Sunrise By the Sea by Jenny Colgan
Chapter Fifty-one
And to Marisa’s astonishment, things moved quickly after that. The most difficult bit, she realised, writing in her workbook, had been getting down the hill.
As half-term approached at the end of May, with the promise of sweet weather, the tourist crowd began gradually to return to Mount Polbearne.
It wasn’t like how it had been, of course, not teeming crowds – for starters, they hadn’t finished repairing the causeway to make it safe for cars so people were still coming in boats or walking tentatively over a temporary metal gantry. The local news had done a small feature on the children who went to school by boat which had been picked up all over the world and launched lots of enquiries, so Reuben was happy and, with people travelling less off the island, Alexei, Marisa could hear, was busier than ever.
But from the second the bakery shut at four till they reopened at six, there was a palpable sense of anticipation in the town, and plenty of daytrippers furious they had to wait about till later, till the ovens stopped producing bread and cakes and moved on to pizza instead.
‘We still need repainting,’ said Polly. ‘We should do something with a pizza theme.’
‘I am not sure that’s wise,’ said Marisa. ‘I think the grey is nice.’
They had tentatively agreed to work together for a couple of months and see how things went before formalising their agreement. Marisa didn’t think that with such a tiny population – about 1500 souls all in – they could possibly sell that much pizza five nights a week to make them sustainable, but Polly pointed out how many visitors they got, and also, they were quite shocked to discover, an astonishing number of people would happily eat pizza at least once a week, or even more often.
‘At least it’s the very best kind,’ said Marisa, fulfilling another order for the Gillespies, whose myriad small boys at least burnt it off charging up and down the hilly streets of the town looking for cats to frighten or grockle children’s sandcastles to stomp on.
Plus, of course, the second-homers, who tended to bring large house parties full of people and were more than delighted to find what was essentially a super posh all-natural ingredients gourmet pizzeria on their doorstep. Huckle pointed out to Polly that this was making things worse instead of better and she had agreed with him without actually knowing what to do about it.
Marisa now worked a couple of hours on admin for the council, paid part time, made up a new batch of sauce every day, then at five headed down to the bakery to work like a demon until nine p.m., when, to the horror of the drinkers in Andy’s bar, they did last orders, causing a massive last-minute scuffle. Andy was relatively good-natured about it, given they were cutting into his fish and chip business, but more tourists was more tourists for everyone, and so in the end he couldn’t really complain. It was long hours – but it was, amazingly, working.