Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery (8 page)

‘Get down, Neil,’ Polly murmured, but to no avail. He was making happy little eeps. One of the old ladies gave him a piece of her bun, which he bit into happily, his beak scattering crumbs across the floor.

Malcolm had gone absolutely puce.

‘This is
your
bird?’ he said. ‘You can’t have a
bird
in here! You can’t… you can’t…’

‘He doesn’t come to work with me,’ mumbled Polly. Malcolm did kind of have a point: she shouldn’t have Neil in the bakery, but nobody ever seemed to mind. ‘I think he was just… passing.’

Malcolm stood back, shaking his head, as if he’d never seen anything so disgusting in his entire life.

‘I think
you
have to decide whether you want to run a food preparation service or a bird sanctuary,’ he said. ‘And decide soon.’

Still balancing his parcels, he marched crossly out of the shop.

 

 

‘He seems nice,’ ventured one of the old ladies.

‘Mabel, he’s horrible,’ said Mrs Hoskings.

‘Really?’ said Mabel. ‘Ah, I’m wearing my peepers, not my lookers.’ She fumbled with her spectacles. ‘Still, nice to have a bit of new young blood around the place, hmm?’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ said Polly, putting Neil out through the door crossly. He checked to make sure she wasn’t kidding, then waddled across the road to pester the fishermen for scraps.

‘And fly, you lazy bird!’ Polly shouted at him, but yelling at Neil certainly wasn’t going to make her feel any better.

‘Yes, well,’ said Mabel, packing away her sausage rolls in her capacious handbag. ‘Last time we had some new young blood around the place, you snaffled it up. Leave some for the rest of us this time, would you?’

Polly gave a half-hearted grin.

‘You,’ she said, ‘are welcome to him.’

Polly didn’t head back for a quick break that morning after the early rush: she was too anxious and keyed up about Malcolm’s visit.

She tried to put a spin on the meeting whereby it hadn’t gone too badly, but she could tell that it had. She imagined him marching back to Janet with a long list of her sins, announcing that the bakery had to be closed down immediately. As usual thinking up good things to say long after the moment had passed, she wished she’d pointed out to Malcolm that actually her predecessor had kept costs down and made everything as cheap as possible, and it had led to the closure of the Little Beach Street Bakery and the near collapse of the old Polbearne bakery, because everyone just went to the mainland to get their nice bread and avoided the horrible cheap stuff at all costs. She vowed to say this to him. Definitely. Next time she saw him…

The rest of the day passed in a blur of the usual cheery people, many of them asking why she looked so gloomy – which is absolutely the last thing to say to someone who looks gloomy and is always unlikely to improve matters – until she was quite fed up. They sold the last cream horn, and Polly stomped outside with a cup of coffee on her own.

It was still cold and windy; the sun had not burned through the cloud as it sometimes did, and not many people were about. It was much easier on days like this, Polly thought, to remember Mount Polbearne as it had been when she had first arrived: shuttered, closed down, tatty everywhere, in stark contrast to the slightly social-climbing aspirations of grandeur it had now.

It was nice this way too, though. Bleak. Choppy. The tide was in, the waves right up to the harbour wall. One or two people were braving the windy high street, though it could hardly be called that, consisting as it did of the chippy and pub at the bottom end, Muriel’s shop, the post office, a gift shop of mysterious means, the vet/doctor’s and a tiny ironmonger’s, which wasn’t much more than a hole in the wall. Otherwise, apart from a couple of lonely dog-walkers almost out of view, and the ever-circling gulls, Polly had the harbour to herself. She pulled her big jumper down over her hands and warmed them around her coffee mug, which, inevitably, had a puffin on it. Huckle had got into the habit of buying her anything he ever came across with a puffin on it, so she now had puffin pyjamas, tea towels, oven gloves and all sorts of nonsense. At first she’d told him to stop, it was tacky, but she’d got used to it now. Plus all the pictures round the house were company for Neil as an only puffin.

She stared out at the choppy grey water, then back at the mainland. The causeway was covered over and Mount Polbearne was isolated, a great island citadel standing all alone. For once, it suited her mood. She understood now why people became so protective of their turf, why they feared incomers. Mount Polbearne had had its own way of life for hundreds of years. It suited them just fine. They didn’t need some mainlander coming in and telling them more efficient ways to get their daily bread. At that precise moment, Polly chose to ignore the fact that she had been born and raised in Plymouth.

A car was standing in the island car park. She squinted at it; it seemed vaguely familiar. Whoever it was, they had only just got ahead of the water, and might have to stay a while. She looked at the two figures leaning against the car. A portly young man, and a slender young woman. Not local, but not strangers either. She tried not to stare as they made their way carefully up the harbour walk, bent against the wind, the spray in their faces. She recognised the local estate agent, Lance. He’d gone to work in another office, she’d heard. Well, he must be back. But who was that with him?

Lance saw her and came up to her.

‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘Have you got a couple of buns for us? We’re starving. Traffic out of Looe was bloody terrible, then we had to go like stink not to miss the tide. My car’s got so much salt damage it’s basically held together by rust.’

Polly smiled. ‘It’s nice to see you again, Lance.’

Lance looked over his large stomach to stare at his shoes.

‘Yeah, well. After I lost them SO much money on that bloody lighthouse.’

Polly tried to hide her smirk, but couldn’t. At one stage there had been a plan to build a bridge from Mount Polbearne to the mainland and Lance had confidently expected to make a fortune selling properties on the island, particularly the lighthouse. In the end, the council had listened to the islanders and voted against the bridge, after which Polly had promptly managed to pick up the lighthouse for a song. Lance had not forgiven her.

‘They sent me off to the north! Bloody Derbyshire!’

‘I’ve heard it’s beautiful up there.’

‘I’ll tell you this: it snows all the bloody time.’

Polly smiled again. ‘But you’re back.’

‘Yeah, no one else wanted this beat… I mean…’

The woman he was with had been standing looking the other way, staring out to sea, but now she turned round, and at once Polly realised she knew her. She could only gasp.

‘Selina.’

‘So, you’ve decided to go back?’
 

‘Well I can’t seem to go forwards.’
 

‘What are you hoping to find there?’
 

‘I’m hoping to understand.’
 

‘And what if you can’t understand?’
 

Selina twisted her wedding ring round and round her finger.
 

‘I don’t know.’
 

 

 

Polly was completely shocked to see Tarnie’s wife. Or rather, of course, his widow. She had only met Selina twice before, once in Polbearne, and once at the funeral. Since then she hadn’t seen her at all, had heard she’d gone back to her parents and hadn’t been the least bit surprised that she hadn’t wanted to see hide nor hair of Mount Polbearne again.

‘Hi,’ said Selina, but she clearly didn’t really remember Polly. Well why would she? thought Polly. She was only the woman who’d secretly slept with her husband (she hadn’t realised Tarnie was married; he didn’t wear a ring) then met her briefly just after her husband had died at sea.

‘Hi,’ said Polly. ‘Um, I run the bakery.’

‘Right,’ said Selina without interest.

‘It’s the best bakery in the south-west,’ said Lance. ‘And I should know. I’ve tried them all.’

He patted his stomach cheerfully.

‘Can you get us a couple of fruit slices? And a loaf of that olive bread to take away? I love that stuff.’

‘Sorry,’ said Polly, indicating Jayden mopping up inside. ‘We’re done for the day. We’re shut.’

‘Yes, but you’re not shut to
me
,’ said Lance. ‘I let you steal a lighthouse off me.’

Polly smiled. ‘I know that. But when we’re out of food, we’re out of food.’

Lance looked crestfallen. Polly thought of the little olive loaf she’d been keeping back for Huckle’s supper.

‘Oh all right then,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Funny you should ask,’ grunted Lance. ‘Selina…’ He struggled for her surname for a second.

‘Tarnforth,’ said Polly, without thinking. Selina gave her a surprised look.

‘Uh, aye,’ said Lance. ‘Selina’s looking at the flat above your bakery.’

 

 

Polly made them all a cup of tea – it really was getting chilly outside, nothing like the lovely weekend – and rustled up the olive loaf, which she served with the incredibly expensive French salted butter she got sent over occasionally as a very special treat. Poor old Huckle would have to make do with the chippy.

She tried to keep her tone light.

‘So, you’re thinking of moving here?’ she said.

Selina was still pretty, but very thin and drawn, and there were hollows under her eyes. She nodded.

‘My parents thought I should have a fresh start, you know? Well, lots of people did. So I moved away, got a new job, gave up teaching – not much use when you’re bursting into tears in front of your class every ten minutes. They were very generous with compassionate leave, but there came a point when even they were just like “Come on.”’

Polly tutted sympathetically. It must be bloody awful to have something so bad happen to you, then everyone whispering about it all the time afterwards.

‘And I was SO sick of being the tragic widow of the town. Everywhere I went, everyone lowered their voices and put on their best, kind, speaking-to-an-idiot-child tone and tilted their heads and were so, so nice to me.’ She grimaced. ‘Drove me nuts.’

‘So you moved somewhere new?’

‘Yup,’ said Selina. ‘Went up to Manchester. Great town.’

‘You liked it?’

Selina gave Lance a look that suggested he should be somewhere else. Being a terrible estate agent but a pretty decent human being, Lance took the hint and took out his smartphone and started fiddling with it.

Selina shrugged. ‘Went out a lot. Hung out with people too young for me. Who didn’t know anything about me. Did the city thing. Casual sex, you know.’

Lance was still looking at his phone, but his ears went bright pink.

‘Mmm,’ said Polly, pouring more tea. ‘Did it help?’

‘Not as much as you’d think,’ said Selina, frowning. ‘And I had my doubts from the outset, to be honest.’

Polly nodded. Selina let out a great sigh.

‘And I have to… my therapist thinks this too. Because I have a therapist now. How wonderful is that? I always hoped I’d have a therapist.’

‘Lots of people have therapy,’ said Polly mildly.

‘Lots of people have scabies,’ said Selina. ‘Didn’t want that either.’

Lance stiffened. ‘You have scabies? Only, the lease…’

‘It’s a figure of speech,’ said Selina. She was sharper, more brittle, thought Polly, than the last time she’d seen her.

‘So, my
therapist
…’

Polly had a sudden flashback to the couples’ therapist she had insisted Chris go with her to at one dark stage towards the end of their relationship. It had been incredibly painful. Chris had sneered at the expensive cars parked outside the practice, its smart reception, the well-dressed therapist with her trendy glasses. He’d sneered at Polly too, for wanting the therapist to like her, for answering questions helpfully.

‘Oh yes, you win that one,’ he’d say, in a tone of voice so nasty she simply couldn’t recognise the sweet, shy art student she’d once known. And then she’d hear herself, placatory, soothing, talking like an annoying nagging mother to a recalcitrant child, and she couldn’t recognise herself either.

The counsellor had done her best, but had started quite early on to talk about debt mediation services to ‘get to the root of the problem’. At the time Polly had taken this at face value and thought it would be helpful (which it would have been if Chris had ever agreed to go). Now she saw it starkly for what it had been: a counsellor who could clearly see that what had once been between them had gone, and who was trying to ease them apart in the most practical way possible.

It made her sad to think of it, even as she consoled herself with the fact that Chris had a new girlfriend and she was happier than she’d ever been. But all those years… all those years, she told herself, got you where you are now. All those years were necessary. If you were just happy from the day you were born, how would you ever know? How would you appreciate how good life could be if it had never been crap?

But of course it was worse for Selina; so much worse. She’d been perfectly happy, more or less – things hadn’t been perfect between her and Tarnie, but that hardly mattered now – and it had been torn out of her hand, like a wave smashing a bottle against a rock.

‘… my therapist thinks it won’t be a bad thing to come home. Reconnect with Tarnie’s world, feel close to him instead of blocking it all out with sex and getting drunk. Well, I think that’s what she thinks. That’s therapists for you: you suggest something and they just say “mmmm” and you have to figure it out from there.’

Polly nodded. ‘Well, it seems like it might make sense. But you never liked it here, did you?’

Selina shrugged. ‘My husband disappeared for weeks on end, worked all night and came home knackered and stinking of fish, with no money in his pocket. That’s what this place did for him. And I begged him and nagged him not to, and he wouldn’t listen to me for a bloody second. Just as well he died, we’d only have ended up divorced.’

The pain in her words was so stark, Polly couldn’t help putting her arm around her.

‘Oh, fucking hell,’ said Selina. ‘When does it stop, this? When do I stop feeling like this, being like this, all the time? Is this the answer, or just another dead end?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Polly honestly. ‘I really don’t know.’

 

 

Polly hadn’t been up in the flat for a long time. Jayden occasionally stored flour there if they needed to, and sometimes Neil forgot and flew back to the wrong house, but otherwise she hadn’t had much call to go up there in the last year. It reminded her too much of the pain of moving, alone, to a strange place; of the long, cold months of the winter after Tarnie had died, when Huckle had gone back to America and she had waited for him, not knowing what to do, missing him so desperately that all she could do was bake bread and stare out to sea and wonder if this was the rest of her life.

‘Can you show me it?’ Selina asked, when Polly revealed it had once been her flat. ‘Only Lance will just give me the spiel.’

‘I won’t,’ protested Lance. ‘I’ll probably forget it.’

Polly’s instinct was to decline, but she couldn’t, of course. She put on a smile, cleared away the tea things and said that of course she would.

‘Polly knows what an excellent piece of —’

Polly gave Lance a warning look.

‘Obviously when it’s had some modifications done,’ said Lance, coughing. Polly gave him an even more meaningful look.

‘Oh, just come on then,’ said Lance crossly, and Polly let them through the side door of the bakery so they wouldn’t have to go outside into the crashing wind.

The stairs were as vertiginous as ever, the little bulb taking a strong pull to make it work, and there was a lot of noise as they clattered upwards. Lance had the Yale key; Polly had a spare in case of emergencies. With the bakery shut downstairs, the building was ominously silent.

But as they stepped into the flat, even on such a grey day, the light flooded through the huge front windows that looked straight out to sea, as if you were flying over it.

‘Wow,’ said Selina, moving forward. ‘That’s quite a view.’

Polly thought of the nights she’d fallen asleep in front of that view. Her old armchair was still stationed by the window, but the rugs and the pictures and the lovely sofa had of course all gone across to the lighthouse, on a day of hard work that had caused more swearing amongst the fishermen than she’d ever heard before, and she heard them swear
a lot.

The bare scrubbed boards still inclined gently towards the front of the room, meaning you couldn’t leave an orange on the floor safely, but the roof tiles were mostly watertight now, and the bathroom and the kitchen, though the most basic of units (and avocado in the case of the bathroom), were at least now clean and safe to use. The basic bed in the back room was still there. Polly had a very quick and uncomfortable flashback to a sun-drenched afternoon she had once spent there with Selina’s dead husband, but suppressed it immediately.