Sunrise By the Sea by Jenny Colgan

Chapter Forty

Marisa had to knock on the back door several times to make herself heard over the wind and the rain. Would this storm ever blow itself out?

Finally, she heard a tired voice say, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’

Polly opened the door to a drowned rat; she barely recognised her at first.

‘Come in, come in,’ she said, as Marisa slightly pitched forwards into the incredibly lovely warmth of the kitchen, where an Aga was radiating heat. The kitchen had always been the warmest room in the lighthouse, due almost entirely to it not being in the lighthouse; it was in an ugly late sixties flat-roofed pebble-dashed extension which, for all its failings, at least benefited from double glazing.

‘Oh my God! Are you all right? It’s wild out there. I’ve just got the children off to sleep.’

‘Aren’t you going to sleep?’

Polly didn’t want to say what she’d been doing in the ten minutes since Daisy finally gave up the unequal struggle against dozing off, Avery having exhausted himself shooting at the lightning.

Staring out of the window she could see the hurricane lamps of the people working down below, desperately trying to shore things up. But she could see in the dim light that the water was still running; that Beach Street did not look normal, with cobbles, but instead shining and reflective and liquid; that the bakery could not hold.

She had been crying.

It was gone and they were going to be ruined, even as she watched the men and women of Mount Polbearne work for all they were worth, with every last breath.

‘Um,’ said Marisa. ‘I made them some food, but it’s all gone and your husband thought maybe we should make something for the morning and maybe I could do it as it’s not so far? And I don’t have any flour left. Your husband suggested I come here . . .’

All of this came out in a rush as it was one thing having Polly in her house, where she was safe, but being in someone else’s felt like a different kettle of fish altogether, but Polly knew what she meant and couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it. And thank God, Huckle was okay.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘We moved all the flour here as a precaution.’

She turned to Marisa and pasted a smile on her face.

‘First, let’s get you out of those wet clothes,’ she said. ‘That was amazing of you to do to that.’

‘It was the least I could do,’ murmured Marisa. But she was still incredibly pleased to hear praise – genuine, well-meant praise. Nobody had found her much of anything but a weird disappointment for so long, no matter how patient with her they’d tried to be.

‘It’s going to be jogging bottoms and they’re going to be too big for you,’ warned Polly, heading towards the door and returning with a big, old and worn but still cosy clean towel. ‘I’d like to tell you that I was an immaculate dresser before I had the children but I’m afraid I would be lying to you.’

Marisa found herself smiling.

‘Dry is absolutely a hundred per cent everything, thanks.’

Polly came back – and oh, the bliss of changing out of wet clothes and into big fluffy dry socks, a clean T-shirt, a red hoody and, in fact, a pair of dungarees which were the first thing Polly could find to hand that was clean.

‘Oh, you look rather cute, that’s annoying,’ said Polly when Marisa had changed. ‘You should keep that red hoody, it suits black hair. It looks mad with red hair, I don’t know why I bought it.’

She also looked a bit mischievous.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I dug this out as well. If we’re going to be up all night baking . . .’

Marisa nodded.

‘Well. I think we need some help.’

And she pulled from behind her back a very old dusty bottle of Prosecco that had been brought for a party and forgotten all about.

The kitchen being so far from the children’s bedrooms, they could happily whack on the radio, which they did, avoiding anything that gave frightening weather updates and sticking to a nineties station that offered up a comforting menu of Britney and the Backstreet Boys, much to their delight, even though Marisa was really too young for them, and Polly had to stop while the dough was proving and put the videos on so she could choose a favourite.

They danced as they moulded pies and muffins, flour liberally sprinkled all over the kitchen, including on Polly’s nose, and Polly started laughing at Marisa’s horrified reaction to noticing bird prints in the flour.

‘We’re going to kill the entire village,’ Marisa had gasped.

‘Well, bit too late now if that’s what’s going to happen.’

Neil himself had vanished up onto the curtain pole, almost as if he was well aware that goodies took time to bake, and taking a small snooze accordingly. Marisa looked at him, looked at the prints, shook her head and burst out laughing again. Polly didn’t think it was quite that funny.

That was because she had absolutely no idea how long it had been since Marisa had laughed aloud in somebody else’s kitchen; had no idea how much Marisa had feared she would never do so again.

The Aga divided up neatly and they did pies, vegetable and cheese muffins, and kneaded up loaves for the day ahead.

‘Do you think you’ll be able to use the bakery?’ said Marisa. Polly shook her head very quickly.

‘I’ll worry about that tomorrow.’ She frowned. ‘Let’s just keep busy.’

And they drank Prosecco and kneaded bread and made muffins and scones – which got a little wonkier as time went on – and Marisa stayed in the kitchen while Polly ran out with tea as often as she could, and at four a.m. the tide, having hit its heights and done its worst, finally turned and started back down again. And as the storm finally began to die away there was nothing to do after that but to wait for the sun to rise as it always did, and survey what they had left.

On Polly’s instructions, all the helpers trooped back, utterly exhausted and muddy but delighted that their unstinting efforts had saved the causeway from being destroyed completely. She would need repairs – but she still stood.

They kicked off their boots – steam rose all around the kitchen till it looked like a laundry – and dried out in front of the fire, being stuffed full of coffee and fresh bread until they felt like bursting.

There was much jolly bravado – after all, nobody had been lost, although one Mini was currently floating off in the direction of France, and nobody had had to be rescued by a coastguard that already had enough on its hands last night to cope with a village that hadn’t helped itself. As well as that, half the RNLI volunteers were from the village anyway, and were already pretty busy, but they had managed to protect their population.

‘Did you really save the causeway?’ said Marisa, so amazed she found her voice to ask the friendly, tired-looking Archie.

‘Well, most of it,’ he said, eating a scone so fast Marisa wasn’t sure it had touched his throat. ‘We’ve got the stones. They’ll need to be put back.’

‘Did you not want to wait for the fire brigade? To make it safe?’

‘But this is us,’ said Archie, his lined face kind. ‘We are Mount Polbearne. We can’t lose a single brick. If a brick in the causeway is lost, it’s a piece of the chain. Every brick matters. Every brick is connected to every other brick. It’s a part of us. We all have to join up. That’s what community means.’

His voice was kind, but there was a reproof in it too, and Marisa realised that however much she felt she was hidden away, here in a tiny community like Polbearne she had been noticed – as, presumably, had her bussed-in groceries and distant deliveries. She had not played her part, even though these men and women had risked everything to save the causeway: for her and for everyone else here.

She nodded, then proffered up the plate again.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Did Polly make these?’

‘I did, actually.’

His pale blue eyes met hers then for the first time.

‘Well done,’ he said. ‘They’re very good.’

The furniture and floors of the population who lived nearest the water’s edge . . . well, that was a different matter. Those going up the hill vowed to take the fresh baking to the school house, where the evacuated residents were gathered, Mrs Brady telling once again the story about how she was a real-life evacuee (which indeed she was; she had been sent to Cornwall from London as a four-year-old. By the time the war had ended she was a strapping, dairy-fed nine-year-old with an accent thick as clotted cream who worked the fields with her kind adopted family – who still spoke a few Cornish words – and returned only rarely throughout her life to the East End slum, and the hardscrabble family of thirteen children she’d been born into).

Then those lucky enough to have been untouched would grab as much sleep as they could before the great clean-up would start in the morning and a reckoning could be made. Huckle and Polly didn’t mention the bakery, didn’t even look at each other. Andy was looking sombre, but his beer barrels were watertight so he’d probably be all right. Polly was hyped up on a combination of Prosecco and coffee and couldn’t stop baking, which Huckle noticed; it’s what she did when she was nervous.

Marisa had waved tentatively to Alexei as he came in, filling the door frame, but he hadn’t seen her at first. Then he’d given her a quick glance as if to say, well, of course here you are, in front of the fire surrounded by food, nice and cosy, I see you can get out when you want to go somewhere nice and, too tired and anxious to explain, she had simply offered him a plate of food, which he had not so much eaten as inhaled. He had sat on the window seat at the far side of the kitchen, while the chatter and gossip continued around them, and in the middle of the tumult had at some point fallen asleep. But it was not for long, because Daisy and Avery, up at dawn despite their disrupted night, had been only too delighted to wake up and find a party going on – with cakes too! – and, charging downstairs, had immediately clambered onto their favourite teacher and had awoken him by pulling hard on his beard.

‘Ach,’ he had said, abruptly jerked out of his dreaming state, but, Marisa couldn’t help noticing, his confusion turned instantaneously to sweetness.

‘Get away, you solnyshko,’ he said. ‘What is rule?’

‘No climbing on the piano teacher,’ said Daisy sensibly.

‘No climbing on piano teachers, thank you very much.’ He stretched and yawned, covering his mouth with his sleeve.

‘BUT!’ said Avery. ‘We is brought HONEY!’

He presented the tub. ‘Oh, I love honey,’ said Alexei, reaching for it. Daisy and Avery swapped a look that said, there we are, proven right yet again.

He is so lovely, Marisa found herself thinking. To everyone who isn’t me.