Trisha Ashley
The Magic of Christmas

Dedication

For my son, Robin Ashley,

with love.

Contents

Title page

Dedication

Prologue: December 2005, Winter of Discontent

Chapter 1: Old Prune

Chapter 2: All Fudge

Chapter 3: Bittersweet

Chapter 4: Mushrooming

Chapter 5: Sweet Mysteries

Chapter 6: Driven Off

Chapter 7: Loose Nuts

Chapter 8: Well Braced

Chapter 9: Soul Food

Chapter 10: Cornish Mist

Chapter 11: Popped Corks

Chapter 12: Just Desserts

Chapter 13: Raspberries

Chapter 14: Slightly Curdled

Chapter 15: Drink Me

Chapter 16: Unrehearsed Entrances

Chapter 17: Tart

Chapter 18: Simmering Gently

Chapter 19: Stirring

Chapter 20: Freshly Minted

Chapter 21: Slightly Stewed

Chapter 22: Given the Bird

Chapter 23: Put Out

Chapter 24: Flambé

Chapter 25: Crème de Coeur

Chapter 26: Crackers

Chapter 27: Charmed

Chapter 28: Cold Snap

Chapter 29: Clueless

Chapter 30: Unscheduled Appearances

Chapter 31: Middlemoss Marchpane

Chapter 32: Hoar Frost

Chapter 33: Well Stirred

Forget the Jimmy Choos, Chocolate Shoes And Wedding Blues Is the Only Accessory You Need For Spring 2012…

Twelve Days of Christmas

About the Author

Other Books by the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Magic of Christmas is loosely based on one of my earlier novels, Sweet Nothings, with the addition of a lot of new material. I felt there was so much more to say about the village of Middlemoss and all the characters who live there, especially Lizzy and her friends in the Christmas Pudding Circle, the annual Boxing Day Mystery Play and the vanishing squirrels!

Prologue: December 2005, Winter of Discontent

The venue for the last Middlemoss Christmas Pudding Circle meeting of the year (which was usually more of an excuse for a party) had been switched to Perseverance Cottage because Lizzy’s thirteen-year-old son had come down with what she’d thought was flu and she wanted to keep an eye on him.

Later, looking back on the events of that day, it seemed to Lizzy that one minute she’d been sitting at the big pine table in her kitchen, wearing a paper hat and happily debating the rival merits of fondant icing over royal with the other four members of the CPC, and the next she was frantically snatching at the card listing the symptoms of meningitis, which she kept pinned to her notice board, and shouting to Annie, her best friend, to ring for an ambulance.

At the hospital, Jasper changed frighteningly fast from a big, gruff teenager to a pale, sick child, and Lizzy tried urgently to contact her husband, Tom, who was away on one of his alleged business trips. But as usual he didn’t answer his mobile and was nowhere to be found, so all she could do was leave messages in the usual places … and several unusual ones.

The hospital radio was softly warbling on about decking the halls with boughs of holly, but Lizzy, filled with a volatile mixture of desperate maternal fear and anger, wanted to deck her selfish, unreliable husband.

It was just as well that Annie was such a tower of strength in an emergency! During that first long day while Lizzy anxiously waited for the antibiotics to kick in, her friend popped in and out between jobs for the pet-sitting agency she ran, visited Perseverance Cottage to feed the poultry and let out Lizzy’s dog, and reassured Tom’s elderly relatives up at the Hall that she would keep them updated with every change in Jasper’s condition.

Then in the evening she returned to the hospital and she and Lizzy spent the long night watches sitting together while Jasper slept, reminiscing in hushed voices about when they first met and became best friends at boarding school. Lizzy had begun spending the holidays with Annie’s family in the vicarage at Middlemoss, where she was quickly absorbed into the Vane household, much to the relief of the elderly bachelor uncle who was her guardian – and it was also in Middlemoss that she’d met Tom and Nick Pharamond, cousins who were often farmed out with relatives up at the Hall in the school holidays.

Nick was the eldest: quiet, serious and appearing to prefer the company of the cook at Pharamond Hall to anyone else’s. Tom, who was really only nominally a Pharamond, his mother having married into the family, was the opposite: mercurial, charming and gregarious, though he’d had a quick temper and a sharp tongue, even then …

Nick was the first to fly the nest. Having inherited the Pharamond cooking gene in spades, it wasn’t a huge surprise to anyone except his staid stockbroker father when he took off around the world at eighteen, tastebuds and recipe notebook at the ready. Now he was chief cookery writer for a leading Sunday newspaper and author of numerous books and articles, while Tom, in contrast, had dropped out of university and gravitated down to the part of Cornwall where many of his more useless friends had also ended up.

When he set eyes on Lizzy again after a long interval, it was across a buffet table at a large party in London, where he was a guest, and where she and Annie, who’d done a French cookery course after school, were helping with the catering. He fell suddenly in love with her, a passion that also embraced her rose-tinted dreams of a self-sufficient existence in the country.

Somehow she’d forgotten about his dark good looks, his overwhelming charm and his quirky sense of humour … Before she’d had time to think – or to remember his quick temper, occasional sarcasms and how short-lived his enthusiasms had been in the past – he’d swept her off her feet, into a registry office and down to the isolated hovel he was renting in Cornwall.

‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ she said to Annie, as Jasper stirred restlessly in his hospital bed. ‘You tried your best to warn me not to rush into it.’

‘You fell in love and so did Tom: there was no stopping you,’ Annie said. ‘Besides, you were addicted to all those books about living in Cornish cottages, with donkeys and daffodils and stuff.’

‘True,’ Lizzy agreed wryly, ‘and it was blissful that first summer – until the reality of living in a dank, dilapidated cottage in winter with a newborn baby set in, especially after Tom started vanishing for days on end without telling me when and where he was going.’

‘He was worse after Jasper was born, wasn’t he? I think he resented not being the centre of attention,’ Annie said.

‘He still does, though how you can be jealous of your own son, goodness knows! Anyway, it was like living with a handsome but unreliable tomcat … and nothing much has changed, has it?’ Lizzy asked bitterly.

‘Perhaps not, but at least two good things came out of your marriage,’ Annie pointed out, being a resolutely glass-half-full person: ‘Jasper and your books about life in Perseverance Cottage.’

‘True, and it was thanks to your telling Roly how cold and damp the cottage was, after you visited us, that he offered us a house on the estate rent free, so that actually makes three good things.’

‘Oh, yes – and it was marvellous when you came back to Middlemoss to live,’ Annie agreed fervently. ‘I’d missed you so much!’

Her voice had risen slightly and Jasper woke up and grumpily demanded why they were muttering over him like two witches. Then he complained that the dim light hurt his eyes, and a nurse appeared and firmly ushered them out of the room for a while.

The following morning it was clear that the antibiotics were working. Great-uncle Roly visited Jasper in the afternoon and by evening he was so obviously on the mend that Lizzy managed to persuade Annie, who’d brought sandwiches and a flask of soup ready to share a second night’s vigil with her, to go home instead and get some sleep.

Lizzy herself intended spending a second night there, of course: by Jasper’s bedside when allowed, or in the stark waiting room, with its grey plastic-covered chairs and stained brown cord carpet.

It was in the latter room that Tom’s cousin Nick Pharamond found her, having driven non-stop halfway across Europe since Roly had given him the news about Jasper. His brow was furrowed with added frown lines from tiredness, and the dark stubble and rumpled black hair didn’t do much to lighten his usual taciturn expression. Lizzy always imagined that Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester would have been exactly like Nick, but she was still both delighted and relieved to see him because, unlike Tom, you could always rely on him to turn up in an emergency.

Although she wasn’t normally a weepy sort of person, she instantly burst into tears all over his broad chest, while he patted her back in a strangely soothing way. Then he made her drink the hot soup Annie had left and eat a sandwich she didn’t want: he was forceful as well as reliable.

The only downside to his presence during the rest of that long night was that Lizzy became so spaced out with shock and exhaustion that something unstoppable took over her mouth. She could hear her own voice droning on and on for hours, telling Nick a whole lot of really personal stuff about the last few years that she’d only previously confided to Annie, like how bad relations had become between her and Tom, especially since she found out about his latest affair.

‘I don’t know who this one is, but she’s been having a really bad influence on him. He’s played away before, of course, but it was never serious. He says it’s my fault anyway, for being so wrapped up in the cottage, the garden and Jasper – and perhaps it is.’

‘That’s totally ridiculous, Lizzy: of course it isn’t your fault!’ Nick said. ‘He should grow up!’

Filled with gratitude at his understanding, she’d fished out a petrol receipt from the bottom of her handbag and on the back of it feverishly scribbled down her cherished recipe for mashed potato fudge, a creation she’d first invented while trying to cook up some comfort from limited ingredients down in Cornwall (and which was much later to be christened Spudge by Jasper).

In return Nick, who was normally pretty tight-lipped on anything personal, divulged that Leila (his wife) refused all his suggestions that they both cut down their working hours to spend more time together, so they seemed to be seeing less and less of each other. This was really letting his guard down, so the night-watch effect must have been getting to him, too.

‘Do you think everything will be all right with me and Tom once Jasper’s off to university in a few years and I’m not so tied to Middlemoss and the school run?’ she asked Nick, optimistically. ‘I could even go with him on some of his business trips to Cornwall.’

‘I honestly don’t know, Lizzy, but it won’t be your fault if it isn’t,’ Nick said, and gave her a big, wonderfully comforting hug.

Then something made her look up and over his shoulder she caught sight of Tom standing in the doorway staring at them.

‘Oh, Tom, where have you been?’ she cried, releasing herself from Nick’s arms. ‘Still, never mind – you’re here now, that’s the main thing.’

Tom ignored her, instead demanding suspiciously of Nick, ‘What are you doing here, that’s what I want to know?’

He was still looking from one to the other of them as if he’d had an extremely odd idea, which it emerged later he had – one that would finally turn what had already become a very sour-sweet cocktail of a marriage into a poisoned chalice.

But at the time, all Lizzy registered was that his first words were not an urgent enquiry about his only child and, in one split second, not only did the last vestiges of her love for Tom entirely vanish, but they took even the exasperated tolerance of the previous years with them, so there was absolutely no hope of resuscitating their marriage.

If Tom had ever possessed the core of feckless sweetness she’d believed in, then some wicked Snow Queen had blown on his heart and frozen it to solid ice.

Chapter 1: Old Prune

Here in Middlemoss Christmas preparations start very early – in mid-August, in fact, when the five members of the Christmas Pudding Circle bulk-order the ingredients for mincemeat and cakes from a nearby wholefood cooperative. Once that has arrived and been divided up between us, things slowly start to rev up again. It always reminds me of a bobsleigh race: one minute we’re all pushing ideas to and fro to loosen the runners and then the next we’ve jumped on board and are hurtling, faster and faster, towards Christmas!

The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in Recipes

The members of the Christmas Pudding Circle were sitting round my long, scrubbed-pine kitchen table for the first meeting of the year. It was a hot, mid-August morning, so the door was open onto the sunlit cobbled courtyard in order to let some cooling air (and the occasional brazen hen) into the room.

I poured iced home-made lemonade into tumblers, then passed round the dish of macaroons, thinking how lovely it was to have all my friends together again. Apart from my very best friend Annie Vane, there was Marian Potter who ran the Middlemoss Post Office, Faye Sykes from Old Barn Farm and Miss Pym, the infants’ schoolteacher. The latter is a tall, upright woman with iron-grey hair in a neat chignon, who commands such respect that she’s never addressed by her Christian name of Geraldine, even by her friends.

‘Oh, I do miss our CPC meetings after Christmas each year,’ Annie said, beaming, her round freckled face framed in an unbecoming pudding-bowl bob of coppery hair. ‘I know we see each other all the time, but it isn’t the same.’

‘I was just thinking the same thing,’ I agreed. ‘And it doesn’t matter that it’s midsummer either, because I still get a tingle down my spine at the thought that we’ve started counting down to Christmas.’

‘I suppose we are in a way, but it’s more advance planning, isn’t it?’ Faye said.

‘Yes, and we’d better get on with it,’ Marian said, flicking open a notebook and writing in the date, for she organises the CPC just as she, together with her husband Clive, run most of the events around Middlemoss. As usual, she was bristling with energy right down to the roots of her spiky silver hair. ‘First up, are there any changes to the list of ingredients for Miss Pym to order?’

‘I still have last year’s list on my computer, so it will be easy to tweak it before I email it off,’ Miss Pym said, helping herself to more lemonade. An ice-cube cracked with a noise like a miniature iceberg calving from a glacier.

But there was not much to tweak, for of course we mostly make the same things every year: mince pies, Christmas cakes and puddings. We need large quantities too, for as well as baking for our own families, we also make lots of small cakes for the local Senior Citizens Christmas Hampers, which are annually distributed by Marian and the rest of the Mosses Women’s Institute.

‘Who has got the six small cake tins for the hamper Christmas cakes?’ asked Annie.

‘Me,’ I said.

‘I’ll put you down to bake the first batch then,’ Marian said, scribbling that down, then she handed out the CPC meetings rota. We’re supposed to take it in turns to host it in our homes but I don’t know why she bothers, because after the first one it always goes completely haywire for one reason or another.

The important business of the meeting concluded, I got out some coffee granita I’d made. It never tastes quite as perfect as I hope it will, but they were all very kind about it. Then the conversation turned to frozen desserts in general and we discussed the possibility of concocting a brandy butter ice cream to go with Christmas pudding. I think Faye started that one: she makes a lot of ice cream for her farm shop.

Writing the CPC meeting up later for the Chronicles, I added a note to include the recipe for the brandy butter ice cream to that chapter if one of us came up with something good, and then laid my pen down on the kitchen table with a sigh, thinking that it was just as well I had the Christmas Pudding Circle to write about.

Although my readers loved the mix of domestic disaster, horticultural endeavour and recipes in my Perseverance Chronicle books, I could hardly include bulletins on the way the last, frayed knots of my failed marriage were so speedily unravelling, which was the subject most on my mind of late. I had become not so much a wife, as landlady to a surly, sarcastic and antisocial lodger.

The first Perseverance Chronicle was written in a desperate bid to make some money soon after we were married, influenced by all the old cosy, self-sufficiency-in-a-Cornish-cottage books that I had loved before the reality set in. Mine were a little darker, including such unromantic elements as the joys of outside toilets when heavily pregnant in winter and having an Inconstant Gardener for a husband.

It was accepted by a publisher and when we moved back to Lancashire I simply renamed the new cottage after the old and carried on – and so, luckily, did those readers who had bought the first book.

My self-imposed quota of four daily handwritten pages completed (which Jasper would type up later on the laptop computer Unks bought him, for extra pocket money), I closed the fat A4 writing pad and turned to my postcard album, as to an old friend. This was an impressively weighty tome containing all the cards sent to me over the years by Nick stuck in picture-side down, since interesting recipes were scribbled onto every bit of space on the back in tiny, spiky handwriting.

He still sent them, though I hadn’t seen very much of him in person, other than the occasional Sunday lunch up at Pharamond Hall, since the time Jasper was ill in hospital. And actually I was profoundly grateful about that, what with having poured my heart out to him in that embarrassing way, not to mention Tom suddenly getting the wrong idea when he arrived and found Nick comforting me …

And speak of the devil, just as I found the card I wanted, a dark shape suddenly blocked the open doorway to the yard and Tom’s voice said, ‘Reading your love letters?’

He was quite mad – that or the demon weed and too much alcohol had pickled his brain over the years! The album was always on the kitchen bookshelf for anyone to read, so he knew there was nothing personal about the cards – unless he thought that addressing them to ‘The Queen of Puddings’ was lover-like, rather than a sarcastic reference to one of my major preoccupations.

Mind you, Tom was not much of a reader, though luckily that meant he had never, to my knowledge, even opened one of my Perseverance Chronicles.

‘No, Tom, I’m looking for a particular marzipan petit four recipe for the Christmas Pudding Circle to try,’ I said patiently. ‘The only love letters I’ve got are a couple of short notes from you, and they’re so old the ink’s faded.’

‘So you say, but I don’t find you poring over them all the time, like you do over Nick’s precious postcards,’ he said, going to wash his hands at the kitchen sink.

I dished out some of the casserole that was simmering gently on the stove and put it on a tray, together with a chunk of home-made bread, since he now preferred to take all his meals alone in the sitting room in front of his giant TV. Jasper and I had the old set in the kitchen and tended to leave him in sole possession.

He picked up the bowl of stew now and stared into it like a sibylline oracle, but the only message he was likely to read was ‘Eat this or go hungry.’

‘What are these black things, decayed sheep’s eyeballs?’

‘Prunes. It’s Moroccan lamb tagine.’

From his expression you would have thought I’d offered him a dish of lightly seasoned bat entrails.

‘And I suppose Nick gave you the recipe. What else has he given you lately?’ he said, with a wealth of unpleasant innuendo. ‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed that your son looks more like him every day!’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t start on that again!’ I snapped, adding recklessly, ‘You know very well why Jasper looks like Nick, just as you look like Great-uncle Roly: your mother must have been having an affair with Leo Pharamond while she was still married to her first husband! Why don’t you ask her?’

It was certainly obvious to everyone else, since those slaty purple-grey eyes and raven-black hair marked out all the Pharamonds instantly. But Tom went livid and hissed like a Mafia villain in a bad film, ‘Never ever malign my mother’s name again like that – do you hear me?’

Then he followed this up by hurling the plate of hot casserole at the wall with enormous force, shattering it and sending fragments of bowl and spatters of food everywhere. He’d never been physically violent (I wouldn’t have stood for it for one second) so I don’t think he was particularly aiming at me, but a substantial chunk of green-glazed Denby pottery hit my cheekbone and fell at my feet.

It was a shock, though, and I stood there transfixed and staring at him, one hand to my face, in a silence broken only by the occasional slither and plop of a descending prune. Suddenly finding myself released from thrall, I turned and walked out of the door, dabbing lamb tagine off my face with the hem of my pale green T-shirt as I went, then headed towards the village.

I must have looked a mess, but luckily it was early evening and few people were about, for the Pied Piper of TV dinners had called them all away, using the theme tune of the popular soap series Cotton Common as lure.

I didn’t have far to go for refuge. Annie’s father used to be the vicar here, but now that he and his wife are alleviating the boredom of retirement by doing VSO work in Africa, Annie has a tiny Victorian red-brick terraced cottage in the main street of Middlemoss.

‘Lizzy!’ she exclaimed, looking horrified at discovering me stained and spattered on her doorstep. ‘Is that dried blood on your face and T-shirt? What on earth has happened?’

‘I think it’s only prune juice and gravy, actually,’ I reassured her, touching my cheek cautiously. ‘A bit of plate did hit me, but it must have had a round edge.’

‘Plate?’ she repeated blankly, drawing me in and closing the front door.

‘Yes, one of those lovely green Denby soup bowls we had as a wedding present from your parents.’

‘Look, come into the kitchen and I’ll clean you up with warm water and lint while you tell me all about it,’ she said soothingly.

The lint sounded very Gone With the Wind – but then, she has all the Girl Guide badges and I don’t suppose the First Aid one has changed for years. So I followed her in and sank down on the nearest rush-bottomed chair, my legs suddenly going wobbly. Trinity (Trinny, for short), Annie’s three-legged mutt, regarded me lambently from her basket, tail thumping.

‘There’s nothing much to tell, really,’ I said. ‘Tom flew into one of his rages and lobbed his dinner at the wall.’

‘Oh, Lizzy!’

‘I said something that made him angry and he just totally lost it this time. I don’t think he was actually aiming at me, though it’s hard to tell since he’s such a rotten shot and – ouch!’ I added, as she dabbed my face with the warm, damp lint.

‘The skin isn’t cut, but I think you might get a bruise on your cheek,’ she said, wringing the cloth out. ‘I could put some arnica ointment on it.’

‘I don’t think I could live with that smell so close to my nose, Annie,’ I said dubiously, but her next suggestion, that we break out the bottle of Remy Martin, which she keeps in stock because her father always swore by it in times of crisis, met with a better reception.

‘I think you really ought to leave Tom right away, Lizzy,’ Annie suggested worriedly. ‘He’s been so increasingly horrible to you that it’s practically verbal abuse – and now this!’

‘I’m just glad Jasper wasn’t there,’ I said, topping my glass up and feeling much better. ‘He’s gone straight from the archaeological dig to a friend’s house, and won’t be back till about ten.’

‘His exam results should be here any time now, shouldn’t they?’

‘Yes, only a couple more days.’ I sipped my brandy and sighed. ‘Even though I’ll miss him, it’ll be such a relief to have him safely off to university in October, because I live in dread that Tom will suddenly tell him to his face that he doesn’t think he’s really his son. That would be even more hurtful than ignoring him, the way he’s been doing the last couple of years.’

‘I don’t know what’s got into Tom,’ Annie said sadly. ‘He always had so much charm … as long as he got his own way.’

‘He still does charm everyone else. I’m sure no one would believe me if I told them what he’s really like at home.’

‘True, but he’s so used to me being around, he’s let the mask slip sometimes, so I’ve seen it for myself,’ Annie said. ‘He was all right with Jasper for the first few years, though, wasn’t he?’

‘Well, he didn’t take a lot of notice of him, but he was OK. But he started to turn colder towards me even before he got this strange idea that I had a fling with Nick, so I think whoever he’s been having an affair with since then has had a really bad effect on his character.’

‘You did have a fling with Nick,’ Annie pointed out fairly.

‘Oh, come on, Annie! I was way too young and anyway, it only lasted about a fortnight before he told me he was going abroad for a year because he wasn’t changing his life-plans for my sake. I didn’t see him after that until the day I got married to Tom and he turned up then with Leila in tow – do you remember?’

‘Gosh, yes. She was so scarily chic, in a Parisian sort of way, that she made me feel like a country bumpkin – she still does! But I thought it was nice of Nick to make the effort, even though he and Tom had grown apart over the years. They never had a lot in common, did they?’

‘I think the main problem was that Tom always felt jealous of Nick, since Nick was a real Pharamond and Roly’s grandson, whereas he was just a Pharamond because his mother had married one. Allegedly,’ I added darkly.

‘It’s odd how things turn out,’ mused Annie, putting away the bowl of water and tossing the lint into the kitchen bin. ‘You always had much more in common with Nick than with Tom.’

‘How on earth can you say that, when we argue all the time?’ I demanded incredulously. ‘The only thing Nick and I have ever had in common is a love of food, even if mine is much less cordon bleu.’

Though of course it is true that food has played an important part in both our families. The search for a good meal in the wrong part of a foreign city was the downfall of my diplomat parents and would be the downfall of my figure, too, were I ever to stop moving long enough for the fat to settle.

As to the Pharamonds, the gene for cooking was introduced into the family by a Victorian heir who married the plebeian but wealthy heiress Bessie Martin, only to die of a surfeit of home-cooked love some forty years later, with a fond smile on his lips and a biscuit empire to hand on to his offspring.

‘You and Nick have both got short tempers and you love Middlemoss more than anywhere else on earth,’ Annie said. ‘And of course I know that Jasper is Tom’s son, but it’s unfortunate that he’s looking more and more like Nick with every passing year.’

‘Well, yes, that’s what Tom said earlier, so I reminded him about the rumours that his mother had an affair with Leo Pharamond before her first husband was killed, and that’s what started the argument off! He always flies into a complete rage if I say anything against his sainted mother.’

‘It’s quite a coincidence that Leo Pharamond and her first husband were both not only racing drivers but killed in car crashes,’ Annie said, ‘though there did seem to be a lot of fatal crashes in the early days.’

‘Someone told me they called her the Black Widow after Leo died, so it’s not surprising her third husband gave it up and whisked her off back to Argentina,’ I said.

Tom’s mother had started a whole new life out there, but her firstborn was packed off to boarding school and farmed out at Pharamond Hall in the holidays. That made us both orphans in a way, which had once seemed to make a bond …

Annie said, ‘Tom’s hardly seen his mother over the years, has he?’

‘No, or his half-siblings. He blames it all on his stepfather, of course, and won’t hear a word against her. Come to that, I’ve only met her a couple of times and we can’t be said to have bonded.’

‘You’d think she’d at least be interested in her grandson – Jasper’s such a lovely boy,’ Annie said fondly.

‘I used to send her his school photos, but since I never got any response, I gave up. In fact, with all this rejection, it’s wonderful that poor Jasper isn’t bitter and twisted, too!’

‘Oh, he’s much too sensible and he knows we all love him: me, Roly, even Mimi.’

I considered Unks’ unmarried sister, Mimi, who is not at all maternal and whose passions are reserved for the walled garden she tends behind the Hall. ‘You’re right, she does seem to like him, despite his not being any form of plant life.’

‘And Nick is fond of him – Jasper and he get on well.’

‘He only really sees him during our occasional Sunday lunch up at the Hall, when we’re all on our best behaviour for Roly’s sake, because Tom’s made it abundantly clear he isn’t welcome at Perseverance Cottage.’

‘How difficult it all is!’ Annie sighed, which was the under-statement of the year. ‘I always agreed with Mum and Dad that marriage should be for ever, but once Tom started having affairs and being really nasty to you and Jasper, I changed my mind. He’s not at all the man you married.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I reflected. ‘I think perhaps he is, it’s just that his true nature was hidden underneath all that charm. His sarcastic tongue has suddenly become a lot more vicious, though, which I expect is because he really wants me out of the cottage now, but I mean to try and stick to my original plan and hang on until I’ve got Jasper settled at university. It doesn’t do a lot for my self-confidence when Tom’s constantly belittling me and telling me how useless I am, though.’

‘You’re not useless,’ she said, ‘you’ve been practically self-sufficient for years in fruit, vegetables and eggs, made a lovely home for him and Jasper, and written all those wonderful books.’

‘I don’t actually get paid very much for the Chronicles – they’re a bit of a niche market – and I’m running late with the next, what with one thing and another.’

‘I suppose it’s hard to think up funny anecdotes to go between the recipes and gardening stuff, what with all the worry about Tom. But if you want to leave him right now, you know you and Jasper can move in here any time you like, and stay as long as you want,’ she offered generously.

‘I do know, and it’s very kind of you,’ I said gratefully, not pointing out that her cottage isn’t much bigger than a doll’s house: two tiny rooms up and down, crammed so full of bric-a-brac you can hardly expand your lungs to full capacity without nudging something over. Jasper, when he visits, tends to stand in the corner with his arms folded so as not to damage anything.

‘Once Jasper is at university I might have to take you up on that offer, but very temporarily. I’ll still need to make a home for him to come back to. I’ll have to get a job stacking supermarket shelves, so I can rent somewhere. I’m not really qualified to do anything else.’

‘Then what about Posh Pet-sitters? Business is expanding hugely since I added general pet-feeding and care to the dog-walking, and I could do with an assistant.’

Annie set up Posh Pet-sitters several years ago with a loan from her parents, and business seemed to be building up nicely, due to the patronage of several of the actors from the long-running drama Cotton Common, set in a turn-of-the-century Lancashire factory town, who have suddenly ‘discovered’ the three villages that comprise the Mosses.

Where they led, other minor celebrities followed, since although off the beaten track, we’re within commuting distance of Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and the M6, and in pretty countryside just where the last beacon-topped hills slowly subside into the fertile farmland that runs west to the coast.

Some of the actors live in the new walled and gated estate of swish detached houses in Mossrow, but others have snapped up whatever has appeared on the market, from flats in the former Pharamond’s Butterflake Biscuit factory, to old cottages and farms.

‘Did you go and see Ritch Rainford yesterday?’ I asked, suddenly remembering how excited Annie had been at getting a call from the singer-turned-actor who plays Seth Steele, the ruggedly handsome mill owner in Cotton Common. (All that alliteration must have been too much for the producers of the series to resist!)

He’s bought the old vicarage where Annie’s family used to live, a large and rambling Victorian building with a brick-walled garden, in severe need of TLC and loads of cash. (The new vicar is now housed in an unpretentious bungalow next to the church.)

Annie’s pleasantly homely face, framed in a glossy pudding-bowl bob of copper hair, took on an unusually rapt – almost holy – expression and her blue-grey eyes went misty. ‘Oh, yes! He’s …’ She stopped, apparently lost for superlatives.

‘Sexy as dark chocolate?’ I suggested. ‘Toothsomely rum truffle?’

‘Just – wonderful,’ she said simply. ‘He has such charisma, it was as though a … a golden light was shining all around him.’

‘Bloody hell! That sounds more like finding all the silver charms in your slice of Christmas pudding at once!’ I stared at her, but she was lost in a trance.

‘Lizzy, he’s so kind, too! When I explained that I used to live at the vicarage, he took me around and showed me all the improvements he’s made, and told me what else he was going to do. Then he just handed me a set of keys to the house so he could call me up any time to go and exercise or feed his dog.’

‘Well, if your clients didn’t do that, you wouldn’t be able to get in,’ I said drily. ‘What sort of dog does he have?’

‘A white bull terrier bitch called Flo – very good-natured, though I might have to be careful around other dogs.’

‘And what’s the new vicar like?’ I asked, but she hadn’t noticed, being full of Ritch Rainford to the point where her bedazzled eyes couldn’t really take in another man. However, a crush on a handsome actor was not likely to get her anywhere.

Annie was once engaged, but was jilted with her feet practically on the carpeted church aisle. Since then she had safely confined her affections to unsuitable – and unattainable – actors.

‘I’ve heard he’s single and has red hair,’ I said encouragingly since, despite her own copper locks, she has a weakness for redheaded men.

‘He hasn’t got red hair, he’s blond!’ she protested indignantly, and I saw that she was still thinking of Ritch Rainford. Perhaps I ought to watch Cotton Common to see what all the excitement was about.

Eventually Annie ran me home, since I wanted to be there when Jasper returned. I was by then attired in one of her voluminous cardigans – a bilious green, with loosely attached knitted pink roses – to hide the dried but dubious-looking stains on my T-shirt.

She said she was going to come in with me and give Tom a piece of her mind, which would not have gone down well, but luckily Tom, his van and some of his clothes had vanished. He’d also locked me out; but not only did Annie have our key on her ring, I kept one hidden under a flower pot, so that wasn’t a problem.

‘Looks like he’s gone away again,’ I said gratefully. ‘Thank goodness for that.’

Of course he hadn’t thought to feed the hens, who had put themselves to bed in disgust, or the quail, so Annie helped me to shut everything up safely for the night.

As we walked back to the cottage Uncle Roly Pharamond’s gamekeeper, Caz Naylor, sidled out of a small outbuilding and, with a brief salute, flitted away through the shadows towards the woods behind the cottage.

He’s a foxy-looking young man, with dark auburn hair, evasive amber eyes and a tendency to address me, on the rare occasions when he speaks, as ‘our Lizzy’, thus acknowledging a distant relationship that all the Naylors in the area seemed to know about from the minute I set foot in the place for the first time at the age of eleven.

Annie looked startled: ‘Wasn’t that Caz? What’s he doing here?’

‘I let him have the use of the old chest freezer in there. Since I cut down on the amount of stuff I grow, I don’t need it,’ I said, for I’d been slowly running things down ready for the moment that I knew was fast approaching, when I must leave Perseverance Cottage. ‘He comes and goes as he pleases.’

She shook her head. ‘All the Naylors are strange …’

‘But some are stranger than others? My mother was a Naylor too, don’t forget! Descendant of some distant ancestor who made good in Liverpool, in the cargo shipping line – which at least explains why I’m such a daughter of the soil and feel so firmly rooted here.’

She smiled. ‘I expect Roly told him to keep an eye on things after that animal rights group started targeting you.’

‘More likely he’s keeping an eye on his freezer,’ I said, though it was true that the only evidence of ARG (as they are known locally) I’d spotted around the place lately were the occasional bits of gaffer tape where a banner had been ripped off my car or the barn. ‘Perhaps they just aren’t bothering with me that much. I mean, I can see why they might target Unks and Caz, especially since no one knows what Caz does with all those grey squirrels he traps, but why me? I’m not battery farming anything.’

All my fowl lived long, happy and mainly useless lives, except for an excess of male quail and the occasional unwanted cockerel, which Caz dispatched for me with expert efficiency.

‘I expect they just include you in with the Pharamond estate, since your cottage is part of it,’ she agreed. ‘It’s not personal.’

We cleaned up the mess in the kitchen as well as we could and then Annie left, since it was clear enough that Tom wasn’t coming back that night, at least – and I thanked heaven for small mercies.

‘What happened to your face, Mum?’ Jasper asked, getting his first good look at me in the light of the kitchen, when a friend dropped him home later. ‘That looks like a bruise coming up. And why are you wearing one of Auntie Annie’s horrible cardigans?’

‘Your father dropped a plate and a piece hit me,’ I explained. ‘Annie loaned me the cardigan to cover up the gravy stains on my T-shirt and I forgot to give it back when she went home.’

He looked at the dent and new marks on the plastered kitchen wall and said, ‘He dropped a plate horizontally?’ in that smart-lipped way teenage boys have.

‘Yes, he was practising discus throwing,’ I said, and he gave me a look but let the subject drop.

He didn’t ask where his father was. But then, at that time, he never did.

Chapter 2: All Fudge

We are in the middle of a hot spell and the air is fragrant with sweet peas and roses and full of the dull, drowsy drone of bees drunk on nectar. Yesterday I divided up the bigger clumps of chives and began drying herbs for winter, crumbling them up as soon as they were cool and storing them in cork-topped containers, though the bay leaves have simply been left in bunches hanging from the wooden rack in the kitchen. But soon they, too, will be packed in jars and put away in the cupboard until needed.

As I used up the final jar of last year’s mincemeat for brownies, I wondered if mincemeat would also work as an ingredient in fudge – maybe even in Spudge, the mashed potato fudge I invented while we were living in Cornwall …

The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in Recipes

Tom had been gone a couple of days when Jasper pointedly enquired after dinner one night if there was anything I wanted to discuss, but I just said we would have a little chat before he went to university and he gave me one of his looks.

I knew he was now an adult, and at some point I’d have to explain to him that I was going to leave his father and the cottage as soon as he’d gone off to university, but at that moment he was so happy that he’d got the exam grades he needed for his first choice, I didn’t want to rain on his parade.

Next day, when I let out the hens, I found it was one of those delicious late summer mornings that reminded me of the early honeymoon weeks of our marriage in Cornwall: dreamy swirls of mist with the warm sun tinting the edges golden, like pale yellow candyfloss wisps. You could easily imagine King Arthur and Queen Guinevere riding out of it in glorious Technicolor, all jingling bridles and hooded hawks, though if they had they would probably have been surprised to find themselves transported from the land of legend into a Lancashire backwater like Middlemoss.

The last remaining acres of darkly watchful ancient woodland that crowded up to the back of Perseverance Cottage would have looked normal enough to them, I suppose – apart from Caz Naylor, who as usual was camouflaged from headband to boots, Rambo-style. I spotted him flitting in and out of the trees only by the white glint of his eyeballs and the sweat glistening between the green and brown streaks on his naked chest. A blink and he was gone, back to wage war on the dangerous alien life form known to the uninitiated as the grey squirrel.

Still, even in Arthurian times they would probably have had some kind of shamanistic Green Man and so would be used to such goings-on, and the duckpond, chickens and vegetable patch out front would look reassuringly normal to them. But what would they have made of the huge, tumble-down old greenhouse, the remains of a previous tenant’s abortive attempt at market gardening? Or my battered, once-white Citroën 2CV? A 2CV that, I now noticed, had its hood down, so the seats would be soaked with dew and very likely lightly spattered with hen crap. Or even, which was much, much worse, duck gloop.

It was also listing drunkenly on one seriously flat tyre.

Tossing the last of the feed to the hens, I stuck my head inside the cottage door.

‘Jasper?’ I called loudly up the steep stairs, expecting him to be still asleep. By nature, teenagers are intended to be nocturnal, so it felt cruel to have to drag him out of his lair under the eaves each morning.

Instead, he loomed out of the doorway next to me, making me jump. ‘I’m here, Mum. What’s up?’

‘Flat tyre. You have your breakfast and get ready while I change it. I hope it’s a mendable puncture – the spare’s not that brilliant and if I have to buy a new one it’ll be worth more than the rest of the car put together.’

One of the Leghorns had followed me into the flagged hallway (a Myrtle: all the white hens are called that; and the browns, Honey) and I shooed it out again. There’s something terribly cement-like about hen droppings when they set hard.

‘I’ll change it,’ he offered. ‘Or I can cycle over.’

‘No, I’ll have it done by the time you’ve had breakfast, and you’ll be late otherwise.’

The medieval dig he was working at was only a few miles away, but the lanes between the site and us were narrow and twisty, so I worried about his safety. Annie calls it ‘mother hen with one chick’ syndrome, but she is just as dotty about Trinity, her rescued dog. And if I hadn’t been an anxious mother, then maybe I wouldn’t have demanded the right treatment for Jasper’s meningitis that time he was rushed into hospital, even before the tests came back positive … It didn’t bear thinking about.

Jasper wandered out again a few minutes later holding a piece of toast at least an inch thick, not counting the bramble jelly and butter, removed the wheel brace from my hand (giving me the toast to hold in exchange), and unscrewed the last nut.

‘Thanks, that was stiff. You’d think if I’d tightened it up in the first place, I’d be able to undo it easily, wouldn’t you?’

‘Dad not back yet?’ Jasper asked, glancing across at the large, ramshackle wooden shed Tom used as his workshop, with the ‘Board Rigid: Customised Surfboards’ sign over it.

‘No.’

‘Well, remember that time you asked him to go and buy a couple of pints of milk, and you didn’t hear from him for a week?’ he said, clearly with the intention of comforting me should I need it. But actually, I was sure he shared my feeling that his father’s increasing number of absences were a blessing, even though I was usually the one on the receiving end of Tom’s viciously sarcastic outbursts.

He couldn’t help but have noticed the way Tom had estranged himself from both of us, behaving more like a lodger than a husband and father.

Just let me get him safely off to university in October, then I can sort my life out – somehow, I prayed silently.

Jasper said nothing more, but retrieved his toast and went back into the house.

The first golden glow of the morning was fading, much as my love for Tom had quickly vanished once I’d grasped what kind of man I’d married: the mercurial type, an erratic moon orbiting my Mother Earth solidity. For years I’d thought that deep down he loved and needed me, and he’d always managed to sweet-talk me into forgiving him for anything and everything, although my exasperation levels had slowly risen as my son matured and my husband remained as irresponsible as ever. Have you ever imagined what it would be like to be married to Peter Pan once the novelty wore off? A Peter Pan with a dark side he kept just for me … like a sweet chocolate soufflé with something hard at its centre on which you could break your teeth – or your heart.

His cousin Nick, whose Mercedes sports car was slowly bumping down the rutted track towards me, scattering hens, wasn’t any kind of soufflé – more like one of his own devilishly hot curried dishes. He does cook like an angel, though, and he’s an expert on all aspects of food and cooking, writes books and articles and has a page in a Sunday newspaper colour supplement.

The Pharamonds didn’t seem to do marriage terribly well and he’d had a volatile, semidetached relationship with Leila for years. She’s another chef, which was at least one too many cooks on the home front, by my reckoning. I was glad to see she wasn’t with him that day, because Leila is a lemon tart. Or maybe, since she’s French, that should be tarte au citron?

Miaou.

I resolved not to be catty about her, even if every time we met she contrived to make me feel like a lumbering great carthorse. She’s an immaculately chic, petite, blue-eyed blonde, while I am tall and broad-shouldered, with green eyes flecked with hazel, fine light brown hair in a permanent tangle, and the sort of manicure you get from digging vegetable beds without gloves on.

Unks – Great-uncle Roly – didn’t like her either. He said if it weren’t for her refusing to stop working all hours in her restaurant in London and settle down, there would have been lots of little Pharamond heirs by then. But he couldn’t have thought this through properly, because if they were a combination of the scarier bits of Nick and Leila, that would be quite alarming indeed.

Leila was married before and was fiercely independent, with her own swish apartment above her restaurant; while Nick had a small flat in Camden. And considering he spent at least half his time at Pharamond Hall, which Leila rarely visited, you’d wonder when they ever saw each other.

I certainly hadn’t seen Nick for ages. He always phoned up for any eggs, fruit or vegetables he needed when staying at the Hall and working on recipes, but I just dropped them off with Unks’ cook, Mrs Gumball.

Yet here he was, deigning to pay me a visit. As his Mercedes pulled up I removed the jack and then slung the punctured tyre in the back of the car, where Jasper’s bike already reposed. You can get anything in a 2CV, if you don’t mind being exposed to the weather.

Nick got out. He was wearing dark trousers and an open-necked soft white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the glossy, thick black plumage of his hair spikily feathering his head. His strong face, with its impressively bumpy nose, can look very attractive when he smiles, though the last time he’d wasted any of his charm on me was in the hospital when Jasper had meningitis. And after the way I’d bared my soul to him in the night hours, I could only feel profoundly grateful that I hadn’t seen much of him since then.

I distinctly remember telling him how I hoped that once Jasper was at university, things would get better between me and Tom – and instead, from that very moment they’d rapidly got worse and worse …

I became aware that Nick was waving his hands slowly in front of my face, like a baffled stage hypnotist.

‘Planet Earth to Lizzy: are you receiving me?’

‘Oh, hi, Nick – long time, no recipe,’ I said, wiping my filthy hands up the sides of my jeans – they were work ones, so it wasn’t going to make a lot of difference. I only hoped I hadn’t run them through my hair first, though since I didn’t remember brushing it this morning, a bit of grease would at least hold the tangles down.

He frowned down at me. ‘I sent you a card from Jamaica.’

‘That was ages ago, and a recipe for conch fritters isn’t exactly the most useful thing to have in the middle of Lancashire – the fishmongers don’t stock them. Anyway, what are you doing here at this time of the morning? Have you driven straight up from London?’

‘Yes, I’m looking for Tom,’ he said shortly, checking me over with eyes the dark grey-purple of wet Welsh slate, as though he wasn’t sure quite what species I was, or what sauce to serve me with. ‘What have you done to your face?’

I flushed and touched the bruise on my cheek with the tips of my fingers. ‘This? Oh, a plate got dropped and one of the pieces bounced up and hit me,’ I said lamely; it was almost the truth.

His brows knitted into a thick, black bar as he tried to imagine a plate that explosive.

‘It looks worse than it is, now it’s gone all blue and yellow – it’ll have vanished in a day or two. And Tom’s away,’ I added. Thank goodness!

From the way Nick was looking at me I thought I’d said that aloud for a minute, but finally he asked, ‘Oh? Any idea when he’ll be back?’

‘No, but he’s been gone since Monday, so I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t turn up today.’

He raised one dark eyebrow. ‘And do you know where he’s gone?’

‘He didn’t say and there is no point in ringing his mobile because he never answers or gets back to me.’ I shrugged, casually. ‘You know what he’s like. He might be off delivering a surfboard. I’m pretty sure he’s not doing a gig with the Mummers, they don’t usually go that far from home.’

‘A gig – with the what?’

‘The Mummers of Invention: you know, that sort of folk-rock group he started with three local friends?’

‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘I’m glad to say I don’t.’

‘You must do because one of them’s that drippy female Unks rents an estate cottage to – she sells handmade smocks at historical re-enactment fairs. And if you ever came up for the Mystery Play any more, you would have seen them – they provide the musical interludes. Tom played Lazarus as well, last year. He stepped in at the last minute and the parish magazine review said he brought a whole new meaning to the role.’

‘I can imagine – and I do intend being here for the next performance.’

‘I thought Leila couldn’t leave her restaurant over Christmas?’

‘She can’t; I can,’ he snapped, and I wondered if their marriage was finally dragging its sorry carcass to the parting of the ways, like mine. ‘So, you’ve no idea where Tom is, or when he’ll be back?’

‘Probably Cornwall, that’s where he mostly ends up, and if so, he’s likely to be staying with that friend of his Tom Collinge, the weird one who runs a wife and harem in one cottage.’

‘I suppose he may be there by now, but he was in London on Monday night, Lizzy. I ran into him at Leila’s restaurant, but he left in a hurry – without paying the bill.’

‘He did?’ I frowned. ‘That’s odd. I wonder what he was doing in London?’

‘Well, it evidently wasn’t me he’d gone to see, since he bolted as soon as I arrived.’ He looked at me intently, as though he’d asked me a question.

‘Oh?’ I said slowly, trying to remember whether Tom had actually ever said which of his friends he stayed with when he was in London.

‘Still, you know Tom,’ I tried to laugh. ‘He probably just found himself near the restaurant and dropped in.’

‘Then just took it into his head to shoot off without paying when I turned up unexpectedly? Leila said she didn’t want to charge him for the meal anyway, since he’s a sort of relative.’

‘That’s kind of her,’ I said, amazed, because it wouldn’t surprise me if she gives even Nick a bill when he eats there!

‘Yes, wasn’t it just?’ he said drily. ‘And one of the staff let slip that he’d stayed in her apartment the previous night, too – the staff seemed to know him pretty well. But I told Leila, business is business and she’d never let sentiment of any kind come before making money before, so I would just drop the bill in on my way up to the Hall. Here it is.’

I looked at his closed, dark face again and suddenly wondered if he suspected that Tom and Leila had something going on. Surely not. It would be totally ridiculous! I knew that Tom had been having a serious affair for the last few years, of course, but not who it was with, although I assumed it was someone down in Cornwall where he spent so much time. It couldn’t be Leila … could it?

My mind working furiously, I took the offered bill and glanced down at it, then gasped, distracted by the staggering sum. ‘You must be absolutely rolling in it, charging these prices!’

‘Not me – Leila. And the prices aren’t anything out of the ordinary for a restaurant of that standard. She’s just got a Michelin star.’

‘Congratulations,’ I said absently, staring at the bill, the total of which would have fed the average family of four for about a year. More, if they grew most of their food themselves, like I do. ‘But I’m sorry, I don’t have that kind of money on the proceeds of my produce sales – and in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve scaled that side of things down drastically in the last eighteen months.’

‘Come on, you must get good advances for your “how I tried to be self-sufficient and failed dismally” books. You can’t plead poverty,’ he looked distastefully down at the mess he was standing in, ‘whatever it looks like here!’

‘You should have looked before you got out of the car,’ I said coldly. ‘The ducks have been up. And one small book every two or three years doesn’t exactly rake in the cash. I only get a couple of thousand for them. I’m lucky to still have a publisher! My agent says it’s only because my faithful band of readers can’t wait to see what else goes pear-shaped every time. And they like all the recipes.’

‘Ah yes, the Queen of Puddings!’ He wrinkled his nose slightly.

‘What?’ I said indignantly. ‘Just because it’s wholesome, everyday stuff, it doesn’t mean it isn’t good food! At least my recipes don’t need ninety-six exotic ingredients, four servile minions and a catering-sized oven to produce.’

He grinned, as though glad to have got a rise out of me, and I began to remember why our boy-girl romance never got off the ground: an interest in food is the only thing we’ve ever had in common, whatever Annie says, and he never tires of reminding me that mine is not gourmet, and it’s largely focused on sweets and desserts.

‘And this is not my bill, so you’ll have to come back and speak to Tom about it later,’ I added, sincerely hoping that that was all he wanted to talk to Tom about. Clearly he was harbouring suspicions … But no, whoever Tom was having an affair with, it couldn’t be Leila, his own cousin’s brittle little acid drop of a wife, however strange the circumstances might look!

‘If I can catch him,’ Nick said, the grin vanishing. He abruptly changed the subject. ‘Jasper had his results yet?’

‘Oh, yes!’ I said, happily diverted. ‘Yesterday and they were just what he needed for Liverpool University, to read Archaeology and History. He’s having breakfast at the moment – why don’t you come in and talk to him? He hasn’t thanked you for that Roman cookery book you sent him, yet.’

Jasper’s keenly interested in food and drink too, but only from a purely historical perspective. Delving about in medieval cesspits and middens, which was what he seemed to be spending his days doing at the dig, suited him down to the ground.

Nick looked at his watch. ‘I haven’t time today, so congratulate him for me, won’t you? I’d better be off. I’m doing some articles on eating out in the North-West – out-of-the-way restaurants and hotels – so I need to drop my stuff off up at the Hall and get on with it. Breakfast awaits, then lunch and dinner …’

‘Lucky you,’ I said politely, though sitting in restaurants isn’t my favourite thing. I’d rather pig out at home than eat prettily arranged tiny portions consisting of a splat, a dribble and a leaf, in public.

He was frowning down at me again. ‘You know, Lizzy, two thousand is peanuts compared to what I get for my books. No wonder you’re living in a hovel – especially with Tom spending his earnings as fast as he makes them.’ He gestured at the giant satellite dish, incongruously attached to the side of the cottage.

‘We don’t need a huge amount of money and Perseverance Cottage is not a hovel,’ I began crossly. ‘Uncle Roly had all the mod cons installed before we moved in, and it’s exactly how I like it. I’ve got everything I want.’

‘Have you? Or perhaps you’ve got more than you bargained for,’ he said drily, his eyes again resting speculatively on my bruised cheek.

I hoped he didn’t think Tom had taken to physical violence – or that I would have stayed to be a punchbag if he had! I was just about to disabuse his mind of any suspicions in that quarter when he turned round to survey my domain and remarked suavely: ‘I wouldn’t say the family have come a long way from the heady days of Pharamond’s Butterflake Biscuits, but they have certainly diverged in their interests.’

Then, before I could point out that he at least was still vaguely in the bakery line, he got back into his car and reversed away in a cloud of dust. A lot of gritted chickens shot out from under it.

‘Wasn’t that Uncle Nick?’ Jasper asked, coming out ready for the off.

‘Yes, but he couldn’t stay. He had an urgent appointment with breakfast, though he did send you his congratulations on the exam results. Get in. I’ll just wash my hands and we’ll go.’

‘Can I drive?’ he asked hopefully. He’d recently passed his test, lessons courtesy of a lucky win on the gees at Haydock by Great-uncle Roly.

‘OK. Turn it round while I get ready.’

He’d left the cottage door open, and one of the hens had made a small deposit on the rag rug.

Chapter 3: Bittersweet

We are more than halfway through August, the time of year for eating fruits and salads as they come into season; but all too soon we will be bottling, brewing, jamming and preserving as if our lives depended on it and famine was sure to follow glut. And the minute the Christmas Pudding Circle receive their bulk order of dried fruits, peel, nuts and other ingredients, we will all be making our mincemeat too, for we use a marvellous Delia Smith recipe that keeps for ever.

The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in Recipes

All the way to the dig, while the loud music chosen by Jasper drowned out even the possibility of conversation, I wondered whether it could possibly be Leila that Tom had been having an affair with for the last couple of years – or the main one, because I’m sure he still scattered his favours pretty widely.

Was Nick really hinting that he suspected that, or had I imagined it? But things certainly didn’t sound too friendly between him and Leila, even by their semidetached, sweet-and-sour standards!

And what would I say to Tom when he returned? While saying nothing would probably be the most sensible option until my plans to leave were in place, I couldn’t let what he’d done pass, even if I didn’t really think he was trying to hurt me physically.

Maybe I should have left before, even if it did mean disrupting Jasper’s schooling? The situation had certainly been affecting him – he seemed practically to have given up going out with his friends in the evening when Tom was home. Instead, he lurked in his room with the laptop Unks bought him, only suddenly looming silently up between us whenever voices were raised.

So now was probably the moment to clear the air and tell Tom straight that I was not prepared to put up with his behaviour any more, so I was leaving him. I was convinced this was what he’d been angling for, so he could play the hurt innocent party to everyone and, perhaps, install someone else here in my place …

I found that a particularly horrid thought, but Perseverance Cottage belonged to his uncle Roly, so obviously if anyone were moving out it would have to be me. And I simply wouldn’t ask Roly to help me, for not only did I not want to disillusion him about Tom, whom he had treated like another grandson, but he’d already been so kind and generous to us all these years by letting us have the cottage rent free.

I expected I could find new homes for the hens and quail, but finding a new home for me would be the major problem. While the recent influx of newcomers into the area (especially the Cotton Common crowd) might mean that Annie’s Posh Pet-sitters could expand enough to employ me part-time, on the downside, it also meant property rentals had soared out of my reach.

It was all depressingly difficult! Oh, why couldn’t Tom just vanish into thin air, never to be seen again, like those mysterious disappearances you read about in the newspapers?

In need of comfort, I stopped off at Annie’s cottage on the way home from dropping Jasper at the dig. It was still early, but she’d already made a chicken casserole and popped it in the slow cooker for later.

She seemed to have learned a lot more practical stuff than I ever did on that French cookery course we did in London after we left school, where volatile Madame Fresnet screamed at us all day long in French, the language in which we were supposed to learn to cook, thus killing two birds with one stone. At the end of the six months we all emerged with shattered eardrums, shattered French and the ability to whip up tartelettes au fromage at the drop of a whisk.

Trinity skipped up to greet me, and Susannah, Annie’s deaf white cat, regarded me with self-satisfied disinterest from the top of the Rayburn.

‘All right?’ Annie asked anxiously, scrutinising my face.

‘Fine. Tom’s not back yet and Jasper’s at the dig – I just dropped him.’

‘It’s great he got his first choice university, isn’t it?’ she said, getting down another mug from the rack and pouring me some coffee. ‘Do you want a chocolate croissant? They’re hot from the oven and I don’t think I can eat the last one, I’ve had two already.’

‘Your eyes are bigger than your belly,’ I said vulgarly, accepting the plate, and sat down at the kitchen table, keeping my eyes firmly away from Trinny’s pleading dark ones, because the last thing a dog with three legs needs is to be overweight.

‘I saw Nick this morning,’ I told her, dunking the croissant into my coffee so the bittersweet dark chocolate began to melt into it. This makes a change, because I usually do it the other way round and dip my food into melted chocolate, especially strawberries. It’s amazing what you can coat in chocolate – and I’m not talking about that revolting body paint, because I prefer to keep the two greatest pleasures life can hold completely and unmessily separate … or at any rate, I did. I think I have forgotten how to do one of them.

‘That’s really what I came to tell you about, Annie. He called in early on his way up to the Hall, and he said Tom was in London on Monday.’

I described my conversation with Nick. ‘Don’t you think that sounds like he suspects Tom and Leila might be having an affair?’

‘Oh, no, surely not? Not with his own cousin’s wife?’ she exclaimed, looking horrified. Annie is just too nice for her own good, but I suppose being a vicar’s daughter didn’t exactly help to squash her natural inclination to think the best of everybody if she possibly could.

‘I don’t know, but I certainly hope not. I can’t really see him and Leila getting it together, can you? She’s quite scary, in a beady-eyed and elegantly chic way. And I always thought it must be someone local or down in Cornwall, so perhaps Nick has got the wrong end of the stick.’

‘I’m sure he must have,’ she agreed, and then her eye fell on the kitchen clock. ‘Look at the time! I promised I’d put in a couple of hours at the RSPCA kennels. The flu’s hit the staff and volunteers hard. There are no pet-sitting jobs that I can’t handle myself this afternoon, but tomorrow will be busier.’

She looked slightly self-conscious: ‘Ritch Rainford has asked me to go in at lunchtime and walk Flo, because he’ll be at the studios in Manchester all day.’

‘You’d better get off, then, if you’re sure there’s nothing you want me to do. I’ll see you at the Mystery Play committee meeting later, when I’ll finally get to meet the new vicar.’

‘Oh, yes, he’s … he seems nice,’ she said vaguely, but I could see that her mind was still too taken up with the delights of Ritch Rainford to bother with lesser mortals.

‘Oh, before you go, can I borrow that candyfloss maker you bought for the last Cubs and Brownies’ bazaar? Some lusciously lemon morning mist has given me ideas.’

‘Of course. Now, where did I put it?’ She vanished into the pantry and came back with a large cardboard box. ‘The instructions and everything are still in there. Do you need anything else? Sugar?’

‘No, I’m OK for sugar,’ I assured her.

I left her putting Trinny in the back of her car, and then drove down to the other end of the village to drop the punctured tyre off with Dave Naylor at the local garage, Deals on Wheels. (And I know it seems confusing at first that most of the indigent Mosses population who are not Pharamonds are either Naylors or Gumballs, but you quickly get used to it.)

Then I headed for home, passing the entire contingent of the Mosses Senior Citizens’ Circle waiting to board a coach for the annual trip to Southport Flower Show … including Unks’ alarmingly spry octogenarian sister, Mimi Pharamond. I slowed down, staring, and she waved at me gaily, the rainbow-coloured Rastafarian knitted hat Nick brought her back from Jamaica flapping over one eye.

Since Juno Carter, her long-suffering companion, was currently laid up after an accident, letting Mimi loose alone on the flower show seemed a recipe for disaster. I only hoped someone had been delegated to keep an eye on her. And a firm grip.

There was still no sign of Tom’s van outside the cottage and you couldn’t miss it because it had ‘BOARD RIGID’ in big fluorescent orange letters up the side and the logo of a stickman surfing. The workshop door was closed too, but in the bedroom I found his dirty clothes scattered on the rug as though washed up there by a high tide, so he’d either gone out again, or come back without his van.

Still, clearly he had returned from wherever it was he’d been. I gathered up Tom’s clothes, added some of Jasper’s and mine, and then went down to stuff them in the machine. There was no beating them on a rock for me, even in the first flush of self-sufficiency in Cornwall, though before I bought the washing machine out of my first Perseverance Chronicle sale, I used to do the laundry by trampling up and down on it in the bath. Then I would pass it through an old mangle in the yard, which was not fun in winter.

It hadn’t taken me long to realise that most books on self-sufficiency were written by men in warm, comfortable rooms, while their wives were out there dealing with the raw realities of life. Or that Tom, while initially enthusiastic, soon lost interest and succumbed to the burgeoning surfing culture instead. Once you added a tiny baby into the equation, the offer of a cottage on the Pharamond estate up in Lancashire was one I was determined we wouldn’t refuse.

As I pointed out to Tom at the time, if you have the contacts, you can customise surfboards anywhere, and besides, Middlemoss was as close to a home as I had ever got, and I longed to return there.

Tom’s jeans crackled when I picked them up to stuff into the washer, but then I always had to empty his pockets of a strange assortment of objects, from board wax to fluffy sherbet lemons.

This time the haul was a dark blue paper napkin tastefully printed in the corner with the word ‘Leila’s’ in gold, a teaspoon that probably came from the same place, since it was definitely classier than any of our mismatched assortment, a stub of billiard chalk, a red jelly baby with the head bitten off and a piece of pink paper folded tightly into the shape of a very small rose.

Tom had doodled in origami roses as long as I’d known him, which could be very irritating when it was my shopping list or the top page of a stack of book manuscript; but equally, it used to be rather endearing when it was an apology for forgetting to tell me he was going off somewhere. At least, it was until the novelty wore off, along with my patience.

I flattened this one out and found it was the last part of a letter, abjuring my husband to ‘Tell old Charlie Dimmock you’ve found someone else and give her the push’, and promising, if he did, to tie him up – and maybe even down if he really begged her to. It was signed ‘Your Dark Heart’.

Well, that didn’t sound like Leila, did it? I could imagine she’d give anyone a good basting, but would she have time in her busy schedule for bondage?

A horrible image flashed before my eyes of a naked Tom, trussed and oven-ready, and I found I was sitting on the quarry tiles feeling sick and recalling the last time we made love, which was just before Jasper was taken ill.

I’d accused Tom of having yet another affair, but this time his attempt to sweet-talk me round hadn’t entirely worked and he’d said I was so unresponsive he felt like he was practising necrophilia. And then I’d said that I felt much the same, since he might look like the man I married, but the part of him I’d loved seemed to be quite dead.

This threw him into the first of his really frighteningly violent rages during which he said that living with a cold bitch of a wife who thought food could cure anything was enough to send any man off the rails, and stormed out.

After this I began sleeping in the small boxroom off our bedroom, and things between us went downhill rapidly. He made no attempt to conceal his affairs, though this note was the first hard evidence that any of them were serious …

Feeling suddenly dizzy, I put my head on my knees and closed my eyes, wishing our old lurcher, Harriet, was still around to snuffle sympathetically in my ear.

When the feeling passed off I resolutely got up and washed my face in the kitchen sink with cold water, ate an entire packet of those chocolate mini-flake cake decorations, then went out to the workshop, from where faint strains of Metallica now wafted through the Judas door.

Chapter 4: Mushrooming

I know a lot of people dry mushrooms, or freeze the button ones, but I either eat them freshly gathered from the nearby fields, or not at all.

But I do make marzipan mushrooms sometimes and give them as gifts in the sort of little paper-strip baskets we used to weave at infants’ school for Easter eggs. The mushrooms are very easy: you simply make the cap from marzipan and place it upside down. Then press a disc of more marzipan onto it, coloured brown with a little cocoa powder, and make a ribbed effect with a fork. Add a marzipan stalk, and hey presto! Realer than real.

The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in Recipes

Tom had his back to me when I went in, spray-stencilling some intricate, hand-cut Celtic design onto a surfboard. He was wearing a mask and baggy dungarees over his T-shirt and jeans, and his dark hair curled onto the nape of his neck in a familiar ducktail.

Where his cousin Nick was built on a large and rugged scale, Tom was a slight, wiry man and every slender bone of his body was beautiful. But despite (allegedly) not being a Pharamond other than in name, he did have the unmistakable look of one, so I was convinced that all the rumours about his mother were true.

I stood there for a minute, thrown by that familiar curl of hair, shaken by the stirring of a tenderness I had thought long dead. Then he must have felt my presence, for he turned cold grey stranger’s eyes on me, pushing down the mask. The CD came to an end and there was silence.

His eyes flicked to the fading bruise on my cheek and away again. ‘You’re still here, then? Thought you might have cleared off.’

‘Like where?’ I demanded. ‘And Jasper? The animals? Did you think I had an ark ready and waiting somewhere?’

‘Ah, yes, I forgot: my great-uncle by marriage, my cottage. Poor little orphan Lizzy has nowhere to go, has she?’

‘Don’t think I intend staying with you any longer than I have to,’ I told him coldly. ‘The minute Jasper’s off to university, that’s it. And if you’re interested, his results came and he got into Liverpool.’

‘It’s always Jasper, isn’t it?’ he said pettishly.

‘You should be pleased because he’s your son too, whatever mad ideas you’ve got in your head. But I’m not playing your games any more, Tom – you can believe what you like.’

‘Oh, come on, Jasper’s the spitting image of Nick, my dear old no-blood-relation cousin – and don’t forget I caught you in each other’s arms at the hospital when Jasper was ill.’

‘I’ve told you repeatedly that he was just comforting me – and you could have been doing that, if I’d been able to get hold of you! But I conceived Jasper practically as soon as we’d got married and I never even looked at Nick in that way – or any other man! No, there’s another obvious reason why both you and Jasper look like Pharamonds, only you’d rather believe ill of me than your mother!’

‘We’ll leave my mother out of this,’ he said, that ugly look in his eyes. ‘But the sooner you clear out, the better.’ Turning back towards his board he said dismissively, ‘Fetch me a beer out will you? There’s some in the fridge.’

‘Fetch it yourself. I didn’t come out here to wait on you. Oh, and here’s a restaurant bill from Leila. I only hope the meal was worth it!’

‘What?’ He swung round and snatched it from me, glanced at it and then looked up suspiciously. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘Nick called by early this morning. You left Leila’s without paying the bill, and she wants her money.’

‘Oh, I don’t think this is Leila’s idea,’ he said, crumpling the bill into a ball and tossing it into a corner. ‘I’ve already paid her – in kind. Bed and board. So now you know, and presumably Nick also knows.’

‘Suspects, perhaps … but … Leila can’t possibly be “Dark Heart”!’ I blurted.

He took a menacing step towards me. ‘What do you know about Dark Heart?’

‘I found a bit of a note in your pocket when I was sorting the washing, but it didn’t sound like Leila,’ I said, standing my ground.

‘It isn’t,’ he said shortly. ‘It’s someone else … someone more conveniently local, who’s prepared to please me in ways you wouldn’t have, even if I’d asked, dearest wife.’

‘Is it someone I know, Tom? And Leila – was that a one-off? She isn’t the woman you’ve been having an affair with since before Jasper was ill, is she?’

He didn’t reply, just smiled rather unpleasantly. I hoped he hadn’t been running two of them in tandem even then. But someone local … who could it be?

Oh God, he hadn’t got drunk and started an affair with that drippy girl who played the electric violin and sang in the Mummers, had he? I’d noticed she hadn’t been able to look me in the eye for months, but thought she’d maybe been one of his one-night flings. Evidently, he wasn’t going to tell me anyway.

I thought of something else. ‘Where’s your van?’

‘It broke down in a lay-by about twenty miles away. I had to get the garage to bring it in – think the gearbox’s had it. Now, any more questions? Only I need to finish this board because I’m off down to Cornwall at the weekend to deliver it, assuming the van’s fixed by then.’

I stared at him, thinking how normal a monster could look.

‘If you aren’t leaving immediately, you could make yourself useful and fetch that beer,’ he suggested.

‘Fetch it yourself! I’m going for a walk in the woods to think all this over, and then later I’ve got a Mystery Play Committee meeting, the first of the year,’ I said, and saw a flash of anger in his eyes.

As I left I heard the music restart, and the hissing of the spray.

Outside I practically fell over Polly Darke, our local purveyor of stirring Regency romances – and I use the term ‘Regency’ very loosely, since she never let historical facts come between her and the story. She gave me one of them once and I noticed the words ‘feisty’ and ‘lusty’ appeared on practically every page to describe the heroine and hero.

And now I came to think of it, she never let facts come between her and a modern story either, since she was always snooping about under one pretext or another, and twisting things she saw and heard into malicious gossip. Divorced, she had lived in her hacienda-style bungalow between Middlemoss and Mossedge for several years, and I’m sure was convinced that she was accepted everywhere as a local.

While I didn’t suppose she could have heard anything much through a wooden door, that wouldn’t prevent her from spreading lurid rumours about me and Tom around the three villages by sundown.

She was looking her usual strange self, in a severely truncated purple Regency-style dress, and with her hair cropped and dyed a dense, dead black. She clutched a small blue plastic basket of field mushrooms to her artificially inflated bosom, which might or might not be a fashion statement – are plastic baskets currently a must-have accessory?

Apart from the kohl-edged eyes and puffy, fuchsia-pink lips (which reminded me, strikingly, of a baboon’s bottom), her face was pale as death. Paler.

‘Oh, Polly, are you all right?’ I asked. ‘You haven’t been eating your own home-bottled tomatoes or anything like that, have you?’

From time to time she fancied herself as the Earth Mother type and tried her hand at jams, chutneys and bottled goods, which she then gave to all and sundry, in my case together with a generous dose of botulism or something equally foul. Just my luck to get that one!

‘Oh, no, I haven’t had time for any of that, Lizzy – I’ve got a book to finish, you know.’

‘Yes, Senga does like you to keep them coming, doesn’t she?’

Having fallen out with two agents and three publishers, Polly had been taken on by my own agent, Senga McDonald – and may the best woman win.

Her dark eyes slid curiously to the closed workshop door and back to my face. ‘I thought I heard raised voices – is everything OK with you and Tom? Only sometimes lately you haven’t seemed entirely happy, and you know you can always depend on me if you need a shoulder to cry on.’

Oh, yes, but only if I kneel down first, I thought, as she smiled at me in a horribly pseudo-sympathetic sort of way.

‘I’m fine,’ I said shortly. ‘We were just discussing business. Were you looking for me?’

She gave a start. ‘Oh, yes. I picked loads of mushrooms in the paddock this morning early and I thought you might like to swap them for some quail eggs? But if it’s inconvenient, it doesn’t matter.’

‘No, not at all. I’m just off for a walk, but you know where they are in the small barn? Help yourself and leave the mushrooms there,’ I told her, and walked off, not caring whether she thought me rude or not. When she first moved to Middlemoss she went all out to be my best friend, but we had absolutely nothing in common (apart from Senga). Anyway, I already have a best friend in Annie.

Nor, it occurred to me, was she the type to skip about the fields at dawn gathering mushrooms, which in any case looked suspiciously like shop-bought ones, small, clean and perfectly formed. My marzipan mushrooms looked earthier than those!

I headed for the woods, for I found their dark, cool depths wonderfully soothing, especially on a hot day. They restored a sense of my unimportance in the great scale of things, shrinking my problems down to a more manageable, acorn size.

Luckily I was wearing a pinky-red T-shirt, so Caz would spot me if I strayed onto the smaller paths he stalked so relentlessly. But if he was out there with his gun, he didn’t make himself known. He’s not much of a talker in any case; but then, most of his dealings are with squirrels, so he doesn’t need to be.

After a while I found my thoughts turning away from more painful subjects onto the comforting one of food, wondering which member of the Christmas Pudding Circle would come up with the best recipe for brandy butter ice cream.

More than likely it would be Faye, since she’s a farmer’s wife who has diversified by opening a farm shop and café, where she sells her own home-made organic ice cream. She was already perfecting a Christmas-pudding-flavoured one.

Eventually, as the shadows lengthened, I reluctantly had to turn for home, even though I dreaded seeing Tom again. But there was no need: he wasn’t there and, more to the point, neither was my car.

Come to that, even the punnet of mushrooms Polly Darke had presumably left had vanished into thin air, though possibly Caz had been around and fancied them. He knows he can help himself to anything edible he can find, though it seemed a bit greedy to take them all. (He keeps the freezer I gave him locked, so goodness knows what’s in there. Better not to know, perhaps?)

I searched for a note saying where Tom and my car had gone to, but there was nothing. Unless he came back by the time I returned from the Mystery Play Committee meeting, Jasper was going to have to cycle home that evening, and I would be extremely annoyed.

I fed, watered and generally cared for everything that needed my attention, then changed and set off for the village hall – on foot.

Chapter 5: Sweet Mysteries

The Mystery Play Committee will reconvene on the 19th of August with rehearsals to start in September as usual. If any member of last year’s cast cannot for any reason continue in their role, would they please inform Marian and Clive Potter at the Middlemoss Post Office.

Mosses Messenger

The members of the Middlemoss Mystery Play Committee were gathered around a trestle table in the village hall, which exhibited reminders of its many functions: the playgroup’s brightly coloured toys poked out from behind a curtained alcove and their finger-painting decorated one wall, while the other bore posters of footprints illustrating the various new steps the Senior Citizens’ Tuesday Tea Dance Club were trying to master.

Personally, I thought salsa might give one or two of them a bit of trouble, but I was sure they would all give it a go. Their line dancing ensemble at the last Christmas concert had been a big hit, and Mrs Gumball, the cook up at Pharamond Hall, had got so excited she fell off the end of the stage. But fortunately foam playmats were always stacked there after an incident a few years back, when one of Santa’s little elves fell over, causing a domino effect along the line until the last one dropped off and broke a leg.

‘I think we might as well start, Clive,’ I suggested to the verger, opening the plastic box of Choconut Consolations I’d brought with me and setting it in the middle, so everyone could help themselves. ‘I don’t know where Annie’s got to, but Uncle Roly’s gone to the races. He said after all these years he could do the Voice of God in his sleep, so you could sort it all out without him.’

This year’s committee was formed of the usual suspects; some of them also CPC members. There was Dr Patel, our semi-retired GP, Miss Pym the infants’ schoolteacher, the new vicar – untried and untested and looking more than a little nervous – and Clive and Marian Potter, who between them ran the post office, the Mosses Messenger parish magazine and also pretty well everything else that happened round Middlemoss, including directing the annual Mysteries. Then there was my humble self, for Clive liked to have a token Pharamond on tap, since Uncle Roly was inclined to give his duties the go-by if something more interesting came along. Annie was presumably held up somewhere.

‘Very well. I’ve convened this meeting earlier than usual for two reasons,’ announced Clive, who is like a busy little ant, always running to and fro. Marian is the same, and I have a theory that they never sleep, just hang by their heels for the odd ten minutes to refresh themselves, like bats. Come to that, they’re so in tune with one another they have probably leaped up the next rung of the evolutionary ladder and communicate in high-pitched squeaks us mere bog-standard humans can’t hear.

‘First off, I thought the vicar might need a bit more time to get to grips with the Mysteries, it all coming as a bit of a surprise to him, like.’

The vicar, a carrot-haired, blue-eyed man with a naturally startled expression, nodded earnestly: ‘But I’m delighted, of course – absolutely delighted.’

I wondered if anyone had warned him that the last vicar was currently having a genteel nervous breakdown in a church nursing home near Morecambe. An elderly man, he’d been hoping for a quiet country living, I feared, where he could jog along towards his retirement, not the whirl of activity that is the Mosses parish. But at least the new one was younger and unmarried. I observed with interest the way he suddenly went the same shade as his hair when Annie, breathless and dishevelled, rushed into the room.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, subsiding into the seat next to me. ‘One of the dogs slipped its lead and was practically in Mossrow before I caught him.’

She smiled apologetically around at everyone and, apart from the vicar, who was still looking poleaxed, we smiled back, since Annie is Goodwill to all Mankind personified. Even though I’m her best friend, I have to admit that she is a plump, billowy person the approximate shape of a cottage loaf and, although her hair is a beautiful coppery colour, that pudding-bowl bob does not do her amiable round face any favours. She certainly doesn’t normally cause men to go red and all self-conscious …

‘We were only just starting,’ I assured her. ‘Clive’s called the meeting to familiarise the vicar—’

‘Do all call me Gareth,’ he interrupted eagerly, finding his voice again, but I expect most of us will just carry on addressing him as ‘Vicar’ because we are nothing if not traditionalists in Middlemoss.

‘And you must call me KP,’ said Dr Patel agreeably, ‘like the nuts.’

‘And I’m Lizzy,’ I put in hastily, seeing Gareth’s puzzled expression at KP’s old joke. ‘You’ve already met Annie, haven’t you?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. ‘At church.’

He was just Annie’s type and clearly smitten, but she didn’t seem to notice!

‘Perhaps we’d better get on?’ suggested Clive. ‘Only the Youth Club will be in here tonight for snooker, and I’ll need to set the tables up. First, could you all please read this quote from a recently published book.’

He passed round a bundle of photocopies.

Although called the Middlemoss Mysteries, this surviving vestige of a medieval mystery play, annually performed in an obscure Lancashire village, is in reality a much debased form. At some point in its history it was reduced to a mere series of tableaux illustrating several key Biblical scenes, such as the Fall of Lucifer, Adam and Eve and the Nativity. Then, early last century what little dialogue remained was rendered into near-impenetrable ancient local dialect by Joe Wheelright, the Weaver Poet, and this is constantly reinterpreted by each generation of actors. The head of the leading local family, the Pharamonds, traditionally speaks the Voice of God.

We all read it in silence.

Then Annie said, ‘Well, it’s not so bad, is it, Clive? We can’t hope to keep the Mysteries a total secret, so we always do get some strangers coming along, especially since the Mosses have suddenly become so terribly trendy to live in.’

‘No, it’s the folksy visitors who would want to take over and fix the whole thing like a fly in amber that we want to discourage,’ I agreed. ‘The Middlemoss Mystery Play is just for the locals, something we’ve always done, like that Twelfth Night celebration they have up at Little Mumming.’

‘That’s hardly comparable with our play, dear, since I’m told it’s only a morris dance and a small miracle scene of George and the Dragon,’ Marian said.

‘That’s right,’ agreed Clive. ‘But they keep it quiet: I’ve even heard that they block the road into the village with tractors on the day, to deter strangers.’

‘I think the best thing about our Mysteries is the way each new generation of actors adds a little something to their parts, even if we do now stick more or less to the Wheelright version,’ I said, though actually, while the acting itself is taken very seriously, I often suspect the Weaver Poet of having had a somewhat unholy sense of humour.

‘I don’t think “debased” is a very polite description,’ Marian said, looking down at her photocopy again and bristling to the ends of her short, spiky silver hair. ‘And what does he mean, “impenetrable dialect”? If the audience doesn’t know the bible stories before they see it, then they should, so they’d know what was going on!’

‘Er … yes,’ said the vicar, with a gingerly glance at Dr Patel, who was sitting with his hands clasped over his immaculately suited round stomach, listening benignly.

‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ the doctor said, catching his eye. ‘I went to infants’ school right here – my father was the senior partner at the practice – so I know all the bible stories. So did all the Lees from the Mysteries of the East Chinese takeaway in Mossedge, and there’s usually at least one of that family taking part in the play.’

‘We have many mysteries,’ I said helpfully. ‘Even the pub is called the New Mystery.’

‘Little Ethan Lee made such a sweet baby Jesus last year,’ Miss Pym said sentimentally. ‘He simply couldn’t take his eyes off the angels’ haloes.’

‘None of us could,’ Annie said. ‘We’d never had ones that lit up before.’

‘Oh?’ said Gareth, clearly groping to make sense of all this. ‘Well, Clive has kindly loaned me the videos of last year’s performance, which I’ve watched with … with interest.’ He cleared his throat. ‘While I’ve seen the Chester Mystery Plays and, er … although the format of scenes from the Old and New Testaments have similarities to that, otherwise they don’t seem much alike …’

‘They’re not, Vicar,’ Clive said. ‘They might have been at one time – you’d have to ask Mr Roly Pharamond, he’s got all the records. But when the Puritans took over and tried to ban it, the squire – another Roland, he was – he told the players to cut it right down, so it could be performed in one day up at the Hall, instead of here on the green.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Marian, ‘and on Boxing Day instead of Midsummer Day, because fewer strangers would be travelling about then. Then, when it was safe to perform the Mysteries in public again – well, we’d got used to doing things our way.’

‘So it’s still performed up at the Hall on Boxing Day?’ Gareth asked.

Miss Pym nodded. ‘In the coach house. The doors are opened wide and the audience stands in the courtyard, with lots of braziers about to keep them warm. The stables on either side are used as dressing rooms. It lasts about five hours, with breaks for refreshments, of course, and musical interludes.’

‘Musical interludes? Indeed?’ Gareth brightened. ‘Hymns, perhaps? I’m hoping to breathe a little life back into the church choir.’

‘No, actually a local group perform – the Mummers of Invention,’ I told him. ‘My husband sings with them and they’re quite good. Sort of electric folk style.’

‘Mummers of Invention?’ he murmured, looking bemused.

‘The last vicar had the strange idea that the play was blasphemous in some way,’ Clive said, ‘but you could see yourself from the video that it’s the exact opposite, couldn’t you? It’s all bible stories, and the entire parish is involved right down to the infants’ school. The children always play the procession of animals into the ark.’

‘And they helped me to make the Virgin’s bower last year with wire and tissue paper flowers,’ Miss Pym said, ‘though since it kept falling on Annie’s head (your fifth and last appearance as Virgin, wasn’t it, dear?) it could not have been called an unqualified success.’

Annie caught the vicar’s eye, went pink, and looked hastily away – but at least now she had noticed him.

‘And you run the Mysteries committee, Clive, and direct the play?’ Gareth asked.

‘Yes, that’s right. In September we start giving out the parts and rehearsing. No one can play the same role for more than five years except God, so things change, and different people come forward or drop out.’

‘Some of the new actors who’ve moved into the area lately have volunteered,’ I said.

‘Yes, like Ritch Rainford,’ Annie murmured dreamily, and I gave her a look. I hope she’s not going to get a serious crush on the man, since it’s unlikely to lead anywhere.

‘But most of them don’t live here all the time, Annie, and you need people who do, especially when there are more rehearsals just before Christmas.’

‘Yes, so the parts are usually played by local people and someone always volunteers if there’s an emergency, like last year when Lazarus broke both ankles falling off his tractor,’ Dr Patel said. ‘He could have lain down, but there was no way short of a real miracle he was ever going to rise up and walk. So Lizzy’s husband, Tom, stepped in at the last minute.’

‘He made a very good Lazarus: I gave him four stars in the parish magazine review,’ Clive broke in.

Gareth turned to me. ‘So, your husband is Tom Pharamond, and he also plays in a band called the Mummers? I don’t think I’ve met him yet, have I?’

‘I shouldn’t think so, he’s not much of a churchgoer. And he said he wouldn’t take part in the play again this year, it was a one-off, Clive – sorry. You’ll need a new Lazarus.’

‘Pity,’ Clive said regretfully. He coughed and shuffled his papers together. ‘So, we’ll ask for nominations for the parts and rehearsals will start in the middle of September in two groups, one on Tuesdays and the other, Thursdays. As usual, I’ll need a director’s assistant for each scene. Lizzy, will you take on the Fall of Lucifer, the Creation, and Adam and Eve? You are still doing Eve this year, I hope?’

‘Yes, my fifth and final go too, thank goodness – even a knitted bodystocking is perishingly cold in December. I had to keep warming myself over a chestnut brazier last year and a couple of my fig leaves got singed.’

‘You could try thermal underwear?’ suggested Miss Pym. ‘Those thin silk ones for under ski suits.’

‘That’s an idea! Not so bulky.’

‘Miss Pym will do Noah’s Flood, of course, and Marian will oversee Moses. One of the tablets broke last time; someone will need to make a new one …’ Clive made a note, and ticked off Moses.

‘Vicar, if you could be in charge of the Nativity – Annunciation, Magi, Birth of Christ, Flight into Egypt?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Gareth agreed, though rather numbly, I thought. But unlike the last vicar, at least he hadn’t started gibbering and lightly foaming at the mouth by this stage.

‘Dr Patel has offered to do the Temptation of Christ, the Curing of the Lame Man, the Blind Man, and the Raising of Lazarus: all short scenes.’

‘Seems appropriate,’ agreed the doctor, adding generously, ‘and the Water into Wine and Feeding of the Five Thousand too, if you like.’

‘I’ll see to the Last Supper, Judas, the Trial and Crucifixion myself this year – the Crucifixion’s always tricky, but you might want to take that on next year, Vicar – and then that leaves just the Resurrection, Ascension and Last Judgement.’

‘I’ll do those again,’ offered Annie.

‘We do the final dress rehearsals for the whole thing up at the Hall in a couple of sessions before Christmas,’ Marian helpfully explained to the vicar. ‘In random order, or it would be unlucky. But since at least two-thirds of the players will have done their parts before, it’s just a question of making sure the new ones know their lines and where to stand, that’s all.’

‘Oh, good,’ said poor Gareth weakly. He looked at his watch. ‘I’d better get back – I’ve got a funeral to prepare.’

‘Yes, our Moses – such a sad loss,’ Miss Pym said. ‘We will have to recast that part, too.’

Clive stuffed his papers and clipboard into a scuffed leather briefcase and then he and Marian started transforming the hall into a snooker parlour for the Youth Club, turning down my offer of help.

When I went out the vicar was already halfway across the green with Annie, heading in the direction of the church. I bet they were only talking about something totally mundane like Sunday school, though, and she hadn’t noticed at all that he fancied her.

Miss Pym climbed into her little red Smart car and vanished with a vroom, and Dr Patel wished me good night and got into his BMW.

I wended my way home to Perseverance Cottage, where I did not find my husband or, more importantly, my car, but did find a telephone message on the machine from Unks, asking me to ring him back. When I did, he told me that Mimi, his elderly sister who lived at the Hall with her long-suffering companion Juno, had been arrested by the police at the Southport Flower Show, having temporarily got away from Mrs Gumball, who’d volunteered to keep an eye on her. You can’t blame her, though, since Mimi is very spry for an octogenarian while Mrs Gumball is the human equivalent of a mastodon, so moves slowly and majestically.

Unfortunately, Mimi is a plant kleptomaniac: no one’s garden is safe from her little knife and plastic bags, and she really just can’t understand why anyone should take exception to her habits. Still, the police had merely cautioned and released her this time and, since the coach had by then set out on the return journey, drove her and Mrs Gumball home in a police car.

Roly said she was under the impression they had done it to give her a treat, and was hoping next year’s flower show would be as much fun.

Then he added, rather puzzlingly, ‘And I hope Tom told you that you can stop worrying about ever losing Perseverance Cottage, my dear, because after I’m gone, it’s yours and Tom’s. I would have said before, if I’d known it was on your mind.’

‘But I wasn’t worried, Unks! In fact, the thought never even entered my head,’ I assured him. Since I would have to leave soon, it was immaterial to me, but Tom had evidently used me as an excuse to find out how things had been left. How Machiavellian he’s becoming!

After this, I unpacked Annie’s candyfloss machine to distract myself from worrying until Jasper arrived safely home. The instructions absolutely forbade me to use any natural essences or colourings other than special granulated ones designed for the purpose, which was disappointing from the point of view of making Cornish Mist, until I discovered one of the tubs in the box was lemon.

Fascinating how the floss forms inside the bowl like ectoplasm, and you have to wind the near invisible threads onto wooden sticks. Fine, sugary filaments drifted everywhere, and the kitchen took on the hot, sweet, nostalgic smell of funfairs.

It was really messy but fun, which Jasper said was a good description of me, too, when he got home and saw what I’d been up to, though by then I was sitting among the debris, writing it all up for the Chronicle.

Maybe I’ll have ‘messy, but fun’ as my epitaph.

Chapter 6: Driven Off

I wonder if plastic bags of fluffy white candyfloss labelled ‘edible Santa beards’ would go down well with children at Christmas? I expect they would try them on and get terribly sticky, though.

The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in Recipes

There was still no sign of my car next morning and, in a furious temper, I rang all of Tom’s friends that I knew about, or who I had mobile numbers for although trying to contact his surfing buddies down in Cornwall was always like waking the dead, and I got little sense out of them even when they did answer the phone.

The first time or two he went missing for a few days I also rang the local hospitals and the police, but after that I learned my lesson.

I woke Jasper early and saw him off by bike to the dig, then I called Annie to tell her I was without transport; but luckily she only wanted me to exercise the two Pekes and a Shitzu belonging to one of the more elderly members of the Cotton Common cast, Delphine Lake. She’d bought one of the expensive flats in part of the former Pharamond’s Butterflake Biscuit factory in the village and I’d walked her dogs several times before.

Uncle Roly sold the Pharamond brand name out to a big conglomerate years ago for cash, shares and a seat on the board, which was both a smart and lucrative deal; so now the factory has been converted to apartments, a café-bar called Butterflakes, and a museum of Mosses history.

Delphine’s dogs may be little, but they loved their walks, so it was late morning before I got back to the cottage and found a female police officer awaiting me on the doorstep. An adolescent colleague sat biting his fingernails behind the wheel of a panda car.

I immediately thought the worst, as you do. ‘Jasper?’ I cried. ‘Has something happened to Jasper?’

‘Mrs Elizabeth Pharamond?’ she queried solemnly.

‘Yes!’

‘I’m Constable Perkins and I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you.’

She paused, and I was just about to take her by the throat and shake her when she added,

‘About your husband.’

‘Oh – thank God!’ I gasped devoutly, then burst into tears of relief.

Wresting the keys from my nerveless fingers, she ushered me into my own home, where she broke the news that Tom had had a fatal accident. He’d driven off the road into a disused quarry, which was odd in itself, since there’s only one place within a radius of about fifty miles where he could have managed to perform that feat, and it’s up a little-used back lane.

While her colleague made me tea, she spoke to me with skilful sympathy, though my reactions clearly puzzled her. But all I was feeling was an overpowering sense of relief that it wasn’t Jasper.

And then I got to thinking that this was all so blatantly unreal anyway, that it couldn’t be true: it must be just some dreadful nightmare!

This was a very calming idea, since I knew I’d wake up sometime, so I agreed quite readily to go and identify Tom’s body. My head seemed to be this helium-filled thing bobbing about on a string – or that’s what it felt like, anyway – but there’s no accounting for dreams.

And Tom, apart from his thin, handsome face being a whiter shade of pale, looked absolutely fine. He was always one to land butter-side up …

‘Is this your husband?’ the policewoman asked formally.

‘Yes – Thomas Pharamond. Are you sure he’s dead? Only he looks just like he did when he was playing Lazarus.’

She gave me a strange look, but assured me that Tom had broken his neck in a very final manner. Then she offered me yet another cup of tea, which I didn’t want, and took me home again, sitting beside me in the back seat while the adolescent did the driving. He feasted on his fingernails at every red light and I don’t know why, but it suddenly reminded me of the stewed apple with little sharp crescents of core snippings that they used to give us at school for pudding.

The policewoman whiled away the journey by telling me that they thought the car (my car, which was now a write-off) had been at the bottom of the quarry for a few hours before it was found, and he must have died instantly, but I expect they say that every time. There would have to be a post-mortem examination, and probably an inquest. I think she said there would be an inquest. I wasn’t taking it all in, because of course it wasn’t real.

When we got to Perseverance Cottage, she asked if there was someone who could stay with me.

‘Oh, yes – I’ll phone the family right now,’ I assured her, suddenly desperate to get rid of her. ‘Thank you for … for – well, thank you, Officer. I’ll be fine.’

She looked a bit dubious, but drove off leaving me to it, and I thankfully closed the front door and leaned against it: that seemed solid enough. So did the cold quarry tiles beneath my feet when I kicked my sandals off …

It began slowly to dawn on me that this really was happening and Tom was actually dead! In which case, I could only be glad that Jasper was at his dig, since I’m sure he would have insisted on coming with me to identify Tom, though actually his face had looked peaceful enough, if vaguely surprised by the turn of events. I felt a sudden pang of guilt, remembering how glad I had been that it was Tom who had died and not Jasper.

But now I’d have to break the news to him about his father … and to Unks and Mimi and Tom’s mother out in Argentina …

Stiffening my trembling legs I tottered into the sitting room and dialled the Hall, getting Uncle Roly.

I don’t think I was the mistress of either tact or coherence by this stage, but he took the news well, if quietly, and offered to phone Tom’s mother and stepfather in Argentina himself, which was a huge relief. Then he said he would also try and contact Nick, still off touring the eateries of the rural North-West.

‘And Jasper?’ he asked. ‘I take it he is at the dig, and doesn’t know?’

‘Yes, and I think I’ll just wait for him to come home before I tell him,’ I decided, for why rush to give him the bad news? ‘Anyway, Tom was driving my car – his van broke down – so I haven’t got any transport.’

When I phoned Annie she was out and the message I left was probably unintelligible.

Roly thoughtfully called in later in the Daimler to say Joe Gumball was driving him over to the dig to collect Jasper and he could break the news to him on the way home, if I wanted.

‘Oh, Unks, you are kind!’ I said, gratefully. ‘But it must be just as hard for you. You don’t have to do it.’

‘My dear, having lived through the war, I’m inured to breaking bad news.’

I offered him some of the damson gin I’d been drinking to try to dispel that feeling of being underwater with my eardrums straining, but which had just seemed to make everything more unbelievably bizarre, and said anxiously, ‘I can’t believe Tom isn’t going to walk back in through that door at any moment, the way he always turned up after he’d been missing for a few days.’

He patted my hand. ‘There, there, my dear. Leave everything to me. I’ll be back with Jasper in no time.’

Mimi phoned me up just after he’d left, but halfway through offering me her condolences in a graciously formal manner, she completely lost the thread and said she was too busy to talk to me just now. Then she put the phone down.

But at least her call had jarred me into remembering to feed the poultry. It was a bit late, but when I called, ‘Myrtle, Myrtle, Myrtle – Honey, Honey, Honey!’ they all came running.

Round the side of the big greenhouse I came unexpectedly nose to bare (except for the camouflage paint) chest of Caz Naylor, who indicated with a nod of his head and a raised eyebrow that he would like to know what was happening.

‘Tom’s driven off the quarry road,’ I said. ‘In my car.’

‘Dead?’

‘So they say.’

‘Car?’

‘That’s a write-off, too.’

He grunted non-committally, then handed me a small blue plastic basket containing one slightly decayed mushroom. ‘Poison,’ he said, prodding it with a slightly grimy finger.

‘I know,’ I began, recognising it, but he turned and flitted off back through the shadows until he’d completely vanished into the woods.

That was the longest conversation I’d had with him for ages … and what was the significance of the poisonous fungi in a punnet that looked suspiciously like the one Polly Darke had brought me full of field mushrooms … was that only yesterday? Perhaps she’d inadvertently picked a poisonous one? After my previous experience of Polly’s way with foodstuffs, I should have been more cautious in accepting them anyway!

Or perhaps Caz had simply taken to giving brief nature lessons in his spare time.

Jasper was very quiet and pale when he came in, and though we shared a long hug, said he’d like to be alone for a bit and vanished up to his room. I thought it best to leave him to talk in his own time.

He did reappear when Annie arrived and seemed pretty composed by then, though he being the quiet stoical type it’s hard to tell, even for me.

I thought I was quite composed too, but as soon as Annie walked through the door I burst into tears, as though her arrival was some kind of absolute proof that it really wasn’t all a ghastly nightmare. I left a full set of grubby fingerprints up the back of her lavender Liberty cotton shirt.

She hugged Jasper too, something which he would normally go out of his way to avoid, even though he is fond of her. Then we all just sat around in a fuzzy cloud of disbelief and damson gin.

It was the sheer unreality: Tom had gone missing so many times, it was hard to believe he wouldn’t just walk through that door at any minute with the TV remote control in his hand (he secreted it away somewhere in his workshop when away), and sit watching endless films on Sky, which he’d had installed soon after he got the giant TV.

He’d always been supremely selfish. Even the Tom I fell in love with, charming though he’d been, really only thought about himself for at least ninety-five per cent of the time, which is why he always did exactly what he wanted and apologised afterwards.

‘Yes, I know,’ Annie agreed when I shared this gem with her, together with the rest of the bottle of gin, after Jasper had gone up to bed (or at least, back up to the Batcave). ‘But when he was around he seemed to cast a spell of charm, so people didn’t realise it until later. Or if they did, they didn’t mind, because they thought he wasn’t doing it intentionally to hurt anyone, it was just how he was.’

The gin might not have been such a good idea after all, for my past life seemed to take on a darkly ominous pattern. ‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘What have I done to deserve this? Why do I have to lose everyone? I know I didn’t love Tom any more, but I didn’t want any harm to come to him either!’

‘We all have to die,’ Annie pointed out soothingly, passing me the plate of ginger parkin she’d found in the fridge while looking for something to blot up the alcohol. I must have sliced and buttered it earlier, on automatic pilot.

‘Yes, but why don’t my loved ones die naturally of old age? Look at my parents! OK, Daddy was a diplomat, but of all the British Consulates in all the world, why did they have to be sent to that one? And having got there, why did they have to immediately sit in the wrong restaurant and get blown up? Couldn’t they have settled for baked beans on bagels at home, and then lived nice, peaceful lives and been more than a few faded snapshots and some stored furniture to their only daughter?’

‘But you had nothing to do with it – you’d just arrived for your first term at St Mattie’s,’ she pointed out. ‘You weren’t even in the same country. Stop imagining you’re some kind of Angel of Death! What would Daddy say if he could hear you?’

From past experience I could confidently predict that Annie’s father would go wandering off into a scholarly monologue on angels of death, the existence and symbolism of, which would be soothing, but not precisely helpful.

Annie gave me a hug. ‘It’s not your fault that Tom was killed and you did your best to save your marriage. I know what it’s been like the last few years, and you’re a saint to have stayed with him.’

‘I’m not a saint. I stayed for Jasper, really, and because we both loved living here.’ A tear rolled down my cheek and landed onto the half-eaten slice of parkin I was holding, though I didn’t remember taking a piece.

‘I’m sure for the first few years Tom did love and need you, Lizzy. He wandered off, but he always came back again.’

‘Perhaps, but there were always other women. I tried to shut my eyes to it, but it hurt, Annie.’ I swallowed hard. ‘But I think I’m grieving for the Tom I married, even if the man I thought he was never existed. And I still feel guilty for being so relieved that it was Tom, rather than Jasper.’

Annie comforted me as well as she could, and I have a vague recollection of her helping me up to bed, where I must have passed out.

When I staggered down next morning, feeling like Lady Lazarus, everything had been cleared and tidied and washed up.

There’s probably a Girl Guide badge for coping with a friend’s bereavement too, together with the Advanced Award for staying in control of your faculties while under the influence of damson gin.

Chapter 7: Loose Nuts

Candied citrus peel makes a good gift and although the traditional process is messy and time-consuming, there is a quick method, which I have used with some success. When candied, the pieces can be dipped in good dark chocolate for a tasty treat.

The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in Recipes

‘Oh, my husband was really selfish,’ I said to PC Perkins, when she came back again later that day for what she called ‘a little background detail’. This, oddly enough, seemed to consist of asking me what Tom had been like, but I expect she’d been on some kind of Dealing with the Victims of Bereavement course, or something.

I’d finished quick-candying the orange peel left from yesterday and today’s breakfast juice, and was just writing the recipe up for the latest Perseverance Chronicle, so even the sitting room, when I led the way into it, still smelled enticingly of citrus and hot sugar.

I seemed to be going through the motions of normal life, but most of the time my brain was entirely absent, so I must have been doing it on automatic pilot.

Jasper, who had phoned up the dig earlier to explain his absence, followed us in and loomed about protectively. After the previous night’s hair-down, damson-gin-fuelled wake with Annie, I had given up trying to hide things from him. I don’t think it worked in the first place.

‘Oh, really?’ she said encouragingly, seating herself on the armchair Tom had favoured for his telly watching. I made a mental note to do something about that giant blank screen, which was like having a dead eye in the room …

I shuddered and she eyed me speculatively.

‘You don’t make your husband sound terribly attractive, Mrs Pharamond!’

‘Actually, he could be very charming, and when I fell in love with him I thought the way he used to vanish for days without a word was endearingly absent-minded and eccentric. But really, he was just too wrapped up in himself to bother doing anything he didn’t want to, a bit like a cat.’

‘But you can still love a cat,’ Jasper pointed out. ‘Most cat owners seem to think their cats love them back, too.’

‘He did seem fond of me, in his way, until the last few years – and of you, too, Jasper, when you were small,’ I assured him, wiping a runny tear away. ‘Some men just aren’t good with children.’

‘I expect we’d have got on better if I’d surfed, or was interested in weird folk-rock music and stuff – fitted into his interests,’ Jasper agreed. ‘History and archaeology bored him.’

‘Yes, and he wasn’t even interested in food, was he, except from the eating it point of view?’

The police officer, who’d been listening in a sort of fascinated silence, now broke in, notebook at the ready. She seemed to have an agenda of her own. ‘Just a couple of questions, Mrs Pharamond – and I’m sure you have a few you would like to ask me.’

She gave me a reassuring smile, though it contained no warmth. Yesterday she’d seemed so kind and sympathetic, so maybe she could switch a façade on and off at will, like Tom. She also had coral-pink lipstick on her front teeth and it was so not her colour.

‘Perhaps your son – Jasper, isn’t it? – could make some tea,’ she suggested.

‘I think I’ll stay here,’ Jasper said thoughtfully, settling down on the sofa next to me.

‘Can you tell me what time your husband left here on the Wednesday? You said you last saw him then, didn’t you?’

‘I don’t know when he left, because I went for a walk in the late morning – a long walk in the woods – and when I got back my car had gone.’

‘Did he often borrow your car?’

‘No, practically never, because I usually made sure he couldn’t find the keys. His van had broken down, that’s why he took mine.’

‘So you were surprised to find your car gone?’

‘Yes, and annoyed when he didn’t come back in time for me to go and collect Jasper from the dig … or at all. I needed my car.’

‘He would probably have come back in good time if the accident hadn’t happened, Mum. His mobile was in the workshop and I expect he’d have taken it with him if he hadn’t just popped out for something,’ Jasper said. ‘Wonder where he was going. I checked it for messages, but he’d wiped them, so that was no help.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said dubiously. ‘He probably just forgot his phone.’

‘Where do you think he might have been going, Mrs Pharamond?’

‘I’ve no idea. But he told me earlier he had to finish a surfboard to deliver this weekend, so I was surprised when he didn’t come back.’

‘Finish a surfboard?’

‘He customised surfboards for a living. You know – spray-painted designs on them? He was a keen surfer, too …’ I stopped, having a sudden vision of Tom freewheeling into space off the quarry road and wondering if he found the sensation exhilarating? I wouldn’t put it past him, and of course he’d never expect anything he did, however dangerous, to actually kill him.

‘And you were here all evening?’

‘Yes. After I got back from the Mystery Play Committee meeting in the village hall I was experimenting with candyfloss, so I was pretty busy.’

She gave me a strange look but didn’t follow that one up. Instead she turned her attention to Jasper.

‘And you were at this archaeological site all that day?’

He nodded. ‘Occasionally I cycle there in the mornings, but Mum usually picks me up in the evening. The narrow roads round the site have become a bit of a rat run since everyone got satnav and she thinks I’ll get knocked off the bike,’ he said tolerantly. ‘When I got home she’d been making lemon candyfloss. Yummy.’

‘Right,’ she said, scribbling away. I nearly asked her if she would like me to whip her up some Cornish Mist, but I could see she had no sense of humour.

‘So, Mrs Pharamond, you must have been angry about your husband taking the car?’

‘I was, and even more so when he didn’t come back. But I knew if I didn’t turn up at the dig, Jasper would cycle back, he really didn’t mind.’

I was starting to feel strangely worried, despite knowing I had nothing on my conscience other than guilt for that profound moment of relief I’d felt on hearing that it was Tom who’d had the accident and not Jasper.

‘Jasper, perhaps tea would be a good idea? Or coffee. Would you mind?’

He gave me a look, but rose to a gangling six foot and, stooping under the low beam, went to the kitchen, though he left the door ajar. This is not a cottage where you can have private conversations … or indeed, private much of anything.

‘Can you tell me how the accident happened yet? I thought he must have had a seizure, perhaps, or a heart attack, even though he seemed a bit young for that? Or perhaps the brakes failed, or something?’

‘Actually, it looks as though one of the Citroën’s wheels came off.’ Her eyes were fixed on my face to gauge the full effect of this pronouncement.

‘A wheel came off? But would that have caused him to veer off the road?’

‘Not necessarily. It’s usually possible to drive on three wheels to a safe halt.’

A sudden, rather nasty, thought struck me. ‘Do you know which wheel came off?’

‘The front driver’s side.’ She looked at me intently again, and I realised I must’ve turned pale. ‘Why?’

‘I had a flat tyre … it must have been that same morning, so I changed the wheel for the spare and took it in to be mended. Jasper undid the last nut – it was stiff – but I changed the wheel and put the nuts on again,’ I said firmly. ‘Jasper had gone back into the house by then. And what’s more, it was absolutely fine on the drive to the dig and back!’

‘Mrs Pharamond, I’m not accusing you of anything!’

Wasn’t she? It began to sound amazingly like it!

‘Isn’t it just possible you didn’t tighten them up quite enough, so they slowly worked loose? Accidents do happen.’

‘You mean I might have accidentally killed my husband?’

Now I saw which way she was heading with this, I thanked God it was me who had tightened the nuts and not Jasper!

‘If they were a bit loose, then the tight bends of the quarry road could have completed the job,’ she said. ‘It’s a possibility. We haven’t found any of them yet.’

‘But I’m sure they were tight, because I used a wheel br—’ I stopped as Jasper came back in carrying a battered tin tray of mugs and an open carton of milk.

‘Yes, they were,’ he said, putting the tray down on the coffee table with a thump that slopped some coffee over the rims. ‘I could hear what you were saying from the kitchen and Mum put the wheel back on and tightened the nuts. And then when she went in to wash her hands, I tightened them up even more.’

We gazed at him, though presumably not with the same mixed feelings of affection and exasperation.

‘Oh, Jasper,’ I said, ‘I’m not being accused of anything except carelessness, so you really don’t have to try and protect me!’

‘I’m not, Mum, it’s quite true. I left you putting the wheel back on, but I checked it was tight enough later, when you weren’t about.’

I wondered how often he’d felt he needed to check up on me, and from my expression he deduced that he ought to add something. ‘It was fine – I thought it would be.’

‘Of course it was! Any idiot can change a wheel,’ I said indignantly.

PC Perkins had lost interest in the ins and outs of our dispute, and turned to Jasper, notebook at the ready. ‘So you are quite sure that the wheel was in a safe condition?’

‘Absolutely. And I often checked them and the tyre pressure since I passed my test, for the practice.’

‘So, how do you account for the same wheel coming off?’

‘I don’t – that’s your job, isn’t it? But we don’t know how long he’d been out, so he could have left the car standing about, and loosening the wheel nuts might have been someone’s idea of a joke.’ He shrugged. ‘Mum’s car was ancient, so who knows? Maybe the threads had gone or something, even?’

I stared at him, thinking that he certainly didn’t get his coolness and sang-froid from me or Tom – but, of course, my father was in the diplomatic service.

She closed her notebook with a snap. ‘Once the post-mortem has been completed, if everything is in order, an inquest will be opened and adjourned and an interim death certificate issued,’ she said briskly, by which I presumed she meant unless they found I’d been feeding him Cyanide Chutney for months. (Or Polly Darke’s poisonous tomatoes. Pity I hadn’t thought of that one!)

‘The funeral can then take place, and the inquest proper will open at a later date.’

‘Must there be another inquest?’

‘Yes, it’s standard procedure in cases of this kind.’

‘Which kind?’ I demanded, when I heard the kitchen door suddenly burst open and crash back against the wall, rattling all the china on the dresser. Then Polly Darke stumbled over the sitting-room threshold like a dishevelled, shrink-wrapped Bacchae, all billowing green chiffon sleeves, stick-thin legs and enormous boobs.

‘Well, stay me with flagons,’ I said, surprised (damson gin for preference), for even Polly wasn’t usually this avid to garner news.

Her slightly prominent eyes passed over the policewoman and fixed on me. ‘Is it true?’ she demanded thrillingly. ‘Is Tom really dead? They’re saying he had an accident – in your car!’

Presumably this was rhetorical, for with an anguished cry of, ‘Tom! Tom!’ she threw herself into the nearest chair and burst into hysterical sobs.

Jasper and I exchanged glances. Attention-seeking taken to extremes, combined with a raging desire to know what was happening was, I’m sure, our first thought.

‘This is Polly Darke, Officer,’ I explained resignedly. ‘She’s a novelist and lives near Mossrow.’

Polly looked up, her face like a drowned flower (a slightly withered pansy). ‘I can’t believe it. Only the night before last Tom was with me, and now he’s gone. Gone!’

‘Why was he with you?’ asked Jasper, puzzled. ‘I thought he’d finally finished those Celtic murals you asked him to do ages ago?’

‘Because he loved me!’ she exclaimed tragically and began to sob gustily again.

‘He was with you the night before last?’ I stared at her, my mind whirling faster than a tumble dryer. ‘Good heavens, don’t tell me that you, of all people, are Dark Heart? No, it can’t possibly be you!’

‘Yes it is! Why not?’ she demanded belligerently, straightening from her pose of utter despondency. ‘I could give him what he needed—’

‘Tie him up, tie him down?’ I suggested a bit numbly. You know, I’d never even considered her as a possible suspect, because to me she was a rather pathetic and ludicrous creature, though perhaps men might see her differently? But not young men, apparently, for Jasper looked even more incredulous than I was.

‘Dark Heart?’ he queried.

‘Yes, your father was having an affair with someone, but though I found a note in his pocket on the morning of the day he vanished, it was only signed “Dark Heart”, so I didn’t know who it was.’

‘You mean, Dad was having an affair with her?’

‘Evidently, but I certainly thought it would be someone younger.’

I’m quite sure Polly is much older than I am – well the other side of forty – even if she does try to hold back the years with every ancient and modern art at her disposal.

‘What do you mean?’ she demanded indignantly, glaring at me. ‘I’m only thirty-five!’

‘And the rest,’ Jasper said drily.

I’d entirely forgotten the policewoman was there until she interjected into the sudden lull in the proceedings, ‘So you knew your husband was having an affair, Mrs Pharamond?’

Her notebook was open again, I saw, pen poised.

I glanced uneasily at Jasper. ‘He … well, he had had lapses occasionally in the past, but they didn’t mean anything. Then I found out about a more serious affair about five years ago, when my son was ill – and I’m so sorry, Jasper: I didn’t want you to find out about your father’s affairs, especially like this.’

‘Oh, I knew all about the women, Mum,’ he said calmly. ‘I even caught him at it with that girl out of the Mummers once, when I walked in on them in the workshop.’

‘You did?’

‘That’s a lie!’ Polly yelled furiously, but Jasper just glanced coolly at her, one eyebrow raised, as though she were a failed soufflé. He looked terribly like Nick. I don’t think Polly is any kind of soufflé, though, more of a synthetic Black Forest gateau with poisonous cherries.

‘So you were not on good terms with your husband,’ the policewoman suggested to me, ‘although he’d had affairs in the past to which you hadn’t objected?’

‘Of course I objected!’ I exclaimed. ‘What do you take me for? And they were usually more in the nature of one-night stands than anything serious. For a long time I used to believe him when he said he loved me and they meant nothing.’

‘Yes, but that was the old Dad, not the nastier model we’ve had to live with lately,’ Jasper pointed out. ‘Even I’ve overheard him, taunting you about some woman he’s been seeing – and he’s not coming across as a very admirable-sounding character, is he?’

The police officer said patiently, ‘So this time he was having a serious affair, Mrs Pharamond? He would have left you?’

‘No, it had to be the other way round, because this cottage belongs to his great-uncle by marriage, Roly Pharamond. So I intended leaving, once Jasper was at university and I’d found new homes for the livestock and sorted out somewhere to go, some sort of job …’ I trailed off.

‘That’s so not true! I heard you arguing in his workshop that very morning and when I questioned him about it later, he told me he’d asked you to leave and you’d refused!’ Polly cried. ‘He was afraid Roly Pharamond would take your side and he’d lose the cottage and everything he’d worked for.’

‘Obviously you didn’t hear much, Polly!’ I said, surprised. ‘What I actually told him was that I’d had enough and was going to leave him as soon as I could. And if anyone worked around here and stood to lose everything, it was me!’ I added incautiously, and the policewoman’s pen skidded quickly across the page.

‘Well, at least you don’t have to do that now, Mum,’ Jasper remarked, and a small silence ensued.

I sighed. ‘We might still have to move, Jasper. It depends on Uncle Roly.’

‘Unks won’t put you out, Ma. He’s really fond of you.’

‘So,’ said the officer to Polly, ‘you overheard an argument, and what then?’

‘She came out,’ Polly said, with a venomous look at me. ‘So I said I’d brought her some field mushrooms to exchange for eggs, and she said, “Help yourself, I’m going for a walk.” She was really odd – she looked furious. When she’d gone I spoke to Tom briefly and he said he’d come over later, after he’d finished the board he was painting – which he did. And that’s the last time I saw him, because when I woke up early next morning he’d gone. He parks around the back of the house, out of sight, so I’d no idea he hadn’t come in his own van,’ she added. ‘I just assumed he had.’

‘No, it was still at the garage,’ I told her. ‘But if he hadn’t taken my car, when he knew very well I wanted it later, it might have been me and Jasper who had the accident.’

‘It should have been you!’ she said venomously. Her reddened eyes and sharp nose made her look like a particularly unsavoury rodent.

Jasper stood up slowly and said in a tone of menace I’d never heard from him before, ‘I think you’ve said – and done – quite enough. Why don’t you clear off?’

She floundered hastily and inelegantly out of the chair and backed towards the door. PC Perkins jumped up and stood between them.

‘If I could have your name and address, Ms Darke? I’ll follow you over and ask you a few more questions in your own home, if I may?’ She turned to me with a thin smile: ‘Thank you for your assistance, Mrs Pharamond.’

I had a horrible feeling she suspected me of loosening the wheelnuts on purpose, then leaving the keys out where Tom was sure to find them. And goodness knew what Polly would tell her!

‘Jasper,’ I said when they’d gone, ‘you were wonderful!’

‘Don’t worry, Mum, that cop may have a suspicious mind, but we know there’s nothing to find, so they can’t pin anything on you.’

‘Thank you, darling,’ I said weakly, then had a thought. ‘I wonder if Tom had anything to eat at Polly’s? Only if he had an attack of food poisoning, that might account for why he lost control of the car when the wheel came off.’

‘I don’t think he went there to eat, Mum,’ Jasper said, before vanishing back up to his Batcave.

In the kitchen I discovered that half the candied peel had vanished, presumably eaten by Jasper while waiting for the kettle to boil, but then, it’s very moreish. But it didn’t matter, I was only going to dip it in dark chocolate as a treat for later.

Meanwhile, there was a whole row of bolting lettuces (I’d planted too many, as usual) to toss to the hens, and fruit to pick: a fresh strawberry Pavlova would be wonderfully comforting.

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