody likes that. So he was excited to go, and dressed the boys in clean white shirts.
When he’d woken up – very cricked and cold and uncomfortable on the sofa with a dead arm and broad daylight outside, even though it was 4 a.m. – he’d had a sense that things were changing. Not quickly, but changing they were, and for the better. And now, he had the inclination to believe Neda. He’d see her again in a month; he wanted to show her how much they’d improved. He thought, for the first time, that it might be possible. Then he looked back into the bedroom and sighed.
‘I DON’T WANT TO GO!’ Ibrahim was shouting. He’d returned to his bedroom and was lying full-length on the bed.
‘There’ll be other kids there.’
‘I hate them!’
‘Agot will be there,’ said Ash happily.
‘Exactly.’
‘She’s a baby.’
‘She’s not a baby! Just play nicely.’
Ibrahim sighed in a very teenage way. ‘Can’t I just play on the iPad today? When there’s no school?’
‘No,’ said Saif. Saying no did not come easily, but he was trying it out for size. ‘If you’re polite and speak English, then I will let you play on it tonight.’
Ibrahim weighed this up and declared it officially acceptable.
‘But not with that baby Agot.’
‘Deal,’ said Saif.
They walked through the farm gates – late, obviously: he’d got it wrong again. A group of people were in the corner playing a piano they’d trundled out of the house, and there was a fiddle, and various already quite drunk people were standing up to do a song. Huge numbers of children were tearing round and round the house playing with the dogs. The smell of grilled meat went all the way down the drive and was driving the dogs potty. He felt suddenly nervous as they walked through the gateway, feeling that awful party feeling when you think you won’t know anyone or that everyone is looking at you, and he realised that bringing a bunch of flowers when the field in front of the farmhouse, which was lying fallow this year, was absolutely teeming with poppies and wild daisies, was perhaps a little unnecessary. Agot came tearing up to them, her almost-white hair glinting in the sun. She was wearing a medieval princess dress of velvet with a long train, goodness knows how or why. But, oddly, it rather suited her.
‘MY FRENS!’ she yelled.
From Agot’s point of view, she had been feeling most out of it, as all the other children went to the local school and had been ignoring her, and she had been on at her father to let her attend simply by calling it ‘MY SCHOO!’ whenever they drove past it. Eilidh’s parents were elderly, and on the mainland. When she was with her mother, Agot got farmed out to a succession of babysitters and, it seemed to Innes, anyone who could take her. It wasn’t that Eilidh was a bad mother – she was a wonderful mother. But trying to keep together the fabric of family and home and work when her ex lived a body of water away was so tough on both of them. It gladdened his heart to see so much of his daughter; he knew many divorced fathers didn’t or couldn’t. But he had no idea what to do with Agot’s apparently implacable will to move.
Ash lit up. ‘AGOT! PLAY!’ he demanded. His small vocabulary of English words tended towards the imperative.
‘YES!’ said Agot, equally happy to respond in shouts, and the six-year-old and the four-year-old took themselves off. Saif looked for Ibrahim, who was staring rather longingly at a rowdy football game that was going on at the end of the low field, consisting of several boys, a couple of girls, some drunk dads and some dogs.
‘You could go and play,’ said Saif.
Ibrahim shrugged. ‘They won’t want me.’
‘This is a party. It’s different from school. You’re good at football.’
‘I’m not,’ said Ibrahim.
‘Well, you can’t be worse than that dog there.’
The ball came soaring towards them. Saif nudged him. ‘Go on.’
‘ABBA!’
‘Just return it. Then you can come back to me.’
‘You are so embarrassing.’
Saif found himself grinning. That was all he wanted to be. An embarrassing dad.