Trisha Ashley - Wedding Tiers

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.’