Wedding Tiers. Trisha Ashley

at weekends than he manages full time.’

      We ate the Battenburg cake right down to the last crumb, and then Dorrie expressed an interest in seeing how Libby and I were doing with the great clean-up. We left Tim and Ben planning out the new vegetable garden.

      Dorrie enlivened our tour of the house with her freely expressed opinions of Tim’s stepmother and the way she’d spitefully let Blessings decay, but our cleaning efforts and Libby’s organisational skills impressed her.

      ‘You’re a born housewife, my dear—just what Blessings needs. And a strong character too, which is just what Tim needs.’

      ‘Oh, thank you,’ Libby said gratefully, turning slightly pink at this accolade. ‘I’m going to do my best to make him happy.’

      Like me, Libby has never had any great career ambitions: she hoped for love, security and safety, which she found through marriage. I suppose gardening and cooking are my passions, and I’m sorry if that sounds old-fashioned and sad, but there it is. And at least I do seem somehow to have made a successful and lucrative business out of the baking! In any case, it was always clear that Ben would be a brilliant artist, and I truly don’t think having more than one genius in the house would work terribly well.

      Libby was pointing out the evidence of fresh woodworm damage. ‘We have to move back into the modern wing tomorrow while the treatment is done. Luckily it’s only a minor outbreak and it turned out it was still under guarantee. When we can get back in, we need to finish brushing down the walls and ceilings and put the furniture in the middle of the rooms under dust-sheets, ready for a man to come and repaint the walls with a special, authentic whitewash—forgotten what they said it was.’

      ‘Limewash?’ I suggested.

      ‘Maybe…whatever.’

      ‘You don’t let the grass grow under your feet, my dear,’ Dorrie said. ‘Like a breath of fresh air to Blessings, you are!’

      ‘I’m doing my best, though of course most of it will take a long time to put right—and a lot more money than I thought at first, especially to have the roof properly repaired instead of just patched. We’ve started running the central heating in this part now too, which is going to be very expensive even though it is an ancient system that doesn’t get terribly hot.’

      ‘That’s probably just as well,’ I said, ‘because too much heat suddenly turned on wouldn’t be good for the place.’

      ‘No, but it needs to warm through and dry out before we move back into the main bedchamber from the modern wing, which Tim is determined to do as soon as possible.’

      ‘The new wing was mainly added for a modern kitchen and utility room, plus an extra bathroom and a couple of spare bedrooms upstairs,’ Dorrie said. ‘But until Tim’s father died, the family always lived in the old part, and that’s how it should be. Once you start lighting fires in the Great Chamber, it will carry the heat right through the rest of the house, you’ll see.’

      ‘That huge fireplace will take quite a lot of logs to fill,’ I said.

      ‘A few of the old trees in the grounds need to come down, or have already fallen down. They could be sawn up and stacked in one of the outbuildings,’ suggested Dorrie.

      ‘Yes, that’s true,’ Libby agreed. ‘Waste not, want not—though we’d probably have to get someone to saw them up, because I don’t think I’d trust Tim with a chain saw. He’s much too absent-minded.’

      ‘It would still be cheaper than buying wood, even so,’ Dorrie said. ‘Are you going to carry on doing all your own cleaning, or get someone in?’

      ‘Actually, since this is where I’m going to be spending most of my time, I think Gina, who looks after me in Pisa and is something of a Cazzini family retainer, could be persuaded to move here. Tim’s stepmother had the chauffeur’s flat over the garage renovated for that Portuguese couple she employed and I’m sure Gina would love to have her own little place.’

      ‘That sounds very suitable,’ approved Dorrie. ‘The gatehouse was formerly a dwelling too, you know, though it has not been lived in for some time. In fact, I think Tim’s father’s old nanny was the last resident and she passed away several years ago.’

      ‘Yes, I had a quick look round it, but I’m putting off cleaning that out until later,’ Libby said. ‘The sanitary arrangements are extremely rudimentary and it’s tiny, but I thought perhaps if it’s done up a bit, it could be let out as a holiday cottage and earn us some money. A romantic getaway for two.’

      ‘I can see you have it all in hand,’ Dorrie said. ‘Now, perhaps we had better see what those two young men have been discussing. And I am sure you and I,’ she added to me, ‘have much more idea of what is wanted, regarding vegetable plots, than they do!’

       Chapter Seven Gathering In

       By the end of October all was safely gathered in, as the old harvest hymn has it. Or almost all. My elderly neighbour helped me to make a beetroot clamp and then store away the last of the carrot crop in layers of sand, and I’m still pickling and chutney making. I’ve also dug over the pea and bean beds, set out Brussels sprout plants and divided clumps of chives.

       Throughout all this, the Artist could be seen in his studio, working on a new series of three-dimensional paintings. He had to be coaxed out from time to time to help with heavy jobs, like chopping logs into firewood and hefting sacks of henfood about; but I expect it did him good.

      ‘Cakes and Ale’

      Now Ben was home, life should have settled back into the cosy, comforting, uneventful round of cooking, dog-walking and gardening, but I found that I still felt vaguely uneasy.

      Of course, the even rhythm of our former existence was bound to change once Libby exploded onto the scene like a demonstration of chaos theory in miniature. But actually, that didn’t bother me in the least, for I was used to Libby and very happy that she was going to be living in Neatslake again. No, it was just a feeling that something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was…

      Ben, too, seemed even more abstracted than usual and had thrown himself into finishing his latest series of paintings. He tended to work on five or six simultaneously, and I never knew what to call them: paintings, installations, constructions, or just artworks. They all started as flat canvases, but then things began to burst out of them, because two dimensions simply weren’t enough for Ben and couldn’t contain his imagery, which dripped, oozed, sidled sideways or simply exploded into 3-D.

      His original inspiration came from our shared love of thrusting, exuberant and earthy nature, full of flowers, rampant foliage and small living creatures. I’d always considered him a brilliant artist and I still did, even though what had been emerging more recently was much darker and (though I hadn’t, of course, said so) rather nasty. I hoped it was just a temporary phase.

      As I worked in the garden I noticed that he was getting an awful lot of calls on his mobile, which seemed to make him cross, but then, if he didn’t want to be disturbed he should have switched it off!

      Once the woodworm treatment at Blessings was done, and the rooms aired, Libby and I returned to our dusting and cleaning, keeping one room ahead of the specialist painters. I was amazed at Libby’s stamina. I was only helping out for an hour or two in the afternoons because of all my cake-making and other commitments, but she seemed to be working dawn to dusk.

      When we took the old curtains down they pretty well fell to pieces, but she had surfed the internet and found a firm who sold medieval-style crewelwork curtains and fabric by the metre, all curly foliage, birds and rabbits—lovely, though very expensive.

      Dorrie brought her friend Miss Hebe Winter (who is my friend Sophy’s great-aunt), to look around one day while we were