Sunrise By the Sea by Jenny Colgan

The sun had been out earlier that day, and the family had all gone out to play.

If you were to glance at the family, you probably wouldn’t notice anything strange at first.

It would probably make you smile to realise that the children were twins, and that they each took after a parent so convincingly – the boy his father’s double, with a shock of unruly blond hair and a wide smiling face; the little girl more cautious-looking, with freckles and her mother’s strawberry-blonde hair and pale skin.

Look closer and you would also see something flapping around them, and assume there was something wrong with your vision, because what on earth was a puffin doing there?

Avery and Daisy had come tumbling down the lighthouse stairs in their usual noisy way.

For the first year or two of their lives, the stairgate had never been opened and had basically confined the children to the barracks of the sunny ground-floor kitchen, because Polly Miller, née Waterford, was terrified of them tumbling down the lighthouse’s circular staircases and cracking their heads open. It was an even stupider idea to live in a lighthouse than it had been before the children, love it as they may.

But her hopes of keeping them safe were completely thwarted when, around eighteenth months or so, she looked away for two seconds, then turned back to see Avery holding up the bolt while Daisy turned it, and Neil (the puffin) standing on the gate, almost as if it was his idea. He certainly fluttered up the stairs guiltily as soon as Polly caught them. The days of the stairgate were numbered. She remembered it as if it were yesterday.

‘Now,’ she had said patiently, as she had a million times before, pulling them on to her lap on the squishy threadbare sofa, the blond head so like Huckle’s; Daisy so like her, ‘we don’t go upstairs.’

‘Ustairs,’ repeated Avery. Daisy nodded. ‘Ustairs . . . NO?’

Huckle had come in for lunch then, and grinned as the twins scrambled down and hurtled across the flagstone floor shouting ‘DADA!’

‘Are you teaching them that going upstairs is the most exciting thing in the world again?’

‘They opened the stairgate. Working as a team.’

Huckle hoisted the two little people up, one arm each.

‘Oh, you are brilliant,’ he said, as they giggled, and he nuzzled them both.

‘It is not brilliant,’ said Polly. ‘They start scrambling up there and someone is going to fall and kill themselves.’

‘I thought that’s why we had two,’ said Huckle, heading towards the stove.

Now, four years on, they had indeed both tumbled down several times, seemingly without injury, and retained the same basic gang set-up – boy, girl, puffin – that took getting into mischief to new levels all the time.

‘I always thought Neil would have been jealous of the babies,’ Polly was saying now, as they watched the three of them trying to play swingball – Neil hovering, then flying up when the ball came round – while she and Huckle sat out in preciously warm spring sunshine.

The lawn streamed down towards the rocks, and normally it was too windy to sit out there, but there was a spot, just behind a low wall, where the wind was blocked and you could lie down and feel the sun on your face and just for a moment everything would be warm and lovely. Unfortunately it also blocked Polly’s views of the twins, so it necessitated bobbing up and down every couple of minutes like a meerkat, and steeling yourself against the wind.

‘Neil was unbelievably jealous of the babies!’ said Huckle, astonished she’d forgotten. ‘You were in a milk coma. A nuclear bomb could have gone off and you wouldn’t have noticed unless a piece of dust had gotten on the babies. What do you think all those marks are on the cradles?’

‘I thought they were just features.’

‘Peck marks!’

‘Oh goodness. Bad bird.’

‘He’s a terrible bird,’ said Huckle with equanimity. ‘Almost like you shouldn’t keep wild sea birds in captivity in the first place.’

‘You shouldn’t,’ agreed Polly. ‘He keeps me.’

When Polly had first moved to Mount Polbearne, alone and nervous years ago, following the collapse of her business and engagement, in short order, a baby puffling had crashed into the bakery one night. After nursing his broken wing back to health, she had tried to release him back into the wild, but he hadn’t taken. Neil had decided that living with a baker was infinitely preferable to diving into the cold sea every day to find fish, and Huckle was inclined to agree with him.

They both watched Neil sweep around the children.

‘I mean, he could—’ Huckle started.

‘Neil can’t babysit!’ said Polly sternly.

‘I know, I know,’ said Huckle. ‘I just thought it might be a nice night to sit out at Andy’s’ – Andy ran the local pub and a superb chippy – ‘or even go up to the posh place and have a glass of wine. Without some small monsters wriggling all over it.’

‘We could call Kerensa,’ suggested Polly, meaning Reuben’s wife, their rich friends who lived on the mainland.

‘I’m not in a Reuben-handling mood,’ said Huckle. ‘Plus . . . Lowin.’

Even though the twins were miles off, they bounced over.

‘ARE WE GOING TO LOWIN’S?’

Lowin, Reuben and Kerensa’s son, who was now almost eight years old, was the hero of the twins’ lives, living as he did in a huge Tony Stark mansion with every computer game and every piece of Playmobil ever made. Lowin, for his part, tolerated the children more or less, as long as they did everything he said in every game and obeyed his every whim, just like the paid staff did. Daisy and Avery were his very willing slaves and were quite happy to go along with whatever Lowin’s newest phase was. Normally it was fine when it was an Avengers obsession phase, or a racing cars obsession phase. But Lowin’s latest obsessive phase was snakes, and despite Kerensa’s promises, Polly was never a hundred per cent certain Reuben wasn’t about to buy him a huge boa constrictor and just let him wear it everywhere like a scarf until it ate Neil.

‘Not today.’

The twins’ faces looked downcast.

‘But he’s getting a huge slide shaped like a snake! The biggest ever!’

‘That sounds dangerous,’ said Polly, getting up. ‘Okay. It’s just leftover chicken.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Huckle, who was about to hit the road again, repping his honey business. Times had been tough – there had been floods all over the West Country and a lot of businesses were finding it difficult to keep going but he was doing his best. ‘It’s good to have home-cooked food. It’s going to be nothing but restaurants and hotel food for a fortnight.’

‘Say that like you’re sad about it,’ pleaded Polly.

‘I am!’ said Huckle. And then, more seriously, grabbing her hand: ‘You know I am.’

‘I wish I was going off to stay in hotels.’

‘It’s not the Ritz! It’s a Travelodge off the A40!’

‘I know. But anywhere is the Ritz with you.’

They shared a kiss. He hated going away. But he had to. They had enough trouble keeping their heads above water as it was.

‘Think of the windows,’ he said.

‘I know, I know.’

If they could replace the lighthouse’s ancient rattly single-paned glass with English Heritage-approved double glazing, the difference it would make in the quality of their lives would be immeasurable. No more icy plunges down the circular staircase; no more painful hauling themselves out of bed.

Although, who knew? The house might never be warm to other people’s standards – Polly’s mother’s, for example, or Kerensa’s, or, well, anyone’s, really. But to the four of them – the children had never known anything else – it was just perfect. Huckle had put an old TV in the master bedroom, and through the cosy nights of winter all four of them curled up with the electric blanket on, Neil hopping on the nightstand, watching Moana, and it was, windows or not, as happy a place as Polly could possibly imagine.

And now spring was coming! And if Huckle made enough this year they were going to get windows and a new boiler, so there was very little to complain about, thought Polly, as she headed back into the kitchen, listening to the merry voices of the twins demanding that their father became a tiger MEEJETLY which he obligingly did, growling so fiercely that Polly wondered if Avery would get upset. Daisy would dry his tears if he did.

She added barley and vegetables to the chicken stock she had boiled up from the roast, happily looking forward to when Huckle would be home for the summer, and the tourists would start to arrive for the season and they would be cheerfully flat out. She couldn’t wait to feel the sun warm on her face again, not the endless winter storms that had seemed to arrive every single weekend. For months the rain had thrown itself against the windows and the house was full of wet wellingtons and the children got cranky when she couldn’t get them out enough, the pleasure of building dens indoors and helping Mama bake having grown stale. The storms had been getting worse – climate change, she knew – and the winters were getting harder.

‘What’s up when I’m away?’ Huckle asked now, following her in while simultaneously half-listening to Avery talk about how Lowin was getting the biggest snake in the world for his birthday.

‘Usual,’ said Polly. ‘Oh no, I forgot! Reuben’s waifs and strays are arriving!’