Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery
Page 18

‘Oh yes, you win that one,’ he’d say, in a tone of voice so nasty she simply couldn’t recognise the sweet, shy art student she’d once known. And then she’d hear herself, placatory, soothing, talking like an annoying nagging mother to a recalcitrant child, and she couldn’t recognise herself either.
The counsellor had done her best, but had started quite early on to talk about debt mediation services to ‘get to the root of the problem’. At the time Polly had taken this at face value and thought it would be helpful (which it would have been if Chris had ever agreed to go). Now she saw it starkly for what it had been: a counsellor who could clearly see that what had once been between them had gone, and who was trying to ease them apart in the most practical way possible.
It made her sad to think of it, even as she consoled herself with the fact that Chris had a new girlfriend and she was happier than she’d ever been. But all those years… all those years, she told herself, got you where you are now. All those years were necessary. If you were just happy from the day you were born, how would you ever know? How would you appreciate how good life could be if it had never been crap?
But of course it was worse for Selina; so much worse. She’d been perfectly happy, more or less – things hadn’t been perfect between her and Tarnie, but that hardly mattered now – and it had been torn out of her hand, like a wave smashing a bottle against a rock.
‘… my therapist thinks it won’t be a bad thing to come home. Reconnect with Tarnie’s world, feel close to him instead of blocking it all out with sex and getting drunk. Well, I think that’s what she thinks. That’s therapists for you: you suggest something and they just say “mmmm” and you have to figure it out from there.’
Polly nodded. ‘Well, it seems like it might make sense. But you never liked it here, did you?’
Selina shrugged. ‘My husband disappeared for weeks on end, worked all night and came home knackered and stinking of fish, with no money in his pocket. That’s what this place did for him. And I begged him and nagged him not to, and he wouldn’t listen to me for a bloody second. Just as well he died, we’d only have ended up divorced.’
The pain in her words was so stark, Polly couldn’t help putting her arm around her.
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ said Selina. ‘When does it stop, this? When do I stop feeling like this, being like this, all the time? Is this the answer, or just another dead end?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Polly honestly. ‘I really don’t know.’
Polly hadn’t been up in the flat for a long time. Jayden occasionally stored flour there if they needed to, and sometimes Neil forgot and flew back to the wrong house, but otherwise she hadn’t had much call to go up there in the last year. It reminded her too much of the pain of moving, alone, to a strange place; of the long, cold months of the winter after Tarnie had died, when Huckle had gone back to America and she had waited for him, not knowing what to do, missing him so desperately that all she could do was bake bread and stare out to sea and wonder if this was the rest of her life.
‘Can you show me it?’ Selina asked, when Polly revealed it had once been her flat. ‘Only Lance will just give me the spiel.’
‘I won’t,’ protested Lance. ‘I’ll probably forget it.’
Polly’s instinct was to decline, but she couldn’t, of course. She put on a smile, cleared away the tea things and said that of course she would.
‘Polly knows what an excellent piece of —’
Polly gave Lance a warning look.
‘Obviously when it’s had some modifications done,’ said Lance, coughing. Polly gave him an even more meaningful look.
‘Oh, just come on then,’ said Lance crossly, and Polly let them through the side door of the bakery so they wouldn’t have to go outside into the crashing wind.
The stairs were as vertiginous as ever, the little bulb taking a strong pull to make it work, and there was a lot of noise as they clattered upwards. Lance had the Yale key; Polly had a spare in case of emergencies. With the bakery shut downstairs, the building was ominously silent.
But as they stepped into the flat, even on such a grey day, the light flooded through the huge front windows that looked straight out to sea, as if you were flying over it.
‘Wow,’ said Selina, moving forward. ‘That’s quite a view.’
Polly thought of the nights she’d fallen asleep in front of that view. Her old armchair was still stationed by the window, but the rugs and the pictures and the lovely sofa had of course all gone across to the lighthouse, on a day of hard work that had caused more swearing amongst the fishermen than she’d ever heard before, and she heard them swear a lot.
The bare scrubbed boards still inclined gently towards the front of the room, meaning you couldn’t leave an orange on the floor safely, but the roof tiles were mostly watertight now, and the bathroom and the kitchen, though the most basic of units (and avocado in the case of the bathroom), were at least now clean and safe to use. The basic bed in the back room was still there. Polly had a very quick and uncomfortable flashback to a sun-drenched afternoon she had once spent there with Selina’s dead husband, but suppressed it immediately.
‘This really is a dump, right?’ Selina was saying, looking distastefully at the kitchen. Polly felt slightly offended. Okay, it was a dump, but it had been her dump. ‘Does it get cold in the winter?’
‘The bakery heats it up?’ said Lance hopefully.
Selina looked confused.
‘But we’ve just been in the bakery, and it’s freezing up here,’ she said.
‘Yeah, but we’re shut now,’ said Polly. ‘It’s probably really warm at… five a.m.’
Selina sighed, then went and looked out of the window again. Her face grew thoughtful. It was a look Polly recognised.
‘It’s a lovely view,’ said Polly. ‘It’s very restful.’
Selina frowned at the lighthouse.
‘Does that thing light up?’
‘It’s a lighthouse,’ said Polly.
‘Does it shine in here?’
‘You see, I never thought to ask that question before I moved in,’ said Polly. ‘But you can buy really good blackout blinds these days.’
Selina looked at the lighthouse again.
‘Do you really live there?’