‘Think of the windows,’ he said.
‘I know, I know.’
If they could replace the lighthouse’s ancient rattly single-paned glass with English Heritage-approved double glazing, the difference it would make in the quality of their lives would be immeasurable. No more icy plunges down the circular staircase; no more painful hauling themselves out of bed.
Although, who knew? The house might never be warm to other people’s standards – Polly’s mother’s, for example, or Kerensa’s, or, well, anyone’s, really. But to the four of them – the children had never known anything else – it was just perfect. Huckle had put an old TV in the master bedroom, and through the cosy nights of winter all four of them curled up with the electric blanket on, Neil hopping on the nightstand, watching Moana, and it was, windows or not, as happy a place as Polly could possibly imagine.
And now spring was coming! And if Huckle made enough this year they were going to get windows and a new boiler, so there was very little to complain about, thought Polly, as she headed back into the kitchen, listening to the merry voices of the twins demanding that their father became a tiger MEEJETLY which he obligingly did, growling so fiercely that Polly wondered if Avery would get upset. Daisy would dry his tears if he did.
She added barley and vegetables to the chicken stock she had boiled up from the roast, happily looking forward to when Huckle would be home for the summer, and the tourists would start to arrive for the season and they would be cheerfully flat out. She couldn’t wait to feel the sun warm on her face again, not the endless winter storms that had seemed to arrive every single weekend. For months the rain had thrown itself against the windows and the house was full of wet wellingtons and the children got cranky when she couldn’t get them out enough, the pleasure of building dens indoors and helping Mama bake having grown stale. The storms had been getting worse – climate change, she knew – and the winters were getting harder.
‘What’s up when I’m away?’ Huckle asked now, following her in while simultaneously half-listening to Avery talk about how Lowin was getting the biggest snake in the world for his birthday.
‘Usual,’ said Polly. ‘Oh no, I forgot! Reuben’s waifs and strays are arriving!’
Chapter Two
At that moment, over in Exeter on the mainland, one of Reuben’s waifs and strays had no idea that was what she was about to become.
Caius – ‘pronounced “keys”’, as he liked to tell people snottily when they attempted it for the first time, unless they by some chance got it right, in which case he would say, ‘It’s “ky-us”, actually?’ – was banging heavily on his flatmate’s bedroom door, but to no avail.
‘Marisa!’
It was, fair enough, hard to hear over the racket.
Caius theoretically liked having lots of friends who were DJs, or said they were, but then he made the mistake of asking them to come and play at his parties and it was horrendous and they all squabbled with each other over how expensive their headphones were, and mixed up their stupid boxes and vied to play very obscure stuff, and frankly, it was a racket.
If he’d cared about his neighbours he would have factored that in too, but, being rich and good-looking, Caius so rarely met people that didn’t like him that he often found it hard to imagine what that might be like.
The flat was absolutely heaving, mostly with people he knew, kind of, some he didn’t, but they were good-looking and appeared well-off, so that was fine too.
But he needed the little room his parents had insisted he let out – something to do with ‘learning how to take responsibility’ or ‘managing efficiently’; it had been hard to tell, he had been on the worst comedown while they’d been talking to him and he still had his earpods in so it could have been anything.
‘Marisa,’ he yelled again, as loud as he could. He winced. Caius didn’t really like shouting; he liked drawling or, even better, not saying anything at all and merely waving a hand at waiters bringing him things.
‘Marisa! Come on, it’s a party! Can’t you make us some canapés?’
Still no reply. He pouted. She must have heard him by now.
Marisa used to be fun. Well, not fun, exactly: she had a real job and went to bed at a reasonable hour. But she cooked and smiled and was funny and he quite liked someone kind of looking after him.
Then she’d gone all quiet and sort of vanished and he knew she’d told him why, some family shiz, but he kept forgetting, and it was really terribly tiresome.
‘Marisa! People want to use this room! For coats!’
‘And also sex and taking drugs,’ said one of a trio of people in black eyeliner appearing behind him, the other two vigorously agreeing.
‘No! Totally none of those things, just probably coats!’ said Caius. He frowned. ‘You know there’s tequila out here, right? There’s tequila out here and none in where you are, which means I don’t understand you at all.’
Well, they agreed about one thing, thought Marisa. Because she didn’t understand herself either.
Chapter Three
Inside her little box room – like many of these expensive new builds in Exeter, the main room was flashy and showy with a big glass wall and a balcony, but the smaller bedrooms were done on the cheap – Marisa Rossi sat on the end of her bed, knees up to her chin, headphones on, the clatter beyond the door more or less white noise.
Another party. Another night when the rest of the world was out and about, having fun.
Everyone else seemed fine. Everyone else always seemed fine.
And, in the scheme of things, losing a grandparent was hardly heartbreaking loss. A lot of people lose grandparents. Everyone, when you think about it.
And they all still seemed able to go to parties. Everyone but her.
But somehow, she could only think of her nonno, Carlo: her kind, funny grandfather in Imperia, Italy, descended from generations of shipbuilders – a tradition that had only stopped with her mother, Lucia, who had left for the UK to find a better life, and married a man from Livorno, just down the road. Marisa’s father couldn’t bear the cold and the rain and left England – and Lucia alone, with Marisa and her brother, Gino. Marisa tried not to take it personally.
But her grandfather had stepped into the breach, and then some. Her fondest memories were golden: holidays spent in Italy; long days on the hot windy shores of Imperia, as the great big industrial ships rolled past; late dreamy evenings at restaurants as she ate spaghetti vongole and fell asleep under the table as the adults talked and laughed long into the night; cool hands rubbing in cream to sunburned shoulders; ice creams as big as a beach ball; stones underfoot as you ran into the water; the pungent scent of the exhausts of the Vespas of the young men gunning around the town, a contrast with the smartly uniformed navale stationed there; the long rolling rhythms of Italian summers.
Abandoned in her teens for holidays with her British friends on cheap packages in the Balearics, drinking shots and laughing uproariously, they sometimes, in her memory, felt like a dream; snatches of an older language tugging somewhere at the fraying edges of her brain, another person, happy and free, in big fussy-bowed dresses her grandmother – who was as stiff as her grandfather was loving – liked to buy her, and which she adored and her mother thought were absolutely awful.