Little Beach Street Bakery
Page 19

On the other hand, she thought, as she skritched Neil and waited for the new bread to bake, its fabulous scent perfuming the old building and causing the rare passer-by outside to stop and take deep sniffs, she was meant to be pausing. Regrouping, not diving into another life straight away. The irony of trying to force herself to relax made her smile.
Well. One thing at a time. And today she was going to take a walk and get to know her new surroundings.
‘You can’t come,’ she said patiently to Neil, putting him down. ‘It’s getting ridiculous if I take you everywhere.’
Neil hopped back over piteously and perched himself up on her hand.
‘WOW,’ said Polly, genuinely delighted. ‘Hello! Look at you!’ He obviously wanted his feathers scratched again, and she was happy to oblige. ‘You’re clearly getting better, little fella.’
At this, Neil did a white poo on the floor.
‘Oh Lord,’ said Polly. ‘I’m not sure I can leave you here either.’
She cleaned up and regarded him carefully. He cocked a beady eye at her, and when she went to use the bathroom, he followed her to the door.
‘Oh my goodness, you’re a lap puffin,’ she said, exasperated. ‘Now listen, I know you’re little and you got lost and you want your mummy, but I’m not your mummy, okay?’ She crouched down. ‘I’m just passing through. Soon I’ll leave Polbearne and you’re going to fly away and never ever think of me again in your little puffling brain, okay?’
Neil put his head on one side.
‘Okay, okay. All right. Just this once.’
She took a heap of paper towels and spread them on the bottom of her little rucksack, then popped him inside.
‘Don’t tell anyone you’re here, okay?’ she said. ‘There’s already one person in this town who appears to hate me without reason. I don’t need everyone else thinking of me as the weird puffin lady.’
Neil chirruped.
Polly took the bread out of the oven, adding the last scrapings of olive oil and some salt crystals, and not making the raise too high, to give it more of a focaccia flavour. She wondered whether she could buy rosemary in this town, then discarded that idea as a) ridiculous and b) slightly over her budget. She wrapped the bread in a tea towel to keep it warm, then in a plastic bag to stop Neil pecking at it, and made an extra sandwich from yesterday’s bread just in case. She also took some tap water she’d put in the freezer to chill, and a couple of local apples she’d bought the day before.
The causeway gleamed open wide this morning, the tide low. As Polly walked across, she wondered how the townspeople – once a part of the mainland – had felt when the sea had gradually started to reclaim their route out of town, having to build the road higher and higher and finally giving up altogether.
As she headed into the countryside away from the shoreline, she realised how long it had been since she’d taken a walk for a walk’s sake. She had marched up and down Plymouth’s shopping streets in her more solvent days, and she’d once belonged to a gym, but she’d never really been one for just… walking.
But out here, with her lunch in her backpack (along with a chattering puffin), marching along narrow shady country lanes with no particular plan in mind, she felt… not too bad. Not too bad at all. She was aware of that funny feeling in her shoulders again, then recognised it for what it was: an absence. An absence of heaviness, of tightness. They should, she thought, advertise walking as an alternative to massages.
The sun did its best to break through as she walked past fields of rape and sweet meadow grass, with the occasional friendly-looking cow and ugly-looking tractor. On one particularly sunny corner, she noticed, to her amazement, what turned out to be rosemary. She broke some off right away, delighted. Even though it was probably covered in diesel fumes, it would certainly do. She stretched her legs and straightened her back and breathed in the smells of the fields – well, the nice fields; some of them were awful – and as she passed the occasional little hamlet, she managed to stop herself from bursting into song with ‘I Love to Go A-Wandering’.
She thought about Chris and wondered what he was doing right now. If he was still at his mum’s, he’d be sullen, truculent; he often was there, the golden boy gone a bit wrong. He would have liked this, she thought. Then again, would he? She barely knew him any more. Anything she’d suggested in the last couple of years he’d shot down right away. The idea of a fresh, healthy country walk would have been met with scorn; the only thing he wanted to do when he wasn’t working obsessively was jog and drink, rather quickly and with only one objective in mind: getting as drunk as possible, whereupon he’d become self-pitying and repetitive, needing a lot of reassurance that everything was going to be all right, then instantly falling asleep wherever he was and waking up the next day in an even filthier mood than before. And Kerensa was not a country walk kind of person at all. Mind you, Polly wouldn’t have considered herself one either.
But now, the sun warming her back, Polly breathed in deeply and tried to make her brain focus on the future rather than the past. Yes, the future was a frightening place, but then where wasn’t?
In this slightly contradictory frame of mind – and wishing she’d brought her old iPod; ‘I Love to Go A-Wandering’ was getting a bit annoying in her head now – she was about to sit down for her lunch when she saw the sign.
Fresh wild-flower honey for sale.
A string of daisies hung round the wooden sign. Ooh, thought Polly. This must be the weird American the fishermen had mentioned. Maybe she should go and introduce herself as the other stranger just arrived in town. They obviously didn’t get that many, and it might help her next time Gillian Manse came round baring her teeth. It struck her that Mrs Manse would of course have a key to the flat, and this gave her the shivers. So. Reinforcements.
Normally the idea of marching up and saying hello to someone out of the blue would have been something she’d avoid at all costs; she’d spent enough time trying to network for the business, even though she’d hated doing it. But in Plymouth she’d known lots of people, which had made things very difficult by the time she’d left. Here, on the other hand, no one had any idea of – and not that much interest in – her situation. And he might need a honey marketing person.
She looked at the sign again. Okay, so that seemed extremely unlikely. But even so…