Starting Over at Acorn Cottage

by Kate Forster

  She hated the bank and she hated Piles and she hated her life in London, which was why, after two months of tying up all the loose ends in her life, she could now slam the door of the flat behind her and say goodbye to the old Clara life and look forward to the new Clara life. But only after tipping the kitchen bin contents replete with potato peelings and coffee grounds onto his bed and feeling no regrets at all.

  Summer

  2

  Henry Garnett was a rare man in modern times. He could fix anything. It didn’t matter if it was run by electricity, water, steam or by hand, he could fix it. The only thing he couldn’t seem to mend was his heart.

  Naomi was fine and then she wasn’t. She died within weeks of the diagnosis of the tumour. She had wanted to die in the van, but no one was having it, not even Henry. He didn’t want Pansy’s last memories of her mother to be in a cramped van with a drip hanging from the brass hook above her head and God knows what else going on as she died.

  In the end, it didn’t matter where Naomi was when she passed because the tumour had taken over most of her brain and her last words to Henry were garbled, nonsensical. He had spent so much time running over her words, trying to find meaning in them.

  ‘Say yes,’ she’d said, opening her eyes for the first time in days.

  ‘To what, my darling?’ he’d asked. She hadn’t eaten in a week. She had stopped drinking last night. He knew it was close to the end.

  But Naomi had shaken her head and said it again. ‘Say yes.’

  He’d tried to get her to open her eyes again. She always had the right advice, the right way to do things, to say things. Naomi was everything and then she was nothing.

  The nurse had put up the drip as Naomi was clutching the sheets in her tiny hands. Those hands could make anything. They could turn roadside flowers into a display worthy of a royal wedding. They could plait pastry and spin wool and tame Pansy’s curls into bunches with ribbons intertwined.

  But the hands were soon still, and Henry had to say goodbye to his Naomi and send her body to be turned into ashes.

  ‘Bury me in the vegetable garden when you find the right house for you and Pansy. I promise to help your crops grow. You can call it Naomi’s Veggie Patch,’ she had laughed.

  Henry hadn’t laughed because he didn’t want her to be in the garden, with the worms and the cold damp soil. Three years later and he still hadn’t bought a house and Naomi’s ashes were still in the cupboard next to the potatoes and onions.

  Instead he and Pansy had been on the road for those three years. He had the tiny house on wheels painted by Naomi, with intricate scrolls, vines and flowers around the front to look like a real garden. There were yellow shutters on the real glass windows, and a blue door and a little thatched roof to advertise that he did thatching for a living, but he did anything he could to pay the bills and keep busy. Repairs, painting, gardening and some labouring.

  Pansy was now six and probably more self-sufficient than she should be for a child of her age. She was happy to keep him company with her drawing and colouring books, but he knew she needed to be in school – that would mean settling down and finding a vegetable patch. Not yet, he told himself.

  Naomi and Henry had met in art school when Henry was studying to be a sculptor, and Naomi was studying painting. He swapped to fine art to be near her. She won the art prize at college and he won her heart. They graduated happy, in love and ready to share their creativity with the world. The first work of art they brought into the world was born just after midnight during a balsamic moon. They named her Pansy Jean Garnett and she was everything they had hoped for and more.

  With their van and Henry doing odd jobs and Naomi painting, it was an idyllic life, with hopes to save enough money to buy a little cottage one day for them to settle down in as a family.

  It was funny how life knew exactly where to place the cuts to make you bleed and hurt the most, thought Henry as he drove towards a small village called Merryknowe. He was to give a quote on a thatched cottage for a woman who had emailed him saying there was a hole in the roof.

  Probably a weekender. He glanced at Pansy asleep in the seat behind him, her copper curls falling over her face, the curls he hadn’t been able to tame as Naomi had.

  Henry drove into the dull little village and found a parking spot big enough for the van and checked the time. He had to quote a job tomorrow morning at a nearby house so thought he would stay in the area for the night.

  He looked up and down the grey street. A few shops but nothing thrilling and certainly nothing that would make you want to stay. Some villages were so picturesque they looked like something from the front of a chocolate box, and others were a mix of function and frill, but Henry wasn’t sure if Merryknowe had ever had any frill because it certainly didn’t have any function.

  A pub. A post office. A tearoom and a bakery and a few other little shops dotted the street. A small creek ran alongside the main road, with a green grassy bank and a stone bridge barely big enough for his trailer to cross.

  ‘Let’s get something nice for lunch,’ he said to Pansy, who was waking up.

  ‘Can I have cake?’ she asked sleepily.

  ‘Yes, my little Marie Antoinette, you may have cake but after something that isn’t cake, okay?’

  After gently unstrapping her from her seat he carried her out of the car and looked around.

  Pansy grumbled something into his neck and then pushed herself out of his arms and jumped down onto the pavement.

  He missed the days when she was little enough for him to carry her in the backpack. Now she was independent, he worried she would wander off on a job, or onto the street and be hurt by a car.

  Although he had to admit, this street didn’t seem to offer any cause for concern. He hadn’t seen a car pass yet, and when he peered inside the window of the tearoom, it looked sad and lonely.

  The bakery had a little more promise, with some delicious-looking apricot tarts in the window and the scents coming from the slightly opened door was enticing.

  ‘In here, Pans,’ he said and pushed the door open.

  Yes, he’d made the right decision. The bakery was warm and smelled good, exceedingly good, he thought as his stomach rumbled.

  There wasn’t much on display but what was looked wonderful. Rabbit pies and sausage rolls and plain scones and cheese scones and some nice-looking jam tarts and little butterfly cakes.

  ‘Can I help you?’ A young woman in a pink apron was at the counter. She had a drawn face with dark circles under her eyes, and a nasty bruise on her cheekbone.

  Henry got a shock at the sight of the bruise and took pause to not show his response. ‘Hello, yes please, everything looks lovely.’

  Pansy was looking at the cakes in the counter display.

  ‘I want one of those,’ she said, pointing to the butterfly cakes that were beautifully arranged with whipped cream and a dusting of icing sugar.

  ‘And a sausage roll please, and a rabbit pie,’ he added. The woman put the items into bags as Pansy stood up and looked at the woman.

  ‘Why do you have a blue mark on your cheek?’ She asked the question Henry had wanted to ask but didn’t wish to be rude. ‘Were you painting and leaned on your hand? I did that once but with green, so I looked like a monster,’ said Pansy with deep concern on her little face.

  ‘I hit my cheek on a cupboard door,’ said the woman, handing the bags to Henry in exchange for the money.

  ‘That’s a silly cupboard door to do that to you,’ said Pansy, looking cross on behalf of the woman’s cheekbone.

  ‘Yes,’ said the young woman handing the change back to Henry but not looking him in the eye.

  He took the packages from her and took Pansy’s hand.

  ‘Let’s go, poppet,’ he said. He looked at the woman, who was looking at Pansy – dare he say it – almost wistfully.

  ‘Take care,’ he said to her, wishing he could say more to help. But what could he say? He was making an assumption that
it wasn’t the cupboard door but a man who did the injury. Naomi would have known what to say to her, probably would have got the story out of her and found a solution for the whole mess and that would be that.

  He sighed as he pushed open the door of the shop and held Pansy’s hand on the way back to the van to eat their lunch.

  The woman had something happening in her life and it wasn’t his business, he told himself. But as he sat in the van, eating the best rabbit pie he had ever tasted, he couldn’t stop thinking about the bruise on her face and wondering how it came to be there.

  He looked at Pansy and hoped to God Naomi would protect her from any pain and heartbreak. He decided he would teach Pansy how to throw a punch, just in case any boy ever tried to hurt her. He knew Naomi would be furious with his thoughts but sometimes he didn’t have all the answers and if anyone hurt his girl, he hoped to God she had enough strength to walk the hell away – but only after hitting him square on the nose.

  He glanced out the window of the van and saw a curtain twitch in the house they were parked out the front of. He laughed to himself. There were always old women who were busybodies, ready to push him and the van out of the village. The number of times old biddies had told him to move on was more than he could count on his fingers and toes.

  He flicked the shutter closed so whoever the old dear was, she couldn’t see in as they ate. The sooner he quoted this cottage, the sooner he could be on the road again with Pansy and Naomi.

  3

  Merryknowe Bakery and Tearooms was the most visited shop in the tiny village, which wasn’t a point of pride – not when the village was dying a slow death from lack of visitors and actual inhabitants.

  It wasn’t the prettiest village in Wiltshire and Rachel Brown tried to bring some elegance to the window of the bakery with her baked goods.

  Sometimes she made cupcakes with pink iced roses or chocolate eclairs with satiny icing but today she had cream-filled butterfly cakes on the silver tray.

  She watched the man and his child walk away from the shop until they were out of sight and she felt herself turn red when she remembered the way he’d looked at the bruise on her cheek. It’s not what you think, she had wanted to say to him.

  She knew people thought it was a man who did this to her, but it wasn’t a man. Rachel had never been close enough to have a man touch her in passion or anger. There was no way she could even meet a man, not with what she had to do every day. She was a slave to her existence. Her routine was exactly the same day in or out.

  Wake at four in the morning. Do the baking. Help upstairs. Wash and dress. Serve in the shop. Clean up the shop. Make dinner and clean up upstairs. Go to bed at nine and then do it all again the next day.

  She had one day off a week where she had to do all the week’s washing and do the hoovering and order for the shop. She had to mop the floors downstairs with bleach and soap flakes and then she had to go through the accounts and make sure everything added up.

  Maths was never her strength as a child and still now, numbers made her head fuzzy unless it was in direct relation to a recipe. But she had to get the accounts right, or she would be punished and the bruise on her cheekbone was testament to this fact.

  Rachel pushed that memory out of her head and thought about the little girl who had come into her shop with her dad. She was so sweet, and Rachel wondered where her mother was, but she looked happy and well with her russet-coloured curls, sweet denim pinafore and green shoes. Rachel wished she could have shoes as pretty as the little girl’s.

  At twenty-five years of age, she knew she looked older than other girls she had gone to school with. She hated the drab clothes she was told to wear, and the way her hair was lank and thin and pulled into a tight bun because it was how she was told to wear her hair, even though her scalp ached at the end of the day.

  She hated the shoes she wore. Mother ordered them for her from the pharmacy because she had flat feet and was susceptible to heel spurs. They were rubber-soled and they sometimes made a squeaking sound when she walked and then she was yelled at for being too loud.

  She hated the bakery and the tearooms, which no one ever really visited. They could be so much more, but no one ever listened to her ideas. It was plain and dull now but, in her mind, it could be charming and fun and somewhere people wanted to visit.

  Rachel baked because that was her job, but she didn’t like the things she was told to make. Sometimes she went off-plan, like today when she had made the rabbit pie after getting the fresh rabbit meat from the butcher. She had used cider and fennel seeds and French wholegrain mustard and double cream. It was a triumph but only possible because she was alone and there was no one to question the scent coming from the kitchen.

  The man and his daughter had bought the last pie, with Joe the butcher buying two, and promising not to tell Mother. Mr Toby, the bus driver, had also made the same promise after buying one. People were happy to make that promise because Mother was so nasty. Rachel had saved a pie for herself because she wanted to taste her success and also because she needed to rid the bakery of the evidence.

  She touched her cheek; her fingers were cool on her skin. The bruise was older, and it looked worse than when it was still waiting to erupt into the green and blue that it was today.

  Rachel knew the stages of the rainbow from a bruise and this was day five. It would turn an unfortunate shade of yellow, and then it would be gone, and it wouldn’t be mentioned again until the next one started to show.

  Arnica cream helped bring out the bruising quicker but lately, she had stopped putting on the cream. Why should she try and make the bruises disappear faster? It wasn’t as though she put them there herself. Or did she want someone to ask more questions?

  At night, in her single bed with the small bedside table holding a copy of The Joy of Cooking, she would wonder if anyone thought about her. If anyone ever thought about how they could help her. If anyone out in the world worried how long she could go on like this for, or if anyone knew what her life was like.

  But Joe the butcher didn’t seem to talk to her unless it was about the gravy beef or fresh rabbit he had caught and minced. And Mrs Crawford told her she was clumsy, had always been clumsy, even as a child in the village. She told her she was clumsy as though it was an accusation, as though Rachel deserved the rainbow of bruises because of her heavy step and careless movements. She was sure Mrs Crawford from the post office knew what was happening to her but didn’t help, which had made her not want to give her a vanilla custard tart, but she knew then, she would have been told on to her mother.

  Then other times Rachel would lie in her bed reading the recipes in the book and imagine turning the tea shop into the restaurant she had seen in the magazines at the library in Chippenham. Wooden tables and comfortable chairs where people could sit and chat and hold hands and smile and laugh and eat delicious food. She would have gorgeous painted walls in either peacock blue or Indian pink – she couldn’t decide – and she would have lamps and bookshelves filled with the books she loved, the books that had kept her company through her young life. All the characters in the books who were her friends and enemies and who taught her that she was worth more than what she had been told so far in her existence.

  A tourist bus arrived, and Rachel waited for them to come to the tearooms. They would be disappointed. Everyone was. The tearooms were cold and so was the tea as it took a while for her to serve all the customers by herself.

  A plate of pinwheel sandwiches and a plate of iced fancies were included in the deal with the tour company. Rachel sighed and started to make the tea as the tourists shuffled into the tearoom.

  She had three hours of freedom left and she was spending it serving disappointed people a disappointing afternoon tea with disappointment all over her face.

  *

  When the final tourist had left, and Rachel had cleaned up the tearooms and the bakery and put whatever hadn’t sold in the fridge, she went upstairs and took off her ugly shoes an
d put on her slippers, her toes curling with relief.

  ‘Are you finished downstairs?’

  The voice made her eyes shut, and she squeezed them tight, as though summoning up courage or a spirit to take her far away from where she was now.

  ‘Nearly, a few things to sell still,’ she answered.

  ‘Did you put everything away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did the tour come in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you buy a rabbit from Joe and make pies?’

  She paused.

  ‘I sold them all. More than usual beef pies.’

  ‘Are you saying my beef pie recipe isn’t as good as your fancy French rabbit pie recipe?’

  Rachel sighed. ‘No, I am not saying that. Joe said the rabbit was good and it was cheaper than the beef.’

  There was silence. Money was always good to use in these sorts of negotiations. The tearooms and bakery weren’t exactly thriving and even the tours were slowing down in recent months. There were other villages with more active communities or money or tourist attractions. Merryknowe wasn’t much of a drawcard, despite the flowing creek and bridge, and cottages lining the streets.

  ‘You should have told me about the rabbit.’

  ‘I was planning to,’ Rachel lied.

  ‘Come and run me a bath and help me get into it. I’m tired from seeing the hairdresser today.’

  Rachel blinked back tears. She was so tired and there was still work to be done.

  ‘Hurry up.’ There was a tone, a warning, one that Rachel knew too well.

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ she answered and set to her task before the other cheek started to change into the colours of the rainbow.

  4

  To start your day properly, you had to pour yourself good China tea into a fine bone china teacup.

  Tassie McIver drank hers from a Wedgewood cup and saucer with a faded pattern of green trailing ivy that had belonged to her great-grandmother. It was a peony-shaped cup that allowed the right amount of depth and width for the leaves that she read every morning.