TRISHA ASHLEY

Wedding Tiers

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge, London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Trisha Ashley 2009

Trisha Ashley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007329052

Version: 2018-04-23

Jean Ashley, 1927-2009, who took joy in my success

Table of Contents

Copyright

Prologue: Ends and Beginnings, 1983

Chapter One-Cakes and Ale

Chapter Two-Sweet Music

Chapter Three-Blessings

Chapter Four-Love, Actually

Chapter Five-All Apple Pie

Chapter Six-Hippie Chic

Chapter Seven-Gathering In

Chapter Eight-Snap Happy

Chapter Nine-Pisa Cake

Chapter Ten-Slightly Adulterated

Chapter Eleven-Over and Out

Chapter Twelve-Stitched Up

Chapter Thirteen-Altered Image

Chapter Fourteen-White Wedding

Chapter Fifteen-Undone

Chapter Sixteen-Peapodded

Chapter Seventeen-Off-Piste

Chapter Eighteen-Mixed Pickles

Chapter Nineteen-Driven

Chapter Twenty-Faithful Friends

Chapter Twenty-one-Visiting Rights

Chapter Twenty-two-Unwanted Presence

Chapter Twenty-three-The Family Way

Chapter Twenty-four-Handsome Cavaliers

Chapter Twenty-five-Chicken

Chapter Twenty-six-Subtleties

Chapter Twenty-seven-Spring Fever

Chapter Twenty-eight-Three Tiers for the Bride

Chapter Twenty-nine-Good Reception

Chapter Thirty-Tried and Tested

Chapter Thirty-one-May Day

Chapter Thirty-two-Raspberries

Chapter Thirty-three-Family Matters

Chapter Thirty-four-Gestures

Chapter Thirty-five-Wedding Belles

Chapter Thirty-six-Fruits and Leaves

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Exclusive extract of Good Husband Material

Also by Trisha Ashley

About the Publisher

Prologue: Ends and Beginnings, 1983

When Josie awoke in hospital, unscathed except for concussion and an impressive array of bruises, she had no recollection of the crash. Granny, red-eyed but stoical, had to break the news to her.

Somehow she managed to blank out most of the weeks immediately following the accident too, so that when she looked back later it seemed to her that one day she was living in St Albans with a full set of parents and several good friends, leavened with the usual teenage-years angst and a heartfelt, if destined to be forever unrequited, passion for Sting, and the next she was being whisked off alone to Granny’s cottage in Lancashire, to start a new life.

‘It’s just thee and me now, flower,’ Granny was all too often to remark, though with the best of intentions. But it wasn’t likely that Josie would forget that fact, even if amnesia and anger were her current first lines of defence. For she was totally and illogically furious, both with her parents for so selfishly getting themselves killed, and with poor, grieving, gentle Granny for being truly ancient, so that Josie was convinced that she would also soon be snatched away, leaving her totally bereft.

It would be better to love no one, to feel nothing at all—much safer.

All that summer, she silently and sullenly followed Granny around the garden while she hoed, dug, planted and harvested, or helped Uncle Harry (who lived next door and was not a real uncle, only having married Granny’s cousin) to tend the poultry. And slowly Josie began to gain some comfort from the cycle of cultivation, the clucking hens and the drowsy, contented humming of bees; while across the Green, the ancient church bells repeatedly rang a joyful wedding peal, a signal that hope and happiness still existed and might one day be hers again.

Only in the evenings, lying in her narrow bed among the transplanted possessions of her former life, the mournful screams of the peacocks next door in the gardens of Blessings would pierce right to her heart with unbearable sadness, and she would put a pillow over her head and weep.

She didn’t take the bus to her new school on the first day. Instead, Uncle Harry drove her there in the yellow Vauxhall Cavalier that was his pride and joy. And then, embarrassingly, he and Granny both stood at the gates like the oldest parents in the world while Josie went on alone. She turned once, and they waved at her, as she had known they would: it was comforting but deeply uncool.

Catching sight of her, a passing youth—tall and broad-shouldered, with floppy, light brown hair—stopped dead and gave her a big, drop-dead-gorgeous smile. Suddenly breathless, she gazed into his warm hazel eyes, and it was as though she already knew she’d found a kindred spirit, a soul mate—recognised that fate, having taken love away with one sweep of the dice, had then, fickle, tossed her a perfect six.

‘Hello!’ he said, his voice deep, friendly and confident. ‘I’m Benjamin Richards—but you can call me Ben…or anything else you like.’

Flustered, she stammered shyly: ‘I’m Josie. Josie Gray.’

‘Nice to meet you, Josie Gray.’ He smiled again before rejoining his waiting friends, who were all nudging each other and laughing.

She was jerked out of her trance by a voice at her elbow saying, ‘You’ve been here five minutes and dishy Ben Richards spoke to you? Wow!’

A small, slender, impishly pretty blonde girl was looking her up and down from under her fringe as if she wasn’t quite sure what the attraction had been. ‘You must be the orphan—only we were told not to mention that.’

‘You just did,’ snapped out Josie, who had become used to people tiptoeing around her as though she were some kind of delicately balanced explosive device.

The girl shrugged. ‘Well, you can’t go pussyfooting around things for ever, can you? I’m Libby Martin, and if it makes you feel any better, my mother’s an alcoholic slut and I have no idea who my father was.’

Strangely, it did make Josie feel better, and she grinned. Then the bell went and everyone started to stream towards the door.

‘Come on—Miss Price told me I had to show you where to go and I’ve got to look after you all week,’ Libby said. ‘God, I’m so glad you don’t look naff—apart from that terrible haircut. If we’re going to be friends, you’ll have to do something about it.’

‘Granny cut it and I think it looks cool,’ Josie said defensively, then added, ‘Are we going to be friends?’

‘Oh, I think so, don’t you? Probably end up BF.’

‘BF?’

‘Best friends.’ Her blue eyes went wide. ‘Where on earth are you from?

‘St Albans.’

‘Huh.’ Libby looked unimpressed—clearly she’d never heard of the place. ‘I’ll tell you about my big plan at break, if you like.’

‘Big plan?’ Josie echoed.

‘Well, I don’t want to be Libby Martin with the slutty mother from up the council estate for ever, do I? So I’m reinventing myself.’

‘Great idea,’ Josie conceded, suddenly dying to know what her new friend was going to reinvent herself as, and how she intended to do it. ‘What—’ she began, but then the bell rang for the second time and Libby grabbed her arm and started towing her along. Practically everyone else had already vanished indoors, including the gorgeous Ben Richards.

‘No time now—I’ll tell you later, so get a move on or we’ll be late. Though come to think of it, I suppose that’s OK today,’ Libby added, again with an impish smile. ‘You’re my “get out of jail free” card.’

At lunchtime Libby outlined her plan, which seemed to be directed at leaving Neatslake as soon as possible and marrying a rich man.

‘Isn’t that a bit…’ Josie searched for the right word, ‘mercenary?. Out for what you can get? What about love?’

‘But I wouldn’t marry a man unless I loved him,’ Libby said, looking shocked. ‘No way would I do that! But I’m only going to let myself fall in love with someone well off, who will look after me.’

‘Right,’ Josie said doubtfully, because this kind of ambition had never cropped up when she’d been discussing future careers with her friends in St Albans.

‘But first, I have to get ready to live that kind of life—you know, like in Pride and Prejudice, when they keep going on about all the accomplishments you need to be the wife of a rich man?’

‘Well, yes, but I think they meant speaking Italian and doing embroidery, that kind of thing, didn’t they?’

‘Yes, but translate that into the twentieth century,’ Libby said impatiently. She dug a notebook out of her bag and flipped it open. ‘I’ve got a list of things I need to learn, like speaking without a broad accent. Mrs Springer, the English teacher, is helping me with that.’

‘I like your accent,’ Josie said.

‘You’re mad!’ Libby said, then moved her finger down the page and continued, ‘Horse riding, tennis, skiing…’ Here she paused, uncertainly. ‘Rich people do a lot of skiing, but that could be difficult round here. We don’t get a lot of snow and the nearest dry ski slope is miles away.’

‘Are you sure you need all of those?’

‘Some of them, anyway—as many as possible. You can help me.’

‘OK, but I’m not mad about horses—they’re so big.’

‘Don’t chicken out on me before we start,’ Libby said. ‘What about you, what do you want?’

‘I don’t know, really. My parents thought I ought to…’ She suddenly trailed off, her voice trembling.

‘Look, don’t go all wobbly on me!’ warned Libby, and to her surprise Josie saw that her new friend had tears in her large blue eyes. ‘If you start crying, then I will too, and then everyone will know I’m as soft as butter and I’ll be done for. I’m only cool to know because they think I’m hard as nails.’

Josie sniffed back the tears. ‘Sorry. My—my parents wanted me to go to university, but I don’t know…Now I just feel I’d like to stay in Neatslake for ever and help Granny with the gardening and Uncle Harry with the hens. Granny’s teaching me how to bake and make jam and stuff too.’

‘You can’t make a career out of any of that.’

‘Yes I could. I could be a gardener, and I think I’d like that.’ She caught sight of Ben Richards in the distance, in the middle of a group of boys. He was taller than the rest so he was easy to spot.

Libby saw where she was looking. ‘Ben’s fourteen, in the next year up from us, and he’s very popular. His parents wanted to send him to some public school but he decided he’d rather come here with his friends and he’s very stubborn. He’s brilliant at art—he’s done his O level already—but he’s totally thick about everything else.’

‘I’m sure he isn’t!’

‘He’s good at football,’ she conceded. ‘I’m not sure how clever you have to be for that, but it makes him popular with the boys too.’

They watched him in the distance and then Josie sighed and said, ‘I don’t suppose he’ll ever notice me again. I suppose it was just because he practically fell over me and I was a new face.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Libby said, looking at her thoughtfully, then added immodestly, ‘You’re not pretty like me, but sort of attractive in a different way. I’ve never met anyone else with hair that really dark red—or eyes that bluey-greyish-lilac sort of colour.’

‘Thanks, but I’m not sure I want to be different.’ Her eyes returned to Ben, now playing football with a group of other boys. She was also tall for her age…

‘Ben asked me out once, but I had to turn him down,’ Libby said.

Josie turned and stared at her new friend, feeling a pang of jealousy. ‘Not part of the big plan?’

‘No way.’ She shook her head. ‘And I think he only asked me because his friends dared him to. They probably told him I was easy, like Mum. Anyway, I don’t want to get tangled up with some village boy; I have to concentrate on the bigger picture. I’m saving myself for Mr Right. Mr Rich and Right,’ she added, then giggled. ‘It might have been worth going out with Ben, though, just to see his parents’ faces! They’re so snobby and stuck up, especially his mother, they’d have had fits.’

‘Oh? What does she do?’

Absolutely nothing, but Ben’s father’s a hospital consultant and they live up a lane the other side of Church Green, in a converted farmhouse. Ben’s already got his own studio in one of the outbuildings, because his mother doesn’t like mess in the house.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘One of his friends told me.’

‘Granny’s house is on the Green,’ Josie said. ‘That pair of cottages by the really old black and white building. My uncle Harry lives next door to us, but he’s not really an uncle, he just married Granny’s cousin.’

‘The old house is Blessings,’ Libby nodded. ‘It’s Elizabethan.’

‘Granny says she used to go there to clean, years ago.’

‘In that case, don’t get ideas about Ben Richards. His parents would probably think a granny who was a cleaner was only one step above a slutty mother.’

‘I don’t see why,’ Josie said defensively. ‘Anyway, she was a nurse during the war, but it damaged her back so she took up cleaning afterwards—just light stuff. She still gets a bad back sometimes, but that’s probably just because she’s really, really old. My mother was a nurse too, and my dad was a policeman. We lived in a police house in St Albans.’

‘Well, don’t start crying again, or you’ll set me off,’ Libby said briskly.

Josie gave a watery smile. She’d got the measure by now of Libby’s kind heart under her sometimes brusque exterior, and her friend’s lovely blue eyes were, indeed, brimming again with sympathetic tears.

‘A dad who was a policeman is at least a couple of rungs up from not knowing who your father is—and my sister, Daisy, doesn’t know either, except that we have different ones,’ Libby pointed out. ‘Maybe it’s better not to know.’

Libby left the bus before her new friend, at the other end of Neatslake, but Ben Richards and a couple of other boys got off when Josie did, suddenly swinging down the spiral stairs from the upper deck as the bus stopped, and jumping off first.

She didn’t think he’d noticed her, but as she turned the corner towards Church Green, he fell into step beside her as if he’d been waiting for her. Which he had.

‘I hear your granny makes the best cakes in Neatslake,’ he said, with that warm, irresistible sideways smile, and Josie felt the glacier around her heart crack into a million fragments and melt away.

* * *

‘Well, that’s going to put the cat among the pigeons,’ Granny said thoughtfully when Ben had finally—and reluctantly—gone off home, full of cheese straws hot from the oven and several slices of butter-rich fruitcake. ‘But he seems a nice boy—considering.’

‘Considering what?’ Josie demanded, coming out of a pleasant trance. Her mouth ached a bit from all the smiling she’d done this afternoon, and she wondered if her face muscles had atrophied over the last few months from disuse. She got up and looked at herself in the small, cloudy mirror beside the coat pegs, but it was about as much good as a reflection on water, all ripply.

‘If you two are going to be friends, I don’t think Ben’s parents, especially his mum, will be too pleased about it.’

‘I’ve heard she’s a snob, Granny. Do you know her?’

‘Oh, yes. Many’s the time Nell Slattery’s sat here in the kitchen with your mother,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘They did their nursing training together and started working at the same hospital together too, and they were quite good friends in those days.’

Josie frowned. ‘So why won’t she be pleased if me and Ben are…’ she blushed, ‘friends?’

‘Well, flower, for one thing her husband is a consultant pathologist and the very instant the ring was on her finger she chucked the nursing and most of her old friends with it, and got Ideas. And for another—well, her husband fell for your mother first, you see, and Nell got him on the rebound.’

‘Ben’s father once went out with Mum?’ Josie said, amazed.

‘No, she didn’t have any fancy for him, but he pestered her until she met your father and they got married—then he turned and wed Nell instead. Since then she pretends she’s never met me if we pass in the village. Cleaners are below her notice. Though I suppose,’ she added with humour, ‘if she really didn’t, she’d be trying to employ me!’

‘There’s nothing wrong with having been a cleaner,’ Josie said loyally.

‘No, I’m not ashamed of having done good honest work, but I was proud of your mother, getting her nursing qualifications. And she was so pretty too. You look just like her at that age, Josie.’

‘But I’m not pretty,’ she said, surprised.

‘Of course you are.’

Josie shook her head definitely. ‘No, I’m not. Libby Martin, my new friend at school, said she thought I was unusual. Libby really is pretty—small and blonde and slim.’

‘Isn’t she Gloria Martin’s younger daughter? The talk of the village, that one is!’

‘Libby isn’t like her mother,’ Josie said definitely.

‘I don’t suppose she is. Neither of the two girls has had a bad word said about them,’ agreed Granny fairly. ‘The older one is apprenticed to a hairdresser and doing well. What’s she called? Some flower name.’

‘Daisy, I think,’ Josie said. ‘So, can I invite Libby to come round here sometimes?’

‘Yes, of course you can.’

‘Cool!’

‘I’m glad to see you making friends already, though I didn’t think you’d be starting with the boys quite so quickly!’

Josie blushed. ‘Ben’s just being nice. I mean, it’s not like he’s asked me out. He did ask Libby out once but she turned him down.’

‘Quite right too. At your age, friendship is better,’ Granny said firmly. ‘I don’t mind him coming here to see you, but no goings-on.’

Josie blushed furiously. ‘Granny!’

Later, in her room, she took the framed photograph of her parents out of the drawer where she’d hidden it away and looked from her mother’s smiling face to her own serious one in the dressing table mirror. Her mother was pretty, even with laughter lines and a bit of extra weight plumping up her cheeks, but Granny was just being kind, for surely her eyes had been bluer and her skin less sallow than Josie’s own?

Then she tried to remember what colour her father’s eyes had been, but already the memories were fading, along with the first sharp edge of pain and anger.

As the years passed, she forged a bond of hopes, dreams and laughter with Libby and moved seamlessly from friendship into love with Ben. But, deep down, she never quite lost that slight feeling of insecurity, the fear that those she loved might just be snatched away from her at any moment.

And she always hated the cry of peacocks.

Chapter One Cakes and Ale

The Artist has gone off to London again, for the opening night of an exhibition that includes his work. The source of his inspiration may come from the countryside, but these increasingly frequent trips to the metropolis are yet another necessary compromise to our way of life.

We aim to be as self-sufficient as possible—and still the twenty-first century constantly intrudes. Realistically, we’re doing well if we can strike an eighty/twenty balance! Even this diary is now written directly onto a laptop and emailed straight off to the editor of Skint Old Northern Woman magazine, just one example of the constant contradictions involved. And, of course, many of you now subscribe to the online version.

But it has to be admitted that the Artist has a weakness for all kinds of gadgets and bits of technological wizardry that I don’t share even when, with the best of intentions, he presents me with something like a breadmaking machine, which he is sure will make my life easier…

‘Cakes and Ale: the musings of a backyard good-lifer’

The sun was making a brave attempt to warm a dank and fuzzy mid-October morning when Ben, looking as big, tousled and wholesomely delectable as always, turned on the doorstep to say goodbye.

‘Oh, I wish you didn’t have to go,’ I said, putting my arms around his neck to pull him down to kissing level. Honestly, you’d think he was going on some exotic foreign trek into uncharted territory, rather than to stay with old friends in London for a couple of days. I really must get a grip! But these moments do sweep over me occasionally, because when you’ve been orphaned as a child and then lost the grandmother who brought you up, it’s hard not to be afraid that fate might also decide to snatch away the person you love most in the whole wide world.

‘You know I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to, darling.’ Ben enfolded me in a reassuring if asphyxiating hug, like a good-natured grizzly bear.

‘Liar, liar, your bum’s on fire!’ I chanted rudely. ‘You’re loving your bit of fame, admit it. These days there’s a glint in your eye and a spring in your step every time you set off for London.’

He grinned, though guiltily, his fair skin flushing slightly. ‘Perhaps—but aren’t I always more than happy to be back home again, with you?’

‘Maybe,’ I conceded, because it was true that he always came back exhausted and more than ready to slip back into the old, familiar rut as if he’d never been away—until the next time. ‘But then, maybe you’re just missing your home comforts?’

‘You’re one of my home comforts,’ he said, squeezing me again and then letting me go. ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I get to Russell and Mary’s flat—promise.’

‘That’s OK, I don’t really think anything awful will happen to you between here and Camden, unless things have changed radically since I last came with you.’ I paused reflectively, trying to remember when that was, and then added in surprise, ‘Do you know, that must be more than a year ago!’

‘Is it?’ he said. ‘It doesn’t seem like that long.’

‘No, the time has just flown. I feel I’m losing touch with Mary too, and we used to be such friends, but now if I phone she’s always about to go out and never rings me back like she says she will. I really must find someone who would look in on Uncle Harry and walk the dog, so I could start coming with you again.’

‘You know Harry’s too independent to let anyone else keep an eye on him and too frail to leave on his own,’ Ben pointed out patiently. ‘Anyway, you’ll be much happier here, doing something with all those baskets of apples and pears Dorrie keeps giving you.’

‘Actually, I always enjoyed my trips to London, catching up with everyone and visiting my favourite places,’ I protested, which was true, especially when Libby was in town so we could meet up. ‘But you’re right, there’s a huge amount to do here at the moment. I’m appled out and I still need to get the last of the marrows in, make green tomato chutney and start pickling beetroot—plus I have a really tricky wedding cake to finish icing. It’s just that I do miss you when you’re away.’

‘And I miss you too, darling,’ he said, but absently, looking at his watch. ‘I’d better go—speak to you later!’

He gave me a kiss and then off he strode across the Green towards the High Street and the bus to the station, swinging his overnight bag, while I mopped a weak and pathetic tear from my eye with the belt of my blue towelling robe and summoned up a bright smile in case he turned round to wave.

He didn’t, but that was probably because Miss Violet Grace whipped around the corner on her tricycle just as he reached it and he had to take sudden evasive action.

A collision was averted and Ben vanished from sight. Spotting me, Violet veered rapidly in my direction, the bobbles of her gaily coloured Peruvian-style knitted helmet flying in the breeze.

‘Isn’t Ben an early bird?’ she called, coming to a sudden halt in front of me, so that her hat fell forward over her eyes. She pushed it back and peered upwards, and what with her mauve lipstick, pale complexion and fringe of silvery hair, she would have looked quite other-worldly had it not been for the faint flush on her cheeks engendered by pedalling hard. ‘Off to London again, is he?’

‘Yes, and I would have driven him to the station in the van, but he insisted on catching the bus. At least, I hope he’s caught it, because I held him up a bit,’ I said guiltily.

Violet had been to fetch the newspaper from Neville’s Village Stores. However hard she and her two elder sisters might find it to make ends meet on their pensions, their father, General Grace, had always had The Times, so it was unthinkable to them that they could possibly start the day without it.

‘Ben is a brilliant artist—The Times said so.’ She looked doubtful, though willing to believe anything written in that august organ. ‘I thought I would just pop across to remind you that there is a wedding at St Cuthbert’s today—ten thirty. Will you be there, dear?’

The Three Graces and I are all wedding junkies, lurking outside the church as the happy couples emerge, although this was a habit I had so far managed to keep from Ben, who was stubbornly anti-Establishment in the matter of legal wedlock. He hadn’t always been so adamant about it; it sort of came over him by degrees while he was a student.

‘I’ll try, but I have a wedding cake to ice and more green tomato chutney to make. I’ll put some in your fruit and veg box later, shall I? And did you say you wanted some frozen blackberries? I’ve got loads.’

‘Lovely,’ she agreed, preparing to cycle off, ‘yes, please. Dorrie Spottiswode’s giving us some apples, so we can make apple and bramble pies. Pansy’s knitting her a tam in exchange, from some leftover mohair. We thought that was about equal value in Acorns.’

Pansy isn’t some kind of ingenious squirrel—Acorns are simply a unit of currency I devised a few years ago, to help a little group of us to swap produce and services.

‘You can have the latest copy of Skint Old Northern Woman magazine too. I’ve read it. And I must finish off the next instalment of “Cakes and Ale” and get it off to them,’ I added guiltily. My deadline was always the twentieth of the month, which wasn’t that far away.

‘Righty-oh, see you later!’ Violet cried gaily, and then cycled off round the Green to Poona Place, leaning forward over her handlebars, earflaps flipped backwards like psychedelic spaniel’s ears, while I, suddenly shivering, went back inside.

In the kitchen, under a tea towel, Ben had arranged root vegetables and green tomatoes into a heart shape and added a carrot arrow.

It was a pity he’d created this earthy symbol of our love on the immaculately clean marble surface dedicated to making my wedding cakes, but it still made me smile.

Later, sitting in our cosy living room overlooking the garden, logs burning in the stove and a glass of Violet’s non-alcoholic but fiery ginger cordial by my elbow (three Acorns per bottle), I was trying to wrap up the latest episode of my long-running ‘Cakes and Ale’ column for the alternative women’s magazine.

I’d written the obligatory ‘what’s-happening-with-the-garden-and-the-hens’ bit, describing September’s mad scramble to get all the fruit and vegetables harvested and stored, clamped, preserved or turned into alcohol, processes that were still ongoing, if not quite so frenetic. Some things, like the elderberries, were quite over and well on the way to being turned into ruby-red wine.

I do love the season of mellow fruitfulness, and there’s nothing quite so blissful as having a larder full of pickles, chutneys and preserves, crocks of salted beans and sauerkraut, and wine fermenting gently by the stove…So maybe I am the squirrel and that’s why my subconscious decided we would call our barter currency Acorns!

Anyway, I finished that part of the article off with Ten Delicious Things to Do with a Plum Glut (crystallised plums—oh, be still, my beating heart!) and then, after an eye-watering gulp of ginger cordial, embarked on the philosophising section, my readers’ favourite:

If we are not quite living off the fat of the land, as self-sufficiency guru John Seymour once put it, we are at least utilising the cream clinging to the edges. And what cream, cheese and yoghurt there has been recently, provided by friends who keep goats, and a Dexter cow or two, at their smallholding on the outskirts of the village…

Mark and Stella, our friends with the smallholding, are a much older hippie couple, and I’ve often wondered whether Ben and I were behind the times or ahead of them when, as teenagers, we dreamed of one day being self-sufficient. Whichever, I was more than happy that the way we lived was suddenly very trendy and aspirational so that the magazine, and especially my column in it, had something of a cult following. I love to share—ideas, inspiration, tips, food…

Granny and Uncle Harry were a great early influence, managing to produce practically all their own fruit, vegetables and eggs, plus the occasional hen for the pot, just from their combined back gardens in Neatslake, which is quite a large and pretty village in Lancashire, not far from Ormskirk.

Ben and I had more of a country smallholding in mind, even if we were hazy about how we could ever afford it—unless Ben’s paintings began to sell really well, of course. That was the dream: we would work our plot together, and he would paint while I baked and bottled and preserved. It sounded such bliss!

But just as Ben was finishing off the final year of his postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art in London, and I was living with him and helping make ends meet by working in a florist’s shop, Granny suddenly died and left me this cottage.

Since she’d taken me in at thirteen when I was orphaned, and was my only remaining blood relative, I was absolutely devastated. It brought back lots of long-forgotten memories of my parents and how I felt after I lost them…and I know all this orphan business sounds a bit Charles Dickens, but I can’t help that—that’s the way it was!

But I couldn’t contemplate selling the cottage, which was my home as well as a link with Granny, and nor did I want to leave Harry, of whom I was very fond, to cope alone. But then, I didn’t want to be parted from Ben either!

I expect I was a bit neurotic, needy and tiresome for a while, but Ben was always there for me, in his strong, silent way. And in the end he came up with the solution, suggesting that he go back and complete the last weeks of his course alone, and then we’d settle down together in Neatslake.

Despite it being Ben’s idea, his parents never forgave me for dragging him back from what they were convinced would have been instant fame and fortune in London; but then, they’ve never thought me good enough for him anyway. At one point they even threatened to cut off the small allowance they were making him, though they changed their mind. I thought he should tell them to stick the allowance where the sun don’t shine as a matter of principle, but he wouldn’t, so we had one of our rare arguments. I’ve never used any of the money—it goes straight into Ben’s account to pay for art materials and CDs and all those gadgets that mean so little to me and so much to him.

But his parents were wrong, because here we still were, living a version of our dream on a slightly smaller plane than we’d envisaged, perhaps, but none the less very happy, for all that. Perhaps one or two things hadn’t worked out how we planned…though as Ben said, as long as we had each other, nothing else really mattered.

And luckily, it was all the compromise involved in trying to balance living a greenish life in the middle of a village, against earning enough to pay the inescapable bills, that interested the readership of Skint Old Northern Woman magazine enormously. While they didn’t pay a lot for my articles, it formed a regular part of my income, and then the icing on the cake came, quite literally, from my hand-modelled wedding cake business, catering for the alternative market—sometimes very alternative:

JOSIE GRAY’S WEIRD AND WONDERFUL WEDDING

CAKES

Do you want something different? Original? Personal? Truly unique?

Josie Gray will design the cake of your dreams!

Or at least it had formed the icing, until Ben had won a major art prize about eighteen months previously, and his work began to get the recognition it deserved at last and fetch much greater prices.

Looking back now, I suddenly had an uneasy feeling that the equilibrium of our lives had subtly changed at that point…but maybe I was being over-imaginative?

Ben bought me a shiny, expensive breadmaking machine to celebrate his win, which he said would take away all the endless kneading. Though, actually, I always rather enjoyed doing it, going off into a dreamy trance and forgetting time, which made for very light bread.

But that, and one or two other little gadgets he’d brought back for me from London, seemed against our whole ethos, though it could be that I was unsettled by them because I simply didn’t like change. It made me uneasy. I just wanted us to go quietly on as we always had, happy as pigs in clover.

The wood-burning stove crackled quietly and nearby a door slammed, waking me from my reverie. The top of Harry’s felt hat appeared as he shuffled slowly down his garden, hidden by the dividing fence, to feed the hens.

There was an arched gateway between our two plots so we could both come and go freely, for though Harry was nominally in charge of the hens, we shared our gardens and what grew in them. But these last few months, as Harry had grown increasingly infirm after a fall, it seemed I was doing the lion’s share of the work.

Ben used to do most of the heavy digging, but lately he’d either been shut up in the wooden studio at the end of the garden, built against the tall stone wall separating us from the grounds of Blessings, or he was in London.

Each time when he got home and enfolded me in a big, warm hug, swinging me off my feet and telling me he loved me, it almost made up for his absence…but not quite.

I looked down at the laptop and sighed heavily, having totally lost the thread of what I was going to say to finish off.

The little wicket gate between the two gardens squeaked open and Harry came through, followed by his sheepdog, Mac. Harry carried a hoe in one hand and a stout walking stick with a ram’s-horn handle in the other, and I had to give him full marks for effort even if I expected to find him lying full length among the brassicas one of these days. And there was the problem of his failing eyesight, so that half the time he was nurturing seedling weeds and tossing the veggies onto the compost heap…Still, that wasn’t too much of a problem in mid-October, and he was heading for the pea and bean beds, which needed clearing anyway.

Behind him, stepping delicately, followed the pale, speckled shape of Aggie, the escapologist hen. The others were all fat, cosy, brown creatures, whom I couldn’t distinguish apart—and didn’t want to, since they were quite likely to end up on my plate. But Aggie, with her inquisitive nature and skill in escaping from enclosed places, was different, and Harry was forbidden from even thinking of culling her, whether she deigned to lay eggs or not.

Opening the door I called, ‘Tea in twenty minutes, Harry?’ and he made a thumbs-up sign.

I went back in, took another look at my notes, and then rattled off the rest of my article, before changing all the names as usual. Even though I never tell anyone’s secrets, or gossip about local people, I wouldn’t feel half as free to write what I wanted if everyone knew it was me, and where I lived!

Then, with a click of a button, I sent it on its way to the magazine.

It was then I suddenly remembered that in the summer, after one of my cakes had featured in the coverage of a terribly smart local wedding, Country at Heart magazine had contacted me. They were interested in the way I combined my wedding cake business with the self-sufficiency too—but, of course, they didn’t know I was the author of ‘Cakes and Ale’ in SONW magazine, and I didn’t tell them!

They interviewed me by email and telephone, and then sent a photographer to take some pics, but I hadn’t heard anything since, so perhaps they’d thought better of it, or found someone more interesting to feature.

Our Sadie’s been after me to up sticks and go and live in New Zealand with them again,’ Harry said, selecting a ginger biscuit from the tin after careful inspection, and then dunking it in his mug of tea. A bit crumbled and fell, but was neatly snapped up before it hit the floor by Mac, who lunged silently shark-like from under the table and then retreated again. ‘She’s sent me a photograph of the extension they’re building onto the side of the house, like a little self-contained flat.’

‘Granny annexe, they call them. She’s obviously very keen for you to go, Harry,’ I said brightly, trying to sound encouraging, even though I would miss him dreadfully if he did go.

‘She says I should want to live near my only daughter and grandchildren, but it was her chose to go and live on the other side of the world in the first place, not me! There’s no reason why I should have to end my days somewhere foreign.’

‘Well, I suppose they’ve made their life there now and the grandchildren are New Zealanders, and when Sadie sent you the plane tickets and you went out to visit, you had a great time.’

‘Liking the place for a holiday isn’t the same as wanting to live there, away from all my old friends.’

‘I suppose not,’ I agreed, though since Harry’s old friends were popping their clogs with monotonous regularity, a fact he pointed out with some relish from the obituary columns in the local paper, that wouldn’t be an argument he would be able to use for very much longer. The group of cronies he met in the Griffin for a pint of Mossbrown ale most evenings had reduced to three, one of whom had to be helped up the steps to the entrance.

Harry seemed to realise this himself, for he added morosely, ‘Not that they aren’t dropping like flies anyway. But I’ll die here, in my own place—and when I’ve gone, you make sure and give that tin box of papers and medals to Sadie, when she comes over for the funeral.’

‘Of course I will—but I hope not for a long time yet, because whatever would I do without you?’

‘Time catches us all in the end, lass. You’ll find my will in the box too. Sadie’ll get most of what I’ve got to leave, of course. Blood’s thicker than water, and you can’t get away from that, even if you’ve been more of a daughter to me than she has.’

‘No, of course not. I’m only distantly related to you through marriage,’ I agreed, because Granny and Harry’s wife, Rosa, hadn’t even been first cousins, so I hadn’t been expecting him to do anything else. It was true that I’d been spending more and more time looking after him, but then that was only fair, seeing how much help he gave me and Ben when we moved back here after Granny died. Anyway, I loved him, and he and Granny had been such good friends, widow and widower, understanding each other.

Harry was still wearing his battered felt hat, which I rarely saw him without, though in times when he was pondering some weighty matter he would run his earth-stained finger around the inside of the band, as now.

‘I saw a piece in a magazine at the doctor’s last week,’ he said. ‘It said how I could claim a medal for the six months of minesweeping I did right after the war. There was an address to send to—I ripped it out. The receptionist said I could.’

He produced a much-folded piece of thin paper from his pocket and handed it to me. ‘What do you think of that?’

I read it carefully. ‘Yes, why not? You’re entitled to it, aren’t you? It did seem so unfair to me, that after being in the navy in the Far East and fighting on for longer than lots of other people, they made you go and do something even more dangerous for six months before they let you demob!’

It was only in the last couple of years that Harry had started to talk about his war service in the navy. A quiet, sensitive man, what he had seen and experienced had harrowed him and driven him into himself, especially after he lost his wife.

‘There was never anything fair about the armed forces, Josie. You did what you were told, or else! But having to go minesweeping when I wanted to get home to Rosa—well, that was a bit of a blow. And it was dangerous work. You never knew when a mine was going to go up and take you with it, and in those little wooden boats we wouldn’t have had a chance, we all knew that.’

‘It sounds dreadful, and you’ve certainly earned your medal!’

‘So you really think I should apply for it, then?’

‘Definitely—another one for the grandchildren. Do you want me to write the letter for you?’

‘No, that’s all right, I’ll do that, but you could take it to the post office later.’ He began the painful task of hauling himself to his feet, but I knew better than to offer him any help.

‘I’ve left you the hens and the piano,’ he said abruptly, once he was upright. ‘The piano was my mother’s and Sadie won’t want to ship it out there.’

‘Thank you—how lovely,’ I said, touched but not at all sure how I would fit the piano into my small house, or the hens and their coop and run into the vegetable garden. The thought of Harry gone and a stranger one day living next door was very disturbing…

‘Well, there’s no need to cry over it, you daft lump,’ he said bracingly. ‘You’re too soft for your own good, you are. Cry if a hen dies, cry over a dead hedgehog, cry every blessed time that Ben of yours goes off to London!’

A peacock distantly wailed from the grounds of Blessings, as if in agreement, even though I thought it was a bit of an exaggeration. I’m not that soft.

I dabbed my eyes with the edge of my sweatshirt. ‘Of course I’m not crying, it’s wood smoke. That last lot I put in the stove must have been damp. And there’s no reason for me to get upset, because you’ve got lots of good years left in you, Harry,’ I said, more positively than I felt, because look what happened to Granny, who was several years younger. And now I had only Harry and Ben—and my friend Libby, of course. But not only did she live far away, she was also rather like a cat in that, though fond of me, she had her own agenda and came and went as she pleased.

‘I’ve got thick vegetable soup on the stove—I’ll bring you some and fresh bread rolls later, when I take Mac out for a walk,’ I said. Harry is fiercely independent, but I fill his little freezer with single portions of soup, casseroles and all kinds of things, with the heating instructions written on the lids. And I make sure he has fresh bread and biscuits—whatever I’ve been cooking.

‘I like that minestrone best,’ he said ungratefully, pausing with Mac on the threshold and letting gusts of October air, redolent with autumnal garden bonfires, into the room. ‘Got a bit of news, I nearly forgot to tell you. Mr Rowland-Knowles has put Blessings on the market.’

I stared at him. ‘But he’s only just moved back in!’

‘Yes, but he found that stepmother of his had run the place into the ground. She only used the modern wing and let the rest go hang, and you need to keep on top of these Elizabethan houses or they quickly start to go downhill.’ He shook his head at the waste of it all. ‘He came round yesterday afternoon and asked me to look over some rotting woodwork and tell him what I thought.’

Harry, who’d been an expert carpenter in his time, had done work in most of the old houses in the area, so that made sense.

‘It was in a right state—windows blown in and the rain’s made a mess of the floor in one bedchamber, not to mention the woodworm taking hold and the roof needing repairing. The poor man’s desperate not to part with it, but he can’t afford to put it to rights.’

‘That’s such a shame!’

‘Vindictive. His stepmother had the right to live there unless she remarried, but now she finally has, it’s a mixed Blessing!’ He grinned, happy with his little joke.

‘But what will happen to Dorrie’s home if Blessings is sold?’ I asked, for Miss Doreen Spottiswode was Tim’s aunt, his mother’s eldest sister, who now lived in a dilapidated cottage in the grounds and, together with an ancient gardener, did her best to stop the place running completely wild.

‘I don’t think they can get her out. She’ll be like a sitting tenant, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Mrs Rowland-Knowles never managed it, try though she might, for Miss Dorrie had just as much right to see out her days there as she had to live in Blessings. But Miss Dorrie’s looked after that garden since she came here to live with her sister, just after she married. She loves it, and it will hit her hard if strangers take it over.’ He shook his head sadly.

‘I suppose Tim Rowland-Knowles thought about all that before he came to his decision, and there mustn’t have been any option, Harry.’ I didn’t know Tim well, because he hadn’t been near Neatslake since his father died, and not often before that, since he and his stepmother hadn’t got on.

But I suddenly remembered the summer when we were fifteen and Libby’s game plan (which involved acquiring the skills she thought would be necessary in order to become a rich man’s wife) had led her to wangle invites for us to tennis parties at the vicarage. Tim was often there, because the vicar’s drippy seventeen-year-old daughter, Miriam, had a crush on him. He’s tall and thin, with a shock of untidy white-blond hair and vague blue eyes, and you couldn’t imagine him being terribly successful as a solicitor.

At the time Libby was convinced she resembled Debbie Harry, which she didn’t, and her efforts to make her cheekbones stand out meant she constantly appeared to be sucking a lemon. As for me, all I wanted was to look just like one of the black-clad female guitarists in the Robert Palmer ‘Addicted to Love’ video. We were both totally deluded and neither look really went well with tennis clothes, so it says much for Tim’s good nature that he directed the occasional kind smile in our direction.

When Harry had hobbled back into the garden I emailed Libby, though I had no idea whether she was in her pretty London mews house or in Pisa, where she had a rather palatial flat complete with a roof terrace covered with lemon and olive trees in huge terracotta pots. Ben and I had been out there a couple of times, for holidays—she’s always been terribly generous and her second husband, Joe Cazzini, who died last year, had been a lovely man.

‘You remember when we were at school and were taken round Blessings in the fifth year?’ I wrote. ‘You said you wanted to live there, and one day you’d have a house just like it. Well, here’s your chance, because Tim Rowland-Knowles (do you remember we used to play tennis with him at the vicarage?) has had to put it up for sale…’

Of course, I didn’t seriously think she’d want to buy it! Libby’s plans had always involved shaking the dust of Neatslake off her dainty feet for ever, and her visits here since her first marriage had been mere flying ones, in and out, to catch up with me. No, I was just using the news as something exciting that might break the monotony of my emails to her, because she’s not that interested in making jam and mixed pickles.

Her emails were always much livelier than mine and I always enjoyed reading them, though I wasn’t jealous of her lifestyle at all. I much preferred my rooted and settled existence to her butterfly one.

But as I pressed ‘send’, I realised that my roots were feeling frail and threatened, as if they had been undermined by a stealthy mole and were dangling in the air. I supposed all Harry’s talk about dying had unsettled me.

I wished Ben—big, solid and as familiar to me as myself—was home right this second to give me a reassuring hug. He was my rock—and I knew that was a trite and overused phrase, but in my case it was true. But then, our life here kept his flighty artistic soul anchored to reality too, and that couldn’t be a bad thing.

Chapter Two Sweet Music

My wedding cake business, creating personalised fantasies in fondant icing, has really taken off recently. They are based on a rich, dark, organic fruitcake covered with natural marzipan, though there is nothing healthy or wholesome about the icing outer layer! Last week, as I finished off a cake in the shape of a magicians top hat, complete with emerging bride and bridegroom rabbits, it occurred to me that this dichotomy neatly sums up the life we lead—eighty per cent healthy and wholesome, and twenty per cent the enjoyable but unnecessary icing on the cake.

‘Cakes and Ale’

The next morning found me putting the finishing touches to a violin-shaped wedding cake, and although I absolutely adore creating something new, this one had really tried my skills to the limit!

For a start, I couldn’t think how to put the arch in the neck, until I hit on the idea of building it in wedges of cake like a bridge, propped up underneath until the keystone piece was inserted to hold it all together.

Now it was neatly encased in white icing, polished smooth with powdered sugar, and with the name of the happy couple and ‘IF MUSIC BE THE FOOD OF LOVE, PLAY ON’ lettered around the edge, subtly highlighted in edible silver.

The strings had also taxed my brain, until I thought of pulling white toffee into long strands, then laying them out to harden on greaseproof paper, before attaching them. I was just completing the last of some spares, in case of mishaps, when the front door suddenly flew open, letting in a brisk breeze, which blew it into a bow.

Three Chanel suitcases in descending sizes thudded onto the mat one after the other, closely followed by the petite but elegant figure of Elizabeth Cazzini, alias Libby Martin, my oldest friend.

I was not really surprised to see her because Libby usually comes and goes as she pleases, without warning, but I yelled, ‘Close the door!’ as the rest of the hardened toffee strings showed signs of rolling off the counter.

‘OK, there’s no need to shout!’ She shut the door and then regarded me with astonishment while I played a losing game of cat’s cradle with the last toffee strand before it hardened.

‘Oh, well,’ I said resignedly, putting it to one side. ‘I already have several spares.’

‘What on earth are you doing?’

‘Putting strings on this violin cake.’ I gave her a quick kiss, at arm’s length because of my sticky apron, and said, ‘Look, just let me fix them into place with sugar paste, and then the really difficult bit’s done and I can relax and have a break. Put the kettle on.’

‘OK,’ she agreed.

With a bit of concentration I managed to attach the strings, then turned to find she’d made two mugs of strong, steaming tea and was rummaging in the biscuit tin. She came up with a pecan puff. ‘How many calories in these?’

‘I’ve no idea. But what are you doing here, Libby, and where did you spring from? I wasn’t expecting you, was I? I only emailed you yesterday and I thought you might still be in Pisa.’

‘I was. And you should have been expecting me, after telling me Blessings was for sale! But I can see if the Griffin has a room free, if you can’t put me up? And unless you’ve done something radical to that Spartan bathroom, it would be much more comfortable anyway,’ she added frankly.

‘Of course you can stay,’ I said, ignoring this slur on my house, which I admit was shabby and comfortable and not terribly modernised. In fact, apart from installing a wood-burning stove in the living room for heating, it wasn’t much different from when it was Granny’s, right down to some ancient and nameless precursor to an Aga in the kitchen inglenook. ‘I just wish you’d let me know. The spare bed isn’t made up and it’s covered in marrows.’

‘How very seasonal,’ she said, cutting the pecan puff in half and putting the rejected piece back in the tin. Libby is very easy to feed because she will eat anything, but only in tiny, doll’s-house portions, which is probably how she retains her figure. ‘But it’s OK, Josie, I’m going out shortly to look over Blessings—I’ve got a viewing order—so you’ll have plenty of time to sort it out.’

I carefully carried the cake into the larder and came back, removing the headscarf I’d covered my hair up with and the enormous flowered wrap-around pinafore. Freed from the possibility of getting her rather glorious suit stained with foodstuffs, Libby got up and gave me a proper, warm hug that belied her crisp and cool manner, but then I know the real Libby under that sophisticated (and sometimes sarcastic) shell.

‘Seriously, Libs, you actually got the first flight back in order to view Blessings?’ I asked incredulously, returning the hug. ‘Not that it isn’t good to see you,’ I added hastily.

She sat down opposite me at the big, scrubbed pine table, her forget-me-not-blue eyes open wide. ‘Of course! I told you that one day I would like to live there, you said so yourself.

‘Yes, when we were fifteen, and Tim Rowland-Knowles’s father let the school take our class round the house, as part of a history lesson, Libby!’

‘I remember—the teacher took our class photo in the garden afterwards and I had a Princess Diana haircut while you were a New Romantic. I’m not sure which one of us looked worse.’ She shuddered at the memory, but since she looked very pretty in the photo (which I still have) it must have been the thought of my outfit that did it.

‘Even then, I didn’t think you meant you intended living in that particular house, Libs, just one like it.’

‘Yes, but that was because I never thought that it would come on the market. It was my ideal. And, if I recall, you once said you were going to be a gardener, marry Ben, have two children and live in the country—but just because you never did any of that, it doesn’t mean that I can’t fulfil my dream, does it? As soon as I got your email I contacted the estate agent and then got on the next plane.’

‘I am a gardener, Ben and I don’t need to get married to prove our love for each other, and Neatslake is surrounded by countryside,’ I said defensively. I didn’t mention the children, which, as she knows, just never came along…

Libby, not the most sensitive of flowers, took a minute or two to evaluate what she’d just said, and then apologised. ‘Sorry, Josie. I take it Ben is still refusing to have any investigations done to see why there are no bambini? That man has a stubborn streak a mile wide!’

I nodded guiltily, because I’m sure Ben would have been horrified to discover that I discussed our private affairs with anyone else. He’d always been a bit jealous of my close friendship with Libs and he tended to say things about her sometimes that made me think that, despite having several weird arty friends from the wrong side of the tracks himself, some of his parents’ snobbery must have rubbed off on him. That had certainly never stopped him accepting her invitations to holiday at her flat in Pisa, or to take us out to dinner at the flagship Cazzini restaurant near Piccadilly, the first one that Joe ever opened.

‘But it isn’t just stubbornness,’ I explained, ‘it’s because he’s seen how traumatic the whole IVF cycle thing has been for Mary and Russell, and he doesn’t want to put me through that. Anyway, we have each other. That’s enough.’

‘Yes, I can imagine him saying so,’ she commented drily, ‘just like when you moved down to London to live with him when he was doing his MA at the Royal College of Art, and he suddenly started saying neither of you need the outdated trappings of marriage to show your commitment.’

‘Yes, that was a bit odd, when we’d talked of marrying before. We did row about it, because Granny had old-fashioned ideas about things and it would have meant so much to her if we had got married, but he wouldn’t change his mind. But then, he does suddenly get ideas in his head and simply won’t change them, no matter what—he always has done. I don’t see why he won’t agree to a few simple tests, though. I mean, it would be good to at least know which of us has the problem, wouldn’t it?’

‘Sometimes there is no problem,’ Libby said. ‘It just doesn’t happen. But I agree you ought to explore all the avenues before you give up on the idea.’ She changed the subject. ‘What have you done to the kitchen? It seems to have a split personality. The left-hand wall has gone all high tech, chrome and utility. And isn’t that a second fridge and sink?’

‘I suppose it does look a bit strange,’ I agreed, seeing it suddenly with her eyes. Most of it was just as it always had been, with jars of wine bubbling round the old stove, herbs, lavender and strings of onions and dried apple rings hanging from the wooden rack over the kitchen table, bright gingham curtains and braided rug, and crocks and pots of earthenware everywhere. But one wall had been transformed into an ultra-modern and terribly antiseptic kitchen workstation.

‘It’s Health and Safety. Even little home cake businesses like mine need to be checked over and meet standards. There are all sorts of rules and regulations! It’s not like the days when I knocked out a few cakes and some jam on the kitchen table and sold them at the WI Markets,’ I said regretfully. ‘Once things took off, it seemed easier to convert part of the kitchen to a sort of production line.’

‘So, the bride cake business is booming?’

I nodded. ‘It really took off last year when I was asked to design a cake for the Pharamond wedding, over at Middlemoss, and there was loads of publicity. It was a bit of a challenge, what with him being a well-known chef and cookery writer and Lizzie a keen cook too. They could easily have made their own, except they couldn’t agree which of them was going to do it.’

‘Didn’t she write those Perseverance Cottage Chronicles that you used to love reading, all grow-your-own and recipes?’

‘Yes, she still does. It was her books that really inspired me and Ben to try and live as self-sufficiently as possible. The cake was quite easy, three tiers in the form of apple pies.’

‘Weird. Why apple pies?’

‘I don’t know, except that she and her husband had some long-running feud about who made the best one. The cake featured in the wedding pictures in Lancashire Life, and so did the one I did earlier this year, when Sophy Winter over at Sticklepond married her gardener. That was trickier—one big square cake with knot gardens in the corners, and a circular maze in the middle, with a bust of Shakespeare at the centre. I told you all about the discovery of a link between the family and the Bard, didn’t I? Secret documents in a hidden compartment seeming to infer that the Winters were descended from Shakespeare? It was all a bit Da Vinci code!’

‘I could hardly have missed the story! But it seems very unlikely to me and it’s still not proven, is it?’

‘No, I expect they’ll be arguing about it for years, but Sophy has built a whole business out of it. They get loads of visitors to the house and garden now.’

‘You know her?’

‘Yes, we got friendly while working out the design for the cake. She’s really nice, and so is her daughter, Lucy. Which reminds me, how is my lovely goddaughter these days? And where is she?’

Pia, christened Philippa, is Libby’s daughter by her brief first marriage. Her second husband, Joe Cazzini, adopted the infant and doted on her, despite already having grown-up children and grandchildren of his own, but her relationship with Libby became increasingly stormy once she hit the terrible teens. Libby tended to be a bit strict with her and I expect having a young-looking, beautiful and glamorous mother around becomes a liability rather than an asset at a certain age. You could hardly have called Gloria Martin a good role model for acquiring parenting skills, either, but Libby did her best.

‘God knows where she is,’ she said gloomily now. ‘I text her all the time, but if I get a reply, it’s just something like, “AM OK”, which she would say anyway, whether she was or not. I thought you might know—she tells you things she doesn’t tell me, sometimes.’

‘No, I haven’t had an email for a few weeks now…and I have a feeling then that she said she was somewhere in the Caribbean, on an island.’

‘The Caribbean is all islands.’

‘No, I meant a little island, belonging to someone.’

‘Possibly. Once she came into her trust fund at eighteen and I lost all control over her, she could be anywhere. Joe must have been mad, doing that!’

‘Well, remember what we were like at that age? We thought we knew it all! You finished your art foundation year and blagged your way onto a fashion course in London, and I horrified poor Granny by often staying overnight with Ben in his Liverpool digs, when he was doing his fine art degree.’

‘Yes, but the rest of the time you were living sensibly at home, working in a nursery garden and studying for your horticulture qualifications on day release,’ she pointed out. And I was entirely focused on my future and getting to where I wanted to be. Pia’s quite different—she goes around with a group of complete wasters who seem to have no ambitions at all, other than to have a good time, though she keeps saying she’s going to go to college eventually.’

‘Well, you did and then you barely lasted a term before you got married.’

‘Becoming a student was just a means to an end, to get me to London, and then you have to strike while the iron’s hot,’ she said, then looked into her mug and reached for the blue and white striped teapot under its knitted hen cosy (one of Pansy Grace’s making, in black-speckled white yarn—it looked just like Aggie).

‘Phillip was such a sweetie, wasn’t he?’ I said. ‘Once I met him, I knew you were really in love with him. It wasn’t just his wealth!’

‘Of course not,’ Libby said indignantly and I grinned, remembering how I’d asked her when she first knew she was truly in love with Phillip and she’d quoted that bit in her favourite book, Pride and Prejudice (which has always been her blueprint for perfection), where Lizzy tells Jane she first knew she loved Darcy when she saw his beautiful grounds at Pemberley!

‘I loved Phillip, and I was devastated when he died within a year. And then Joe came along and I fell in love all over again.’ She sighed sadly. ‘You know,’ she confided, ‘the trouble with marrying wealthy elderly men is that they’ve always already signed over their business interests to the offspring of their first marriage, who are usually old enough to be your parents, if not grandparents, and have their own families. So although they’ve left themselves plenty to live on, there’s never an enormous legacy for the second wife. Neither Phillip nor Joe left me a huge inheritance, but Joe arranged Pia’s trust fund with the rest of the family when he formally adopted her—they always considered her one of the Cazzinis, even though she was no more related to them than I was. She’s dark like Phillip, though, so she looks like one.’

‘Oh, come off it with the poverty-stricken bit. You’re loaded!’

‘Comfortable, not mega-rich,’ she insisted, though she always seems to me to be fabulously wealthy and able to do anything she wants. ‘If I buy Blessings, I might have to sell the flat in Pisa.’

‘Or the London house?’

‘Tricky. Pia mainly uses that as her home base when she does deign to grace me with her presence. And that’s good, because when she’s in London, she gets taken over by the Cazzini uncles and aunts and cousins, especially Joe’s youngest sister, Maria, and they might manage to knock some sense into her head eventually. She’s more likely to listen to them than to me. The relations in Pisa are a bit too distant to have much clout. Anyway, I like having a base in London.’

She got up. ‘I’ll just go and tidy up a bit and do my face, then I’m off.’

‘You aren’t letting the grass grow under your feet!’

‘I can’t afford to. The estate agent said there’d been lots of interest in Blessings already, almost all from the actors in that Cotton Common soap series that they shoot in Manchester.’

‘I suppose there might have been. They’ve been moving into the area, especially round the Mosses, in the last few years.’

‘Well, they’re not moving into Neatslake,’ she said firmly. ‘Oh, and is Ben home? I forgot to ask,’ she added as an afterthought.

She and Ben had a fairly spiky relationship and I thought he was a little jealous of her. But it wasn’t like we didn’t both have other friends too, though come to think of it, they were mostly couples, like Mark and Stella who keep the goats, or Russell and Mary. Libby—after Ben, of course—was my best friend…

‘He went to London yesterday.’ I looked at the clock. ‘He usually gives me a ring about this time, if he can.’

‘I hope you gave him a clean hankie and told him not to speak to strange women before he left,’ she said tartly, before vanishing into the bathroom, which was inconveniently located downstairs, off the living room. As the door closed behind her I heard her exclaim, ‘Bizarre!’

I expect she was impressed by my cherished collection of knitted French poodle toilet roll covers. Whenever the Graces seem to be running short of Acorns, I ask for a new one and Pansy obliges, with whatever wool comes to hand. The last one was in glitzy speckled silver yarn.

The post, including a plastic-wrapped copy of Country at Heart magazine with the article about me in it, arrived immediately after Libby had left for her viewing. I almost phoned her mobile to tell her about it, but then thought it would wait.

The pictures were rather nice—one of me wearing a big floppy straw hat, digging in the garden, with Aggie waiting for worms, and Ben in his studio painting one of his three-dimensional creations. There was also a lovely one of Harry sitting in a deck chair under the plum tree, Mac curled at his feet, and a couple of smaller shots of me in the kitchen and the wedding cake I had been making (a fairy cake—lots of fairies).

Then I read the article, and really, I don’t remember saying most of the things it said I had! How odd. It all looked and sounded terribly idyllic, though.

Chapter Three Blessings

I’m making a diamond wedding anniversary cake—a stacked two-tier one, with the names of the happy couple around the top tier and ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ around the bottom one. There will be a pink and blue harlequin diamond pattern all over it too, and some of the original favours from their wedding cake—white doves and horseshoes, mostly. I’d already baked the cake, so today I covered it with marzipan.

After that, I started off some carrot wine and then, being in that kind of groove, made two carrot cakes which I decorated with little carrots made from the scraps of marzipan left over from the cake, coloured orange and green with natural food colour.

‘Cakes and Ale’

After puzzling over some of the inane, if not downright daft, things I was supposed to have said about self-sufficiency and nature’s wonderful bounty, I put the magazine to one side and retrieved the Violin cake from the larder, looking at it with considerable pride.

The strings were firm and hard, and it was lucky it was an autumn wedding, because with a bit of luck it would be cool at the reception and they wouldn’t sag. I threaded a bunch of white and palest pink silk ribbons around the neck carefully, like adorning a medieval troubadour’s lute, then covered it and replaced it in the cold larder, ready to deliver tomorrow.

Then I went upstairs to move the vegetables from the spare bed and make it up, though it seemed a lot of bother when Libby probably wouldn’t stay more than one night. It was pretty chilly in there, but would soon warm up once the door was left open and the heat from the stove wafted up the stairs.

As I shook out lavender-scented sheets and pillowcases, I thought how horrified Libby would be when she saw the way Blessings had deteriorated. Her recollections, like mine, would be of how it was once, the snowy interior walls of the Elizabethan part of the house studded with plaster emblems and the garden neatly laid out, all lawns, roses and specimen trees.

But Harry had said it was all sadly changed now…and, come to that, I’d forgotten to remind Libby of Dorrie Spottiswode’s existence, though I expect she would find that out soon enough. Dorrie and I had become friends over the last few years, but I didn’t think Libby had ever met her.

I wondered what she would make of Tim, for she probably only remembered him as the languid fair youth of so long ago. He’s a solicitor in Ormskirk, and I expect he has some private income, though obviously it’s not enough to restore Blessings to its former glory.

Tim was in the pub one evening recently when Ben and I were meeting our elderly hippie friends, Mark and Stella (who unfortunately seem to take the smell of goat with them everywhere, though you get used to it after a bit).

I asked him if he remembered playing tennis with me and Libby when we were teenagers and he said he did—but he was just being polite; I could see he didn’t really. But that was hardly surprising, because we were two awkward, immature schoolgirls and he was almost grown up. He seemed very nice, though he has a permanently anxious look in his blue eyes—an eager-to-please expression—and that shock of white-blond hair makes him look a bit startled. He has a nervous habit of constantly trying to smooth it down, though regular haircuts would be a more practical idea.

But anyway, I was right about the eager-to-please bit, because he certainly seemed to have pleased Libby I’d just started to wonder how many hours it took to show somebody round a house, even a substantial Elizabethan town house, when she phoned to say Tim had invited her out to dinner and she didn’t know what time she would be getting back!

If I hadn’t been so surprised I would have told her to call in for the front door key on her way, but by the time it occurred to me and I phoned back, she had switched her mobile off.

I went back to marzipanning my Diamonds Are Forever anniversary cake, but I was a bit distracted…What was Libby up to? Trying to beat the poor man down on the price?

She staggered in looking glazed at about one in the morning, after hammering on the door to wake me because by then I’d fallen asleep on the sofa in the living room.

‘Did you have a nice time?’ I asked sleepily as she removed her coat and kicked off her stilettos with a sigh of relief.

‘Bliss!’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Sorry to make you stay up, though. I wasn’t thinking straight when I phoned you earlier because—well, you won’t believe this, Josie, but I’m in love!’

I creaked my eyelids open a bit wider. ‘You do mean with Blessings, don’t you?’

‘No! Well, yes,’ she qualified, ‘it’s the sweetest little Elizabethan house imaginable. But I’ve fallen in love with Tim too. Oh, Josie, this is it— love at first sight.’

‘Again?’ I said, putting the kettle on for cocoa.

‘This is different! I fell in love with Phillip and Joe, of course, but not the very second I set eyes on them,’ she said indignantly. ‘But when Tim opened the door, we just gazed into each other’s eyes and…well, we couldn’t look away. And after that…’ she heaved a voluptuous sigh, ‘we talked and talked. Then we realised how late it was and thought we’d better go out for something to eat…Oh, I feel like we’ve been soul mates for ever!’

‘That’s a bit how I felt when I first saw Ben,’ I said, with a reminiscent sigh. ‘Though I suppose I was so young I didn’t understand it was love.’

She snapped back to reality, her blue eyes wide, and said, ‘No, it was nothing like that, though admittedly you and Ben had a bit of a Juliet and Romeo thing going on. Lucky there were family objections only on his side—it takes two families to start a good, tragic feud.’

I let that go. I played Juliet to Ben’s Romeo in the school play one year, and I hated the end, though if they had both got up and run off hand in hand, I suppose it wouldn’t be a tragedy.

‘Did you actually find time to look around Blessings—remember, the house you were so keen to buy that you flew all the way over from Pisa with a viewing order?’

‘Of course I did, and it’s even more wonderful than I remembered, though it’s so run down and shabby! Those plaster walls with funny little animals and shields and stuff moulded into them, and the huge beams and little diamond-paned windows with ripply glass. Tim adores the place and, do you know, he loves Italy too. He’s been to Pisa but always wanted to go back for long enough to explore it properly! Isn’t that a coincidence?’

‘Mmm…’ I said, starting to feel sleepy again. This was way past my bedtime.

‘In fact, we seemed to agree about everything. And the great thing is, there’s no need to buy Blessings if Tim and I are getting married so I can spend the money renovating it instead.’

I missed my mouth entirely with the last dregs of my cocoa and it went down the front of my dressing gown. ‘Married? Libby, you only met him two seconds ago!’

‘That’s all it took for us to fall in love and know we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together,’ she said simply. ‘Tomorrow we’re going to buy an engagement ring and I’m moving into Blessings.’

‘Bloody hell!’ I gazed at her anxiously. ‘Look, Libby, hadn’t you better think about it a bit first and not do anything hasty? I mean, I know you fell in love with your first two husbands quickly and married almost immediately, and it worked out fine, but this is hugely rash. And he’s not rich, either.’

‘I know, but it doesn’t matter.’ Then she bleated, ‘Resistance is useless,’ in a Dalek voice, and giggled like a teenager.

‘You’ve gone mad, Libs!’

‘Yes, but mad in a good way. Tim’s handsome, sweet, funny, and kind—everything I could possibly want…’

I gave her the sweet and kind, but he definitely wasn’t handsome. So it must be love.

‘We’d like to get married tomorrow.’

‘Well, you can’t,’ I pointed out. ‘I really think you ought to consider all this in the cold light of day, not get carried away and—’

‘Break out the elderflower champagne and let’s celebrate!’ she interrupted gaily. ‘Come on, Josie, don’t I always know exactly what I’m doing?’

‘You did’, I conceded, ‘but that was before you turned into Love-Crazed of Pisa!’

But by then, being Libby, she had taken out a little pink leather-bound notebook from her handbag and started to make a to-do list.

‘What’s the name of the vicar?’ she asked, looking up.

She was still in the same state next morning, except the list was now two pages long.

Over breakfast I showed her the Country at Heart article, which she read through twice, and then commented, ‘It doesn’t sound like you at all!’

‘It isn’t. I’m quite positive I didn’t say most of that. In fact, some of it is quite idiotic.’

‘The average reader probably won’t think that, and it’s great publicity for the cakes—and for Ben too, come to that.’ She peered more closely at the photograph of him in his studio. ‘I’m not sure about whatever it is he’s working on, though. It looks like an explosion in a half-set black pudding.’

‘His work has been a bit odd lately,’ I admitted. ‘I don’t like it very much, but it must be good or he wouldn’t have won that prize.’

‘I tell you what,’ Libby said, tapping the page with her long, French-manicured nails, ‘I bet lots of Skint Old Northern Woman readers get this magazine too, and they will put two and two together. Your cover will be blown.’

‘Oh, I hope not. I’d have to be so careful what I said if everyone knew who I was!’

She’d got me worried, but later, when I got Ben on the phone and told him, he said he didn’t think the readership of a little niche magazine like SONW would be the same as that for an expensive glossy like Country at Heart. But he was pleased he was in it, I could tell from his voice.

I didn’t mention the Libby and Tim situation. I thought I’d give it twenty-four hours and see if it wore off.

Chapter Four Love, Actually

A friend is suddenly moving back to the village after dividing her time between Italy and London for several years—in fact, she is here!

She always had a fancy to live in a nearby small Elizabethan house and, when it recently came onto the market, she snapped it up—and the owner with it. Reader, she married him!

I’ve had to quickly finish off the Diamonds Are Forever anniversary cake I was making (a special order) so I could start on my friend’s bridal cake…

‘Cakes and Ale’

Libby and Tim certainly didn’t let the grass grow beneath their feet, and by the time Ben returned from London only a few days later, they were engaged, living together and planning their imminent nuptials.

I’d finally broken the news to Ben on the phone, but I wasn’t sure he quite believed me until he got back and I showed him the announcement in the local paper, which had just come out.

‘This has to be the most unlikely pairing ever!’ I said. ‘I mean, “A marriage has been arranged between Mrs Elizabeth Cazzini of London and Pisa, and Mr Timothy Rowland-Knowles of Blessings, Neatslake,” may sound very well, but everyone around here knows that she started life as plain Libby Martin from the council estate. And if her mother wasn’t actually on the game, she sailed perilously close to the edge! Libby doesn’t even have a father to give her away; she says she’s going to do it herself. Mrs Talkalot at the post office says the village is reeling with shock, but she personally doesn’t think Libby is after Tim’s money. I told her Libs is much better off than Tim so, if anything, it would be the other way round, but I’m not sure she believed me.’

Even two rich and elderly husbands later, transformed into a wealthy and sophisticated widow, I was sure there would always be people who would try to put her down. Not that they would manage it. Libby might look like the fairy off the top of the Christmas tree, but her backbone is pure steel.

‘That sort of class snobbishness doesn’t seem to matter so much these days, does it?’ Ben said rather absently, staring at the newspaper.

It was on the tip of my tongue to blurt out that it certainly did matter to his parents, who had never thought me good enough for their blue-eyed boy, but I heroically managed to stop myself in time. It was mostly his mother’s jealousy and spite, anyway.

‘I suppose you’re right and perhaps no one will take much notice, especially since Libby’s mum moved down to Brighton years ago to live with her other daughter,’ I conceded, though if Gloria Martin turned up at the wedding—and there is no way you can’t invite your own mother, regardless of what you think of her lifestyle choices, is there?—then it might rake things up again. ‘Tim doesn’t care who her parents are. Dorrie Spottiswode did think Libby was a gold-digger at first, but she quickly warmed to her once she discovered she was a well-off widow, and she’s started going on about “vigorous plebeian blood enriching the atrophied Rowland-Knowles family tree”, now.’

‘Libby’s certainly a fast worker; I’ve only been away a few days.’ Ben didn’t sound admiring, more thoughtful, but as I’ve said, he’d always been a bit jealous of our close friendship. Perhaps it was because Libby and I shared a bond that deep. We both had sadness in our pasts and a yearning for security, even if our ideas of what that entails, and how to obtain it, were entirely different. I often suspected a bit of Ben’s parents’ snobbish attitude had rubbed off on him too, so no matter how smart and rich she became, in his mind she remained Libby Martin from the dysfunctional family at the wrong end of the village.

‘She didn’t have to work at it, Ben, because she and Tim fell in love the instant they set eyes on each other again. It’s terribly romantic! He showed her over the house and then they went out to dinner—and by next day they were cruising Lord Street in Southport, looking for an engagement ring, and sending out the announcement to the newspapers. They just caught the deadline for this week’s issue.’

‘Does she have enough room on her finger for any more rings?’ he asked sarcastically.

His attitude was really starting to annoy me. ‘Don’t be silly. She took off Joe’s ring when she put on Tim’s, just as she did with her first husband’s when she married Joe. The ring’s terribly pretty—rose diamonds in a platinum setting.’

I tried not to sound too wistful. The only ring I possessed was Granny’s old worn wedding band, upstairs in a box of treasures; but then, when I spent most of my days either up to the elbows in earth or cake mix, it wouldn’t be practical to wear jewellery anyway, would it? But it would have been nice to have the option!

‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ Ben quoted smugly.

‘Oh, honestly, Ben!’ I snapped. ‘What is the matter with you? Libby’s married in haste twice before and been very happy, so I think she knows what she’s doing. And it will be lovely to have her living nearby—she’ll be company when you’re away. They’ve asked us both over for a drink tomorrow evening, so that you and Tim can get to know each other.’

‘We do know each other. We’ve met a couple of times down at the Griffin.’

‘Oh, have you? I know we ran into him there once when we were with Stella and Mark, but we didn’t talk much.’ Ben does sometimes walk down there in the evening with Harry and then stays for a drink, and to most men, exchanging a few words at the bar is enough to constitute a friendship. ‘Well, it’s kind of them to invite us round for a drink, isn’t it?’

He grunted unenthusiastically, but I expect he was just tired. As usual on his return from these trips, he was looking exhausted and glad to be home, but I had a feeling there was also something on his mind…

‘Libby showed me over Blessings yesterday and the Elizabethan part does want a lot doing to it. Tim’s stepmother really let it go. It’s not even clean. That Portuguese couple who worked for her don’t seem to have been very efficient at all, so I’m helping her have a good spring-clean. Just as well it’s not that big a house, more of a town house than a manor.’

‘Haven’t you got enough to do, Josie? I hardly see you as it is. You’re always off looking after Harry, walking the dog, making cakes or doing errands for the Three Graces.’

‘But these days you’re shut away in the studio working most of the time you’re home, Ben, so I don’t see much of you either, unless you come to talk to me while I’m gardening,’ I pointed out.

‘I want to finish that second series of paintings,’ he said, ‘but if you’re out half the time, you aren’t going to know whether I’ve been looking for you or not, are you?’

Actually, I did have a pretty good idea, because once he was down in the studio he was lost to the world until called in for meals or to help with something. He’d even constructed a little lean-to kitchen area at the side, with a cold-water sink and a kettle, and took a Thermos of cold milk down with him for his tea. I kept the biscuit barrel stocked up, and popped down with hot scones and other treats from time to time. Sometimes he used the kitchen area as a darkroom and I lived in fear that one day he’d absent-mindedly make his tea with developing fluid, or something.

If he’d been around more often, he would have realised that I was only usually out in mid-afternoon when I needed a break, unless I crept out to the church gates for ten minutes for a sneaky wedding fix when I heard the bells peal out…

‘Helping to sort out Blessings is just a temporary thing and we’re having fun!’ I said. ‘I rang Sophy Winter up and asked her advice on cleaning and renovating old properties, because she’s done wonders with Winter’s End since she inherited. She was very helpful. And her great-aunt Hebe is a friend of Dorrie’s, so when she heard what was happening she sent Libby a big jar of her home-made beeswax polish. Wasn’t that kind?’

‘I can’t see the elegant Mrs Elizabeth Cazzini getting her hands dirty. You’ll end up doing it all yourself.’

‘There you do her an injustice,’ I said indignantly, ‘Libby’s never minded hard work. She went straight out and bought overalls and ordered the cleaning materials Sophy advised from a specialist firm called Stately Solutions.’ I didn’t mention the several pairs of thin cotton and latex gloves, with which Libby intended to protect her immaculate nails. ‘Dolly Mops, that cleaning agency from Ormskirk, sent a team round to give the modern wing a good going-over, but Sophy advised us to do the rest ourselves. And she knew someone who could come and repaint the plaster walls with whatever authentic gunge they need—you can’t just slap vinyl emulsion on them.’

‘Oh, well, I suppose it’s only a week or two, and I expect you’ll both have fun doing it up and planning the wedding and everything,’ he said, his usual good nature returning. ‘Now I’ve got this studio space in Camden I’m bound to be away more, so it will be good that you’ve got company.’

While I was pleased to see Ben slowly warming to the idea of Libby’s permanent presence on the Neatslake scene, this last statement dismayed me.

‘Away more? I thought the stuido was just for storage, because it would be easier than moving your work up and down between here and London in the van. Are you going to paint there too?’

‘Probably just finishing things off. I’ll still do most of it here. But the artists at the studios are forming themselves into a group to exhibit together, the Camdenites, and they want me to join them.’

‘Ben,’ I said, dismayed, ‘at this rate we might as well both move down there and use the cottage as a weekend retreat!’

‘Don’t be silly, you know we both love it here and it’s where my inspiration comes from. It’s only networking, exhibiting and selling my stuff that takes me to London. Now my name’s really getting known, I have to strike while the iron’s hot. But this will always be my home, and actually, when I’m in London, I love the idea of you up here waiting for me and everything going on just as usual.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ I said, slightly mollified, ‘and I do see what you mean about striking while the iron’s hot. But I don’t actually hate London and it’s always nice to catch up with Russell and Mary, so I think, although I got out of the habit of coming with you after Harry had that fall, I should get back into it again!’

‘But that’s easier said than done, isn’t it? I do understand that you can’t leave Neatslake at present. It’s not like Harry can be left alone to look after things any more, and the garden would run to seed now he’s too frail to do much. Besides, what about the Three Graces, not to mention Josie’s Weird and Wonderful Cakes?’

I sighed. ‘I know—it’s all so difficult! I love my life here and I don’t want to go away. It’s just I don’t want us to be apart so much, either.’

‘It’ll get better soon, you’ll see,’ he said easily. ‘When I’m a big name, I can paint anywhere and people will come to me to buy my work, not the other way round.’

‘I suppose so, and it’s some consolation to know we have friends you can stay with. How are Russell and Mary?’

In the days when the three of them were at the Royal College of Art and I was looking after us all and working in a nearby florist’s, learning how to torture innocent flowers into bouquets and wreaths, we’d all been good friends and shared seedy digs together. Now they’re married and have a ground-floor flat in Camden, and they put Ben up in the spare room.

‘They’re fine,’ he said, suddenly looking a bit shifty and evasive. After all these years I recognise the signs.

I narrowed my eyes. ‘And?

‘And what?’

‘And the rest—whatever it is that you don’t want to tell me.’

For a moment he stared blankly at me.

‘Come on, Ben, tell me the awful truth. You haven’t fallen out with Russell and Mary, have you? We’ve known them so long and it’s been really useful being able to stay with them.’

‘No, I haven’t fallen out with them, but they may not be able to put me up much longer because they’ll want their spare room themselves.’ He got up and put his arms around me. ‘Mary’s expecting. She says it’s all due to some herbal stuff she’s been taking, but I suspect it’s more because they ran out of money for further IVF treatment, and the pressure was off a bit.’

‘Expecting?’ I held him off, gazing up into his face, which looked anxious and concerned. ‘You mean, it worked?. What kind of herbal stuff?’

‘Something she got from a Chinese practitioner, though I really don’t see how a few dried plants brewed up into a tea could make any difference, Josie.’

‘Well, something obviously did! How pregnant is she?’

‘About three months. I only just found out, but I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you would be upset.’

‘I’m not upset,’ I lied, since I certainly was. And also, I was ashamed to find, jealous—plus deeply hurt that Mary hadn’t told me about the Chinese herbalist, when she knew how desperately I wanted a baby, too. ‘I’m really pleased for them, but surprised Mary didn’t phone and tell me herself.’

‘I expect she wanted to wait a bit before she told anyone this time.’

Mary had been pregnant twice after IVF treatment and lost the babies at the twelve-week stage, so that would be quite understandable.

‘This Chinese medicine…I wonder where she—’ I began.

Ben’s arms tightened around me. ‘Forget it, Josie. What’s meant to be, will be.’

I held him off and snapped, ‘That’s all very well, but maybe it was meant to be that I consult a Chinese herbalist too! Had you thought of that?’

‘Now, darling, don’t start getting upset about it. I knew this would rake it all up again,’ he said, stroking my back in a would-be comforting way that didn’t quite cut the mustard this time. My biological clock had been ticking so loudly lately that he must have felt he was being followed around by the crocodile in Peter Pan.

‘We’re happy just as we are really, aren’t we?’ he added soothingly.

‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make the attempt to have a family, does it, Ben? I mean, without getting obsessed by it, we could at least explore all the avenues before giving up!’

Not for the first time I suspected that, whatever he said, Ben liked being the centre of my world and didn’t want to share it with anyone, even children (or my one close friend, Libby). Like a big cuckoo chick in a nest, really…

I wondered if all hugely talented artists were that egocentric.

Ben gave me another squeeze and then, obviously considering the matter closed, sat back down in the rocking chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Changed back into old, worn jeans and sweatshirt, his light brown hair tousled, he was the Ben I knew and loved, rather than the distinctly smarter London version who had returned to me earlier that day, but it still didn’t stop me feeling exasperated with him.

‘It’s so good to be home,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I’m shattered. At least here no one expects anything of me and I can just sink back into my groove.’ But then he sat up again as a thought struck him. ‘Unless…Libby’s not staying with us, is she?’

‘No, she moved into Blessings the day after the viewing.’

He subsided again. ‘That’s what I said—fast worker!’

Of course, I phoned Mary as soon as I had a minute to myself, to congratulate her and, if truth were told, to find out all about the Chinese herbalist.

‘This is such great news, Mary! I don’t know how you managed to keep it to yourself for so long.’

‘Well, I would have told Ben sooner only—’

‘I know,’ I broke in sympathetically, ‘you wanted to hug it to yourself for a while, make sure everything was going well, didn’t you?’ I suppose that explained why she’d been a bit distant and reluctant to talk to me for ages too.

‘Yes, there was an element of that until I was at the three-month stage,’ she admitted, ‘but also I felt so sick all the time, which was a bit distracting, though that’s better now. Just as well, because I’ll have to go on teaching as long as I can. The two courses of IVF we paid for meant we had to increase our mortgage, so we still need my income coming in. But afterwards, Russell and I will have to arrange our classes so that one of us can baby-sit while the other is teaching.’

They both lecture part time and since Mary’s are mostly evening classes, that should work well.

‘I bet Russell’s delighted!’

‘Oh…yes. And relieved, I think.’ She gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘It’s only now it actually looks as if I will have this baby that I realise quite how obsessed I’ve been with it. It’s lucky we’ve managed to come through it all as a strong couple.’

‘I thought you’d given up any thought of getting pregnant after the last attempt.’

‘Oh, no! I had to give up the IVF—it was way too expensive and the whole regime of drugs and stuff very invasive—but I never gave up hope.’

‘Ben said you were taking a kind of herbal medicine?’ I prompted.

‘Yes,’ she said eagerly, ‘about a year ago Olivia told me about a Chinese herbalist who specialised in infertility problems, so we went together, for courage.’

‘Olivia?’

There was a pause, and then Mary said, ‘Oh, she’s a fairly new friend you haven’t met. But she’s in her early forties so she was getting even more desperate than I was. Anyway, we were given this rather foul concoction to take three times a day, plus recommendations to balance our yin and yang and stuff like that.’

‘And do you think that’s what did the trick?’

‘I honestly don’t know. It might have been just the relaxing part of it that was crucial, though, goodness knows, we were relaxed enough when we were first married and nothing ever happened then—and we were both younger, so it should have been easier to get pregnant.’

And what happened to your friend? Did it work for her too?’

‘Well, that’s the amazing thing. She fell pregnant about a fortnight after I did! But again, who knows whether it was because she stopped trying so hard or due to the healthy regime and the medicine?’

Who knew, indeed…but it sounded at least worth a try!

‘Mary, do you think you could give me the contact details for this herbalist? It’s all natural, isn’t it?’

‘I haven’t got them by me, but you can look her up on the internet,’ she said, and I jotted down the name.

‘Thanks, Mary.’

‘Are you sure you want to try it?’ she asked. ‘It’s very expensive, though not on the scale of IVF treatment, obviously. And pregnancy does change things. Ben said to me once that he really didn’t mind that you hadn’t had children because he liked you just to himself, the two of you, and having a family would have changed the dynamics of the relationship.’

‘Ben said that?’ I thought about it. ‘He’s always gone along with me when I’ve said I wanted children, but you’re right, he’s never actually been bothered by them not coming along, except on my account. But then, I suppose I’ve always gone along with things he’s felt strongly about in the end, like his going all anti-marriage, even when it upset Granny. She would have loved to have seen me married.’

‘Ben does dig his heels in about things sometimes,’ Mary agreed, ‘and then he never changes his mind. Not that I’ve seen much of him the last few months. I—’ She broke off. ‘Sorry, thought I heard Russell come in. What was I saying?’

‘That you’d hardly seen Ben lately, but I suppose he’s pretty busy when he’s down, especially now he’s taken on studio space. I take it you are one of the Camdenites too?’

‘Yes. Some of my big sculptural ceramic pieces are going into the first exhibition. It’s all looking very promising, though in a way we’re all currently riding on the coat-tails of Ben’s success.’

‘I don’t think he sees it that way—we’ve all been friends so long. And it’s been kind of you to let us use your spare room. I know I haven’t visited for ages, but it’s a relief knowing that Ben’s staying with friends when he’s down in the Big Smoke. But I expect you’re going to turn it into a nursery soon, aren’t you, so he’ll have to find himself another place to stay?’

‘I—yes,’ she said, and then added hurriedly, ‘Look, I’ve left something on the stove, I’ll have to go. But it’s been lovely talking to you, Josie.’

‘Yes, we really should—’ I began, but I was talking to empty air.

What she’d said about Ben not being that keen on the idea of children really crystallised what I’d long suspected myself. He would have accepted it, had it happened, but that was as far as he was prepared to go. And that wasn’t far enough.

It would be terribly devious if I did something about it behind Ben’s back, but it didn’t stop me looking up that website. Mary was right about the expense, but then, we had money in the bank, some of it earned by my cake business, not just from Ben’s work. And the regime seemed to involve a healthy diet and destressing more than anything, which could only be good.

It was surely worth a try? And if babies changed the dynamics of a relationship, it was in a good way, so if anything came of it, I expected Ben would get used to it. He’d have to.

As I started to bake the first in a series of small, round dark fruitcakes from which to construct the wedding cake of Libby’s dreams, I kept wondering if the Chinese medicine had really been what had made the difference to Mary, or if it was just coincidence—or even hope and positive thinking?

It was an exciting prospect, though. All aspects of my life seemed to be exciting lately!

Chapter Five All Apple Pie

It’s been such a good year for the apples and pears that we get from a member or our Acorn barter group, that I’m starting to feel sick of the sight of them! The best have been individually wrapped in tissue and stored in boxes. Festoons of dried fruit rings hang from the kitchen ceiling, there are jars and jars of apple jelly, apple and bramble jam and apple sauce, and one side of my second freezer, in the garden shed, is stacked with pies, crumbles and purée. The apple press has been fully employed and demijohns of wine bubble gently in the kitchen inglenook.

I’m appled out!

‘Cakes and Ale’

‘Why do you want to do the whole church wedding thing, with a meringue dress and all the rest of it, Libby?’ I asked curiously next day. ‘I mean, it is your third time and you’re already living with Tim!’

We were standing in one of the bedrooms in the Elizabethan part of Blessings, the one with the window that had blown in and been left hanging open, so that the rain had made a mess of the floorboards beneath. Harry had been over to mend the catch that morning and we’d just finished pinning a sheet of polythene over the broken panes to keep any more rain from getting onto the floorboards, until they could be replaced.

We were both wearing jeans and jumpers, though of course Libby’s was designer, lush oatmeal cashmere, to my jumble sale and hand-knitted (by Pansy Grace). Libby had incongruously topped her ensemble with a long wedding veil and, since it was a dark day, she looked rather ghostly against the pale plaster walls studded with heraldic emblems, most of them grimacing creatures.

She turned to look at me, opening her round, forget-me-not-blue eyes even wider, like a surprised kitten just before it inserts its needle-sharp teeth into your hand. ‘Yes, but I’m widowed, Josie, and Tim’s ex-wife is a Catholic and managed to get the marriage annulled on some technicality, so we’re allowed the full monty if we want it.’

‘Non-consummation of the marriage?’ I asked with interest, that being the only grounds for annulment I’d ever heard of. (And I hadn’t known about Tim’s brief early marriage before she told me, either—that had been a surprise.)

‘Absolutely not!’ she said decidedly. Then a soft smile appeared on her face, one that was totally different from any expression I’d ever seen her wear before the advent into her life of Tim Rowland-Knowles. Soft was something she had never been, even as a mother. Especially as a mother, since I’m sure she was so terrified that Pia would turn out like her granny that she was often way too strict with her. No wonder the poor child had rebelled!

Anyway,’ she added dreamily, ‘this time it’s entirely different. Before I met Tim I only allowed myself to fall for rich men—and I did truly love Phillip and Joe, you know I did.’

I nodded, because she had been rosy and starry-eyed both times being, despite her crisp-shelled exterior, a romantic at heart.

‘But I hadn’t realised I could feel so—so deeply head-over-heels, and fluttery in the stomach when I see Tim, and as if everything is new and bright and beautiful. So I want to trip down the aisle looking and feeling like a Madonna—totally pure and extra virgin.’

‘You will,’ I assured her, touched, and I didn’t ask which Madonna she had in mind because I thought I could guess. Indeed, she was humming a very familiar tune as she adjusted about three miles of antique gossamer thread veiling, secured by a pearl and diamond tiara, on her natural (if slightly enhanced) golden hair.

It was a Spottiswode heirloom and had been Tim’s mother’s bridal veil, which Dorrie had bestowed on her earlier that morning, as a familial seal of approval. Libby looked like an angel in it—but actually, she looks like an angel in anything. I sometimes wish I did too, but I’m tall, sturdy and grave, with perfectly nondescript blue-grey eyes, a cloud of unruly, fine, dark auburn hair and pale, sallow skin.

‘I’ll have to take the veil with me when I go down to London to find my wedding dress,’ she said, ‘or it won’t match. It’s going to be difficult finding something off the peg that’s suitable, especially in petite, but there’s no time to have one made. I’ll take your measurements with me, Josie, but you’re a pretty standard size twelve, so I should be able to find you something’

‘I can’t imagine why you want me to be a bridesmaid, when you must know hordes of younger and prettier women.’

‘Yes, I do, and that’s precisely the point: I don’t want my thunder stolen and you’ll make a perfect foil,’ she said frankly, examining her flawless and Botoxed-smooth complexion in a clouded mirror, before pushing the veil back a little so that a few more gilded curls peeped out. ‘I’d have had Pia too, but since she put the phone down on me as soon as I told her about Tim and now isn’t answering my calls, I don’t think she’s going to turn up. I don’t even know where she is.’

‘You’re worried about her, aren’t you?’

‘Of course I’m worried, but what can I do? She’s turned eighteen and she’s got money—she’s out of my control. She hasn’t listened to a word I’ve said since she hit the teens anyway, so it’s probably as well I don’t know what she’s getting up to.’

She shrugged resignedly and returned to the subject in hand. ‘You know, Josie, you shouldn’t put yourself down all the time, because you are pretty in your own unusual way when you scrub up, besides being the only real female friend I’ve ever had, so I truly want you at my wedding, as my bridesmaid.’

‘Well…OK,’ I said, touched. She had asked me the previous two times, but luckily there had been hordes of little granddaughters of the bridegroom simply panting to climb into fuchsia silk taffeta, so I’d managed to get out of it. ‘But do you think you could find me a dress in any other colour than pink?’

To be honest, I’m not a terribly girly girl, which is probably just as well. It wouldn’t be practical to go all pastel and frilly when I spend most of my time working in the garden in jeans and wellies, and the rest wrapped in a huge pinafore cooking, jamming, wine-making or baking and decorating cakes.

‘I suppose blue would be better, especially the same dirty French blue as your eyes, and it would flatter your sallow skin more,’ she agreed candidly. ‘It’s a pity the wedding is late in the year, because you look so much better in the summer when your skin has a bit of a glow.’

‘Thanks.’

‘But pink is more weddingy and anyway, it’s going to be a question of what I can find in your size. Besides, I’m going to have a hint of pink in my bouquet and in the roses on the cake, so it would tie in.’

‘You’re quite sure about the cake design before I start putting it together?’

Libby had certainly sounded definite about what she wanted—the Leaning Tower of Pisa, with an ascending swirl of blush-pink roses entwined around it. Hence all the little round cakes I’d been baking, ready to stack up high and ice.

‘Oh, yes, and I’ve told Gina to send me some postcards of the tower, to help you get it right,’ she said, Gina being her devoted tuttofare, or maid-of-all-work, in Pisa.

‘If Pia does change her mind once she’s over the shock, she could take my place as bridesmaid,’ I suggested hopefully, because although I’d always secretly yearned to walk down the aisle, it was as a bride, not an also-ran.

‘I hope she will change her mind, but I’m not holding my breath. But look on the bright side, Josie, if Ben sees you looking all bridal, flowery and pretty, perhaps he’ll finally decide to tie the knot. And, come on, you know you want to!’

‘No I don’t! We don’t need to be married to show we care about each other,’ I lied firmly. ‘Especially not at this stage. Weddings are for other people, not us.’

Libby, who knew me all too well, blew a raspberry and even as I said the words, I was feeling the familiar pang of sorrow and regret that Granny had never seen me walk down the aisle, as she had so desperately wanted to—and now she never would. It had felt very selfish of us not to give her that happiness—or selfish of Ben, because of course I would have loved to…

Still, the upside was that at least I hadn’t got Ben’s ghastly, social-climbing mother as my ma-in-law. I hadn’t even seen them since they moved to Wilmslow several years previously, though Ben visited them sometimes. They still thought I ruined his life by making him move back to Neatslake instead of staying in London and becoming famous, which they were convinced he would have been before now. But it was his decision just as much as mine. I sometimes wondered if he had ever told them that. But I expect he had and they just didn’t believe it.

‘Ben and I’ve been together since I was thirteen, Libby. That’s rock-solid enough, isn’t it,’ I asked, ‘even without a wedding ring?’

She gave me a sideways look from her deceptively innocent eyes. ‘But haven’t you ever found that a bit smothering? You’ve never really fallen in love, or out of love, just jogged comfortably along on a plateau of contentment, doing everything the way Ben wanted it.’

‘The way we both wanted it,’ I corrected her. ‘I’m living the life I always dreamed of and I’m not a slave, even if I do think it’s important to create a comfortable environment for him to work in. And, what’s more, I did fall in love with Ben, the moment he first spoke to me!’

‘Puppy love!’

‘Maybe it started that way, but it’s still going strong. If you remember, my game plan was the direct opposite of yours. I just wanted to stay in Neatslake for ever when I grew up.’

‘Which you have, apart from two years in London, while Ben was at college. But while I’ve just really and truly fallen deeply in love for the first time with husband number three, there you are, still ambling along in your little rut with Ben. I don’t suppose you’ve ever even looked at anyone else?’

‘No—well, apart from Sting, before he started to look like that coconut head in the Tom Hanks castaway film. But Ben hasn’t looked at anyone else either, Libs. We’re fine as we are. Everything in the garden is perfect…or almost perfect,’ I qualified honestly. ‘I wish he didn’t have to go off to London so much lately, for instance. That is a fly in the ointment.’

‘It’s the price of fame,’ she shrugged. ‘You should be glad he’s finally made it big and his work is fetching good money. All the more reason to marry him now, before some other woman decides he’s a good prospect and snaps him up.’

I smiled. ‘Libby, that’s not going to happen and you know it!’

‘You can’t bank on that. He looks pretty tasty in an expensive suit and with a decent haircut.’

‘It wasn’t expensive. He bought it from Tesco, though it was quite a good fit.’

‘The one I last saw him wearing didn’t come from Tesco,’ she said positively.

‘Oh? Actually, he did say something about buying another one and he’s got some smarter jeans, but he mainly keeps his London clothes at Russell and Mary’s flat so I haven’t seen most of them.’

‘You should see that suit. I wouldn’t have known it was the same Ben, when I popped into the opening of his one-man exhibition at the Egremont Gallery in May.’ She paused. ‘He didn’t see me; he was talking to a tall blonde for ages—fortyish, expensive-looking. He seemed quite engrossed in what she was saying.’

I grinned. ‘I think I know who that must have been. He told me all about her—he calls her his patroness! I’ve forgotten her name, but she’s an investment banker and nearer fifty than forty, though I expect she’s very well preserved. There’s family money too, and she must be very well off because she’s bought several pieces of his work and he’s charging quite steep prices now.’

‘Hmm…Well, he certainly looks expensive these days,’ Libby said ambiguously, ‘and I still think you ought to go down to London with him more often and keep an eye on him.’

I felt a sudden, unexpected, pang of doubt. It was true that the Ben I knew and loved, the tall, rugged one in hand-knitted jumpers and tattered jeans, with his thick, light-brown hair rumpled and all on end, had to spruce himself up a bit when he was away and often even returned looking like a total stranger, until he’d changed back into his old clothes again.

But I said firmly, ‘I trust Ben and he hates having to leave me so often. He phones me up every night when he’s away, from Russell and Mary’s house. We both enjoyed living in London when he was at the RCA, but it wasn’t where we wanted to live for ever, and now we just prefer it for visits. Neatslake is home.’

‘Is Mary still making those dreary pots?’

‘Mostly large one-off ceramic pieces, and they sell very well. She and Russell have studio space in a converted warehouse in Camden and Ben’s just taken one there, to give him a London base to store his stuff. He and some of his ex-RCA friends have formed a group to exhibit together, but of course his inspiration is here, so he’ll always want to spend most of his time here.’

‘Well, I still think you ought to make more effort, Josie—spice the relationship up a bit. And with men, even old ones, never, ever take your eye off the ball.’ She thought about that for a minute, blinked her preposterously long, tinted eyelashes and amended, ‘Balls.’

She may be the expert on most men, but Ben was different. ‘I know you mean it for the best, Libs, but you don’t understand. Ben loves me the way I am and we’re happily living the life we always wanted. Money, material things and marriage have never been that important to us. Ben’s work is, though, and it’s wonderful that it’s getting the recognition it deserves at last. Besides, even if I wanted to go to London with him, I couldn’t keep going off and leaving Harry to cope with everything. He’s getting so frail now that I’m always afraid he’s going to fall over and really hurt himself.

‘You can’t build your life around an elderly neighbour, even if you do have some sort of gardening commune going with him!’

‘You know Harry is far more to me than just a neighbour, Libs, and he’s been a huge support over the years. But now he’s getting too frail even to walk his dog every day…and then sometimes he forgets to shut the hens up and I’m afraid that that fox I saw one evening will come back and take them.’

Especially Aggie, my beloved but overly adventurous speckled friend…

‘Then there are my Acorns to keep an eye on,’ I added.

Soon after Ben and I settled in Neatslake I’d been horrified to discover that the three elderly Grace sisters’ pensions were barely enough to keep them alive since the General died, let alone warm, amused and well fed, and Dorrie Spottiswode had been in much the same situation. My weekly boxes of fruit, vegetables and eggs, plus anything else I could pretend to have a glut of, helped to keep them all going.

‘Dorrie’s been really struggling to make ends meet since Tim’s father died. She could have grown her own vegetables, but she’s devoted herself to trying to keep the Blessings gardens in some kind of order, especially the roses, so she’s been bartering things for eggs and stuff instead.’ And most of what she had been bartering was the fruit from the Blessings orchard, I thought guiltily, plus the occasional bunch of Tim’s grapes from the greenhouse!

‘Josie, it’s the twenty-first century, and the way you’re trying to live is totally perverse—if you can even call all this scraping by on what you can grow “living”. And you can’t tell me that you’re charging enough for your cakes to make a decent profit, either.’

‘You’d be surprised! And I only make unusual cakes, which are fun to do. I’m not tied to producing boring, royal-iced, tiered ones—I leave that to the bakery. And I write my magazine piece every month too, which I also enjoy. They’re both just a way of making enough to pay the utility bills. And actually, the self-sufficiency, make-do-and-mend, thrifty lifestyle is terribly fashionable again, you know. That’s why Country at Heart did the piece about us.’

‘Yes, but now Ben’s raking in the money, you don’t have to do any of that! Turf the garden, get rid of the hens, and get a life, before it’s too late. You could even get a flat in London and use the cottage as a weekend place.’

‘I suggested that, now Ben is away so much, but he adores it here too—it’s not just me insisting that we live like this! He says when he’s in London he loves the idea of me in the cottage, waiting for him. And we have a life, and we like things the way they are now,’ I said firmly, unshakeable (and probably horribly smug) in my conviction that what I had would endure for ever.

‘But something Ben told me when he got back from London has upset me a bit, Libby Mary’s pregnant! It’s all through taking some kind of Chinese herbal medicine, apparently, not IVF, and it’s stirred up all my feelings again. But Ben was reluctant to even tell me about it and he certainly didn’t want to talk about us trying it.’

‘No, well, if Ben really wanted children he’d have agreed to have some tests done years ago, wouldn’t he?’ she pointed out. ‘He likes being the cosseted centre of your world, with you running round after him, and I’m sure he’d hate to change that.’

‘I’ve slowly come to that conclusion myself, though he’s always agreed with me that we’d like children. I can understand that seeing what Russell and Mary went through, financially and emotionally, set him against taking that route, but now he really doesn’t even want to discuss it any more. He goes all hurt when I try.’

‘I can’t say I ever wanted any more after Pia, and she was a mistake,’ Libby said frankly. ‘Not that she wasn’t sweet when she was little, it’s just that Joe spoiled her and she turned into a monster once she hit thirteen.’

‘I expect she’ll grow out of it eventually,’ I said consolingly.

She looked thoughtful. ‘I have a horrid feeling that Tim would absolutely adore a little Rowland-Knowles. Think what that would do to my figure! At our age, everything isn’t just going to snap back into place like elastic afterwards, is it? But maybe I’m past it,’ she said hopefully ‘Doesn’t fertility decline rapidly after thirty?’

‘Yes, but you still have a pretty good chance. I mean, you’ve already got Pia, so you know you can get pregnant.’

‘Well, I’m telling you now that if I do have to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous pregnancy, I don’t see why you shouldn’t too. Shall I talk some sense into Ben and tell him he’s being a self-centred pig?’

‘Absolutely not! It would have the opposite effect anyway; you know how stubborn he is, and the more you try and change his mind about anything, the more he digs his heels in.’

‘Did you get the name and address of that Chinese herbalist from Mary?’ she asked innocently.

I grinned, although guiltily. ‘Yes…she gave me the website address and I got the contact details through that, though I haven’t done anything about it. And Mary said it was very expensive.’

‘Give it to me. I’ll find out about it and get you some when I’m down in London, my treat. After all, if it worked for Mary, it’s worth a go! And if Tim is insistent, I may have to try it too—but it will be our secret.’

‘OK,’ I said, because I suddenly realised how unbearable it would be if all my friends suddenly produced a late crop of offspring, just when I thought I’d resigned myself to being barren ground.

Chapter Six Hippie Chic

On the recycling front, a friend has given me lots of genuine hippie clothes that she wore as a girl and, although I don’t really care about fashion, I’m told that this kind of thing is back in vogue again. One of the Acorn members is altering them to fit me and it feels rather decadently pleasant to change out of my workaday jeans into something long and floaty, or sumptuously velvety, in the evening. I don’t suppose the Artist will notice…

‘Cakes and Ale’

Ben was fairly comatose that evening, after a dinner of globe artichokes with melted butter, followed by stir-fried brown rice and vegetables and a blackberry mouse. It made him reluctant to get all dressed up to go for drinks at Blessings, until I pointed out that I’d never seen Tim at home wearing anything other than jeans and jumpers almost as disreputable as Ben’s usual attire.

‘You’ve got a skirt on,’ he pointed out to my amazement, because he doesn’t usually notice that sort of thing.

‘Well, I do sometimes change in the evening. I don’t live in jeans, do I?’ I stroked the sumptuous folds of the long, teal-coloured velvet skirt lovingly. ‘This is a genuine hippie skirt Stella gave me. She showed me a picture of herself wearing it, circa 1970, with a headband and moccasins, and she looked lovely. But she can’t fit into it now and she thought it would suit me.’

In fact, Stella had been sorting out a whole trunkful of clothes, and the skirt was only one of many pretty things she’d given me. ‘Fashion’s gone boho, so I think I’m actually very trendy at the moment.’

I rather hoped he would think I looked pretty in my long blue skirt and cotton top, but instead he said, with unusual grumpiness, ‘If it doesn’t matter what I wear, I’ll go like this, then,’ this being his paint-spattered jeans and a sweatshirt up which he had at some time wiped a loaded palette knife.

‘Fine—Tim won’t notice. Libby says he can’t wait to get out of his solicitor’s suit when he gets home and out into the garden. He and Dorrie are having endless discussions about how to restore the grounds to their former glory. Now, come on, or we’ll be late.’

I put on a long, purple Moroccan cloak with a pointy, tasselled hood (another of Stella’s offerings) and picked up a coracle-shaped wicker basket decorated with faded raffia flowers. It contained a bottle of our best elderflower champagne and a Battenburg cake made using natural marzipan and pink food colouring. Libby doesn’t know anything about baking, but she can whip up Italian pasta meals at the drop of a hat, especially those that had been her late husband’s favourites. I expect she’ll now learn to cook what Tim likes, being a great believer in the way to a man’s heart being through his stomach. I ascribe to that one a bit myself—Ben loves my food, just as he adored Granny’s cakes and biscuits when we were still at school. She used to joke that he had a stomach like a bottomless pit.

Cupboard love.

Ben always says his mother can’t cook and on the occasions when he visits them in Wilmslow, they eat ready-prepared Marks and Spencer’s meals, though since she’s never invited me over for a meal (or anything else), I can’t vouch for that. They have never visited this house either, though I gritted my teeth and invited them a few times, until I realised they were never going to accept me—or Nell Richards wasn’t. I had a feeling Ben’s father, sarcastic and superior though he was, might have weakened a bit, left to himself. But you can see why it was a bone of contention between me and Ben that he still accepted an allowance from them after they’d snubbed me for all these years!

We walked past Blessings and up the little side lane, because no one ever used the front entrance of Blessings: by the time the bell had been pulled and someone had heard it jangle, then unlocked the big, oak door, come down a flight of steps, crossed the little front courtyard and opened the great gate, set in its castellated wall, the visitor would have long since vanished. Instead, a brass plate and an arrow directed you round the back.

Feeling like a slightly Goth Little Red Riding Hood with my cloak and basket, I led the way to the rear gate and up the short gravelled drive past the empty and neglected gatehouse. I was heading for the kitchen wing, but Libby was standing at the French doors that had been rather incongrously let into the back wall of the Great Chamber, looking out for us.

The two men got on fine, as I’d known they would, especially once they’d had a glass or two of bubbly each. Tim might have gone to Ampleforth College and sounded a bit plummy, but you soon forgot that because he was so ordinary and nice.

It still struck me as odd to see him and Libby together, because she’d always gone for more of a father figure before (if not grandfather figure!), and Tim is only a couple of years older than she is. And he had a lost-boy sort of air about him that seemed to be awakening an unsuspected and long-dormant maternal streak in her. I was amazed! I’d never seen much sign of it with Pia, even though I knew how much Libby loved her. It was all very strange.

The Great Chamber was the first room Libby and I had started cleaning and it looked much better without cobwebs and a furring of dust along every surface. Like all the Elizabethan part of the house, it had had electricity put in at some time in the dim and distant past and a central heating system of old-fashioned proportions and inefficiency. But apart from that, it was very much as it had always been: a large room with a huge fireplace at one end, dark oak flooring in need of polishing and a central spoked wheel depending from the moulded ceiling, which had probably once been set with candles but now held those dim, twisty little lightbulbs instead. There were several windows with diamond panes of ripply glass, which let in the light but left the view outside blurry. From black, wrought-iron poles hung tattered, sun-rotted curtains and, even after unpicking a bit of hem, we had been unable to decide what their original colours had been.

Many of the rooms at Blessings were plastered and studded all over with moulded heraldic emblems, a bit like extreme Anaglypta, which had been tricky and delicate to dust. We’d used special brushes, as advised by Sophy Winter, and great care, especially where faint traces of bright paint and gilding still clung here and there.

The house seemed to have been updated in the thirties and forties, when the new extension was added. Spartan bathrooms had been created in small chambers, and telephone lines, electricity cables and water pipes run over the surface of the walls, seemingly at random. There had been no attempt to hack into the plaster and hide them, but I expect, from a historic viewpoint, that was a good thing.

We each had a glass or two of elderflower champagne, and then Libby went away to find a knife and plates for the Battenburg cake. She’d just come back when the French doors swung open and Miss Dorrie Spottiswode marched in on a blast of chilly air and stood, hands on hips, surveying us with light blue eyes that were a fiercer variant of Tim’s. It occurred to me that Stella and Mark’s billy goat, Mojo, had just those same pale, slightly mad eyes, with small dark pupils…But luckily Dorrie doesn’t smell the same as the goat, just strangely but pleasantly of Crabtree & Evelyn’s Gardeners soap, lavender and mothballs.

‘Ha—carousing, I see!’ she said severely. With her pulled, blue tweed skirt sagging at the seat and worn with purple Argyll-patterned knee socks and stout, Gertrude Jekyll-style lace-up boots, she cut a strange figure—but then, she usually does. In honour of the evening hour, she had changed her habitual woollen jumper for a silk shirt and pearls, but she still wore her French beret, set at a jaunty angle over elf-locks of iron-grey hair.

‘Come in, Aunt Dorrie, we’re just having a little drink to celebrate our engagement,’ Tim said warmly. ‘I was wondering where you had got to. Didn’t you get the note I put through your door earlier?’

‘The cat tried to eat it. I wondered what the soggy bits of paper on the mat were.’

‘Well, you’re here now, that’s the main thing. You know Josie Gray and Ben Richards, don’t you?’

‘Of course I bloody do—they live a stone’s throw away! And anyway, I’m an Acorn.’

An…Acorn?’ queried Tim, cautiously.

‘It’s sort of a barter group Josie set up, darling,’ Libby explained. ‘They use imaginary acorns for currency.’

‘Oh, right!’ he said, though he didn’t look particularly enlightened.

Anyway, I’d have to be flaming blind, deaf and dumb not to recognise every living soul in a village this size, after living here all these years, wouldn’t I? And there’s nothing wrong with any of my faculties.’ Dorrie was obviously in belligerent mode.

‘Of course not, Aunt Dorrie,’ Tim said.

And if I don’t recognise someone, then Mrs Talkalot at the post office soon fills me in, whether I want to hear it or not.’

Mrs Talkalot is the name the postmistress, Florrie James, is commonly known by in Neatslake, and she even good-naturedly refers to herself by it. She only ever stops talking to draw breath and doesn’t so much converse with her customers as let loose a permanent stream-of-consciousness gabble. Her husband wears a permanently dazed expression and keeps his hearing aid turned off most of the time.

Dorrie jerked her head at me. ‘Old Harry Hutton’s her uncle and she’s a friend of the Grace sisters. Go there for bridge sometimes. Violet’s useless, but Pansy and Lily aren’t bad.’

Tim began to open a bottle of champagne that they had ready in an ice bucket. ‘Josie and Ben brought us some of their elder-flower champagne, Aunt Dorrie, and this isn’t going to be half as nice—we should have saved you some.’

‘I don’t want either of them. I don’t like anything sparkling; the bubbles go right up my nose.’ She seated herself in an upright armchair covered in tapestry birds and roses. ‘I’ll have a nice glass of sherry.’

‘Ben and Josie tell me they make a lot of wine and beer themselves. They grow most of their own fruit and vegetables too, and keep hens,’ Tim said, and Dorrie and I exchanged slightly guilty glances, thinking about all the apples and pears we’d had from the old Blessings orchard.

‘I’d love to do that,’ he continued. ‘Maybe I could even keep ducks too, since we have the lily pond. Or what’s left of the lily pond. It’s very overgrown.’

‘I couldn’t keep everything up practically single-handed,’ Dorrie said gruffly. ‘Moorcroft’s past doing anything now except mow the grass very slowly, and by the time he’s finished he has to start again. Needs pensioning off.’

‘No indeed, Aunt Dorrie, you’ve worked wonders,’ Tim said quickly. ‘Without you, it would be a wilderness.’

‘It’s not far off now, though I’ve kept a firm hand with the roses.’

‘And you don’t need more poultry, Tim, you’ve got peacocks,’ Libby pointed out.

‘Yes, but they’re only ornamental, darling. You can’t eat them.’

‘I think people used to,’ I chipped in, ‘but I wouldn’t have thought there was a lot of meat on one.’ I wouldn’t have minded giving it a go—I hated the mournful scream they made. I always had.

‘They’re stupid creatures,’ Dorrie said. ‘We had two females once, but they wouldn’t roost in the trees out of reach of the foxes. Rare instance of the female being stupider than the male, ha-ha.’

Dorrie was a bit of a feminist at heart, but then, after her fiancé was killed in the last war she had parachuted into France to help the Resistance movement as a wireless operator, so she was entirely fearless and self-reliant, and knew she could do anything a mere man could do, only a lot better.

‘Ducks should be all right, though,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘They can nest on the little island in the middle of the lily pond. And if you want to grow your own produce, we could make a vegetable patch at the end of the old orchard, if you like, and put in soft fruit bushes too.’

‘And we could trade things,’ Ben suggested, forgetting that we already did, unknown to Tim and Libby ‘We have a huge plum tree in Harry’s garden but no apples or pears; there isn’t room.’

‘But we get loads of quinces because they grow all along both sides of the fence between the two gardens,’ I put in hastily.

‘I like a bit of quince jelly with my salad meats,’ Dorrie said.

‘Is it nice?’ asked Libby.

‘Yes, I’ll give you a jar, Libs. I’ve made loads of it this year, and I’m still making quince wine.’

Dorrie said hopefully, ‘Some of the woodwork’s rotten on the big greenhouse, Tim, but if you had it repaired, we could grow tender fruit in there. The old vine still produces grapes, but I’m always afraid the roof is going to collapse in on me when I go to pick them. And I have to beat Moorcroft to it, because he loves them. But it’s more than time he retired anyway, he says so himself when his lumbago is bad.’

‘It would save money,’ agreed Tim, ‘and I suspect I’ll do more at weekends than he manages full time.’

We ate the Battenburg cake right down to the last crumb, and then Dorrie expressed an interest in seeing how Libby and I were doing with the great clean-up. We left Tim and Ben planning out the new vegetable garden.

Dorrie enlivened our tour of the house with her freely expressed opinions of Tim’s stepmother and the way she’d spitefully let Blessings decay, but our cleaning efforts and Libby’s organisational skills impressed her.

‘You’re a born housewife, my dear—just what Blessings needs. And a strong character too, which is just what Tim needs.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ Libby said gratefully, turning slightly pink at this accolade. ‘I’m going to do my best to make him happy.’

Like me, Libby has never had any great career ambitions: she hoped for love, security and safety, which she found through marriage. I suppose gardening and cooking are my passions, and I’m sorry if that sounds old-fashioned and sad, but there it is. And at least I do seem somehow to have made a successful and lucrative business out of the baking! In any case, it was always clear that Ben would be a brilliant artist, and I truly don’t think having more than one genius in the house would work terribly well.

Libby was pointing out the evidence of fresh woodworm damage. ‘We have to move back into the modern wing tomorrow while the treatment is done. Luckily it’s only a minor outbreak and it turned out it was still under guarantee. When we can get back in, we need to finish brushing down the walls and ceilings and put the furniture in the middle of the rooms under dust-sheets, ready for a man to come and repaint the walls with a special, authentic whitewash—forgotten what they said it was.’

‘Limewash?’ I suggested.

‘Maybe…whatever.’

‘You don’t let the grass grow under your feet, my dear,’ Dorrie said. ‘Like a breath of fresh air to Blessings, you are!’

‘I’m doing my best, though of course most of it will take a long time to put right—and a lot more money than I thought at first, especially to have the roof properly repaired instead of just patched. We’ve started running the central heating in this part now too, which is going to be very expensive even though it is an ancient system that doesn’t get terribly hot.’

‘That’s probably just as well,’ I said, ‘because too much heat suddenly turned on wouldn’t be good for the place.’

‘No, but it needs to warm through and dry out before we move back into the main bedchamber from the modern wing, which Tim is determined to do as soon as possible.’

‘The new wing was mainly added for a modern kitchen and utility room, plus an extra bathroom and a couple of spare bedrooms upstairs,’ Dorrie said. ‘But until Tim’s father died, the family always lived in the old part, and that’s how it should be. Once you start lighting fires in the Great Chamber, it will carry the heat right through the rest of the house, you’ll see.’

‘That huge fireplace will take quite a lot of logs to fill,’ I said.

‘A few of the old trees in the grounds need to come down, or have already fallen down. They could be sawn up and stacked in one of the outbuildings,’ suggested Dorrie.

‘Yes, that’s true,’ Libby agreed. ‘Waste not, want not—though we’d probably have to get someone to saw them up, because I don’t think I’d trust Tim with a chain saw. He’s much too absent-minded.’

‘It would still be cheaper than buying wood, even so,’ Dorrie said. ‘Are you going to carry on doing all your own cleaning, or get someone in?’

‘Actually, since this is where I’m going to be spending most of my time, I think Gina, who looks after me in Pisa and is something of a Cazzini family retainer, could be persuaded to move here. Tim’s stepmother had the chauffeur’s flat over the garage renovated for that Portuguese couple she employed and I’m sure Gina would love to have her own little place.’

‘That sounds very suitable,’ approved Dorrie. ‘The gatehouse was formerly a dwelling too, you know, though it has not been lived in for some time. In fact, I think Tim’s father’s old nanny was the last resident and she passed away several years ago.’

‘Yes, I had a quick look round it, but I’m putting off cleaning that out until later,’ Libby said. ‘The sanitary arrangements are extremely rudimentary and it’s tiny, but I thought perhaps if it’s done up a bit, it could be let out as a holiday cottage and earn us some money. A romantic getaway for two.’

‘I can see you have it all in hand,’ Dorrie said. ‘Now, perhaps we had better see what those two young men have been discussing. And I am sure you and I,’ she added to me, ‘have much more idea of what is wanted, regarding vegetable plots, than they do!’

Chapter Seven Gathering In

By the end of October all was safely gathered in, as the old harvest hymn has it. Or almost all. My elderly neighbour helped me to make a beetroot clamp and then store away the last of the carrot crop in layers of sand, and I’m still pickling and chutney making. I’ve also dug over the pea and bean beds, set out Brussels sprout plants and divided clumps of chives.

Throughout all this, the Artist could be seen in his studio, working on a new series of three-dimensional paintings. He had to be coaxed out from time to time to help with heavy jobs, like chopping logs into firewood and hefting sacks of henfood about; but I expect it did him good.

‘Cakes and Ale’

Now Ben was home, life should have settled back into the cosy, comforting, uneventful round of cooking, dog-walking and gardening, but I found that I still felt vaguely uneasy.

Of course, the even rhythm of our former existence was bound to change once Libby exploded onto the scene like a demonstration of chaos theory in miniature. But actually, that didn’t bother me in the least, for I was used to Libby and very happy that she was going to be living in Neatslake again. No, it was just a feeling that something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was…

Ben, too, seemed even more abstracted than usual and had thrown himself into finishing his latest series of paintings. He tended to work on five or six simultaneously, and I never knew what to call them: paintings, installations, constructions, or just artworks. They all started as flat canvases, but then things began to burst out of them, because two dimensions simply weren’t enough for Ben and couldn’t contain his imagery, which dripped, oozed, sidled sideways or simply exploded into 3-D.

His original inspiration came from our shared love of thrusting, exuberant and earthy nature, full of flowers, rampant foliage and small living creatures. I’d always considered him a brilliant artist and I still did, even though what had been emerging more recently was much darker and (though I hadn’t, of course, said so) rather nasty. I hoped it was just a temporary phase.

As I worked in the garden I noticed that he was getting an awful lot of calls on his mobile, which seemed to make him cross, but then, if he didn’t want to be disturbed he should have switched it off!

Once the woodworm treatment at Blessings was done, and the rooms aired, Libby and I returned to our dusting and cleaning, keeping one room ahead of the specialist painters. I was amazed at Libby’s stamina. I was only helping out for an hour or two in the afternoons because of all my cake-making and other commitments, but she seemed to be working dawn to dusk.

When we took the old curtains down they pretty well fell to pieces, but she had surfed the internet and found a firm who sold medieval-style crewelwork curtains and fabric by the metre, all curly foliage, birds and rabbits—lovely, though very expensive.

Dorrie brought her friend Miss Hebe Winter (who is my friend Sophy’s great-aunt), to look around one day while we were working. The room we were in was a bit gloomy and for a minute we thought we were seeing ghosts, because they walked in wearing Elizabethan dress. Miss Winter, who is tall, grand and aquiline of nose, is a dead ringer for the Virgin Queen, and even Dorrie was transformed by a wide ruff and full skirts, despite having kept her beret on.

It turned out they’d been to a historical re-enactment society meeting in Sticklepond. Lots of the members help out as volunteers at Winter’s End in full costume, when it’s open to the public. They are very big on the Elizabethan over there, especially since the discovery of that Shakespeare document.

Miss Winter had come out of sheer curiosity to see Libby, I think, the plebeian marrying into the Rowland-Knowleses, and, like Dorrie, she found her not at all what she expected.

I left them having tea (it was lucky I’d taken Libby an apple upside-down cake), passing Hebe’s little white Mini car on the drive. How does she get behind the wheel in a farthingale?

Moorcroft, the gardener, was very ready to take a golden handshake and retire, which would be much more economical in the long run than paying him to cut the grass and hide out in the garden shed, making endless cups of tea on a Primus stove.

Tim and Dorrie, full of plans and enthusiasm, began to try to get the grounds into some kind of order and create a fruit and vegetable patch. Tim came over a couple of times to ask my advice—or Ben’s, if he caught him out of the studio, which was pretty rare at the moment.

‘Tim’s passionate about gardening. He’s even more dotty about it than you are,’ Libby said one day, when we were taking a break from cleaning out what had once been the old kitchen, but was now a kind of storeroom. She straightened up with a groan; she’s only about five foot two without her stilettos, so even standing on a stool she’d found, reaching up with the feather duster, was quite a stretch.

‘I think he loves flowers and shrubs more than vegetables, Libs, like Dorrie.’

‘Yes, but now you’ve infected him with the self-sufficiency bug he’s determined to follow suit.’

‘Well, that’s OK, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, as long as he doesn’t expect me to start digging and jamming and making pies…though when Gina’s here I expect she’ll be quite happy to cook what he grows. It will save us money too, which will be a good thing, because I hadn’t realised quite how high the cost of restoring and maintaining a place of this age would be. I know I’m well off, but really, we need to find some way of increasing our income, unless I sell one or both of my other homes. But Tim loves Italy, so apart from our honeymoon being in Pisa, I hope we’re going to spend a lot of time there—and it’s handy having a pied-à-terre in London.’

‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I’m starting to think that’s what we could do with, though at least Ben hasn’t been so eager to rush back to London this time. He’s very engrossed in his paintings.’

‘Tim hates being a solicitor, so it’s a pity we can’t find some way of making Blessings pay for itself. But it’s a bit too small to open to the public. We live in all of it and we can’t just move into the modern wing three-quarters of the time, can we?’

‘Perhaps you could open a little garden centre in the grounds?’

‘I’m not sure they’re really big enough for that, either, but it’s worth thinking about.’

‘How are the wedding plans coming on?’

Libby pulled a large, folded list out of the pocket of her all-enveloping blue striped cotton apron, which looked like something a Victorian maid might wear. ‘Special licence—check. Church, vicar, church bells, organist and photographer—all sorted. Cake—you’re doing that. Invitations—already done by those strange friends of yours, though I don’t see why the cards and envelopes have to have bits of grass and petals in them.’

‘It’s because they make the paper themselves, using natural sources and inks,’ I explained. ‘All recycled and biodegradable.’

‘And why does it say on the invitations that confetti will be provided at the church door?’ she queried. ‘Guests usually bring their own!’

‘We don’t want paper confetti everywhere. We need to supply a natural alternative, Libby! Perhaps something like millet, which would give the birds a feast afterwards? Yes—a golden shower of millet would be lovely…’

‘I am not emerging from the church to be pelted with handfuls of budgie food,’ Libby said coldly.

‘No?’

‘No!’

‘Oh…then how about dried rose petals?’ I suggested. ‘I’ve heard of those being used.’

‘Now, that’s more like it!’

‘Hebe Winter uses a lot of roses in the products she makes to sell in the Winter’s End shop—perhaps she could supply us with rose petals. Shall I ask?’

‘Yes, do. If you could sort that out for me, it would be a great help,’ Libby agreed. ‘Actually, the Winters are on the guest list, since they’re friends of both Dorrie and Tim. And I’ve invited a second photographer, but not an official one—Noah Sephton. He was some kind of cousin of Joe’s and a great friend. He’ll be staying overnight, but I think I’ll have to put him in the gatehouse. I’ve asked Dolly Mops to come and clean it out and I thought they might as well do the flat over the garage too, though, knowing Gina, she’ll scrub it from floor to ceiling as soon as she gets here, anyway.’

‘It’ll be nice to see Gina again. And I think I’ve heard of Noah Sephton,’ I said doubtfully. ‘Didn’t he take those lovely photographs of you with Pia as an infant, which are in your apartment in Pisa?’

‘Yes, but you should have heard of him anyway, because he’s quite famous for his portraits. He has an annual exhibition of his more oddball, black-and-white photos every year too, and they’re a sell-out. His last one was called Fate’

‘I know all about fate’, I said, and, as if on cue, one of the two peacocks wailed. It always gave me the cold shivers. ‘Couldn’t you try eating the peacocks?’ I pleaded. ‘I hate the noise they make.’

‘Don’t be silly, they give the place class. Get over it,’ she said absently, looking down at the back of the list where she’d jotted the names of the invited guests. ‘There are quite a few celebs on here as well as Noah, because Tim knows Rob Rafferty, the star of that Cotton Common TV soap and one or two of the other actors, though I don’t think Hello! magazine will be jostling for my wedding photos any time soon.’

‘So you’ve got it all pretty well arranged?’

‘Yes, apart from the reception venue. At this rate, we’ll be handing out directions in the church!’

‘Still no luck finding somewhere nearby?’

‘No, they’re all either booked up, can’t handle the numbers, or they don’t do them at this time of year—or something’

‘Oh dear, and it’s hardly marquee weather, is it?’

‘I expect I’ll think of something. I’ll have to. I only hope the guests who are coming from a distance can find somewhere to stay on the night of the wedding!’

‘Any word from Pia yet?’

‘No, still not a dicky-bird since I told her I was marrying again and she put the phone down on me. She’s not answering my emails either.’

‘She hasn’t contacted me for ages,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t usually leave it this long.’

‘She’s sulking, but I’d like to know if she intends turning up for the wedding. It would have been lovely if she’d been happy about my getting married again and agreed to be a bridesmaid, but it doesn’t look likely to happen.’

‘Once she gets over the shock she’ll probably get back in touch again,’ I said optimistically.

‘I’d just settle for the sound of her voice telling me she was all right, at the moment,’ Libby admitted.

‘I’ll try emailing her again when I get home, Libs. Perhaps she’s still speaking to me.’

‘Oh, thanks, Josie—and I must take your measurements before you go, because I still have to dash down to London in search of my wedding dress and shoes, and get a bridesmaid’s dress for you. I should have gone before, but there’s been so much to do.’ My practical, hard-headed friend gave a dreamy sigh. ‘I hate the thought of being apart from Tim, even for one night. Isn’t it strange?’

‘No. And now you know how I feel when Ben goes off to London without me.’

‘It’s not the same. You’ve never been in love with Ben, just loved him with blind, dogged devotion.’

‘Not blind. You can’t live with someone for that many years and not be aware of their failings. But he’s such a brilliant artist, a genius, that I’ve had to be the one to make allowances.’

‘I don’t see why having any kind of talent should entitle you to get away with behaving badly,’ she said, ‘or selfishly. Though, actually, it usually does seem to have that effect. Noah—Noah Sephton, the photographer I was telling you about—goes through girlfriends faster than a hot knife through butter. He says he’s a romantic and believes in true love, but he never puts his money where his mouth is.’

‘Has he never been married?’

‘Joe said he was, briefly, when he was very young, but she died of leukaemia, so I expect it was all a bit Love Story and put him off marrying again.’

‘That’s terribly sad!’ Tears came to my eyes as they usually did when I heard something touching. ‘It’s probably blighted the poor man’s life.’

‘No, I don’t think so. The loveliest girls seem to fall for him and it all looks really promising, but by the time they start to hint that they’re getting serious ideas he’s ready to move on.’

I thought about that. ‘Perhaps it’s because no one is going to measure up to his dead wife? I mean, if they were really young and not married long, the rosy glow wouldn’t have worn off and, looking back, she will always seem perfect, won’t she?’

‘Or perhaps whatever he says about love, he just prefers casual sex with no commitment?’ Libby suggested.

‘That makes him sound horrible—shallow and self-gratifying.’

‘Well, actually he’s not, he’s really warm and nice.’

‘I suppose he’s good-looking?’

She considered. ‘You might not pick him out in a crowd straight away, but once you did, you’d wonder how you missed him. He’s about six foot and slim, not exactly handsome, but he’s got lovely, light grey eyes and long, long black eyelashes…His smile’s sort of quirky and goes up at one side too…and his hair’s almost black and goes curly if it gets damp.’

‘You sound half in love with him yourself!’ I said, dismayed at this apparent lack of loyalty to Tim.

‘Not me! You know I’m a hard-headed, marriage-or-nothing kind of girl!’

‘Maybe, but you moved in with Tim the day after you met him,’ I pointed out.

‘Yes, well, that’s different. And he proposed to me before I moved in, don’t forget.’

‘Come on, you were so love struck you would have done it anyway.’

‘Maybe, but so was Tim, so it doesn’t matter.’ She smiled happily. ‘Oh, Josie, it’s such bliss! I only hope Pia does come to the wedding and realises how nice he is, then she’ll soon get over her huff and we can be one happy family.’

I thought this was more than optimistic. ‘You can see her point, Libby. She adored Joe, he was a father to her in every sense. And I think girls often get on better with their fathers than their mothers, until they get older. You were fine until she was thirteen or fourteen, and then she started seeing you as competition.’

‘She was lovely when she was little,’ she agreed. ‘Then—bam!—in kicked the hormones and she turned into a sulky monster in a permanent strop.’

‘She’ll turn back into a human being again any minute now,’ I assured her. ‘And if she surfaces in London, Maria Cazzini will make her come to the wedding.’ Maria, the formidable matriarch of the family, had married the cousin who now ran the family restaurant business. A thought struck me. ‘You have invited your mother and sister, haven’t you?’

‘Tim said I had to,’ Libby said unenthusiastically. ‘I’ve told Daisy she’ll have to keep Ma off the sauce the whole day. I’m trusting her, but I’ll have a hire car on standby to whisk them away if she goes off-piste. I’ve booked them into a Travelodge, where I expect they’re used to getting all types, including drunken mothers of the bride.’

‘But I thought she’d joined AA and gone teetotal?’

‘That’s what she says, but Daisy reckons she’s just got more cunning about where she hides it.’

‘It was very kind of Daisy to move her down there and look after her.’

Libby gave me a scathing look. ‘It was Joe’s idea. He bought them the house and paid the bills. Now I send money every month and that’s another drain on my income, but at least I know Mum is eating properly and living respectably, because Daisy has control over everything.’

It was some years since I’d seen Libby’s mother, but even semi-reformed, she was still likely to add a lively touch to the wedding proceedings, not to mention raking up the past in the minds of those villagers who were still finding it hard to accept that any daughter of Gloria Martin could possibly marry a Rowland-Knowles, so I could quite understand why Libby was reluctant to invite her. But Tim was right—it had to be done!

I emailed Pia and that night she phoned me. It was such a relief to hear her voice, even if she was in a strop.

‘How can Mum get married so soon?’ she demanded. ‘She can’t have loved Dad at all. It’s indecent!’

‘But she did love Joe very much, Pia, really she did. And it’s more than a year now. She and Tim just fell in love at first sight, that’s all.’

‘She’s too old to fall in love,’ she stated disgustedly.

‘Oh, I don’t think you’re ever too old, darling. And Tim is lovely—quiet and kind. You’ll like him, honestly.’

‘She doesn’t care if I’m there or not. She probably doesn’t want me coming along and making three.’

‘There you’re quite wrong. She does worry about you, and Tim is really looking forward to meeting you. He hopes you’ll make your home at Blessings with them.’

‘Blessings?’

‘That’s the name of his house. It’s Elizabethan, and Libby’s currently designing your bedroom in one of the original chambers, so if you don’t want to find yourself in a flowery bower, with the gilded rococo bed with cherubs she is talking about shipping over from Italy, you ought to get down here and tell her so.’

‘Cherubs?’ she said, horrified. Then she collected herself and said tersely, ‘It doesn’t matter: I’m not coming.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘Pisa, with Gina. But she says they’re coming here for their honeymoon, so I’ll have to clear out to London then.’

‘Look, do come just for the wedding, Pia,’ I cajoled. ‘Some of the Cazzinis are—your aunt Maria, for one.’

‘Aunt Maria’s coming?’

‘Yes, she’s already sent an enormous Gaggia coffee machine as a present, so I think you can take it that she approves! I’m sure she’ll be disappointed in you if you don’t come—and your mum will be deeply, deeply hurt.’

There was a small silence. ‘I might come up from London with Aunt Maria, just for the wedding,’ she conceded sulkily.

‘I think that would be a very kind and generous thing to do,’ I said encouragingly. ‘And perhaps you could ring your mother and tell her? She’d love to hear from you and—’

‘No!’ she said explosively and slammed down the phone, her volatile and passionate Italian side clearly getting the better of her good manners. But I was sure Maria Cazzini would manage to persuade her at least to turn up on the day and be polite. I hoped so, because otherwise Libby would be devastated and it would ruin her big day.

I rang her straight away and gave her an edited version of what Pia had said, because I knew it would be a huge relief to Libby just to know she was safe and well. Whether Pia turned up for the wedding would all depend on Maria Cazzini’s persuasive skills.

At dinner last night (Spanish omelette followed by a blackberry version of Eton mess), I said to Ben that he seemed to have an awful lot of calls on his mobile lately, and was everything all right?

I could tell something had been on his mind since he’d come back from London, even after he told me about Mary being pregnant, but I thought perhaps it had to do with his parents. He tends not to mention them to me; they’re a thorny subject.

He took a deep drink of elderberry wine and said, Actually, darling, there is something worrying me and I haven’t known how to tell you. In fact, I thought it would just sort of…well, fizzle out on its own.’

That was typical of Ben. He’d let problems slide in the hope they’d either simply go away or I would sort them out for him, by which time they had generally escalated.

I leaned my elbows on the table and said encouragingly, ‘So, what is it?’

‘You’ll probably think this sounds silly, but I’m being…well, stalked.’

‘Stalked?’

‘Pestered—followed—rung up and harassed. By this woman who has been buying my work—you know, the patroness?’

I nodded.

‘Now she seems to want to acquire me too. She must have a mental problem, because in her head she’s convinced that we’re already having some kind of relationship. It’s getting a bit embarrassing.’ He looked at me appealingly ‘I’ve tried distancing myself, but it’s very awkward.’

‘Yes, it must be! The poor thing,’ I added charitably, because I could see how easy it would be to fall for Ben and, if you were inclined to mix reality and fantasy, dream up a whole relationship in your head.

‘The Egremont Gallery must have given her my number, because she keeps phoning me up. I’m just afraid she might call the house too, and she’s so unhinged she sees you as the usurper, darling, so goodness knows what she might say.’

‘Do you know, there have been a lot of calls lately where the phone’s been put down the moment the caller heard my voice,’ I said. ‘Do you think that might have been her?’

‘Possibly.’ He leaned back, looking relieved. ‘I’m really glad I’ve told you about it now, Josie!’

‘Yes, but shouldn’t we tell the police or something? I’ve read of cases where stalkers can get quite nasty—even dangerous.’

‘No, I don’t think so. I’m sure she isn’t the violent type. And, after all, she’s not going to turn up here—it’s too far away—and in London I avoid her as much as possible. Let’s wait and see,’ he suggested.

He was probably right. For all we knew she made a habit of imagining herself in love with personable men and would soon lose interest in Ben and be off after someone new. And since after getting that off his chest he reverted back to being the good-natured, easy-going Ben I was used to, I felt much, much happier.

On Halloween I had a whole tray of small toffee apples to offer any young ghoul who turned up on my doorstep—and quite a lot did, attracted to my pumpkin lantern like moths to a flame.

I’d dipped the tops of the apples in dark chocolate and they were really yummy. Ben, who has a sweet tooth, ate three before the first trick-or-treater rang the bell, and there were only just enough to go round.

Since the Country at Heart article I had had an increasing number of enquiries about wedding cakes, though luckily once I made it clear that I only delivered locally, most of them lost interest. But not all. I was having to harden my heart and only take the ones I really wanted to do, because I didn’t want to spend all my time making weird and wonderful wedding cakes!

At the moment, Libby’s Pisa Tower cake was taxing my skills to the limit…

Chapter Eight Snap Happy

Round here, on Guy Fawkes Night, we still tend to carve turnip heads to put our candles in, rather than pumpkins. The smell of hot turnip, the exciting tang of gunpowder in the air and the taste of hard, home-made, splintery treacle toffee—those are the things I associate with 5th November.

Sometimes we go over to the bonfire at Middlemoss, a few miles away, where they have the strange tradition of burning an effigy of Oliver Cromwell instead of Guy Fawkes…

‘Cakes and Ale’

Libby finally left for her shopping trip to London early next day, which, considering her wedding day was now less than three weeks away, was pushing it a bit. I was not even going to think about what monstrous bridesmaid’s creation she might bring back for me…

Later that morning I was standing at the sink washing up the equipment I’d just used to make parsnip wine, when I glanced out at the tranquil Green and spotted Aggie, the escapologist hen, wandering up the road. Without stopping to take off my red rubber gloves, I shot out of the front door.

A large, maroon car was sweeping up towards me and the unaware hen, who was ambling along in its path in an aimless, hesitating sort of way.

‘Aggie!’ I yelled, and, without thinking, leaped forward into the road to make a grab for her. Behind me, the car slammed on its brakes with a squeal, but Aggie, squawking loudly, shot off across the grass, with me in hot pursuit.

Luckily, all the titbits I’d given her made her too fat to keep up any kind of pace, so I soon scooped her up and tucked her under my arm. She gave in instantly, and made amiable clucking noises.

The driver of the old Jaguar that had so narrowly missed us was now standing next to it: a tall, slender man with short, ruffled black hair and an olive complexion that contrasted startlingly with his light grey eyes. As we approached, he had the cheek to whip a camera up and click away with it!

I was already cross and this didn’t improve my temper, so I marched up to him and let rip: ‘Are you mad, driving so fast in a village? You could have killed Aggie—in fact, you could have killed both of us!’

‘Ooo-er!’ agreed Aggie, softly.

‘I wasn’t actually driving fast,’ he said, with a hint of amusement in those grey eyes that made me feel even crosser. ‘In fact, I was crawling—and I’d seen the hen. I just wasn’t expecting a madwoman in red rubber gloves to hurtle out right after her.’

Aggie made another throaty crooning noise and he lifted his camera—an old-fashioned one, I noticed, not a new digital job—and clicked the shutter.

‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’

‘Sorry—habit. Do you mind?’ He had a very charming, apologetic smile that tilted upwards at one corner, but I wasn’t at all beguiled.

‘Yes, I do mind!’

‘Once a photographer…’ he drawled, looking at me assessingly with half-closed eyes. ‘And you do make rather a unique picture, standing holding that hen.’

I became conscious that my hair was blowing out in the wind like a banner, my feet were bare and frozen, and my red rubber gloves did little to add to an ensemble that consisted of a rather pulled green fleece over torn dungarees. ‘Maybe, but you should ask permission first!’

‘Sorry, it really was just impulse. Actually, I’m looking for a house called Blessings, if I have the name right. It sounds a bit unlikely.’

‘Blessings?’

‘Yes. You’ve heard of it?’

‘You’re practically next to it. It’s that Elizabethan pile over there. Are you…I mean, do you know Tim Rowland-Knowles?’

He looked that type—sort of minor public school, comfortably off and assured.

‘Not yet. But an old friend, Libby Cazzini, says she’s going to marry him, so, since I was passing nearby, I thought I’d pop in on my way back to London.’

‘You’re an old friend of Libby s?’ I gazed at him like the halfwit he patently thought me, while my brain digested a couple of things. ‘Oh…then would you be that photographer she told me about—Jonah somebody?’

‘Noah. Noah Sephton.’

‘I knew it was biblical. And you’re out of luck, because Libby’s actually on her way to London, to buy her wedding dress. Maybe you’ll catch up with her down there, though she’ll be a bit pushed for time since she’s coming back tomorrow.’

He smiled again, rather attractively. And I suppose you wouldn’t be the mad friend who chose to stay in Neatslake when she could have lived in London, by any chance? I can’t remember your name at all, biblical or otherwise.’

‘Josie—Josie Gray,’ I said, wondering what on earth Libby had said about me. ‘Does she talk about me?’

‘All the time.’ He offered a long, slim hand and, hampered by the hen, I shook it awkwardly. Then he turned to survey the Green and the church behind it, with its strange, rather squat tower and said, ‘Well, it’s a pretty enough spot, but I always thought she’d had a dodgy start in life here and never wanted to come back again.’

‘So did I, but she always loved Blessings and now she loves Tim Rowland-Knowles too, so that’s the reason she’s coming back.’

I wondered if, perhaps, he had become more than just a friend since Libby’s husband had died (I knew her too well to think she would play around while she was still married); but he didn’t look upset or even slightly jealous, just interested.

‘So it’s really love, purest love?’

‘Definitely. Tim’s such a sweet man,’ I assured him. ‘They fell for each other the minute they met…or met again, because we’d played tennis with him when we were teenagers. I didn’t think he would remember us, because he’s a few years older and we were just tedious, giggly fifteen-year-olds at the time, but he says he does.’

‘Oh, well,’ he shrugged, ‘it seemed a bit sudden, but she’s old enough to know what she’s doing. Maybe I’ll see her in London, as you say. I’ll give her a ring. Should have done before I called in, only I was so near. And I did meet you, after all. I expect I’ll see you at their wedding?’

‘I suppose—’ I stopped, for the Jaguar’s passenger door had swung open and a girl with tousled blonde hair and the longest legs I’d ever seen got out. Even dishevelled, without makeup and in Ugg boots and a crumpled denim miniskirt, she looked beautiful. She just had to be a model, she had that ‘look at me!’ air about her.

‘Are you going to be much longer, darling?’ she asked Noah, ignoring me. ‘I’m freezing.’

‘Get back in the car then,’ he said shortly.

Behind her, Ben suddenly appeared in the cottage doorway, tall, tousled and chunky, a smear of ochre paint up one cheekbone. As always, I felt my face break spontaneously into a smile and my heart melt.

Noah, looking bemused at this sudden transformation from the half-propitiated virago of a moment before, moved aside as I wished him an absent goodbye and went in, hen and all—though not before he had whipped that camera up again.

I heard the whirr of the shutter and sincerely hoped he had forgotten to load it with film, or I might just appear in one of his exhibitions as ‘Portrait of the Village Idiot’.

When I told Ben who I’d been talking to, he was cross that I hadn’t introduced him.

‘He’s very well known and he’s photographed a lot of famous writers and artists. If he’d known who I was, he might have taken my picture and it could have done my career a bit of good!’

‘He seemed to be more interested in taking mine,’ I pointed out, ‘and Aggie’s.’ Under my arm, Aggie crooned agreement.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.