“It’s like . . . I’ve found something satisfying. Something that really and truly makes me happy. Finally.”
“What are you two chittering about?” said Innes. “Also, you’re a total freak, Flora.”
“Shut up,” said Flora. “You’re just jealous.”
“That you kissed a fish? Yeah, right.”
“It’s a mammal, actually, Captain Ignorant.”
“It’s a mammal, actually, Captain Ignorant,” repeated Innes annoyingly.
“I thought having a child would make you grow up.”
“Did you?”
He grabbed a few bottles of the local ale from the fridge and headed back to his farmer mates.
“And Innes,” said Flora. “What’s he going to do? After Dad, it was always going to be Innes’s farm. And God, what will we do with Hamish?”
“Hamish,” said Fintan, “will always be fine.”
They looked over to the corner where he was sitting, bursting almost comically out of his shirt. He looked too large for the room and was glumly watching the women, some of whom had started to dance.
“Nobody has to go anywhere. Nobody has to move,” said Fintan. “And our future . . . It could be anything with Colton. There’s no future here, you know it.”
“Hmm,” said Flora.
“I mean, with new things . . . It could be amazing. But the farming—we can’t compete, we really can’t. With cheap milk from superfarms. And transporting those animals; you know what that does to our profits.”
Flora nodded.
“It’s just a long, slow decline . . . you know it, Innes knows it. Unless we reinvent ourselves.”
“But this is MacKenzie land,” she said. “And it has been for such a long time. Such a very long time.”
“I know,” he said. “We need to pick our moment. Let’s feed up Dad.”
Flora smiled.
“On it,” she said.
She was dishing up some vol-au-vents that Isla and Iona had made after studying the recipe book and deciding on balance not just to gather wild mushrooms from the hedgerows and hope for the best, when a tall figure marched into the kitchen. Flora looked up. It was Jan, and she looked utterly furious.
“Oh good, you,” said Flora. “Um, this is my house, so if you’ve wandered up to be insulting, can I ask that you don’t? Or perhaps leave?”
She was slightly beyond trying to be nice and reasonable. It hadn’t really gotten her anywhere in the past.
“I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” said Jan.
“No, you have a bone to pick with Charlie,” explained Flora, too irritated to care about her tone of voice.
“Apparently you’ve been touching wildlife,” spat Jan. Her color was high and Flora wondered if she’d been drinking.
“Um, sorry?” said Flora. “Vol-au-vent?”
“You touched that whale.”
“Yes, I did,” said Flora. “It seemed scared and I wanted to make it less scared. So I just kind of patted it a bit.”
Jan shook her head.
“Unbelievable.”
“I wouldn’t pat a whale in a zoo,” protested Flora. “I just wanted to help.”
“You don’t interfere with the animal kingdom.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly that. You start messing about with animal populations, all hell will break loose. You don’t think we interfere enough in the food chain? That we haven’t already done terrible, terrible damage to almost every species on this earth, particularly whales?”
“I wasn’t harpooning it. I was soothing it.”
Jan rolled her eyes.
“Do you think so?”
“What would you have done? Left it on the beach to die?”
“That’s what you’re meant to do! Whales beach themselves for reasons we don’t understand. Maybe she was old! Maybe she was sick! How would you know?”
Flora felt her skin starting to prickle.
“Well, I don’t. But it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”
“Oh, people always think they know what the right thing is. They think they know. You sitting here in your posh farmhouse with your posh friends.”
The idea that MacKenzie Farm could be called posh by anybody who’d grown up in a First World country—and in the richest family on the island at that—riled Flora beyond belief, but she tried to keep calm.
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “But I couldn’t have watched it die.”
“No. Too busy showing off,” said Jan, which truly stung. Flora folded her arms.
Charlie wandered into the kitchen, his face breaking into a smile when he saw Flora.
“Hey,” he said.
Jan whipped around; he hadn’t previously noticed her.
“Jan,” he said.
Flora looked at them carefully. What the hell was going on?
“Um, I’ll just grab a couple of beers.” Charlie moved hastily to the fridge. “Good work today, Flora.”
Jan practically hissed in annoyance. Once Charlie had left again, she turned to Flora once more.
“And we’re back together,” she said. “So you can stop eyeing him up.”
Flora threw her hands up.
“Oh for God’s sake. I don’t care! There’s . . . there’s someone else.”
She couldn’t believe that of everyone she could have mentioned this to, it was Jan.
Jan looked at her.
“That American guy who thinks he’s it?” she almost spat. “Good luck with that. I heard he was halfway up that Icelandic barmaid.”
“Thank you,” said Flora pertly, resisting the urge to tell Jan to get the fuck out of her kitchen, and her house, and in fact her life forever.
Then she checked her phone again, but still nothing.
Chapter Forty-three
Joel had squash buddies, drinking colleagues, work acquaintances, and college frat-boy chums who held regular get-togethers all over the world.
He never spoke to a single one of them. Not about anything real.
“Where are the newspapers?” he said brusquely.
Margo looked up. He was being belligerent even by his standards, had been in the week or so since he’d gotten back from Scotland. On the other hand, he’d caught up on his work in record time, which meant a vast amount of overtime for her.
“Times, FT, Telegraph, and Economist,” she recited, looking at the lobby table. “What’s missing?”
Joel frowned.
“I made an addition to the periodicals list,” he said.
Margo checked her post.
“Oh yes, here it is,” she said. “Obviously comes out a day or two late.”
She stared at it.
“Island Times?”
“Just covers all our bases,” said Joel.
“Shall I put it out here?”
“No, uh, give it to me.” And Joel stalked off to his office with it tucked under his arm, Margo staring after him in astonishment.
How, thought Joel, how could he not have noticed Flora before? Because all he noticed in his office now was a huge Flora-size hole. He thought he saw her everywhere he went, her pale hair blowing in the wind. Except he was in a hermetically sealed office fifteen floors up, and the windows didn’t open, and the breeze never reached him.