Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues (43 page)
Then Justin, the last man on earth I felt like talking to, managed to catch me on the phone one afternoon just after the shop was shut, when Bella and I were having a sit-down and a cup of coffee. She didn’t have to dash off and fetch Tia for once, since she’d gone to tea with a friend.
‘Tansy?’ Justin said, ‘I’ve been trying to get you for ages, because I really wanted to apologise for the other evening. I wasn’t myself.’
‘Well, whoever you were, it wasn’t an improvement,’ I said. ‘Far from it. I accept your apology, but I’d prefer that you never contacted me again, Justin. Please, just let me go now.’
‘Come on, Tansy! I can’t remember much about that evening, but Marcia says I only went back to her flat in the early hours, so I wanted to know – I mean, I can’t remember whether we –’
‘There was no “we”,’ I interrupted, astonished. ‘You were drunk and aggressive and wouldn’t go away. In the end, I got Timmy and Joe over and they managed to get you in a taxi. And it was only about one in the morning, so Marcia was exaggerating.’
‘So … nothing happened?’ He sounded disappointed.
‘What, you really thought I might have leaped into bed with you?’ I exclaimed incredulously. ‘Of course nothing happened! Now, I think we’ve said everything we need to say and –’
‘But I love you, Tansy. I’ve even moved up here for you!’
‘No, you finally decided to move as far away from your mother as you could, and I was a handy excuse. And don’t keep telling me that you love me, because I’m not sure you ever did, you’re only obsessed with me now because I turned you down.’
‘I can see what’s happened,’ he snapped angrily, ‘and Marcia is right. You’d have come back to me like a shot if you hadn’t fallen for that actor next door, that’s what it is. But she says he’s not interested in you, he’s still grieving for his wife, so maybe it’s time you came to your senses and realised that we –’
‘Justin, not only am I never coming back to you, but I’m expecting another man’s baby!’ I yelled, entirely losing it. Then I slammed down the phone with a trembling hand.
I was sorry I’d blurted that out the moment it was said – and even more so when I turned round and saw Ivo framed in the doorway, his face deathly white.
Behind me I heard Bella put her cup down in its saucer with a small clink.
‘Is that true?’ Ivo demanded. ‘And – is it
mine
?’
‘Of course it’s yours, you prat,’ Bella said helpfully, getting up to go.
Ivo glared at me, ignoring her. ‘And you were going to tell me … when, exactly, Tansy? Or not at all?’ He suddenly paled. ‘You weren’t going to –’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Bella exclaimed impatiently. ‘Tansy’s over the moon about it and she was only waiting till she got safely past the three-month stage before she told you. She doesn’t know how you’re going to take it – and neither do I. Now, I’m off. Play nicely, children.’
She whisked the packet of manuscript he’d brought with him out of his hands as she went past him, but I’m sure he didn’t notice, for his merman-grey eyes were fixed on my face.
‘Are you really over the moon about it, Tansy?’ he enquired softly.
‘Of course I am! I
desperately
want this baby –
your
baby,’ I confessed. ‘But don’t worry, I know you don’t love me and I’m not expecting –’
Ivo took two quick steps and seized me in a rough embrace. ‘I do love you! Why on earth would you think I didn’t? I’ve been torturing myself thinking you’d never get over Justin.’
‘But I thought you still loved Kate, despite everything, and probably always would!’
‘Kate?’ he said incredulously. ‘No, I’d stopped loving her long before she was killed, but … well, I stayed fond of her and she needed me … or so I thought. And then I felt responsible for the accident and terribly guilty …’
‘I think you’ve paid any penance now, with interest,’ I said, nestling into his arms. ‘I didn’t want to fall in love with you, if her ghost would always be there with us.’
‘It won’t be. It’s more than time for both of us to put the past behind us and move on. And you’re so precious to me I don’t want ever to let you out of my sight again. Let’s get married!’
‘You’ve run mad!’ I said, then voiced my greatest fear. ‘This is a miracle baby but … I’m only just pregnant, and what if something happened and I lost it?’
‘Nothing will happen, you’ll see,’ he assured me, stroking my hair tenderly, so that a scatter of multicoloured butterfly clips pattered round our feet like rain. Then we kissed, one long, slow kiss leading to another …
This time, there was no disapproving voice in my head, just a sense of absolute bliss.
When we told Raffy we wanted to get married, he said, ‘“Consideration like an angel came, and whipp’d the offending Adam out of him,”’ then flashed a quizzical grin at Ivo, so he’d obviously caught the Shakespeare bug too. Or maybe he’d seen the occasion coming and mugged a quote up specially? I wouldn’t have put it past him.
He managed to squeeze us into a wedding slot in not much more time than it took to put up the banns, for as Ivo pointed out, if I didn’t have a white wedding, then Aunt Nan was going to be very disappointed.
Bella would be my bridesmaid and then I would be hers not long afterwards, for she and Neil have now fast-forwarded their engagement: they long to live together with Tia in the little cottage with the pigsty in the garden.
Of course, I had to ring Immy and tell her I was getting married, for however little it felt like it, she
was
my mother (though I’d decided to let sleeping dogs lie as regards Nan’s revelations). She said I’d done all right for myself, even if she thought I was mad turning Justin down.
She must have passed on the news, too, because Marcia had the gall to call me and tell me I was welcome to Ivo, because she and Justin were now engaged!
‘I’m at that age when a gal might as well settle for the best she can get,’ she explained.
‘But don’t you think it’s all a bit incestuous, what with him having been my fiancé and then having an affair with your sister?’
‘Not really. Why not keep him in the family?’ she said unrepentantly. ‘Daddy’s mad about it, but he’ll come round eventually when he sees how I keep Justin in line.’
‘“Oh what a tangled web!”’ Ivo exclaimed in astonishment when I told him, and then said he thought he could tie some of that plot in nicely with his latest novel and vanished back to work. Now he’s left the acting profession he’s really thrown himself into writing his books and is going to come out as Nicholas Marlowe, the author.
One hot, sunny, bee-drowsy afternoon when we were in the garden picking herbs, I offered to have ‘Here Comes the Bride’ permanently silenced. The back door was open, and we could
just
hear it, even from so far away!
‘There’s no need, I’ve got used to it – and when we knock the two cottages back into one, I’ll be part of the business too,’ Ivo said. ‘I’ve ordered the full church peal for our wedding, by the way: no half-measures. And I’ll see if I can get the organist to play you up the aisle with “The Wedding March”, rather than a fugue.’
‘Lovely!’ I said contentedly. ‘It’s just as well Toby and Flash are friends now too, isn’t it?’ I looked over at where they lay in the shade and thought that perhaps ‘friends’ was going a little too far, since Toby seemed to be using Flash as a kind of furry hammock.
‘I’d still quite like to have Cedric fitted with a silencer,’ Ivo admitted, as the hens came high-stepping cautiously through the arch in the holly hedge.
‘“Hence home, you idle creatures, get you home: is this a holiday?”’
he added.
I find it strangely sexy when he goes all Shakespearian …
‘Yes, go and lay a few eggs,’ I encouraged the hens, then slipped my arm through his and uttered a blissful sigh.
‘From now on, let’s just remember the happy hours, like the sundial in the courtyard says,’ I suggested.
‘
As You Like It
,’ he replied, with that irresistible smile – and kissed me.
Exclusive Recipes from Trisha Ashley
Recipe 1: Fat Rascals.
Fat Rascals are a Yorkshire delicacy somewhat akin to rock cakes and no-one can come close to those baked to a secret recipe by Betty’s Café in Harrogate. However, this is author Angela Dracup’s quick, easy and delicious version with one or two tweaks of my own.
Ingredients.
8oz/200g self-raising flour.
Pinch of salt.
A quarter teaspoon each of ground cinnamon, grated nutmeg and mixed spice.
3oz/75g margarine or butter
3oz/75g castor sugar
3oz/75g mixed dried fruit with peel.
2oz/50g currants
One large egg lightly beaten with two tablespoons of milk.
Method.
1) Preheat the oven to gas mark 6/200C/400F and cover an oven tray with baking paper.
2) Put the butter, flour, salt and spices into a large bowl and mix together using the rubbing-in method until it looks like very fine breadcrumbs.
3) Add the dried fruit and sugar and mix well.
4) Start to stir in the egg/milk mix a spoonful at a time until you have a stiff dough.
5) Divide into either two big rounds or four smaller ones and place on the baking tray. (You can decorate the top with glace cherries for eyes and slivered almonds for teeth to make smiley faces if the fancy takes you.)
6) Bake for fifteen to twenty minutes.
7) Best eaten warm, with butter!
Recipe 2: Microwave Meringues.
There are lots of recipes for these but they are all more or less the same – just sugar and egg white. Easy to whip up in minutes, you can then use them to base other dessert recipes on.
Ingredients
.
One large egg white.
12oz/300g icing sugar
Method.
1) Cover a microwaveable plate with baking paper.
2) Lightly beat the egg white in a large bowl and then sieve the sugar over it.
3) Stir well until you have a thick mixture a little like soft fondant icing. You may have to add a little more sugar or beaten egg whites to get this consistency, but if so, do it a tiny bit at a time.
4) Roll into 8 balls and microwave them on the paper-covered plate two at a time for about a minute – watch them swell up like magic!
5) Let them cool, then eat as they are or sandwich together with whipped cream.
Variations:
1) Break the meringue into pieces and mix with whipped cream and strawberries to make Eton Mess, the perfect summer dessert.
2) Make a Pavlova. Cover two plates with baking paper and form the mixture into two balls. Place one in the centre of each plate and microwave for about a minute, which should give you a large round disc of meringue. Do the same with the other.
Spread a layer of whipped cream on the bottom layer, sprinkle on strawberries or other fruit, cover with a little more cream and then put on the top circle of meringue.
Recipe 3: Fairy Cakes.
Who needs a big, heavy, greasy muffin when they can have a delicious little morsel like this? And don’t slather on an inch-thick layer of sugary ‘frosting’ until you have eaten one straight from the oven to remind yourself just how good home-baked cake can taste.
Ingredients.
You will need paper cake cases – you can get small ones for fairy cakes and even tinier, bite-size ones. If you haven’t got a cake or muffin tin, just stand them on a baking tray.
4oz/100g butter or margarine
4oz/100g castor sugar
4oz/100g self-raising flour
2 medium eggs
Half level teaspoon baking powder.
Method.
1) Preheat the oven to gas mark 6/200C/400F
2) Soften the butter (a minute on very low in the microwave will do it) and place in a large mixing bowl.
3) Sieve the flour into it, and then stir in all the other ingredients.
4) Mix well for a couple of minutes until you have a smooth mixture.
5) Divide between about eighteen paper cases for normal sized fairy cakes (the mixture will rise a lot, so don’t overfill!). If using the tiny ones, then a level teaspoon of mixture should be more than enough.
6) Bake for about fifteen minutes, until a nice golden-brown colour, then leave to cool on a wire rack.
Variations.
1) To make chocolate fairy cakes, add a level tablespoon of cocoa powder when stirring the ingredients. You could also decorate the top with a little melted chocolate.
2) To make butterfly cakes, slice off a disc from the top of the cakes and cut them into two halves.
Put a blob of jam and another of butter cream or whipped cream on top of each cake.
Place two half-circles of cake on top of each one to make butterfly wings.
3) Fruit fairy cakes: add about an 1oz/25g of currants to the mix while stirring.
4) Decorate each cake with a little water icing (literally icing sugar mixed with water).
I would like to thank Angela Dracup for her recipe for Fat Rascals, Linda Long for help with Welsh names and my son, Robin Ashley, for brewing up experimental flagons of the medicinal mead that features throughout the novel. But most of all, grateful thanks must go to my mother, Mary Long, whose enterprise in starting up a little shoe shop in the difficult post-war years inspired me to write this story.
Trisha Ashley was born in St Helens, Lancashire, and gave up her fascinating but time-consuming hobbies of house-moving and divorce a few years ago in order to settle in North Wales. Her previous book,
The Magic of Christmas
, was a
Sunday Times
bestseller in 2011.
