‘Really?’
He fired up YouTube and searched “twins piano duets”.
‘Huh,’ he said.
There were indeed vast numbers of twins, often identical, playing duets on huge pianos.
‘Well,’ said Polly.
Hearing the name of Mr Batbayar, Daisy and Avery had marched over to the ancient upright they’d rescued from the old schoolhouse before Reuben started developing it – literally nobody else had wanted it – and started banging away loudly. It sounded appalling.
‘Perhaps,’ said Huckle, ‘there weren’t many entrants to the scholarship.’
‘They do need to get them young,’ said Polly. ‘I suppose it will mean a lot of extra practice.’
‘And he didn’t know they were about to give up? This isn’t him being sneaky?’
‘No! And why would he, anyway, he doesn’t know us, and I can’t believe rural piano teachers make enough money they can hurl it all over the place.’
‘Cor. Well then.’ Huckle beamed proudly. He thought absolutely nothing was beyond the scope of his twins.
‘What’s that girl next door like? Why has she never been seen in the village? She’s incredibly mysterious.’
‘Ooh, no, she’s not! She’s got agoraphobia.’
‘Is that the stay-in one or the go-out one?’
‘Well, why don’t you think about it for five seconds?’
‘I’m very tired.’
Polly smiled at him.
‘Goodness,’ said soft-hearted Huckle. ‘I hate to think of anyone shut in.’
He looked out to the frothy bright waves gleaming, a distant rain shower heading their way under a cloud, but sun showing promisingly either side of it.
‘I know,’ said Polly.
‘That’s terrible,’ said Huckle. ‘Is there something we should be doing?’
‘Leaving her a trail of cakes, that kind of thing? Not sure,’ said Polly thoughtfully. ‘She seems nice though. I get the impression she’s had a bit of a rough time. I think she’s come here to get over it. Not everyone copes.’
Huckle put his hand over his eyes.
‘We will though,’ she said, going over to him and putting her arms around him. ‘We will.’
‘How?’
‘We could Airbnb the lighthouse. People love that kind of thing.’
‘But where would we live?’
‘We could move above the bakery.’
‘It’s one room!’
‘It’s a nice room.’
‘For two adults, two children and a bird. I’m not sure that’s going to work out.’
‘We could find somewhere cheap on the mainland. Away from the beaches and the nice bits.’
‘Yeah,’ Huckle sighed.
‘You know when I first arrived here it was all cheap,’ said Polly. ‘I paid nothing for that flat above the bakery.’
It was now occupied by a posh Pilates teacher whom Polly scuttled past most days before she got a lecture on her terrible posture.
‘Yes,’ said Huckle. ‘And then you only bloody gentrified the bakery, didn’t you? And sent it all upmarket and lovely and then people started moving in and then a posh restaurant came along and then bloody Reuben set up his stupid posh school and then everyone wanted a second home there and now nobody can afford to live there any more, especially not us.’
‘I know,’ said Polly. She lowered her voice. ‘We could maybe sell the lighthouse?’
Huckle rolled his eyes.
‘Yeah, no, clever people want to move here,’ he said. ‘Not idiots that want to live in a lighthouse.’
She smiled and they intertwined their fingers.
He looked over at the beef wellington she was whipping up for supper, her fingers easily entwining the pastry.
‘Can’t you do something like that for the posh second-homers?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ said Polly. ‘The locals want bread and cakes and pasties and I don’t think the posh folk eat bread at all. Plus they’re never here.’
‘There must be something,’ said Huckle. ‘Because we can’t sell our home. Maybe our best option is to let the twins grow up to become musical geniuses and make their fortune in the world of piano duets. Is that a thing?’
‘Let’s hope,’ said Polly. ‘I’ll just say thank you to Mr Batbayar.’
‘Also tell him to shave off his beard so the children will stop training their pet bird to peck out his eyes if he turns into a bear.’
‘I’m not sure if that will translate into Russian.’
Chapter Twenty-six
Anita had warned her that the process was – or could be – one step forwards, two steps back, but Marisa was too buoyed by the success of her scheme to listen.
And she so enjoyed cooking with Nonna, and sharing it with her neighbour. Well, apart from the night where Alexei suggested a plum wine which came from his unfathomably deep liquor cabinet.
For the plum, Nonna suggested duck, and Marisa, to her absolute astonishment, was able to order it from a nearby farm and when it appeared, tragically covered in feathers and with the head still attached, Nonna talked her down off the ceiling and patiently, after going out and finding her own from somewhere – Marisa was scared to ask in case she’d just headed down to the nearest lake and lassoed one – walked her through butchering it, a faintly unpleasant affair but still, oddly, in its own way quite affirming; she felt in touch with her hands and the food she was preparing, that something really was happening. She played a podcast and almost – almost felt like a normal person, doing a normal thing.
Unfortunately, what Alexei had taken to be plum brandy, due to a fancy swirly label he couldn’t read properly, was plum sake, and so unbelievably strong that they were both completely trolleyed by the second glass, poured with Alexei’s rather generous hand, and the duck breasts burned on the hob but they didn’t care as they were laughing too much, so it wasn’t exactly the evening they’d planned, especially when Marisa made the mistake of saying, ‘Okay, play something now,’ and he had said, ‘Oh, music is only when drunk, I see,’ and then tried to play something and got completely bamboozled and ended up ploughing the tune into a wall.
But it was still fun, and the following evening Marisa salvaged what she could of the duck and sliced it very thinly and reduced the sake down to its essence and made a cold plum and sesame seed duck salad with beansprouts that was formidably delicious because she couldn’t bear the idea of the duck dying in vain, so it all worked out as well as it possibly could.
‘But I still have to pay you for the lessons,’ she protested, picking up a groceries delivery on the front step after enduring the twins’ faltering attempt at ‘Three Blind Mice’ for a solid forty-five minutes. (Huckle sat outside, pondering what the talent was, exactly, that Mr Batbayar had spotted that he couldn’t quite hear.)
‘We’re drinking through your friend’s bar, and lessons are expensive.’
Alexei frowned. The evening light was cresting the hill, about to disappear behind their houses.
‘Yes. There is a thing.’