Starting Over at Acorn Cottage

by Kate Forster

  She opened the door and kicked a sad bra that had seen better days under the bed.

  ‘Just pop the box down on the floor,’ she said casually.

  ‘You don’t have any drawers or a wardrobe,’ he said, looking around.

  ‘No. That’s on the to-do list. Along with one thousand other things.’ She swallowed, trying to not show her nerves at him being in her room.

  Get it to together, Clara. He’s not here to undo your bodice and ravage you, although you wouldn’t say no, but seriously, get it together, girl.

  Henry was measuring an area of space with his hands and then walking in weird robotic-style steps and counting.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘Just working out where I can put a chest of drawers and a wardrobe.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about that,’ she said.

  ‘But you need somewhere to put your clothes.’ He seemed genuinely confused.

  ‘Henry, you are doing so much for me already, I can’t ask you to manage my clothing situation.’ In her head, she heard a pithy comment about him managing her undressing situation but didn’t say it, even though she was thinking about clever she was.

  ‘If we were closer, I could but I respect your boundaries.’ He pretended to tap a cigar from the corner of his mouth like Groucho Marx.

  ‘What on earth are you saying, Henry?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’ She saw him turn ever so slightly red.

  They both knew what the other was thinking, she realised, and she started to laugh and then so did he.

  ‘God, there are so many double entendres going through my head.’

  ‘Me too, sorry.’

  ‘You want my knickers in your drawers,’ she said, having trouble getting the words out when she was laughing so hard.

  ‘I want to open your drawers,’ he said wiping his eyes.

  ‘I want you to manage my clothing situation, and by that I mean unclothing me.’ She screamed with laughter.

  ‘I want to kiss you,’ Henry said suddenly.

  The laughter stopped and they stood facing each other.

  ‘I want you to kiss me,’ she said, feeling the familiar ache in her body when she thought about him.

  Henry moved towards her, and she met him halfway. Still not touching, her eyes searched his face.

  ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he said.

  ‘So are you,’ she whispered.

  ‘I think about you all the time, Clara.’ His voice sounded tight and his words were rushed.

  ‘I think about you too, Henry,’ she whispered and moved closer to him.

  He leaned down and she closed her eyes when she heard a huge crash and a scream.

  ‘Pansy,’ they both said then raced down the stairs and out of the cottage.

  Henry went out the back door and Clara out the front door. They ran around the garden and saw Pansy standing pointing at the van.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ said Henry as he ran towards Pansy and scooped her up into his arms.

  Clara looked at the van.

  A huge branch from the oak tree above had fallen on the van, crushing the roof in the middle. It would have killed anyone who was sitting inside at the little booth where they had eaten the night before.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Clara. ‘Oh my God! What if you were in there?’ She started to cry and couldn’t stop.

  ‘But we weren’t,’ Henry said calmly as he walked to her side, Pansy still in his arms.

  ‘But what if you were? Oh God.’ Clara couldn’t even fathom the disaster had they been inside the van.

  ‘But we weren’t,’ said Henry again, putting his arm around her shoulders.

  ‘And if we were, we would have smashed-in heads now,’ said Pansy. ‘So it’s good we weren’t inside and if we go inside we will have to wear a helmet like Rachel wears for her bicycle.’

  Clara started to laugh through her tears. ‘Yes, we will have to all wear helmets,’ she said.

  The three of them stood looking at the van, Henry’s arm around Clara’s shoulders and Pansy in his arms.

  ‘Well, this puts us into a bit of a quandary,’ he said.

  ‘You will have to stay with me,’ she said. She felt his hand on her shoulder tighten and then release.

  ‘I don’t expect you to do that,’ he said.

  ‘I know but you must. I have a spare room.’ She said it as though it wasn’t a big deal but it was a huge deal. It was a loaded gun and all Henry had to do was pull the trigger and he could be in her bed in a heartbeat.

  Pansy jumped down from Henry’s arms.

  ‘I get to sleep in the cottage? In a house?’ She ran inside and left Clara and Henry outside.

  ‘I’ll sleep in the spare room with Pansy,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to grab the mattresses from the van, once I get the branch lifted off.’

  His arm was still around her.

  She didn’t want him to move his arms away but he did and she felt the energy in her body dissipate.

  ‘I’d better check on the van,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to call the insurance company and take photos.’

  Clara nodded. ‘Sure, I’ll go up and see how the room will work for you both.’

  She turned to walk inside as Henry went to the van and opened the door and looked inside.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Oh Naomi.’ He sat on the steps of the van and put his head in his hands.

  Clara rushed over to see what he was looking at. She stepped around him and looked at the inside of the van. On the floor was a smashed wooden box and grey coarse sand was all over the floor.

  Clara sat next to Henry on the step of the van and took his hand.

  ‘I am so, so sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s awful. Really.’ She rubbed his back as he cried. He wept like she had never heard a man cry before, body-racking sobs that shook the van’s steps as his head ended up on her lap. She stroked his hair until the sobs subsided, and she realised then that the crush had dissolved and had been replaced a deep and real love, just like the love he still felt for his dead wife.

  26

  Clara brought Henry a plastic container from her kitchen, as he couldn’t access any of the cupboards, and a dustpan and brush. He swept up Naomi and put her into the container with an orange lid with Clara’s name written in marker underneath.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said as he sealed the lid.

  The beautiful box she had painted was shattered and beyond repair.

  After he had cried, and Clara had held him, he realised he hadn’t cried like that since the funeral but he was unsure if he felt any better. Some people claimed that crying helped you but now he felt embarrassed and guilty for keeping Naomi’s remains in the van and not putting her to rest. And then when he was just about to kiss Clara the branch fell. She knew, he thought. Naomi knew and she’d dropped the branch on the van because she didn’t want him to be with anyone. He knew it was ridiculous but he also half believed his superstition.

  He and Naomi hadn’t talked about what would happen to Henry after she died. They only talked about Pansy. About how to care for her, what she needed at that time but they weren’t to know what she needed in the future because they were so focused on the moment. Time was running out and they needed to collect as many memories as they could.

  He pushed down the lid on the container and walked to the cottage.

  Clara and Pansy were talking in the kitchen and he put the container in the top cupboard above the stove.

  ‘I’ll try and get the mattresses out,’ he said, not looking at Clara or Pansy. ‘I’ve unhooked the van from the truck, so I can still get around. The insurance company have asked for photos, which I have taken, but I will need to get the tree off and try and get the roof pushed up so I can get all our things out.’

  ‘Can we stay here, Daddy?’ Pansy smiled up at her father. She looked so like her mother it took his breath away and he felt the tears threatening to fall again.

  He looked up at Clara who seemed to be busy with the carro
ts she was peeling.

  ‘Maybe I will try and get us a hotel.’

  Pansy and Clara looked up at him.

  ‘No,’ cried Pansy. ‘I want to stay with Clara.’

  ‘Stay here, Henry, it’s fine. It would be nice.’ Clara seemed fine, maybe a little distant but she smiled at him warmly and he felt butterflies. Why was this all so confusing?

  ‘I’m going to get the beds,’ he said and walked outside to the van.

  He managed to crawl into the space and drag out Pansy’s mattress as it was smaller than his, along with her bedding, and he pulled it upstairs into the spare room.

  Clara followed him up the stairs.

  ‘I’ll go and buy a spare bed tomorrow. I needed one anyway, so it’s a good excuse.’

  Henry sighed and turned to her. ‘I am sorry about before.’

  ‘Which part?’ asked Clara but it wasn’t combative. It was real and curious and he tried to work out which part he was sorry for.

  ‘All of it,’ he said.

  Clara sighed and looked around the room. ‘It’s not perfect but it will do for now.’

  ‘Clara, I am sorry I cried.’

  She spun around to look at him. ‘What on earth for? Why would you apologise for feeling emotion? You had a shock. Your wife’s ashes were on the floor. It was awful.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t think men shouldn’t cry; it’s that only three minutes before, I was about to kiss you.’

  She paused for a moment and he was worried what she would say next.

  ‘I wanted you to kiss me,’ she said, tucking her hair behind her ear. ‘But it’s probably best you didn’t, you know? It would complicate things with you working here and so on.’

  Henry felt disappointment flood his body. God, he felt like he was being unfaithful to Naomi and was he letting Clara down.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You’re probably right.’

  Clara left him alone in the room. He made Pansy’s bed up and went back to the van for some of her clothes and some of his. What a mess, he thought as he closed the van door after taking some more photos for the insurance company. What a huge, fucking mess.

  *

  Clara made them cottage pie and Pansy ate only the mashed potato and then rubbed her eyes and said she wanted to lie in bed and watch her TV show on her iPad about a talking dog.

  Henry tucked her into bed and came back to Clara who was scraping the leftovers into a bowl and covering it with cling film.

  ‘Thank you for dinner,’ he said, feeling awkward.

  ‘That’s okay, cottage pie is always a good, filling option.’ She filled the sink with hot water and dishwashing liquid and dropped the plates into the sudsy water.

  ‘I’ll wash, you dry,’ she said, tossing him a tea towel.

  They worked in silence for a while.

  ‘Cottage pie was what broke myself and Giles up.’

  ‘How?’

  Clara rinsed a plate of the suds under the tap.

  ‘I sent him to a golfing weekend with his friends. He said he was staying at a mate’s house, and I knew it would be pizza and beers, so I make a big cottage pie and put it in a container and sent it away with him. Then months later, after he’s told me he left the container at the mate’s place in the country, I figure it’s just gone, you know?’

  Henry nodded as he dried a plate and Clara continued.

  ‘Then I go to dinner at my best friend Judy’s house and go to get something from the cupboard in the kitchen, and lo and behold, there’s my Tupperware with the orange lid that has my name on it and was sent away with cottage pie in it, at her house. The one Naomi’s ashes is in now. Sorry but that’s all I had.’

  Henry shrugged. ‘That’s okay, she would like to be a part of the drama. Go on. What happened then?’

  ‘I confronted them at the dinner, and that’s when Giles told me they were in love. So I set fire to the dining table by accident after throwing a breadstick at his head but since I don’t believe in accidents and coincidences, I probably meant them to all burn in hell, and so I left with my container and haven’t spoken to either of them again.’

  Henry started to laugh and so did she. ‘So, Naomi’s ashes are now in the container that you once filled with cottage pie that then uncovered an affair? Oh, that’s perfect.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, I can try and find another container but that’s all I had at hand.’

  ‘That’s okay, she would love it.’

  They sat at the kitchen table and drank tea and talked late into the night. Clara was whip-smart and Henry was entertained by her humour and dreams for her future, which included chickens, a dog and an open fire and a Welsh dresser just like Tassie’s.

  But later when the lights were out and he was trying to sleep, half on Pansy’s mattress and half on the cold wooden floor, he wondered if there was such a thing as Naomi’s having a premonition, and her insisting he say yes. But to what? When they were first together, she would create elaborate treasure hunts with such obscure clues that even she would forget what they meant and they would have to work them out together, which he loved doing. But she had left him for three years wondering what he was supposed to be saying yes to and now she was in the container that had undone Clara’s relationship and had brought her here, lying in the next room.

  It was so ridiculous it was funny, but someone it almost made sense. Almost.

  27

  Clara walked into the large and impersonal hospital, finding the floor and room where Mrs Brown was recuperating.

  She knocked on the open door, put her head around and saw Mrs Brown lying in bed.

  Gone was her tanned face and bouffant hair. She looked paler and older and without makeup, somewhat vulnerable. Clara nearly felt sorry for her.

  She put a bag of grapes on the table next to the bed.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Brown, I’m Clara Maxwell. I’m a friend of Rachel’s.’

  Mrs Brown glared at Clara. ‘She doesn’t have any friends, so who are you? A social worker?’

  ‘She does have me as a friend. A new friend but she is a wonderful girl.’ Considering your abuse, she’s bloody amazing, Clara thought but didn’t say.

  Mrs Brown scoffed, ‘For an idiot, she does okay. Why hasn’t she come to see me? I need things from home.’

  Clara pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed.

  ‘I think Rachel is afraid of you,’ she said and watched Mrs Brown’s face, which gave nothing away.

  ‘She is an ignorant child who would be living in a house for retarded women if it weren’t for me giving her a job.’

  Clara held her tongue at the poison coming from the woman’s mouth. ‘You shouldn’t say that word.’

  ‘I don’t care, I say it as I see it, and she’s not right.’

  ‘How can you say that about your own child?’ Clara could not understand how this woman could be so cruel.

  Moira Brown looked nonplussed.

  ‘Mrs Brown, did you ever think that your continual criticism and abuse made her so anxious she couldn’t function properly?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, I didn’t abuse her.’

  ‘You did! You hit her – I saw the bruise and according to others, this was a common occurrence.’

  ‘When she can’t take instruction, I do it to help it sink in.’

  Clara could not believe this woman wasn’t even denying her abuse to Rachel. God, now she wanted to push her down the stairs.

  ‘You can’t keep abusing her and holding her back. She’s doing wonderfully at the bakery; it’s never been busier.’

  Mrs Brown laughed. It was a thin, brittle laugh that sounded like a glass splintering.

  ‘I am selling the bakery and the tearooms. I’m heading to Costa del Sol to live. Rachel can come to be my housekeeper. God knows she wouldn’t get a job here.’

  ‘Are you serious? That’s how you speak about your own daughter?’ Clara failed at keeping the venom from her own voice.

  ‘She’s not my daughter,’ said Mrs
Brown. ‘She was my useless husband’s child. The wife died and I had to take her on as well, and then Alfie died and left me with his lump. I started the bakery to try and make a living but she can’t cook very well and all I do is work.’

  Clara stood up and picked up the grapes. ‘You are a truly awful person. Really, and I knew someone who was awful, but this sort of abuse – and it is abuse – is not ever going to be allowed as long as I know Rachel. Goodbye, Mrs Brown, and I hope you break your other leg.’

  She walked out of the room, her eyes stinging with tears in the face of such hate and loathing.

  She remembered the words her father used to say to her mother.

  You’re an idiot. You can’t do anything right. What is this slop you’ve cooked? Why didn’t you die when you had Clara? Would have saved me having to care for you and for her.

  Clara leaned against the wall and took a deep breath. It’s okay, she reminded herself. He’s gone. You are safe. But Rachel wasn’t safe. There was no way she would let that bitch take Rachel to Spain and ruin what chances she had of having a life with joy and purpose and perhaps love.

  She would do whatever it took to save Rachel from that woman and Clara thought she might have a plan.

  *

  After Clara had gone to see Mrs Brown and bought two single beds and bedding for the spare room, to be delivered that day, she drove back to Merryknowe and called in to the bakery.

  ‘Hey,’ she said to Rachel who was plating pies in the kitchen. ‘Is that Alice working behind the counter?’

  ‘Yes. She’s much faster than me on the till and doesn’t need to use the calculator. She can do all the maths in her head. I’m jealous, I wish I could be that fast.’

  ‘And I reckon Alice wishes she could make a raspberry pie as good as yours. We all have different skills. The world would be boring if we were all the same.’

  ‘Joe said that to me also; you and him have the same ideas about some things,’ Rachel said. ‘You’re both so smart.’

  Clara smiled at Rachel. She was so sheltered and so abused that anyone who had normal views of the world was considered a genius in Rachel’s eyes.