Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery
Page 83

The last thing she remembered as she dozed off was a sudden dazzling halo of light as the lighthouse lamp came back on and swung around to the island, bringing safety once more.
Malcolm walked with his head down slowly past the pub, the windows lit with candles, the noise and the laughter steady and cosy. Flora and Jayden were huddled together, concentrating on something. He wondered what it was. Selina was laughing in the candlelight, her face looking young and carefree. The lighthouse beam illuminated Beach Street once more. They saw him outside, and nodded, but nobody invited him in, and he trudged on.
Archie shucked off his oilskin at the outside door of the cottage. He took off his boots and crept stealthily into the little house at the top end of the town, checking first on the three little ones, pink-faced and oblivious in their bunks, little puffs of sleeping breath on the air. Then he strode over to look at the baby, whose tiny fists were clenched, whose eyes were moving under their lids, the thick lashes reflecting on to the round rosy cheeks, swaddled up cosy and tight in his crib.
At last his heavy tread went to the front bedroom, where his wife, he knew, would be lying unsleeping. He walked straight round to her side of the bed, and she sat up as he took her in his arms.
‘I’m back,’ he said quietly, and she buried her pillow-warmed face in his shoulder and nestled into him.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘But… I’m really back,’ he said.
‘My love,’ she said, embracing him tightly, as the lighthouse beam came round again.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Huckle had just negotiated a massively better price for feed lots when the phone in his pocket buzzed. He ignored it: it was a beautiful morning and he had just saved the farm a load of money and was feeling rather good about himself.
Then it buzzed again.
He took it out.
He froze.
‘What’s up, son?’ The shopkeeper’s face was concerned.
Huckle shook his head, and all the colour drained from his face as he stared at his phone. Now it was pinging and pinging and pinging: Chaos as huge storms batter southern Cornwall; Widespread floods and power cuts as Mount Polbearne suffers its most bruising storms in 150 years. The headlines seemed to go on and on. Huckle couldn’t scroll through them quickly enough.
‘I have to leave,’ he said, suddenly. ‘Something has happened.’
‘Nothing bad, I hope,’ said the man.
‘I don’t know,’ said Huckle. ‘I just don’t know.’
Out in the street he called the farm phone before he lost the signal.
‘Clemmie?’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘I’m telling Dubose. I have to go.’
‘But I don’t —’
‘We should have told him right away. We shouldn’t have waited. I shouldn’t have stayed. He needs to know, and he needs to know now, and if this can’t make him change his ways, well, I’ll help you find a new manager for the farm.’
He paused.
‘But it can’t be me. Not any more.’
‘But…’ Her voice sounded so sad.
‘Clemmie,’ said Huckle. ‘Either he will or he won’t, but he’s that baby’s daddy and he needs to face up to it, and you need to know. I can’t stay for ever.’
‘I know.’
There was a pause.
‘Do you want to email or will I?’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Clemmie, I am so sorry, but you have to. Because I have to go.’
Looking out into the hot afternoon sun of Georgia, peach fields stretching out across the flat landscape, it was almost impossible to believe in the extraordinary forces tearing everything apart halfway across the world. He turned his phone on to BBC News. They were showing footage taken on people’s phones from far away of apocalyptic scenes in the dark. And this was on the mainland. He couldn’t bear to think what it might be like further out at sea, where it would be even wilder.
Why? Why had he stayed so long? Why hadn’t he just let Dubose fix his own messes right from the start? Because of Clemmie, of course. But still.
Then he heard a line that stopped his heart.
‘News reaches us that the storm has grown so intense it has even cut off the Mount Polbearne lighthouse. All nearby shipping has been warned to find safe harbour immediately.’
Safe harbour, thought Huckle, desperately. Safe harbour.
He couldn’t get a flight into the south-west of the UK: all the airports were closed. The nearest he could get was London, leaving in two hours. He took it.
Huckle was not a nervous flyer. He was not, in general, a nervous anything. But he had never known a flight like this. The flight time – eight hours – was cut down to six as they were propelled across the Atlantic by speeding winds. The turbulence threw the plane up and down, bounced it about like it was nothing. Even the stewardesses looked concerned, and calm as he was, Huckle didn’t like an anxious-looking stewardess. Not, he thought, that he’d have slept anyway. He looked at the little piece of paper he’d taken from Candice’s house, tucked away in his wallet, and put it away again frowning.
The plane bumped steadily up and down until there was no one on the flight not covered in coffee. Eventually, weaving its way from side to side, it touched down, and after a stutter, some jumping, and that invariable moment when Huckle thought, hang on, aren’t we coming in too fast, finally ground to a halt.
Even here in London, heavy rain was chucking itself against the windows in the light of a very murky grey dawn. It was too early in the morning for the trains to be running, and as he soon saw, they weren’t running to the west of the country anyway. Everything was cancelled; all the lines were shut.
He ran to the nearest car hire place and asked for a jeep.
‘Would you like our additional insurance, sir?’ the pretty young girl at the desk asked him.
‘Yes,’ he growled without thinking about it.
The car was sturdy, heavy-duty and, best of all, very high off the ground. Huckle grabbed another coffee and rubbed his eyes, which were gritty with tiredness. Then he hit the road.
Visibility was absolutely dreadful. Great lorries threw up huge piles of spray on the motorway. After such a long period of dry weather, the ground was hard, and the fields Huckle could see as he sped down the road at precisely 71 miles per hour, trying to balance his anxiety to get there with his anxiety not to be pulled over by the police – although it did occur to him that after a Force 9 storm, the police were probably a lot busier elsewhere – were flooded.