The Bookshop on the Corner (35 page)

Next to the card was a brand-new, unwrapped, shiny-boxed Girl's World.

Issy became aware, later in life, that it must have cost her mother something to buy it—something more than money—but it didn't feel like that at the time. Despite her granddad's efforts to interest her in it, she left the box unopened in the corner of her bedroom, unplayed with. They both woke early on Christmas morning, Joe from long habit, Issy from excitement of a kind, although she was aware that other children she knew would be waking up with their mommies and probably their daddies too. It broke Joe's heart to see how she tried so hard not to mind, and as she unwrapped her new mixing bowl, and her lovely little whisk, all child-sized, and the tiniest patty pans he could find, and they made pancakes together before walking to church on Christmas morning, saying hello to their many friends and neighbors, it broke his heart all over again to see that some of her truly didn't mind; that even as a small child she was already used to being let down by the person who ought to be there for her the most. She'd looked up at him, eyes shining as she flipped over a pancake.

“Merry Christmas, my darling,” he had said, kissing her gently on the head. “Merry Christmas.”

Excerpt from
Little Beach Street Bakery

Y
EARS LATER,
when she was an old lady, and many miles away, Polly would find it hard to explain that that was how they had lived back then. That some days they could cross to the mainland in a car, but some days they had to take the boat. Sometimes they were cut off for a long time and nobody would quite know when or how; the tidal charts could only track the tides, not the weather.

“But wasn't it awful?” Judith would ask. “Knowing you were cut off?”

And Polly would think back to the way the sun had glinted off the water when it wasn't receding, and the light would change and the water would glow pink, rose, and violet in the setting sun over to the west, and you knew another day was going past and you weren't going anywhere. “Actually, it wasn't,” she'd say. “It was lovely. You just had to snuggle down, settle in. It was only you and everyone else on the Mount. Make sure everything was high up, and if the power was still on, that was nice, but if it wasn't, well, you'd manage that too. You could see the candles glowing in all the little windows. It was cozy.”

“It sounds about a hundred years ago.”

Polly smiled. “I know. But it wasn't that long ago, not really . . . It feels like nothing to me. If there's a corner where you plant your heart, it's always with you. But of course that all came much later. To begin with, it
was
awful.”

Polly leafed through the paperwork they had given her in the shiny folder with the picture of a lighthouse on the front. It was, she noticed, a pretty picture. She was trying incredibly hard to look on the bright side.

And the two men in the room were nice. Nicer than they had to be; so nice, in fact, that they made Polly feel oddly worse instead of better. She felt sorry, rather than angry or defiant.

They were sitting in the back room of the little two-room office in the converted railway station that she and Chris had been so proud of. It was charming, with an old nonworking fireplace in what had once upon a time been the waiting room.

Now both rooms were a mess: files pulled out,
computers lugged around, papers strewn everywhere. The very nice men from the bank were patiently going through all of them. Chris was sitting there sullenly, looking like a five-year-old deprived of a favorite toy. Polly was dashing around trying to be helpful, and every so often he would shoot her a sarcastic look that she knew meant “Why are you being so helpful to these people who are trying to destroy us?” And even though she supposed he had a point, she couldn't help herself. It also occurred to Polly later that the bank employed these people to be nice for exactly that reason: to encourage helpful behavior, avoid confrontation, stop fights. This made her sad, both for herself and Chris, and for these nice men whose job day to day was witnessing other people's misery. It wasn't their fault. Chris thought it was, of course.

“So,” said the older of the two men, who wore a turban and had small neat glasses perched on the end of his nose. “The normal form is that bankruptcy procedures come before the circuit court. You don't both have to go; just one of the directors needs to actually be there.” Polly winced at the word “bankruptcy.” It sounded so final, so serious. Something that happened to silly pop stars and celebrities. Not to hardworking people like them.

Chris snorted sarcastically. “You can do that,” he said to Polly. “You love all that busy bee stuff.”

The younger man looked sympathetically at Chris. “We realize this is very difficult.”

“How?” said Chris. “Have you ever gone bankrupt?”

Polly glanced back down at the pretty lighthouse, but it wasn't really working anymore. She tried to think of something else. She found herself admiring the lovely drawings from Chris's portfolio they'd hung on the wall when they'd first moved there, seven years earlier, both of them in their mid-twenties, full of optimism for launching a graphic design firm. They had started out well, with some of Chris's clients from his old job, and Polly had worked ceaselessly on the business management side, drumming up new contacts, networking relentlessly, selling to businesses all over Plymouth, where they lived, and as far away as Exeter and Truro. They had invested in a flat on a new development near the waterfront in Plymouth, very minimalist and modern, and had gone to all the right restaurants and bars, to be seen and to do business. It had worked well—for a time. They had felt themselves quite the up-and-comers, loved saying they ran their own business. But then came the 2008 banking crisis, and new technology in computers was making it easier than ever to manipulate images, and do your own artwork. With firms cutting back on outside commissions, advertising, and freelancers, loading more and more onto their own staff, graphic design, as Chris pointed out, went horribly downhill. It got done. Just less and less by them.

Polly had worked her fingers to the bone. She had never stopped pitching, closing, discounting; doing anything to get the sales for her talented other half. Chris, on the other hand, had withdrawn completely, blaming the world for not wanting his wonderful artwork and hand-crafted lettering. He had become sullen and uncommunicative, which Polly had tried to counter by maintaining a positive attitude. It had been pretty tough to keep that up.

Although Polly would never, ever admit it, barely to herself, the fact that the day had
finally come—long after she had implored him to wind up the business and find a job elsewhere, and he had accused her of disloyalty and plotting against him—was something of a relief. It was unpleasant, awful; so shaming, even if lots of people they used to barhop with in the trendy center of Plymouth were going through—or knew people who had been through—the same thing. Polly's mother didn't understand at all; she saw it as something akin to prison. They were going to have to put the house on the market, start over. But having Mr. Gardner and Mr. Bassi here from the bank at least seemed to mean that something was getting sorted out, something was happening. The last two years had been so miserable and defeating, professionally and personally. Their relationship had been put on hold; they were more like two people who grudgingly shared a flat. Polly felt wrung out.

She looked at Chris. New lines were etched on his face that she'd not really noticed before. It had been a while, she realized, since she'd really looked at him properly. Toward the end, it had felt that even glancing up when he came back from the office—she always left first, while he would stay, going over their few commissions again and again and again, as if sheer perfectionism might change the inevitable—carried a note of accusation, of blame, so she had kept her head down.

The weird thing was, had it been only their personal lives coming apart, then everyone they knew would have been full of sympathy and help and advice and reassurance. But a failing business . . . people were too scared to say anything. They all kept their distance, and didn't probe too much, even Polly's fearless best friend, Kerensa.

Perhaps it was because the fear—of penury, of losing the life you had worked so hard for—was too deep, too strong, and everyone thought their situation might be infectious. Perhaps it was because people didn't really realize. Perhaps the pair of them had kept the facade up too successfully for too long: looking cheery; putting joint meals on the credit card and holding their breath when it was time for it to go through the machine; handmade birthday gifts—thank goodness Polly could bake, that was useful; hanging on to the flashy black Mazda, though that would have to go now, of course. Polly didn't care about the car. She did care about Chris. Or she had. In the last year or so, she hadn't seen the Chris she knew at all. The sweet, funny man who had been so shy and awkward when they'd got together, then blossomed when he'd started up his own graphic design consultancy. Polly had supported him all the way. They were a team. She'd proved it too; come to work for the business. Put in her life savings (which after the mortgage hadn't been much), fought and fought for business, charmed and chased and exhausted herself in every conceivable way. That made it worse, of course. When he'd finally come home that fateful night, a cold, cold spring though it felt more like never-ending winter, and sat down, and she'd looked at him, really looked at him, and he'd said grimly, “It's over.” Local newspapers were closing, so they didn't need advertising, so they didn't need layout or design . . . and businesses didn't really need flyers anymore, or they did but they designed them themselves on the Web and printed them out at home. Everyone was a designer now, and a photographer, and everything else Chris had once done so well, with so much care and attention to detail. It wasn't really the recession, although that hadn't helped. It was that the world had changed. He might as well have been trying to sell pagers, or cassette tapes.

It had been months since they'd last made love, but she'd woken often in the early
hours to find him lying wide awake beside her, desperately doing sums in his head or just letting misery and anxiety churn around inside him. And she'd tried to find the right words to help, but nothing had. “No, that won't work,” he'd bark in response to her every suggestion, from wedding stationery to school yearbooks. Or, “It's pointless.” He'd become more and more obstructive, until working together was almost intolerable, and because he didn't like any of Polly's ideas for the business, and they had almost nothing coming in, Polly had less and less to do. She'd let him leave first in the morning so he could go for a run; my only form of stress release, he'd said, at which she'd bitten her tongue to stop herself pointing out that any time she suggested anything—a walk, a stroll down to the harbor, a picnic, things that cost nothing—he'd snarl back at her that it was useless and he couldn't be bothered. Polly had tried to get him to a doctor, but that was a waste of time too. He simply wouldn't admit that there was anything wrong—with him, with them, with anything. It was just a slump; it would be all right. Then he came across her looking on a jobs website and that had been the catalyst. The row they'd had that night had nearly blown the roof off, and it had all come tumbling out: how much money he'd borrowed, how much worse the situation was than he'd ever let on to Polly. She'd stared at him openmouthed. A week later—a silent, agonizing week—he'd slumped in, sat down, and looked her straight in the face. “It's over.”

And now here they were in the wreckage of their business with the very nice Mr. Gardner and Mr. Bassi, and every happy dream and plan they'd come up with in the days when they thought they could do anything
. . .
every piece of paperwork she'd watched him sign as they popped the champagne, christened the desk in the lovely little office, goggled at their ad in the Yellow Pages . . . all of it was gone, into a world that really didn't care how hard they'd worked or how much they'd wanted it or any of those reality-show clichés that actually were completely irrelevant in the scheme of things. It was over. All the pictures of lighthouses in the world couldn't change that.