Little Beach Street Bakery
Page 85

‘I need to thank you, you know,’ she said.
Polly looked at her.
‘Excuse me?’
Mrs Manse nodded.
‘Before you came… I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t go. You know. The town would have died without a bakery. Yes, I hated the work; it was my husband’s idea for me really. But I did it for him and I did it for the town, because it was my town and no other bugger would.’
Her face looked distant.
‘And I lost Alf and Jimmy, and well, that was…’
There was a long silence.
‘But then you came with your fancy ideas and your daft words for a basic bloomer and your stupid plans to make things different… and, well, it worked. Some of it,’ she added. Polly smiled to herself.
‘And now they don’t need me. There’s more and more of ’em, and they don’t need me. They’d rather go somewhere young that lets seabirds walk in the flour.’
She harrumphed this last bit. Polly patted her on the shoulder.
Mrs Manse’s eyes lifted and looked out.
‘I knew,’ she said. ‘I knew when that boy Tarnie never came home. Those other boys came home, but my boy never did.’
‘I know,’ said Polly respectfully.
‘I know now, I do, you know. I know…’
Her voice trailed off; she looked a little confused.
‘I know he isn’t… I know they won’t…’
Her old hand clasped Polly’s suddenly, with surprising strength.
‘I hope they’re together, Jim and Cornelius. Wherever they are.’
Then she burst into tears.
Polly moved fast, turning the shop sign over to ‘Closed’ – it wasn’t like the Little Beach Street Bakery, where there’d be a huge queue down the harbour by now; nobody was passing at all. She locked the door and immediately went into the back of the shop and switched on the kettle.
‘Nice cup of tea,’ she said. ‘Nice cup of tea.’
‘They don’t come back,’ said Mrs Manse.
And although Polly knew she meant her husband and her son and Tarnie, she couldn’t help thinking of someone else, someone whose hair glinted in the sun, who was so far away… As the kettle boiled, and she kept a worried eye on Mrs Manse, she wondered, wasn’t she doing kind of the same thing? Keeping everything nice for Huckle, just as Mrs Manse couldn’t bear the idea of not being there to greet her menfolk when they came home? Just in case? There wasn’t any more chance of Huck coming back, not really. Not at all. It had taken Gillian Manse a very long time to face the truth. When would Polly face it?
She made Mrs Manse drink the tea, then took her upstairs to her little flat and, without much difficulty – the old lady was still mumbling – persuaded her to get into bed. She called Archie and asked him to track down Mrs Manse’s sister in Truro, then she sat in the stifling flat, waiting for the doctor, who had to wait for the tide.
As she waited, she noticed that the photo, the old photo she’d seen in the drawer, had been taken out and put on top of the cabinet that housed the television, freshly dusted and polished. Gillian had been speaking the truth, Polly realised; she had accepted what had happened to her boys, and knew that they wouldn’t be coming home again.
The doctor arrived looking harassed.
‘The sooner they get that bridge sorted, the better,’ she said. ‘This is ridiculous, it’s medieval. How do you guys live like this?’
Polly looked at her.
‘We like it,’ she said, defensive again.
The doctor checked Mrs Manse over and declared her physically fit, if clinically obese. She sniffed loudly. ‘Though you might just call that normal these days. All that white bread.’
Polly decided she didn’t like the young doctor.
‘She’s a little confused, though. I would say it’s almost certainly just a dizzy spell to do with her age, and I would suggest that whatever she does now, she doesn’t stay on her feet for too long.’
‘I think she wants to go and play bingo,’ said Polly.
‘Perfect,’ said the doctor. ‘Is she still working?’
‘Runs this place single-handedly.’
The doctor shook her head.
‘That won’t do. That won’t do at all.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Mrs Manse sleepily. ‘This… this girl is going to run it for me now. Aren’t you, Polly?’
Polly realised that this was the first time Mrs Manse had ever used her name. She normally just referred to her as ‘you’; as in ‘you’ve ruined this village’.
She squeezed Mrs Manse’s wrinkled old hand.
‘Of course I am,’ she said. ‘I promise.’
Chapter Thirty-One
The seasons had rolled around and new shops had opened in Polbearne: a bespoke fishmonger that paid the men well for their catch, next to the beautiful seafood restaurant; and a children’s clothes and knickery-knackery shop that Polly was astonished to see could actually make a living.
Both bakeries too were thriving; they had hired another member of staff and Jayden oversaw the running of everything with ease, handling the main baking and the grunt work and leaving Polly to experiment with new tastes and flavours and techniques, which she enjoyed. She had also got a lovely mention in a Sunday newspaper, which pleased her. She had been on one or two dates, once with a surfer friend of Reuben’s, who turned out to be very chatty on the subject of surfing and almost entirely uninterested in anything else, and also with an architect who was working on one of the conversions, but nothing had quite clicked, even as she told herself that what she and Huckle had had was a friendship gone slightly awry, and that was all. Anyway, she was far too busy to worry about that, what with Christmas with her mum, her brother and his children, Reuben and Kerensa and Kerensa’s parents. It all got a bit embarrassing when Reuben and Kerensa kept snogging over the Christmas crackers, but there was a big service up in the old church building, everyone freezing but giving thanks for a year that could have been so much worse, and the whole thing was brilliant fun.
But as spring and the wedding approached, she found herself getting a bit nervous again. She settled on a cool ‘Hey, how are you?’ approach, but then of course if Huckle turned up with his ex – if he turned up with anyone – she knew she would be gutted.