Wedding Tiers

TRISHA ASHLEY

Wedding Tiers

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge, London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Trisha Ashley 2009

Trisha Ashley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007329052

Version: 2018-04-23

Jean Ashley, 1927-2009, who took joy in my success

Table of Contents

Copyright

Prologue: Ends and Beginnings, 1983

Chapter One-Cakes and Ale

Chapter Two-Sweet Music

Chapter Three-Blessings

Chapter Four-Love, Actually

Chapter Five-All Apple Pie

Chapter Six-Hippie Chic

Chapter Seven-Gathering In

Chapter Eight-Snap Happy

Chapter Nine-Pisa Cake

Chapter Ten-Slightly Adulterated

Chapter Eleven-Over and Out

Chapter Twelve-Stitched Up

Chapter Thirteen-Altered Image

Chapter Fourteen-White Wedding

Chapter Fifteen-Undone

Chapter Sixteen-Peapodded

Chapter Seventeen-Off-Piste

Chapter Eighteen-Mixed Pickles

Chapter Nineteen-Driven

Chapter Twenty-Faithful Friends

Chapter Twenty-one-Visiting Rights

Chapter Twenty-two-Unwanted Presence

Chapter Twenty-three-The Family Way

Chapter Twenty-four-Handsome Cavaliers

Chapter Twenty-five-Chicken

Chapter Twenty-six-Subtleties

Chapter Twenty-seven-Spring Fever

Chapter Twenty-eight-Three Tiers for the Bride

Chapter Twenty-nine-Good Reception

Chapter Thirty-Tried and Tested

Chapter Thirty-one-May Day

Chapter Thirty-two-Raspberries

Chapter Thirty-three-Family Matters

Chapter Thirty-four-Gestures

Chapter Thirty-five-Wedding Belles

Chapter Thirty-six-Fruits and Leaves

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Exclusive extract of Good Husband Material

Also by Trisha Ashley

About the Publisher

Prologue: Ends and Beginnings, 1983

When Josie awoke in hospital, unscathed except for concussion and an impressive array of bruises, she had no recollection of the crash. Granny, red-eyed but stoical, had to break the news to her.

Somehow she managed to blank out most of the weeks immediately following the accident too, so that when she looked back later it seemed to her that one day she was living in St Albans with a full set of parents and several good friends, leavened with the usual teenage-years angst and a heartfelt, if destined to be forever unrequited, passion for Sting, and the next she was being whisked off alone to Granny’s cottage in Lancashire, to start a new life.

‘It’s just thee and me now, flower,’ Granny was all too often to remark, though with the best of intentions. But it wasn’t likely that Josie would forget that fact, even if amnesia and anger were her current first lines of defence. For she was totally and illogically furious, both with her parents for so selfishly getting themselves killed, and with poor, grieving, gentle Granny for being truly ancient, so that Josie was convinced that she would also soon be snatched away, leaving her totally bereft.

It would be better to love no one, to feel nothing at all—much safer.

All that summer, she silently and sullenly followed Granny around the garden while she hoed, dug, planted and harvested, or helped Uncle Harry (who lived next door and was not a real uncle, only having married Granny’s cousin) to tend the poultry. And slowly Josie began to gain some comfort from the cycle of cultivation, the clucking hens and the drowsy, contented humming of bees; while across the Green, the ancient church bells repeatedly rang a joyful wedding peal, a signal that hope and happiness still existed and might one day be hers again.

Only in the evenings, lying in her narrow bed among the transplanted possessions of her former life, the mournful screams of the peacocks next door in the gardens of Blessings would pierce right to her heart with unbearable sadness, and she would put a pillow over her head and weep.

She didn’t take the bus to her new school on the first day. Instead, Uncle Harry drove her there in the yellow Vauxhall Cavalier that was his pride and joy. And then, embarrassingly, he and Granny both stood at the gates like the oldest parents in the world while Josie went on alone. She turned once, and they waved at her, as she had known they would: it was comforting but deeply uncool.

Catching sight of her, a passing youth—tall and broad-shouldered, with floppy, light brown hair—stopped dead and gave her a big, drop-dead-gorgeous smile. Suddenly breathless, she gazed into his warm hazel eyes, and it was as though she already knew she’d found a kindred spirit, a soul mate—recognised that fate, having taken love away with one sweep of the dice, had then, fickle, tossed her a perfect six.

‘Hello!’ he said, his voice deep, friendly and confident. ‘I’m Benjamin Richards—but you can call me Ben…or anything else you like.’

Flustered, she stammered shyly: ‘I’m Josie. Josie Gray.’

‘Nice to meet you, Josie Gray.’ He smiled again before rejoining his waiting friends, who were all nudging each other and laughing.

She was jerked out of her trance by a voice at her elbow saying, ‘You’ve been here five minutes and dishy Ben Richards spoke to you? Wow!’

A small, slender, impishly pretty blonde girl was looking her up and down from under her fringe as if she wasn’t quite sure what the attraction had been. ‘You must be the orphan—only we were told not to mention that.’

‘You just did,’ snapped out Josie, who had become used to people tiptoeing around her as though she were some kind of delicately balanced explosive device.

The girl shrugged. ‘Well, you can’t go pussyfooting around things for ever, can you? I’m Libby Martin, and if it makes you feel any better, my mother’s an alcoholic slut and I have no idea who my father was.’

Strangely, it did make Josie feel better, and she grinned. Then the bell went and everyone started to stream towards the door.

‘Come on—Miss Price told me I had to show you where to go and I’ve got to look after you all week,’ Libby said. ‘God, I’m so glad you don’t look naff—apart from that terrible haircut. If we’re going to be friends, you’ll have to do something about it.’

‘Granny cut it and I think it looks cool,’ Josie said defensively, then added, ‘Are we going to be friends?’

‘Oh, I think so, don’t you? Probably end up BF.’

‘BF?’

‘Best friends.’ Her blue eyes went wide. ‘Where on earth are you from?

‘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.

‘I hear your granny makes the best cakes in Neatslake,’ he said, with that warm, irresistible sideways smile, and Josie felt the glacier around her heart crack into a million fragments and melt away.

* * *

‘Well, that’s going to put the cat among the pigeons,’ Granny said thoughtfully when Ben had finally—and reluctantly—gone off home, full of cheese straws hot from the oven and several slices of butter-rich fruitcake. ‘But he seems a nice boy—considering.’

‘Considering what?’ Josie demanded, coming out of a pleasant trance. Her mouth ached a bit from all the smiling she’d done this afternoon, and she wondered if her face muscles had atrophied over the last few months from disuse. She got up and looked at herself in the small, cloudy mirror beside the coat pegs, but it was about as much good as a reflection on water, all ripply.

‘If you two are going to be friends, I don’t think Ben’s parents, especially his mum, will be too pleased about it.’

‘I’ve heard she’s a snob, Granny. Do you know her?’

‘Oh, yes. Many’s the time Nell Slattery’s sat here in the kitchen with your mother,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘They did their nursing training together and started working at the same hospital together too, and they were quite good friends in those days.’

Josie frowned. ‘So why won’t she be pleased if me and Ben are…’ she blushed, ‘friends?’

‘Well, flower, for one thing her husband is a consultant pathologist and the very instant the ring was on her finger she chucked the nursing and most of her old friends with it, and got Ideas. And for another—well, her husband fell for your mother first, you see, and Nell got him on the rebound.’

‘Ben’s father once went out with Mum?’ Josie said, amazed.

‘No, she didn’t have any fancy for him, but he pestered her until she met your father and they got married—then he turned and wed Nell instead. Since then she pretends she’s never met me if we pass in the village. Cleaners are below her notice. Though I suppose,’ she added with humour, ‘if she really didn’t, she’d be trying to employ me!’

‘There’s nothing wrong with having been a cleaner,’ Josie said loyally.

‘No, I’m not ashamed of having done good honest work, but I was proud of your mother, getting her nursing qualifications. And she was so pretty too. You look just like her at that age, Josie.’

‘But I’m not pretty,’ she said, surprised.

‘Of course you are.’

Josie shook her head definitely. ‘No, I’m not. Libby Martin, my new friend at school, said she thought I was unusual. Libby really is pretty—small and blonde and slim.’

‘Isn’t she Gloria Martin’s younger daughter? The talk of the village, that one is!’

‘Libby isn’t like her mother,’ Josie said definitely.

‘I don’t suppose she is. Neither of the two girls has had a bad word said about them,’ agreed Granny fairly. ‘The older one is apprenticed to a hairdresser and doing well. What’s she called? Some flower name.’

‘Daisy, I think,’ Josie said. ‘So, can I invite Libby to come round here sometimes?’

‘Yes, of course you can.’

‘Cool!’

‘I’m glad to see you making friends already, though I didn’t think you’d be starting with the boys quite so quickly!’

Josie blushed. ‘Ben’s just being nice. I mean, it’s not like he’s asked me out. He did ask Libby out once but she turned him down.’

‘Quite right too. At your age, friendship is better,’ Granny said firmly. ‘I don’t mind him coming here to see you, but no goings-on.’

Josie blushed furiously. ‘Granny!’

Later, in her room, she took the framed photograph of her parents out of the drawer where she’d hidden it away and looked from her mother’s smiling face to her own serious one in the dressing table mirror. Her mother was pretty, even with laughter lines and a bit of extra weight plumping up her cheeks, but Granny was just being kind, for surely her eyes had been bluer and her skin less sallow than Josie’s own?

Then she tried to remember what colour her father’s eyes had been, but already the memories were fading, along with the first sharp edge of pain and anger.

As the years passed, she forged a bond of hopes, dreams and laughter with Libby and moved seamlessly from friendship into love with Ben. But, deep down, she never quite lost that slight feeling of insecurity, the fear that those she loved might just be snatched away from her at any moment.

And she always hated the cry of peacocks.

Chapter One Cakes and Ale

The Artist has gone off to London again, for the opening night of an exhibition that includes his work. The source of his inspiration may come from the countryside, but these increasingly frequent trips to the metropolis are yet another necessary compromise to our way of life.

We aim to be as self-sufficient as possible—and still the twenty-first century constantly intrudes. Realistically, we’re doing well if we can strike an eighty/twenty balance! Even this diary is now written directly onto a laptop and emailed straight off to the editor of Skint Old Northern Woman magazine, just one example of the constant contradictions involved. And, of course, many of you now subscribe to the online version.

But it has to be admitted that the Artist has a weakness for all kinds of gadgets and bits of technological wizardry that I don’t share even when, with the best of intentions, he presents me with something like a breadmaking machine, which he is sure will make my life easier…

‘Cakes and Ale: the musings of a backyard good-lifer’

The sun was making a brave attempt to warm a dank and fuzzy mid-October morning when Ben, looking as big, tousled and wholesomely delectable as always, turned on the doorstep to say goodbye.

‘Oh, I wish you didn’t have to go,’ I said, putting my arms around his neck to pull him down to kissing level. Honestly, you’d think he was going on some exotic foreign trek into uncharted territory, rather than to stay with old friends in London for a couple of days. I really must get a grip! But these moments do sweep over me occasionally, because when you’ve been orphaned as a child and then lost the grandmother who brought you up, it’s hard not to be afraid that fate might also decide to snatch away the person you love most in the whole wide world.

‘You know I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to, darling.’ Ben enfolded me in a reassuring if asphyxiating hug, like a good-natured grizzly bear.

‘Liar, liar, your bum’s on fire!’ I chanted rudely. ‘You’re loving your bit of fame, admit it. These days there’s a glint in your eye and a spring in your step every time you set off for London.’

He grinned, though guiltily, his fair skin flushing slightly. ‘Perhaps—but aren’t I always more than happy to be back home again, with you?’

‘Maybe,’ I conceded, because it was true that he always came back exhausted and more than ready to slip back into the old, familiar rut as if he’d never been away—until the next time. ‘But then, maybe you’re just missing your home comforts?’

‘You’re one of my home comforts,’ he said, squeezing me again and then letting me go. ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I get to Russell and Mary’s flat—promise.’

‘That’s OK, I don’t really think anything awful will happen to you between here and Camden, unless things have changed radically since I last came with you.’ I paused reflectively, trying to remember when that was, and then added in surprise, ‘Do you know, that must be more than a year ago!’