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‘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 (#ulink_0a3bad80-6e18-5c04-9792-b16d4d8a6e63)
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?’
