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.
Chapter 4
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.”