Page 13 of Sunset at Embthwaite Farm
But Agatha had already turned and started walking down the street, so Anna felt as if she had no choice but to follow her, and truth be told, shewouldlike a cup of tea and a cream bun, if not the interrogation that inevitably would come along with it.
Five minutes later, she was settled as the only customer in Agatha’s tea room, which was exactly as she remembered—patterned carpet, patterned curtains, patterned drapes, and all different patterns. Somehow, in a crazy way, it worked. And Agatha’s baking, she recalled, was absolutely wonderful.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Agatha called as she bustled back to the kitchen. “I’ll put the fire on.”
The fire was a three-bar electric fire of the kind Anna remembered from her childhood. She recalled there had been something oddly comforting about its orange glow, but it had produced very little warmth. Still, she appreciated the effort, along with the friendliness. She’d been lonely since coming back to Embthwaite Farm, she realised. She didn’t have dozens of friends back in Stroud, and she tended to be quite a reserved person anyway, but she’d made a few and she missed the chats at the garden centre, the occasional night out for a glass of wine.
“So.” Agatha came back into the room and plonked a tray onto Anna’s table. “Let that steep for a bit,” she said, nodding towards the teapot-for-one. “I’ll put the fire on.” She flicked a switch by the hearth and with a buzzing sound, the electric fire started to turn a pale orange. Anna smiled.
“Thank you, Agatha,” she said. “This is lovely.”
“You used to come here quite a bit, as I recall, with your wee one.”
“Harriet,” Anna confirmed, feeling a pang of sorrow at the memory. “It was a treat after dentist appointments, although I don’t know if a cream bun was the right choice, considering she usually got a lecture from the dentist about avoiding sweets.” A sigh escaped her, the sound more accepting than melancholy. Those days felt like a very a long time ago.
“She was such an affectionate thing, your Harriet,” Agatha continued as she moved around the room, tweaking a napkin or straightening a spoon on the already laid tables, as if she was expecting a dozen customers to stampede the doors. “Thought the world of you, it seemed to me. Hanging on your every word.”
For a second, Anna could picture it perfectly—Harriet with her dark button eyes and head of glossy black curls, grinning up at her with a whorl of whipped cream on her chin. Anna laughing, touching her finger to the cream before Harriet grabbed her finger and with eyes sparkling with mischief, licked it off. Anna’s laugh, as clear as a bell, as she shook her head, too amused actually to scold her.
Rachel would have never shared a moment like that, Anna reflected. She’d been so serious as a child, so anxious to always get it right, to please her father. Harriet had been the mummy’s girl, and Anna had adored her for it. Her lonely, battered soul had craved the connection, the comfort.
Of course, as Harriet had grown older, that connection had lessened, or at least changed. In secondary school, Harriet had made a boisterous gang of friends who often came to the house, sprawled in the living room or around the kitchen table with crisps and fizzy drinks while Anna had retreated upstairs. By that time, her depression had started in earnest, a black cloud of dark thoughts that followed her wherever she went. It hadn’t helped that she’d felt, in some way, as if she’d lost Harriet; even then she’d known it wasn’t really a fair or healthy way to think. Being a mother was, at its essence, a continual process of letting go. Children needed to find their way in the world, away from their parents.
But maybe not quite as far away as Harriet had ended up going.
“Well,” Anna told Agatha, with a small, bittersweet smile. “She did, once.”
Agatha cocked her head. “That doesn’t change,” she said quietly. “Even if it looks like it does. Inside.” She pressed two bony fingers to her heart. “They don’t change.”
Anna stared at her, hope warring with a deep-seated scepticism. Wasthatwhy Harriet was holding on to her anger? The other side of love, as it were?
“Now,” Agatha stated briskly, all traces of sentiment gone, “eat your cream bun!”
Chapter Six
It turned outto be remarkably, ridiculously easy to rent a house. After her tea at Agatha’s—the cream bun was just as delicious as she’d hoped—Anna decided, rather recklessly and on the spur of the moment, to call the number that had been on the flyer outside the post office.
She wasn’t even sure what she was going to say; she just felt the need to do something. Talking to Agatha, recalling how she and Harriet had tea in the cosy little tea room, had stirred up far too many memories. Good memories, ones she’d repressed because she hadn’t felt she deserved to remember them, somehow. To recall the happy times she’d once had with her daughters.
It made Anna wonder if she was the one who had subconsciously negated everything she’d ever done in light of her abandonment. No, she decided, her daughters had done that, too. But she’d let them. She’d believed they were right, and truth be told, she still wasn’t sure that they were wrong.
But those memories were in the past, and she wanted to think about a future. A future for herself, as well as for Harriet and Rachel…a future in which they could all be together, which, she was coming to conclude, necessarily involved some kind ofspace. Hence, the house.
A cheerful but slightly hassled-sounding young woman answered the mobile number Anna dialled after a couple of rings, and Anna haltingly explained her interest.
“The rental?” the woman exclaimed distractedly. “Oh, yes, it’s free. Do you want to come and have a look round? I’m home now and the baby’s not too grumpy so now is as good a time as any, if you’re nearby.”
“All right,” Anna replied, startled by the seeming simplicity of the thing. The woman, Jane, gave her directions while a baby began to grizzle in the background, and it turned out the rental house was only two streets away from Agatha’s, on a quaint, narrow little street of similar houses, all with doors painted in different colours, like a rainbow. The door of the rental was lavender, and the house next door, where Jane lived, was a deep cobalt blue.
As Anna knocked, she could hear wailing and surmised the baby in question had decided to be well and truly grumpy, after all.
“Coming…coming!” a woman called breathlessly, and then she flung open the door, blowing a strand of strawberry-blonde hair out of her freckled face, a large, chubby baby balanced on one hip. The baby’s face was screwed up and red from crying, but as he (or she? Anna wasn’t sure) caught sight of her, a lively interest came over the chubby, dimpled face and then the baby let out a squeal of what sounded like delight before starting to gummily gnaw one fist.
“Oh, he likes you,” the woman, who had to be Jane, exclaimed in approval. “He doesn’t take to everyone. He particularly doesn’t like my mother-in-law, which, I have to say, isveryunfortunate.”
“I think that’s a fairly standard reaction to mothers-in-law,” Anna replied with a smile, and Jane let out a positive hoot of laughter.
“Oh, I’m going tolikeyou,” she exclaimed. “Do you like gin?”
