Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery

by Jenny Colgan

  “Oh, right,” said Selina. “She’s enormous.”

  Samantha was annoyingly tapping the mike at the front of the hall.

  “Hello, everyone!” she said brightly. There was a large crowd milling around. “Now, thank you so much to everyone who’s contributed to make the fair such a success . . .”

  Selina and Polly swapped rueful looks.

  “And now, I’d like to ask our town’s resident baker . . . the woman who feeds us all those naughty treats . . .”

  Polly stiffened. She didn’t really like being referred to like some kind of drug dealer.

  “. . . to come forward and judge the baking competition! Jayden said it would be fine.”

  Samantha grinned widely at Polly, as if she had no doubt that there was nothing Polly would like better. Polly blinked. She had no recollection of Samantha asking her to do this, but it was entirely possible it had been mentioned in one of the many emails she had never looked at.

  “Um?” she said.

  “To judge the baking competition!” Samantha repeated encouragingly.

  Polly reluctantly made her way to the front of the hall. On the long table behind the microphone was a vast array of home-baked goodies, and standing behind each plate was an apprehensive-looking villager.

  Polly knew every single person there. Every single one was a customer. Or ex-customer, once this went the wrong way, she thought.

  She started at one end of the table and tried each of the various pies, cakes, breads and tarts, although she could hardly taste them for nerves. There were old Mrs. Corning’s rock buns . . . Muriel had made a date tart . . . and nine-year-old Sally Stephens, the vet’s granddaughter, was standing proudly behind the most beautiful lemon meringue. All eyes followed Polly beadily as she moved from plate to plate.

  “These are all wonderful,” she stammered. “I really can’t choose.”

  Samantha’s face was stern.

  “Well, you have to choose,” she said. “I’ve donated first prize of a weekend at a spa.”

  Polly groaned internally. There were very few people in Mount Polbearne who wouldn’t fancy one of those in the middle of winter.

  She looked around once more at the eager faces. Then she picked up old Florrie’s dull, dry biscuit.

  “Um, this one,” she said.

  The elderly lady looked up with watery eyes.

  “What?” she said in a quavering voice.

  “You’ve won, love!” shouted Samantha cheerily.

  “What?”

  Polly had thought giving the prize to the neediest entrants was the best solution, but now she was feeling a bit unsure.

  “You’ve won the baking competition! Congratulations, Florrie!”

  Florrie blinked as someone from the local press took a photograph. Polly listened uneasily to the mutterings of the locals behind her. She’d probably lost about thirty percent of the goodwill toward her business in one fell swoop. This was going great.

  “It’s a SPA!” Samantha was now hollering in Florrie’s ear.

  “A what, love?”

  Polly was thrilled when Bernard from the puffin sanctuary walked in the door, as it gave her an excuse to escape from the baking table.

  “Hello!” she said, waving at him frantically and heading over. “Selina’s over here!”

  Selina shot her a look. Bernard looked anxious, as always.

  “How are the puffins?” said Polly.

  “Noisy,” said Bernard. He glanced around. “This is a fundraiser, is it?”

  “For the village,” said Polly.

  “We should do one for the sanctuary,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Polly reluctantly.

  “Can I sign you up?”

  “Probably,” said Polly. “But don’t worry. I’m still doing Reuben’s Christmas to raise money for you guys. And I was thinking, Flora. In the summer, you might fancy going in and helping Bernie with the catering.”

  “Work on a bird farm?” said Flora, shuffling her feet.

  “It’s a job,” said Polly.

  “I can get a job anywhere,” said Flora, and despite her sullen attitude, open-ended approach to timekeeping and total lack of initiative, you only had to taste her pastry to know that it was true; she could.

  The one good thing about the stall, Polly supposed, was that they sold out early and could go. It took her a moment to compose herself enough to smile when she handed the money box over to Samantha, but she just about managed it.

  Samantha, who lived in a big pile in London, as well as owning a second home in Mount Polbearne, just didn’t have a handle on actual money, and that wasn’t really her fault. So Polly smiled as widely as she could and said goodbye to everyone as she left.

  “Aren’t you coming to the pub?” said Selina. “Everyone else is going to the pub. You’re coming, aren’t you?” she said to Bernard, who looked confused, and then cheerful.

  “I can’t,” said Polly, sighing. “I need to get practicing for Reuben’s specialist bloody Christmas canapés. His parents arrive soon and I’m not sure I know what I’m doing.”

  “Well, say hi to Kerensa for me,” said Selina, and Polly vowed to do absolutely no such thing.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was nearly Christmas Eve, and Polly was still hard at work. She had started playing Christmas carols in the shop now; she refused to do it earlier, partly because it made it sound like a coffee shop and encouraged everyone to stay for absolutely ages, and partly because she couldn’t listen to “Mary’s Boy Child” more than four hundred times per holiday season.

  She hadn’t heard from Kerensa, except a quick check to see if she was okay, which she insisted she was. She’d thrown herself into baking, trying out new types of gingerbread and mincemeat treats, and decorating—the bakery was overwhelmed with a little toy wooden village, with lights inside that she’d built up to look as much like Mount Polbearne as possible. The local children were absolutely obsessed with it and clustered around, having to be torn away by their parents, often with a sticky bun or pain au raisins in their mittened hands. It didn’t occur to Polly until much later how much her model village inspired the children of their austere little tidal island. For years afterward they would come to look at it, and although as they grew older they could see how small and basic it actually was, they would be furious if she moved or changed the tiniest thing. Eventually, they brought their own children, and the little ones would still gaze and exclaim in awe while the bigger ones shook their heads, absolutely astonished that their parents could have grown up in such entertainment-free surroundings.

  But that was in the future. Now she was in a decorating frenzy, as if trying to make the whole world welcoming and cozy.

  Inside the lighthouse, she’d wrapped miles of tinsel around the balustrade, was planning a vast tree and had hurled fairy lights at almost anything that moved. She’d also stocked up on Icelandic-pattern cushions and blankets for the sofa, so they could hunker down and watch Scandinavian box-set dramas whilst wearing more or less authentic Scandinavian sweaters.

  Huckle just let her get on with it, a smile playing around his lips. He knew it was displacement activity and hoped it would burn itself out. He knew she needed distraction.

  “Sweetie,” he said, late one night as they clung together in bed, bathed in the glow of eighty tiny penlights Polly had forgotten to switch off on her way upstairs, “you know, if you want to get rid of all that excess zeal . . . I mean, everything looks amazing, but I was just thinking you should channel it. I mean, we could . . . We could think about bringing the baby forward? Or even think about organizing a wedding? I mean, my parents were asking about it . . . Obviously they’ll have a long way to come and . . .”

  He could tell by the way she stiffened that he’d said the wrong thing.

  “Well, I thought it was nice,” he whispered gently in her ear. “My dad said . . . I mean, absolutely no offense to your mum or anything. And no offense to us, obviously, especially you, beca
use you work your socks off . . .”

  Huckle had tried working his socks off and had hated it. Ironically, since he’d started working in a very sock-free fashion, his easy charm and natural nice looks had made him just as successful as he had been in the corporate world, with none of the early-morning starts Polly had.

  But even being successful in a home-made honey business is very much not one of the more financially lucrative ways to be a success. Fortunately, Huckle’s wants were few; he had the same few well-made pieces of clothing in his wardrobe that only grew more faded and softer and thus rather more appealing with every passing year; he fixed up the motorbike himself if and when it needed it, and all the things he liked to do—walking, staying in, listening to unbelievably terrible MOR American rock music, drinking beer at the Red Lion, going to bed with Polly—were pretty inexpensive.

  “Anyway, they have tons of money . . . God knows why, they don’t deserve it. Polly, look. They’ve offered to pay for the wedding. Here. Apparently all their friends want to come to England, they think it’s quaint. We could do anything you liked. Any way you wanted.”

  There was a long silence.

  “You’re not insulted, are you? I mean, I didn’t say we’d definitely take the money or anything . . .”

  Polly shook her head.

  “Oh love. No. It’s not the money. It really isn’t—that’s so nice of them. Incredibly nice of them. I’m not proud, I’m really not remotely proud.”

  “But . . .”

  Polly shook her head.

  “I can’t . . . I just . . . Not now. Family stuff. I don’t . . . I’m so busy. You know. I’m not . . . I’m so not ready . . .”

  She meant to say, of course, I’m not ready for marriage, not I’m not ready for you.

  But Huckle only heard one thing: that she didn’t want to marry him.

  “Okay,” he said. It was hard to hurt Huckle’s feelings; he was genuinely good-natured and rarely got upset over anything. But it was certainly possible.

  “I’m sorry,” said Polly. “But you know how it is . . . and I’m so busy . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

  Polly thought about Carmel, spending years wondering if her husband was going to misbehave again. She thought of her mother, sitting alone in her kitchen eating soup night after night for the whole of the only life she was ever going to get.

  She thought—briefly, glancingly—about the impossibly huge notion that she had half-brothers and -sisters out there in the world. Of course it had always been a possibility, but one she hadn’t had to dwell on particularly. But now she knew for a fact that it was definitely, absolutely true, and more than that, that one of them must be round about her own age.

  Well. She was in no position to think about families just now. Even building one with Huckle. Surely he could understand that? She just couldn’t, and that was an end to it.

  The wind whistled around the lighthouse, although inside, lit gently with fairy lights, it was cozy and warm, the remnants of the evening’s fire dampened down but still gently heating the way up the house for once. The fire had been wonderful that night, and the entire building felt warm.

  Yes, thought Polly, trying to stop making lists in her head, and snuggling down. He would understand. He totally would. Huckle understood everything.

  But if life teaches us anything, it’s that what we assume someone should know about us—even someone we really, really love; especially someone we really, really love—can be completely misunderstood or overlooked, or that the silence we think contains so much is simply unobserved. We believe—or we would like to believe—that the people we’re closest to can tell what our intentions are, the same way your mother knows when you are small whether you’ve been stealing biscuits out of the biscuit jar by the fact you have chocolate smeared around your mouth.

  But nobody is psychic. And for once, it was Polly who drifted off to sleep to the sound of the crashing waves, whilst Huckle lay staring into the darkness, feeling unusually thoughtful; unusually sleepless; very unusually alone.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  He might have understood more if he’d been at Reuben’s the next day, when Reuben’s parents showed up, but he wasn’t.

  The mansion had been decorated from top to bottom. Polly couldn’t help sighing, just a little. It was a bit silly, having money, given that there were only so many buns one could eat in a day; only so far she could pretend she could tell the difference between a cheap and an expensive bottle of wine; and how much she couldn’t see the point of a highly expensive handbag (Polly’s bags invariably became full of bits of tissue, odd pencils, half-used lipsticks and a light scattering of powdered yeast; she couldn’t imagine the horror of doing that to something worth more than a small car).

  But the difference between her little fairy lights and Reuben’s professional decorating job was obviously substantial. The tree in the driveway, at the circular turn in front of the door, was three stories high. The theme was kind of diamonds and ice sculptures, which ought to be tacky but annoyingly looked utterly perfect against the metal frame and bright glass of the lovely modern house. Frost crackled on the ground outside and on the beautiful spotlit path that led down to Reuben’s private beach. Polly took her tasting trays into the massive professional kitchen. Reuben was a good cook, but obviously he kept someone on hand to do all this kind of stuff. Kerensa was nowhere to be seen. She’d told everyone she was doing lots of pampering and baby massage stuff, but Polly knew for a fact that she didn’t give a toss for anything like that, which meant she must instead simply be lying low.

  Polly sighed. Did nobody get a happy ending? Did it simply not work? This should be the happiest time of her best friend’s life—married to a bloke who, whilst nobody would describe him as “lovely,” was fun and adored her and whom she adored back, and who suited her very well, expecting the birth of their first baby in their gorgeous mansion by the sea. It was like that girl who’d married the Prince of Monaco and had twins and always looked entirely furious about everything. Really, if Kerensa couldn’t be happy, nobody could. And yet there she was, off with a Brazilian stripper. Well, briefly, but even so.

  Polly sighed and dumped her two large trays of food, turning on the oven to heat everything up. She was officially catering just the Christmas party, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, but she’d agreed to put on a little taster session when Reuben’s parents arrived, cold and presumably ravenous. She glanced around.

  Marta, the maid, smiled at her politely, but they didn’t speak. Polly made herself some coffee in Reuben’s absurdly noisy and overcomplicated machine, which appeared to have enough technology to launch a Mars mission, then padded around the enormous room. It was far bigger than what she had at the bakery to feed the entire town. As well as the industrial-sized ovens, there was a huge grill wok, and a pizza oven . . . you could run a fairly nice hotel from here. Which was, she supposed, what was happening.

  The sun beamed in through the windows, adding to the warmth of the underfloor heating. As an American, Reuben liked his house boiling in the winter and freezing in the summer, and with the sun streaming in it was almost too warm. Polly wished she could stretch out on the floor like a cat and take a nap.

  Suddenly she heard a noise, a loud flapping. It sounded ominous and weird. Marta didn’t flinch, but Polly rushed out into the hall. As well as the vast tree filling the turret, she could see another, this one with carved wooden Nutcracker soldiers positioned all round it—in the sitting room, where a huge fire was crackling away despite the fact that the room was completely empty.

  She opened the front door on to the sparkling driveway ahead and to her amazement saw a big black helicopter descending right in front of her. Of course she’d recognized the noise, but she hadn’t seen a helicopter up close since . . . since they’d had that great storm a year or so ago. She put that out of her mind and smiled anxiously, realizing as she did so how much it made her feel even more like staff.

  The heli
copter made a tremendous noise as it teetered to a stop in a big H Polly hadn’t even noticed in the driveway. Seriously, how did people get so much money? She knew Reuben did something with algorithms that drove big computer companies bananas, but she had no idea what an algorithm even was, though clearly it was something that allowed you to own a helicopter.

  The blades finally came to a stop, and Reuben emerged, looking jolly as ever, taking off his headphones and jumping down. He waved heartily and Polly waved back obediently, still feeling like an indentured servant. Marta went forward and started collecting large amounts of heavy luggage, as Reuben helped down first his father, then his mother.

  His father was so obviously future Reuben it was almost comical to see them together. He was bald, with only a hint of Reuben’s ginger hair around the tops of his ears, and bushy pale eyebrows. The top of his head was covered with freckles. If you were a worse person than Polly, you might be tempted to connect some of them up and make a second face. His body was almost perfectly spherical, and he was wearing an extremely expensive-looking cashmere coat over an exquisitely tailored tweed suit—rather flamboyantly British—with a spotted handkerchief in the top pocket. His beautiful clothes did absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that he essentially looked like a snowman with tiny fat arms and legs sticking out the sides, or a cheerful baby.

  Rhonda, Reuben’s mother, was all hair. It was jet black, a color unusual in nature for a woman of her age, which was, of course, completely indeterminate, and she was wearing—no she wasn’t. Yes she was. Fur. A full-length mink coat, completely without shame. She was short, too, and it actually looked a bit like a scene from The Revenant.

  Well. Polly did not like fur and that was that, but also she could imagine how much Rhonda would care about whether she liked it or not: not a whit.

  Rhonda had also managed to keep her false eyelashes on through an eight-hour flight and a helicopter transfer, which was pretty impressive when you thought about it. She had hugely made-up eyes that reminded Polly of Liza Minelli, and a large lipsticky smile. The lipstick was bleeding slightly.