by Jenny Colgan
“Good!” said Huckle. “Okay, this feels like a good start. Okay, listen. Without me ever under any circumstances not wanting to marry you, all right?”
“Uh huh.”
“What would you think if . . .” He gripped the letter a little tighter. “What would you think if we, like, maybe did it the wrong way round?”
Polly blinked, not sure she understood him straightaway. Then gradually it dawned.
“You mean . . .” she said, and her heart started to beat very fast. It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought about it; it was just she felt it was very far off. After the wedding, maybe, and everything, when the shop was stabilized and . . . She felt suddenly panicked. Rushed.
She realized she’d been putting it off.
“I mean,” said Huckle, “it’s not like we’ve not been practising the stuff you need to do to kind of make a baby.”
“I know that,” said Polly. “But . . .”
Outside the sea crashed against the rocks, and spray flew upward. But inside everything was warm and cozy, the fire lit and a candle burning in the window. She and Huck weren’t superstitious, but the fishermen were, and Polly knew they liked to see the little light flickering as they returned to harbor, guiding them safely home.
She looked into Huckle’s face: his blue eyes, which always had an amused look about them; the broad, generous lips, always so ready to break into a smile. He wasn’t smiling now.
She reached out and took his hand.
“Do you think we’re ready?” she asked.
“No,” said Huckle. “You’ll feed them on nothing but cake and make them obese and grumpy, like Celeste.”
“Oh,” said Polly.
He stroked her cheek. “But I don’t think anyone’s ever ready. I don’t think that’s how it works.”
Polly swallowed down her fears and indecision. After all, she should be thrilled, shouldn’t she? A man she loved dearly, to whom she was engaged to be married, had just asked her if she’d like to have a baby with him.
“You can think about it,” said Huckle, noting how anxious she was. He didn’t want to rush her.
“Okay,” said Polly. “Okay. Thanks.” She turned to him awkwardly. “I mean, we could go upstairs now . . .”
Huckle shook his head. “I hope that isn’t a ruse to get out of going to the town meeting.”
“Rumbled,” said Polly, though in fact she’d been trying to change the topic of conversation as much as anything else. “I thought maybe if I took you upstairs and did that thing you like, you might not make me leave the house again. Because I am never leaving the house again, like I told you. Once I’m in for the winter, I’m in. Summer we can stroll along the beach and eat outside and enjoy paradise. Winter time I am going to put on four stone and never change out of my sixty-denier tights and possibly not shave my legs, and you’re just going to have to deal with it.”
“I will deal with it,” said Huckle, “and I will deal with you, young lady, in absolutely no uncertain terms. After the town meeting.”
“Noooo!”
“Get your coat on.”
“My coat’s wet!”
“I’ll take you for chips afterward.”
“I don’t care.”
“Come on! And if you don’t, I’ll get Samantha to come around and sign you up for the committee.”
“I can’t believe I’m supposed to be joining my life together with such a bad, bad man.”
Huckle grinned. “It’s my innate drive and decisiveness. Move your ass.”
Chapter Four
The village hall was surprisingly crowded—or rather not surprisingly when you considered how organized Samantha liked to be, and how relentless her pestering was if she didn’t get what she wanted.
It was vicious outside, rain seemingly dancing all ways in the sky, with a distinct promise of snow on the air. It didn’t snow much on the island, simply because they were surrounded by too much salt water, but it wasn’t unheard of, and the icy wind definitely seemed to make it feel like a possibility. Huckle put his arm around Polly, but it didn’t help that much as they trudged up the hill to the old schoolhouse at the top, Huck clutching a box under his other arm. Polly had okayed Jayden to make some extra apple turnovers that afternoon and pretend they were leftover stock so they could donate them, though that only made lots of people tut at her and tell her about stock control and how she shouldn’t be so wasteful if she was going to run a successful business, so she pretty much wished she hadn’t bothered.
There was lots of chatter and some crying in the hall. Muriel from the grocer’s was holding baby Cornelius, and Samantha had brought her daughter Marina, so the place sounded quite lively. Most of the village was there, it seemed to Polly, including lots of the older residents, who were out for a free cup of tea and a bit of excitement—nothing wrong with that; as well as Mattie, the part-time vicar, and a stern-looking woman Polly didn’t recognize, obviously the council worker from the mainland. She had a sour look to her.
Samantha cleared her throat, ready to call the room to order.
“Welcome, everyone, to the Mount Polbearne town meeting . . . You will find agendas and minutes on your seats . . .”
Everybody pretended to look at them.
“Now, tonight we’re here to talk about the possibility of reopening the village school. As of the next calendar year, we’ll have nine babies ready for nursery and a total of fourteen children up to the age of eleven. As this would be the largest school roll in Mount Polbearne in over twenty years, we feel the time is right for the county council to allocate us school services.”
She continued in this vein for rather longer than was probably necessary, extolling the virtues of Mount Polbearne “not as a monument of ancient Britain set in aspic, but as a living, breathing, growing community,” and Polly, as she listened, rather found herself falling under her spell.
Mount Polbearne had grown and flourished for hundreds of years, the generations continuing through fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. It was only recently that the place had started to die, as holidaymakers traveled further afield and people began to favor convenience in their lives over all things. Was it possible, thought Polly, that now they could reverse the process? Keep alive their little corner of the world, with its inconvenient access, winding roads, inclement weather, terrible broadband and lack of home delivery services?
She had been up for a very long time, and it was warm in the hall. Samantha’s soothing tones washed over her, and she found herself snuggling under Huckle’s large arm, her eyelids drooping. Huckle nudged her and smiled.
“This is where ours will go one day,” he whispered in her ear, and she smiled sleepily.
Then, abruptly, Samantha stopped speaking, and after a short pause, another voice started up. This one was harsh and abrasive, and Polly jerked awake, blinking.
“We have a responsibility in our district to ensure the health and safety of all our customers,” said the annoyingly nasal voice. “Now I can see here that two years ago Mount Polbearne fought very strongly against a new bridge to the mainland that would have enabled ambulances and other vehicles to get through in a timely fashion. I simply can’t see a situation in which anyone would allow a school to function in this place.”
And it’s all your own fault, the voice implied, even if it didn’t actually say it out loud.
There was a clamour of dissent, and a raft of questions, but the woman—whose name was Xanthe—simply closed her very thin lips and shrugged her shoulders. It was not going at all well.
Polly suddenly discovered that actually she did care, more than she’d realized, and she sat up straight and wondered how you would make a case for a child who fell over in the playground and couldn’t get to a hospital on the mainland if the tide was in. One option would be to have the GP there more often, but the local doctor wasn’t fond of the Polbearne beat either—that old timekeeping issue.
She sensed that Xanthe thought they were all totally ridiculou
s, clinging to a rock in the middle of the sea and refusing to move to modern identical boxes on the mainland, all neat and tidy and squared away for the convenience of the NHS and the local council and the postman and the people who picked up the bins. It made Polly quite determined to do the opposite. This was a free country, wasn’t it? Why should they toe the line and conform just so some suit from the council could tick a bunch of boxes about health and safety? She sat up straighter.
“Couldn’t we just have the school open when the tides are favorable?” she asked. Huckle glanced at her, grinning. Polly never could keep her natural enthusiasm down for long.
“I don’t believe schools get to pick and choose their hours,” said Xanthe, smiling thinly.
“Course they do,” said Polly. “It’s not written on holy tablets that they’re shut during August, is it? It’s not, like, the law.”
“School hours are the law,” said Xanthe. She might as well have said “I am the law,” and Polly started to bristle.
“Laws change,” she said.
“You think we should change the laws of England to accommodate Mount Polbearne?”
“Well, that escalated quickly,” murmured Huckle. “What is this, a coup d’état?”
Polly sat back, fuming. “I just think that if you wanted to find a way, you could.”
“We have budget cuts to make and staff to keep safe,” said Xanthe. “The world doesn’t begin and end with Mount Polbearne. Even if the road does.”
“I hope she misses the crossing cut-off tonight,” muttered Jayden, sitting just behind them. There were small noises of agreement and the kind of shuffling that denotes a large group of people who are quite tired now and want to go home or to the pub.
Suddenly the door to the hall burst open, and everyone turned to look as Reuben and Kerensa marched in, Reuben looking as usual extremely bullish.
“Hey!” he shouted, as if everyone weren’t looking at him already. Behind him, Kerensa looked uncharacteristically deflated and a little pale, Polly noticed. She hadn’t seen her friend in a while—Kerensa worked sporadically and Polly on her own admission had very much gone into hibernation the last month or so. The idea of getting dressed up to go out somewhere when you first had to take off the seven layers of clothing you were already wearing didn’t seem to appeal. They’d texted, of course, but the unpredictability of the Mount Polbearne signal meant they’d hardly spoken on the phone. Now Polly perked up to see her, but she couldn’t help being slightly worried at the same time.
“Hey?” She waggled her eyebrows in Kerensa’s direction, but got no response.
“Hey, everyone,” Reuben went on. “Great news! Glad tidings and all that stuff! So, anyway, we’re totally having a baby!”
Polly jumped up. Huckle rolled his eyes. Only his showboat of a friend would use a public meeting to announce something like that. Nonetheless, everybody clapped and cheered, happy to hear good news. Reuben and Kerensa might live in a huge mansion on a private beach, but new babies were new babies and, right now, very welcome.
Polly ran up to hug her friend.
“I am going to kill you for not telling me,” she said fondly. “Seriously. I am going to absolutely kill you.”
“I wasn’t going to tell anyone,” said Kerensa, sounding horrified. “I haven’t got my head around it myself yet.”
“How far gone are you?”
“About eight months, apparently.”
“You’re NOT!”
“I am. I know. Don’t kill me.”
“But that’s not even possible.” Polly was absolutely stung. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Kernesa shrugged. “I didn’t know. I didn’t realize.”
“You didn’t realize? How thick are you? Didn’t Reuben guess?”
“Not until tonight.”
There was something strange about Kerensa. Polly turned to look at her, then glanced over at Reuben.
“Is he handing out cigars?”
“I told him not to do that.”
“Are you feeling sick?”
“Sick, fat, everything.”
Polly stood back. This wasn’t like Kerensa in the slightest.
“Seriously, Kez. Why . . . why didn’t you tell me?”
But Kerensa just shrugged, and Polly, hurt, made her promise to come over later, because Reuben was insisting on taking everyone to the pub and it looked like it was going to be quite a noisy night.
“So in conclusion,” said Xanthe, obviously annoyed that attention had been diverted away from her, “I have to say that the case for a school in Mount Polbearne has not yet been successfully made.”
Reuben raised his hand to stop the hubbub and turned around.
“Oh yeah, you should have a school here,” he said. “That’s an excellent idea. I’ll send my kids over. Nice. Brilliant. Okay, that’s sorted.”
“Well, Health and Safety say the local council couldn’t recommend a school facility on these premises,” said Xanthe thinly.
Reuben stared at her for a moment.
“Who cares?” he said eventually. “I’ll buy it and open my own school. No problem. Private school, we can do what we like. Free to local residents, of course. Then we’ll charge a fortune to gullible Russians and I’ll end up even richer than I am now. Which is very rich.”
The room applauded. Xanthe looked horrified.
“But the hours . . .”
“My school, my hours,” said Reuben, and on this general wave of cheerfulness, the meeting broke up and the villagers swarmed out into the biting cold and down to the warmth of the pub, except for Jayden, who had to get the taxi boat out to take a furious Xanthe back to the mainland, where she had self-importantly parked her car on the forecourt rather than in the designated parking lot, and thus found it up to its axles in seawater.
“I can’t believe how you can live out there,” she hissed, once she’d finally got it started.
Jayden looked at her, blinking, and to his credit didn’t say, “Because it’s not full of people like you.”
Chapter Five
The next day, Polly left Jayden touting doughnuts to the blearily hungover and headed straight out over the causeway to visit Kerensa.
Reuben and Kerensa’s mansion had recently had a complete overhaul and was now freshly redecorated. Reuben had been going through something of a Game of Thrones phase, so the place had gone from frenzied gilt to a kind of peculiar medieval mishmash, full of tapestry and gigantic wooden throne-style chairs. Tartan curtains hung from wrought-iron poles, and great oil paintings had been shipped in. There were also lots of candles. Polly thought it was spooky. Kerensa was just pleased she’d managed to talk Reuben out of getting a kestrel.
Polly rang the ridiculous deep-clanging bell and was let in by Marta, the maid.
Kerensa was half-lying on a dark purple chaise longue next to a huge roaring fire that looked like it should have a pig over it roasting on a spit. She still wasn’t smiling; she still looked pale and wan.
“Last night was quite fun!” said Polly, who’d had two glasses of wine and considered herself almost ready to get into the Christmas spirit. “How are you? Still feeling poorly?”
She hadn’t even confessed to Huckle how hurt she felt at being left out of Kerensa’s news. So they’d been away a lot, but . . . eight months? Before she could think, she blurted out “Who doesn’t know they’re having a baby for eight months?”
“Loads of people,” said Kerensa defensively, as Marta came in and set out the tea on a side table. Polly would never get used to this kind of thing. “Some people don’t know they’re having a baby till they actually poo it down the toilet.”
“Okay,” said Polly. “Okay, okay, okay. It just seemed . . . Okay.” She looked at her dear friend. “You just . . . I mean, are you happy about it? Your mum must be over the moon.”
“She is,” said Kerensa. She stirred her tea.
“What’s up?” said Polly, suddenly worried. Where was her mouthy, exuberant friend?
Kerensa let out a great sigh, and Polly moved forward on the huge overstuffed sofa she was sitting on.
“What?” she said. “Weren’t you ready, Kez? I mean, neither of us is getting any younger . . .” She was conscious that she was trying out some of Huckle’s arguments on Kerensa. She was also curious as to whether her friend felt as ambivalent about the whole thing as she did.
To her horror, Kerensa suddenly dissolved in floods of tears.
“What?” said Polly, rushing to sit next to her. “What is it? What’s happened? Don’t you want the baby? What is it?”
Kerensa could barely choke out the words.
“Do you remember in the spring . . . when Reuben was being such a putz?”
Polly cast her mind back. The problem was, Reuben was so often completely insufferable, it was hard to remember just one occasion.
“D’you mean that time when he booked that band to play in the garden for his birthday then insisted on getting up and singing all the songs, and he was terrible and started yelling at people for not enjoying it?”
Kerensa shook her head. “No, not that.”
“Was it the time he fell out with the telephone company and hired ninety-five people to cut the wires into their building, and MI5 thought he was planning a terrorist atrocity and he had to get himself that incredibly expensive lawyer?”
“No, not that one either.”
Kerensa sighed.
“Remember our anniversary?”
“When he flew back from San Francisco because he felt guilty?”
“Yes,” said Kerensa, hanging her head.
“And took you to loads of places and whisked you off to the States with him and it was all lovely and romantic?”
“Yeah, all right,” said Kerensa. “But leading up to that, he’d been totally awful.”
“And . . . ?” said Polly.
“Selina and I went out one night.”
Polly blinked, trying to remember.
“Oh yes, she said you were really drunk. I don’t like people who tell other people that someone’s been really drunk.”
“She didn’t say anything else?”