by Jenny Colgan
But now here was a letter from Samantha, who, despite only having a holiday home on Mount Polbearne with her husband, Henry, always liked to get her fingers into as many pies as possible. She’d also had a baby last year and had started making worrying noises about schools in London and nursery prices and children being too jaded and sophisticated in the big city (even though Polly and Kerensa had thought that being jaded and sophisticated was absolutely Samantha’s favorite thing). The letter was a typed circular, announcing a meeting to discuss the possibility of appealing to the council to reopen the village school, seeing as there were now upward of a dozen children being bussed to the mainland every day—expensive—and lots more babies on the way.
Jayden smiled when he saw it.
“Ah, school was fun here,” he said. “You know, except for Dawson, prob’ly.”
“It would certainly improve the children’s attendance in the winter,” said Polly, who had noticed how often they couldn’t go because of bad weather making the crossing too difficult.
“Well, go to the meeting then,” said Jayden.
“No way!” said Polly, for whom the idea of giving up a winter’s evening wrapped round the fire and Huckle before falling asleep at 8:30 was sacrilege.
“You should,” said Jayden. “You’ll be having babies one day. One day soon, I reckon.”
Polly glanced down at the fourth finger of her left hand—it was still awaiting the ring Huckle was having made for her, the seaweed engagement ring he had put there the previous summer not having proved as long-lasting as they hoped their union was going to be.
“Hmm,” she said, feeling a slightly familiar wobble of panic that came over her whenever she thought about the future.
It was true, she wasn’t getting any younger. But she was so crazy busy holding both the businesses together, and she couldn’t possibly afford to employ someone else and take maternity leave. And that ridiculous lighthouse they’d thought was such a hilarious idea at the time . . . How on earth could she look after a child? How on earth did anybody do it? She had absolutely no idea. And Huckle would probably want to get married first, and truly, she had enough on her plate . . .
Even though it was still almost pitch dark outside, the first customers were lining up expectantly. The older people still started work early after lifetimes of toil at the very edge of the British Isles, and the fishing boats came in to hit the fish markets so that the restaurants and chippies could get the very best and freshest from the cold, salty water. In the summer, Polly would head out and watch the sun coming up and sit out in the dawn in a sweater, chatting with the fishermen. In deepest, darkest winter, they all simply had to charge in at the speed of light, closing the door behind them as quickly as possible.
The old ladies bustled in with their dogs, and Archie, captain of the fishing boat Trochilus, turned up looking utterly freezing. There was a local saying that there was no such thing as bad weather, simply bad clothes, but all the fishermen had the best high-quality gear there was, and even then it was a tough old life out there, particularly when sometimes you needed to use your stiff, freezing fingers to untie knots, or gut fish, or open the freezer compartment. Archie’s were mottled red and white and took a while to unfurl as Polly handed him his incredibly strong tea in the special mug she kept for him in the back kitchen.
“Good catch?” said Jayden, who used to work with Archie and had never gotten over how grateful he was not to have to do it any more.
“Aye, not so bad,” said Archie, head down, inhaling the steam from the tea. That, from Archie, meant things were definitely looking up.
Old Mrs. Corning, one of Polly’s regulars, marched up to the counter.
“Where’s your calendar?” she said, pointing with her walking stick. Brandy, her tiny dog, yapped as if to back her up.
“My what?” said Polly, confused.
“Your Advent calendar! Advent starts today. Or weren’t you raised in a Christian society?”
“I haven’t seen her at church,” said another of the old ladies who was busy chatting to Jayden.
Polly rolled her eyes. She’d slightly hoped that everyone’s opinion on her comings and goings and what she did and didn’t do might have died down since she’d gotten engaged to Huckle, but, if anything, it appeared to have gotten worse. Polly had grown up in Exeter, quite a large city, and had found village living agreeable but certainly different.
“Mattie and I get along very well,” she pointed out. Mattie was the vicar who came over from the mainland every couple of weeks to hold a service. Polly tended to skip the service—in season she was working; out of season she was fast asleep—but Mattie often popped down for a coffee since she and Polly were roughly the same age and had quite similar outlooks on things.
Polly paused and froze. No wonder she’d been so funny with Huckle this morning. No wonder.
“Is it really the first of December today?” she said.
“Yes. First day of Advent. You know. To celebrate the birth of Our Lord, Christ the King. That’s what Christmas is supposed to be about.” Mrs. Corning, who was a kind old stick really but rather felt the world was running away from her—even in rural Cornwall—peered at Polly through her thick glasses. “Are you all right there, me lover?”
Polly blinked. “Sorry. I didn’t realize the date. November was so gray and endless, it all felt as if it were sliding into one another . . . all the days . . .” She wrung out her tea towel. “I’m not making sense. Sorry, Mrs. Corning. Well. Anyway. It’s . . . it’s my dad’s birthday.”
It didn’t feel right calling him that. He wasn’t her dad; dads were people who turned up.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Corning, who lived in a world where almost all the men had died, and she and her small battalion of ladies, with their thin permed hair and their sensible beige BHS anoraks bought on irregular trips to Looe, stuck close to one another and looked out for each other and spent far longer discussing the ailments of their small dogs than they did looking back on the past, and their handsome sixties Teddy boys, back from their National Service, grinning over their John Players. “Has he been gone long?”
“Oh yes,” said Polly.
Even then she didn’t want to tell the truth: that he’d never been there to leave in the first place. The only reason she knew his date of birth was because she’d written it on her passport application form. That had been literally all she’d ever had from him, according to her mother, apart from some basic maintenance. A ne’er-do-well. Someone whose presence wasn’t missed. You couldn’t miss what you’d never had, after all, her mother had pointed out to her.
Polly wasn’t sure about that, not at all.
The cold of the day brought punters in in shedloads, relieved to get out of the wind and pick up some warm pecan and cinnamon buns. The hot chocolate stayed simmering in its pot, getting richer and thicker with every new cup that was poured, and the till dinged satisfyingly all morning.
Huckle wandered down about three o’clock as Polly swept up the mail ready to take back to the lighthouse. She would do her paperwork by the Aga as she tested out a new Christmas cake recipe, even though the idea that she was making different types of Christmas cakes had raised eyebrows throughout the village.
“Hey,” she said, pleased to see him.
Huckle looked at her, still a little concerned after what she’d said that morning.
“You all right?”
She nestled reassuringly into his arm as he leafed through the post, stroking her hair gently.
“I’m okay, really,” she said, muffled. “I just needed a quick cuddle. Mrs. Corning wanted to give me one, but I was worried she’d break a hip.”
“Did you call your mom?”
They exchanged a look.
“The usual?”
“Yeah.”
Huckle sighed. Polly’s mum wasn’t really one for answering the phone. Or going out. Polly had never noticed until she’d left home how reclusive her mother actually was; she neve
r invited friends over, never had people in, very rarely went out, only socialized with her own parents, both now gone. Because that was how Polly was raised, it hadn’t even occurred to her to question it until she’d gone out into the world and discovered loads of other people actually having fun.
“Just tell her to come down here! Breathe some fresh air, take some walks, get some color in her cheeks. It’ll do wonders for her.”
“She can’t,” said Polly. This was not the first time they’d had this discussion. “Seriously. It’s impossible. Last time I tried to get her out, she told me she couldn’t because she’d miss Doctors. Doctors,” she went on to an uncomprehending Huckle, “runs on BBC One five days a week and has done for about seventy-two years. You can watch Doctors or you can actually have a life, but it’s tricky to do both.”
“She should see an actual doctor,” said Huckle, and Polly grimaced. They’d been there before, too. Her mother wasn’t sick, she was just . . . introverted. That was all. It was all right to be quiet in a world full of shouting social-media extroverts, wasn’t it?
“Well, call her again when you get home,” said Huckle. “Hey ho,” he added, picking up Samantha’s letter. “What’s this?”
“Meeting for a possible school,” said Polly. “Have you seen Neil?”
Huckle snorted. “Have I seen him? He’s practically sitting in the Aga. I have never known a bird so fond of his home comforts. If he isn’t careful, we’re going to end up roasting him for supper.”
“That’s not funny,” said Polly, who had a total blind spot as far as the cheeky puffin was concerned. “Still no sign of Celeste?”
Celeste was Neil’s girlfriend; or rather, he had mated with another puffin and they had been nesting around the back of the lighthouse. Their first egg, to Polly’s absolute dismay, had not hatched. Celeste had been fairly grumpy with them to begin with, so this tragedy hadn’t necessarily changed her attitude that much, and then one day she had simply upped and left. Polly had been so heartbroken, Huckle had had to put her to bed. It had taken all his powers of persuasion to convince her that birds couldn’t actually imagine the future and therefore Neil had absolutely no idea what he was missing out on, though even now she didn’t exactly quite believe him.
It was true, though, that as the weather had turned colder, Neil was quite happy to eep until the door was opened, then march in and settle himself down cozily in front of the stove for a snooze. He seemed more or less entirely unfussed about his longer-term prospects.
“Puffins shouldn’t even be this hot!” Huckle had said, looking at the bird stretched out contentedly in front of the oven. “They’re going to die out as a species!”
Polly had skritched Neil behind the ears fondly, and he had fixed Huckle with a beady eye.
“Okay, okay,” said Huckle, who was mostly pretty good at hiding his feelings about sharing his life with a small black and white seabird.
They locked up the bakery and headed out into the already darkening afternoon. As they rushed across the pebbled esplanade and up the steps to the lighthouse door, the clouds scudded across the sky and handfuls of rain and seawater hit them in the face.
“Guh,” said Polly. “Seriously. Why couldn’t we have opened the Little Caribbean Beach Street Bakery?”
Huckle smiled.
“We still could,” said Polly. “We could get Neil a very, very small straw hat.”
They shut the door behind them, and Polly took off her wet boots and put the kettle on.
“Oof. Right. I am not moving out of here tonight.”
Huckle was standing by the door, still studying the letter he’d grabbed from the counter.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t be going to this?”
Polly frowned. “A town meeting?”
“Yes, well, our town meeting.”
They looked at each other.
“What’s this about?” said Polly suddenly.
“Well,” said Huckle. On the small kitchen table was a large ledger book. “The honey . . . I mean, the honey thing isn’t going too well . . .”
“That’s all right,” said Polly. “I’m not taking off this coat till spring. You can also sew me into my underwear if you think that would help.”
Huckle poured tea for them both and indicated she should sit down.
“Listen, I’ve been thinking.”
“Uh oh,” said Polly, her heart starting to beat a little faster. “I’ve been thinking” was one of those phrases, like “we need to talk” or “you’d better sit down,” that brought about a modicum of panic. It reminded her of her horrible break-up with her ex, Chris, and the loss of the business they’d built up together. She hated those kinds of conversations.
Huckle took her hand in what was clearly intended to be a reassuring manner but that unfortunately had completely the opposite effect.
“What is it?” she said in alarm.
“Oh. Well . . .”
There was never any rushing Huckle. He was a slow-talking, laid-back boy from the American South who could normally calm Polly down in any circumstances, no matter how frenetic she got. She hoped he would manage it now.
“I was just thinking ’bout our wedding.”
After Reuben and Kerensa had had the most over-the-top crazy themed wedding ever a couple of years back, Polly and Huck had vowed never to do that, telling each other that they’d have something small and intimate. But small and intimate was proving harder and harder, seeing as how literally everybody in the village thought they would be invited, plus Polly’s family and all her old friends from home, who complained they never saw her these days since she’d moved away to the back end of beyond. She could have pointed out it was only two hours away but didn’t need to, as quite often people turned up with a carload of buckets and spades to spend their summer holidays at her house, which was lovely but could get a little tiring when she had to get up at five a.m. and her guests were carousing till all hours and begging her to join them.
She told herself that was why she didn’t like to plan ahead. She didn’t really want to think about what else it might be: that her own mother and father . . . that they’d never been a family. The only families she knew had failed so badly.
“Uh, yeah?”
Huckle cast his eyes down as he thought about what he wanted to say. He’d given up a good corporate job to move to the UK, almost on a whim, after a long-term relationship had fallen apart due to their crazy working habits. His initial idea had been to destress, downsize for a little bit, get himself some breathing space somewhere far away from home—he loved working with his bees—and his father’s British nationality had made it a cinch.
Then he’d accidentally fallen madly in love with this strawberry-blond whirlwind of baking powder and capability, and that had been that.
Except he was stuck in an extremely remote, if utterly beautiful, corner of Cornwall, far away from reliable broadband and transportation and normal jobs. Last year, when Polly had lost her job temporarily, he’d tried commuting back to work in the States, but it had nearly torn them apart. He couldn’t be a management consultant again, he just couldn’t. It felt like it ate his soul from the inside. Even if Polly had been willing to move to America, which she wasn’t. There wasn’t much for her to do in Savannah, he knew; there probably wasn’t room for another artisan bakery in the beautiful old-fashioned town.
And anyway, Mount Polbearne was where she belonged, however much she complained about the weather. They’d both become part of this community through good times, as businesses thrived and the town was a happy place, and bad, like the previous year, when a fishing boat and its young captain, Tarnie, had been lost, breaking the hearts of everyone in the area. They were a part of it now.
But oh my goodness, he couldn’t make any money. A few jars here and there of his exquisite honey, which he sold to whole-food shops and beauty salons, wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough to pay for a wedding, even one a million times less flash than Reuben’s.
He held Polly’s small hand, muscular from kneading bread, with white crescents of flour beneath the tidy unpolished nails, and she looked up at him, concern in her eyes. He cursed himself for simultaneously thinking that money did and didn’t matter. It shouldn’t when it came to how you spent your days—free and creative, out in the fresh air or experimenting in a kitchen, as opposed to shut up in some ghastly air-conditioned office listening to boring managers and filling in spreadsheets for ten hours a day.
“You know, about the wedding?”
Polly winced. It seemed like it didn’t matter what they did, this wedding was going to be a big deal regardless.
“Don’t wince!” said Huckle. “Seriously, that is not a good look for talking about, you know, marrying me.”
“I know,” said Polly. “It’s just . . . you know. Getting your family to come all that way, and it’ll have to be something really nice and special, and my family too, and it’s just so much and we’re so . . .”
She didn’t want to say “skint,” but she didn’t know how to avoid it. She never, ever wanted Huckle to go back to that high-paying job that made him so miserable. It wasn’t worth it, not at all, ever. They got by. They got by absolutely fine, they needed so little. Well, the lighthouse needed a lot, but it had stood for nearly two hundred years so far; it could survive a couple of winters more.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m listening.”
“Well, I was thinking,” said Huckle. “You know, you are thirty-three . . .”
“Thanks.”
“. . . and, well, I figure we seem to be giving ourselves a ton of stress with thinking about a wedding. And cash and other stupid things that we don’t really want to think about.”
He held her close to him.
“You know,” he said softly, “I couldn’t love you any more than I do. I couldn’t.”
Polly looked up at him, blinking.
“I love you too,” she said. “So much.”