‘I should have a shower,’ said Huckle, his mouth watering nonetheless. The horrible tasteless muck you could buy when you were on the road, on offer in service stations and convenience stores, made him not want to eat at all. Something as simple and as beautiful as one of Polly’s special pies made him want to bury his face in it.
‘Yes. You smell bad,’ said Daisy, who was burrowed under his arm. He frowned.
‘But the pie smell good,’ said Avery, as Polly shooed him away.
‘Off you go, gannets. You’ve had supper. Let Daddy enjoy his dinner and you can watch Moana.’
‘MOANA! MOANA!’
They looked at the books together. Another hotel chain had moved to a bulk supplier, Huckle explained. They just couldn’t make it work.
It didn’t matter how many times they went over it. They weren’t going to make it. Unless this summer was an unlikely hit. Unless there were a million billion weddings, even though weddings had taken a turn for the quieter, after the last floods. And even then. Unless there was an influx – but after last year, when there had been so much rain and it had been so stormy and damp . . . well.
She sighed and closed her eyes. The heating could come off. They’d done without it before.
She could always ask her mother for help – a problem shared was a problem halved and all that – but her mother lived on a small pension and Polly knew that if she told her, she would fret to the hills and back which would simply give her another problem.
And if she told her best friend Kerensa, she’d try to give her money, Kerensa being incredibly rich, and that would just be absolutely awful. If anything, Polly spent more on Kerensa than she did on her other friends, just in case she ever looked like she was taking advantage. She took Champagne, not Prosecco; insisted on splitting dinner. She wasn’t entirely sure Kerensa even noticed.
And her other friends, dotted around the country, weren’t necessarily finding life any easier than she was at the moment and thought that she and Huckle, living in a groovy lighthouse on a gorgeous island in Cornwall, were the luckiest people they knew anyway, even if their children did fall down the stairs about once every three days.
‘I could . . . well, I don’t think I could . . . I could look for a corporate job,’ said Huckle, as she moved over and lay down on the sofa, her head comfortably in his lap. It was a terrible position to have a serious discussion from, which, she knew, was why she had chosen it.
‘On the plus side, you don’t actually smell bad,’ she said. ‘Or at least, I like it.’
Huckle smiled, seeing she was trying to distract him, and coiled a length of her pale red hair around his finger.
‘You’re not listening,’ he said. ‘I could go back to the office.’
He had tried working at his corporate job once before, back in America. It had not gone well.
She grimaced. ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘It’s too far. Even if they’d have you back, which they probably wouldn’t. And you’re getting too old. They’ll be running on cheap interns now.’
Huckle shrugged. ‘Maybe Reuben could find me something?’
Polly winced. ‘He’d make you pay.’
‘He would.’
They held each other. Neil was sleeping in his box but opened a beady eye just to check on them.
‘Just you and me, kid,’ said Polly, hoisting herself up to sit on his lap.
‘Just you and me,’ he said, burying his head in her lovely hair.
‘We’ll figure something out,’ said Polly. ‘But in the meantime I’m going to switch the heating off.’
Huckle groaned. The nights were still chilly and the lighthouse got the full brunt of every gust of wind that came along.
‘It’s a shame you’re so tired,’ said Polly, ‘given this is the last night you’ll see me not swathed in nine layers of old fishermen’s jumpers.’
Huckle’s voice was muffled as he nuzzled in closer to her neck.
‘I’m not that tired.’
She wriggled on his lap. ‘Well, that’s good.’
She moved closer to him, pressing herself against his flat stomach.
‘MUM! Come see the song you like! The man is dancing.’
Huckle frowned. ‘This isn’t the bit where you fancy the god Maui again, is it?’
‘He’s a very attractive cartoon god, what’s not to like?’ said Polly without moving. ‘Goodness, and I thought I was in the mood before.’
Chapter Twelve
Marisa sat, back against the wall, waiting.
Perhaps, she told herself. Perhaps it would be nice – some lovely music, nothing too difficult, a few tunes every night? That would be pleasant, no? Yes. It would be all right. It would be nice, in fact. A little music. Presumably if he was a teacher he’d be good, right? It would be okay. She tried some of the breathing exercises she’d read about. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, hold for four: one, two, three—
CRASH!
At first, Marisa thought someone had dropped the piano again. But then there was another powerful crumping noise and two things immediately became obvious: one, that despite the luxury fixtures and fittings and the gorgeous layout, the walls of these buildings were paper-thin (this was entirely correct; Reuben only meant them as holiday homes so hadn’t bothered with soundproofing. In his own house, which had a totally circular bedroom, you could land a helicopter outside without noticing, and in fact this had happened); and two, this was not going to be ‘a little pretty music coming from next door’.
This was incredibly discordant and loud, banging away as if he were trying to hurt the piano rather than play it. Was he even a musician? she found herself wondering. He certainly wasn’t playing like one. It was a horrible sound.
She moved into the bedroom on the other side of the sitting room, but it didn’t change matters at all. The only place that was slightly quieter was the bathroom which didn’t have any windows. She ran a bath. Then she put her own speakers on, very loudly in the bathroom. Unfortunately, the blend of the last Taylor Swift album and the (albeit fainter) racket from next door was even worse.
Close to tears, she sat in the bath. This couldn’t last for ever.
It lasted for three hours.
Any idiot, she knew, would just go and speak to him. Say excuse me, hello, introduce herself and discuss what was sensible to do. You could even get keyboards that didn’t make any noise, she knew, so maybe something like that. Well. There were all sorts of things she could have done.
Unfortunately, over the next few weeks, she found herself completely incapable of any of them. She ordered a very expensive pair of noise-cancelling headphones that cut out absolutely every other piece of noise in the house in a slightly off-putting way, but still let the banging and crashing noise through so she felt like now she was in a world where only the horrible piano existed.
Perhaps it would stop when he went to work, she thought.
She thought wrongly. In fact, one of the reasons Reuben had been so keen to put the music teacher into one of his houses was that he planned to build huge glass arts and music structure effectively hanging off the cliff side of Mount Polbearne, turning it into an ‘international arts destination’ (his words) or ‘a James Bond dystopian carbuncle’ (the views of the planning committee). The plans were still on hold.