Sunrise by the Sea
Dedication
To teachers,
especially for this past year. Thank you.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Part Two
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Outro
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Also by Jenny Colgan
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part One
Chapter One
The sun had been out earlier that day, and the family had all gone out to play.
If you were to glance at the family, you probably wouldn’t notice anything strange at first.
It would probably make you smile to realize that the children were twins, and that they each took after a parent so convincingly—the boy his father’s double, with a shock of unruly blond hair and a wide smiling face; the little girl more cautious-looking, with freckles and her mother’s strawberry-blond hair and pale skin.
Look closer and you would also see something flapping around them, and assume there was something wrong with your vision, because what on earth was a puffin doing there?
* * *
Avery and Daisy had come tumbling down the lighthouse stairs in their usual noisy way.
For the first year or two of their lives, the stair gate had never been opened and had basically confined the children to the barracks of the sunny ground-floor kitchen, because Polly Miller, née Waterford, was terrified of them tumbling down the lighthouse’s circular staircases and cracking their heads open. It was an even stupider idea to live in a lighthouse than it had been before the children, love it as they may.
But her hopes of keeping them safe were completely thwarted when, around eighteenth months or so, she looked away for two seconds then turned back to see Avery holding up the bolt while Daisy turned it, and Neil (the puffin) standing on the gate, almost as if it was his idea. He certainly fluttered up the stairs guiltily as soon as Polly caught them. The days of the stair gate were numbered. She remembered it as if it were yesterday.
“Now,” she had said patiently, as she had a million times before, pulling them onto her lap on the squishy threadbare sofa, the blond head so like Huckle’s; Daisy so like her, “we don’t go upstairs.”
“Ustairs,” repeated Avery. Daisy nodded. “Ustairs . . . NO?”
Huckle had come in for lunch then, and grinned, as the twins scrambled down and hurtled across the flagstone floor shouting “DADA!”
“Are you teaching them that going upstairs is the most exciting thing in the world again?”
“They opened the stair gate. Working as a team.”
Huckle hoisted the two little people up, one arm each.
“Oh, you are brilliant,” he said, as they giggled, and he nuzzled them both.
“It is not brilliant,” said Polly. “They start scrambling up there and someone is going to fall and kill themselves.”
“I thought that’s why we had two,” said Huckle, heading toward the stove.
* * *
Now, four years on, they had indeed both tumbled down several times, seemingly without injury, and retained the same basic gang setup—boy, girl, puffin—that took getting into mischief to new levels all the time.
“I always thought Neil would have been jealous of the babies,” Polly was saying now, as they watched the three of them trying to play swingball—Neil hovering, then flying up when the ball came round—while she and Huckle sat out in preciously warm spring sunshine.
The lawn streamed down toward the rocks, and normally it was too windy to sit out there, but there was a spot, just behind a low wall, where the wind was blocked and you could lie down and feel the sun on your face and just for a moment everything would be warm and lovely. Unfortunately it also blocked Polly’s views of the twins, so it necessitated bobbing up and down every couple of minutes like a meerkat, and steeling yourself against the wind.
“Neil was unbelievably jealous of the babies!” said Huckle, astonished she’d forgotten. “You were in a milk coma. A nuclear bomb could have gone off and you wouldn’t have noticed unless a piece of dust had gotten on the babies. What do you think all those marks are on the cradles?”
“I thought they were just features.”
“Peck marks!”
“Oh goodness. Bad bird.”
“He’s a terrible bird,” said Huckle with equanimity. “Almost like you shouldn’t keep wild seabirds in captivity in the first place.”
“You shouldn’t,” agreed Polly. “He keeps me.”
When Polly had first moved to Mount Polbearne, alone and nervous years ago, following the collapse of her business and engagement, in short order, a baby puffling had crashed into the bakery one night. After nursing his broken wing back to health, she had tried to release him back into the wild, but he hadn’t taken. Neil had decided that living with a baker was infinitely preferable to diving into the cold sea every day to find fish, and Huckle was inclined to agree with him.
They both watched Neil sweep around the children.
“I mean, he could—” Huckle started.
“Neil can’t babysit!” said Polly sternly.
“I know, I know,” said Huckle. “I just thought it might be a nice night to sit out at Andy’s”—Andy ran the local pub and a superb chippy—“or even go up to the posh place and have a glass of wine. Without some small monsters wriggling all over it.”
“We could call Kerensa,” suggested Polly, meaning Reuben’s wife, their rich friends who lived on the mainland.
“I’m not in a Reuben-handling mood,” said Huckle. “Plus . . . Lowin.”
Even though the twins were miles off, they bounced over.
“ARE WE GOING TO LOWIN’S?”
Lowin, Reuben and Kerensa’s son, who was now almost eight years old, was the hero of the twins’ lives, living as he did in a huge Tony Stark mansion with every computer game and every piece of Playmobil ever made. Lowin, for his part, tolerated the children more or less, as long as they did everything he said in every game and obeyed his every whim, just like the paid staff did. Daisy and Avery were his very willing slaves and were quite happy to go along with whatever Lowin’s newest phase was. Normally it was fine when it was an Avengers obsession phase, or a racing cars obsession phase. But Lowin’s latest obsessive phase was snakes, and despite Kerensa’s promises, Polly was never 100 per cent certain Reuben wasn’t about to buy him a huge boa constrictor and just let him wear it everywhere like a scarf until it ate Neil.
“Not today.”
The twins’ faces looked downcast.
“But he’s getting a huge slide shaped like a snake! The biggest ever!”
“That sounds dangerous,” said Polly, getting up. “Okay. It’s just leftover chicken.”
“That’s all right,” said Huckle, who was about to hit the road again, repping his honey business. Times had been tough—there had been floods all over the West Country and a lot of businesses were finding it difficult to keep going but he was doing his best. “It’s good to have home-cooked food. It’s going to be nothing but restaurants and hotel food for a fortnight.”
“Say that like you’re sad about it,” pleaded Polly.
“I am!” said Huckle. And then, more seriously, grabbing her hand. “You know I am.”
“I wish I was going off to stay in hotels.”
“It’s not the Ritz! It’s a Travelodge off the A40!”
“I know. But anywhere is the Ritz with you.”
They shared a kiss. He hated going away. But he had to. They had enough trouble keeping their heads above water as it was.
“Think of the windows,” he said.
“I know, I know.”
If they could replace the lighthouse’s ancient rattly single-paned glass with English Heritage–approved double glazing, the difference it would make in the quality of both of their lives would be immeasurable. No more icy plunges down the circular staircase; no more painful hauling themselves out of bed.
Although, who knew? The house might never be warm to other people’s standards—Polly’s mother’s, for example, or Kerensa’s, or, well, anyone’s, really. But to the four of them—the children had never known anything else—it was just perfect. Huckle had put an old TV in the master bedroom, and through the cozy nights of winter all four of them curled up with the electric blanket on, Neil hopping on the nightstand, watching Moana, and it was, windows or not, as happy a place as Polly could possibly imagine.
And now spring was coming! And if Huckle made enough this year they were going to get windows and a new boiler, so there was very little to complain about, thought Polly, as she headed back into the kitchen, listening to the merry voices of the twins demanding that their father became a tiger MEEJETLY which he obligingly did, growling so fiercely that Polly wondered if Avery would get upset. Daisy would dry his tears if he did.
She added barley and vegetables to the chicken stock she had boiled up from the roast, happily looking forward to when Huckle would be home for the summer, and the tourists would start to arrive for the season and they would be cheerfully flat out. She couldn’t wait to feel the sun warm on her face again, not the endless winter storms that had seemed to arrive every single weekend. For months the rain had thrown itself against the windows and the house was full of wet wellingtons and the children got cranky when she couldn’t get them out enough, the pleasure of building dens indoors and helping Mama bake having grown stale. The storms had been getting worse—climate change, she knew—and the winters were getting harder.
“What’s up when I’m away?” Huckle asked now, following her in while simultaneously half-listening to Avery talk about how Lowin was getting the biggest snake in the world for his birthday.
“Usual,” said Polly. “Oh no, I forgot! Reuben’s waifs and strays are arriving!”
Chapter Two
At that moment, over in Exeter on the mainland, one of Reuben’s waifs and strays had no idea that was what she was about to become.
Caius—“pronounced ‘keys,’” as he liked to tell people snottily when they attempted it for the first time, unless they by some chance got it right, in which case he would say, “It’s ‘ky-us,’ actually?”—was banging heavily on his flatmate’s bedroom door, but to no avail.
“Marisa!”
It was, fair enough, hard to hear over the racket.
Caius theoretically liked having lots of friends who were DJs, or said they were, but then he made the mistake of asking them to come and play at his parties and it was horrendous and they all squabbled with each other over how expensive their headphones were, and mixed up their stupid boxes and vied to play very obscure stuff, and frankly, it was a racket.
If he’d cared about his neighbors he would have factored that in too, but, being rich and good-looking, Caius so rarely met people that didn’t like him that he often found it hard to imagine what that might be like.
The flat was absolutely heaving, mostly with people he knew, kind of, some he didn’t, but they were good-looking and appeared well-off, so that was fine too.
But he needed the little room his parents had insisted he let out—something to do with “learning how to take responsibility” or “managing efficiently”; it had been hard to tell, he had been on the worst comedown while they’d been talking to him and he still had his earpods in so it could have been anything.
“Marisa,” he yelled again, as loud as he could. He winced. Caius didn’t really like shouting; he liked drawling or, even better, not saying anything at all and merely waving a hand at waiters bringing him things.
“Marisa! Come on, it’s a party! Can’t you make us some canapés?”
Still no reply. He pouted. She must have heard him by now.
Marisa used to be fun. Well, not fun, exactly, she had a real job and went to bed at a reasonable hour. But she cooked and smiled and was funny and he quite liked someone kind of looking after him.
Then she’d gone all quiet and sort of vanished and he knew she’d told him why, some family shiz, but he kept forgetting, and it was really terribly tiresome.
“Marisa! People want to use this room! For coats!”
“And also sex and taking drugs,” said one of a trio of people in black eyeliner appearing behind him, the other two vigorously agreeing.
“No! Totally none of those things, just probably coats!” said Caius. He frowned. “You know there’s tequila out here, right? There’s tequila out here and none in where you are, which means I don’t understand you at all.”
* * *
Well, they agreed about one thing, thought Marisa. Because she didn’t understand herself either.
Chapter Three
Inside her little box room—like many of these expensive new builds in Exeter, the main room was flashy and showy with a big glass wall and a balcony, but the smaller bedrooms were done on the cheap—Marisa Rossi sat on the end of her bed, knees up to her chin, headphones on, the clatter beyond the door more or less white noise.
Another party. Another night when the rest of the world was out and about, having fun.
Everyone else seemed fine. Everyone else always seemed fine.
And, in the scheme of things, losing a grandparent was hardly heartbreaking loss. A lot of people lose grandparents. Everyone, when you think about it.
And they all still seemed able to go to parties. Everyone but her.
But somehow, she could only think of her nonno, Carlo: her kind, funny grandfather in Imperia, Italy, descended from generations of shipbuilders—a tradition that had only stopped with her mother, Lucia, who had left for the UK to find a better life, and married a man from Livorno, just down the road. Marisa’s father couldn’t bear the cold and the rain and left England—and Lucia alone, with Marisa and her brother, Gino. Marisa tried not to take it personally.
But her grandfather had stepped into the breach, and then some. Her fondest memories were golden: holidays spent in Italy; long days on the hot windy shores of Imperia, as the great big industrial ships rolled past; late dreamy evenings at restaurants as she ate spaghetti vongole and fell asleep under the table as the adults talked and laughed long into the night; cool hands rubbing in cream to sunburned shoulders; ice creams as big as a beach ball; stones underfoot as you ran into the water; the pungent scent of the exhausts of the Vespas of the young men gunning around the town, a contrast with the smartly uniformed navale stationed there; the long rolling rhythms of Italian summers.