Bram grimaced a concession. ‘Them’s the rules, I guess.’
‘But we can’t make Grannie and Grandad and Uncle Fraser and Mum eat a peanut butter and raspberry jam quiche,’ Max wailed, the wail turning into a chortle as the two of them gave themselves up to mirth.
Bram smiled as he opened the oven door. ‘Okay, Phoebs, you have the time it takes to blind-bake the cases to ponder the wisdom of your choices.’
The three pastry cases were lined up ready to go into the oven. Phoebe’s effort was already looking extremely unappetising, sweaty-looking and grey. Max’s pastry, in contrast, was so perfect it looked like the bought stuff, neatly pressed into the wavy edge of the quiche tin and overlapping the edges just the right amount to allow for shrinkage.
When had this happened? When had Max become someone who made perfect pastry? Almost while Bram wasn’t looking, their little boy had grown up. Up, up and away. After this last year of school he’d be off out into the world on his gap year – which absolutely terrified Bram, no matter how much Kirsty tried to reassure him that Max was a sensible boy and would be perfectly fine constructing a school with no proper training under the supervision of a load of randoms a hundred miles from the nearest hospital in the Rwandan bush, surrounded on all sides by Gaboon vipers, spitting cobras and black mambas, an encounter with any one of which could prove fatal. Kirsty had banned Bram from Googling snakes, but that only meant he’d moved on to spiders – and they were worse, if anything, being so much less visible.
He shoved the three pastry cases into the oven and threw an arm around Max’s shoulders, trying and failing not to choke up. He’d really missed Max these last two months. After selling the flat in Islington, Bram, Kirsty and Phoebe had moved straight up to Scotland to live temporarily with Kirsty’s parents until the new house was finished, but Max had stayed on with Bram’s parents in London to finish the school year, with just the odd weekend trip up to Scotland.
‘I’m relying on you to contain the force of nature that is your sister until I get back, okay? I’m going to the veg patch to harvest some onions.’
Bram had planted onions, leeks, carrots, lettuce and chard in late spring and tended them religiously on every visit to the new house. Today, hopefully, they could all enjoy the fruits of his labours.
‘We’ll try not to burn the place down in your absence,’ said Max, pushing his floppy dark fringe to the side, the better to scrutinise the oven temperature. He was taller than Bram now, and fortunately blessed with Kirsty’s looks rather than Bram’s: her straight brows and soulful green eyes.
‘That would be good.’
Phoebe laughed. ‘Grandad wouldn’t be happy if we burned the house down on our first day in the new kitchen!’
‘I don’t imagine he’d be best pleased, no.’ Bram looked beyond the big antique pine table to the open-plan sitting area situated between the kitchen and the front door. Kirsty and her dad, David, who had built the house for them, had based this open-plan space on the Walton house – Kirsty had been obsessed with the TV show The Waltons as a child – with two windows either side of the door looking onto a verandah. There was a solid fuel-burning stove and even a radio cunningly disguised to look like an old-fashioned wireless.
In an hour’s time David would be coming through that door, a compact, muscly bundle of contained energy, nose twitching, on the hunt for something to criticise. David and Linda, Kirsty’s mum, lived in an ‘executive bungalow’ four miles away in Grantown-on-Spey. Bram had hoped that four miles out of town was far enough that David wouldn’t be popping in all the time, but here they were, on their first day in residence, and David, Linda and Kirsty’s brother, Fraser, were somehow coming to lunch.
How had that happened?
He ran a hand along the wooden worktop. David was an old-school builder who considered eco-friendly materials the work of the devil and had been appalled at the idea of using reclaimed wood in the kitchen, but had had to admit that the worktops looked great. ‘You’d never know it was reclaimed crap, eh, Bram?’ he’d said after his team had installed them.
‘Is our house the best house in the world, Max, or what?’ Phoebe demanded, whirling round on the spot. Phoebe had shown her brother around yesterday like an estate agent trying to sell the place to a potential purchaser. ‘I’m never going to live anywhere else but here!’
Bram and Max exchanged indulgent looks. Phoebe, like Bram, was a real homebody, and had been desperate to move into our house, even though living at Grannie and Grandad’s meant she could play with Lily, Rhona and Katie Miller whenever she liked. The Miller sisters, Phoebe’s best friends, lived across the street from Linda and David, and Phoebe had got to know them well during all the holidays they’d spent up here. Back in London, Phoebe had somehow got off on the wrong foot with the girls in her class – Bram had never got to the bottom of the reason for this – and had had to deal with a certain amount of nastiness and bullying. When the decision to move up here had been made, Phoebe had immediately exclaimed: ‘I can be in Rhona’s class!’ and burst into happy tears.