Sunrise By the Sea by Jenny Colgan

Chapter Eleven

Polly hated Huckle being on the road. It had got harder and harder, everything had. Well, no. The bakery was as bustling as ever, but there was a limit to how much you could make selling pasties and gingerbread even if – as she was very proud – they would be the best pasties and gingerbread you could get your hands on for miles around. Of course, part of the reason for that was that she used high quality local ingredients in everything she made which meant that her profit margins weren’t what they might be either.

Huckle, who had retired from the rat race to raise bees, had gone back into the rat race when he realised just how much it cost to run an absurdly inconvenient home, two children and one puffin, selling his honey for local natural beauty products to spas and hotels.

Which had been fine but his honey business was now looking wobblier and wobblier. Bigger chains had come in, and honey seemed to get cheaper in the supermarket week after week. People didn’t really care how organic things were if they were feeling pennies pinching and after a couple of bad seasons and bad weather, they certainly were.

Huckle was the sweetest-natured and most laid-back of men but he was starting to get a furrow in between his eyebrows.

Life had rushed by the last few years, speeded up as quickly as the lighthouse lamp turned round, lighting the sailors on their long journeys past. From their first meeting at his cottage, wearing his beekeeper costume . . . through their bumpy romance, to her engagement ring, carefully preserved now in a little glass box, made of dried seaweed . . . to the wedding Kerensa had organised for them when Polly was simply too busy to do it herself – nothing they had done had been conventional. But all of it had been fun.

And since the babies had come, they had spent a lot of it in a hurly-burly, even if it had been fun too – nappies and Peppa Pig and talcum powder and rushing out the door and having food on you and first steps and exhaustion and laughter and bewilderment – but they had never stopped moving; everything had always been crazy. But good crazy.

Was that about to stop? wondered Polly. It felt rather like her worst fears were being confirmed, as he rang her – his sweet southern accent without all of its normal jocularity – just to tell her he was coming home early, which pleased her and worried her all at once; he told her which tide he would catch, and she said fine, and he hung up, and in the silence was a stop, immediately filled by the children appearing at her side.

‘Where’s Daddy? What Daddy saying? Avery and me would like to know, please?’

Daisy was being polite which meant, Polly knew, that she was worried about something.

Polly pasted a large smile on her face.

‘I think,’ she said. ‘I think Daddy is going to come home early.’

‘Hooray!’ said Daisy.

‘Boo!’ whined Avery.

‘Stop that,’ said Polly. She didn’t have time for this now. Avery had announced that he was going to be Polly’s twin and/or husband and he hated everyone else in this stupid family and Polly was trying to ignore it – she knew it was a natural phase but she wished he would get over it.

‘Maybe Daddy stay will away working,’ continued Avery, taking Polly’s hand and giving her a sincere blue-eyed look which he had found very effective on his darling mama even at this tender age. ‘Then we can get married.’

‘No, he’s coming home and we’re going to be a family,’ said Polly. Possibly a poor one, she didn’t add.

It was in the tilt of his shoulders as he walked through the door, the cast of exhaustion on his handsome face even as he collapsed onto the old sofa and let Daisy swarm all over him.

Avery sat and started singing a little song to himself about everyone he didn’t hate, mostly Mummy and Neil.

Huckle cuddled his daughter while staring straight over her head, and Polly brought him a glass of wine and he smiled at it, but didn’t move to pick it up.

Coldness gripped Polly’s heart. She’d been through the agony of losing a business once, many years ago after the banking crash. It’s what had brought her to Mount Polbearne in the first place.

But she’d been young then; more than able to pick herself up and start over. She didn’t have responsibilities, employees; Christ, she didn’t have children.

‘Tough week?’ she said tentatively. Huckle turned his tired eyes to Polly.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said, his hands still gently stroking Daisy’s hair. He’d lost weight, thought Polly. Whenever he’d been on the road for a few days, she always found herself assessing him for the first time again; even with his suit crumpled and his blond hair in need of a trim, and his blue eyes tired – in fact, perhaps because of those things too – he was still the most attractive man she’d ever seen in her life, still the golden boy she’d come across once, taking off his ridiculous beekeeper hat, insects buzzing on a spring zephyr, hollyhocks growing wild over his head.

She would have taken him straight to bed if the children were not there and if he wasn’t patently completely and utterly exhausted beyond reason.

‘Okay,’ she said softly, and laid the table for a pork pie, carefully made from a hot water crust which he loved, the insides scented and delicious, a fresh early summer salad on the side, with tomatoes from Reuben’s terrible forcing greenhouses; that Polly secretly thought were cruel to plants – the tomatoes, nonetheless, were bright, sweet, red love-hearts of things.

‘Don’t come to the table, it’s okay,’ said Polly, making him up a plate.

‘I should have a shower,’ said Huckle, his mouth watering nonetheless. The horrible tasteless muck you could buy when you were on the road, on offer in service stations and convenience stores, made him not want to eat at all. Something as simple and as beautiful as one of Polly’s special pies made him want to bury his face in it.

‘Yes. You smell bad,’ said Daisy, who was burrowed under his arm. He frowned.

‘But the pie smell good,’ said Avery, as Polly shooed him away.

‘Off you go, gannets. You’ve had supper. Let Daddy enjoy his dinner and you can watch Moana.’

‘MOANA! MOANA!’

They looked at the books together. Another hotel chain had moved to a bulk supplier, Huckle explained. They just couldn’t make it work.

It didn’t matter how many times they went over it. They weren’t going to make it. Unless this summer was an unlikely hit. Unless there were a million billion weddings, even though weddings had taken a turn for the quieter, after the last floods. And even then. Unless there was an influx – but after last year, when there had been so much rain and it had been so stormy and damp . . . well.

She sighed and closed her eyes. The heating could come off. They’d done without it before.

She could always ask her mother for help – a problem shared was a problem halved and all that – but her mother lived on a small pension and Polly knew that if she told her, she would fret to the hills and back which would simply give her another problem.

And if she told her best friend Kerensa, she’d try to give her money, Kerensa being incredibly rich, and that would just be absolutely awful. If anything, Polly spent more on Kerensa than she did on her other friends, just in case she ever looked like she was taking advantage. She took Champagne, not Prosecco; insisted on splitting dinner. She wasn’t entirely sure Kerensa even noticed.

And her other friends, dotted around the country, weren’t necessarily finding life any easier than she was at the moment and thought that she and Huckle, living in a groovy lighthouse on a gorgeous island in Cornwall, were the luckiest people they knew anyway, even if their children did fall down the stairs about once every three days.

‘I could . . . well, I don’t think I could . . . I could look for a corporate job,’ said Huckle, as she moved over and lay down on the sofa, her head comfortably in his lap. It was a terrible position to have a serious discussion from, which, she knew, was why she had chosen it.

‘On the plus side, you don’t actually smell bad,’ she said. ‘Or at least, I like it.’

Huckle smiled, seeing she was trying to distract him, and coiled a length of her pale red hair around his finger.

‘You’re not listening,’ he said. ‘I could go back to the office.’

He had tried working at his corporate job once before, back in America. It had not gone well.

She grimaced. ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘It’s too far. Even if they’d have you back, which they probably wouldn’t. And you’re getting too old. They’ll be running on cheap interns now.’

Huckle shrugged. ‘Maybe Reuben could find me something?’

Polly winced. ‘He’d make you pay.’

‘He would.’

They held each other. Neil was sleeping in his box but opened a beady eye just to check on them.

‘Just you and me, kid,’ said Polly, hoisting herself up to sit on his lap.

‘Just you and me,’ he said, burying his head in her lovely hair.

‘We’ll figure something out,’ said Polly. ‘But in the meantime I’m going to switch the heating off.’

Huckle groaned. The nights were still chilly and the lighthouse got the full brunt of every gust of wind that came along.

‘It’s a shame you’re so tired,’ said Polly, ‘given this is the last night you’ll see me not swathed in nine layers of old fishermen’s jumpers.’

Huckle’s voice was muffled as he nuzzled in closer to her neck.

‘I’m not that tired.’

She wriggled on his lap. ‘Well, that’s good.’

She moved closer to him, pressing herself against his flat stomach.

‘MUM! Come see the song you like! The man is dancing.’

Huckle frowned. ‘This isn’t the bit where you fancy the god Maui again, is it?’

‘He’s a very attractive cartoon god, what’s not to like?’ said Polly without moving. ‘Goodness, and I thought I was in the mood before.’