Not only had he written an exhaustive list, he had also drawn little sketches of the cottage and watercolours of what it would look like after the garden was planted and in bloom.
It was the most exquisite thing she had ever seen and she pored over the drawings of the rooms and the new roof, and the furniture suggestions. It was as though she was eleven again and she and Mum had briefly escaped and she was drawing pictures of her perfect house in her diary for one day. Someday. Maybe that day was now.
Choosing not to look at the prices yet, she had been lying in the cold imagining his vision for her cottage when Rachel had rung.
She immediately dressed and ran out the door. As she turned on the car, she saw Henry’s door open and he came to the side of the car.
‘Everything okay?’ His beautiful face was concerned.
‘The girl at the tea shop – I gave her my number. Well, she called me; her mother is hurt. I’m going to wait with her.’
‘The one with the bruise?’ he asked.
‘Yes!’ said Clara. ‘You saw her also?’
‘I thought she must have a dodgy boyfriend.’
Clara turned on the lights of the car. ‘No, I don’t think it’s a boyfriend. I’m going down to see if she’s okay and wait for an ambulance with her. Something about her worries me.’
Henry nodded and then waved as she drove down the lane and onto the road.
The roads were dark and she thought the lights of her Mini weren’t strong enough. She turned on high beams and saw a fox run across the road.
‘Christ, fox, get off the road,’ she murmured as she headed towards the village and then pulled up at the front of the bakery.
She used the flashlight on her phone and banged on the glass with her hand.
‘Rachel? It’s Clara. Turn the lights on so the ambulance medics can see the shop.’
The lights turned on and then the door opened, the bell sounding incongruous in the night and the surroundings.
Clara stepped inside and saw Rachel’s mother lying on the floor with blood everywhere and her leg looking very much broken.
‘Oh God, is she dead?’ asked Clara without thinking.
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so – she was moaning,’ Rachel said in a monotonous voice.
Clara rushed behind the counter and pulled a stack of tea towels and handed them to Rachel. ‘Put theses against her head, try and slow down the bleeding.’
Rachel stood helplessly so Clara moved quickly and took them off her. She gently lifted the woman’s head and put the tea towels underneath the wound, hoping it would stem the bleeding.
‘Go and get a blanket for your mum. We need to keep her warm so she doesn’t go into shock.’
Thankfully Rachel responded and went upstairs and came back with a wool blanket and Clara instructed her to use it to cover her mother.
The sound of the ambulance broke the still of the night and Clara watched Rachel, who was standing on the bottom stair, biting a nail.
‘She will be okay,’ she said gently to Rachel. She wondered if for a moment Rachel looked disappointed at this news and briefly entertained the thought that Rachel had pushed her mother down the stairs. If it was Clara, she would have pushed a woman like that, and for a moment, the memory of the last night with her father came back to her – the sounds of his screaming in the kitchen, and Clara’s blind rage at what he’d done. It took all her might to push these memories back down where she kept them, guarded by the dragons of her childhood that had kept her safe.
Clara stood back as the paramedics rushed inside, did their work on Moira Brown and then loaded her into the back of the ambulance.
‘We can follow in the car,’ said Clara. Soon, she and Rachel were driving to Salisbury, the ambulance lights far ahead in the distance.
Rachel was silent as they drove in the car, speeding along the dark roads, and Clara respected that but wondered what was going on in the girl’s mind. She knew this silence. She knew the fear this girl felt, and she knew the relief that the person who’d hurt you had been stopped – but at what cost had that come to Rachel? She hoped it wouldn’t be the price that she had paid so many years before.
11
Henry was concerned he had done too much with the sketches and the watercolours for Clara but he was a visual person and sometimes a one-line quote description did not do justice to the work he could envision for a home.
It felt ironic to Henry that he was so brilliant at conjuring up what a house needed and wanted, as though it whispered it to him as he repaired for the owners, and yet he travelled in a van on wheels.
If anyone else looked at Acorn Cottage, they saw a shrivelled old maid but Henry saw a great beauty waiting to be unveiled. With the right amount of care he could make her so pretty and elegant again, bringing the garden to life and the charm back to the home. Rethatching the roof was laborious and necessary but he would source the best water reed he could for Acorn Cottage, then he would paint the cottage inside and out. Perhaps a pink wash for the outside to pick up the light in the mornings and evenings. He wanted the cottage to look like a cloud at any time of the day.
The inside would be the colour of clotted cream and he would build furniture and fix things that were already inside, and find pretty items for the rooms in local second-hand shops and paint them with flowers and polka dots and everything Naomi had wished for and that Clara loved.
He imagined roses
