Wedding Tiers (27 page)

Noah had been around in my absence and pushed a sprig of mistletoe through the door with a note saying, ‘Consider yourself virtually kissed!’ And when I went round to take Mac home and lock the hens up, so Harry didn’t have to go out into the cold again, there was another big basket of chopped firewood by the back door and a new heap in the woodshed.

When I phoned Libs up to wish her happy Christmas, I asked her to thank him.

Boxing Day was pretty much a repeat of the day before, in that Harry and I ate a huge lunch and then he retired to his house, while Mac and I tried to walk off the excess calories.

But in the afternoon I went up to Blessings for tea. Harry was invited too, but instead went to see the widow of his friend Bob, and said he would have his dinner at the Griffin later—they do a good meat and potato pie there, with mushy peas and gravy—then have an early night in with the telly.

At Blessings everyone was gathered in the Great Chamber, including Dorrie and Noah. Pia had just been dropped off by Jasper and was actually wearing her rainbow jumper, hat, scarf and mittens so that it seemed my birthday and Christmas presents had been a resounding success.

I’d given Libby a knitted French poodle toilet roll cover in Lurex-spangled white yarn, so she could start her own collection (whether she liked it or not), and all the menfolk rum and raisin fudge I’d made at the last minute, plus a long narrow striped scarf apiece—a muted, manly version of Pia’s. Luckily Pansy knits them one after the other on automatic pilot when she’s watching telly, so always has a good stock to hand.

When Gina came in, she said my wine and
petits fours
were just what she needed, now her family were here and eating her out of house and home, and I thanked her for the amaretti biscuits (most of which I had already eaten; I was sure I would have regained all my lost weight by New Year!).

We all ended up playing board games, because there’s something about Christmas that seems to make you want to, though perhaps it’s just having the leisure to do that kind of thing. I’m not bad at Scrabble and Cluedo, but with Monopoly I always buy the colours I like best, so that I’m either a resounding winner or, more often, lose my shirt. It was all fun, anyway, right up to the moment, over the Earl Grey and Christmas cake, when Libby dropped a bombshell.

‘Noah’s going to rent the gatehouse for a few months,’ she said, pouring tea from a large, flowery pot. ‘His next exhibition will be photographs of wedding receptions, so he’s going to be taking pictures at most of the Blessings ones—and he’s going to include one or two he took at ours as well.’

‘And Freddie’s,’ he put in. ‘I think I got some good ones there.’

I turned and stared at him. ‘You’re going to live in
Neatslake
?’

‘Well, I’ll be going up and down a bit to my studio in London during the week,’ he said. ‘I’ll divide my time.’

He sounded just like Ben, with one foot in the country, and one in the metropolis. I think I was probably scowling, because he added, ‘But I won’t if you
hate
the idea, Josie!’

‘You’ve no objection, really, have you, Josie?’ Tim looked surprised, as well he might.

‘Me? Not at all—why should I? The people in your photographs might, though, Noah. Some of your angles are not exactly flattering.’

‘Oh, no, they’ll be so made up that the great Noah Sephton is going to photograph them that they’ll sign a disclaimer,’ Libby said. ‘Or most of them will, anyway.’

Noah smiled modestly at me, which for some reason made me feel like hitting him over the head with the Monopoly board…

‘What’s more, he’s going to update the gatehouse a bit at his own expense,’ Tim put in, ‘have a shower put in, and so on. It’s a bit basic right now, to say the least.’

Noah shrugged. ‘I like to be comfortable and, who knows, if I like living here enough I might take out a long lease on it, if you’ll let me. I intend moving in sometime in March, just before Old Barn Receptions is launched. I want to be here from the first!’

He sounded terribly enthusiastic now, but I expected that once he’d got enough pictures, he would be hightailing it off back to the bright lights again.

‘How
is
the barn coming along?’ I asked Libby ‘I’ve been too busy the last few days to go and see.’

‘There’s still lots to sort out. A permanent stage and sound system are going in next, but the workmen aren’t here over Christmas, of course. I’ll be lucky if they’re back after the New Year!’

‘What about that advert you were going to put in
Glorious Weddings?

‘It’ll be in the February issue, which is out in mid-January, so we should start getting some early bookings,’ she said hopefully. ‘And I’ll be starting local advertising in the New Year too, when the brochures have arrived from the printers.’

It did sound as if it was all pretty well on track and she didn’t really need my help that much, except as a sounding board, prop and stay, which had always been my main function as Libby’s friend! However, she did tend to get carried away with the finer detail instead of sorting out the basics first, so once the New Year was over I would have to make sure she hadn’t missed out anything vital.

After tea, Pia and Noah both said they would like some fresh air and elected to walk me home, then came in for a glass of wine. Pia ate a gingerbread star and two chocolate watches from the tree, while telling Noah about some of the zanier presents I’d given her for Christmas and birthdays over the years.

‘One year, when I was about eight, she sent me a little Paddington Bear fibreboard suitcase for Christmas, and she’d filled it with lots of tiny wrapped presents.’

‘How sweet,’ Noah said. He looked quite at home on the sofa, lying back with his long legs stretched before him, ankles crossed, a glass in one hand and a half-eaten gingerbread star in the other.

‘Well, the suitcase was, but I was into practical jokes about then—a horrible childhood stage—and so there were things like severed fingers and plastic doggy-do. I’m not sure Mum has quite forgiven either of us for the fake ink blot, because I put it right in the middle of a brand-new huge cream leather sofa and she nearly had a seizure. Then there were the realistic plastic bluebottles…’ Pia, who had been a little imp, smiled reminiscently.

‘Not so sweet, then,’ he said, amused.

‘Ah, but it was the very last little parcel in the suitcase that was the best thing—the dried scorpion.’

‘Josie sent you a
dried scorpion
for Christmas?’

‘That’s what it said on the brown paper packet. Only when I started to undo it, it made a horrible scrabbling and rattling noise as if it was alive in there and trying to get out, so I screamed at the top of my lungs! I was petrified.’

‘I didn’t mean to frighten you,’ I apologised.

‘Oh, I loved it! And of course when it stopped making a noise and I found out it was just a wound-up piece of elastic and card, I tried the trick on everyone and it got them all going every time. I’m surprised I didn’t scare you with it too, Noah. I mustn’t have seen you until the novelty wore off and I’d moved on to something else.’

‘I’m glad I missed that one! But I do seem to remember you playing tricks on me at one time, and now I know who to blame.’ He raised a quizzical eyebrow at me.

‘I think I must be the world’s worst godmother,’ I said guiltily.

‘No, the very best,’ Pia said warmly.

When they left, Noah lingered slightly and said, ‘I’ll say goodbye for the moment, Josie, because I’m off early in the morning. I did chop you extra wood today, to keep you going.’

‘Yes, I noticed, thank you for that. I’m going to miss you,’ I added.

‘I’d be flattered if I thought that was for myself, rather than my wood-chopping abilities,’ he said ruefully.

‘No you wouldn’t, you’d run a mile. It’s much better just to be friends, you said so yourself.’

‘Did I? Well, I’ll be up occasionally to see how the gatehouse renovations are coming along, then I’ll be settling in by March, so you won’t have to do without my log-splitting skills for long.’

He bent his dark head and kissed me goodbye and, perhaps because of Pia’s interested gaze, it was
almost
brotherly.

Then he wound the striped scarf I had given him around his neck and sauntered off, looking as if he’d sprung out of an Armani advert.

Harry and I spent a quiet New Year together, after which he retired to his shed and filed seven days’ worth of metal off his minesweeping medal before displaying it, framed, on his living-room wall, together with the entire MOD correspondence. So many people had been to see the collection that he was thinking of charging an admittance fee.

My days were fully occupied with the usual busy round, including making lots of jars of lovely, deep-orange marmalade—plus keeping Libby grounded over the Old Barn conversion.

Then there were lots of enquiries about wedding cakes, most of them generated by that article in
Country at Heart
magazine. But I took Libby’s advice and put my prices up, turned down any boring commissions or troublesome-sounding customers, and stuck to my guns about only delivering locally. Having to collect the cake put a lot of people off.

I still get internet fan mail too, though I thought it would have tapered off by now. It still seems odd to me that I should have a cult readership interested in the way I live
my
life, just as Ben and I once pored avidly over John Seymour’s self-sufficiency books and Lizzie Pharamond’s
Perseverance Cottage Chronicles.
We were too late for the first great wave of self-sufficiency, but now I’m a kind of guru to the next generation!

I suppose my lifestyle seems more accessible than that of the earlier self-sufficiency experts, since I live a truly green life only about eighty per cent of the time, if I’m lucky, so even city dwellers can follow some of my ideas.

After all, when Ben, Mary and Russell were doing their MA courses at the Royal College of Art in London and we all lived together in a basement flat, I still managed to grow loads of fruit, herbs and vegetables in containers liberated from skips. I sprouted mung beans, made jam, and baked bread, pies and cakes with wholemeal flour too.

And whatever Ben says, I never
hated
London. I may not have been much of a party animal, like him, but I used to love meeting Libby for lunch in the Museum of Garden History, or going out to Kew Gardens for the day, plus there were all those lovely parks. There are worse jobs than selling bunches of flowers all day in a florist’s too.

Rob Rafferty called in today for a chat and Noah was quite wrong about him, because he made no attempt to pounce on anything except my cakes, though I am sure the whole village is now talking about all the men visiting my cottage. Still, at least it will distract them from raking up old stories about Libby’s mum’s colourful past, which they have had a tendency to do since the wedding…Thinking about that reminded me of my horrible little secret, though I hastily pushed it out of sight.

* * *

Noah was still in London, but a few days into January I started to get all sorts of little hen-related gifts in the post, like a plastic wind-up chicken that laid eggs—and they just
had
to be from him, because I didn’t know anyone else who would do something so daft. Then one day I got home from walking Mac to find a fresh stack of firewood and a cockerel weathervane on the woodshed roof, which was a bit of a giveaway, coupled as it was with a note from Noah saying he’d found Aggie halfway to Blessings and returned her to her run, though he couldn’t guarantee she would still be there on my return. (Though by some miracle she was.)

I phoned him up to thank him and then I asked, ‘Noah, have you been sending me lots of hen stuff in the post?’

‘Hens? Who,
me
?’ he said innocently. Then he asked me if I’d like to go with him to see the Antony Gormley sculptures of a hundred iron men, facing out to sea along the beach at Crosby, near Southport.

I’d wanted to see them for ages, but not got around to it, so I agreed and, despite the icy breeze blowing along the sands, I was glad I had, because they were very impressive. They had all the dignified presence of the Easter Island statues and, like them, looked as if they’d been there since the dawn of time.

They were also stark naked and Noah said they made him feel shy and distinctly lacking in the undercarriage department—as well they might—but I wasn’t about to bolster up his ego on that point so I just nodded agreement. I expect this was why he chased me round and round one of them with a smelly dead crab, though he didn’t catch me, thank goodness.

Gina had sent a packed lunch of sandwiches and Thermoses of hot coffee and soup, which we had in the car to thaw us out before the drive back. All in all, it was the best day I’d had for a long, long time, right up to the moment when Noah dropped
me off at home, windblown, tired and relaxed from the warmth of the car.

I opened the front door and scooped up the post waiting for me on the mat as Noah tooted his horn and drove off, dumping three circulars and a letter from
Reader’s Digest
(telling me I had won a huge amount of money—
perhaps)
straight into the recycled paper bin.

That left one handwritten envelope, which contained only a newspaper cutting from
The Times
, announcing that Ben and Olivia’s nuptials had taken place at a register office. The envelope was postmarked Wilmslow, so I knew Ben’s mother had sent it.

The sun seemed to go out of the day with Ben’s mother’s act of spitefulness. I never did anything to deserve all the enmity Nell Richards has directed at me over the years, but I hoped this would now be an end to it, for Ben and I were irrevocably parted. What more could she want?

To round the day off, Ben himself phoned me up in the evening, drunk as a skunk, to tell me his marriage was all my fault and he hoped I was satisfied.

‘I don’t see why I should have to take the blame for any of your actions, Ben Richards,’ I told him coldly. ‘As far as I know, you’re an adult, even if you don’t behave like one.’

But then his voice went all choked as he said he hadn’t done any new work of any significance since we had parted and he didn’t feel as if he ever would. ‘I never really appreciated that our life together in Neatslake was the wellspring of my inspiration until it was too late, Josie. My creativity is shrivelling, here in London!’

‘Well, presumably it shrivelled a bit whenever you were down there, Ben—and you’ve spent a lot of time in London in the last year, though admittedly
not
painting.’

‘I thought you’d understand,’ he said reproachfully ‘You always believed in my art!’

‘I still do,’ I replied, with a guilty thought for the rotting prawns, though I hoped by now they were little more than a faint, unpleasant tang on the air. ‘But now I come to think of it, you never did any really brilliant work while you were at the Royal College of Art, did you? It wasn’t until you moved back to Neatslake that you were truly inspired again. I hope you get your mojo back, though, Ben, I really do—only it will have to be without any help from me.’

‘My work can’t have been that bad, because I got my MA!’ he said indignantly, but then, with an effort, he added that he understood my bitterness (he has
no
idea!), and if he’d driven me into the arms of another man he forgave me (which was very big of him), and so surely
I
could forgive
him
for his little slip too?

He seemed to have entirely forgotten that he’d married his little slip. And if he still thinks I had a fling with Noah, then either he hasn’t seen Mary since I spoke to her, or if he has, she didn’t manage to convince him his suspicions were as unbelievable as
she
found them!

Unless, of course, village gossip has reached his ears via Stella and Mark, and he has drawn the wrong conclusion? And according to Libby, the village now seems to suspect I’ve got a thing going with Rob as well, but Ben mustn’t have heard that fresh titbit…

I couldn’t think of a thing to say, but luckily I didn’t have to, because at that point there was the sound of a sharp-edged, by-now-familiar female voice saying, ‘Ben? Who are you talking to?’ and the phone went dead.

Noah came over to chop more wood next morning, before going back to London, arriving just in time to catch me about to trundle a heavy load of it over to the Graces in the wheelbarrow.

‘Why don’t you fill your car boot with it?’ he asked curiously.

‘Because the car was Harry’s pride and joy, and I’m trying not to make too much of a mess of it.’

‘Well, luckily I’m not so precious about my Jag—I’ll take it across,’ he offered, and he did too, though I insisted on lining his boot with henfood sacks first.

When he came back we had a cup of tea and a slice of treacle tart and I found myself telling him about Ben marrying Olivia and then phoning me to tell me it was
my
fault—that everything, including his losing his inspiration, was my fault—only suddenly, through Noah’s eyes, I could see the funny side of it for the first time.

Before he left, I showed him the rush WAG wedding cake order I’d just finished making—a football topped with a pair of icing sugar Manolo Blahniks and a handbag. It was pretty straightforward, except that I had to buy a special cake tin for the football, though I expect it will come in handy for all kinds of designs now.

Because of the firewood the Graces now think Noah is wonderful and a ‘dear boy’, and Pansy asked me if I thought he would like one of her handknitted sweaters as a thank you. I said I was positive he would love one, especially if it had big, cheerful stripes, because he was very into that sort of thing.

Since Ben’s call I knew he’d come up and stayed with Mark and Stella, because he’d been seen in the village. And once I thought I saw him in the distance myself when I was out walking Mac, so I turned and made off in the other direction, just in case.

It made it a little awkward about the co-op order too. Stella was very cool when she next rang to ask what I wanted. Then she called again when it arrived to tell me how much I owed her and where she would leave the order for me to pick up, so I haven’t actually seen her since the day I ran into Ben in their kitchen. And that’s OK by me. My true friends are the ones who have stuck by me, like Libby and Harry.

* * *

I was wrong about the TV series, because it looks as though at least the first six episodes will be shot. I had to drive over to the wine bar in Middlemoss to meet Claire Flowers for a big discussion over lunch—not that I actually
discussed
anything much, since she did most of the talking.

By the time we’d eaten a plate of seafood linguini (one little plateful cost as much as I could have fed twelve people with!), she’d thrashed everything out to her satisfaction and I was committed to the project and, if truth be told, starting to get a little excited about it too.

‘So we’ll start shooting in early March then, and hope for a good dry bright spell. The budget will be tight,’ she began, then broke off and waved at someone behind me.

‘It’s Rob,’ she said. ‘I wonder if he would like to make a brief appearance in an episode—free.’

‘He might, but he’d serve no useful purpose, except decoration,’ I said, twisting round to see him. ‘He—’

‘Josie!’ Rob swooped down on me like a golden eagle, scooped me up and kissed me with his usual enthusiasm. Then he did much the same to Claire, only by then I’d noticed the tall, slim, blonde girl standing behind him.

‘This is Anji,’ Rob said, coming up for air. ‘She’s got a cameo role in an episode of
Cotton Common
and when Claire said you’d be here for lunch today, we thought we’d come over because Anji really wanted to meet you.’

‘
Me?
’ I said, baffled and a bit embarrassed. Close to, Anji looked even more beautiful than she had the first time I’d seen her but, although there was a social smile on her lovely lips, her eyes were icy and my heart sank into my boots.

‘Yes, you—my friends have told me
all
about you,’ she said pointedly, ‘and I’d
love
to have a little chat!’

And then Claire had to leave and Rob went to buy drinks and Anji more or less told me to leave her boyfriend alone!’ I told
Libby, who’d come over with some curtain material samples she couldn’t make her mind up about, just after I got home, limp as a rag.

‘What, Noah?’ Libby exclaimed. ‘Good heavens, rumours
do
get around!’

‘It must be Olivia spreading them, because Mary certainly doesn’t move in the same circles,’ I said. ‘Anyway, Anji said they’d been seeing each other for months and everything had been fine until he came to Neatslake for your wedding, and now he was blowing hot and cold and talking about spending half his time down here, so she wanted to know what the big attraction was.’

‘What on earth did you say?’

‘That the attraction certainly wasn’t me—and by then, I think she was having trouble believing it herself. I mean—she is
stunning
, Libs, and even though I’d dressed up a bit for the wine bar I still couldn’t hold a candle to her. In fact, I expect she just frightened Noah off a bit by getting too serious too soon, but I expect she’ll get him back if she settles for what he’s prepared to offer.’

After all, I certainly did, and you couldn’t say he wasn’t upfront about the lack of seriousness of his intentions!

‘So what did she say next?’ Libby enquired, fascinated.

‘That now she’d seen me again, she couldn’t really square the rumours with the reality, but if I
did
have any designs on Noah, to lay off! And I said I didn’t, and anyway had only just broken up with my long-term partner and so wasn’t interested in men, except as friends. Then Rob came back and I said I had to go, and escaped.’

‘What an exciting life you’re leading!’ Libby said. ‘I do think Noah dumped Anji before he had his little moment with you after my reception, though, so you needn’t feel guilty about that on
her
account.’