Wedding Tiers (4 page)

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.

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.’