Trisha Ashley - Wedding Tiers

‘St Albans.’

‘Huh.’ Libby looked unimpressed—clearly she’d never heard of the place. ‘I’ll tell you about my big plan at break, if you like.’

‘Big plan?’ Josie echoed.

‘Well, I don’t want to be Libby Martin with the slutty mother from up the council estate for ever, do I? So I’m reinventing myself.’

‘Great idea,’ Josie conceded, suddenly dying to know what her new friend was going to reinvent herself as, and how she intended to do it. ‘What—’ she began, but then the bell rang for the second time and Libby grabbed her arm and started towing her along. Practically everyone else had already vanished indoors, including the gorgeous Ben Richards.

‘No time now—I’ll tell you later, so get a move on or we’ll be late. Though come to think of it, I suppose that’s OK today,’ Libby added, again with an impish smile. ‘You’re my “get out of jail free” card.’

At lunchtime Libby outlined her plan, which seemed to be directed at leaving Neatslake as soon as possible and marrying a rich man.

‘Isn’t that a bit…’ Josie searched for the right word, ‘mercenary?. Out for what you can get? What about love?’

‘But I wouldn’t marry a man unless I loved him,’ Libby said, looking shocked. ‘No way would I do that! But I’m only going to let myself fall in love with someone well off, who will look after me.’

‘Right,’ Josie said doubtfully, because this kind of ambition had never cropped up when she’d been discussing future careers with her friends in St Albans.

‘But first, I have to get ready to live that kind of life—you know, like in Pride and Prejudice , when they keep going on about all the accomplishments you need to be the wife of a rich man?’

‘Well, yes, but I think they meant speaking Italian and doing embroidery, that kind of thing, didn’t they?’

‘Yes, but translate that into the twentieth century,’ Libby said impatiently. She dug a notebook out of her bag and flipped it open. ‘I’ve got a list of things I need to learn, like speaking without a broad accent. Mrs Springer, the English teacher, is helping me with that.’

‘I like your accent,’ Josie said.

‘You’re mad!’ Libby said, then moved her finger down the page and continued, ‘Horse riding, tennis, skiing…’ Here she paused, uncertainly. ‘Rich people do a lot of skiing, but that could be difficult round here. We don’t get a lot of snow and the nearest dry ski slope is miles away.’

‘Are you sure you need all of those?’

‘Some of them, anyway—as many as possible. You can help me.’

‘OK, but I’m not mad about horses—they’re so big.’

‘Don’t chicken out on me before we start,’ Libby said. ‘What about you, what do you want?’

‘I don’t know, really. My parents thought I ought to…’ She suddenly trailed off, her voice trembling.

‘Look, don’t go all wobbly on me!’ warned Libby, and to her surprise Josie saw that her new friend had tears in her large blue eyes. ‘If you start crying, then I will too, and then everyone will know I’m as soft as butter and I’ll be done for. I’m only cool to know because they think I’m hard as nails.’

Josie sniffed back the tears. ‘Sorry. My—my parents wanted me to go to university, but I don’t know…Now I just feel I’d like to stay in Neatslake for ever and help Granny with the gardening and Uncle Harry with the hens. Granny’s teaching me how to bake and make jam and stuff too.’

‘You can’t make a career out of any of that .’

‘Yes I could. I could be a gardener, and I think I’d like that.’ She caught sight of Ben Richards in the distance, in the middle of a group of boys. He was taller than the rest so he was easy to spot.

Libby saw where she was looking. ‘Ben’s fourteen, in the next year up from us, and he’s very popular. His parents wanted to send him to some public school but he decided he’d rather come here with his friends and he’s very stubborn. He’s brilliant at art—he’s done his O level already—but he’s totally thick about everything else.’

‘I’m sure he isn’t!’

‘He’s good at football,’ she conceded. ‘I’m not sure how clever you have to be for that, but it makes him popular with the boys too.’

They watched him in the distance and then Josie sighed and said, ‘I don’t suppose he’ll ever notice me again. I suppose it was just because he practically fell over me and I was a new face.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Libby said, looking at her thoughtfully, then added immodestly, ‘You’re not pretty like me , but sort of attractive in a different way. I’ve never met anyone else with hair that really dark red—or eyes that bluey-greyish-lilac sort of colour.’

‘Thanks, but I’m not sure I want to be different.’ Her eyes returned to Ben, now playing football with a group of other boys. She was also tall for her age…

‘Ben asked me out once, but I had to turn him down,’ Libby said.

Josie turned and stared at her new friend, feeling a pang of jealousy. ‘Not part of the big plan?’

‘No way.’ She shook her head. ‘And I think he only asked me because his friends dared him to. They probably told him I was easy, like Mum. Anyway, I don’t want to get tangled up with some village boy; I have to concentrate on the bigger picture. I’m saving myself for Mr Right. Mr Rich and Right,’ she added, then giggled. ‘It might have been worth going out with Ben, though, just to see his parents’ faces! They’re so snobby and stuck up, especially his mother, they’d have had fits.’

‘Oh? What does she do?’

Absolutely nothing, but Ben’s father’s a hospital consultant and they live up a lane the other side of Church Green, in a converted farmhouse. Ben’s already got his own studio in one of the outbuildings, because his mother doesn’t like mess in the house.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘One of his friends told me.’

‘Granny’s house is on the Green,’ Josie said. ‘That pair of cottages by the really old black and white building. My uncle Harry lives next door to us, but he’s not really an uncle, he just married Granny’s cousin.’

‘The old house is Blessings,’ Libby nodded. ‘It’s Elizabethan.’

‘Granny says she used to go there to clean, years ago.’

‘In that case, don’t get ideas about Ben Richards. His parents would probably think a granny who was a cleaner was only one step above a slutty mother.’

‘I don’t see why,’ Josie said defensively. ‘Anyway, she was a nurse during the war, but it damaged her back so she took up cleaning afterwards—just light stuff. She still gets a bad back sometimes, but that’s probably just because she’s really, really old. My mother was a nurse too, and my dad was a policeman. We lived in a police house in St Albans.’

‘Well, don’t start crying again, or you’ll set me off,’ Libby said briskly.

Josie gave a watery smile. She’d got the measure by now of Libby’s kind heart under her sometimes brusque exterior, and her friend’s lovely blue eyes were, indeed, brimming again with sympathetic tears.

‘A dad who was a policeman is at least a couple of rungs up from not knowing who your father is—and my sister, Daisy, doesn’t know either, except that we have different ones,’ Libby pointed out. ‘Maybe it’s better not to know.’

Libby left the bus before her new friend, at the other end of Neatslake, but Ben Richards and a couple of other boys got off when Josie did, suddenly swinging down the spiral stairs from the upper deck as the bus stopped, and jumping off first.

She didn’t think he’d noticed her, but as she turned the corner towards Church Green, he fell into step beside her as if he’d been waiting for her. Which he had.