“I’m sorry,” I hear myself say. “I can’t do it.” I head for the kitchen door and out into the garden.
“What?” Iris comes after me, wiping her hands on her apron. “Sweetie, what’s wrong?”
“I can’t do this!” I wheel round. “I can’t just … just sit around patiently, waiting for yeast to get its act together.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s such a waste of time!” I clutch my head in frustration. “It’s such a waste of time. All of it!”
“What do you think we should be doing instead?” she asks with interest.
“Something … important. OK?” I walk to the apple tree and back again, unable to keep still. “Something constructive.”
I glance at Iris, but she doesn’t seem offended.
“What’s more constructive than making bread?”
Oh, God. I feel an urge to scream. It’s OK for her, with her hens and her apron and no wrecked career on the Internet.
“You don’t understand anything,” I say, close to tears. “I’m sorry, but you don’t. Look … I’ll just leave.”
“Don’t leave.” Iris’s voice is surprisingly firm. The next moment she’s in front of me, placing her two hands on my shoulders, looking at me with her penetrating blue eyes.
“Samantha, you’ve had a trauma,” she says in kind, even tones. “And it’s affected you very deeply—”
“I haven’t had a trauma!” I wheel away, out of her grasp. “I just … I can’t do this, Iris. I can’t pretend to be this. I’m not a bread maker, OK? I’m not a domestic goddess.” I look around the garden desperately, as though searching for clues. “I don’t know who I am anymore. I have no bloody idea.”
A single tear rolls down my cheek and I wipe it away roughly. I’m not going to cry in front of Iris.
“I don’t know who I am.” I exhale, more calmly. “Or what my goal is … or where I’m headed in life. Or anything.”
My energy’s gone and I sink down on the dry grass. A few moments later Iris comes and squats down beside me.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, her voice soft. “Don’t beat yourself up for not knowing all the answers. You don’t always have to know who you are. You don’t have to have the big picture, or know where you’re heading. Sometimes it’s enough just to know what you’re going to do next.”
For a while I let her words run through my head, like cool water on a headache.
“And what am I going to do next?” I say at last, with a hopeless shrug.
“You’re going to help me shell the beans for lunch.” She’s so matter-of-fact that I half smile in spite of myself.
Meekly, I follow Iris into the house, then collect a big bowl of broad beans and start splitting the pods as she shows me. Pods into a basket on the floor. New broad beans into the basin. Over and over and over.
I become a little calmer as I immerse myself in my task. I never even knew broad beans came from pods like this. To be honest, my total experience of broad beans has been picking them up in a plastic-covered packet from Waitrose, putting them in my fridge, taking them out a week after the sell-by date, and throwing them away.
But this is the real thing. This is what they’re like, dug straight out of the ground. Or … picked off the bush. Whatever it is.
Each time I split one open it’s like finding a row of pale green jewels. And when I put one in my mouth, it’s like—
Oh, OK. It needs to be cooked.
Yuck.
When I’ve finished the beans we return to the dough, kneading it into loaves. We put the loaves into special tins and then have to wait another half hour for them to rise again. But somehow this time I don’t mind. I sit at the table with Iris, hulling strawberries and listening to the radio until it’s time to put the tins into the oven. Then Iris loads a tray with Cheshire cheese, bean salad, biscuits, and strawberries and we take it outside to a table set under the shade of a tree.
“There,” she says, pouring some iced tea into a tumbler made of bubbled glass. “Better?”
“Yes. Thanks,” I say awkwardly. “I’m sorry about earlier. I just …”
“Samantha, it’s all right.” She cuts a piece of cheese and puts it on my plate. “You don’t have to apologize.”
“But I do.” I take a deep breath. “You’ve been so wonderful … and Nathaniel …”
“He took you to the pub, I heard.”