She poured water into the huge old enamel mug her mother had kept topped up all day long; there were deep brown tannin lines scored into it. It felt a little strange, a little intimate, to be drinking from her mother’s cup. She regarded it curiously, then decided to go ahead, even if it was spooky. She was being superstitious, that was all. She dunked the teabag and let it steep for longer than she normally would, smiling wryly as she did so. Her mother had liked tea you could stand the spoon up in. Then she took the cup and sat down in her mother’s armchair, the one nearest the fire, the one she almost never used. Sitting down wasn’t really the kind of thing her mother did. It only happened on her birthday, and Mother’s Day, and Christmas Day, when they all made a great fuss of her, imploring her to relax while they fetched and carried and did everything for her.
Flora wanted a biscuit, but there were none; instead she settled back to look at the notebook, this little piece of her mother, years on.
It gave off a faint smell, like a concentrated essence of the kitchen: a little grease, some flour; simply home, built up like a patina across the years, from tiny fingers sticky and desperate to touch the jam (“HOT! HOT! HOT!” Flora could faintly hear the echo of her mother’s voice shouting at them all as they jabbered and pushed to get closer to the jewel-colored liquid she stirred in a huge vat for days in the autumn, filling jars and sending them out to the village fair, the kirk harvest festival, and the old and infirm anywhere). She sipped her tea and turned to the first page.
The first thing she saw was a note in her father’s cramped handwriting, the ink faded now. Love you, Annie, it said. Hope you write some lovely things here. And it was dated, faintly, August ’78, which meant it must have been around her mother’s birthday.
Flora squinted at it. It was a notebook—a handsome one—not a recipe book. Why had it turned into a recipe book? What else would her mother have written in there? She smiled as she thought about her father, never the most imaginative of gift givers. But perhaps her mother had loved it anyway.
She turned the page. All the recipes had her mother’s funny little titles and annotations. Here was vegetable broth. As soon as she saw it, she could conjure up the sharp smell of the boiling stock her mother made on a Sunday after the roast; the thick, rich soup that resulted; the steamed-up windows of the farmhouse when she came back from school on dark winter Monday evenings, the warm room lit up and cozy as she sat and did her homework, complaining mightily that all the boys fancied Lorna MacLeod, which they did, while her brothers set the table and her mother refilled her teacup, and Flora’s too, and busied herself at the stove.
Over another page and it was another soup recipe, oxtail this time, but the writing was different. With a start, Flora recognized her granny Maud’s hand—Maud was long dead now, a northern witch, like her mother—a beautiful copperplate inscribed in fountain pen. At the top she’d written, in small flowing letters, a Gaelic phrase Flora couldn’t decipher straightaway; she had to fetch the old dictionary from the sitting room before she could figure it out: It will be of the longest time . . . until it is as good as mine.
There was something about that simple, gentle phrase that made Flora smile. As she pulled her legs up under herself—the weather had turned, as it always did, and now rain was slamming gently against the windows—Bramble looked up, then struggled to his feet and limped carefully across the room. He flopped his head and promptly fell back to sleep again.
“I hope this is you recovering, and not just being a lazy arse,” murmured Flora.
She didn’t remember Granny Maud that well, as by the time Flora had come along, she’d had rather enough grandchildren and was starting to slow down quite a lot. She’d come and help Annie shell peas and they’d drink tea and gossip in Gaelic, which Flora couldn’t follow, and occasionally Granny would make a slightly sarcastic remark about Flora having her head stuck in a book, which would make Annie narrow her eyes a little, and the matter would be dropped.
It had been, though, a straightforward loving relationship, Flora thought. Annie, fourth of Granny’s seven living children, had simply left school at seventeen and married Flora’s dad the next day, in a kirk service, wearing a plain white cotton shift, barely a wedding dress at all.
Flora remembered when her friend Lesley had gotten married. Her mother had practically begged to attend, and had swooned over Lesley’s empire antique lace and narrow train and wildflower bouquet, even as Flora and Lorna had rolled their eyes and gotten drunk quietly in a corner and shown the English friends of Lesley’s nervous-looking new husband how to dance like island girls.
It would have been nice, Flora knew, if she could have gotten married before she lost her mother. She’d probably have liked that. She’d have liked that so very much. She hadn’t really thought about marriage a great deal, only in the abstract, as something that might happen one day but was a long way off.
She wondered if her mother would have liked to have seen it.
Tears sprang to her eyes. Well. There was no point in crying about something that had never even happened, she told herself sternly, rubbing Bramble’s chin. There had been no wedding; no boyfriend had ever asked her, not even Hugh, and she hadn’t liked anyone enough to be more than slightly upset when they didn’t. That was just how life was. She turned the page quickly.
As she did so, engrossed in the hard-to-make-out spidery handwriting, with its ink smudges, food spots, and random Gaelic words interspersed with the English text (not to mention the strange old imperial measurements she had never even heard of—what the hell was a “gill”?), she heard a noise at the door.
She looked up, startled. Her dad was standing there, looking like he’d seen a ghost. Surprised, she let the huge enamel cup drop from her fingers, and they both watched it rattle to the floor, making the most extraordinary noise.
“Dad . . .”
“Jesus,” he said, putting his hand to his chest. “Sorry, love. Sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I didn’t . . . I just . . . You look so like her. You just look so like her sitting there. Sorry.”
Flora had jumped up to get a cloth from the sink, where it was soaking in bleach. She mopped up the spilled tea.
“I was just . . .”
Her father shook his head. “Sorry, lass, sorry. I got . . . I just got a shock.”
“Shall I put the kettle on?”
He smiled. “That’s exactly what she’d have said if I’d seen a ghost.”
There was a pause. He looked around the kitchen, and his eyes lit up.
“Oh, well look at that,” he said. “Oh, Flora.”
Flora felt a bit irritated. She didn’t particularly want praise for scrubbing a floor.
“You’ve made it so much better.”
“Well, don’t mess it up again,” she said, her voice coming out harsher than she’d intended.
“Oh . . . no. You filled up the tea bin!”
“I did.”
“It’s . . .” He shook his head. “You know, I hadn’t really noticed how disorderly everything was.”
“Well, maybe try and keep it straight now?”
“Aye . . . aye,” he said. “I’ll tell the boys. I just came back to get my . . .” He looked confused.
“What?” said Flora, worried. The last thing she needed now was him getting forgetful.
“My . . . my . . .”
“Stick? Sandwiches?”
She made him his tea as the lazy old dogs nudged around him.
“Ach, no,” he said, smiling. “I thought you might still be out. I thought I might have a wee nap.”
Flora smiled.
“Of course you can have a nap, for God’s sake; you’ve been up since five!”
“I might just . . .”