Starting Over at Acorn Cottage

by Kate Forster

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve had a terrible row with Henry, haven’t you?’

  ‘Henry and Pansy are leaving when the van is fixed,’ Clara said. Her voice sounded tight and pained.

  ‘Well, that’s a big mess isn’t it? I know it wasn’t her.’ Tassie tapped the lid of Naomi’s container.

  ‘Of course it was her; it’s always her,’ snapped Clara. ‘He won’t let her go.’

  Tassie shook her head. ‘I don’t think it’s him that won’t let her go, love; I think it’s you. I think you hang on to the dead because it’s safer than being with the living.’

  ‘That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,’ said Clara, but Tassie noticed she couldn’t look at Naomi’s ashes.

  ‘Why are you competing with a dead woman? You won, Clara, you’re alive. You get to kiss Henry and love Pansy.’

  But Clara shook her head. ‘No anymore, he doesn’t want me.’

  ‘Oh, Clara, you don’t want to be happy.’ Tassie sighed and thought for a moment.

  ‘Tell me about your father.’ Tassie stared at Clara, looking for something in her face but she wasn’t sure what it was exactly.

  ‘My dad? Why?’ Clara sat back in the chair and crossed her arms.

  Tassie noticed but said nothing. She’d learned from her years as a teacher that the less she said, the sooner the students would say what they knew. She would never cajole or push; instead she led them down the path and then let them find their way out by using the truth.

  Clara glared at her but Tassie remained unmoved.

  ‘What has my father got to do with anything? He’s dead,’ said Clara.

  ‘Tell me about his death,’ she prompted.

  ‘No,’ snapped Clara. ‘Why are you here? Why do you want to talk about him? I never think about him.’

  Tassie shook her head. ‘But you do, love, all the time, and he feeds off it, doesn’t he?’

  Clara gasped. ‘You need to leave.’

  ‘No, pet, you need to say that to him, not to me,’ said Tassie.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Clara asked.

  Tassie could hear Pansy singing the song but she still couldn’t place it.

  ‘Clara, we haven’t got much time, but you need to tell the truth. You need to tell Henry what happened with your father. It will ruin you if you don’t. He’s with you every moment, every day. You carry him with you wherever you go. That’s why things don’t turn out right for you. They start out well but then they end badly. And I know you and Henry need to be together. Naomi told me but your father will ruin your life if you let him.’

  Clara stood up, her chair making a loud clatter on the wooden floor. ‘Leave. You’re out of your mind,’ she said loudly.

  ‘No, dear, I’ve never been more sane and besides, I’m eighty-nine years old. I can’t walk home, can I? Now sit down and talk to me and I will tell you what I know.’

  Clara sat, albeit reluctantly, and looked at Tassie, but with less hostility.

  ‘My father died when I was twelve,’ she said. ‘He was an abusive, awful person, who killed my grandmother, and tried to kill my mother, so my mum killed him in self-defence.’

  Tassie stared at her for a long time but Clara didn’t flinch. She realised that this lie had been told for so long it almost felt real to Clara.

  ‘Were you there when your mum killed him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clara. Clara started to cry. All her former anger and bravado had dissolved, and she put her head on the table and sobbed.

  ‘Tell him, tell him.’ Tassie touched Clara’s hair.

  ‘I can’t; he won’t want to be with me,’ she said, her voice strangled.

  ‘He will,’ said Tassie.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ Clara said. ‘You are telling me this old wives’ tale stuff to scare me or something. I don’t know why you’re doing it but it’s awful. I thought you were my friend.

  ‘I am your friend but I know what I know and your father is still with you and will be until you let him go.’

  They were quiet for a moment. A fly and the sound of Pansy’s song came through with the breeze.

  Clara looked up and Tassie saw her eyes widen.

  ‘That song. Where did Pansy learn that? Pansy?’ she called out.

  Pansy and Gumboots ran inside. ‘Yeah?’ she asked.

  ‘That song you’re singing, where did you learn that?’ Clara asked her.

  ‘This song?’ Pansy sang it and Clara put her hands to her ears. Tassie saw her turn white.

  ‘Daddy was singing it and now I’m singing it. I can teach you if you like.’

  Clara shook her head.

  ‘Thanks, pet,’ said Tassie to Pansy who ran outside again.

  ‘What is the song, Clara?’ she asked gently.

  ‘It was on the radio in the kitchen the night he died,’ she said. ‘My gran loved it. It was an old Elvis song called “Don’t Cry Daddy”, fitting really.’

  The sound of Clara’s car made Clara wipe her eyes quickly and move to the sink to have a drink of water as Henry walked in the door, humming the song ‘Don’t Cry Daddy’.

  Clara looked at Tassie who stood up.

  ‘I am going to talk to the trees with Pansy. Come and see me when you’re done,’ she said to them both.

  ‘I bought you gin and tonics,’ Henry said looking confused.

  ‘Pour one for each of you and sit and listen for a bit, pet,’ she said before patting his arm and walking into the garden to listen to the old oak tree.

  49

  Clara waited for Henry to make them the drinks and then he sat opposite her.

  ‘You’ve been crying,’ he said but not unkindly.

  She ignored his comment because she knew there were more tears to come and deep down, she knew Tassie was right. Ghosts, spirits, God knows what it was but yes, she held her father with her closely and every day he was with her, every day that final moment was with her.

  If telling the truth to someone helped lift that weight, then she would do it. She couldn’t live with all of it anymore.

  She’d never told Giles, God knew he wouldn’t have understood, nor had she told her friends through high school or university or work. She never even divulged it to the therapist she saw briefly when she found out her mum was sick.

  She took a sip of her drink and then another. ‘You asked if I murdered someone.’

  Henry nodded and frowned.

  Clara sipped more of her drink. A large gulp – the gin burned but it was bracing.

  ‘I did. I murdered someone.’

  Henry started to laugh and then he saw her face. He was silent and she didn’t speak so he could process what she told him.

  ‘Who?’ he asked. His drink was leaving sweat marks and they ran down onto the table. Clara paused then spoke slowly as though reaching for every word to ensure it was the right one.

  ‘My mum and dad had a difficult relationship. They were both disappointed in how their lives unfurled and they drank. They were disappointed in choosing the other, and not wanting more in life. They were nearly going to divorce and then Mum got pregnant with me.’

  She sipped her gin and then kept speaking.

  ‘Mum left three times that I can remember. Each time the beatings were worse than the ones before that had made her leave. He had taken everything from her by then. She didn’t have a job, or friends, and she hadn’t seen her own mum since I was a baby.’

  She breathed out again and she noticed it sounded a little jagged, as though she had been running. She twisted the glass around on the table and dabbed at the ring marks.

  Henry seemed to sit very still, as though he didn’t want to scare her into not speaking but she couldn’t stop now. It was as though Tassie had undone her.

  ‘Then I told my teacher about what Dad used to do to her, which was both good and bad, because you know, teachers have to tell the police and then it’s out of your hands.’

  She paused, thinking about the next part.
r />   ‘It set off a chain of events that I don’t think I could have stopped, even if I tried.’

  Henry nodded. ‘That was very brave of you,’ he said but she didn’t respond. She didn’t need platitudes. She needed to be free.

  ‘The social workers and the police visited Mum at home and Dad wasn’t there, thank God. And she told them she had nowhere to go. But they found her mum and they spoke on the phone then and the next day, which was good.’

  She took a deep breath and kept speaking. ‘I was taken out of school at lunchtime by a policewoman and someone from social services and Mum met us at the library, and they drove us to my gran’s house in Luton. It was like a holiday. My gran was a truly wonderful granny, you know? She would draw faces on boiled eggs before she cooked them for me, to have with toast soldiers.’

  Henry smiled at her but she didn’t let him speak. Her voice was an out-of-control train now and it would keep going until it crashed at the inevitable ending.

  ‘And she would make me cocoa and serve it in a cup and saucer in bed, and Mum stopped crying. And we were happy, the three of us all together for the first time. My granny had chickens. I used to love to go and collect the eggs every morning. It became my job. I had names for them all and I would pat them and sing them songs. That’s why the chicken you bought me meant so much to me.’

  Henry nodded as Clara went on.

  ‘Mum got a job at the grocer’s and she told me she would save enough money to buy us a cottage with chickens. It was all we talked about and Granny said she would come and visit us and we would have vegetables and I would preserve things. I read Little House on the Prairie more than three times. I wanted to be a pioneer.’

  Henry smiled at her.

  ‘So this was the dream, where I am now, except it was supposed to be with Mum and then with Giles but it’s you, and I love that it’s you and Pansy but I know that what I will tell you will ruin everything, which is why I didn’t want to tell you but Tassie says I have to or else I will be ruined.’

  She felt the tears forming and took a deep breath to try and keep them at bay.

  ‘Anyway, I digress. So the chickens, which symbolised new beginnings and everything wonderful in my life, were also the signal that Dad was back.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  Clara looked at his handsome face, his beautiful smile. No man would keep a woman like her around his child.

  She spoke slowly.

  ‘I came home from school and went to see the chickens and they were all dead.’

  Henry gasped. ‘What?’

  ‘Dad had cut their heads off, one by one, and lined them all up. I started to scream and ran inside. I remember the radio was on. There was newspaper on the bench with potato peelings on it. Gran had been preparing dinner.’

  She closed her eyes. She was back there now. ‘He had Mum in a headlock from behind, and there was Granny on the floor. She was bleeding. The blood was everywhere.’

  She could hear her mother’s gasps for breath and see her face turning blue, and she felt hot tears falling down her cheeks.

  ‘I picked up the knife that Gran had been using and I plunged it into my dad’s back. It went in easily and came out easily. I did it five times, until he fell down and Mum grabbed me and the knife from my hand.’

  She opened her eyes and Henry was sitting very still.

  ‘Mum took the knife and stabbed him four more times in the heart and then told me to ring 999.’

  Clara was looking over his head as she spoke.

  ‘Gran was dead. He had choked her. And Mum had come home from work and saw him. Then he started on her when I walked in. I think he would have killed me too.’

  She felt like she was in court again.

  ‘The police said it was manslaughter but her lawyers said it was self-defence. She served three years.’

  ‘Oh, Clara,’ said Henry. ‘Who looked after you?’

  ‘No one. Myself. I lived with a cousin of Mum’s who worked at a meat works. She was never home and when she was she was getting ready to go to bingo or the pub. She left me alone and I visited Mum at prison and went to school and became an adult. Worked hard at school. When Mum came out of prison, I started at university. We never spoke about it, not even when she was dying. It was the big secret in our tiny two-person family and yet it was so big.’

  Clara saw tears in his eyes.

  They both sipped their drinks, steadying themselves, she thought.

  ‘So I understand why you won’t want me around Pansy – I do. But I needed to tell you.’

  They were silent again then she spoke. ‘But you know? What was the saddest part?’

  Henry shook his head. ‘No?’

  ‘I didn’t stab him because of what he had done to Gran or what he was going to do to Mum, God knows what that would have been, but I stabbed him because he killed the chickens. All I wanted were the chickens and he killed them, and I guess, in some way, he killed my dream.’

  Henry nodded. ‘The chickens were a symbol though. And they were like you. Defenceless.’

  She nodded and looked him in the eye. ‘So yes, that is the first time I have told my whole story to anyone.’

  Henry stood up and she lowered her head. He would go now, she was as sure of it as she was that the sun would come up tomorrow.

  But he walked to her side of the table and lifted her head to him and leaned down and kissed her gently on the mouth.

  ‘I love you, Clara Maxwell, and if you think for a minute that I wouldn’t want you in my life when you are one the bravest, smartest women I know, then you are wrong, so very wrong.’

  Clara smiled at him and he searched her eyes.

  ‘I want you to stay with me. I want to marry you and care for Pansy together and have a baby and have this be our dream.’

  She’d said it. She’d finally said everything that had happened and everything she had wanted and he was still standing before her.

  He pulled her to her feet.

  ‘All I have done since I arrived is make this a home for us, even if I didn’t realise it. I want it all as much as you do. I think I have from the moment you burst into tears at the hole in the roof.’

  ‘I am so, so sorry for everything I said,’ she cried, holding his face. ‘I was wrong and rude and awful, and all I can say is, I was afraid. I hope you can find it in yourself to forgive me.’

  But Henry shook his head and kissed her forehead. ‘You said some truthful things to me and I needed to hear some of them. Some of them were a bit harsh but I don’t hang on to grudges.’

  Clara hugged him. She loved the way her face buried into his shoulder and she kissed his neck.

  ‘You’re lovely,’ she said.

  ‘You’re lovelier,’ he replied and then he kissed her so well her knees buckled and she thought she might have died and gone to heaven.

  50

  Secrets can be so heavy that they can drown a person, Tassie used to say to children who wouldn’t tell her what was on their mind. Sometimes she knew when there was trouble at home, or things happening that shouldn’t to small children. She could tell when she looked in their eyes, by the way they fought for others instead of fighting for themselves. They raged against everything in the world except what troubled them, fighting the fight for everyone else. Tassie had seen it in Clara when she first noticed Rachel in the tearooms. Clara was a wounded fighter who hid her scar beneath practicality and reliability. She had worked to become everything her father wasn’t and stronger than her mother could ever be. When Clara arrived in Merryknowe she was drowning but the cottage was her buoy and slowly she made it to the surface.

  Now Tassie sat on one of the plastic garden chairs that Henry had bought for the garden, watching Pansy play on the swing in the tree.

  Clara walked up beside her, sat on the grass and handed Tassie a gin and tonic.

  ‘I told him,’ she said.

  Tassie nodded and took the drink.

  ‘I guess I should tell
you now,’ said Clara but Tassie shook her head.

  ‘I don’t need to know, love. I know enough that something happened and changed you. It pushed you down for so long that you chose the wrong boys and the wrong friends and the wrong job because you wanted to make people happy. You thought if you made people happy then that would absolve you.’

  Clara was silent next to her.

  ‘But you had nothing to forgive yourself for. You did what you did to survive and you did survive but now…’ Tassie looked around at the cottage and Pansy on the swing and Henry coming out with the other chairs for him and Clara. ‘Now, you are living.’

  Clara wiped a tear away and Tassie patted her on the head.

  ‘The secret needed to come out eventually. It was too big to keep between you and Henry,’ she said.

  Clara nodded and allowed Henry to pull her up from the grass so she could sit on the chair.

  ‘Can you text Joe and ask him to come and get me?’ asked Tassie to Clara.

  ‘I can drive you,’ offered Henry.

  ‘Oh no, you’ve been drinking.’ Tassie sipped her own drink. ‘I haven’t had a sip of one of those for years. It is most refreshing.’

  She watched as Clara texted on her phone, marvelling at the ease of communication between humans and yet how much was still hidden and unsaid between friends and lovers.

  They sat peacefully under the tree for a while, the last of the summer bees lazily swimming through the heat waves, looking for crumbs of pollen.

  Tassie turned to Henry. ‘And what about you, love?’

  Henry looked at Tassie in mock horror. ‘Please don’t tell me it’s my turn to be in your spotlight.’

  ‘What are we going to do about Naomi? She’s ready to go, you know?’

  Henry nodded. ‘I know – she told me.’

  He looked at Pansy swinging with the puppy jumping up trying to reach her on his short little legs.

  ‘She wanted to be in a vegetable garden but I don’t like the idea of digging up carrots with her bones in it.’

  Tassie listened to the trees for a while and then heard the sound of Joe’s voice coming from around the side of the house.

  ‘Righto, I must be off. I have a lovely chicken schnitzel dinner from Rachel coming. Did I tell you I’ve cancelled meals on wheels now? Rachel brings me whatever she is having for dinner. Last night it was an egg and bacon pie with your eggs from Clara’s Cluckers. Very good it was too.’