Dorrie jerked her head at me. Old Harry Huttons her uncle and shes a friend of the Grace sisters. Go there for bridge sometimes. Violets useless, but Pansy and Lily arent bad.
Tim began to open a bottle of champagne that they had ready in an ice bucket. Josie and Ben brought us some of their elder-flower champagne, Aunt Dorrie, and this isnt going to be half as nicewe should have saved you some.
I dont want either of them. I dont like anything sparkling; the bubbles go right up my nose. She seated herself in an upright armchair covered in tapestry birds and roses. Ill have a nice glass of sherry.
Ben and Josie tell me they make a lot of wine and beer themselves. They grow most of their own fruit and vegetables too, and keep hens, Tim said, and Dorrie and I exchanged slightly guilty glances, thinking about all the apples and pears wed had from the old Blessings orchard.
Id love to do that, he continued. Maybe I could even keep ducks too, since we have the lily pond. Or whats left of the lily pond. Its very overgrown.
I couldnt keep everything up practically single-handed, Dorrie said gruffly. Moorcrofts past doing anything now except mow the grass very slowly, and by the time hes finished he has to start again. Needs pensioning off.
No indeed, Aunt Dorrie, youve worked wonders, Tim said quickly. Without you, it would be a wilderness.
Its not far off now, though Ive kept a firm hand with the roses.
And you dont need more poultry, Tim, youve got peacocks, Libby pointed out.
Yes, but theyre only ornamental, darling. You cant eat them.
I think people used to, I chipped in, but I wouldnt have thought there was a lot of meat on one. I wouldnt have minded giving it a goI hated the mournful scream they made. I always had.
Theyre stupid creatures, Dorrie said. We had two females once, but they wouldnt roost in the trees out of reach of the foxes. Rare instance of the female being stupider than the male, ha-ha.
Dorrie was a bit of a feminist at heart, but then, after her fiancé was killed in the last war she had parachuted into France to help the Resistance movement as a wireless operator, so she was entirely fearless and self-reliant, and knew she could do anything a mere man could do, only a lot better.
Ducks should be all right, though, she said thoughtfully. They can nest on the little island in the middle of the lily pond. And if you want to grow your own produce, we could make a vegetable patch at the end of the old orchard, if you like, and put in soft fruit bushes too.
And we could trade things, Ben suggested, forgetting that we already did, unknown to Tim and Libby We have a huge plum tree in Harrys garden but no apples or pears; there isnt room.
But we get loads of quinces because they grow all along both sides of the fence between the two gardens, I put in hastily.
I like a bit of quince jelly with my salad meats, Dorrie said.
Is it nice? asked Libby.
Yes, Ill give you a jar, Libs. Ive made loads of it this year, and Im still making quince wine.
Dorrie said hopefully, Some of the woodworks rotten on the big greenhouse, Tim, but if you had it repaired, we could grow tender fruit in there. The old vine still produces grapes, but Im always afraid the roof is going to collapse in on me when I go to pick them. And I have to beat Moorcroft to it, because he loves them. But its more than time he retired anyway, he says so himself when his lumbago is bad.
It would save money, agreed Tim, and I suspect Ill do more 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 Tims stepmother and the way shed spitefully let Blessings decay, but our cleaning efforts and Libbys organisational skills impressed her.
Youre a born housewife, my dearjust 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. Im 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 Im 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 dont 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 its 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 whitewashforgotten what they said it was.
Limewash? I suggested.
Maybewhatever.
You dont let the grass grow under your feet, my dear, Dorrie said. Like a breath of fresh air to Blessings, you are!
Im doing my best, though of course most of it will take a long time to put rightand a lot more money than I thought at first, especially to have the roof properly repaired instead of just patched. Weve 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 doesnt get terribly hot.
Thats probably just as well, I said, because too much heat suddenly turned on wouldnt 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 Tims father died, the family always lived in the old part, and thats 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, youll 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, thats true, Libby agreed. Waste not, want notthough wed probably have to get someone to saw them up, because I dont think Id trust Tim with a chain saw. Hes 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 Im 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. Tims stepmother had the chauffeurs flat over the garage renovated for that Portuguese couple she employed and Im 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 Tims fathers old nanny was the last resident and she passed away several years ago.
Yes, I had a quick look round it, but Im putting off cleaning that out until later, Libby said. The sanitary arrangements are extremely rudimentary and its tiny, but I thought perhaps if its 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 Im still pickling and chutney making. Ive 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 didnt 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 wasnt right, but I couldnt 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 werent enough for Ben and couldnt 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. Id always considered him a brilliant artist and I still did, even though what had been emerging more recently was much darker and (though I hadnt, 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 didnt 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 Libbys 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 rabbitslovely, though very expensive.
Dorrie brought her friend Miss Hebe Winter (who is my friend Sophys great-aunt), to look around one day while we were working. The room we were in was a bit gloomy and for a minute we thought we were seeing ghosts, because they walked in wearing Elizabethan dress. Miss Winter, who is tall, grand and aquiline of nose, is a dead ringer for the Virgin Queen, and even Dorrie was transformed by a wide ruff and full skirts, despite having kept her beret on.
It turned out theyd been to a historical re-enactment society meeting in Sticklepond. Lots of the members help out as volunteers at Winters End in full costume, when its open to the public. They are very big on the Elizabethan over there, especially since the discovery of that Shakespeare document.
Miss Winter had come out of sheer curiosity to see Libby, I think, the plebeian marrying into the Rowland-Knowleses, and, like Dorrie, she found her not at all what she expected.
I left them having tea (it was lucky Id taken Libby an apple upside-down cake), passing Hebes little white Mini car on the drive. How does she get behind the wheel in a farthingale?
Moorcroft, the gardener, was very ready to take a golden handshake and retire, which would be much more economical in the long run than paying him to cut the grass and hide out in the garden shed, making endless cups of tea on a Primus stove.
Tim and Dorrie, full of plans and enthusiasm, began to try to get the grounds into some kind of order and create a fruit and vegetable patch. Tim came over a couple of times to ask my adviceor Bens, if he caught him out of the studio, which was pretty rare at the moment.
Tims passionate about gardening. Hes even more dotty about it than you are, Libby said one day, when we were taking a break from cleaning out what had once been the old kitchen, but was now a kind of storeroom. She straightened up with a groan; shes only about five foot two without her stilettos, so even standing on a stool shed found, reaching up with the feather duster, was quite a stretch.
I think he loves flowers and shrubs more than vegetables, Libs, like Dorrie.
Yes, but now youve infected him with the self-sufficiency bug hes determined to follow suit.
Well, thats OK, isnt it?
Yes, as long as he doesnt expect me to start digging and jamming and making piesthough when Ginas here I expect shell be quite happy to cook what he grows. It will save us money too, which will be a good thing, because I hadnt realised quite how high the cost of restoring and maintaining a place of this age would be. I know Im well off, but really, we need to find some way of increasing our income, unless I sell one or both of my other homes. But Tim loves Italy, so apart from our honeymoon being in Pisa, I hope were going to spend a lot of time thereand its handy having a pied-à-terre in London.
Yes, Ive been thinking about what you said, and Im starting to think thats what we could do with, though at least Ben hasnt been so eager to rush back to London this time. Hes very engrossed in his paintings.
Tim hates being a solicitor, so its a pity we cant find some way of making Blessings pay for itself. But its a bit too small to open to the public. We live in all of it and we cant just move into the modern wing three-quarters of the time, can we?
Perhaps you could open a little garden centre in the grounds?