by Jenny Colgan
Polly patted her shoulder sympathetically.
“Listen,” she said. “You don’t know. Nobody knows. Don’t worry about it. This baby will come out and everyone will love it and find things in it that look exactly like Reuben and you’ll be overcome with love and everything will be totally fine and you’ll be a family. Honestly. You have to think that.”
“What if it comes out with one of those big dark eyebrows that meet in the middle?” said Kerensa. “Oh God. Oh God. What was I thinking? Seriously, if I ever have a stupid night of stupid pointless passion ever again—which I won’t if I’m lucky enough to get away with this, which I don’t deserve to, don’t point it out, nobody is beating me up more than I’m beating myself up, believe me . . .”
“Yes?” said Polly.
“Well, just make sure it’s with a short ginger guy with freckles,” said Kerensa in despair.
“I’ll keep a tight grip on you if we ever go to Scotland,” said Polly as they stood in front of the immaculate door. “Okay, come on.”
“What’s the game plan?” said Kerensa.
“Now you ask me,” said Polly. “I don’t know. You just pour the wine and we’ll take it from there.”
“Nothing can go wrong,” said Kerensa.
Doreen opened the door in her usual cautious way, as if worried about who would be there, even though they were expected.
“Did you bring that bird?” she said nervously. Polly had introduced Doreen to Neil once. It hadn’t gone well. Doreen had asked Polly where he pooed and Polly had said oh he wears a nappy and Doreen had believed her and then looked anxious when she realized he didn’t.
“No, Mum,” said Polly, giving her a kiss on her dry cheek and handing over the box.
“What’s this?”
“They’re Christmas twists. I’m trying them out.”
“Also, we have wine!” said Kerensa, waving the bottle. “Quick, Doreen, where are the glasses?”
Doreen was fond of Kerensa, if occasionally a bit intimidated.
“You look huge, Kerensa,” she said bluntly as Kerensa sidled over to get glasses.
“Uh, yeah, thanks,” said Kerensa shortly. She didn’t like people pointing out how big her bump was. It just made her think even more that there was some six-foot hairy Brazilian in there. “It’s mostly water retention.”
“What did you do, swallow a swimming pool?” said Doreen. Polly and Kerensa exchanged glances. This wasn’t like Doreen; she seemed very light-hearted.
“So, Pauline, how are things at the bakery?”
Polly resisted the temptation to roll her eyes. She hated the name Pauline. It made her sound thirty years older than she was. Or rather, there was nothing wrong with the name; it just didn’t suit her. She felt like Doreen and Pauline were contemporaries, not mother and daughter. She longed for the pretty names her friends had: Daisy and Lily and Rosie. Even Kerensa was old and local and traditional. Pauline just sounded gray and dutiful. Doreen’s father, Polly’s grandfather, had been called Paul. So it seemed they’d picked her name with the least effort imaginable.
Polly knew this wasn’t really the case. She knew her mum loved her. Just that she found it difficult to show.
The mince pie bites were delicious, but it was Kerensa who was truly wicked, topping up Doreen’s glass whenever she so much as looked away.
Doreen got up to bring “tea”—a reheated (but still frozen in the middle) shop-bought pie and some nasty plain salad with no dressing: large slices of droopy-looking tomato, over-thick cucumber and wilted lettuce that was all stalk. Kerensa looked at it in horror. Polly was used to it and didn’t mind so much. There was a reason she’d rushed out to teach herself to bake as soon as she’d been old enough to turn on the oven.
Doreen, unaccustomed to drinking, loosened up after her second glass and got quite giggly by her third.
“Well, of course when I was pregnant,” she said suddenly, and Polly stiffened. It wasn’t a period of her life she ever spoke about. Kerensa squeezed Polly’s knee in a kind of “I told you so” excited way.
“Yes?”
Doreen pursed her lips as if to stop herself talking.
“Well, things were different then.”
“No, no, go on,” said Kerensa, wielding the wine bottle. “Tell me. I want to know everything. Did you cry every day and feel like a heffalump?”
“Well, I was never as big as you,” said Doreen.
“Yeah, all right, thanks.”
“But yes,” she said. “I cried every day. But it’s different for you. You’ve got a happy family and lots of money and you’re going to live happily ever after. It was just me and my Pauline, wasn’t it, love?”
“And Nana and Gramps,” said Polly awkwardly.
“Yes, yes. But you know,” Doreen sighed, “I sat in that maternity ward—they used to keep you in for days then—and Nana and Gramps would visit, but my friends didn’t, not really. Well, I didn’t have a lot of friends really. Just a few people from school, and the women I knew at Dinnogs, and they disapproved, of course. Even though it was the 1980s, when you think things might have eased up a bit . . . no, not at Dinnogs. I think they’re trapped in the fifties even now. Not that I would ever shop there again. Never. Not in a million years.” She took another sip of wine, her face pink.
Polly looked around the room, immaculate from the net curtains to the identically matching floral three-piece suite. There on the mantelpiece was her Year 1 photo, one tooth missing, her hair a brighter red then before it had softened into strawberry blond, freckles cheerfully scattered across her face. She looked like Pippi Longstocking. And there on the wall was her degree certificate from the University of Southampton—Polly hadn’t wanted it particularly, so here it was, displayed, even though her mother received so few visitors. And she knew that upstairs, her old bedroom was still just as it had always been, her bed made up just in case she ever wanted to come home.
It didn’t matter that sometimes they couldn’t communicate, that her mother had never, perhaps, been as naturally warm as she thought other families might be.
This was still home. It always had been.
Suddenly she didn’t want to throw this bomb in here. Didn’t want to disrupt her mother’s careful, sheltered life any more than she had to. Yet she had to say something. Ever since Carmel’s phone call, the only thing she’d been able to think about was the man dying in a hospital bed not too far from here. A man who was her biological father. Not her father in any meaningful sense, but a part of her nonetheless. And there was only one person on earth who could tell her the right thing to do.
Kerensa emptied yet more wine into Doreen’s glass. She wouldn’t have been this squiffy in years; she kept giggling and had gone very red in the face.
“Tell me what it’s like,” said Kerensa. “You know I don’t have anyone. My mum says she can’t remember, and Polly is absolutely no use at all.”
“Oh, it was so long ago,” said Doreen.
“It wasn’t that long ago,” said Polly.
“Tell us!” said Kerensa.
“Well . . .” said Doreen.
Kerensa, with some lack of grace, got carefully to her feet.
“I’ll just wash up,” she said, winking at Polly. “I’m still listening!”
“No, no, I’ll do that,” flapped Doreen, but without making any real effort to get up. Kerensa gave Polly a stern look and another hefty wink.
“Now,” she hissed.
Polly refilled her own glass and leaned forward.
“Mum,” she said.
“Doesn’t Kerensa look blooming!” her mother was saying. “Oh, her mother is so lucky. How I’d have loved a grandchild. She’s fallen right on her feet, hasn’t she? Although I’d never have thought that little chap would have it in him!”
She giggled, then hiccuped. Polly realized she’d need to be quick, before her mother fell asleep at the table.
“Mum,” she said. “Mum. I need to ask you about my dad.”
Doreen rolled her eyes and poured herself another glass. There was a long silence.
“That rat bastard,” she said finally.
Polly had never heard her mother swear in her life.
“Well?” she said. “Please. Can you tell me a little more? Please? It’s important.”
“Why?” said her mother. “Why now?”
Polly thought for a moment.
“Well, if Huckle and I are going to get married . . . then we might have a baby . . .”
“Oh please,” said her mother. “You’ve been engaged for months and haven’t even bothered to book a date or tell people what’s happening. I don’t think you can pin him down at all. He doesn’t seem that fussed.”
This wasn’t the time to tell her it was Polly who had cold feet, and that this was why.
“Just tell me about Tony,” she said. “What was he like?”
Her mother sighed, staring into her glass.
“I don’t feel very well,” she announced. This was a common tactic. Polly was meant to drop the subject now and start asking after her mother’s health. Doreen could discuss her health issues for several hours at a time. One time they’d been walking down the high street and Polly was sure she had seen her GP hiding inside a shoe shop.
“You’re fine,” said Polly. “You can go to bed in just a minute. But first, please . . . You owe me, Mum. I can’t . . . I don’t feel I can take the next step in my life without knowing. Without knowing more.”
She felt bad lying like this. But she had to know.
Her mother blinked.
“Well,” she said. Then she sighed again. “Your hair,” she said, setting down her glass. “Your hair. That’s exactly what his was like. And you know, lots of women, they don’t like a sandy-haired man. I don’t know why. I thought it was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. It shone in the sunlight, and his freckles . . . they were like golden dots. I wanted to . . . I wanted to kiss them all.”
She laughed, harshly and suddenly. “Listen to me.” She shook her head. “Ridiculous.”
“No it’s not,” said Polly. “Really it isn’t.”
“People think the eighties wasn’t very long ago,” said Doreen. “That things weren’t that different. But I’ll tell you, they were. Do you know, when Lady Diana Spencer got married, they sent her to see a doctor to see if she was a virgin or not. And they told people that; everybody knew. It was official. She went to see the official royal doctor and he said she was a virgin. In the eighties. SO.”
Polly stayed silent, willing her mother just to carry on talking.
“I was on hats,” said Doreen. “Well, hats and gloves really, but it was the hats I liked. At Dinnogs. For weddings, mainly, and Christmas felts in winter. Men wore more hats then. People wore more hats then. Central heating ruined everything.”
This was obviously going off at a bit of a tangent, but Polly decided to ignore it and topped up her mother’s glass again.
“So he used to come in . . . you’d always notice him. He was tall, like you. Thinner than you, though.” She smiled. “He’d come in and look at the hats and chat to me . . . Well, he was a sales rep, he did a lot of business upstairs. Curtain material, that kind of thing. He’d always hover round the door. They put the pretty girls near the door, just to get the chaps in, you know.” She blushed. “The young girls, anyway.”
“You were lovely, Mum,” said Polly loyally. In the very few photographs they had from that time, her mother had a Human League haircut and funny pointy shoulder pads.
“So he’d go upstairs, then he’d come down and talk about hats, and once . . .” She went an even brighter red. “Once he asked me to help him try on some leather gloves. He had . . . he had the most beautiful hands.” She bit her lip. “It was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to me. The boys round my way, all farm boys . . . well, I wasn’t interested, I really wasn’t. I mean, he seemed so sophisticated. Well, he was twenty-three years old. Anyway, he asked me out and we went to a snug. That was the bit in a pub where women could go; they still had those in the eighties, you know.”
“It seems a million years ago.”
“It was! We smoked inside!”
Polly smiled. “Whoa.”
“So we smoked Regal King Sizes, and I had half a cider and black and he drank a couple of pints, and he told me about life on the road and his car—he had a Ford Escort, he loved it.”
Polly nodded.
“It was . . . it was the best night of my life. And he didn’t try anything on, he really didn’t. He gave me a lift home in his car. Then he came in the next week. And the next.”
Suddenly Doreen’s face sagged and she looked terribly sad.
“He just seemed so nice. I was twenty. I thought this was it. You met a boy you liked, he liked you, that was it, you got married, that was how it was then. None of this wandering about until you’re in your thirties thinking you’ve got all the time in the world, then getting all panicky about it.”
Polly ignored this.
“And he met my mum and dad, you know, it was all totally above board . . . they thought he was charming. And so handsome with that lovely hair. Of course you heard jokes about traveling salesmen, but I didn’t think it would apply to Tony. More fool me.”
There was a pause.
“I walked in to Dinnogs one morning, and it was so strange. As if I could feel something in the air. Lydia by the perfume station, she barely looked up, and normally you couldn’t get five yards without her squirting something all over you. And Mrs. Bradley was standing there with a face like fizz. She had one of those monobosoms . . . you never see those any more, do you? I suppose she wore a corset. They’re a dying breed . . .”
Polly held her breath. This was all new to her. She leaned forward ever so slightly, desperate not to startle her mother into clamming up again.
“And there she was.” Doreen shook her head. “You know,” she said, with a wondering tone, “you know, she was colored! Sorry, black. Sorry. I don’t know what to say these days.” She paused. “I wouldn’t . . . I mean, I wouldn’t have been surprised nowadays. But it was different then, it really was. I mean, we weren’t in London, or Birmingham. This was the south-west of England. It was really white . . . I’m just making excuses now.”
She breathed out again.
“She had a big belly on her. So. That was a lot to take in right then. And one in me, although I didn’t know it, of course. That damn Ford Escort. Anyway. At first I didn’t take her seriously, her standing there saying Tony’s her husband and to leave him alone. I really didn’t. She was screaming and shouting and I just got the security guard to ask her to leave.”
She stared at the floor, bright red.
“Oh God, Polly. Oh God. I’ve never told anyone that. I never have. Things were different . . . Oh Polly.”
The tears were coursing down her cheeks now, and Polly put her arm around her.
“It was just wrong that got wrong that got wrong. He did me wrong and I did her wrong, and then, well, you came along and I reckon we all did you wrong too.”
Polly shook her head.
“You didn’t. You didn’t, I promise.”
“I called him—no luck. No chance. There weren’t mobile phones then, and I couldn’t email him or Facebook. Then I tracked down his mam and dad; they were in the book.”
She shook her head.
“They were pleased to see me. It had been quite the family scandal when he’d met . . . now what was her name . . .”
Polly was half crying and trying to comfort her mother and feeling awful and slightly drunk as well, otherwise she wouldn’t for a moment have said what she said.
“Carmel,” she supplied, without thinking.
Kerensa, who’d been shuffling unobtrusively in the kitchen, carefully listening in on absolutely everything, materialized like a bouncy ball in the middle of the floor.<
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“Coffee!” she bustled. “I think we all need some coffee! Doreen, you need a coffee machine in there. Man cannot survive on granules alone, especially when you’re up the duff and only allowed one cup a day. It might as well be decent.”
Doreen was staring at Polly in horror.
“You’ve seen her.”
Polly swallowed, desperately wishing there was a way out of this, but not knowing what it was.
“She just . . . she rang me,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t do anything. I just . . . I just wanted to know a bit more.”
“So, what, are you friends?!” Doreen’s eyes were wide with shock.
“No. She just . . . she said . . .”
Polly bit her lip with how much she didn’t want to say what she was about to say.
“He’s very ill. And he wanted to see me.”
The color drained from Doreen’s face. She was stone-cold sober now.
“And did you?”
“No,” said Polly. “I wanted to talk to you first.”
“So that’s reasonable, isn’t it?” said Kerensa. “That’s the best thing to do in families, isn’t it? Talk everything out?”
Polly shot her a look.
Doreen’s hand was at her mouth.
“This is exactly why,” she said, “I tried to keep this stuff away from you. All the horrible, bad stuff. I was just trying to protect you.”
“But he paid money all those years!” protested Polly.
“Oh, I let you think that, of course. Let you think he cared. It was his parents. They’d rather have had me than her. That’s all it was. Their guilt money.” She practically spat.
Polly blinked, tears brimming at her eyes.
“So you walking in, dropping these bombs about reuniting with your father . . .”
“I wasn’t! I’m not!”
“I haven’t seen him since he got what he wanted and disappeared,” said Doreen. “Didn’t give a toss for the consequences. Not a toss. Knew where I lived. Didn’t care.”
She stood up.