by Jenny Colgan
‘Traumatised by what?’ said Selina. ‘We’re fine. It was brilliant fun actually.’
And weirdly, thought Polly, Selina did look fine. Revitalised, as if her crashing experience had given her more energy, not less. There was a sparkle back in her eyes.
The medic ignored her and carried on examining Polly.
‘Yup, just as I thought. Bruised ribs. Want to come with us?’
‘For some bruised ribs?’
‘Some people like going in helicopters.’
‘Well that’s nice,’ said Polly. ‘But no thanks. I’ll take some paracetamol if you have it.’
The medic quickly and expertly bandaged her up and handed her a packet of aspirin.
‘There you go. Couple of those every two hours, you’ll be right as rain.’
‘I know,’ said Polly in a resigned tone. ‘We get a lot of rain.’
‘Polly Waterford?’ said a voice. A short, chubby middle-aged man was standing there, with a wide-eyed lad next to him.
‘Uh, yeah?’ she said, exhausted.
‘Hi. We’re here to fix your lighthouse. We hitched a lift with the big boys.’
‘I got to go on a helicopter,’ said the young lad. ‘It were amazing. In the storm and everything.’
‘See?’ said the medic.
‘Fine,’ said Polly. Her shoulders were dropping. ‘Okay, right, be right with you.’
The whisky was passed round again, but Polly didn’t want any more.
‘Can’t you just go on your own, mate?’ said Jayden, full of new-found swagger. ‘It won’t be locked. Will it, Pol?’
Polly shook her head and waved her hands.
‘No, it isn’t locked, but I have to come over anyway.’
Suddenly the idea of having to climb all those stairs again, back in the cold lighthouse, before she even looked at the damage that must have been done to it, seemed a little overwhelming.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Selina. ‘You’re staying right here. Upstairs. It’s warm and cosy, and there are clean sheets on your old bed. Or there will be in about ten seconds.’
‘Where are you going to sleep?’ said Polly in surprise. Selina smiled.
‘I couldn’t sleep now for any money. Also, Andy’s opening up,’ she added. ‘He says nobody’s getting any sleep in the storm anyway, so he might as well make some money. You want to come?’
‘No,’ said Polly. ‘Oh God, I would love to sleep, though.’
‘Up you go,’ said Selina. ‘Don’t wait up! I’ll sleep on the sofa when I get in.’
‘Are you sure?’
Selina smiled, and the two girls hugged and left, and the other villagers clapped them as they went.
It was the oddest thing, to go back to what had once been her flat, only to find it all different. It smelled different: perfume and body lotion and a whiff of cat litter, although Lucas was nowhere to be seen on such a night.
Exhausted, Polly grabbed a rug off the sofa and went to the old chair by the window she used to sit in. It was still very windy and wet outside, but the thunder and lightning had passed on, out to sea. The worst was very definitely over. She looked up. At the top of the lighthouse, the men had already set up torches and were clearly beginning to work. Out on the harbour, the helicopter was taking off, Paul and Josephus safely aboard. It was rather thrilling to see it rise in the air seemingly right in front of her nose. Still no light, of course, in the village, nor on the coast. Now that the helicopter had gone, they were plunged back into gloom. She could hear, though, cheerful noises coming from the pub. They were celebrating. And she should be celebrating too. They had come through the storm. They had saved that little family – goodness, she still felt shaky about that. She knew she would have to sit down and process everything. But for now, in this dark little corner of the world, she felt suddenly overwhelmed by tiredness. There would be no bread tomorrow. Just this once. Just this once…
The last thing she remembered as she dozed off was a sudden dazzling halo of light as the lighthouse lamp came back on and swung around to the island, bringing safety once more.
Malcolm walked with his head down slowly past the pub, the windows lit with candles, the noise and the laughter steady and cosy. Flora and Jayden were huddled together, concentrating on something. He wondered what it was. Selina was laughing in the candlelight, her face looking young and carefree. The lighthouse beam illuminated Beach Street once more. They saw him outside, and nodded, but nobody invited him in, and he trudged on.
Archie shucked off his oilskin at the outside door of the cottage. He took off his boots and crept stealthily into the little house at the top end of the town, checking first on the three little ones, pink-faced and oblivious in their bunks, little puffs of sleeping breath on the air. Then he strode over to look at the baby, whose tiny fists were clenched, whose eyes were moving under their lids, the thick lashes reflecting on to the round rosy cheeks, swaddled up cosy and tight in his crib.
At last his heavy tread went to the front bedroom, where his wife, he knew, would be lying unsleeping. He walked straight round to her side of the bed, and she sat up as he took her in his arms.
‘I’m back,’ he said quietly, and she buried her pillow-warmed face in his shoulder and nestled into him.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘But… I’m really back,’ he said.
‘My love,’ she said, embracing him tightly, as the lighthouse beam came round again.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Huckle had just negotiated a massively better price for feed lots when the phone in his pocket buzzed. He ignored it: it was a beautiful morning and he had just saved the farm a load of money and was feeling rather good about himself.
Then it buzzed again.
He took it out.
He froze.
‘What’s up, son?’ The shopkeeper’s face was concerned.
Huckle shook his head, and all the colour drained from his face as he stared at his phone. Now it was pinging and pinging and pinging: Chaos as huge storms batter southern Cornwall; Widespread floods and power cuts as Mount Polbearne suffers its most bruising storms in 150 years. The headlines seemed to go on and on. Huckle couldn’t scroll through them quickly enough.
‘I have to leave,’ he said, suddenly. ‘Something has happened.’
‘Nothing bad, I hope,’ said the man.
‘I don’t know,’ said Huckle. ‘I just don’t know.’
Out in the street he called the farm phone before he lost the signal.
‘Clemmie?’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘I’m telling Dubose. I have to go.’
‘But I don’t —’
‘We should have told him right away. We shouldn’t have waited. I shouldn’t have stayed. He needs to know, and he needs to know now, and if this can’t make him change his ways, well, I’ll help you find a new manager for the farm.’
He paused.
‘But it can’t be me. Not any more.’
‘But…’ Her voice sounded so sad.
‘Clemmie,’ said Huckle. ‘Either he will or he won’t, but he’s that baby’s daddy and he needs to face up to it, and you need to know. I can’t stay for ever.’
‘I know.’
There was a pause.
‘Do you want to email or will I?’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Clemmie, I am so sorry, but you have to. Because I have to go.’
Looking out into the hot afternoon sun of Georgia, peach fields stretching out across the flat landscape, it was almost impossible to believe in the extraordinary forces tearing everything apart halfway across the world. He turned his phone on to BBC News. They were showing footage taken on people’s phones from far away of apocalyptic scenes in the dark. And this was on the mainland. He couldn’t bear to think what it might be like further out at sea, where it would be even wilder.
Why? Why had he stayed so long? Why hadn’t he just let Dubose fix his own messes right from the start? Because of Clem
mie, of course. But still.
Then he heard a line that stopped his heart.
‘News reaches us that the storm has grown so intense it has even cut off the Mount Polbearne lighthouse. All nearby shipping has been warned to find safe harbour immediately.’
Safe harbour, thought Huckle, desperately. Safe harbour.
He couldn’t get a flight into the south-west of the UK: all the airports were closed. The nearest he could get was London, leaving in two hours. He took it.
Huckle was not a nervous flyer. He was not, in general, a nervous anything. But he had never known a flight like this. The flight time – eight hours – was cut down to six as they were propelled across the Atlantic by speeding winds. The turbulence threw the plane up and down, bounced it about like it was nothing. Even the stewardesses looked concerned, and calm as he was, Huckle didn’t like an anxious-looking stewardess. Not, he thought, that he’d have slept anyway. He looked at the little piece of paper he’d taken from Candice’s house, tucked away in his wallet, and put it away again frowning.
The plane bumped steadily up and down until there was no one on the flight not covered in coffee. Eventually, weaving its way from side to side, it touched down, and after a stutter, some jumping, and that invariable moment when Huckle thought, hang on, aren’t we coming in too fast, finally ground to a halt.
Even here in London, heavy rain was chucking itself against the windows in the light of a very murky grey dawn. It was too early in the morning for the trains to be running, and as he soon saw, they weren’t running to the west of the country anyway. Everything was cancelled; all the lines were shut.
He ran to the nearest car hire place and asked for a jeep.
‘Would you like our additional insurance, sir?’ the pretty young girl at the desk asked him.
‘Yes,’ he growled without thinking about it.
The car was sturdy, heavy-duty and, best of all, very high off the ground. Huckle grabbed another coffee and rubbed his eyes, which were gritty with tiredness. Then he hit the road.
Visibility was absolutely dreadful. Great lorries threw up huge piles of spray on the motorway. After such a long period of dry weather, the ground was hard, and the fields Huckle could see as he sped down the road at precisely 71 miles per hour, trying to balance his anxiety to get there with his anxiety not to be pulled over by the police – although it did occur to him that after a Force 9 storm, the police were probably a lot busier elsewhere – were flooded.
As he drew closer to his destination, he began to see the storm’s true effects. Trees that had been there for hundreds of years were uprooted, bent over, simply scattered across the wayside. The rain was still constant but there was no thunder or lightning, just a messy blasted wasteland.
After Dartmoor, he had to get on to the little roads, and here the first real difficulties appeared. Every so often he would see the twinkling yellow lights of the highway patrol, rescuing stranded vehicles or moving tree trunks out of the way. He had the radio playing, and the stern British voice was recommending all travel in the area be avoided unless absolutely necessary. Huckle didn’t care. This was absolutely necessary.
He took the hard shoulder when he needed to; skirted to the other side of the road, made the jeep attempt steep and muddy angles. There were almost no other vehicles on the road; those that were were emergency vehicles or army trucks full of young men, obviously drafted in to lend a hand. One tried to flag him down, presumably to ask him what the hell he was doing there, but Huckle pretended not to see them, and they carried on. He was just trying to get home.
All the way he was kicking himself for being so stupid. All this time he had thought Polly was being the stubborn one. But of course Polly was just doing what Polly did, in her own quiet, competent way. It was him: he had been the stubborn one, the one who was so absolutely sure that he knew what was best for them, the definite best way for them to work: to get money together.
He had, he thought ruefully, gotten a little caught up in the world of being helpful; of making money for the farm; of believing that they needed nice things, or fancy things. And it wasn’t that nice things weren’t important; Polly knew that. But they weren’t as important as all the other stuff they had.
He thought of Candice and Ron, ruthlessly earning and spending, with serious expressions on their faces, filling their garage with skis and snowmobiles and pool equipment and framing their expensive holiday landmark pictures, as if this was another box ticked in some obscure life competition in which they didn’t even know who they were playing against, nor really what the rules were, apart from the one they all ignored, which was that the richest people anyone knew also tended to be amongst the unhappiest. He thought of Dubose, unable to settle down to the most basic of decent lives: looking after his family, tending the land. Always searching for something else, the next thing, a better thing, the promise.
And, Huckle thought, manoeuvring carefully around a tyre that had obviously fallen off the back of someone else’s jeep and wondering if this was what life would be like after the zombie apocalypse, he’d got caught up in it too. He’d gotten sucked back into it again, even though he’d been so pleased to break free from it in the first place; even though he knew, had always known, that that life wasn’t for him; knowing that he had tasted actual, proper contentment. Oh God, was he going to lose it now?
He reached the turn-off for Mount Polbearne and tried calling Polly again. Both lines were dead, as they had been ever since his flight landed. And now his signal had gone too. He hadn’t seen another car for forty minutes. He told himself to stop being ridiculous; he was being absurdly pessimistic. It would be…
He swallowed. He couldn’t think about it. He couldn’t be too late. He couldn’t be. Up to now he’d managed to keep his panic under control, focusing on one thing at a time. His job. His flight. The turbulence. The drive. Compartmentalise. Compartmentalise. Get through it.
He had never ever once allowed himself to think that something might have happened to Polly. Not until this moment.
Huckle was not an introspective man. This had driven Candice crazy – she was always trying to get him to go to therapy with her, just for the experience – but Polly liked it. He was practical. He fixed things. He was careful. He rode the motorbike. If Polly was upset or cross about something, he would listen to her, hear her out, then suggest he make them Spanish omelettes and they could curl up on the sofa and watch something with zombies in it. Most problems, when it came down to it, could pretty much be cured, or at least helped, by curling up on the sofa with an omelette, watching something with zombies in it.
But now, as he put his head down on the steering wheel, in front of the dark landscape ahead of him, he tried to fight his imagination galloping away from him. He had an image, so strong, of Polly falling down the stairs in the dark; or going out to help someone and being swept away from the harbour wall – it happened, it did happen in terrible weather, on the news, you saw it; or being underneath a stone that falls off a house, or… A million horrible scenarios crossed his mind and he felt a cold hand grip his heart at the thought of her not being there; of a life without his sweet, funny, kind, hard-working Pol, banging on about her puffin…
He shook his head. He couldn’t think like this, he couldn’t. He had to go on. He had to.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The roads got worse and worse. Just as Huckle wanted to go his fastest, just as he absolutely had to, needed to know, he had to inch along. A shed by the side of the road with its roof off. No livestock to be seen anywhere. A collapsed barn, roof tiles smashed everywhere you looked, hedges obliterated. People were indoors, hiding away, not even assessing the damage yet. Nobody would be going to work today.
Suddenly he was rounding the headland, the first glimpse of Mount Polbearne, just past the railway station. He felt utterly done in, completely exhausted.
The rain, which had been steadily getting lighter, suddenly, as he crested the hill, stopped altogether, and
a tentative, weak spot of sunlight appeared from behind the clouds. He couldn’t help it: he stopped the car and got out. Mount Polbearne looked as forbidding and daunting as he had ever seen it. But there was something wrong. He looked closely. It was the church at the top; something had happened. The old ruin up there that had never quite got fixed. Its shape had changed. Obviously a few more stones had come off in the storm. He shook his head. He couldn’t see the lighthouse from this angle. Onwards.
Even though it was officially low tide, water was still sloshing over the causeway. It was filthy, filled with the flotsam and jetsam of what had clearly been a very, very grim night. Huckle didn’t care. This was why he had rented the goddam jeep.