One Night on the Island(82)

I put my arm around Brianne’s shoulders and squeeze her tight. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say.

Brianne shakes her head. ‘Dolores is in bits. Delta too.’

My heart hurts for them. Dolores and her brother were chalk and cheese but still each other’s biggest fans, and Delta adored him like a father. Raff was too big a personality for such a small community to lose, it’s going to devastate them.

Brianne pulls a folded blue note from her pocket. ‘She asked me to give you this if I caught you.’

I dab my eyes dry and smooth the paper open on my knee.

Cleo, can you stay a while longer? I know the answer is probably no, but if you can, I could really use a friend. Delta x



Sometimes in life you’re asked to go out on a limb and do something, even when you know it will have repercussions on other areas of your life. You step up or you don’t. I know Delta would understand if Brianne went back without me, but I think of the patchwork blanket and everything it represents. Friendship. Sisterhood. Love. The boat sails without me today.

I’d say every living soul on the island is packed into the Salvation Arms tonight. I’ve been behind the bar most of the afternoon with Delta on a stool close by. She cried buckets when I walked into the pub earlier, and poor Dolores looks glassy-eyed, a radio that’s lost signal. People have turned up with plates of sandwiches and all kinds of other stuff; we’ve set it out on a hastily erected trestle table over on the far side of the room. Carmen made her way from her house at the far end of the village with a huge Guinness cake balanced on top of the bars of her walking frame, and it really touched me when she quietly took off her gunmetal-grey shawl and wrapped it around Dolores’s shoulders. The warmest wool on the island had never been more needed.

‘No one’s money is any good in here today,’ I say, when someone tries to pay me for their drinks. It was the only instruction I was given when I stepped behind the bar. Dolores issued strict orders to unlock the doors for the islanders and to not let anyone pay a cent.

‘You okay?’ I say, heading around the other side of the bar with a cup of tea for Delta just after nine. She’s held up heroically all afternoon but she must be dead on her feet. ‘You look knackered.’ It’s noisy in the bar, so many people eager to share their stories and anecdotes about Raff. I’ve heard outrageous tales, all true no doubt. He was a man who burst at the seams with life. There’s music too. A couple of Raff’s oldest friends have set up in one corner with an accordion and tin whistle, joined at some point by Ailsa on guitar and Erin’s tall husband, Luke, island doctor and dubious fiddle player. If you were to look through the steamed-up pub window you could easily mistake it for a New Year’s Eve celebration, entirely fitting for a man who danced through life like a party streamer. Such joy, people have said to me. Such a rogue, others have said. And then there are those who’ve told me quieter stories about a man who turned up with school shoes for their kids when money was tight, and who sent Sunday lunch to people who were alone or under the weather. It feels very much as if Salvation has lost its father tonight.

‘He’s been toasted to the rafters,’ Delta says, even as someone behind her raises their glass. ‘I’d kill you for a whiskey.’ She reaches out and grips my arm to steady herself as she slithers awkwardly off the stool. ‘Need to pee again.’

I smile as I hang on to her, and then I pause, disconcerted because my foot is suddenly warm. When I look down, I see why, and when I look back up again slowly, Delta grips my hands hard enough to cut the blood supply.

‘Ah, shite,’ she says quietly. ‘My waters just broke.’

‘Raff would have pissed himself laughing at this, wouldn’t he?’ Delta says, cradling her newborn son in her arms a few hours later. We’re in Raff’s cosy sitting room behind the pub, where she’s propped up on the big green sofa Raff sometimes used to catch forty winks on between the afternoon and evening shift. Everything kind of shifted a gear out in the bar once word went round that Delta’s waters had broken. Dr Luke calmly laid down his fiddle, to everyone’s relief, and guided his patient out of the busy bar, accompanied by Erin to give him a hand and Dolores for moral support. In London, it would have been a mad panic of hospital bags and running red lights. Here on Salvation, it’s ‘Hold my pint, I’ll be back through shortly to wet the baby’s head.’

‘No swearing in front of my grandson, now,’ Dolores says. She sparked to life the moment she realized her daughter needed her. I wouldn’t put it past Raff to have looked down at his sister in trouble and given his niece a bit of a nudge.

Dolores studies the tiny boy in her daughter’s arms, and then places her hand tenderly on Delta’s cheek. Delta meets her mother’s eyes and nods, silent, bittersweet acknowledgement that their family has experienced profound loss and bottomless joy today. I feel a sudden jolt of longing for my own mum. It’s been too long since I last saw her, last shared a cup of tea and basked in her calming company. Dolores twists to glance behind her for a second, searching, and then she reaches across the back of the sofa for Carmen’s grey shawl. She discarded it earlier in the heat of the moment, sweat on her brow, and now she carefully lifts her infant grandson and wraps him up.

‘There you go.’ She perches beside Delta, her eyes on Salvation’s brand-new resident. ‘The warmest wool on the island.’