Page 78 of The Cake Fairies
Chapter Thirty-Five
POLLY
Polly felt a rare kind of awakened this morning; the sort of awakened that happened to most folk only once or twice in a lifetime, like somebody had thrown her into an ice-cold shower until it had cleansed every part of her soul. With every second of the encroaching dawn, the answer became clearer and clearer, until it was vibrant, inescapable, and obvious… and twofold.
One: Baking was her life’s vocation. The joy of the cake drops – as ridiculous as some of them had been – was testament to that. But marriage in Middle Ham had never sat well with female ambition. It was an unwritten village rule that once wed, a woman was expected to give up her vocation; to raise children, to cook, clean, wash and play general skivvy (housewife). Well, Polly wasn’t that female; could never risk the likely chain of events once the confetti had been thrown, the wedding cake cut. It would have started with shutting shop early to provide the ubiquitous plate of meat and two veg on the table at five sharp the moment the last morsel of the marzipan icing had been munched. It would have ended with the bakery shutters pulled down, the For Sale hung sign up.
No way!
And no wonder it had put her off dating. But she’d let her paranoia take things too far. Alex was a man of 2020 for a start.
Two: She hadn’t wanted to lose Alex. If she’d grown too close to him, she worried she’d have lost him. Just like she’d lost her parents. If she’d ever truly had them in the first place,
She could have been more transparent with Alex from the outset. Taken control of her own destiny and seized that blessed iPhone from Annabelle. She could’ve played her own receptionist. How different things might be.
And then she felt guilty. Her parents hadn’t always been like that. Those were the memories she was choosing to let bob on the surface – that was all. Beneath them came a surge of love and tenderness.
The way her father had tucked her into bed at night, whispering bedtime stories way after the seven o’clock curfew so her mother wouldn’t hear.
The way her mother had brushed her hair and fixed it into a ponytail with a ribbon, never forgetting to cradle her face tenderly in her hands and kiss her lightly on the right cheek when she was done.
Polly had been running scared for too long.
This morning, she saw the truth with absolute clarity. The only person she’d ever allowed herself to be close to was Annabelle. They were the same age, more likely statistically to make it to old creaky bones together, they ran a business together; something her cousin would never expect her to give up. That’s why she’d shunned every man. That’s why she was so stubborn towards Alex when they’d first met. She was only here for a year. Then she’d return to the doldrums of Middle Ham. What good would it ever have done to follow through with him, only for her heart to be left irreparably broken?
She sighed heavily. All she could do was vow to herself she’d make better use of the present, seizing a second chance with Alex if fate should ever be so kind. It was too late to turn the clock back on any of the past, despite the fact Polly thought very differently about the constructs and capabilities of time nowadays.Whatever nowadays even meant.She let out a hearty laugh at the notion. And the sentiment of that took her straight back to last night and the eruption of joy when she and Annabelle had returned to their new-found friends with a range of naked raw vegan layer cakes that they’d quickly thrown together with all the simplicity of constructing a Lego set – a pastel peony elevating the décor here and there.
Their campfire coterie had ballooned to epic proportions when they’d returned armed with their creations. And oh, how the Famous Fifteen had swooned over the scaffoldings of acai berries and beetroot smothered with raw cacao. Dave and Johnny couldn’t get enough of the lemongrass and matcha creations either, fighting tooth and nail for the final piece!
Polly needed to channel a little of their warrior-like behaviour herself and dig deep. Annabelle had poured her heart out to her last night, something that couldn’t have been easy amidst the pressure of their assortment of onlookers. It was time for Polly to open up to the woman who was not only her cousin, but her best friend, too – with the helping hand of several cups of tea (well, coffee for Polly) and toasted marshmallows for breakfast.
“I found something,” Polly began in earnest, studying a ladybird climbing to the tip of a perfectly pointed blade of grass. No going back now. “I went snooping a few years ago. I know I shouldn’t have. It was just too tempting. I knew Ray had a box.” She looked up. Was it her imagination or did Annabelle’s hue take on a distinctly whiter shade of pale then? “Dave and George had warned me many a time not to go rooting around in their bedrooms. ‘Clean them, but leave the clothes folded on the bed,’ they’d said. ‘We’ll pack those away; a man has his needs for privacy.’ Well, Ray never had… so technically that made it okay.”
Annabelle took a large gulp of her drink, a pair of incredulous eyes peeping over its rim, and Polly carried on.
“To be honest I thought they were alluding to porno mags. I mean you would, wouldn’t you?” Annabelle almost spat out her tea, but Polly couldn’t afford to get side-tracked, lest she completely stall. “But then I reasoned that if that was the case, they’d be stashed under the bed. A randy brother isn’t the most endearing of images, admittedly, but I couldn’t imagine them being arsed to fumble around in their wardrobe in the heat of the moment.”
“Yuck,” said Annabelle, furrowing her brow so pointedly that Polly got a future glimpse of how she’d fare in the ageing process.
“Indeed,” Polly gritted her teeth, “I need to hurry up and get to the point. Let’s erase that thoroughly disgusting imagery immediately from our heads.”
Polly took a swig of her own now cold coffee, caught Annabelle’s horrified expression and ended up spitting her own drink everywhere in a fit of hysterics. It took some time before either cousin was calm enough to carry on.
“I found a letter. No… no, not a French one!”
“Oh? What kind of letter?”
“Actually, it was more like a complete bundle. They’d been sent from my grandfather to my father. They were,” Polly’s voice began to warble, “what you might call guilt letters, I suppose.”
“What?” said Annabelle, a mystified expression clouding her face.
“My parents’ marriage was an utter shambles, Annabelle. Grandfather Jack had penned letter after letter to my father, begging him to take my mother on.” Annabelle’s eyes widened. “And if he wouldn’t, he’d made it quite clear, in no uncertain terms, that he’d…” Polly started to shake, sobbing uncontrollably.
“That he’d what? What would he do?”
Polly cleared her throat and recomposed herself.
“It turns out my father’s father – our grandfather Reginald who we never knew – are you still with me…? Here’s where it gets complicated; he’d taken some village land, land that belonged to my mother’s ancestors. The deeds had been missing a while, but then one day they resurfaced… God knows where… I couldn’t face reading on any longer.”
