Stupid Bugglas was in the way again. If there was one thing Agot really hated, it was how distracted her beloved uncle Joel had gotten ever since the baby had arrived. Even when Joel had been on the outs with various other members of her family, Agot had adored him from the get-go, which Joel found slightly alarming. He didn’t really know how to talk to children. This was 100 percent what Agot liked about him. He treated her entirely like the small adult she fully believed herself to be.
This was one of the long number of things Douglas had completely ruined, in Agot’s eyes. Uncle Joel was always staring at the stupid baby, or picking up the stupid baby, or asking her if she’d seen what the stupid baby could do now. The things the baby couldn’t do—dance, play shinny, sit up for a tea party, look at pictures of ice-skaters, watch ice-skating on television, talk about ice-skating, and pester her father to watch old Torvill and Dean videos and skate about the kitchen floor on clean dishcloths, pretending to be an ice-skater, much to the annoyance of anyone else trying to get anything done or anyone who didn’t want Boléro in their heads for the next six months—were huge. Agot was trying to shout louder to get them to pay her some attention, but it didn’t seem to be working.
Seeing him cooing over the stupid baby the next day in the kitchen gave her an idea. She went through to where Flora was squinting at her phone. Everyone looked all day at their phones, then if she wanted to do it they said, “No, no phones for you, Agot,” even though if it was bad, why did they do it all day, and then they would say, “Agot, you are being too noisy,” and she would absolutely not be noisy if she had a phone. Why was everyone so stupid? And why was Christmas so far away? When you are five, four weeks is forever.
“Auntie Flora,” she said conversationally.
“Darling,” said Flora, who had been looking at flour sourcing and wondering why the hell Fintan wasn’t.
“I think,” said Agot seriously, “I think Uncle Joel does not love us anymore.”
“Do you?” said Flora.
She glanced above Agot’s head and saw Joel dancing with the baby in the kitchen, little Douglas giggling and reaching up his little fingers. It was a pretty sight.
“What makes you think that?”
“Because it is true.” Agot sighed in a world-weary fashion. “He loves that baby now.”
“I think it’s possible to love more than one person at once,” said Flora.
Agot frowned. “One time,” she said, “I dropped Big Fox and Daisy Duck and Jamford into a puddle at the same time, because it was a wet, wet, wet day.”
Jamford was a small stuffed cow she dragged along, the origin of whose name was lost in the mists of time.
“And,” she said darkly, “I picked up Jamford first.”
Flora thought about that. “Well, yes, I can see that,” she said. “But you picked up Big Fox and Daisy Duck next, right?”
Agot shook her head solemnly. “No,” she said. “Jamford was very muddy, so I had to fix him.”
“And you left Big Fox and Daisy Duck in the mud?”
She shrugged. “Oh, maybe Daddy got them.”
Flora looked at her. “I don’t think Uncle Joel would leave you in the mud,” she said.
“Not me, silly,” said Agot. “You!”
Then she clambered up in Flora’s lap.
“Hmm hmm hmm, oh, look, a phone,” she said, repeating herself and getting gradually louder until Flora handed it over. Agot sat back with a contented sigh, while Flora glanced over at Joel, who had to be in London that night and was patently unhappy about it.
BACK AT THE Seaside Kitchen, Iona had filled her Instagram feed with beautiful shots of the previous night to go with all the lovely pics she already had of the café. She wasn’t getting much traction, and everyone else was getting annoyed with her, as she insisted on lining up every single thing perfectly, buying so many fairy lights their electricity bill was going up, and using a ruler to straighten the edges of her Battenberg cake to make sure it looked absolutely perfect in the photographs.
She had lobbied Flora to buy new artsy-looking cake stands, which Flora was dead set against—it was hard enough to keep the lights on through the winter as it was. And now old Mrs. McClocherty was waiting to get served at the till, and Mrs. Barr behind her, who was having to deal with the wait for cake by listening to an exhaustive list of Mrs. McClocherty’s latest medical symptoms.
Iona reflected that she needed something better than this.
The success of the dinner somehow softened the atmosphere in the kitchen. And Gaspard was softening too to what was available on the island. He pulled in a huge side of locally smoked salmon one afternoon to experiment with canapés and insisted they all try a bit.
“You have to learn,” said Gaspard. “Only have what is good.”
“Won’t that make you very expensive?” asked Isla shyly.
He glanced at her. “Yes,” he said. “You pay sheet you get sheet, okay? We must get out and see the terroir.”
“I don’t know what that is,” said Isla. “But the Seaside Kitchen has millionaire’s shortbread.”
Gaspard snorted loudly.
“Can I come?” Konstantin asked.
“You are pot boy. Is not necessary for you. Scrub pot cupboard, please.”
But Konstantin had looked so pained and sad that Gaspard relented, and he’d practically bounded upstairs to grab an extremely expensive-looking coat and scarf and his ridiculous dog.
They strode down the long road to the village. It was snowing, the sky gray and low and the fresh flakes bouncing into their faces. Bjårk was happily stamping his massive paws in and out of frozen puddles that cracked every time and surprised him anew every time. Konstantin was like a teenager, his long legs stretching out the journey, as the snow finally fell away and the breeze dropped and a watery winter sunlight appeared. He cracked as many puddles as Bjårk did, covering a lot of ground as if just delighted to be out in the open air, as indeed he was.
Isla was snuggled in her new teddy bear coat. Konstantin had frowned when he’d run into her at the kitchen door.
“You look like a bear,” he’d said.
“So?” said Isla, who was nervous and not paying attention and not really in the mood to go out in the freezing cold with a temperamental chef and a spoiled man-boy. Kerry and Tam were getting to stay in and do prep in the nice warm kitchen, and she’d much rather be with them, however many dirty looks Kerry shot her.
“So you are buyer for the Seaside Kitchen,” said Gaspard.
“I don’t need to be the buyer,” said Isla. “I know exactly where to get everything from. Bread from Mrs. Laird, dairy from Fintan and Innes, smoked fish from Linhorn, and fresh fish from right outside my front door.”
“Well, then you must show me, and we can make sure together. It is important for a kitchen to understand provenance.”
Near the entrance to the farm, they were stopped in their tracks by a loud voice.
“You are a bad dog!”
“Hé hé,” said Konstantin. “I don’t think he is a bad dog.”
Agot came up to his knees. “He broke my skating rink!”
Everyone looked at the muddy, icy puddle in which Bjårk was standing.
“I am going to the ’limpics and now I cannot practice.”
“You’re going to the Olympics to ice-skate?”
“Yes!”
“This is Fintan’s niece, Agot,” said Isla. “Agot, this is Konstantin. He works at Colton’s hotel and this is his dog, Bjårk Bjårkensson.”
Agot looked at Bjårk with undisguised dislike. “I don’t like his dog.”
Konstantin looked at her, insulted. “That’s a puddle, not an ice rink.”
There was a pause. Then Agot turned tail and rushed back to the farmhouse, bawling her eyes out.
“Well done,” said Isla crossly. “She’s five. And your boss’s niece.”
“Well, she should have better manners,” said Konstantin, going slightly pink.
“So should you! She’s a child!”
“I am now concerned we will be banned from their dairy,” said Gaspard. “You—keep your mouth shut.”
Flora came down to meet them, holding hands with a howling Agot. Konstantin immediately went forward to meet them.
“I am very sorry,” he said, crouching down in front of the child, although he still sounded sullen. “My dog should not have broken your ice rink.”
“That’s because he’s a very bad dog,” said Agot, and Konstantin bit his lip to stop himself saying any more and straightened up again.
“Okay,” said Flora. “Is that it?”
“I am not sure,” said Isla to Flora quietly, as they headed up toward the dairy, “which one of them is more spoiled.”
And Flora would normally have leaped to defend her family. But today, with Douglas being fretful because his dad was away, she just laughed. It had been a challenging day. The baby had grizzled and growled, and she had found herself jealous of Joel sitting on a plane, both hands free, drinking a cup of coffee, reading the paper, even though she knew he didn’t want to go and sit in meetings, didn’t want to leave them. But the day stretched ahead, and she’d been up three times in the night and her brain was a fog, and there was so much laundry to be done but she couldn’t put the baby down. Sharing a laugh with Isla was definitely an improvement.