AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She remembered the names of every one of the villagers going back generations whose little white cottages clung to the rocks Down-along.
She knew what the school run sounded like when old Mr Caffey would ring his bell in the playground and thirty kids of all ages would open cottage doors all at once and snake their way up to the little school on the promontory, all boisterous laughter and high jinks.
There were no children living in the village now; too inconvenient without access for cars. Her own grandchildren lived out on the promontory in a new build where they had a nice level garden – not a postage stamp on a slant – and two parking spaces.
So many of Clove Lore’s cottages were falling into disrepair now or had been gutted and fitted out with all mod cons. There were five planning permission applications in at the council at the moment for vertical extensions so that dear old wonky roofs could be ripped off and further storeys added, as if her parents and grandparents hadn’t tried to preserve the old way of living for these younger ones. It was all wrong, to her mind.
She wept for all this, and for her own hard work starting up the ice-cream parlour thirty years ago, helped by her three brothers, all fishermen, none married and now all gone, keeping her late husband company some place where there were no such things as storms, she hoped.
Love. That was what Clove Lore needed if it was going to survive into the next century. And happy homes. Not those fancy ‘lifestyle units’ going up inside the gutted shell of the Big House that no locals could afford anyway. Even Elliot and Jude, her biggest matchmaking success – after the Burntislands with their three pre-school age offspring – had settled down way out of the village on the main road.
She blew her nose and told herself she’d been through worse than a bit of rain and a touch of the winter blues. She should pull herself together and have a bit of mint choc chip.
At the sound of thunder and another hard blast of wind, the walls of her little cottage shook and she clasped at her chest, feeling very sorry for herself indeed and, not for the first time, terribly lonesome.
Down at the Siren’s Tail, the doors were bolted shut for the first December afternoon since that period during the war when the barrels had run dry. Bella’s granddad had told her all about it. She considered putting masking tape in crosses over the windows like he’d described, only not to stop bombs sending smashed glass everywhere, but a storm that sounded at that moment, out on their vulnerable spot by the sea, far louder than bombs.
Bella remarked to her husband that she was glad their guests had cleared out on the nineteenth when they’d had the chance. She felt sorry for the Austens, hiding away in their suite upstairs. ‘Some Christmas this is going to be for them, stuck indoors with a baby.’
They sat in their little den just off the bar. Finan topped up their gin glasses after a long morning poring sorrowfully over their accounts.
This had been their make or break winter. Bella’s wet cheeks told her husband she was broken.
Tomorrow they’d ring the brewery and, come January, the ‘for sale’ sign would go up and the Siren’s Tail would run the risk of becoming just like all those other boarded-up pubs all across the country with beer towels over dry taps. Who bought a pub these days? You’d have to be mad.
Finan stroked the back of his wife’s hand and told her they’d had a good run. ‘Twelve years is better than most country publicans manage, especially ones depending on tourists!’
He’d tried to cheer her up by talking about how they could get a nice little place just outside of Launceston near their nieces and nephews and although the thought of moving away from the home she’d always known caused her pain, they’d both smiled bravely and tried to convince themselves a fresh start would be good for them.
In their father’s fisherman’s cottage at the top of the slope, Tom and Monty Bickleigh sat by the fire. They’d listened to the clatter of decorative nets, buoys and lobster pots that had, until this morning, been arranged artfully around their front door, scattering themselves across the visitor centre car park fifty yards farther up the slope.
Monty turned a piece of toast on a fork near the flames in relative contentment while Tom, eight minutes his junior and always the more agitated, stared at the flames and brooded about how he’d really thought he’d had a chance with the girl from the ferry.
Their cottage was so close to the entrance to the Clove Lore estate they could hear the donkeys in their stalls braying every time the wind rattled the doors. The stable master, Mr Moke, had been recalled from Christmas at his brother’s in Barnstaple by a flustered Minty. At that moment he was trying to get some sleep on the bales next to his charges. This was not the holiday he’d planned at all.
Nobody stirred abroad. The village was pitch black. The curtains at every window were drawn and barely a fire-glow escaped them as the storm did its worst.
Whilst the clouds rumbled with sounds of rapidly approaching thunder, and jagged electric shards forked across the horizon, Magnús and Alex stood frozen before one another and asked themselves what on earth they were supposed to do now.
