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‘Skúffukaka?’ No, there was no chocolate in the little kitchen, the key ingredient in Icelandic brownies.
‘Vínarterta?’ Hisammahad made it at this time of year when he was small, a kind of layered cheesecake and very comforting, but he wouldn’t know where to start with those, and didn’t that require spices and prunes?
The shelves weren’t well stocked at all. It made him wonder if the other booksellers generally bought in their own ingredients. There was only one thing for it, he knew.
‘Mamma?’
‘She’s not here,’ Jón told him. He must be working from home again.
‘Ó, já, that’s right.’ Their mother worked at the public library in the mornings now she was semi-retired, then she’d be drinking coffee with her macramé circle because it was a Tuesday.
‘How’s Devon?’ Jón enquired.
‘A little windy,’ replied Magnús, enjoying the understatement immensely. ‘And there are no customers in the bookshop.’ He waited for Jón’s droll reply about how that was nothing new for him, but it didn’t come. Instead there was an awkward silence before Jón steered them to safer ground. ‘Have you met the local people yet?’
Magnús’s mind flitted right past Jowan and Mrs Crocombe, Bella, Finan and the Bickleigh brothers, straight to the woman who had washed up on the shore.
‘So? What are they like?’ Jón pressed.
‘They’re uh…’ A twinge hit him hard in the stomach, something like hunger, when he recalled the woman. It struck him that she’d have been driven home by now. She couldn’t have come very far along the coast in that little cruiser. She’d be safely with her family again. Why did that realisation make him wince? He should have hammered on Jowan’s door like Thor until he was forced to let him in. He’d saved her, hadn’t he? Maybe just a little? That was what the local gossip-mongers in the crowd had said. He should have said goodbye to her at least, checked she was OK.
‘They’re… uh… interesting.’ He tried not to follow his thoughts; they led to nowhere. She was gone. ‘Listen, I have to bake something to sell in this coffee shop.’
‘You’re going to bake?’ Jón was definitely laughing now.
‘I can bake.’
‘Uh, sure you can. What are you gonna make?’
‘No idea. I thought Mamma might know.’
‘It’s Christmas, right?’
Magnús silently shrugged.
‘You’ve gotta makeJólakaka.’
Yes! That was it. He scanned the café shelves once more. He could almost taste his mother’s Icelandic Christmas cake, light and sweet and, he imagined, fairly easy to make.
‘Want me to send you a photo of Mamma’s recipe?’
‘Já, I need it now.’
‘There, sent,’ Jón told him a few moments later after he’d rummaged in the kitchen for the notebook of family recipes. Jón asked if it was snowing.
Magnús didn’t know if it snowed this close to the sea in England, but he delighted in letting Jón know everyone here was talking about storms coming in and this morning it had felt windier even than Stórhöfði and he was pretty sure that was the most windblown place on earth – even the tough little puffins were blown away by the end of summer there.
‘Stay indoors and bake yourJólakaka.Þetta reddast,’ Jón told him. There it was again, the family motto.It’ll be fine.
‘Of course. How bad can it be?’ Magnús replied, and after Jón’s usual farewell of ‘Bless bless,’ they hung up.
Peering through to the shop floor to make sure there were no customers in there – there weren’t – Magnús rolled up his sleeves. He had work to do and no windy day or thoughts of the shipwrecked maiden, now long gone, could distract him.
