Wedding Tiers. Trisha Ashley
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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.’
‘Oh, come off it with the poverty-stricken bit. You’re loaded!’
‘Comfortable, not mega-rich,’ she insisted, though she always seems to me to be fabulously wealthy and able to do anything she wants. ‘If I buy Blessings, I might have to sell the flat in Pisa.’
‘Or the London house?’
‘Tricky. Pia mainly uses that as her home base when she does deign to grace me with her presence. And that’s good, because when she’s in London, she gets taken over by the Cazzini uncles and aunts and cousins, especially Joe’s youngest sister, Maria, and they might manage to knock some sense into her head eventually. She’s more likely to listen to them than to me. The relations in Pisa are a bit too distant to have much clout. Anyway, I like having a base in London.’
She got up. ‘I’ll just go and tidy up a bit and do my face, then I’m off.’
‘You aren’t letting the grass grow under your feet!’
‘I can’t afford to. The estate agent said there’d been lots of interest in Blessings already, almost all from the actors in that Cotton Common soap series that they shoot in Manchester.’
‘I suppose there might have been. They’ve been moving into the area, especially round the Mosses, in the last few years.’
‘Well, they’re not moving into Neatslake,’ she said firmly. ‘Oh, and is Ben home? I forgot to ask,’ she added as an afterthought.
She and Ben had a fairly spiky relationship and I thought he was a little jealous of her. But it wasn’t like we didn’t both have other friends too, though come to think of it, they were mostly couples, like Mark and Stella who keep the goats, or Russell and Mary. Libby—after Ben, of course—was my best friend…
‘He went to London yesterday.’ I looked at the clock. ‘He usually gives me a ring about this time, if he can.’
‘I hope you gave him a clean hankie and told him not to speak to strange women before he left,’ she said tartly, before vanishing into the bathroom, which was inconveniently located downstairs, off the living room. As the door closed behind her I heard her exclaim, ‘Bizarre!’
I expect she was impressed by my cherished collection of knitted French poodle toilet roll covers. Whenever the Graces seem to be running short of Acorns, I ask for a new one and Pansy obliges, with whatever wool comes to hand. The last one was in glitzy speckled silver yarn.
The post, including a plastic-wrapped copy of Country at Heart magazine with the article about me in it, arrived immediately after Libby had left for her viewing. I almost phoned her mobile to tell her about it, but then thought it would wait.
The pictures were rather nice—one of me wearing a big floppy straw hat, digging in the garden, with Aggie waiting for worms, and Ben in his studio painting one of his three-dimensional creations. There was also a lovely one of Harry sitting in a deck chair under the plum tree, Mac curled at his feet, and a couple of smaller shots of me in the kitchen and the wedding cake I had been making (a fairy cake—lots of fairies).
Then I read the article, and really, I don’t remember saying most of the things it said I had! How odd. It all looked and sounded terribly idyllic, though.