Wedding Tiers

Chapter Two Sweet Music

My wedding cake business, creating personalised fantasies in fondant icing, has really taken off recently. They are based on a rich, dark, organic fruitcake covered with natural marzipan, though there is nothing healthy or wholesome about the icing outer layer! Last week, as I finished off a cake in the shape of a magicians top hat, complete with emerging bride and bridegroom rabbits, it occurred to me that this dichotomy neatly sums up the life we lead—eighty per cent healthy and wholesome, and twenty per cent the enjoyable but unnecessary icing on the cake.

‘Cakes and Ale’

The next morning found me putting the finishing touches to a violin-shaped wedding cake, and although I absolutely adore creating something new, this one had really tried my skills to the limit!

For a start, I couldn’t think how to put the arch in the neck, until I hit on the idea of building it in wedges of cake like a bridge, propped up underneath until the keystone piece was inserted to hold it all together.

Now it was neatly encased in white icing, polished smooth with powdered sugar, and with the name of the happy couple and ‘IF MUSIC BE THE FOOD OF LOVE, PLAY ON’ lettered around the edge, subtly highlighted in edible silver.

The strings had also taxed my brain, until I thought of pulling white toffee into long strands, then laying them out to harden on greaseproof paper, before attaching them. I was just completing the last of some spares, in case of mishaps, when the front door suddenly flew open, letting in a brisk breeze, which blew it into a bow.

Three Chanel suitcases in descending sizes thudded onto the mat one after the other, closely followed by the petite but elegant figure of Elizabeth Cazzini, alias Libby Martin, my oldest friend.

I was not really surprised to see her because Libby usually comes and goes as she pleases, without warning, but I yelled, ‘Close the door!’ as the rest of the hardened toffee strings showed signs of rolling off the counter.

‘OK, there’s no need to shout!’ She shut the door and then regarded me with astonishment while I played a losing game of cat’s cradle with the last toffee strand before it hardened.

‘Oh, well,’ I said resignedly, putting it to one side. ‘I already have several spares.’

‘What on earth are you doing?’

‘Putting strings on this violin cake.’ I gave her a quick kiss, at arm’s length because of my sticky apron, and said, ‘Look, just let me fix them into place with sugar paste, and then the really difficult bit’s done and I can relax and have a break. Put the kettle on.’

‘OK,’ she agreed.

With a bit of concentration I managed to attach the strings, then turned to find she’d made two mugs of strong, steaming tea and was rummaging in the biscuit tin. She came up with a pecan puff. ‘How many calories in these?’

‘I’ve no idea. But what are you doing here, Libby, and where did you spring from? I wasn’t expecting you, was I? I only emailed you yesterday and I thought you might still be in Pisa.’

‘I was. And you should have been expecting me, after telling me Blessings was for sale! But I can see if the Griffin has a room free, if you can’t put me up? And unless you’ve done something radical to that Spartan bathroom, it would be much more comfortable anyway,’ she added frankly.

‘Of course you can stay,’ I said, ignoring this slur on my house, which I admit was shabby and comfortable and not terribly modernised. In fact, apart from installing a wood-burning stove in the living room for heating, it wasn’t much different from when it was Granny’s, right down to some ancient and nameless precursor to an Aga in the kitchen inglenook. ‘I just wish you’d let me know. The spare bed isn’t made up and it’s covered in marrows.’

‘How very seasonal,’ she said, cutting the pecan puff in half and putting the rejected piece back in the tin. Libby is very easy to feed because she will eat anything, but only in tiny, doll’s-house portions, which is probably how she retains her figure. ‘But it’s OK, Josie, I’m going out shortly to look over Blessings—I’ve got a viewing order—so you’ll have plenty of time to sort it out.’

I carefully carried the cake into the larder and came back, removing the headscarf I’d covered my hair up with and the enormous flowered wrap-around pinafore. Freed from the possibility of getting her rather glorious suit stained with foodstuffs, Libby got up and gave me a proper, warm hug that belied her crisp and cool manner, but then I know the real Libby under that sophisticated (and sometimes sarcastic) shell.

‘Seriously, Libs, you actually got the first flight back in order to view Blessings?’ I asked incredulously, returning the hug. ‘Not that it isn’t good to see you,’ I added hastily.

She sat down opposite me at the big, scrubbed pine table, her forget-me-not-blue eyes open wide. ‘Of course! I told you that one day I would like to live there, you said so yourself.

‘Yes, when we were fifteen, and Tim Rowland-Knowles’s father let the school take our class round the house, as part of a history lesson, Libby!’

‘I remember—the teacher took our class photo in the garden afterwards and I had a Princess Diana haircut while you were a New Romantic. I’m not sure which one of us looked worse.’ She shuddered at the memory, but since she looked very pretty in the photo (which I still have) it must have been the thought of my outfit that did it.

‘Even then, I didn’t think you meant you intended living in that particular house, Libs, just one like it.’

‘Yes, but that was because I never thought that it would come on the market. It was my ideal. And, if I recall, you once said you were going to be a gardener, marry Ben, have two children and live in the country—but just because you never did any of that, it doesn’t mean that I can’t fulfil my dream, does it? As soon as I got your email I contacted the estate agent and then got on the next plane.’

‘I am a gardener, Ben and I don’t need to get married to prove our love for each other, and Neatslake is surrounded by countryside,’ I said defensively. I didn’t mention the children, which, as she knows, just never came along…

Libby, not the most sensitive of flowers, took a minute or two to evaluate what she’d just said, and then apologised. ‘Sorry, Josie. I take it Ben is still refusing to have any investigations done to see why there are no bambini? That man has a stubborn streak a mile wide!’

I nodded guiltily, because I’m sure Ben would have been horrified to discover that I discussed our private affairs with anyone else. He’d always been a bit jealous of my close friendship with Libs and he tended to say things about her sometimes that made me think that, despite having several weird arty friends from the wrong side of the tracks himself, some of his parents’ snobbery must have rubbed off on him. That had certainly never stopped him accepting her invitations to holiday at her flat in Pisa, or to take us out to dinner at the flagship Cazzini restaurant near Piccadilly, the first one that Joe ever opened.

‘But it isn’t just stubbornness,’ I explained, ‘it’s because he’s seen how traumatic the whole IVF cycle thing has been for Mary and Russell, and he doesn’t want to put me through that. Anyway, we have each other. That’s enough.’

‘Yes, I can imagine him saying so,’ she commented drily, ‘just like when you moved down to London to live with him when he was doing his MA at the Royal College of Art, and he suddenly started saying neither of you need the outdated trappings of marriage to show your commitment.’

‘Yes, that was a bit odd, when we’d talked of marrying before. We did row about it, because Granny had old-fashioned ideas about things and it would have meant so much to her if we had got married, but he wouldn’t change his mind. But then, he does suddenly get ideas in his head and simply won’t change them, no matter what—he always has done. I don’t see why he won’t agree to a few simple tests, though. I mean, it would be good to at least know which of us has the problem, wouldn’t it?’

‘Sometimes there is no problem,’ Libby said. ‘It just doesn’t happen. But I agree you ought to explore all the avenues before you give up on the idea.’ She changed the subject. ‘What have you done to the kitchen? It seems to have a split personality. The left-hand wall has gone all high tech, chrome and utility. And isn’t that a second fridge and sink?’

‘I suppose it does look a bit strange,’ I agreed, seeing it suddenly with her eyes. Most of it was just as it always had been, with jars of wine bubbling round the old stove, herbs, lavender and strings of onions and dried apple rings hanging from the wooden rack over the kitchen table, bright gingham curtains and braided rug, and crocks and pots of earthenware everywhere. But one wall had been transformed into an ultra-modern and terribly antiseptic kitchen workstation.

‘It’s Health and Safety. Even little home cake businesses like mine need to be checked over and meet standards. There are all sorts of rules and regulations! It’s not like the days when I knocked out a few cakes and some jam on the kitchen table and sold them at the WI Markets,’ I said regretfully. ‘Once things took off, it seemed easier to convert part of the kitchen to a sort of production line.’

‘So, the bride cake business is booming?’

I nodded. ‘It really took off last year when I was asked to design a cake for the Pharamond wedding, over at Middlemoss, and there was loads of publicity. It was a bit of a challenge, what with him being a well-known chef and cookery writer and Lizzie a keen cook too. They could easily have made their own, except they couldn’t agree which of them was going to do it.’

‘Didn’t she write those Perseverance Cottage Chronicles that you used to love reading, all grow-your-own and recipes?’

‘Yes, she still does. It was her books that really inspired me and Ben to try and live as self-sufficiently as possible. The cake was quite easy, three tiers in the form of apple pies.’

‘Weird. Why apple pies?’

‘I don’t know, except that she and her husband had some long-running feud about who made the best one. The cake featured in the wedding pictures in Lancashire Life, and so did the one I did earlier this year, when Sophy Winter over at Sticklepond married her gardener. That was trickier—one big square cake with knot gardens in the corners, and a circular maze in the middle, with a bust of Shakespeare at the centre. I told you all about the discovery of a link between the family and the Bard, didn’t I? Secret documents in a hidden compartment seeming to infer that the Winters were descended from Shakespeare? It was all a bit Da Vinci code!’

‘I could hardly have missed the story! But it seems very unlikely to me and it’s still not proven, is it?’

‘No, I expect they’ll be arguing about it for years, but Sophy has built a whole business out of it. They get loads of visitors to the house and garden now.’

‘You know her?’

‘Yes, we got friendly while working out the design for the cake. She’s really nice, and so is her daughter, Lucy. Which reminds me, how is my lovely goddaughter these days? And where is she?’

Pia, christened Philippa, is Libby’s daughter by her brief first marriage. Her second husband, Joe Cazzini, adopted the infant and doted on her, despite already having grown-up children and grandchildren of his own, but her relationship with Libby became increasingly stormy once she hit the terrible teens. Libby tended to be a bit strict with her and I expect having a young-looking, beautiful and glamorous mother around becomes a liability rather than an asset at a certain age. You could hardly have called Gloria Martin a good role model for acquiring parenting skills, either, but Libby did her best.

‘God knows where she is,’ she said gloomily now. ‘I text her all the time, but if I get a reply, it’s just something like, “AM OK”, which she would say anyway, whether she was or not. I thought you might know—she tells you things she doesn’t tell me, sometimes.’

‘No, I haven’t had an email for a few weeks now…and I have a feeling then that she said she was somewhere in the Caribbean, on an island.’

‘The Caribbean is all islands.’

‘No, I meant a little island, belonging to someone.’

‘Possibly. Once she came into her trust fund at eighteen and I lost all control over her, she could be anywhere. Joe must have been mad, doing that!’

‘Well, remember what we were like at that age? We thought we knew it all! You finished your art foundation year and blagged your way onto a fashion course in London, and I horrified poor Granny by often staying overnight with Ben in his Liverpool digs, when he was doing his fine art degree.’

‘Yes, but the rest of the time you were living sensibly at home, working in a nursery garden and studying for your horticulture qualifications on day release,’ she pointed out. And I was entirely focused on my future and getting to where I wanted to be. Pia’s quite different—she goes around with a group of complete wasters who seem to have no ambitions at all, other than to have a good time, though she keeps saying she’s going to go to college eventually.’

‘Well, you did and then you barely lasted a term before you got married.’

‘Becoming a student was just a means to an end, to get me to London, and then you have to strike while the iron’s hot,’ she said, then looked into her mug and reached for the blue and white striped teapot under its knitted hen cosy (one of Pansy Grace’s making, in black-speckled white yarn—it looked just like Aggie).

‘Phillip was such a sweetie, wasn’t he?’ I said. ‘Once I met him, I knew you were really in love with him. It wasn’t just his wealth!’

‘Of course not,’ Libby said indignantly and I grinned, remembering how I’d asked her when she first knew she was truly in love with Phillip and she’d quoted that bit in her favourite book, Pride and Prejudice (which has always been her blueprint for perfection), where Lizzy tells Jane she first knew she loved Darcy when she saw his beautiful grounds at Pemberley!

‘I loved Phillip, and I was devastated when he died within a year. And then Joe came along and I fell in love all over again.’ She sighed sadly. ‘You know,’ she confided, ‘the trouble with marrying wealthy elderly men is that they’ve always already signed over their business interests to the offspring of their first marriage, who are usually old enough to be your parents, if not grandparents, and have their own families. So although they’ve left themselves plenty to live on, there’s never an enormous legacy for the second wife. Neither Phillip nor Joe left me a huge inheritance, but Joe arranged Pia’s trust fund with the rest of the family when he formally adopted her—they always considered her one of the Cazzinis, even though she was no more related to them than I was. She’s dark like Phillip, though, so she looks like one.’

‘Oh, come off it with the poverty-stricken bit. You’re loaded!’

‘Comfortable, not mega-rich,’ she insisted, though she always seems to me to be fabulously wealthy and able to do anything she wants. ‘If I buy Blessings, I might have to sell the flat in Pisa.’

‘Or the London house?’

‘Tricky. Pia mainly uses that as her home base when she does deign to grace me with her presence. And that’s good, because when she’s in London, she gets taken over by the Cazzini uncles and aunts and cousins, especially Joe’s youngest sister, Maria, and they might manage to knock some sense into her head eventually. She’s more likely to listen to them than to me. The relations in Pisa are a bit too distant to have much clout. Anyway, I like having a base in London.’

She got up. ‘I’ll just go and tidy up a bit and do my face, then I’m off.’

‘You aren’t letting the grass grow under your feet!’

‘I can’t afford to. The estate agent said there’d been lots of interest in Blessings already, almost all from the actors in that Cotton Common soap series that they shoot in Manchester.’

‘I suppose there might have been. They’ve been moving into the area, especially round the Mosses, in the last few years.’

‘Well, they’re not moving into Neatslake,’ she said firmly. ‘Oh, and is Ben home? I forgot to ask,’ she added as an afterthought.

She and Ben had a fairly spiky relationship and I thought he was a little jealous of her. But it wasn’t like we didn’t both have other friends too, though come to think of it, they were mostly couples, like Mark and Stella who keep the goats, or Russell and Mary. Libby—after Ben, of course—was my best friend…

‘He went to London yesterday.’ I looked at the clock. ‘He usually gives me a ring about this time, if he can.’

‘I hope you gave him a clean hankie and told him not to speak to strange women before he left,’ she said tartly, before vanishing into the bathroom, which was inconveniently located downstairs, off the living room. As the door closed behind her I heard her exclaim, ‘Bizarre!’

I expect she was impressed by my cherished collection of knitted French poodle toilet roll covers. Whenever the Graces seem to be running short of Acorns, I ask for a new one and Pansy obliges, with whatever wool comes to hand. The last one was in glitzy speckled silver yarn.

The post, including a plastic-wrapped copy of Country at Heart magazine with the article about me in it, arrived immediately after Libby had left for her viewing. I almost phoned her mobile to tell her about it, but then thought it would wait.

The pictures were rather nice—one of me wearing a big floppy straw hat, digging in the garden, with Aggie waiting for worms, and Ben in his studio painting one of his three-dimensional creations. There was also a lovely one of Harry sitting in a deck chair under the plum tree, Mac curled at his feet, and a couple of smaller shots of me in the kitchen and the wedding cake I had been making (a fairy cake—lots of fairies).

Then I read the article, and really, I don’t remember saying most of the things it said I had! How odd. It all looked and sounded terribly idyllic, though.

Chapter Three Blessings

I’m making a diamond wedding anniversary cake—a stacked two-tier one, with the names of the happy couple around the top tier and ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ around the bottom one. There will be a pink and blue harlequin diamond pattern all over it too, and some of the original favours from their wedding cake—white doves and horseshoes, mostly. I’d already baked the cake, so today I covered it with marzipan.

After that, I started off some carrot wine and then, being in that kind of groove, made two carrot cakes which I decorated with little carrots made from the scraps of marzipan left over from the cake, coloured orange and green with natural food colour.

‘Cakes and Ale’

After puzzling over some of the inane, if not downright daft, things I was supposed to have said about self-sufficiency and nature’s wonderful bounty, I put the magazine to one side and retrieved the Violin cake from the larder, looking at it with considerable pride.

The strings were firm and hard, and it was lucky it was an autumn wedding, because with a bit of luck it would be cool at the reception and they wouldn’t sag. I threaded a bunch of white and palest pink silk ribbons around the neck carefully, like adorning a medieval troubadour’s lute, then covered it and replaced it in the cold larder, ready to deliver tomorrow.

Then I went upstairs to move the vegetables from the spare bed and make it up, though it seemed a lot of bother when Libby probably wouldn’t stay more than one night. It was pretty chilly in there, but would soon warm up once the door was left open and the heat from the stove wafted up the stairs.

As I shook out lavender-scented sheets and pillowcases, I thought how horrified Libby would be when she saw the way Blessings had deteriorated. Her recollections, like mine, would be of how it was once, the snowy interior walls of the Elizabethan part of the house studded with plaster emblems and the garden neatly laid out, all lawns, roses and specimen trees.

But Harry had said it was all sadly changed now…and, come to that, I’d forgotten to remind Libby of Dorrie Spottiswode’s existence, though I expect she would find that out soon enough. Dorrie and I had become friends over the last few years, but I didn’t think Libby had ever met her.

I wondered what she would make of Tim, for she probably only remembered him as the languid fair youth of so long ago. He’s a solicitor in Ormskirk, and I expect he has some private income, though obviously it’s not enough to restore Blessings to its former glory.

Tim was in the pub one evening recently when Ben and I were meeting our elderly hippie friends, Mark and Stella (who unfortunately seem to take the smell of goat with them everywhere, though you get used to it after a bit).

I asked him if he remembered playing tennis with me and Libby when we were teenagers and he said he did—but he was just being polite; I could see he didn’t really. But that was hardly surprising, because we were two awkward, immature schoolgirls and he was almost grown up. He seemed very nice, though he has a permanently anxious look in his blue eyes—an eager-to-please expression—and that shock of white-blond hair makes him look a bit startled. He has a nervous habit of constantly trying to smooth it down, though regular haircuts would be a more practical idea.

But anyway, I was right about the eager-to-please bit, because he certainly seemed to have pleased Libby I’d just started to wonder how many hours it took to show somebody round a house, even a substantial Elizabethan town house, when she phoned to say Tim had invited her out to dinner and she didn’t know what time she would be getting back!

If I hadn’t been so surprised I would have told her to call in for the front door key on her way, but by the time it occurred to me and I phoned back, she had switched her mobile off.