Dulcie reached out to stroke her arm. ‘You don’t have to, honestly. You’ve had a tough time of it lately. Just relax and put your feet up.’
As Carla watched her walk back to the house, tears pricked her eyes. Dulcie was the best friend ever, and Carla wished she still lived in Birmingham. It wasn’t the same without her. When Dulcie won the farm, Carla had been convinced Dulcie would soon realise life in the sticks wasn’t for her. But to her surprise, Dulcie had taken to it like a duck to water (after an initial blip or two) and was now incredibly happy. She was also madly in love, and Carla couldn’t help wishing that she could find a love like that. She had begun to think she might have found it with Yale, but look what a rat he had turned out to be.
Carla returned Cloud and her babies to the field to join the other goats, and watched them for a while, enjoying their antics as the little ones played together. Then she dawdled back to the house.
When she got there, she discovered Maisie had arrived and was about to start making soap.
Maisie greeted her with a hug. ‘Long time, no see,’ she said.
‘It’s been a while,’ Carla agreed. ‘I hear you’ll be running a kennel soon.’
‘Yeah, who’d have thought it!’
‘Not me.’ Carla grinned at her. ‘Look at you, adulting at last.’
Abruptly, she sobered as she realised that Maisie’s lifestyle was now far more adult than her own. Maisie was the one with a house, a business plan, and a partner. Whereas Carla was still living with her mum, her boyfriend had turned out not to be hers at all, and she wasn’t sure whether she still had a job.
Maisie gave her a sympathetic look. ‘Dulcie told me about your stinker of a boyfriend.’
‘But he wasn’tmyboyfriend, was he? He was someone’sfiancée.’
‘Stop beating yourself up. You weren’t to know.’
‘Is that what I’m doing?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘But he could cost me my job.’
‘So? Get another.’
‘That’s easy for you to say,’ Carla retorted.
‘Because I’ve had loads of them?’ she laughed. ‘Doesn’t that prove my point?’
‘But I like my job.’
Maisie shrugged. ‘In that case, you’ll have to fight for it.’
Easier said than done, Carla thought. How could she fight when she didn’t have a leg to stand on? Yale had made sure of that.
‘Why the goggles?’ Carla eyed the pair in her hand with mistrust. They weren’t exactly fetching.
‘Lye is basically sodium hydroxide,’ Maisie explained. ‘It’s horrid stuff. You don’t want to get it on your skin, and definitely not in your eyes.’ She gave her a pair of black, heavy-duty rubber gloves. ‘You’ll need to put those on as well.’
‘Why use it at all, if it’s so horrid?’
‘When it’s mixed with fats and oils the chemical reaction leaves no residue, so it’s perfectly safe. In fact, you can’t make soap without it. Well, youcan, but it’s not classed as natural soap.’
Carla frowned. ‘Do you mean that the soap I washed my face with this morning contains lye?’
‘It does. Plus goat’s milk, coconut oil, olive oil and fragrance.’
‘You know an awful lot about it.’
‘I’ve been making soap for a couple of months now, but there’s still a lot to learn.’
Carla examined the equipment and ingredients laid out on the workbench. She and Maisie were in one of the sheds next to the milking parlour. After being informed that it used to house sheep, Carla was convinced there was still a whiff of the woollyanimals in the air. Her eyes roved around the room, noting the fridge and freezer, the racks of shelves with colourful bars of soap on them, and the table with an old bookcase behind which held the finished products, packaged and neatly labelled.
