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Chapter Five All Apple Pie (#ulink_71eaa826-179c-558d-9f38-f92e02e790dd)
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 andpurée.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 (#ulink_b3eb1fa6-abbc-5aa9-92fb-397964722f2e)
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.
