Elliot found himself wishing he’d remembered to buy candles as he thumbed the small velvet box in his pocket, deciding to defer the question he’d been meaning to ask Jude this evening until some other peaceful night in front of the TV. Jude couldn’t help glancing at him in concern. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked gently.
‘I…’ he hesitated. ‘I’m just thinking of the animals at the practice. They’ll be frightened by the sounds of the storm.’
Jude smiled at her soft-hearted Elliot, turned off the heat and abandoned the stir fry, reaching for him.
‘They’ll be all right, they’re safe. Anjali’s there with them, right?’ Seeing that this might not in fact be the thing making Elliot fret, she added, ‘And we’re safe here. All is well, OK?’
He nodded with a smile and let her kiss him.
Gently, he lifted her and set her onto the kitchen counter so they could be closer, and she laughed at this, like she always did.
‘You’re right,’ he told her, before taking a deep breath and slowly lowering himself to kneel at her feet. He presented her with his gift.
‘Jude Crawley.’ He gazed up at her with soft eyes as she brought her hands to her face. He opened the box to reveal the fiery orange stone in its silver setting. ‘Will you have me, forever, as your husband?’
His face fell when Jude hopped down from the counter telling him to wait there. He stood again, unsure what to do. Was it too soon? Had he blown it?
She was back a moment later with a wrapped box from under the Christmas tree. ‘Only if you’ll have me as your wife,’ she told him, and his amazement turned to happy tears as he tore the paper away to reveal a gleaming band of his own.
The rest of their evening slipped away by torchlight beneath the covers as easily as those rings had slipped onto their fingers.
Down in the village, not all of Clove Lore’s inhabitants were quite so comfortable.
Mrs Crocombe sat alone in her ice-cream parlour weeping, not so much at the thought of the freezers losing power but more because, in rare moments like this, she felt very much alone in the world.
She pulled the notebook from her pocket and leafed through the names of old pals and people who’d passed through; those she thought would stick around, and those who’d left for good. She was one woman trying to build a village on love. Not an easy task.
She knew what some of the locals called her. She was a busybody, a gossip, a pain in the neck. But she’d seen the village in its prime, when there was no such thing as holiday houses left vacant all winter then rented out all summer to people who brought in their own food and left nothing but litter.
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.
