Therein followed a small problem of how to get it over the balcony. It didn’t occur to either of them just to open their front doors. Instead Marisa grabbed one of her big yellow striped towels and held it in the gap between the two balconies, and he gently lowered it in.
‘Thanks for this,’ she said. ‘Would you . . . like to eat?’
She could tell he was still annoyed with her and desperately wanted to swallow his pride and say yes.
‘Well, what are you having for dinner?’ she asked him.
He frowned. ‘Is fine.’
‘What?’
‘Cabbage that is stuffed.’
‘That sounds . . .’
‘Is very good.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Supper will be about fifteen minutes. I’ll leave it up to you what you do with the cabbage.’
‘Is very good,’ said Alexei with feeling.
‘Well, bring it. I’ll see you on the balcony.’
Marisa returned to where the chicken was browning beautifully and put the potatoes back on the heat. She added garlic to melting butter and threw in some chopped onions, sprinkling them with a huge splash of the expensive sherry. The smell was absolutely divine.
Quickly she made up a salad, slicing her precious sun-dried tomatoes into little sharp-tasting shreds with the kitchen scissors, but letting long luxuriant thin slices of parmesan settle onto the rocket leaves. Then she threw the mushrooms into the hot butter with the onions caramelising gently, and ground a large amount of white pepper into the mix. This she poured over the chicken with its crunchy aromatic skin, added the completely luscious mashed potatoes and the sharp little salad, then carried two hefty platefuls out to the balcony.
Alexei arrived at about the same time with some pale-looking cabbage on his plate. He looked at her plate and he looked at his plate. Then he took his plate and hurled the cabbage off it over the side of the rocks, till it splashed into the water below.
It was so unexpected Marisa let out a bark of laughter, and after that it felt very odd not to sit out with one another and chat, or so Marisa thought. Alexei, however, gulped down his food like a bowl had just been set in front of a dog, in complete silence. Then he looked up, noticing she had barely started.
‘Is very good,’ he said, still chewing.
‘Okay,’ said Marisa. ‘So. Um. Do you like being a piano teacher?’
There was a pause.
‘Um,’ said Marisa eventually, when it became clear he wasn’t going to fill it.
His beetle-like eyebrows came together.
‘You play the piano?’
‘No.’
‘Any instrument?’
‘No.’
‘You sing?’
‘No.’
‘When you are happy? Or in the shower? You do not sing? You have no music?’ His face looked sad. ‘It is sad to have no music.’
Don’t start, thought Marisa. Don’t tell me about sad. She used to love music, used to go to gigs all the time. Here she just used it to block out the rest of the world, to block out other people’s music and noise.
Out over the sea a gull called. The waves pounded onto the rocks below. It was as quiet as it had been since Marisa had moved in.
‘Well,’ she said carefully. ‘Silence is nice too. Listen?’
The push and pull of the water came back and forth. Another gull answered the cry. The lighthouse flooded their windows, briefly, and off again. There was the distant clatter of the masts of the fishing boats, clicking in the wind.
He did listen, tilting his large head to the side.
‘Well,’ he said finally. ‘Perhaps that is just a different type of music.’
‘Perhaps it is,’ said Marisa quietly.
Chapter Twenty-five
‘This is very odd,’ said Polly, looking suspicious as she fussed around the kitchen early doors. Huckle was staying at home. He was trying to do mail-out internet orders. It was not going so well. People got cross with him and ordered the wrong amounts or ordered different things or sent things back they hadn’t used or, worse, sent things back they patently had used, including honey they had eaten half of then decided they didn’t like, or cream they’d broken the seal of, or ancient gifts they’d received a year ago they’d suddenly decided they didn’t want, and the site collapsed all the time because their broadband was so awful. It was horrible, especially for Huckle, who liked people on the whole but he had to admit that if you were running a mail-order internet business, people were not very good at showing you their best side.
‘What?’ he said, looking up wearily. The sun was just coming up and Daisy and Avery were supposed to be getting ready for school but instead had decided to throw raisins in the air to see if Neil could catch them. He couldn’t, but he was having a very good time trying.
‘That puffin is getting so fat he’s unaerodynamic,’ said Huckle. ‘You should call the New Scientist. “Impossible Creature can Fly”.’
Neil came to an undignified screeching halt above a raisin that had fallen on the floor.
‘“And Make Holes in the Floor”,’ said Huckle. ‘Stop feeding Neil.’
‘It’s EXERCISE,’ yelled Avery, scurrying around the kitchen with his arms outstretched. ‘Why can Neil fly and I can’t?’
‘That’s a very good point,’ said Huckle. ‘Probably because you’re not fat enough.’
Avery immediately started gulping handfuls of raisins from the packet. Polly rolled her eyes and started clearing up.
‘I was saying . . .’
‘Oh sorry,’ said Huckle. It was very difficult with small children, they had both found, to ever get to the end of a conversation.
Polly tried to catch Daisy to brush out her strawberry-blonde hair. Nicely done, it was a heavenly cloud. Left the way Daisy liked to leave things, it looked like a witch’s mane and would take nine times as long to be attacked by a comb the next time, with Daisy in floods the entire time, deeply remorseful for not having combed it more often, but somehow even more determined to never let a comb near it subsequently. It was a battle Polly could already see stretching far into the distance, possibly for ever.
‘What?’ said Huckle, as Polly wrestled with the Tangle Teezer. It was the single most expensive item for hair Polly had ever bought. It was worth every penny.
‘I’ve forgotten,’ she said.
‘YAY, NEIL, TWO RAISINS!’
‘OW!’
‘Okay then . . .’
‘No, hang on . . .’
She looked up. ‘I got an email from Mr Batbayar.’
Huckle looked no more enlightened.
‘The piano teacher.’
‘The BEAR!’ screamed Avery. ‘Neil, we will teach you to peck out the eyes of a BEAR.’
‘Don’t do that, smalls,’ said Huckle. ‘What did he say? Is he upset at the cancellation?’
‘Actually,’ said Polly. ‘I hadn’t mentioned it, I was about to then I had coffee with that new shy girl up there and we overrun and I forgot. But, he said that the twins are doing so well he entered them for a scholarship and apparently they got it! For twins. Apparently loads of twins play the piano together.’
Huckle screwed up his face.