Page 76 of Adrift in Iceland
‘Rachel’s right,’ said Jonas. ‘You’ve all worked hard over the summer. It’s easy to think we could carry on at this pace, but it’s important to take the opportunity for some downtime.’
‘Do you have anyone to take over from Eva?’ Isak asked.
Jonas shook his head. ‘No. Which makes it the perfect time to stop for a while.’
‘Altogether?’ Leifur was used to working at the pace they had been. Harder even when he’d been fishing. ‘The bad weather hasn’t hit yet, and there are still whales to see.’
‘We only put dates on the website until the end of August. We could have loaded on more dates, but I wanted to see how things were going. And I think we probably can keepgoing in some form over the winter, whether it’s whale watching or northern lights trips, but now that the summer’s over, let’s take a different pace.’
‘Let’s eat,’ Rachel said, putting a pan of curry and a bowl of rice on the table. ‘Dig in.’
Leifur spooned some curry and rice onto his plate. Although the full days had been a blessing, taking his mind of missing Astrid, perhaps it made sense to take stock of the summer and work through the winter at a slower pace. He knew he’d paid back almost all the loan he’d had from Jonas, and that was despite the wage bill being bigger than they’d planned. It had been a good season.
Rachel, Isak and Eva went into the lounge after dinner, leaving Leifur and Jonas to talk.
‘What do you think about having some time off and starting back up in November, on a much-reduced schedule?’
‘Honestly, I’m not used to having time on my hands and I’m not very good at it,’ said Leifur. ‘I’d rather keep going even if it’s just a few trips a week.’
‘Okay. Let’s make a plan.’ Jonas opened his laptop and found the scheduling spreadsheet. ‘When Eva leaves, that’s the end of the whale-watching season for us. It’s hard to find a marine biologist willing to work seasonally, and we can’t afford to have a permanent one on the payroll.’
‘Agreed. But if we run any tours, we’ll need another pair of hands.’
‘I’ll find someone to help out,’ Jonas said. ‘Shall we agree on three northern lights trips a week until November? After that, the season really gets going, and we’ll have a feel for whether we want to increase it to six or seven times a week over the winter.’
‘We’re more likely to get disrupted by the weather at that time of the year.’
‘Exactly. It gives us a bit of room for manoeuvre. And youand Isak will still be paid the same amount over the winter,’ said Jonas, still looking at his spreadsheet as if he hadn’t just made the most generous offer in the world.
‘We can’t accept that.’
‘You can. You’ve both given everything to the company over the summer. If we worked out your hourly rate, I bet it would be a pittance.’
Leifur knew that wasn’t true. ‘I’d rather we were paying the loan off.’
‘I’m not going to be moved on this, Leifur. You run the boat and the tours with little interference from me. The business side of things is my call.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Besides, you think your brother would be with you on that?’
Leifur laughed. ‘Definitely not.’
They heard a knock at the front door, and Olafur appeared in the kitchen. ‘Am I interrupting?’
‘No, we’ve just finished.’
Jonas dished out another round of beers, and they went to join the others in the lounge.
‘Honestly, Rachel, you need to speak to this woman who brought her felted placemats into the shop today,’ Gudrun was saying. ‘She’s got a studio and is up for you taking tours there, and she could do workshops for you.’
‘That sounds amazing,’ Rachel said. ‘I need to start planning for next summer. I’ll pop in and get her details from you.’
It was the first time in a while that Leifur had seen Gudrun. He’d been avoiding her. Astrid’s three months had been up around a month ago. They’d not kept in touch over the summer, after agreeing it was best not to, giving them both space to move on. But part of him had thought she would come back after the summer, and the fact she hadn’twas something he’d tried not to think about. But seeing Gudrun, he’d have to ask how Astrid was. And then he’d know whether she was still working and that’s why she hadn’t come back, or if she’d met someone else and that’s why she hadn’t come back to Reykjavik.
‘We haven’t seen you for ages,’ Gudrun said to him.
‘The weather’s been good recently, so we haven’t had much downtime.’
