It had never occurred to her that she had helped them. She hadn’t thought anything was going wrong at all with Polly; had thought, apart from a little bad luck in the storm, Polly had the most enviable life she could imagine. A bakery, a lovely husband, two beautiful children, a bird . . . well, she wasn’t particularly desperate for a bird but even so. Polly seemed so sorted. It made her heart lift to hear praise.
‘And . . .’
She had been about to go further but didn’t. She didn’t want to say that Polly had saved her in a deeper way, that she, and her nonna and Anita and, yes, Alexei too . . . that these people had built her a key, piece by piece, to unlock her prison door.
‘Well. It’s just cool,’ she managed eventually.
Huckle beamed. He was a sunny soul.
‘There we are,’ he said. ‘The universe had a plan.’
‘I don’t think the universe ever has a plan,’ said Marisa.
‘Ssh,’ said Huckle. ‘The universe will hear you and totally mess up the plan.’ He glanced back. ‘Okay, let me go get those monsters. They’re meant to be extra talented but I have to say, I’m not hearing it.’
‘Oh, I do,’ said Marisa quickly, not wanting him to suspect what she had done. ‘It’s really obvious when you live next door.’
‘Well,’ said Huckle, beaming, and the pleasure Marisa felt at making another human being happy outweighed the fact that she had patently lied to do it. She found herself wondering briefly what Father Giacomo would say to that but shook it out of her mind and headed down into the village to start another busy evening shift trying to explain to people why she didn’t allow pineapple on her pizza although they were welcome to add it at home if they wished. Neither did she do ‘stuffed crust’ or anything with the word ‘feast’ in it.
Because she had found her voice, she said it with a smile, and by the time people had eaten their first slice, they simply didn’t mind.
She and Polly found an easy rhythm working together, even if Polly did it on several cups of very strong coffee.
‘You know,’ Marisa said, ‘it’s not difficult, not really. Couldn’t Jayden do some nights?’
‘Hmmm,’ said Polly. It was still a question of money, but she also found it incredibly difficult to leave the business at such a fledgling stage. She needed to see which bits of the evening were noisy, which were quiet, how it ebbed and flowed, what would happen when the novelty wore off.
The phone rang. It was a house in Looe, the town on the mainland directly facing them. Could they possibly deliver their pizza by boat?
‘We had one a week ago,’ explained the woman on the other end of the line, ‘and I just can’t stop thinking about it.’
Polly and Marisa looked at each other.
‘It’ll be freezing,’ said Marisa. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘The price of the boat . . .’ said Polly.
‘I know,’ said the woman. ‘But it’s really good pizza.’
‘We need drones,’ said Marisa as Polly put the phone down.
‘Don’t get ahead of yourself,’ said Polly, smiling. ‘Drones, really.’
‘Not really.’
‘Okay,’ said Polly. ‘Sorry. Sleep deprived.’
‘You really should . . .’
‘I know, I know. I will take a night off when—’
‘Three margaritas and two pepperoni please!’
It was Jayden.
‘I can’t get you working in here,’ said Polly. ‘You’ll eat all the stock. Have you got guests in?’
Jayden had the grace to look a bit embarrassed.
‘Yes,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘We totally do.’
‘How’s married life?’ said Polly.
‘Well, I think we’re finally getting to the stage where we’re comfortable with each other,’ said Jayden, who had always been in awe of his pretty young bride Florrie.
‘Don’t get too comfortable,’ said Polly. Although it was a losing battle trying to stop Jayden’s natural physique becoming completely spherical. It was simply how he was built.
When he had been a fisherman, a long time ago – and hated it to the very depths of his being – he had managed to stay in reasonable shape with the intense physical labour. Working in a bakery was simply not the same as being on a fishing boat in a force five for thirty-six hours into the eye of the storm.
Not having to gut fish made Jayden happy every single day of his life. His sole deepest fear was that Florrie would get on Bake Off – she was an excellent patissier – and leave him for Paul Hollywood. Apart from that he led the life of almost total contentment, the kind won by contemplating every day how you have escaped a terrible fate.
‘I think being comfortable is very nice,’ he said, and Polly grinned and gave him a stonking staff discount then thought better of it and waved him away without asking for anything – she paid him what she could afford, but it was little enough.
‘No, don’t do that,’ moaned Jayden.
‘No, I mean it. Take them. You’re opening up tomorrow and I’m having a lie-in.’
‘Nooo,’ he said. ‘Because I love this pizza. And if you don’t let me pay I can never come back as often as I want to have pizza. I can never come back again otherwise I’ll be the big elephant who ate all the pizza profits and that will make me so sad. Pleeeease.’
Polly took his money, even though she felt bad doing it.
Chapter Fifty-five
The night flew by, Marisa noticed, in the same way her old job had done. When you worked with people you liked, and you were busy, it wasn’t really hard, it was kind of . . . well, not fun: you still had to clean the oven. But that endless, slow dragging sense of time that had been sitting on her while she’d been at home; the sense of waste that grief and illness had given her. That had gone.
One night they’d even brought Nonna down on the laptop to see the ovens. She had of course sniffed that they weren’t using wood burners even when Marisa attempted to explain that they weren’t fitted, it would take hours to get them up to temperature and there weren’t any trees for miles around. She had nonetheless seen a smile creasing that old face, along with something that looked like pride.
‘So my Lucia goes all the way England, and you work in a takeaway,’ she said. ‘That is the way of it.’
And Marisa hadn’t minded the sting in her words at all.
‘I like it,’ she said. And she wasn’t lying.
‘Don’t tell your mother,’ said Nonna, and Marisa winced. That was the one piece of her life that was still broken, that still hurt when she probed it, like a cracked tooth.
But she still had a half-smile on her face swinging uphill on a mild warm night, clear overhead, a few stars popping out, thinking of Jayden and his commitment to the pizza place (Polly’s Pizza it had become known as, swiftly and inevitably) being so strong he’d insisted on handing over money when it wasn’t even called for. She was so busy, she almost forgot to agonise about the note.
Well. It was gone now and there was nothing to be done about it.
It was only when she turned into the little road, happily enjoying the scents of the night air, the calling of the gulls shearing out across the water – although of course when local people complained about their rat-like qualities she absolutely publicly agreed with them – that she saw him, his large form perched on her balcony, outlined in the moonlight.