Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery (12 page)

Huckle wished he knew how to stop Polly crying. Every time she managed to control herself, another wave would come over her and she’d lose it again.

‘And… and the newspaper is going to come and see me… and I’ll be serving up some fricking ham and pineapple sandwich on WHITE PLASTIC BREAD! And everyone will laugh at me.’

‘Hush,’ said Huckle. ‘Nobody reads papers.’

‘Don’t YOU start.’

She snivelled again.

‘And once a week! How can you have a bread delivery ONCE A WEEK? What’s it going to be like? It’s going to be worse than Mrs Manse’s!’

‘Hush,’ said Huckle. ‘You can just sell the contraband on the side, like you did when I met you.’

‘I can’t,’ said Polly, sobbing. ‘I can’t, because then I didn’t have the mortgage, did I? I didn’t have to have a job; I didn’t have much, but I could just about survive. But I can’t do it again. I’m a discharged bankrupt, it’s been hard enough as it is. If we lose the lighthouse…’

Huckle rubbed her back.

‘We won’t lose the lighthouse. I can get a job again in a minute.’

‘Yes, but not a job where you’ll be home every night to cook and play with Neil!’ said Polly. ‘It’ll be a job that needs you to wear a tie and not live on an island, won’t it?’

Huckle shrugged, acknowledging the difficulty.

‘Maybe,’ he said.

‘Oh God, it might be a job in America.’

‘No,’ said Huckle. ‘It will be a job wherever you are.’

‘But I want to be here,’ said Polly. ‘I want to be here with my bakery. But I can’t start over again! I just can’t.’

‘You can,’ said Huckle, although they both knew how impossible it would be.

‘I can’t!’ said Polly. ‘Malcolm and Janet would run me out of town. They would. They’d probably apply to some town hall about having me shut down; they’d make sure I couldn’t rent premises. And I couldn’t do it anyway. Can you imagine me trying to get a business loan? I want to open a bakery in a town of eight hundred people that already has two bakeries. Oh, and it’s on an island and I’m a discharged bankrupt with a ridiculous overpriced mortgage because I live in a stupid lighthouse.’

‘I feel you’re focusing very much on the negative,’ said Huckle carefully. Neil waddled over from where he’d been biting the tea towels and rubbed himself on her ankle.

‘Tell me what the positives are, Huckle. Please tell me and I’ll try and focus on them.’

Polly sank to the ground and buried her face in her hands. She was such a picture of misery, Huckle felt his heart ache for her; she looked like an inconsolable child.

‘Ssh,’ he said. ‘The positives are… maybe there’ll be a sudden retro fashion for white-bread sandwiches? You could call it… I don’t know. Mother’s Pride.’

Polly didn’t raise her head.

‘Or maybe,’ he said, ‘you won’t mind not having to get up and bake every day.’

She looked at him then, aghast.

‘But that’s what I
do
,’ she said. ‘That’s all I want to do. I love it.’

Huckle put his arm round her.

‘We can find somewhere else to do it,’ he said. ‘There’s always somewhere else.’

‘I don’t want to be anywhere else.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Huckle. ‘You and me together, wherever we want to be: what can possibly go wrong?’

‘Eep,’ said Neil.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Huckle.

He sat down beside them both as the evening light shone golden through the lighthouse windows.

‘Well this is what you English call a pickle.’

 

 

Polly took a walk the next morning after she’d prepared the day’s dough. She wanted to get some exercise, shake off the cobwebs and the crossness; she’d found, too, that a walk often cleared something up in her head, helped her see the way a little more clearly, and she hoped it would today, because she’d lain awake half the night feeling totally helpless, until Huckle, fed up with her wriggling, had turned her towards him and said, ‘Now, stop it, this is ridiculous. Go to sleep right now.’

And strangely, something about the power of his words had relaxed her body, and she had, finally, fallen fast asleep.

It was a bright, windy day with a hint of grey cloud above the scudding white, but the rain would probably hold off. Polly never bothered with the weather forecast. It simply didn’t apply to them, out on this little rocky outcrop between Cornwall and France. It was certainly chillier out in the water, and windier. But they often escaped the heavy rain that sometimes sat low over Cornwall’s rolling green hills and fields; the mainland could be completely smothered in thick cloud whilst Polbearne gleamed in fresh sunlight, and it felt like their little semi-island wasn’t actually connected to the real world at all.

Polly set off in the direction of the beach. The causeway was open, but it would be covered over again in a couple of hours, so she would just have to get by by marching in a circle, possibly doing a couple of circuits if she needed to. But the cliff above the beach was quite steep, so at least she’d get some exercise.

Neil came with her, hopping cheerfully from stone to stone, fluttering a little, then coming down to settle; occasionally, if they hit a flat bit, perching on her shoulder.

‘You are such a lazy boy,’ said Polly, rubbing his feathers affectionately.

What to do? What to do? The idea of not lighting her amazing wood-burning oven every morning made her so sad. Of course she could stay in bed longer, but that was scant consolation to someone about to lose the only job she’d ever loved. The town would no longer smell, early in the morning, of heavenly fresh baked bread, bread with a crunch you could feel on the outside giving way to a soft and yielding inside.

When the fishermen came in early in the morning, their fingers stiff and red from gutting fish in ice on the quayside, she took real delight in pressing warm rolls and hot cups of coffee into their hands, seeing the gratitude on their faces. Would it be the same when fresh, expensive salted butter didn’t melt into the delicate crumb? When the plastic bread bought in en masse, filled with preservatives, emulsifiers, colouring and all the rest, flopped lifelessly and congealed into a flavourless grey mush that stuck to the roof of your mouth? Would that be the same?

Maybe she should call Janet, she thought. But she remembered how Janet had looked at her sons at Gillian’s funeral; the pride with which she had referred to Malcolm as a ‘businessman’; the fact that she had never once come to visit her sister in Mount Polbearne, never once returned to the town of her birth in all the time Polly had been there; clearly didn’t have the faintest interest in what the bakery did or how it functioned as long as it supplemented as efficiently as possible her meagre pension. And, Polly suspected, gave Malcolm something useful to do.

She clambered over the rocks and on to the beach. The skeleton of the tanker that had been wrecked last year – in the same storm that had claimed Tarnie’s life, and destroyed most of the fishing fleet – was still there, a rusting carcass. Some people said it was an eyesore, that it ought to be cut into pieces and taken away (every bit of its cargo, including 15,000 rubber ducks, had already been removed). But it was also an odd kind of tourist attraction – people travelled from a long way away to have a look at it, and many amateur divers came up on the weekend to wreck-dive, even though this was considered to be an extremely dangerous and foolhardy enterprise.

Polly sat down, took out her flask of coffee and paper bag containing a cream puff and looked out at the wreck with a shiver. She rather liked it, in a creepy kind of way. She knew it was a bit ugly, dumped in the bay like a leftover piece of Meccano, but something about its rusting hulk and pathetic angle in the water made her contemplative and a little melancholy. It had started to feel part of Mount Polbearne: the tip of the iceberg amongst the many wrecks that lay beneath the surface of the water, seduced and then led horribly astray by her rocky shores and deadly coves.

Neil hopped over to look into the paper bag with interest. Polly watched him nudge it with his beak, practically an expert, pushing at it to get at the goodies inside.

‘Neil!’ she said, affectionate but still exasperated. ‘You are SO greedy.’

Neil looked at her enquiringly, then picked up the bag with his beak and brought it over to her.

‘Seriously?’ said Polly. ‘Seriously? You do this now? You
fetch
?’ She looked at him. ‘I’m not sure whether you’re some kind of a bird genius, or whether I should be getting really worried about you.’

She fished about in the bag.

‘Here,’ she said, breaking him off a little of the cream puff. The pastry was lighter than air and utterly delicious. Polly finished hers in a millisecond, then gave Neil the bag with the crumbs in it. He immediately turned it upside down on his head and started staggering about blindly on the rocks.

‘Neil!’ said Polly. ‘Neil, get back here.’

His wings were fluttering wildly inside the little bag, and he knocked over her flask with all her coffee in it. Polly swore and finally caught up with him, plucking the bag off. Neil shook his head sharply and fluttered up and down in the air to make sure his wings still worked.

‘Don’t put bags on your head,’ said Polly. ‘Don’t talk to strangers, don’t let anyone touch your special area, and ESPECIALLY don’t put bags on your head. How many times have we been through this? And fly over the road, don’t walk.’

There was a laugh from somewhere right behind her. Nobody was normally about this early; Polly whirled round. Selina was just behind her, dressed in workout gear. She waved.

‘God, you gave me a fright,’ said Polly.

‘Sorry,’ said Selina. ‘But the little guy… it was pretty funny.’

‘Oh, I’ve told him and told him,’ said Polly. ‘Whenever I can’t find that puffin, he’s inside a bag somewhere.’

Selina smiled and moved forwards.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I appreciate anything that makes me laugh. Sorry if it’s a suffocating bird.’

‘What are you doing?’ said Polly.

Selina rolled her eyes.

‘If I tell you, promise not to tell anyone?’

‘Totally.’

‘Well, my therapist thinks I should do yoga. And get lots of fresh air. So I’m trying to combine the two, even though it makes me feel like a total idiot when I do. I creep out before anyone’s awake.’

‘Oh no, I think that’s good,’ said Polly. ‘You can’t do it in the flat?’

Selina shook her head.

‘God, no, there’s… well, lots of reasons. And the floor makes me do a roly-poly.’

‘Yes, it would,’ said Polly, thinking of the wobbly old incline. ‘Well, I’d offer you some cream puff, but I think we’re kind of out.’

‘And your coffee’s gone,’ said Selina, looking at the knocked-over flask. ‘You can come and have some at mine if you like.’

‘I would like,’ said Polly, pleased. ‘I’ve just been sitting here mired in my own thoughts, which are all rubbish.’

‘That
never
happens to me,’ said Selina, winking, and they walked off together, a slightly chastened Neil hopping behind them.

Polly explained the bakery situation to Selina as they clambered back over the rocks, feeling even in the telling that a little bit of the weight was lifting off, even if no immediate solutions were presenting themselves.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Selina, which was actually very helpful under the circumstances. ‘They’re total morons. They’ll run the place into the ground.’

‘I don’t think
they
think so,’ said Polly. ‘I think they think they can get all our profits without any actual expenditure.’

‘In that case,’ said Selina, ‘I think I have some magic beans they might be interested in.’

Polly gave a weak smile.

‘Look,’ said Selina. ‘As soon as they see it’s not working, they’ll change back to doing it your way, won’t they?’

‘I’d like to think that,’ said Polly. ‘But they’ll probably just figure I sabotaged it, and sack me instead.’

‘Hmm,’ said Selina. ‘Tricky one. Can’t you start up what you did before? Sell the illicit stuff?’

Polly shrugged. ‘I didn’t own a lighthouse before. And I think the bottom is probably going to drop out of the lighthouse market any day now, so… we’re a bit stuck.’

‘Does your other half not work?’

‘He does, but…’ Polly scuffed her shoe. ‘It sounds stupid, but all my life I’ve dreamed of being able to go it alone, know what I mean? I started up my own business with my old partner when I left college, and, well, that failed, but it was so amazing when the bakery started to take off. I know it wasn’t wholly mine, but it was my baby really. The idea of failing
again
and having to start over… God, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘Can’t you buy them out?’

‘No,’ said Polly. ‘Janet probably only wants ridiculous offers, like she’s some kind of multimillionaire magnate selling a house of solid gold. Nobody would be stupid enough to pay what she’s asking. Well, one of my friends would, but I’m absolutely not asking him. I don’t want to be a hobby baker.’

‘Hmm,’ said Selina. ‘Well, you know, I only ever wanted to marry rich, and look how that turned out.’

There was a short silence. They both stumped up the tiny hill towards Beach Street, the lighthouse looming on their right-hand side.