Wedding Tiers

‘Don’t chicken out on me before we start,’ Libby said. ‘What about you, what do you want?’

‘I don’t know, really. My parents thought I ought to…’ She suddenly trailed off, her voice trembling.

‘Look, don’t go all wobbly on me!’ warned Libby, and to her surprise Josie saw that her new friend had tears in her large blue eyes. ‘If you start crying, then I will too, and then everyone will know I’m as soft as butter and I’ll be done for. I’m only cool to know because they think I’m hard as nails.’

Josie sniffed back the tears. ‘Sorry. My—my parents wanted me to go to university, but I don’t know…Now I just feel I’d like to stay in Neatslake for ever and help Granny with the gardening and Uncle Harry with the hens. Granny’s teaching me how to bake and make jam and stuff too.’

‘You can’t make a career out of any of that.’

‘Yes I could. I could be a gardener, and I think I’d like that.’ She caught sight of Ben Richards in the distance, in the middle of a group of boys. He was taller than the rest so he was easy to spot.

Libby saw where she was looking. ‘Ben’s fourteen, in the next year up from us, and he’s very popular. His parents wanted to send him to some public school but he decided he’d rather come here with his friends and he’s very stubborn. He’s brilliant at art—he’s done his O level already—but he’s totally thick about everything else.’

‘I’m sure he isn’t!’

‘He’s good at football,’ she conceded. ‘I’m not sure how clever you have to be for that, but it makes him popular with the boys too.’

They watched him in the distance and then Josie sighed and said, ‘I don’t suppose he’ll ever notice me again. I suppose it was just because he practically fell over me and I was a new face.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Libby said, looking at her thoughtfully, then added immodestly, ‘You’re not pretty like me, but sort of attractive in a different way. I’ve never met anyone else with hair that really dark red—or eyes that bluey-greyish-lilac sort of colour.’

‘Thanks, but I’m not sure I want to be different.’ Her eyes returned to Ben, now playing football with a group of other boys. She was also tall for her age…

‘Ben asked me out once, but I had to turn him down,’ Libby said.

Josie turned and stared at her new friend, feeling a pang of jealousy. ‘Not part of the big plan?’

‘No way.’ She shook her head. ‘And I think he only asked me because his friends dared him to. They probably told him I was easy, like Mum. Anyway, I don’t want to get tangled up with some village boy; I have to concentrate on the bigger picture. I’m saving myself for Mr Right. Mr Rich and Right,’ she added, then giggled. ‘It might have been worth going out with Ben, though, just to see his parents’ faces! They’re so snobby and stuck up, especially his mother, they’d have had fits.’

‘Oh? What does she do?’

Absolutely nothing, but Ben’s father’s a hospital consultant and they live up a lane the other side of Church Green, in a converted farmhouse. Ben’s already got his own studio in one of the outbuildings, because his mother doesn’t like mess in the house.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘One of his friends told me.’

‘Granny’s house is on the Green,’ Josie said. ‘That pair of cottages by the really old black and white building. My uncle Harry lives next door to us, but he’s not really an uncle, he just married Granny’s cousin.’

‘The old house is Blessings,’ Libby nodded. ‘It’s Elizabethan.’

‘Granny says she used to go there to clean, years ago.’

‘In that case, don’t get ideas about Ben Richards. His parents would probably think a granny who was a cleaner was only one step above a slutty mother.’

‘I don’t see why,’ Josie said defensively. ‘Anyway, she was a nurse during the war, but it damaged her back so she took up cleaning afterwards—just light stuff. She still gets a bad back sometimes, but that’s probably just because she’s really, really old. My mother was a nurse too, and my dad was a policeman. We lived in a police house in St Albans.’

‘Well, don’t start crying again, or you’ll set me off,’ Libby said briskly.

Josie gave a watery smile. She’d got the measure by now of Libby’s kind heart under her sometimes brusque exterior, and her friend’s lovely blue eyes were, indeed, brimming again with sympathetic tears.

‘A dad who was a policeman is at least a couple of rungs up from not knowing who your father is—and my sister, Daisy, doesn’t know either, except that we have different ones,’ Libby pointed out. ‘Maybe it’s better not to know.’

Libby left the bus before her new friend, at the other end of Neatslake, but Ben Richards and a couple of other boys got off when Josie did, suddenly swinging down the spiral stairs from the upper deck as the bus stopped, and jumping off first.

She didn’t think he’d noticed her, but as she turned the corner towards Church Green, he fell into step beside her as if he’d been waiting for her. Which he had.

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Of course you are.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, of course you can.’