His face grew grave. Now he was listening.
“He stays with me.”
“I’m not sure whether that will be possible.”
“You can’t banish me and not him! He behaves worse than I do!”
As if to prove this, Bjårk slinked over to the breakfast table and, disappointed to find it empty, let out an almighty fart and disappeared underneath, snuffling for crumbs. His large hind end started shaking the exquisite rococo legs of the gilt table, and Anders rushed over to steady it before it crashed onto the parquet. He rolled his eyes.
“Well, I’m not going anywhere,” said Konstantin.
“You aren’t today,” said Anders. “Your father has impounded your cars. But next week, I’m very much afraid that you are.”
Konstantin blinked. This couldn’t be happening. It just couldn’t.
Gradually, the meaning began to sink in.
“You took my phone?!”
Chapter 6
On the rare occasions Fintan had the funds and free time to go to Glasgow, he had absolutely loved it. He adored the wet, majestic city with its vast sandstone tenements, the glittering straight roads like he imagined they had in New York, and the expensive Merchant City district with its designer clothes shops and mysterious-looking restaurants.
He loved the people marching down from Buchanan Street, every shape and size, from every corner of the world. Students, tourists, businessmen. It felt like the center of the world. He loved the Glasgow girls, with their tans and long eyelashes and brightly colored clothes, often inappropriate for the weather, and who cared a jot for that? They yelled, they laughed, they looked like stunning tropical birds compared to the duller colors of home.
But most of all he loved the men. Or rather, a certain type of dangerous, slender, short-haired man, who might give you a glance here or there, or walk boldly up Sauchiehall Street hand in hand with his boyfriend. The city smelled of opportunity and excitement and sex, and Fintan had loved it ever since his mother had first brought him there, a wide-eyed and extremely confused fifteen-year-old, to do the Christmas shopping, loading everything into the little prop plane that would take them home again. It had been quite the adventure. They had eaten oysters at Rogano and looked at the beautiful Glasgow School of Art. Fintan had never seen anything like the variety of shops and things to buy and had been paralyzed by choice. His mum had bought him a discounted Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt and he had worn nothing else for a year. And he had sworn he would go back, be a student there, make his life in the city.
But he hadn’t. His mother had gotten sick and he’d had to look after her, and then the farm had really needed all hands on deck, and that dream had gotten away from him. Of course, he had discovered a new love of food and cooking when Flora came back from London. And then he’d met Colton and fallen in love, and everything had changed in the very best way, and for a short time he’d been the happiest man in the universe and firmly believed that everything had turned out for the best.
That had not lasted long.
And now here he was, trudging the damp shiny pavement of the old place again, the leaves wilting beneath his feet, umbrellas overhead, pipers trying to make money on the corners of the huge stone buildings. He didn’t raise his eyes to look in the extravagant shop windows; he didn’t glance at men walking into coffee shops who might glance back at him. He just thought over his life, of the ways he had and hadn’t taken, the other roads and other doors.
HE ARRIVED AT the employment agency in a very low mood indeed. Flora had suggested, at the beginning of the year when things were very bleak, that he take a little of Colton’s money and go lie on a beach somewhere, and he’d gone to Cancún by himself and drunk cocktails under a palm tree and cried himself sick. It had not been entirely successful.
People did keep telling him not to worry, that it took a long time. The problem was they’d say that with their heads tilted and a sad face on, and he knew they meant it and he knew they were concerned. But then they went on and bought one of Flora’s sausage rolls, or patted the next dog they saw, or went to the library and exchanged the latest novels. But he was still here, stuck in his misery. They did two minutes a day and thought they were being helpful, when it was all he could do to not snarl at them, to not feel enraged at the way they carried on with their totally normal lives, now made even more perfect by being able to mentally pat themselves on the back for doing a good deed to poor wee Fintan.
Grieving set his teeth on edge. And more than this, it was dull. So dull. To be missing Colton every second of every day, to wake up every morning and remember the whole sodding thing again, to know, because he’d been told, that it would never go away, not entirely, and that this was just how it was now, and oh, by the way, loads of people lived like this so he might as well get used to it.
He didn’t want to get used to it, he thought, kicking a pile of leaves with unusual savagery, so that a passing taxi driver eyed him warily. He didn’t want any of this. He didn’t want to be going to some lousy chef agency. He wanted to be lying in his and Colton’s vast bed in the mansion—before it turned into a hospital bed, before that bed was donated to a hospice on the mainland. Way, way back, even though it was only a year or so. He wanted them to be lying there, going through CVs, laughing at things together, then going to the kitchen to make French toast and those hideous vitamin things that Colton would gulp down with a wince and a shudder. Fintan had assumed it was because he was being Californian about things.
It wasn’t.
But no. He was out on his own, doing a job he didn’t even know if he was suited for. It was all right for Flora, he thought. Her life had worked out absolutely fine. She had her boyfriend, had a baby, had the house even. Fintan couldn’t bear to live in his mansion, had made Flora rent it. But he still resented them being there. He wanted it bricked up like a shrine, kept exactly how it had been when they had been in love, with nobody else walking through it, no babies laughing or fires crackling. Every time Flora changed something, he winced. Flora, aware of this, tried to tiptoe around the place, so as a result, nobody was particularly happy with the arrangement.
He arrived at the large red sandstone building. Happy Hospitality was the name of the company. He snorted to himself. Whatever.
Chapter 7
The young recruiting agent was pretty and enthusiastic.
“Well!” she said. “You are quite the conundrum! Lots of our chefs want to work with their own kitchen . . .”
Fintan stared ahead stonily, ignoring the cup of coffee the receptionist had brought him.
“. . . but the location is quite . . .”
“It’s far away, aye,” he said shortly. “It comes with accommodation.”
“Yes, but often people aren’t sure whether they want to uproot their entire lives . . .”
“Is that so?”
“But we do have a few people for you to meet!”
The woman smiled brightly and buzzed in the first person, a morose bearded man with a bright red nose and trembling hands. Fintan internally sighed. He had thought that recruiting a chef to a state-of-the-art kitchen, with a mandate to build a creative menu using whatever local ingredients he or she wanted to source, would be enticement enough. Mure had an embarrassment of riches in that regard: shellfish—oysters, lobsters, and crayfish—all pulled from the ice-cold water each morning; rich green vegetables that kept their flavor from the soil; samphire glistening like emeralds along the wide beaches; careful crops of wild mushroom; venison from the mainland, rich and dark as chocolate; elderberry and juniper gin, distilled on the island; rhubarb to beat the band.