It would have been cruel to disillusion them, to point out that until the 1990s the café on Fethering Parade had been a butcher’s shop, that the oak beams and other period impedimenta had been grafted on as part of a shrewd marketing campaign. And that all of the café’s ‘homemade’ fare was delivered every morning from a specialist supplier in Brighton.
The owner of Polly’s Cake Shop was a woman, but she wasn’t called Polly. The name was just another bit of window dressing, with possible echoes of the old nursery rhyme, ‘Polly, Put the Kettle On’. The café was owned by an unsentimental woman called Josie Achter. Jude had met Josie through a mutual friend who conducted a Pilates class that Josie attended. Like most Fethering residents, Jude had also met the owner when enjoying the delights – in Jude’s case particularly the éclairs – of Polly’s Cake Shop.
Josie Achter, Jude discovered – though from local gossip rather than the woman herself – had invested all of her divorce settlement into the business and exchanged the five-bedroomed house in Esher that she’d shared with her inadequate husband for the cramped flat above the café. There she had brought up her daughter Rosalie until the girl went to college in Brighton to study Hospitality and Catering. And, at the end of her course, though she no longer lived with her mother, Rosalie worked with her in the business. Then after some years Josie, who must by then have been in her late sixties, announced that she was going to retire.
Fethering was rife with rumours that mother and daughter had had a row, but no one actually knew what had happened between them (though lack of information had never inhibited anyone in the village from having an opinion about anything and everything). The only certain facts that emerged were that Rosalie was not going to take over the business, and Josie was going to sell up.
There not being an enormous amount to talk about in Fethering, once the weather and house prices had been dealt with, this news prompted fierce debate. People who had never patronized Polly’s Cake Shop became very concerned about ‘saving this valuable amenity for the village.’ Rumours proliferated about who the purchaser of the property was likely to be. As was standard procedure in such cases, someone claimed to have heard that the premises were to reopen as a sex shop. A more likely conjecture was that it would become another estate agent’s. (While other businesses closed with some regularity, there always seemed to be room for another estate agent.)
Equally groundless suspicions were voiced that Polly’s Cake Shop was to become an upmarket restaurant under the control of a well-known television chef. This idea that it might continue as a catering outlet gave rise to the inevitable rumour that the place was to become a McDonald’s (a prospect that caused much fluttering in the bourgeois dovecotes of Fethering).
And quick on the heels of that came the positive assertion, from somebody who knew as little about the true situation as anyone else in the village, that Polly’s Cake Shop was going to become a branch of Starbucks.
This possibility led to considerable outrage and a letter to the Fethering Observer, spelling out the threat of ‘a genuinely local business becoming an identikit branch of an international, overpriced conglomerate with an idiosyncratic attitude to paying British taxes.’
Soon a ‘Save Polly’s Cake Shop’ campaign had been started. An Open Meeting of the usual suspects among Fethering’s busybodies was held, and it was proposed that an action committee should be formed (again no doubt of the usual suspects). The personnel of that body, together with the appointment of a Chair and other officers would be decided at their next meeting, but it was at that first one that the possibility was raised of the village taking over Polly’s Cake Shop as a ‘Community Project’.
And that was the news which had prompted Carole Seddon’s tirade that October Sunday afternoon in the Crown and Anchor.
TWO
Jude had suggested they stay in the pub to eat, but Carole insisted that she had in the fridge the ‘perfectly adequate remains of a chicken salad’ she’d made on the Friday. She didn’t also say that the real reason she wanted to get home was to watch a Sunday evening television series featuring nuns and midwives to which she had become secretly addicted.
So home they went: Jude to her house, Woodside Cottage (though so far as anyone could tell there had never been a wood anywhere near it), and Carole next door to High Tor (though there wasn’t a tor within a hundred and fifty miles of Fethering).
While Carole settled down with her perfectly adequate salad for an evening of prayer and placentas, Jude found the light on the answering machine flashing when she entered her sitting room. The message was from one of her clients, Sara Courtney, who sounded to be in a really bad way.
Sara had come to her a couple of years before, on the edge of a serious nervous breakdown and contemplating suicide. In her early forties, she had just come to the end of a very long cohabiting relationship with the chef of the Brighton restaurant she co-owned. The door to her future, which she had thought would at some point involve marriage and children, had been slammed in her face.
So she had not only taken an emotional knock but, as a partner in the business, had also lost her livelihood. Her former partner had subsidized the restaurant by taking on huge loans which Sara didn’t know about, and also to subsidize his cocaine habit, which she didn’t know about either. She had thought his ‘unwinding in a club after a long evening over a hot stove’ had involved alcohol at the worst. How wrong she had been. The result was that the restaurant into which she had invested all of her savings had to be sold to settle the debts her former partner had run up.
Her sense of identity had also been challenged. Sara Courtney had always prided herself on being self-reliant. She had worked her own way up in the catering trade, never relying on the financial support of any man. So the loss of the restaurant also took away her raison d’être.
As a result of this double private and professional battering, she had completely lost confidence in every aspect of herself. She was delusional and seemed to have a very tentative hold on her sanity. She lost the certainty that a healthy mind can distinguish the real from the imaginary. Ugly fantasies filled her days, and nightmares kept waking her at night. She had started self-harming; her forearms, which she always kept covered in public, were ragged with scars.
Jude, who’d never suffered under the illusion that her style of healing was a complete cure for everything, had despatched Sara first to her GP, who’d prescribed a course of anti-depressants. As these began to dilute the patient’s more self-destructive impulses, Jude had started a series of healing sessions designed to bolster her confidence.
These had continued over some months and were soon showing positive results. From the almost catatonic state of despair in which Sara had first visited Woodside Cottage, she was starting to see the possibility of life continuing, though not perhaps in the way she had envisaged that it might in the past.