Wish Upon a Star

This book is dedicated to all my wonderful readers – my stars to steer by.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue: 2001, The Return of the Native

Chapter 1: A Star is Born

Chapter 2: The Night Watch

Chapter 3: Lardy Cake

Chapter 4: Christmas Pudding

Chapter 5: Falling Star

Chapter 6: Hasty Pudding

Jago

Chapter 7: The Cult of Perfection

Chapter 8: The Happy Macaroon

Jago

Chapter 9: The Blue Dog

Jago

Chapter 10: Sweet Perfection

Aimee

Chapter 11: Flaky

Chapter 12: Fruitful

Jago

Chapter 13: Sad Cake

Chapter 14: Stella’s Stars

Chapter 15: What the Dickens?

Jago

Chapter 16: Puffball

Chapter 17: Honeyed

Jago

Chapter 18: Pinker’s End

Chapter 19: Gone, but Not Forgotten

Chapter 20: The Proof of the Pudding

Jago

Chapter 21: Is There Honey Still for Tea?

Jago

Chapter 22: Princess Possibilities

Chapter 23: Mincemeat Mess

Jago

Chapter 24: Tart

Aimee

Chapter 25: Horse Feathers

Chapter 26: Jumbled

Aimee

Chapter 27: Nearer, My God, to Thee

Chapter 28: Taking Stock

Chapter 29: Nesting

Chapter 30: Plagued

Chapter 31: Cooking Up a Storm

Chapter 32: A Random Lot

Chapter 33: Up the Pole

Aimee

Chapter 34: Babes in the Wood

Chapter 35: Fêted

Aimee

Chapter 36: Surprise Package

Chapter 37: Nuts

Chapter 38: On the Edge

Jago

Chapter 39: To Infinity and Beyond

Jago

Chapter 40: Flying Pigs

Jago

Chapter 41: Boston Beans

Jago

Chapter 42: Piece of Cake

Chapter 43: Celestial Bliss

Recipes, Wish Upon a Star, Trisha Ashley

Acknowledgements

Read on for an exclusive extract of Trisha’s next novel Every Woman for Herself

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue: 2001, The Return of the Native

It was early evening in the village of Sticklepond and the bar of the Falling Star was almost empty, apart from a couple of locals who’d dropped in on their way home from work, and the shoe salesman in the corner who had booked a room for the night and was now studying racing form in the paper as if his life depended on it.

As Florrie Snowball slapped a hot, limp, microwaved sausage roll and a pint of Middlemoss Brown Ale in front of Pete Ormerod, who farmed up by the edge of the Winter’s End estate, she said, ‘I hear there’s an Almond moved back into the village.’

‘That’s right,’ he agreed, poking the middle of the sausage roll with the end of a gnarled finger as if unsure what might pop out. ‘News gets around fast.’

‘Someone saw her – there’s no mistaking an Almond, and anyway, we’ve seen Martha come and go over the years, right up till her mother died, haven’t we? Not that she didn’t keep herself to herself, just like her parents did.’

‘They had cause enough, didn’t they?’

‘I’m not one to think the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children, poor innocent mites, and only us old ones remember the whole story now,’ Florrie snapped. ‘And anyway, Martha’s parents were no more than cousins, so it wasn’t really anything to do with them.’

‘They still felt the shame, though,’ Pete Ormerod said heavily, ‘and went off to Australia with the rest of the family, even if they were back within the year.’

‘Well, you did all right out of it, didn’t you?’ she pointed out tartly. ‘Buying Badger’s Bolt farm gave you twice as much land and they were in such a hurry to get away, I bet you paid less than it was worth.’

‘It was enough to buy them a sheep holding in Australia and that’s what they wanted – though the sheep were what Jacob couldn’t abide. But there was never a better cattle man than Jacob Almond and I was more than glad to give him his old job and cottage back.’

‘I always thought the whole clan of them upping sticks and emigrating was a bit of an over-reaction myself,’ Florrie said. ‘Came of them being Strange Baptists from that chapel that was over in Ormskirk, I expect. The young ones these days’d think nothing of what happened – they see worse on the soaps every night. So now Martha’s back living in the very same cottage she grew up in, it’s surely time to forgive and forget.’

‘Not exactly the same cottage,’ Pete said through a mouthful of sausage roll, ‘the last people who had it built a big garden room at the back with a bedroom over it and tarted the place up no end.’

‘Well, you should know, you were the one who sold it off to them in the first place. And it’s just as well it’s been done up, because it was no more than a hovel before, and after being married to that London doctor Martha must be used to something different – and come to think of it, she’s not an Almond now, she’s Martha Weston.’

‘She’ll always be an Almond as far as some of us are concerned, there’s no getting away from it,’ Pete said, shaking his head, and seeing he was set in that conviction she said no more, though she did severely admonish him for having the bad manners to talk with his mouth full, before leaving him to the rest of his sausage roll and pint.

It had been sheer serendipity that the house where she was born should have come up for sale just as Martha Weston had started her search for a new home. Now, unpacking books in the almost unrecognisable cottage, she neither knew nor cared whether the locals were talking about her or not – she was just glad to be back where she felt she belonged.

Although she didn’t know all the ins and outs of it, Martha was well aware that one of her relatives had somehow blotted his copybook and been expunged from the family records in the dim and distant past (‘Never mention Uncle Esau to your father,’ her mother had always said), an event that had precipitated the entire Almond clan taking flight like a flock of startled birds.

She barely remembered Australia, except that it had been hot and smelled of sheep, but her parents had been even more insular on their return and she became a solitary child, happy in her own company, who could often be seen sketching in the countryside.

She’d gone to grammar school in Merchester and then, after being taken up and encouraged by Ottie Winter from the big house (who was even then getting a name for her sculptures), went off to art school in London.

Marrying a doctor and staying there hadn’t been any part of her plans, but love plays tricks on us all. Still, as soon as his death released her, she had flown like a homing pigeon back to the village where she was born.

She belonged in Sticklepond, but since both nature and nurture had made her solitary she often walked in the gloom of the evening when few were about and did most of her shopping in the nearest town instead of the village.

But strangely and without her being aware of doing it, whenever her way took her past the war memorial on the green, she would avert her eyes and quicken her step, just as her mother had always done.

Chapter 1: A Star is Born

While the consultant was explaining the complexities of my baby’s heart condition to me in a hushed, confidential tone, I stared fixedly at his yellow and red-spotted bow tie, half expecting it suddenly to spin round like a joke one: that’s how spaced-out with fear, anaesthetic and shock I was after my emergency Caesarean.

I don’t know why he bothered to lower his voice anyway, since I’d been shunted off into a room of my own … or maybe that should be a store cupboard of my own, because it was a tiny slice of space with one high window and a wall lined with boxes of equipment. They were probably as surplus to requirements as I seemed to be, now that my baby was sustained by the resources of the intensive care baby unit instead of my own.

‘Can I see her?’ I interrupted.

Ma, whose ample frame was squeezed into a tubular metal chair on the other side of the bed, with her elbow resting on a pile of cardboard cartons, said, ‘She can’t come up here, Cally, when she’s in an incubator attached to all those bleeping things, and you certainly aren’t up to going down there yet. But she’s perfect – hands like tiny pale pink starfish.’

‘You said she was so blue she looked like a Smurf,’ I said accusingly, tears welling.

‘I thought you were still asleep when I was talking to that nurse, and anyway, it was just a glance in passing right after she was born. She looks pink now.’

‘She was a little blue at first, but now she’s stabilised and a relatively healthy colour,’ the consultant said soothingly. ‘You will be taken down in a wheelchair to see her as soon as you are recovered enough.’

‘She is going to be all right, isn’t she?’ I pleaded. ‘Only there was an angel hanging around when I woke up and I thought it might have come for her.’

‘That was a nun,’ Ma said. ‘She had a white habit on and flapped past the trolley when you were being wheeled out of theatre. Thought she looked more like an albatross, myself.’

‘Why would a nun be on a maternity ward?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, but it’s a damned sight more likely than an angel.’

I focused on the consultant again and he looked back at me and frowned. ‘Your baby’s heart problems should really have been picked up on a scan …’ He paused and then added with false brightness, ‘Still, there is one good thing.’

‘There is?’ Ma asked incredulously.

‘Yes, the majority of female babies with similar malformations also have Turner’s syndrome, which can lead to other side effects, but your baby doesn’t.’

‘Thank heaven for small mercies, then,’ my mother said drily, without removing the jade cigarette holder that was clenched between her teeth. Having tired of repeating to hospital staff that she’d no intention of lighting up inside the premises, she’d removed the pink Sobranie from it and placed it carefully in a silver case in her vast red Radley handbag. The consultant eyed the empty holder in much the same way I’d been looking at his bow tie, and then his gaze moved to the colourful splashes of oil paint on the legs of her black slacks and across her tunic where her bosom tended to rest on her palette while she painted. She looked like a walking embodiment of Jackson Pollock’s Dark Period – if he’d had one.

Still, it was a measure of her love that she’d rushed down on the first train once my friend Celia had called her, despite her oft-repeated statement that she never wanted to set foot in London again.

‘Never mind Pollock: this is my dark period,’ I muttered.

‘I think our Cally’s a bit delirious,’ she said, laying one small, cool, plump hand on my forehead. ‘Though she often talks daft.’

‘I’m not – and I understand about Stella needing an operation right away. Will she be all right afterwards?’

‘She certainly won’t survive if we don’t operate,’ the consultant said evasively, still in that low, confidential voice. ‘She’s not quite full term and of course there are always risks involved in operating on such small babies. But you do understand that her long-term outlook is at present obscure, don’t you? She will definitely need more treatment later, possibly including further operations.’

‘There seems no option but to agree to this operation,’ Ma said, shifting the jade holder to one side of her mouth. ‘It will give her a fighting chance, at least.’

He nodded, though he didn’t look as if he’d have placed any money on it.

But I clung to that idea, for of course the advances of modern medical science would ensure that my baby would make a full recovery and live a normal life. She’d be one of the lucky ones: my Stella, my little star.

Having been fathoms deep in a bottomless ocean of anaesthesia when Stella came into the world, I worried that I might find it difficult to bond with her. But the moment I set eyes on my baby I was consumed by a blinding flash of such instant besottedness that I could spend an hour or more just marvelling over the perfect convolutions of her tiny ears, or the minute crescents of her fingernails, like those fragile pale pink shells I used to pick up on Southport beach.

Celia, the friend who had so luckily been staying with me when I was rushed into hospital, was equally enthralled and enchanted, but Ma, who is not the type to dote on babies, only said the poor mite looked like a skinned rabbit. Then, this obviously having triggered a thought train in her head, she went out and bought Stella a white plush rabbit that was bigger than she was.

When we got the hospital chaplain to christen Stella, Ma suggested we have the rabbit as a godparent, after Celia, though I think she was joking … But there it was in the photographs, along with the special cake iced with the baby’s name that I’d sent Celia out to buy. If all had gone to plan, of course, I would have made it myself at a later date. For me, important occasions must always be accompanied by cake, since it earned me a living as a cookery writer, as well as being my comfort food of choice.

‘Go to Gilligan’s Celebration Cakes off Marylebone High,’ I told her. ‘If it has to be shop-bought, they’re the best and they’ll ice her name on it while you wait.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember you going there to research an article on traditional wedding cakes for Good Housekeeping and bringing me a chunk of fruitcake back,’ Celia agreed. ‘And you said one of the staff was dead sexy and looked just like Johnny Depp.’

‘Did I? Oh, yes, but Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow,’ I said, a sudden flash of recollection bringing up the undeniably attractive image of a thin, dark, mobile face with high cheekbones and a pair of strangely luminous light brown eyes meeting mine across a work table, while the heady scent of dried fruit and spices mingled with the sweet smell of sugar.

‘That seems like another life,’ I sighed. ‘It happened to a different person.’

Chapter 2: The Night Watch

During the long night watches after Stella’s first operation, as the lights flashed on the machinery and the hospital hummed faintly along to the tired buzzing in my head, there were way too many hours in which to think.

Her arrival had instantly turned my life upside down, so that everything I’d once thought important had run right to the bottom of my hourglass of priorities. My hard-fought-for career as a cookery writer, for instance, which paid the mortgage on the shoebox-sized basement flat within walking distance of Primrose Hill, where I lived with my little white dog, Toto.

Toto was a Battersea Dogs and Cats Home stray and looked like a cross between a whippet and a Skye terrier, if you can imagine that: all bristly white coat, with a terrier head but slender body and long legs. Ma and Celia were both staying on at my flat and looking after him, as well as taking it in turns to come into the hospital, though Ma spent most of her visits drawing a series of starfish-like little hands and winged creatures that appeared to be some kind of nun/angel/albatross hybrid. Her paintings are already very Chagall-with-knobs-on, so I could barely imagine the turn they would take when she got back home again.

Toto was an excellent judge of character and although he adored Celia and Ma, he’d never taken to my ex-fiancé, Adam, a tall and charismatic marine biologist who’d proposed to me after a whirlwind romance. In retrospect, I only wished I’d trusted my dog’s instincts more than my own.

Adam had swept me off my feet and we’d planned to get married in the lovely ancient church of All Angels in the village of Sticklepond, where Ma now lived … the minute he got back from the eighteen-month contract in Antarctica that he’d already signed up for, that was.

I’d suggested he cancel it, but he’d explained that he’d always dreamed of going there and needed to get it out of his system before he settled down.

‘It’ll be cutting it fine for starting a family by then, though,’ I’d said. ‘I don’t want to leave it too late, or it might not happen at all.’

‘Mmm,’ he’d agreed, with much less enthusiasm than he’d shown while talking about the Antarctic; but by then I’d discovered his acute phobia about hospitals and illness of any kind, and put it down as some general squeamishness to do with that.

Still, I’d been convinced he’d be bored out of his skull stuck in the Antarctic for eighteen months with a lot of other boffins, examining the local frozen seafood. But no, it turned out that there was a whole community there, with everyone from cooks to dentists laid on, which I supposed made sense when most of the year you couldn’t fly in or out.

They made their own entertainments too, and going by the pictures on Facebook of Adam messing about on Ski-Doos and in the snow with his new friends, he’d found a few ways to occupy his spare time.

Of course, we’d constantly emailed and chatted via Facebook, and sometimes he could call me, though not the other way round. But as time passed he seemed to become less and less interested in anything outside the base … I suppose that’s a bit like hospital, where your real world shrinks to your immediate surroundings and everything else seems remote and unimportant.

I expected that would change once he came home, even if I did feel nervous about our reunion. And there was a sticky moment at the airport, when he looked like an unshaven stranger as he came through into the arrivals hall. But when he spotted me and smiled there was that instant feeling of connection, just like the first time we’d met, and I ran straight into his arms. He’d kissed me, then said, looking genuinely startled, that he’d forgotten how pretty I was!

We went back to my flat and that evening everything was all right between us – in fact, it was more than all right. He was tired and abstracted, not helped by a call from a colleague, though what could be that urgent about Antarctic pond life I couldn’t imagine at the time. His end of the conversation was a bit terse.

I should have smelled a rat right then, because next morning it was like Jekyll and Hyde revisited: right after breakfast he suddenly announced he’d already signed up for another eighteen months in Antarctica and, moreover, he’d met someone else up there and she was going back in April, too.

Of course I was devastated and furious. I told him to get out of my flat and my life and he’d packed up his stuff and left within the hour, with my parting shot that I hoped they both fell down an Antarctic crevasse on their next tour of duty ringing in his ears.

Toto, gleefully grasping that the hated interloper was out of favour, managed to sink his teeth into Adam’s ankle at the last minute, which would give him something to remember us by till all the little puncture wounds healed up again.

It was only much later that I realised that Adam had left me a much longer-lasting and life-changing memento.

Once Stella was out of immediate danger, Celia needed to get back to her husband, four rescue greyhounds and six cats in Southport, who were all pining for her.

I would also pine for her, though she’d promised to return when Stella was finally allowed home.

Ma was staying on for a few more days, though I was sure she was dying to head straight back up north, too. In fact, I was surprised she’d stayed as long as she had.

When I was growing up in Hampstead I’d thought she’d seemed happy enough, though she was always fairly reclusive and preoccupied with her work, of course, but she sold up and moved back with alacrity to the Lancashire village where she was born after Dad died.

‘Ma’ is not some cute contraction of ‘Mum’, but a relic of her early attempts to get me to call her by her Christian name, Martha. She was never much like any of my school friends’ mothers, delegating most of her maternal responsibilities to a series of foreign au pairs, but I’d never doubted that in her way she loved me. And Anna, the final and most beloved of the au pairs, a tall, blonde, Swedish domestic goddess, had instilled my love of cooking and baking, so it worked out brilliantly for me.

I emailed Anna the news about Stella and received a warm, reassuring reply straight away: she’d always had the power to make me feel comforted, an effect that has also rubbed off onto the cakes she taught me to make.

I decided that for Stella’s first birthday I would make her a prinsesstårta, that most splendid of Swedish celebration cakes.

‘You are going to tell Adam about Stella at some point soon, aren’t you?’ Celia asked, just before she finally set off home.

‘No! Why should I, after he accused me of getting pregnant on purpose when I told him she was on the way and then suggested I get an abortion?’

‘I know he didn’t want the baby, but now she’s arrived he might feel differently,’ she suggested. Having an incredibly generous heart she was always looking for the best in everyone, even my absent ex-fiancé, Adam Scott – or ‘Scott of the Antarctic’, as Ma generally referred to him.

‘I don’t think so. Anyway, he’s changed his email address and I couldn’t phone him in Antarctica even if I wanted to, which I don’t.’

‘Facebook?’

‘I’ve blocked him.’

‘I still think he ought to know,’ she said stubbornly. ‘He has a responsibility to support you, too.’

‘I don’t want his support and I’m sure he still wouldn’t be interested – even less so in a baby with health problems, because he’s got that phobia about illness and hospitals, remember?’

‘Oh, yes, I’d forgotten about that. So perhaps you’re right, but if he hears about the baby from anyone, he may contact you when he comes back to the UK.’

‘I doubt it, and it wouldn’t be till October of next year, when Stella—’

I broke off, swallowing hard, and she said quickly, ‘Stella will be walking and saying her first words by then, you’ll see. The operation went well, didn’t it?’

‘Yes, but they made it plain they couldn’t fix everything in one go and would have to wait and see how her condition developed. She seems to be making progress.’

‘The body has great powers of self-healing,’ Celia said firmly.

I clung to that thought after she’d gone back to Southport: once I finally got her home, Stella and I would take the future one step at a time, savouring each moment like a special gift.

Chapter 3: Lardy Cake

Long before Stella’s due date I’d stockpiled articles for my two regular publication slots: the ‘Tea & Cake’ page in Sweet Home magazine, which are quick, easy recipes, and my Sunday newspaper supplement one, ‘The Cake Diaries’, which have more complicated recipes along with some quirky background history, or stories about where I first came across a particular cake, thrown into the mix.