He can barely even look at me, thought Lorna, her heart aching.

Chapter 28

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.

Chapter 29

B ack at the Rock, Gaspard appeared in the kitchen, looking furious as always, a cigarette being thrown out behind him. Flora had left a huge fire bucket there to try to catch them all, but it didn’t always succeed.

“Today!” he said. “Tarte tatin with leeks from the kitchen garden. No messing. We have a million winter leeks. This rock is a good place for growing leeks. Aha, bien, ah oui, who knew. Alors: everyone learn. I will need your help to make starters.”

And they spent all afternoon learning how to perfectly roast the leeks in purest butter, made pastry again and again under his disappointed eye, rolled and blind baked and wasted butter, and marveled at Bjårk’s frankly extraordinary ability to eat remnants of pastry while carefully separating out any hint of greenery and daintily spitting it out of the corner of his mouth. By the evening, all of them had more or less presentable—and undeniably delicious—leek tatins sitting in tiny ramekins.