They all sat down eventually round the huge table. Joel didn’t say very much. Flora thought he was horrified by their rough ways.
In fact, although he had spent time with plenty of families as a child, he hadn’t gotten to know any of them well. He’d been always passed on—the smart little closed-up boy who wasn’t cute or smiley or friendly or appealing enough ever to be adopted; who was so difficult to reach; who said curious things; who beat the older children in every exam they ever took and every book they ever read.
By the time Dr. Philippoussis had spotted his obvious fierce intelligence and found him a place in a good school with a sympathetic teacher who provided him with all the books he could read and fed his hunger for study and learning, he was a teenager, and nobody wants a teenage boy around the place, not really. He had won a scholarship to boarding school, and with a sigh of relief, social services had washed its hands of him.
He found his current situation unnerving. Flora’s family talked so much, yammering away as they grabbed sandwiches and drank endless cups of tea. Joel kept his diet very tightly controlled; he never ate bacon sandwiches, though it had nothing to do with any religion—he’d been brought up by a ragtag of different sects (evangelicals, Baptists, atheists) and had taken nothing from any of it. No, it was because they were made up of carbs and fat, two things he had attempted to banish from his diet forever, to keep himself fit and healthy and one step ahead of the baying pack he somehow always felt right on his heels. He couldn’t have told you who the baying pack was. He just always knew it was there.
He took a tentative bite of his sandwich. That was another thing he was wary of: Don’t leave your food for a second. Someone would take it. Eat when you could.
He blinked. This kept happening. He didn’t know anything about catering or running a business. But he knew quite a lot about high-quality food: expensive client dinners, vast amounts of money spent at hot new restaurants. And he could tell one thing: this stuff was miles ahead. Absolutely miles. The bread might have been yesterday’s, toasted, but its astonishing qualities showed through. The crispy, salty bacon; the chipped enamel mugs of strong tea: you could sell this absolutely anywhere. Flora was going to be fine. He looked at her, effortlessly dishing up seconds to a huge, quiet boy who must be yet another brother—how many were there? This, he thought, was where she could absolutely shine.
And as he watched the laughing, noisy, teasing clan and concentrated on his sandwich while a plethora of incomprehensible conversations about cattle feed and yields and bloody cheese went on over his head, he realized, to his surprise, looking down, that there was a small shape scrambling up onto his lap; Agot had wandered over to him completely unselfconsciously and was crawling up his leg.
“Agot, get down,” said Flora when she saw her.
Agot pouted.
“I YIKE MAN,” she said defiantly, scattering crumbs from her sandwich all over his trousers and the floor.
“Sorry,” said Innes. “Agot, get down.”
Joel had frozen. He wasn’t used to children, didn’t have the faintest clue what to do.
“I’S NOT GET DOWN,” said Agot, offering Joel a piece of her toast.
“It’s fine,” said Joel, taking the toast and putting it on the table. Everyone else visibly relaxed. Be normal, he told himself. This is completely normal. Families are totally normal. It’s you who’s weird.
And although it was an unfamiliar sensation, it was not, he realized, at all unpleasant. The child’s chubby little legs kicked out in front of her as she made herself comfortable; she smelled nice too, of toast, and a faintly familiar shampoo, and sleep.
“AHHH, SAMWIDGE,” she said happily, taking a large bite and causing a spot of grease to land on his now basically ruined trousers. Flora winced, but when she caught Joel’s eye, she realized he was smiling.
“This is,” he said, “a pretty amazing sandwich.”
He looked at Fintan.
“You’re going to do this, you know. I really think you are.”
Fintan blinked.
“Thanks!”
Joel glanced at his watch.
“I have a flight to catch,” he said.
Flora nodded.
“I know. And I’d better get to it too. Come on, Agot, let’s go put you back to bed.”
“I’S NOT TIRED!”
Joel made to stand up, and Agot immediately flung her arms around his neck.
“MAN NOT GO!”
“Sorry,” said Flora. “Agot! Stop that!”
“NOT GO BED!”
Joel carefully disentangled Agot’s arms from round his neck and put her down on the floor. Flora watched him, feeling ludicrous at how much she wanted to do exactly what Agot had just done: throw her arms around him and see that gentle look in his eyes.
No. She didn’t want a gentle look in his eyes. Not at all. She breathed in and out. She had to get a grip. She had to.
“NO GOING TO BED!”
No, thought Flora. None of them were.
Chapter Twenty-nine
After that, things moved with extraordinary speed. Flora had briefly wondered, with a bittersweet pang, whether Joel would come back up to deal with the paperwork, but of course it was far beneath him.
Within weeks, everything was organized. New equipment arrived every day, along with very stern people from the Food Health and Safety Executive, who inspected everything, demanded changes, and then came back again to check them. Fintan worked day and night to get everything in the dairy regulation and utterly gleaming.
All of Colton’s old staff were sent over to help, even as he went on a huge recruitment drive in the village, offering decent wages and flexible working hours at the Rock just to get everything moving. Lorna held a competition for the schoolchildren to design a logo; an extremely happy cow standing in a field with the pale sea behind it won the day. Agot scowled furiously when the triumphant child had his photo taken for the Island Times, and refused to appear alongside him, instead hurling herself on the ground and kicking her little boots against the cobblestones.
Flora got in touch with some of the girls she’d been at school with and asked them if they wanted a bit of work, or if they knew anyone who did. Which was how they got a couple of bonnie girls, Isla and Iona, back from the mainland for the summer, all cheery and ready to work.
She also recruited Mrs. Laird, who “did” for the doctor and the vicar, but who was also, Fintan happened to know, the best bread maker on the island.
“There were a lot of ladies popping by for Dad,” he told a horrified Flora. “She was by far the best baker, though.”
“You didn’t let them do that!”
“We did! They brought over a lot of frozen stews. Although we mostly just stuck to sausages.”
“I wondered how we’d managed to acquire nineteen new casserole dishes.”
“Hmph,” said Fintan.
“I hope you didn’t string Mrs. Laird along.”
But it was true, she did make wonderful bread, bannocks, and bridies.