Wedding Tiers. Trisha Ashley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

       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 СКАЧАТЬ