Little Beach Street Bakery

by Jenny Colgan

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He told me before that he wasn’t ready for a relationship. He’d just come out of something really serious. Anyway, if a boy likes you, he’ll come and get you. Like Reuben did.’

  ‘What are you, in the 1950s?’ said Kerensa crossly. ‘That’s nonsense. Call him.’

  ‘It was just a kiss.’

  ‘Sometimes that’s worse. Oh, I don’t mean that. Oh Pol. You have had some rotten luck.’

  They both fell silent.

  ‘I’m such an idiot,’ said Polly. ‘I really thought he was…’

  ‘There’s no doubt he likes you,’ said Kerensa. ‘He’s always looking for you. He doesn’t talk to anyone else, just sits in his chair giving it the big Owen Wilson. Then you turn up and it’s like his eyes suddenly open; he’s suddenly there.’

  ‘Really?’ said Polly, then, quickly, ‘Oh. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter now. He probably won’t come back.’

  Kerensa paused. Polly wondered if she would try a comforting lie, but in the end she didn’t.

  ‘He might not,’ she said. ‘But you’ll be all right, yeah?’

  ‘Of course!’ said Polly stoically, taking a large slurp of her wine. ‘I’ve got Neil.’

  ‘Exactly!’ said Kerensa.

  And they chatted about other things, and decided in for a penny, and ordered a bottle of the delicious white wine and had a hilarious afternoon after all.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Huckle found it both comforting and a bit weird how people hardly commented on his being back. It was like he’d just been on holiday. Which he had, he supposed.

  His mother was pleased, of course, but she was so used to him being away in the ‘big city’, which was what she called Savannah, doing things that she didn’t really understand, that going to a totally foreign country wasn’t much different to her. His buddies were glad to see him, and made lots of cracks about warm beer and cricket, and whether he’d developed a weird accent. He spoke to a firm of consultants he knew, who took him on immediately, and found himself working regularly in offices around town. The hours were long, but the work wasn’t difficult – it was quite nice to engage his brain again, at least for now – and the money was amazing. As his quiet way of saying fuck it, he rented an apartment just like his old one, as far away as possible from the quaint town houses of the old city, which reminded him too much of England: a glass box, way up in the sky in a new high-rise. He had hardly anything in it; it was not at all cosy, had no rugs or eiderdowns or thatched roofs. And it was cool.

  He had to put Mount Polbearne out of his life now, remember it as a dream. There was a harbour in Savannah, full of big beautiful boats: pleasure cruisers and the gambling riverboats that still patrolled the slow, silty mouth of the great Savannah river and the swampland beyond. But there were little boats too, and Huckle walked past them of an evening, when the temperature dropped a little and it was possible to go outside without feeling you were in a steam oven. The harbour front at Savannah was pretty, lined with shops and bars and the smell of churros and barbecue, and teeming with happy plump tourists wearing matching T-shirts. But Huckle went to listen to the chattering masts. Sometimes he would close his eyes.

  At the back of his mind he knew he had to sort out the little apiary when his lease ran out, go and tidy his stuff away in England.

  It would be best, he surmised, not to see anyone when he went over. Maybe Reuben, briefly, though Reuben couldn’t be trusted for a millisecond not to charge over to Polly and blab about everything. But he couldn’t… He told himself he didn’t want to lead Polly on, he told himself it had been just a passing summer friendship at a time when they both really needed a friend. That was all.

  But of course, he realised, if they really were friends, they’d be chatting right now. Every day, in fact. He’d have liked to chat with her, tell her more about his life and how he was doing and what Savannah was like: he would love to show it to her.

  But she was in love with a dead man. He’d been hurt before; it wasn’t going to happen again. And look how busy she was, how the bakery was thriving; she wouldn’t have the faintest interest in him. Best put it behind him, stay where he belonged. And anyway, he’d forgotten how much he liked it here: the easiness of getting everything, the choice in the supermarkets, his cool apartment, the noisy bars. It wasn’t that bad, he told himself.

  Even so, he still walked down to the harbour most evenings, just to listen to the masts.

  It was always going to happen, sooner or later. Savannah wasn’t that big a town, and sure enough, one beautiful pink-tinged Sunday evening, when Huckle was considering going to a movie then browsing the bodega, he ran into Alison, Candice’s elder, skinny sister.

  ‘Huckle!’ she said, clearly only pretending to be surprised. ‘I didn’t know you were back in town… Well, I’d heard something.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Huckle. ‘Hi.’

  ‘So how was England? Lots of rain? Beer warm? Did you play cricket?’

  ‘Er, yeah,’ said Huckle, feeling uncomfortable.

  ‘Well, great to see you, gotta run.’

  ‘Er, how’s Candice?’ said Huckle, quickly.

  ‘Well, she’s just great!’ said Alison. Huckle waited for the stab in the heart, but surprisingly, it didn’t come. Instead, to his amazement, he felt mildly interested; quite pleased, in fact.

  ‘Cool,’ he said with a huge smile. ‘Well, tell them I said hi.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ she said, heading off into the sunshine.

  He knew that, Candice being Candice, she’d be straight on to him, and sure enough, he was barely back in his apartment before his email pinged, asking him to meet up for coffee. She didn’t mess about.

  They carefully avoided their old haunts and met the next day outside the office where he was working. She looked, as ever, good: worked-out and muscular, very blonde, her heels tapping on the sidewalk. Mentally Huckle contrasted her with Polly – long strawberry-blonde hair floating around her shoulders, the soft freckles on her nose – then blinked the image away.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘You look great.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Candice. ‘I’m on this new meal plan. You look good too.’

  ‘Yup, me too,’ said Huckle. ‘I just eat bread all the time.’

  She arched an eyebrow.

  ‘That stuff is pure poison.’

  ‘Soy latte?’

  She smiled. ‘Always.’

  They sat by the window.

  ‘So how was England? Does it rain all the time? Did you play cricket?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Huckle. ‘It rains a bit. Sometimes. But not like here, where it’s like a monsoon. It kind of spits on you a bit and gets real windy, then it’s gone. But at the moment the weather is beautiful. It’s not hot and sticky like here, it’s maybe high seventies?’

  The thermometer next to the water tower in Savannah had been showing 94° that morning.

  ‘So you wear a T-shirt, but maybe take a jumper for when the sun goes down. And the town, right, it’s got all these tiny little stone houses that look like they’re climbing on top of each other. Some of the sidewalks have stairs in them otherwise they’re too steep to get up. And there’s only a few roads and they all lead to the harbour, and in the morning if you get up early you can see the fishing boats come in with the night’s catch, and you can buy some right there and then and they slit the fish for you and take out the guts and it’s the freshest fish you can possibly imagine. And right on the harbourside there’s a little higgledy-piggledy shop…’

  He paused for a moment, then went on. Candice looked at him curiously.

  ‘It’s a bakery, the most amazing bakery I’ve ever been to. Every morning from first thing you can smell the wonderful scents rising up from the baking bread, and when she opens her doors, you can buy the bread warm straight out of the oven, and tear bits off and sit on the harbour wall, and after half an hour most of the town will come by for a bit of chit-chat and to buy their own bread, a
nd that’s how Polbearne wakes up of a morning.’

  His face was completely lost in reminiscence.

  ‘Sometimes, if you’re really well behaved, the girl who runs the bakery will bring you a cup of decent coffee too. But you mustn’t bother her, she’s very busy.’

  Candice raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Sounds like you know this baking woman quite well.’ Candice herself never cooked; she got her meals delivered from a nutrition company. ‘Sounds like she’s a good friend,’ she went on, looking at him. She hoped he had found someone else; it would make her life a lot easier not having to feel guilty.

  Huckle sighed.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t want to complicate things,’ he mumbled. And he told her about the fishing boat disaster.

  ‘Jeez,’ said Candice. ‘That’s awful. But was she serious about this Tarnie guy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Huckle.

  ‘’Cause it sounds to me like you like her a lot.’

  Huckle shrugged.

  ‘And she might have liked you too. In fact I think you might have been a total pair of idiots.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ said Huckle, taking a long sip of his coffee. ‘How’s…’

  Candice went a little pink, and smiled.

  ‘Er, you know… now that I’ve heard all about Little Miss Bakery, I am a lot less bothered about telling you this, but Ron and I are getting married.’

  ‘Congratulations!’ said Huckle, and again to his amazement, he found that he genuinely meant it. Ron and Candice were well suited he did three triathlons a year.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Candice. She looked at him.

  ‘You were so daft to run away like that,’ she said. ‘Well, that’s what I thought at the time. But now… I’m not sure it didn’t suit you. You look well, Huckle.’

  He smiled. ‘Oh, anywhere suits me.’

  Candice arched an eyebrow.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said as they stood up to go. ‘Stay in touch. If you’re staying.’ She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.

  ‘Sure,’ said Huckle, watching as she clip-clopped her way down the sidewalk.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  They were all gathered in Polbearne’s new posh restaurant, summoned for a meeting by Samantha and Henry, who, despite being incomers, had somehow contrived – as well as providing the local builders with a huge amount of work, and persuading several of their posh friends to buy tumbledown cottages, which pleased everybody – to take over the running of the town. They had called a meeting about ‘the Greatest Danger of our Time’, according to the posters they’d put everywhere, and nearly everyone had turned up obediently, partly interested, partly because there wasn’t much else to do now the summer rush was slowing down, and partly because they suspected, correctly, that Samantha and Henry might provide free wine.

  Patrick was there from the vet’s; Muriel, of course; Mrs Manse, sitting alone imperiously; Archie and Kendall from the boats, and Jayden. Polly was sitting at the side, with Neil, stifling a yawn.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked Patrick. She knew that the unspoiled, unmodern ambience of the village was what appealed to him about Polbearne. He felt they had something there, an unbroken link to the past – several of the older residents still spoke a little Cornish they’d heard at the feet of their own grandparents. The idea of change terrified him.

  Just then, Samantha stood up and pinged her glass.

  ‘Now, I’m sure you’ve all heard the news,’ she said, which she knew wasn’t the case because she’d only got it herself from a planner she’d made a huge effort to cultivate on the mainland so he’d let her build a roof garden.

  People shook their heads, and Samantha explained.

  The new summer rush had never slowed, not even for a second, but it wasn’t that that was changing things; it was the wreck. The police had sealed off the beach, and special ships had come along and siphoned all the diesel off the ship – about forty thousand gallons – but there was still a lot of merchandise on the bottom of the ocean and the ship needed to be taken away for scrap. Every day, ducks were washing up; taken by the tides, they had been found as far away as Exmouth, and Land’s End.

  But back in Mount Polbearne, the problem was local. Lorries and diggers and diving vessels and personnel needed to get into the town to work, and they needed to get back at night-time, regardless of the tides. The new residents wanted building work done to their houses, which also meant trucks and lorries and diggers. And they wanted to drive their cars. Daytrippers too didn’t want to risk getting stranded or take an overpriced ferry boat back to the mainland. The talk had been around for years, but it had started to gain more and more momentum, particularly when a car broke down one summer Sunday on the causeway just as the tide came in, and the family inside, including very young children, had had to make a heart-stopping dash for it as the water lapped around their knees. Something had to be done, was the general consensus, and the local council, delighted with the regeneration of the area, had applied to the central development fund for a bridge to connect them to the mainland.

  There was a gasp around the room, then an immediate burst of noise.

  Some people thought it was a great idea. It would open up the town to more people. It would mean you could go and do a supermarket shop and not worry about getting back in time. It meant no more being stranded in the wintertime when the storms made the causeway impassable for days. It meant the fishermen could get their fish to market faster, and that people could live on the Mount and commute. Jayden was very excited, pointing out that he wanted to go to a nightclub in Plymouth and flash his new-found ‘indoor job’ status. The fishermen grumbled a bit about the imminent loss of their water taxi income, but most understood that there was no halting progress, that it had always been just a matter of time. Patrick, of course, was valiantly opposed.

  ‘Well can’t they all go and live in those places, then? The pizza-ordering places? And we can keep this as a place where you can’t order a pizza.’

  Polly suddenly felt like she’d love a pizza, but didn’t feel she could mention it. Maybe she’d make some in the shop. Maybe, she thought suddenly, she could be the pizza concession – she had the oven, she’d just need to work slightly different hours. It would be tricky, but not impossible, and given the amount of hungry men currently working in the town, probably extremely popular.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, in two minds.

  ‘Abso-bloody-lutely not no bridge!’ thundered Henry in his pink cords. ‘We’d get all sorts in here.’

  All the Polbearnites, including Polly, rolled their eyes, and helped themselves to another glass of the wine Henry was paying for.

  It was a lot to think about, and the main topic of conversation of everyone who came into the shop, along with the fact that a famous pop star had tried to buy the lighthouse.

  ‘The LIGHTHOUSE is for sale?’ said Polly in amazement. She still had broken nights, despite spending a lot of money on blackout curtains. How could you live in that?

  ‘Well no, it’s fine when you’re inside it,’ said Muriel. ‘It’s the only place in Mount Polbearne you can’t see the damn light.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Polly. ‘Is the pop star going to buy it, then?’

  ‘No,’ said Muriel. ‘They wouldn’t let him put in a fireman’s pole and a helter-skelter.’

  ‘Why does planning say you can’t have a helter-skelter but you can have a bloody great eyesore bridge?’ said Patrick, who was picking up a bloomer. He had given two interviews to national papers (who were very in favour of maintaining Polbearne’s traditional ways, regardless of whether any of the locals wanted to go to a supermarket or not) and was feeling commensurately proud of himself.

  ‘Good point,’ said Polly.

  She wandered over to the lighthouse after another night of being kept awake. It was as dilapidated as the rest of Mount Polbearne – or half of it, at least, given how much gentrification was going on, a gentrification which, it was occasionally pointed
out to her, she had helped start. Nobody had lived in the lighthouse for a long time, since the beam had become remote control; the black and white stripes were peeling, and the little granite cottage next to it was small and functional. It was completely impractical as a project. But she couldn’t quite get it out of her head.

  Every two days, rain or shine, she went to Huckle’s cottage to look after the bees. It had turned into her constitutional, her own form of exercise, until it was just out of habit, more than anything else, or some kind of weird talisman. She cleaned out beds, removed dead bees and checked on the queen; sterilised and filled the honey pots and carried them back in her rucksack, Neil sitting on some newspaper on the top. The honey continued to sell well in the shop, and she put the money aside carefully for Huckle when he came back. But she’d heard nothing; of course he wasn’t coming back. For all she knew, his ex had greeted him off the plane with open arms, apologising for breaking his heart, begging him to go back to her.

  Polly came back to the harbour one afternoon after a honey trip and to her great surprise ran into Dave the temp.

  ‘Hello!’ she said. It was late August. Not quite so light in the morning when she got up to start the day’s baking, but still warm, and the soft summer air had a touch of cooler breeze about it. ‘How’s your girlfriend?’

  ‘Good!’ he said. He was looking more cheerful, although his spots were still there. ‘She had the baby early.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Polly. ‘Is she all right? Did you call her Augusta?’

  ‘No,’ said Dave. ‘We wanted to call her September, remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Polly. ‘But I thought maybe because she was born in August…’ Her voice trailed off. Dave still looked utterly uncomprehending. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’s wonderful.’

  He smiled again. ‘She’s amazing.’

  ‘So what are you doing back here?’ asked Polly. ‘Tell me you’re not working on the new bridge. You’ll never manage it.’