Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery Read online

  He’d already left. Although there was a long black hair in the shower.

  I know. I did say it was a Bad Thing.

  And oh, it gets worse. Think of something slightly regrettable you’ve done on a night out, then multiply it by a factor of about a million.

  Kerensa got home—with a sniggering, only mildly hungover Selina, who thought the entire thing was unutterably hilarious and had been careful to drink lots of water at the same time, as she is also that kind of a friend—to discover that Polly had felt so guilty about not seeing her that Huckle had phoned Reuben and basically ordered him to go home and be nice to his wife.

  So Reuben had postponed his business in SF and flown all the way back, laden with every perfume in the duty-free shop because he couldn’t remember what she liked. He’d marched back in the door—where a miserable Kerensa had been throwing up all morning and crawling along the tiles writhing with hungover guilt and misery—grabbed her in his arms and declared his undying love for her, then attempted to dramatically carry her upstairs, which he couldn’t manage as he’d been on a plane all night and Kerensa was two inches taller than him and also wanted to die; but they did their best together regardless, the early April light glowing through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows in their enormous circular bedroom, with its ridiculous/spectacular (delete according to taste) circular bed, and after that, he promptly whisked Kerensa away everywhere he went for the next six months.

  So that is the terrible thing that happened in the spring.

  And if this was a film, right, we would have reached the point where the ominous music crashes in and the credits start . . .

  Chapter Three

  Five weeks before Christmas

  This year,” Polly was saying boldly, sitting up under the duvet, “I am making a LIST. A PLAN. This year everything will not be a disaster.”

  “When has Christmas ever been a disaster?” said Huckle, turning over, still sleepy and utterly unwilling to relinquish the duvet. Polly was getting up in the pitch dark, as she did for months on end in the winter, and their last heating bill had scared them both rigid, even though the house was almost never warm.

  Polly had thought—and hoped—that heating the lighthouse would be like heating a gigantic chimney; that she could light the Aga at the bottom and the heat would permeate up the entire place. This was not the case at all. This was very far from the case. The kitchen was warm, but unless—and even after—they turned on the ancient clanky and very reluctant heating system for about five hours and tried to ignore the fact that they were living in a Grade I listed, non-insulated, not-meant-for-human-habitation building, running up and down the stairs was torture, a sport that took dares and bribery for anyone to accomplish.

  Huckle did occasionally think longingly of the little beekeeper’s cottage he’d once rented on the mainland, just across the causeway, which was a lot warmer simply by virtue of not being perched more or less in the middle of the sea. The beekeeper’s cottage had had low ceilings and tiny windows and soft throws and cushions and curtains and two small bedrooms and had been cozy all winter long with one log burner and about four radiators.

  And even further back, he thought of his childhood home in Virginia in the US, which was warm most of the year anyway—sometimes uncomfortably so—but when the cold weather did come in, his father would simply fire up the vast furnace in the basement and the whole house would heat up straightaway. The first thing his father had said to him when he found out he was moving to England full-time was, “You know they don’t heat their houses?”

  At the time, Huckle had thought this was a quaint and outdated expression, like the British not knowing how to drink cold beer or go to a dentist. But now he was beginning to have a great deal of sympathy with his pa and wondering what other advice he should take from him whilst he still had the chance, before hypothermia set in and robbed him of brain-stem function.

  Polly was pulling a third sweater over her head.

  “That’s my favorite sweater,” said Huckle. “It’s kind of even more shapeless than the rest and gives you a sexy Marshmallow Man silhouette.”

  She hurled a sock at him.

  “Still more attractive than the goose bumps,” she said. “Anyway, I don’t think you’re listening to my excellent plans for a list.”

  “It’s five a.m.,” said Huckle. “You shouldn’t even have woken me. It was vicious and cruel and I shall get my deadly revenge.”

  And he grabbed her ankle and pulled her closer, trying to get her under the warm covers, where he liked, in fact, having to burrow beneath the layers of heavy clothing, knowing that somewhere in there, deep underneath, were Polly’s soft creamy curves, waiting to be discovered like buried treasure; visible, in general, to nobody else but him. He could already anticipate the shiver of his cold hand on her warm skin.

  Polly giggled and shrieked.

  “No! NO way! I have a million things to do and all anyone wants to order is gingerbread.”

  “You smell of gingerbread,” said Huckle, sticking his head up her sweater. “It’s awesome. It makes me horny and hungry all at the same time. They’re going to ban me from supermarkets. I’m going to turn into Fru T. Bunn, the pervy baker.”

  Polly scrunched up her face.

  “Oh God, Huck, I can’t. I can’t. Now that I’m up and have momentum . . . if I don’t get going now, I’ll get back into bed and never leave.”

  “Get back into my bed and never leave. That’s an order.”

  “And we’ll starve to death.”

  “Neh, we’ll live on nothing but gingerbread.”

  “And die early.”

  “So worth it. Where’s Neil?”

  Neil was the puffin Polly had inadvertently adopted when she’d nursed him back to health after he had broken his wing as a puffling. By all accounts, he would soon fly off home to join his flock. It hadn’t happened yet.

  “Outside.”

  They looked at one another. As ever, Huckle had that slow-burning, amused look in his eyes, as if the world was a funny game; that eternal sunny side of him that made him always think that everything would turn out for the best. His dark blond hair was scruffy. He slept in his old college T-shirt and smelt like warm hay and honey mixed together.

  Polly glanced at the alarm clock, which Huckle covered up with his hand. She had deliveries, invoicing, paperwork, baking, serving . . .

  “What happens one day,” said Polly, getting dressed again in a tearing rush, trying to text Jayden, her assistant, to tell him she was running late, “after we’ve been together for ages and everything, and sex kind of tails off?”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “Well, it does.”

  “Not to us.” Huckle gave her a warning look. They had gotten engaged in the summer, and every time he mentioned the future, Polly changed the subject or fretted about being too busy. He knew he had to sit down and properly talk to her about it; he knew she was busy, but he didn’t understand why it seemed to be a problem. To Huckle it couldn’t be simpler—they loved each other, they wanted to be together forever, they wanted to raise a family. Of course, he sometimes reflected, he loved Polly because she wasn’t like other girls. But he couldn’t help thinking that most other girls, surely, would have been happy with that.

  He decided, once again, that this wasn’t the time. He grinned at her.

  “Can’t you enjoy just one thing for five minutes?”

  Polly smiled back. “Yes,” she said. “And I think it was longer than five minutes.” She frowned. “Mind you, I kind of lost track of time.”

  “Fine. Deal with it. Be happy. Everything lasts forever. I’m going back to sleep.”

  And he did, even as Polly pulled on her thick woolly socks, his face completely smooth and relaxed in sleep, and Polly loved him so much she thought her heart would explode; she was terrified by how much she loved him. It was just everything that came next that scared the life out of her.

  Downstairs, she stoked up t
he Aga for Huckle later, grabbed a quick coffee and ran out of the lighthouse door. The rain threw itself violently at her face. She could always tell by the wind whistling through the windows how bad the weather was, but you had to steel yourself for it when it truly arrived, and now that it was nearly December, it was definitely here, with no end in sight.

  That was what you got, Polly supposed, when you lived on a lump of rock in the middle of the sea, with houses built on steeply winding streets in gray slate, the same color as the stone itself, leading upward toward the great ruined church at the very top. The ancient causeway that led to the mainland was dangerous to navigate, although possible, but mostly the many tourists parked at the parking lot on the other side and walked the cobbled road, squealing if they mistimed it and the tide rushed in closer and closer. The fishermen who made their living on Mount Polbearne had a handy sideline in rescuing the stranded and acting as a highly expensive taxi service.

  There had been a movement a year or so ago to build a permanent road to the island, but it had been defeated by the villagers, who liked its unique character and didn’t want Polbearne to change from the way it had been for hundreds of years, regardless of how inconvenient it was.

  The sandwich shop Polly also ran up the road was closed for the winter, but the bakery continued, as busy as ever, as villagers and off-season tourists queued to get the freshest, warmest bread from the oven, not to mention the hot tasty pasties for the fishermen to take out in their boats; the flaky croissants that Patrick the vet would devour in his sunny office, waiting on his barking clients; the cream cheese brownies adored by Muriel, who worked in the little grocer’s that sold every single thing you could possibly want; the doughnuts for the construction workers doing up the posh new second-home extensions, with their glass-walled balconies and steel wires; and the jam tarts for the old ladies who had lived here all their lives, whose voices had the low hum and musical cadence local to the region, whose own grandparents had spoken Cornish and who remembered Mount Polbearne without electricity or television.

  Polly braved the incredibly high winds on the shell-embedded steps that led down from the lighthouse—then battled her way across the promenade, with its low stone wall, crumbling slightly from the years of pounding waves, and down the seafront to Beach Street, the cobbled road that faced out to sea.

  Buying the lighthouse had been an act of temporary madness, she knew, triggered by the astonishing fact of it coming up for sale. There was far too much work that needed to be done, and they absolutely couldn’t afford to do it, but still, she couldn’t get over how much she loved it, or the great feeling of pride she experienced when she saw it beaming out through the darkness (the top, working segment still belonged to the government), its red and white stripes a cheerful bulwark at the very edge of the village. The light didn’t reflect back into the house—it was the only place on Mount Polbearne where you couldn’t see it shining—and from the seaward side there was a completely unbroken view out across the Channel. In Polly’s eyes, the ever-changing panorama—sometimes angry and dramatic, sometimes stunningly restful, and sometimes, when the sunset hit, the most radiantly beautiful thing on earth—was worth every penny of the horrifying mortgage and the freezing early starts.

  The only lights on this early, apart from one or two lanterns along the seafront, were, of course, in the bakery. Polly ran around to the back door and slammed inside.

  The kitchen was gorgeously, ravishingly warm, and she took off her gigantic parka with a sigh of relief. Jayden looked up inquiringly. Polly went pink, and it wasn’t just from the heat in the kitchen; she was remembering with a smile what had made her so late.

  “Um, hi!”

  “The cheese twists are in,” said Jayden self-importantly. He’d grown a moustache for Movember the year before, and it had suited him so much he’d ended up keeping it. That, combined with his white apron and a rapidly increasing girth through stock sampling and eating far more from the bakery than Polly would recommend that anyone do, gave him the look of a jolly tradesman from about 1935, and it suited him rather well. Jayden was madly in love with Flora, a local girl who had an incredibly light hand with pastry, and she was feeding him up too, despite being very thin herself. They looked like a couple from a nursery rhyme.

  At the moment, though, during the winter closure, Flora was at college on the mainland—the first time she’d ever spent much time there—studying at a patisserie school in Devon. Jayden was absolutely miserable about it; he couldn’t bear her being away and humped around like a sad walrus. Polly thought their romance was very touching but wished he wouldn’t be quite so miserable with the customers. He used to flirt with them and cheer them up no end.

  “Thanks, Jayden,” she said, topping up her coffee cup from the machine.

  They’d recently started selling hot beverages, and Polly had spent a very long and over-caffeinated day at a trade fair trying to find a machine that could dispense drinks that weren’t absolutely disgusting and tasted all the same. She’d found one eventually—you could tell it straight off by the way everyone was clustering around the stand trying out the freebies, even people who were trying to sell other coffee machines—but of course it was by absolutely miles the most expensive one there. She’d be lucky to make her money back on it if she kept it for thirty years. There was a limit to how much you could charge a freezing fisherman who’d been on the water for eighteen hours for a hot Bovril, and it only just covered their costs. But it was nice to have it.

  Except for the hot chocolate. Nobody could make hot chocolate properly in a machine. After it had arrived, Reuben, their loud American friend (some might say pain in the neck, but Polly had grown quite tolerant in the last couple of years), had marched in shouting, “I make the best hot chocolate ever. Don’t even think of doing it in a machine, otherwise this friendship is totally at an end,” and brought her several tins of his specially imported Swiss chocolate.

  No slouch in the kitchen himself, he’d shown her how to make it, with gently warmed milk and whisked cream and the chocolate folded in until it became a thick, warming syrup that tasted like liquid joy, finished off with special small American marshmallows, a touch of whipped cream and a Flake.

  Polly charged for those separately and only served them in the winter, but there was absolutely nobody in town—and for a long way around—who didn’t think they were absolutely worth it, much to Reuben’s complacent happiness. In fact, the start of the Little Beach Street Bakery’s hot chocolate season was, as far as many local inhabitants were concerned, the first bell of Christmas.

  “There’s a sou’wester out there,” observed Jayden sadly. “I hope Flora’s all right.”

  “She’s in a centrally heated hall of residence, on a campus, on the mainland, and will still be in bed for another three hours,” said Polly. “I think she’ll be fine.”

  Jayden sighed. “I miss that lass.”

  “She misses you too! That’s why you get so much post.”

  As if worried he wasn’t getting enough baked goods, Flora was sending Jayden the results of her efforts through the post every couple of days. Some made it in fairly good shape—the French cakes were a particular highlight—but others, like the croquembouche, were something of a disaster. Dawson, the postman, was threatening to sue them for repeatedly ruining his trousers. He was already furious because he was always either missing the tide or getting caught in it. Mount Polbearne wasn’t the jewel in a postman’s round, to be honest. On the plus side, they’d all agreed that he could bin the junk mail at the recycling center on the mainland, so that helped everyone. Until Flora’s cakes had come along. Jayden had offered to share the results with him, but Dawson had declined the first time and was too proud to change his mind now. If they came out particularly nicely—the cream horns had been surprisingly unspoiled—Polly put them on sale and posted the proceeds back to Flora. This annoyed Dawson too, especially if she put coins in the envelope.

  “Morning, Dawson,” said
Polly now, answering the back door and taking the pile of bills and one slightly soggy jiffy bag from him. “Want a cup of coffee?”

  Dawson muttered to himself—he’d obviously had to come extremely early this morning, on his bicycle, in the pitch black, to catch the tide, and he really wasn’t happy about it. The post delivery tended to vary between six a.m. and two o’clock in the afternoon.

  “On the house?” added Polly. She worried that if Dawson ever got too cold and miserable, he’d simply stop coming altogether and throw all their post into the sea. Mind you, she thought, leafing through the usual pile of endless bills, some days that wouldn’t necessarily be the worst idea.

  Dawson muttered some more and retreated into the inky darkness. Polly shrugged and shut the back door.

  “It’s amazing how well I’ve integrated into the community after a mere two years here. Accepted everywhere.”

  Jayden sniffed. “Oh, Dawson’s always been like that. I was at school with him and he used to cry if they made him eat gravy. So we used to always give him our gravy, like. That seems wrong now, looking back on it, I suppose. We used to call him Ravy Davy Eat Your Gravy. Yeah, I think that might definitely have been wrong.”

  “Oh!” said Polly, pulling out a letter from a plain brown envelope postmarked Mount Polbearne, which meant Dawson would have had to pick it up from the old-fashioned red pillar box on the town’s little main street, cart it over to Looe, then bring it all the way back out with him again. “Well, it’s funny you were talking about schools . . .”

  Jayden and his contemporaries—now in their mid-twenties—had been the last generation of children educated on Mount Polbearne, in the little schoolhouse on the lee of the island that was now used for village get-togethers and parties. The tables and wooden desks were still stored there, rather forlornly, and the old signs carved into the lintels on each side of the tiny building, marking the entrances for “BOYS” and “GIRLS,” were still visible, even though, like everything else on the tiny island, they were gradually being eroded by time and tides and heavy weather.