Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery
Page 25

‘No,’ said the woman. ‘No. We’ve been married…’ There was a sob in her voice. ‘We’ve been married thirty-five years.’
Two years longer than Polly had been alive. And then she understood.
Chapter Fourteen
It was 4.30 a.m. Polly would have been getting up shortly in any case. She was in two minds. She hadn’t phoned her mum. She hadn’t phoned anyone. She was in Huckle’s arms, wishing she could just stay there for ever and never have to move. His touch, his lovely smell tightly wrapped around her; it was the safest place in the world, the only place she wanted to be.
She laid her head against the golden hairs of his chest and sighed. Huckle knew about her dad, of course, or at least as much as she did, which wasn’t much. His own family were noisy and affectionate, and apart from DuBose, his black sheep brother, they seemed nice and pretty normal, so she didn’t know if he could possibly understand. It wasn’t like losing a father, losing someone you loved. It was the weirdest sensation out there: that somebody, a person you didn’t know, shared various things with you – Polly’s unusual red-gold hair, for example, didn’t come from her mother’s side at all. You were half a person you’d never met.
Most of the time she never even thought about him. Sometimes she did. But she’d never gone looking for him; never been particularly interested in trying to make up the pieces of the puzzle. She knew friends from school who had, and in general they’d been severely disappointed, as well as upsetting the parent who’d actually brought them up. And it wasn’t as if she had memories. He’d got her mother pregnant, that was all.
And now, somehow, he’d tracked her down – Huckle agreed with her that it was probably the piece in the paper they’d done last year; a nice journalist had come and asked all about the bread van Polly was running, and recommended it to everyone, and she had felt like quite the sensation for a week or so.
He must have seen it. That must have been it.
Polly blinked hard. She looked up into Huckle’s eyes.
‘What do you think? Should I go and see him?’
Huckle shrugged. ‘It’s up to you,’ he said.
Neil had woken and had stalked across the kitchen counters as he usually did, leaving floury footprints behind him. He jumped up on to Polly’s shoulder, knowing instinctively as he always seemed to that she needed him there for comfort.
‘Don’t tell me that!’ said Polly. ‘Tell me to do something one way or the other and that will help me decide!’
‘Okay, well, l think you should go.’
‘I don’t want to go! He never knew me! He never cared for me! Not a Christmas card, nothing!’
‘Okay, don’t go.’
‘But this might be my one chance to meet the only father I’m ever going to have!’
Huckle was still holding her tightly, even though Neil was breathing fish fumes in his face.
‘Okay, so go.’
‘But I don’t owe him anything! You know, my mother never moved house her entire life. He’d have known where to find her. I think that’s why she never moved. And he never once bothered…’
Huckle nodded.
‘No, you’re right. Don’t go.’
Polly stood back.
‘You are absolutely no use at all.’
‘I’m not, I know.’
Polly breathed deeply.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I know what I’m going to do.’
‘Toss a coin?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m going to get in the van and drive there. Then when I’m outside the hospital I’ll see if I know what to do.’
‘You’re putting it off? How does that even work?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Polly. ‘I’ll figure it out as I drive. I’ll call Jayden and wake him; he can get Selina down to cover the basics.’
She grabbed her big parka and went to throw it on over her pyjamas.
‘I’m just saying,’ said Huckle carefully. ‘I’m just saying that if you decided to go in, you probably wouldn’t want to be in your pyjamas. But also if you want to, that is completely fine too.’
‘Gah,’ said Polly. ‘No, you’re right.’
While she ran upstairs to get changed, Huckle grabbed a clean shirt and washed in the sink.
‘What?’ she said when she came downstairs to find him dressed.
‘I’ll take you.’
‘What do you mean? No, I’ll be fine. What if I change my mind? You’ll lose an entire day.’
‘Yeah, right, for something that might actually be quite important. You can change your mind. But I don’t like you thinking about it whilst also sitting in traffic. I don’t like that at all.’
‘You know if you’re taking the bike…’
‘I know, I know.’
Neil loved the sidecar.
‘I still might change my mind.’
‘Well if you aren’t changing it now, you’ll need to get a move on. The tide is turning.’
The tiniest glimmerings of dawn could be seen as they trundled across the treacherous causeway. It was strictly forbidden to cross it at night, but nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to that. Huckle steered the motorbike with its ancient burgundy sidecar carefully along the cobbles, the water lapping at the sides of the narrow ancient road.
It was freezing in the sidecar, even under the waterproof cover; Polly curled her fists into the sleeves of her jumper. Her hair was whipping out behind her underneath the old-fashioned helmet. Neil didn’t mind the cold, of course, and Huckle was concentrating on the slippery, treacherous road beneath them. She shrugged down further in her layers and gazed out towards the dawn, enjoying the sense of motion beneath her and the quiet emptiness of the road ahead. Not quite empty, of course; this early in the morning there were tractors and farmers out and about; milkmen and postmen and of course bakers. The lighthouse flashed behind them – Polly hardly noticed it these days – then switched itself off as the pink spread across the sky and the morning was fully there.
It was too noisy to speak, but occasionally Huckle would turn his head to the left as if to check on how she was doing, and she would blink back to indicate that she was all right and he would power on.
But was she? She sat rigid in the sidecar, trying to examine herself to see what she actually thought. Was this all connected? she wondered. The way she kept brushing Huckle off whenever he tried to talk to her about children. She kept telling him they were too poor, or too busy… but was that true? Or was it all down to the fact that she didn’t know how to be part of a family? Not a full one anyway. She didn’t know how a father should be.