Christmas at the Island Hotel - Jenny Colgan Page 0,30

had felt the lack very keenly, “that when you look at it from out here, there’s barely any lights on the island at all.”

“Yes, well,” said Flora, “that’s because we’re out at sea on a boat, and people very rarely decorate for people passing by for two minutes on a boat. The next nearest people who could see it are in Norway.”

“Hmm,” said Joel. “Only I was thinking . . . it is Douglas’s first Christmas . . . I really need to get on it.”

“I’m aware of that, thank you,” said Flora, smiling to herself at the sheer amount of extraordinary woolen garments that had already come her way from her older customers, with more to come, she knew. That poor child would get eczema before he was two.

“I haven’t managed to allocate Colton’s lights provision yet.”

They looked at the dull island.

There was a council ruling every year that the money that other places set aside to use for their Christmas decorations actually went toward extra street lighting.

School finished in the dark in the winter months, and the school itself was at the very top of the hill above the village. Extra lighting and handrails on the hill meant more children could walk to and fro on their own, without parents having to drive up and get them, increasing danger to the other, still-walking children. It was a sensible arrangement. But it left the island rather devoid of decorations elsewhere. Joel hadn’t noticed it last year. This year, of course, everything was completely different.

“Cool,” said Flora, whose mind was on other things as they completed the short journey and Bertie held out his hand to lift her off.

“You’re looking lovely,” he said, lightly depositing her on the quayside.

“Thank you!” said Flora, genuinely grateful as it helped cheer her up quite a lot about the zip situation. Bertie was happy. He’d made her beam. There was always hope.

Chapter 23

One, thought Lorna MacDonald. She was getting dressed for the dinner in her flat near the tiny school where she was headmistress and thinking about Saif, the island’s doctor, who had come as a refugee from Syria and with whom she was passionately in love, even though he had no idea if his wife was still alive. Oh, and she taught his children.

It was, frankly, an incredible mess, and now the end of the year was nearly upon them, and she was doing a mental tally and not liking in the slightest what it showed.

One night at the beginning of the year, snuck under the cover of darkness.

One night in the springtime, when the boys went camping with the Scouts.

Three nights: they had managed a long weekend in Edinburgh, when Pam and Charlie had taken the boys on an Outward Bound course they had had free places for.

Saif had been bowled over by the city’s dark, extravagant beauty, its glorious, brimming-over atmosphere, the tiny closes and cobbled steps, the hidden-away bars and vast vistas.

They had stayed in a turret of a hotel they could barely afford, climbed Calton Hill in the rain, eaten every type of food they couldn’t find on Mure, which was, frankly, pretty much all of them. They’d even found, on the corner of an ancient square, a Middle Eastern restaurant, which he pronounced “not bad,” even as Lorna laughed her head off at the sight of him absolutely stuffing his face with baba ghanoush.

She had a couple of photos of the two of them. The sun had shone down and they had grabbed an extraordinary amount of unlikely food from Valvona & Crolla and sauntered to Princes Street Gardens, and they sat out and had an actual picnic in the shadow of the castle, and she had taken a selfie of them both, his head next to hers, laughing and slightly embarrassed at the same time; guilty seeming, always.

But she took it anyway, even though she knew, a million times over, that she couldn’t post it anywhere, couldn’t put it on her social media. She sent it to Flora, who was half dead from breastfeeding and couldn’t do much more than send a weak thumbs-up. But Lorna looked at it all the time. They could be any couple in that photo. They could be normal. If they weren’t in secret. If she wasn’t his children’s teacher. If his wife wasn’t missing. If they could go public . . .

Well, there was no point in thinking about that. They couldn’t go public, they just couldn’t. Little stolen moments, occasionally