Starting Over at Acorn Cottage

by Kate Forster

  While the tea was important, it was the tea leaves that set the tone for the day.

  The tea must be drunk with the left hand as that was closest to the heart, which suited Tassie as she read the paper, first checking for her own death notice, because, as her own mother said, if her name wasn’t in the paper, she was still free to live another day. She then moved to the crossword before moving to the weather forecast.

  Leaving half a teaspoon of tea in the cup, she turned the cup three times on the saucer, from left to right. Tassie moved the cup swiftly and then she slowly turned it over onto the saucer, with its bottom in the air, letting the tea drain away and the tea leaves settle with the news of the day.

  Tassie checked on the weather for the day as she waited for the fate of the tea leaves to settle. She saw no difference between the forecast for the weather and the forecast for her day from a teacup. The weather people were more often wrong about the rain and sunshine than she was about what was coming and going in the village and her life.

  Turning the cup over, Tassie peered inside.

  The handle was pointing to her. Interesting, she thought. Something was coming that would involve her. This was already unusual. All the leaves were near the rim. The events would happen soon, she noted. A ladybird symbol showed herself inside the cup. Betoken visitors, Tassie thought. A visitor for her.

  The sound of knocking on the front door made her jump.

  ‘Mrs McIver, it’s the nurse,’ called the woman from outside the small house.

  Tassie McIver sighed. The cup was playing with her, she thought, as the district nurse was not a wanted or welcome visitor. It took her some time to stand up, and sometimes the new nurses left before she managed to shuffle to the front door, but this nurse had too much bonhomie in her voice to be going anywhere soon.

  Today the air felt warm, and Tassie’s arthritis was behaving but even so, she felt every step in every bone, as she managed to get to the door.

  She opened it to find a cheerful nurse whose condescending smile put Tassie immediately into a bad mood.

  What did she have to be so cheery about? Sponge-bathing old men and changing dressings on ancient skin like Tassie’s was not living her best life.

  Tassie had watched The Oprah Winfrey Show in the hospital and learned about living her best life, and she wondered if she had, at eighty-nine years old, lived her best life.

  Eight-nine years living in one place – Merryknowe village. Nothing happened in Merryknowe without Tassie knowing, even if the villagers didn’t know she knew – she knew all but she kept it quiet.

  It wasn’t that Tassie was a witch, or even vaguely religious, but she understood the rhythms and cycles of life, and believed that at the bottom of the deepest rut lay jewels if you were prepared to be patient and dig down inside yourself a little further to draw them out.

  ‘Morning, Mrs McIver, how are you today?’ asked the overly cheerful nurse.

  ‘Not as good as you,’ she said to the nurse, but it was not meant to be mean. It was a statement of fact. She doubted that anyone in the world was as cheerful as this nurse was about her life.

  ‘I had a wonderful night’s sleep,’ said the nurse, but Tassie looked at her and hid a little knowing smile. That nurse was not sleeping alone, but Tassie couldn’t see a wedding ring – not that it mattered anymore.

  Tassie was never one to live by convention anyway. How could you live your best life if you were so busy being what other people wanted, that you forgot what you really wanted?

  The nurse changed the dressing on her shin, where she had torn it on a branch that fell in the garden.

  Her skin had once been supple and brown in summer, now it was the shade and texture of the bark from a birch tree and had the healing capability of a corpse.

  Sometimes that’s how she felt on her worst days. A walking corpse with no family, no friends left, and her days spent in front of the television or listening to the radio.

  ‘See you in a few days,’ said the nurse when she left.

  ‘I might be dead by then,’ called out Tassie.

  ‘Oh, Mrs McIver, you make me laugh.’

  The nurse drove away in her car. Did the idea of Tassie’s death amuse the nurse? She wouldn’t be amused if she came to the house and opened the door and found Tassie dead in her chair. In this heat, Tassie would be well and truly ripe by the time the nurse came, like a pear about to split its old, wrinkled skin.

  Tassie looked out the window of her living room and saw Rachel Brown turning over the sign on the door of the bakery and tearooms to tell everyone it was now open for business.

  Poor Rachel Brown. If Tassie was younger, she would have tried to help the girl but at eighty-nine, she didn’t think there was much she could do other than speak kindly to her when she managed to cross the road for a tea and a butterfly cake.

  Tassie went into her little kitchen and turned on the kettle. She took her breakfast of stewed apples and yoghurt out of the fridge and sighed. She wanted eggs and sausages but those days were long behind her. Dinner consisted of a meals on wheels affair that came from the next village, one she heated up in the oven. Stringy beef stew with Yorkshire pudding and carrots and peas – it sounded far better than it tasted.

  And then there was fish, chips and mushy peas, which almost had her signing up for the death clinic in Switzerland that she had read about in a large-print book from the mobile library. Getting old was depressing, she had decided nine years ago, and now she was truly dispirited about still being here. She sat at her pine table eating her apple and yoghurt and cheated by dripping honey on top that Nahla the cleaner from the council had given her from her husband’s hives on his allotment.

  The nurse said she shouldn’t have honey or cream cakes or sugar in her tea but Tassie really didn’t care anymore. If she died in a diabetic coma it was better than trying to swallow the mushy peas and fish combination, which was its own sort of special hell.

  The morning passed slowly, and more than thrice Tassie checked the traffic at the bakery. She worried for the business. Tourists didn’t come to Merryknowe very often, mostly because there wasn’t anywhere decent to eat and the Merryknowe Tearooms were not a drawcard with their ugly plastic tablecloths and that horrid Mrs Brown, the mother, hovering about.

  Just as she was looking at the bakery, she saw a small truck with a van attached to the back of it shaped like a cottage. It had a thatched roof and was painted sunflower yellow, with painted flowers like a traveller’s van, and curtains on the windows.

  Tassie had never seen anything like it in her eighty-nine years. When it stopped and a tall man stepped out and then took a sleepy child from the truck, she felt a shiver of something she hadn’t felt in a long time run up her head and over the scalp.

  Something new in the village – more than new, it was something spectacular, and she watched him walk into the bakery with the little girl who had jumped down from his arms.

  She looked at the van for the longest time, willing it to stay. For years she had known Merryknowe would die when she did. She was the last surviving long-time resident and the last of the old ones but everyone who came here left not long after. She knew the tearooms’ failing would be the final nail in Merryknowe’s coffin and yet there was nothing she could do, until the man in the van walked into the shop across the road from where she lived.

  This was what she had been planning in her mind. New energy and new love. But the man wasn’t for Rachel Brown, no, he was meant for someone else, but they hadn’t arrived yet, and Tassie McIver hoped to hell whoever it was, would come soon.

  5

  Clara turned off the main road, checked the map on her phone and enlarged the image, peering at it closely.

  There didn’t seem to be anything on the image that looked like a cottage. Just a huge number of trees and what looked to be an unmade road.

  The cottage’s formal address was Acorn Cottage on Shears Lane but there was no sign for the lane, so she took a punt and drov
e to where she thought the lane should be.

  It must be close, she thought as she put the car into drive and went further down the bumpy road, which was covered by trees.

  They cast a beautiful green light over her as she drove slowly and her stomach flipped with anticipation. This was her dream about to come true. Everything she had wished for as a child was about to become a reality because she had worked hard and she had taken a chance. Sure, she was drunk when she did it – Clara rarely drank and was a lightweight so the bottle of wine really pushed her over the edge – but here she was. She turned into a clearing, the green light disappearing, and the cottage was before her, waiting.

  Clara stopped the car and burst into tears.

  ‘Oh shit,’ she said aloud. ‘Oh my God.’ Her eyes tried to take in everything at once.

  It was a dump. Whatever filter the agent had used on the photographs should be called, Lies and More Lies, she thought. The cottage looked like it was drunk. It looked like a cottage bought when drunk and was the living embodiment of her bad decision.

  Clara wasn’t used to making bad decisions. She had only ever made one significantly bad decision before the cottage but she didn’t like to think about that. And choosing Giles could arguably have been a bad decision but this cottage was the worst decision she could have made.

  This is what happens when you drink and buy property, she told herself as she stepped out of the car and walked towards the cottage. Why did she do something so rash? She was like the customers at the bank she had tried to protect. She had made a rash decision and it was giving her an anxiety rash, she thought as she scratched at her neck. She had spent her savings on this sad, lonely cottage that looked slightly lopsided.

  There was a wooden gate, the paint long washed away, with a sign reading Acorn Cottage. She pushed open the gate and it promptly fell onto the overgrown path.

  It had been two months since she had bought the property. For two months she had spent every weekend crying in the flat, knowing Piles was over with Judas, probably laughing about her and her sad life.

  And Petey… she wondered what happened to him. He had moved out, according to Piles, but Clara didn’t ask for more details. It was just all so awful and tawdry. Clara had tried to live a life with no surprises and now she had been sucker punched again by this cottage.

  She had lost her mother and her relationship in the space of a year and now she had a derelict house to live in.

  The agent told her the roof needed work, and he had given her the number of a man who was a thatcher. She had emailed the thatcher to come and look at it today, and wondered how bad it could be. Now she wondered if she wanted to know how bad it actually was.

  The cottage was dated back to the 1800s according to the title. The last owner had died in the 1990s and since then it had gone to seed, as it were. The garden was wild, with climbing roses reaching out with long thorny stems grabbing her on her top as she passed them.

  Clara slapped them away as she tried to make sense of the images she’d seen online and what she was looking at now.

  The grass was long like a meadow, filled with dandelions. The lavender bushes were stringy and leggy, with a few bees hanging around the flowers in hope.

  Weeds were everywhere through the garden beds, thistles and other grasses and huge trees surrounded the cottage, which was more spooky than charming. It was a mess. A huge mess of huge proportions with a huge task to make it liveable.

  This wasn’t what Clara had hoped for. The agent had told her to come and see it but she’d said she was too busy – which she was as she finished her role at the bank and her relationship with Giles. Perhaps she didn’t want to admit she had a gnawing feeling she had made a huge mistake, so she had avoided her decision and this was the outcome.

  It had seemed like such a good idea when she was trying to prove to Giles that she would live her life without him, but now she felt like an idiot. She hadn’t done the due diligence on the investment, and here was her reward.

  There was a stand of oak trees circling the front of the property and an outlook over green land with a white fence that belonged to the farm a long way down the lane.

  The grass was overgrown on her property, with dandelions waving obnoxiously as though laughing at her poor decision-making.

  What had the estate agents thought when they listed this property?

  She’d had no time to come and see it before, not with moving out and leaving the bank and finalising her mother’s estate. The agent had promised it was liveable. He had used the word charming. More like disarming.

  The sound of a car on the unmade road made her turn from the rural nightmare.

  But it wasn’t a car, it was a van of some sort, with a little mini cottage on top, complete with a thatched roof. Oh God, it was a mobile Snow White and the Seven Dwarves roadshow, she thought in horror.

  ‘God help me,’ she muttered to herself as the van stopped and a man stepped out of it, smiling at her.

  ‘Oh shit,’ she whispered. He was as handsome as anyone she had ever seen in her life, even with the beard, which to his credit looked well-tended – unlike when Piles had tried to grow a beard and she’d asked him if he had dirt on his upper lip, and he hadn’t spoken to her for a week.

  ‘Clara?’ the handsome bearded man asked.

  ‘Hi.’ She tried to wave back like she had seen Carrie Bradshaw do on TV, casual, cute, sexy, but then decided at the last minute she would do a casual nod and stick her hand up like she was on roll call at camp, but it ended up being a combo she was sure looked like she was pretending to yank a chain on a toilet or the emergency brake on a train.

  He was getting something out of the van, so hopefully, he hadn’t seen her weird callisthenics move. She put her hands into the pockets of her jeans and finding a G-string she had shoved in there last-minute when she had left Piles’s flat.

  ‘Henry Garnett,’ he said as he walked towards her, carrying what looked to be a large sack of clothing until the sack lifted its head and peered at Clara.

  ‘It’s a child,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, this is Pansy, my daughter.’

  It made sense a man like this had a child. Mrs Garnett was probably inside the van spinning wool and then dyeing it pink from avocado skins or nettle blue or something.

  ‘Hi, Pansy, how are you?’ she said.

  Pansy looked unimpressed with Clara and the cottage and snuggled her head back into Henry’s shoulder.

  ‘So this is the little doer-upper?’ Henry said, as Pansy suddenly pushed herself down from his arms and stood staring at the house, her hands on her hips.

  ‘It’s a shithole,’ the child said emphatically.

  ‘Pansy!’ Henry looked horrified. ‘Where did you hear that word?’

  ‘The plasterers on the Moorcroft house. They said it was a shithole and that Mr Moorcroft was an absolute bast—’

  Henry put his hand over his daughter’s mouth, his face bright red.

  ‘God, I am sorry, she comes on jobs with me and sometimes there is less than desirable language flying around the place. Oww!’ he cried.

  Henry held his hand and then started to shake it. ‘You bit me.’

  ‘I did. Your hand smells like onions,’ said Pansy calmly and she walked into the garden.

  Clara started to laugh. This child was incredible, she thought. She had never liked children but this one, she liked.

  ‘She’s incredible,’ she said to Henry.

  ‘She’s a changeling and any day the Goblin King is coming to take her back.’ He was still rubbing his hand.

  ‘Why does she come on the jobs? Where’s Mum?’ she asked casually, trying to sound non-judgemental.

  ‘Inside, next to the onions and the potatoes.’

  ‘Peeling them for dinner?’ asked Clara.

  ‘No, she’s dead. Her ashes are in the van.’ Henry shrugged. ‘She died three years ago. Pansy and I live in the van and go from job to job.’

  Clara was taken aback. N
ow the Piles and Judas betrayal didn’t seem so terrible compared to him raising a child in a van, alone.

  ‘Tell me about the cottage,’ he said, his tone clearly a sign that he was changing the subject.

  ‘It was built in the 1800s and it is, as your changeling stated, a shithole and I have mad regrets about buying it.’

  Henry started to laugh now. ‘I have seen worse.’

  ‘Where? In war-torn countries? I haven’t even been inside. I’m scared of what I will find.’

  ‘Let’s do the tour together,’ he said. ‘Pans, we are going inside.’

  Pansy was picking dandelions from the long grass. ‘Good luck,’ she said, not looking up.

  ‘How old is she?’ Clara asked.

  ‘Six going on sixty,’ he sighed.

  ‘She’s not in school yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  She heard his tone change again and she left it. It wasn’t any of her business, she reminded herself.

  But she thought about her mother, Lillian, and her insistence on education for Clara, her only child. There were only the two of them, and Lillian had worked hard for Clara to have as much as she could afford, even though she worked in a nursing home as a carer. She never missed a concert or an awards assembly and even managed to buy a little flat for them both.

  Thinking of her mother made her eyes sting, and she focused on the cottage.

  ‘Have you got a key? We can do this together if it’s easier.’

  Clara thought about Piles and this being their dream and her eyes stung again.

  Pulling the large old-fashioned key out of her handbag, she went to the front door and tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t move.

  ‘It’s stuck,’ she said to Henry.

  ‘Wait on,’ he said and he half-walked, half-jogged to the van.

  ‘Let me put some of this in your keyhole,’ he said, pumping something from a can into the door lock.

  ‘Steady on, ask me for a drink first.’ Then she realised she had said it aloud.