Wedding Tiers (7 page)

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.

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.’