Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery
Page 30

‘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 travelling salesmen, but I didn’t think it would apply to Tony. More fool me.’
There was a pause.
‘I walked in to Dimmogs 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 coloured! 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.’