After a while Jack shouts that the food is ready and everyone takes their seats. I help him carry dishes of food across the sand, placing them at intervals along the tables. Charred sausages, kebabs, burgers and corn dripping with butter and dusted with paprika and salt crystals. Herb-crusted salmon that falls into soft flakes, wrapped in tin foil parcels; crispy slices of halloumi and grilled mushrooms dripping with butter and garlic. Alice asked various friends to bring salads and they set them down on the table too in a cheerfully mismatched mix of Tupperware and bowls.
‘Wait! Let me take a photo!’ shouts Alice. I’m glad she thought to capture the moment; I’ve been too overwhelmed to take a single picture.
‘OK, let’s eat!’ she says once the photo is taken.
There’s a scrabble of movement as people pass dishes to one another, lemonade is poured for the children and beers are handed around for the adults from cool boxes nestled in the sand.
Once the barbecue food has been demolished Alice and Molly lift something onto the table and place it in front of Ella. It’s a homemade cake decorated with messy buttercream, scattered flowers and fourteen brightly flickering candles.
‘Make a wish, sweetheart,’ I say quietly into her ear as Ella leans forward, takes a deep breath and blows. Alice takes a few more photos but I focus instead on trying to capture this scene in my mind. Ella at fourteen, hair wild and curly with salt water, face scattered in freckles, a wide smile on her face, her family and a whole island celebrating with her. I think back to all the birthdays where it’s just been the two of us, maybe with a few of her friends coming over in the afternoon. All those times I’ve cleared up alone at the end of her birthday, wishing I could have given her more. I’m doing my best not to cry.
‘Time for presents,’ says Alice, and I notice for the first time a huge pile of gifts on a small table behind Ella’s chair. I spot my own near the bottom of the pile; I gave it to Alice before we left this morning. I so hope Ella likes it.
Ella begins at the top of the pile, unwrapping each present carefully, her face brightening each and every time a gift tumbles out of the paper onto her lap. ‘Ohthankyou,’ she says to everyone. Her sincerity makes my heart feel as though it might burst with pride and love. The gifts themselves bring tears to my eyes again too. A book of landscape photography from Jack and Alice and a ‘Save the Sea’ T-shirt from Molly, which Ella immediately pulls on over the top she is already wearing. An assortment of homemade jams and chutneys from Sarah and her family and a box of cupcakes from Sarah’s mother Linda. From Tess and Joy, a hand-woven leather bracelet; from Brenda, a frame of pressed flowers from her garden. And from Morag: a single dram of whisky in a tiny glass bottle tied with ribbon. Everyone brings something. I’m not sure I’ve ever known such kindness in my life.
Eventually Ella reaches my present, a flatish parcel wrapped up in bright yellow paper, a sprig of buttercups tucked into the bow of an orange ribbon.
‘Happy birthday, darling. Your main present is back in London but I wanted you to have a little something to open today.’
My heart thumps inside my chest as Ella peels back the paper.
‘Oh, Mum,’ she says quietly.
‘Do you like it?’
‘I love it. Did you … Did you do this yourself?’
I nod as Ella lifts out of the paper a watercolour painting of Hilly Farm and the beach and sea beyond. On the beach are the silhouetted figures of two teenage girls walking along the sand.
The painting was Mallachy’s idea. One afternoon earlier this week he paused at my side and picked up the pile of my discarded pictures.
‘This is wonderful, Lorna’, he said, and as he turned the painting around I almost looked away, too scared to see my own inadequacies staring back at me. But as I took in the watercolour painting of Hilly Farm and the beach I felt an unexpected sense of pride and relief welling inside my chest. It seems that despite my worst fears, I haven’t forgotten after all. It has been there inside me all this time, just waiting for the moment when I would finally lift up a paintbrush again. A bloom of hope unfurled itself inside me. I started work on a few more paintings, then, this time focusing on what I was doing, daring to actually look at what I was creating.
Mallachy helped me make a frame for Ella’s painting out of driftwood found on his stretch of beach. Alice provided the paper and ribbon.
‘Look, everyone, isn’t this amazing? My mum painted it!’
Ella passes the painting along the table. I catch Sarah’s eye across the table and we smile at each other. I think of the easel she gave me for my twelfth birthday and she gives me a little nod that says more than anyone else at this table could possibly understand.
Once ‘thank you’s and ‘you’re welcome’s have been exchanged, Ella and the other children scatter away from the table again. Eventually the adults do the same. Some of the children and their families swim and splash in the sea, their cries rising over the sound of the waves. People lounge on deckchairs and on the sand, chatting in small and ever-shifting groups. I spot the island children gathered around Jean Brown and her husband, who are sitting in their deckchairs talking with Morag and Brenda. Some of the younger children give Jean hugs. I can’t help but smile. It seems Mrs Brown is just as well-loved now as she was when I was one of her pupils.
I drift between people, thanking everyone for their kind gifts to Ella. I sit for a while with Mallachy, close but not quite touching, very aware nonetheless of his presence and his warmth beside me.
The afternoon stretches in the way that only perfect summer afternoons do. There’s a brief shower (this is still Scotland, after all) but the sun soon comes out again and dries clothes and tablecloths. Later, someone lights a series of bonfires along the beach that glow in the orange light of the setting sun.
I find myself reclining in a deckchair next to Sarah and Alice, a somewhat depleted cool box of beers resting in the sand beside us, as the sun turns the water and the sky a watercolour wash of amber and peach. We’ve been chatting for a while, but right now we sit in comfortable silence, watching Molly, Olive and Ella practising cartwheels on the sand. Some of the younger children watch on, a few valiantly attempting to copy the older girls.
‘I think because of what happened with my parents I forgot the good bits about this island.’
They both turn to me as I speak. Their cheeks are flushed after a day in the sun. I wonder if mine are the same.
‘That’s understandable,’ says Alice, Sarah nodding beside her.
‘I forgot about the community here,’ I add.
Nearly everyone on the island had some part to play in orchestrating today’s party. And all for a girl they barely know.
‘And I forgot how beautiful it can be.’
