‘You don’t get to choose if you have a baby or not really. The baby chooses you. Some women aren’t ready to have them and that’s fine and some yearn for them so much they scare them away. I yearned. Still do sometimes, even though my insides are now pickled and George has been dead for thirty years.’
A shadow crossed Tassie’s face and Clara felt guilty for disturbing old memories in an old woman.
‘I want to help Rachel, but I don’t know what else I can do,’ said, Clara changing the subject.
‘Rachel needs someone to believe in her. Any praise you give her sits so uncomfortably on her shoulders that she’d as soon shrug it to the floor and ask for a beating than hear in detail why she might be brilliant. Abuse does that to you. You begin to believe it until you become it.’
Clara looked down at the table and touched the gold-edged plate as a vision of her own mum came into her mind and she closed her eyes for a long moment.
Tassie continued. ‘She needs time away from the abuse and the abuser, and then she needs to learn to trust. I had a rescue dog like her once. Took two years for her to allow George to pat her but then she would sit on his knee of a night and look at me as though I was the mistress and she was the wife.’
Clara laughed. ‘I don’t know that Rachel will ever get to that stage but I would just like her to have a little more confidence in herself and in her skills in the bakery.’
Tassie nodded. ‘I agree, and that will come, but you have to show her you can be relied on, and small movements, no big gestures yet. She shies away easily.’
Clara wasn’t sure if Tassie was talking about Rachel or her old pet dog.
‘Tell me about the cottage,’ said Tassie. ‘I seem to remember there was a lovely climbing rose, pink, very fragrant. Shelia used to bring me bouquets when she came by the village.’
‘I don’t know much about gardening,’ admitted Clara. ‘I need to learn.’
‘You’ll learn by being in it,’ said Tassie. ‘The soil will be fine after all this time resting – it’s ready for love, it’s fertile. Put things in it, let them grow, create a little place where you don’t worry about anything but the shoots coming up from the earth, and the thrill of the new buds on a branch.’
Clara thought back to when she was a child and the book she had loved.
‘Like Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden,’ she said.
Tassie smiled. ‘Mary was a girl after my own heart. I would have slapped that terrible screaming Colin also.’
‘You know, I am so glad I met you, Tassie. You just might be the perfect person. I think I’m going to aspire to be like you in my life.’
Tassie laughed and banged the table with her hand. ‘Well, you might want to aim a little higher, love, but I will agree: I am a good place to start.’
Clara picked up a piece of gingerbread, took a bite and sighed. ‘It’s exquisite. That girl sure can cook.’
Tassie nodded. ‘She needs to be on one of those baking shows they have on the telly,’ she said to Clara.
‘But her mother would be trying to get on the camera instead. Claiming it was her recipe,’ Clara answered.
Clara chewed her delicious treat and sipped her tea. Tassie was absolutely right, but how could Clara protect this girl from the one person who was supposed to love her?
If she knew the answer to that, then her own life would have been very different.
As though reading her mind, Tassie spoke. ‘Sometimes the only thing we can do is survive. We can go through life showing people we are coping and functioning but inside us, we know we’re only pretending and we hope that no one else will ever find out.’
She paused before continuing. ‘Until there is something that changes us and we know we can’t go back to living like that anymore. We have to move forward. We make a huge change. We do something drastic. For some women the first sign is cutting their hair. For others it’s letting go of everything and by everything, I mean every cup and saucer, every shred of responsibility in life. They climb mountains or open an orphanage, or plant a garden. But they are changed and they know they can never go back to that life again.’
When Tassie finished speaking, Clara felt a tear fall from her eye but she didn’t brush it away. It was soothing in the warmth of Tassie’s kitchen.
‘I don’t want that life anymore,’ she heard herself say aloud.
‘Of course you don’t, pet, that’s why you’re here; it’s good to know what you don’t want, so then you’ll know what you do want when it comes.’
Clara wondered why such a strange sentence felt so right.
‘Shall we do a reading?’ asked Tassie as she spun her cup a few times and then turned it over on the saucer.
‘What do I do?’ Clara wondered why she felt like she was dipping her toes into a forbidden pool.
‘Leave a little tea in the cup, not too much more than a sip, and spin the cup three times and turn it upside down.’
Clara did as she instructed and stared at the cup for a minute.
‘Now, turn it over,’ said Tassie and they turned theirs over together.
Tassie looked inside her cup and shrugged. ‘Nothing interesting.’ Then she took Clara’s cup and peered inside.
‘A man and a goat,’ she said and shook her head slowly.
‘Is that good? Is Henry bringing a goat home?’ Clara laughed.
Tassie put the cup down. ‘A visitor who won’t be welcome is coming. I suggest you be ready.’
Clara frowned and peered into the cup. All she could see were a few leaves with no distinct shapes.
‘I’m not expecting
