Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery
Page 45

Chapter Thirteen
‘I’m still so lonely.’
‘Can’t you put yourself out there a little more?’
‘I tried that. Then he vanished completely from the town, so I learned my lesson about that. I don’t know. I think they all hate me because of my cat. And because I nobbed Huckle’s brother or something. They all talk about me all the time.’
‘Is that the reality, do you think, or something you’re projecting?’
‘What’s the difference?’
Two weeks later, Polly had more or less given up on trying to sleep. It wasn’t as if she had anything to get up for. In the kitchen, her pans, her loaf tins and baguette brick and living yeast went ignored and unused.
All the pleasures she had taken so seriously – feeding herself and her friends, enjoying the merits of good food and good company, doing things slowly and getting them right – all of this had gone by the wayside. She had lost it. She felt so sorry for herself. Malcolm had got Jayden to paint over her name, which he had done, feeling like a war-time collaborator, he’d explained later, even though Polly said it was fine, it didn’t matter. Except he hadn’t got quite the right pale grey colour that Chris, Polly’s ex, had used, so all you could see were big brown chunky paintbrush marks.
Every night Polly sat by the window pretending she wasn’t watching out for Neil. Huckle would call, but he was worried by how down she sounded; how unlike herself. He was very concerned about her.
Huckle himself was frenziedly busy. He had turned up tired, dusty, astonished anew by the heat in the great flat plains of Georgia, with the corn high, to find Clemmie in a state of nervous collapse trying to deal with suppliers, creditors, field workers, unseasonal rainstorms and generalised chaos. When she saw him, she burst into tears.
‘I thought you were Dubose coming home.’
‘Won’t I do?’
Clemmie sobbed. ‘You’ll be… you’ll be much better.’
As soon as Huckle pulled out the farm accounts, he understood why. Everything was a terrible mess. He couldn’t figure out what Dubose had been doing all this time. With a sigh, tired and jet-lagged, he let Clemmie make him some iced tea – he’d missed it terribly – and sat down in the tiny dark office in the old wooden farmhouse. It was going to be a long couple of months.
Two weeks later he was just about starting to get a handle on it. He spoke to the merchants, timed out a proper schedule for the labourers, and started to get everything gradually moving into line. The accounts had involved night after night of painful reworking of columns of figures; it reminded him of his old city job, and why he’d left it behind. His days started early – the farm had a dairy herd as well as crops – and carried on well into the evening. Clemmie fed him grits and bacon in the morning; waffles; proper fried chicken at night, but he barely stopped, even to eat, which meant he wasn’t nearly as attentive to Polly as he knew he ought to be. But right here in front of him, as the golden heat poured down on the vast acres of land, there were jobs and livelihoods that Dubose had been in severe danger of simply dribbling away, and he had to get his head down and sort it out. He couldn’t remember ever working so hard.
Even though Huckle had set up a bank account for her and started sending little bits of money as he gradually turned the farm around, Polly hadn’t used a penny of it. She hadn’t gone to see any vans, hadn’t started thinking about what would be good and easy to make in very enclosed conditions, and summer was coming in fast. The season was short, and she would really have to make the most of it before people decided that coming to Mount Polbearne for a good lunch was such a waste of time they just wouldn’t bother.
The time difference was six hours, which was tricky, as late at night Polly sounded sleepy and a little despondent. And she talked about that puffin a lot. Huckle wanted to tell her to get back into the kitchen and bake, for heaven’s sake, but he didn’t know a way to say it without sounding cruel. He decided he needed to get Reuben to give her a kick up the arse. But finding more time in his day was tricky at the moment.
Back in Cornwall, the weather had stayed as heavy and unsettled as Polly’s mood, and she had given up on sleep altogether. She threw on one of Huckle’s heavy plaid winter shirts, put on her sandals and clop-clopped down the circular stairs of the lighthouse, slipping out of the door into a warm, starry evening and an almost-full moon.
She pulled the shirt around her and wandered down over the rocks. The pub and the chippy were closed; the fishermen long gone off to the hunting grounds, where radars beeped to tell them of the fathomless unsuspecting shoals beneath their feet where they could drop their nets. It would not, she thought, looking up at the jewelled sky, be a bad night to be a fisherman. Some nights were very bad. But not tonight.
She walked slowly across the low-tide shingle beyond the harbour wall, between the groynes. It was almost a beach when the tide was out and the old road to the mainland was revealed in all its glory. She picked up a stone and hurled it with all her might into the water. Then another, then another.
‘Oi!’ came a voice. ‘Careful now, you’ll have someone’s eye out.’
Polly jumped.
‘Oh goodness,’ she said, turning round and forgetting to be cross. ‘You startled me.’
Selina stood there.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I saw you down there and… well. I wanted… I wanted to apologise.’
Polly swallowed hard.
‘You nearly killed my bird,’ she said, before she could help herself. ‘He nearly died.’
‘I didn’t know it was your bird,’ said Selina. ‘He just hopped into the room. I had no idea. I’m so sorry.’
‘Cats shouldn’t kill birds.’
‘Can I tell you that I’ve already had that vet on and on and on at me about this?’ said Selina. ‘He also threatened to de-claw Lucas, which let me tell you I think is illegal.’
Polly was pleased to hear about Patrick sticking up for her.
‘But I am so, so sorry. I didn’t realise he meant so much to you. Lucas was just doing what cats do.’
‘I know,’ said Polly. ‘I do know. Neil shouldn’t have been hopping about in a house; he should have been flying around outside.’
‘Well, that is what most birds do, isn’t it?’