Lighting all her scented candles at once gave a very distinctive pong to the room but did it give the place a rosy glow. Marisa added an extra jumper, and set about eating what was in her freezer. Thank goodness the oven was gas.
She should probably go and see Alexei, she thought. He almost certainly didn’t have a candle – what man had candles just lying around the place, unless they were trying to seduce someone, which as far as she could tell he absolutely never tried to do.
She wondered about his love life. Another musician maybe? A cellist, with hair to her knees. A great Amazon of a person, who could look him in the eye. A girl or a boy? Oh, a girl, he had said. An Amazon girl, she decided, with big long lily-white arms that were absolutely hypnotising as they swayed to and fro: beautiful Valkyrie legs either side of the cello. He would have been completely hypnotised, playing along with the orchestra – did they have a piano in orchestras? Marisa wasn’t a hundred per cent sure – and then he’d had to come to Britain to get this job and he’d had to leave her behind and he was full of powerful jealousy and that’s what made him so angry and making such crashing music all the time . . . Ooh, perhaps she was married to the chief of the orchestra, and he had a passionate Russian desire for her that could never be assuaged and therefore he’d had to flee his mother country to try and forget her, even though he never ever could. Marisa would have liked to have been the kind of terrifying girl no man could ever forget but she wasn’t quite sure how that would work.
So he’d gone to the furthest spot in the world to get away from a doomed love affair and now he was being regularly propositioned by the women in the village but his heart was true only to the cellist and—
Her reverie was interrupted by a steady banging on the door.
‘Marisa! Marisa!’
It was him.
Chapter Thirty-five
Startled, she jumped up, leaving the spoon in the ice cream, which wouldn’t balance, so she just took it with her.
She opened the door, the rain pouring down the lintels, the wind blowing round her ankles.
‘Um . . . ice cream?’ she said as she saw his large startled face.
‘This is not ice cream time,’ he said brusquely. Ah. Obviously their fight was not forgotten. No wonder the imaginary cellist had left him, she thought crossly.
‘This is obviously a time for ice cream,’ she said. ‘The power’s off, didn’t you know?’
‘Of course I know,’ growled Alexei. ‘I know what power cut is. But – we must go!’ he said. ‘Everyone must go. Is the . . . ?’
He waved his enormous hands crossly, searching for the word. Marisa looked at him.
‘The thing! That is between us!’
‘The door? The steps?’
‘The big thing!’
‘You?’
He flapped his hands, even more het up.
‘Is not funny! Come! The road. The road on the sea. The road that is on the sea.’
‘The causeway?’ gasped Marisa.
‘Yes! That! It is washink away! We must go!’
Marisa peered out fearfully into the flashes of lightning, the sheeting rain.
‘Yes!’
‘I don’t think—’
‘Yes! Everyone is needed.’
‘But I don’t know what I could do.’
He regarded her with that long unblinking dark gaze.
‘You haff tools?’ he growled, not willing to continue the conversation. He dropped eye contact entirely.
‘What kind of tools?’
‘Tell me you haff tools, we discuss that later.’
‘Uh . . . no,’ she said.
‘Lantern? Torch?’
She shook her head. ‘I have . . .’
She ran into the kitchen, panicking, and returned with a soup ladle.
He nodded.
‘I have no time,’ he said.
And his vast, yellow-clad form – he had somehow acquired a fisherman’s sou’wester, presumably from whoever had woken him up – disappeared into the crashing rain and the storm and as she watched him go, she saw, in the distance, other doors opening, and the shouts of men and women as the village joined together to try and save their own community, to try and save their world from the vagaries of the storm and the weather – and she was the only person sitting there and doing absolutely nothing, as worthless as she was.
Chapter Thirty-six
‘Peow peow peow peow!’
‘I am not sure,’ said Polly carefully, ‘that shooting at the storm will make it go away.’
She had tried to make things cosy – they had lit the hurricane lanterns with which the lighthouse was always well supplied, and the fire was banked high, which just about made up for the fact that of course the television was off and the very loud streaming of Ratatouille, a film Polly loved as much as the children did, was no longer placating Daisy. The child was no longer small enough to be comfortably hoiked around in the crook of Polly’s arm, but Polly was doing her best.
Huckle glanced at his phone.
‘Holy crap,’ he whispered, as Daisy stiffened.
‘Is Daddy swearing?’
‘Nooo,’ said Polly and was almost relieved when Daisy slipped down and announced to Avery that apparently holy crap wasn’t swearing and they could say it now whereupon they started galloping around the room chanting ‘ho-lee crap! ho-lee crap!’ as Polly sidled up to look at what Huckle was showing her on the phone. She closed her eyes. It was a text from Andy. The harbour wall was crumbling and the causeway was losing its cobbles. Oh my God.
‘Do you remember when they wanted to build a permanent bridge?’ she asked Huckle wearily, who nodded. They had turned it down: happy to live half on an island, half connected to the land, as the causeway rose and fell through the tides, giving them the best of both worlds, just as it had been for hundreds of years.
Polly frowned.
‘Do you think it’s possible we should have just let them?’
Huckle was already shrugging on a huge outdoor coat and checking his boots were dry.
‘Right now I do.’
‘We can’t lose the causeway! It’s been there for eight hundred years.’
‘Well, that might be part of the problem. And the rest of the problem . . . probably human beings.’
‘HO-LEE CRAP! HO-LEE CRAP!’
Polly screwed up her face and ran to make him up a flask of coffee.
‘Be careful out there.’
‘I don’t even know if we can save it,’ said Huckle, grabbing a torch and one of the hurricane lamps. ‘If you see me back in five minutes . . . I’m not sure that’s good news.’
‘Be careful,’ said Polly, going up towards him and nuzzling his neck briefly, breathing in his lovely warm scent. He held her closely.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Although you know I have good life insurance. You could replace the windows.’
‘Do not even joke about things like that.’
He kissed her on the forehead as she tipped the hot coffee into the flask and, instinctively, added a couple of spare buns to his pockets. She could tell he was doing his absolute best to be brave, and loved him to distraction.
‘See you later, kiddos.’