It happened very quickly. Lorna turned on hearing her name, but it wasn’t—was never, it seemed—the voice she wanted to hear her name from at all, and she was scanning the crowd even as Inge-Britt was asking her to help.
Ten-foot Christmas trees, even wrapped in netting, are heavy, unwieldy things, hard to get a grasp on, even if you are a tall, glamorous Icelandic girl.
“Lorna!” Inge-Britt yelled, but Lorna was still searching the mass of faces, looking for the one pair of dark eyes she could drown in, looking for that shaggy black hair, always in need of a haircut, that rangy frame, the golden skin . . .
The tree fell straight over, heading directly for little Ash, whose damaged leg (and wide-eyed demeanor) meant he wasn’t always as quick off the mark as he could have been.
It happened as if in slow motion: Isla looking on in concern as the tree toppled out of Inge-Britt’s arms toward the little boy, until, like a flash, the tall blond man beside her dived underneath it and pushed the boy out of the way and crashed onto the cold port tarmac, with a tree crashing down on his broad back.
“OH MY GOD.” Lorna dashed down at once. “I wasn’t . . .”
“I thought you’d heard me,” said Inge-Britt, as they both knelt down in front of the stunned Konstantin. Inge-Britt shot Lorna a look.
“Are you all right?” said Isla softly, sitting down on his other side.
Konstantin blinked at her. “This is cold and wet,” he said. “Even more than everything is here already.”
Ash was looking at the man astounded, as Saif rushed forward to pick him up. Lorna couldn’t look him in the eye in case she found him blaming her for nearly whacking Ash on the head with a Christmas tree.
“Ash, I told you to stay out of the way,” he said gently into the boy’s ear, but making sure he didn’t raise his voice or sound cross. How Lorna loved his voice.
“Do you want to get up?” said Isla to Konstantin. “Or are you quite comfortable?”
“It’s all relative,” said Konstantin, as Saif rushed over to him to make sure he was all right, which, apart from some gravel in his hands and some tears to his surprisingly expensive raincoat, he was.
“Thank you,” muttered Saif gravely. “Thank you for saving my boy.”
Konstantin looked up at the tree, as if surprised at himself. “You’re welcome. I didn’t even realize I’d done it until I had.”
“Well, you are brave,” said Saif, cleaning off Konstantin’s hand with an antiseptic wipe.
“Ouch, that stings,” said Konstantin. “So now I think that I am not.”
“Is this a cut filled with superglue?”
“Can we talk about that later?”
“Here,” said Flora. “Have some free hot chocolate for being heroic.”
“Can I have some free hot chocolate?” said Ash.
“You were antiheroic!” protested Flora. “You got in the way of the trees!”
“Oh,” said Ash, crestfallen.
“Of course you can,” said Flora, feeling guilty.
“I’M SORRY,” SAID Lorna, as Saif carried her two trees up the hill, with Ash helping from the back. He didn’t say anything. It was very difficult when the boys were with them.
“You didn’t do anything,” he said in his usual calm way, but his mind was far away. There was a reason he had been avoiding Lorna—deliberately avoiding her. For months. He knew it was cruel and unfair, but he didn’t know how to tell her, because he didn’t know what to tell her.
After querying the letter, he had received word through a back channel in the Home Office that there was some chatter and to stand by, and he could think of little else. His wife had now been missing for nearly three years. It was impossible to focus on the situation with his wife and Lorna, as well as a highly demanding job as the island’s only doctor and being a single father to his two sons. And all the time having to stand by. He couldn’t give heart space to Lorna, because he knew if he did, she would consume him utterly, and he couldn’t—he couldn’t let that happen. He could barely even look at her.
He can barely even look at me, thought Lorna, her heart aching.
A whole group headed off to the Harbour’s Rest for lunch, and Konstantin amazed himself that he noticed all the things Gaspard would not have stood for in his kitchen, how far below the standards of the Rock it fell. He genuinely was surprised at himself.
Isla had slipped away to take her mother a tree: a little sweet three-footer that could sit on top of the nest of tables in the good room.
Her mother sniffed. “Well, that’s just going to shed, isn’t it?”
“But it looks so pretty,” said Isla. “And it smells good too.”
“I don’t know why I bother,” said Vera, smiling sadly. “Are you really working Christmas Day?”
Isla owned that she was, if they got the bookings.
“Well, Flora’s got you run ragged, I see,” said Vera. “I never saw you as a kitchen maid, Isla.”
“I’m not!” said Isla, stung. “Gaspard is teaching me loads.”
“That Frenchman! I saw him in the Harbour’s Rest. He looks filthy.”
Isla bit her lip.
“And those tattoos! I don’t like the look of him.”
Vera didn’t like the look of many people, though.
“You’ll come, though,” said Isla, trying to build bridges. “Can’t you bring a friend? I can book you in. It can be my Christmas present to you.”
“Sitting in a strange hotel eating Christmas lunch on my own? No thank you,” said Vera, who had fallen out with her two sisters for reasons that were misty in the memory, possibly even in Vera’s memory too, but it meant Isla hadn’t even seen her cousins for six years.
“Well, maybe you’ll change your mind,” said Isla. “I’m heading back up.”
“Again?”
“We’re doing a dinner service. It’s going to the old folks’ home. You could go and help serve it if you like. We’re doing something new, I think it’s like a kind of French cake. You’d like it.”
Vera sniffed again. “I doubt it,” she said. “And it’s Escape to the Sun tonight on channel four.”
And for a rebellious second, Isla really, really wished she would.