Flora caught up with Fintan and they walked through the lobby of the Rock hotel. It had felt like it would take forever to get finished, but it was done: sound and warm and dry and very beautiful. And Christmassy, even though it was only November. The tree wouldn’t arrive for a few weeks, but the staff had already put up the great scalloped green hanging boughs tied up with tartan ribbon, their scent filling the air. There were bowls full of oranges studded with cinnamon cloves, the great log fire at the entrance was lit, and gentle music was playing in the background.
Originally a large mansion built for a wealthy local family, the Rock had been converted by the brash American developer Colton Rogers, with absolutely no expense spared. There was also no taste spared, in terms of what an American thought a Scottish hotel was supposed to look like, which meant tartan carpets, lots of open fires, muskets and giant stag heads on the walls, and a library full of old hardback books that had been bought from an aristocratic book dealer down Kirrinfief way, without Colton reading a single word of any of them.
It was a little kitsch, maybe, but Flora couldn’t help admitting to herself that she rather loved it. It was just so warm and cozy all the time, which in the winter on Mure meant a lot. And being done up for Christmas put it in its absolute prime.
There was underfloor heating, towel warmers filled with fluffy towels, and great deep tubs in the bathrooms, and the hot water never seemed to run out. The kitchen was pristine and full of the latest equipment, Flora noticed enviably, ready to churn out bread and pastries, high teas and fresh lobster, buttery scones and creamy Cullen skink, sumptuous cranachan. And behind the bar, forty-five different types of whisky waited tantalizingly, together with a menu of delicious local cocktails.
Flora and Fintan looked at each other. Flora was excited by all the possibilities; Fintan’s shoulders were slumped, his entire countenance a mask of misery and defeatism.
“It’s never going to pay its way in a billion years,” said Fintan bitterly. “We should just get rid of it.
“Colton didn’t leave me a fortune,” he went on anxiously. “He just left me this place. We’d tear through the money in five minutes.”
Colton had donated the bulk of his considerable fortune to medical research; he’d left the hotel and his house to Fintan, but Fintan couldn’t bear to live in the vast echoing house by himself, so Joel and Flora were renting it, while Fintan stayed back at the farmhouse.
“And I don’t know how to run a hotel! I don’t even know what VAT is!”
“It’s like a very complicated puzzle the government sets you for fun, but if you get it wrong you go to jail,” said Flora, but Fintan wasn’t listening.
“I already can’t get staff! And how am I going to tell them what to do? What if the people here want to leave because they hate me? What if nobody comes? How much would we have to charge? I should sell it. I should sell this whole place.”
Flora stood, warming her hands in front of the fire. There was a skeleton staff, all of whom seemed great. They just needed a chef and a bit of help in the kitchen. Fintan was panicking.
“But it’s all Colton’s,” said Flora softly. “It was his dream. It’s exactly how he wanted it.”
Flora eyed the huge antlered stag head above the fireplace and reflected that, for better or worse, it certainly was that.
He sighed. “It’s all that’s left of him. How could I sell that?”
His voice was anguished. Flora didn’t know what to say.
“Well, how would you feel if you did sell it?” she tried gently.
“We met for the first time on the lawn,” said Fintan bitterly. He now appeared to have completely changed his mind about selling it and was somehow blaming Flora for implying it. “We got married out there, or did you forget?”
Flora stayed silent. She understood Fintan’s bitterness and grief. She had just slightly hoped that he might get a bit more excited about moving forward, find energy in working on the new project, in making it as wonderful as Colton always hoped it would be.
Fintan, however, was still fuming at the world, specifically the Rock hotel section of it, the amazing boutique property that was now, technically, his to do as he liked with. To most people, Flora reflected, a little glumly, it would have been a wonderful legacy. But Fintan seemed determined to have none of it.
She tried to help. “We’ll just need to charge a lot of money,” said Flora. “Get the right people in.”
“Rich nobbers.”
Flora shrugged. “There are plenty of nice rich nobbers.”
“Are there, though?” said Fintan, looking cross.
“Well, you married one for starters.”
“Yes, but he . . . he was a one-off.”
Flora smiled sympathetically as they walked on to the dining room, which had cozy soft leather banquettes at the windows, comfortable tweed chairs, and wide dark oak flooring. There was paneling along one wall with expensive, terrible oil paintings of stags and Bonnie Prince Charlie. It was completely empty and still.
Flora looked around. “So many tables,” she said, half to herself. The Seaside Kitchen had twelve tables, at least two of which were permanently occupied by knitters who worked with the Fair Isle companies. Then there was the mums and babies group who spent copiously on the organic purees she put together each morning with whatever she had on hand, plus a long line of extremely hungry fishermen, farmers, hikers, bird-watchers, and holidaymakers who wanted sausage rolls and haggis pies and hot soup. She knew her clientele back to front and was fond of all of them. That she could manage. But this . . . even though it was technically a boutique hotel, it was still an awful lot of doing. Was Fintan up to it?
As if hearing her thoughts, Fintan let out a great sigh. “All I ever wanted to do was make cheese.”
Flora looked at him. His handsome face was so tired; he’d lost too much weight. He was still in the throes of such a strong grief.
It made her vow to appreciate her own situation more. Especially when she remembered how much she’d worried about Douglas before he’d arrived. And after. She had been told by the other mums she met around the place that this wasn’t uncommon at all. People who desperately wanted to be parents, who had fantasies about how perfect it was all going to be, had a very difficult time of it, when their baby wouldn’t sleep or eat, or wasn’t the perfect heavenly dream they’d expected or read about in magazines or looked at in advertisements. And new mums didn’t lose their baby weight by “running about after the baby” like celebrities said they did. Was it just possible, she’d heard one mother muse, that those celebrities might in fact be talking out of the cracks of their arses?
Flora had by no means lost her baby weight but was filing it very far down on her list of “Current Things to Worry About.” He wouldn’t mention it in a million years, not being an idiot, but Joel thought it suited her; it made her so pretty and rounded and soft.
With Joel, there had been some worry. But as with some reluctant parents in cases of accidental pregnancies, or those who had slightly (or in Joel’s case, extremely) ambivalent fathers, the force of the extraordinary rush of love that babies brought with them could knock them over, take them completely by surprise, and Joel was the worst of the lot.
From the second Dougie had arrived, Joel had behaved like a man poleaxed by love. Flora complained he had never once appeared so gaga about her, but she didn’t really mind, she supposed. He had been so worried about whether he would take to parenthood—he had been a foster child, moved around from house to house, never once finding a home—that he had been mute and difficult and anxious all the way up to the birth itself (an unusually speedy process that Flora found increasingly difficult to remember anything about), but as soon as the squawking gawky, tiny, blood-, shit-, and goo-covered alien—or, counterpoint, the most beautiful miracle ever in the history of human existence—was placed on Flora’s stomach by the midwife, Joel had been hit by a lightning bolt.
And any ups and downs Flora felt after the birth—and there were absolutely loads of them, notably how it feels to become a mother when your own mother is no longer around to share it with you—were somehow balanced out by Joel’s extraordinary, all-encompassing love for the baby and for her; and finally, her doubts about whether he was, with his difficult past, capable of loving at all were set aside. She knew she was lucky. She didn’t even know where the resentment came from. So she ignored it, hoping it would go away. She was so lucky.
“I’M JUST SO miserable,” said Fintan again.
Flora looked at him. Time was running short. She’d hoped and hoped and hoped that he would perk up, come back to himself for long enough to consider taking the job on. But he was listless and sad and nothing could motivate him. If it was ever going to happen, she knew, there was only one person who could do it.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Well, I suppose I could help out a bit.”
“We’ve been through this! It’s called interfering.”
Flora gave him a big-sister look.
“And I thought you were on your fancy maternity leave.”
Flora chose to ignore him. “Look. You love doing all the food and stuff, right? That’s your area. Best of everything. We have a little money. And even if we lose it all, well, we never had any to start with, right?”
Fintan shrugged. “But this is Colton’s dream.”
“And his dream was to have the absolute best of everything, right?”
Fintan nodded.
“Well. You go do your part. Find the best chef, get the best local ingredients, make sure the food is amazing. Let me handle the rest.”
Fintan stared at her. His entire demeanor changed. Flora could tell he really didn’t want to accept, but also that he really, really needed to.
“Yeah, I’m not going to do much,” she said. “But I’ve got experience with hygiene regs, fire checks, all of that now. I can help you out when Joel has got Dougie.”
She didn’t dare even hint that she might quite like having a project while Joel and Dougie were carrying on their massive love affair.
They both looked around. The dining room still seemed huge. But Fintan’s face showed something she hadn’t seen for a long time: a tiny bit of hope.
So it was that Flora came to be interviewing her own staff at the Seaside Kitchen. They were doing a brilliant job during her maternity leave and the place was as bustling and jolly as ever, she observed, not without a touch of envy, and young Malik, who’d been drafted in to help, seemed competent and popular too.
Flora sat the girls down.
“I feel like Paul Hollywood,” she grumbled. “Not necessarily in the good way.”
The girls looked at her expectantly, Iona cheerful, Isla terrified. Flora smiled encouragingly.
“The Rock needs kitchen staff, and the Seaside Kitchen needs looking after just as normal till I get back.”
Iona frowned. “By ‘looking after,’ do you mean making too many giant custard creams and then secretly eating them by yourself by the cold storage?”
“Uhm, no,” said Flora, blushing.
“Do you mean going behind the larder to snog your boyfriend?”
“I . . . I do not mean that,” said Flora, biting her lip a bit. “And this is insubordination.”
“Well, not if I’m going to be management. Is Isla going to be management too?”
“I think I’m going to regret this,” said Flora. They were just young girls, after all. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.
“You were right about the big custard creams, though,” mused Iona. “We should do more. Bourbon creams and jam sandwiches, people loved them, and they’re easy to do, you just need the molds. Markup’s good. Oh! And pumpkin spice.”
“What?” said Flora, carefully pretending she knew what Iona meant.
“We need to get pumpkin spice.”
“Uhm, what is that?”
Iona looked unsure for a moment. “I don’t know exactly. But it’s what you have to have on your coffee this time of year. Instagram says so.”
Flora blinked. “Instagram?”
“Yeah. You have your pumpkin spice latte and post it on Instagram.”
“And it makes your coffee taste of pumpkin?”
“I don’t know.” Iona started scrolling through her phone. “It’s just what everyone’s doing, that’s all. And people take pictures of the biscuits.”
“Do they?”
Flora had noticed, in the last year or so, people taking pictures of themselves more and more outside the pretty pale-gray-painted frontage of the little harbor café but hadn’t thought much of it; customers were customers, and tourists did tourist stuff, and even if these days it meant all of them lining up in the exact same angle to take exactly the same photograph, well, she didn’t really think about that very much.
“We need an Instagram page.”
Iona was quite pink in the face now, and Flora realized she was entirely serious and also that she’d thought about this a lot and hadn’t just been cutting sandwiches the whole time.
“We need to show off how lovely it is here and have people come in and link and make sure that tourists come even if it’s just to see us. And—”
Flora frowned. “Hang on . . . have you been having these brilliant ideas all this time?”
Iona looked perturbed and didn’t say anything.
“Am I a terrible boss who never listens to anything?”
“You never asked,” said Iona.
This wasn’t at all the way Flora had predicted the morning turning out.
“Also, I think we should do organic baby food for the mothers group. The markup is—”
“Okay, okay, you’ve got the Seaside Kitchen,” said Flora, smiling. “Just turn us into millionaires by Christmas, please.”
She looked at Isla, who was standing there quietly.
“Are you happy to come up to the big house?” she said. “I know it’s not as glamorous a job, but there’s lots of opportunity to learn in a bigger kitchen, try out different skills, cooking as well as baking . . .”
“Does she have to wash pots?” said Iona.
“Everyone has to wash pots,” said Flora. “That’s how small businesses work.”
Isla looked at Iona a bit sadly. “It’ll be hard to be separated,” she said quietly. In fact, she was gutted to be leaving her best friend. She didn’t like things changing. She wasn’t very good at it.
“You’ll be great,” said Flora.
“I don’t know if I have good ideas like Iona.”
“That’s not really how you should approach a job interview!” said Flora, then, when she saw Isla’s face fall, “I’m kidding! I’m kidding. I’ve seen you work your socks off here for three years. I know how good you are. I’m lucky to have you both and you’re both getting raises.”
“And a marketing budget,” said Iona.
“Iona!” said Flora. “I am intensely cross with you for not telling me all this before.”
“Take it up with management,” said cheeky Iona. “Oh no, that appears to be me!”
Flora shook her head. “Okay, Isla,” she said. “You come with me. I’ll talk you through it up at the hotel. And the calls have already gone out for other staff. It’s going to be fun!”
Isla was already working out what to tell her mum.