There was Mrs Baillie who was furiously interested in her next-door neighbour and whether he had any lady visitors (not including herself, Marisa noticed rather ruefully), and was it true he was a great composer who had left a tragic love affair and Marisa said politely that she didn’t know and Mrs Baillie had sniffed and said, oh well, he was going to love her new rendition of ‘Eternal Flame’ and Marisa had made a mental note to prepare herself for that.
And there was Reuben, of course. Reuben didn’t care if you were shy or not, it meant nothing to him. Actually, he quite liked it as it gave him more space to tell you about all the awesome things he’d done and how much money he had. Marisa was actually genuinely quite frightened of him, partly because he was frightening and partly because they were attracting so much business she was worried he was going to turf her out of her house and lease it to some rich people, finished road or not.
Inch by inch, little by little, though, Marisa felt the dread lifting, found herself looking forward to work, happy to be there, pleased to see the regular customers and happy to be useful and supporting Polly, who was drooping but still would not and could not stop.
The only person it was really going to kill was Polly; the hours were absolutely punishing. Jayden could open up some days, but not every day, and she found it incredibly difficult to sneak back and nap in the afternoon; she just seemed to have lost the habit since the children were born; always a tiny bit on edge, in her sleep, for one of them falling out of a window. It had switched something in her fundamentally.
And she missed her evenings with Huckle – even as he picked up all the slack; cooking, bath times, stories, everything they used to share he was now handling every night by himself, willingly and without complaining – but she missed them very much. Bedtime stories were her favourite part of the day; the children, finally worn out, sweetly scented, Avery’s fair hair combed out neatly into a parody of a little American boy, exactly like Huckle at that age; Daisy in her pretty flowered pyjamas, one either side on Avery’s little truckle bed. The room wasn’t big enough for two full beds set apart and they refused to be separated, so the truckle it was. One day they would get a bunk bed. It was the great aspiration of their childhood and they spent many happy hours bickering over who was going to sleep on the top bunk, and working out a complicated rota system somewhat hindered by Avery’s slowness to grasp the days of the week and being constantly frustrated that they were an odd number.
They had drifted through The Big Red Bath; Moomins, Goodnight Moon even though it terrified them both; In the Night Kitchen likewise; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but not the Great Glass Elevator as it was Very Very Strange; The Gruffalo more times than Polly could count, and she had been gearing them up, as they neared six, to enter Narnia for the first time . . .
It was her favourite part of the day, sleepy and cosy and knowing Huckle was downstairs, with supper on the way, and perhaps a glass of wine poured and the fire roaring and Neil doing little bird snores in his cardboard box.
She knew, every night, as she yawned over the accounts in the bakery, that this was absolutely the best thing for them; that Marisa, completely unexpectedly and out of the blue, had saved them all; that it was an extraordinary stroke of luck.
But oh my God she was so bone-weary.
‘Can’t I toss pizza?’ said Huckle. ‘How hard can it be? I’ll wear a nifty hat and everything.’
‘Well, obviously you could,’ said Polly. ‘But it doesn’t solve the problem of both of us being at home to spend time together and have a cuddle and all the things I want.’
‘I tried to give you a cuddle last night,’ observed Huckle. ‘And you snorted and did a massive snore right in my face.’
‘Well, exactly. And I can’t afford to hire someone yet,’ said Polly. ‘But this is . . . it’s going to be good for us.’
‘I can tell that,’ said Huckle, ‘because you look so bright and breezy about everything.’
‘This is a problem,’ said Polly.
‘You know what would probably bring in enough to hire someone a couple of nights a week?’
‘Don’t say it.’
‘Catering Lowin’s birthday party.’
‘I TOLD YOU NOT TO SAY IT!’
Polly caught Marisa doing her breathing exercises one night, and instead of being scornful – which Marisa, for some reason, had thought people would be – was incredibly interested and insisted they sat down with a cup of tea and try them together. Poor Polly lasted precisely fifteen seconds before dozing off so quickly she almost toppled off her chair. Marisa thought she had never needed Alexei so much; he needed to come and play something rousing in front of the kitchen. And just as soon as the thought of him stopped making her blush bright red, she was absolutely going to send him that note.
Chapter Fifty-four
Marisa would have told Polly what she was doing, but Polly would have got overexcited – being an old married lady meant she loved to hear about other people’s love lives. And she wouldn’t have told Nonna because Nonna of course would have implied that what she was doing was very sluttish and she shouldn’t be chasing a man who hadn’t even come to visit her since she’d been over which was, frankly, not a bad point.
And she couldn’t have told anyone how much mental energy she was expending on the whole thing because it was embarrassing, kind of how she was at fourteen, mooning over Ishmael Mehta in her chemistry class who had the most directional haircut in the entire school, with a Nike swoosh shaved into his skull.
So she kept it to herself. And worked on it very slowly, and carefully, the paper upside down, sitting out on the sunny afternoons – and occasionally dozing off, if it was quiet or there was someone good in, like young Edin, the talented boy, who kept getting better and better, and she could happily sit listening to that, feeling relaxed as he played.
Until finally it was done, and she took a deep breath and put it an envelope and, once more – and, ridiculously, equally nervous this time as last time, although for completely different reasons – picked a time when he was very busy with the twins, hammering away on either side of the keyboard at a deafening volume as ever, and slipped it under his door.
Of course this was a mistake with five-year-olds in the room, on a par with leaving an unattended box of strawberry tarts. Marisa didn’t know a lot of five-year-olds. The music next door stuttered to a halt.
‘There is POST! There is POST! POST CAME!’
There was a scramble of little footsteps.
‘We will get your post!’
Marisa was for once pleased she had somewhere else to go that wasn’t home. She set off down the hill at a brisk rate to avoid answering questions. Huckle, who was sitting across the street looking at his online banking on his phone for the first time in months without wanting to cry, glanced up and smiled.
‘Hey, can I get my wife back any time soon?’
She smiled at him.
‘Soon as we run out of pizza you can.’
He rolled his eyes then came down to join her.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Thanks. We really owe you for what you did.’
Marisa blinked. That was exactly how she felt about them.
‘Are you kidding? I really needed a job.’