Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery
Page 29

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 grey 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, toppin
g 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 blonde, 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 realised 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.’
She’d said it before, of course. But this time she wasn’t going to be fobbed off.
Doreen rolled her eyes and poured herself another glass. There was a long silence.