Wish Upon a Star

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘You could probably find someone locally.’

  ‘Chloe and Poppy are sharing a nanny, so they can do some work as well, a young local girl. Chloe said the nanny might be able to take Stella out in her double buggy sometimes, because Poppy’s baby is too small for it yet, but really I could do with someone I could call on when I need them.’

  ‘And not just a teenager with no experience, who might panic if Stella wasn’t well or let her overtire herself,’ Jago agreed.

  I brooded a moment as he headed up the small roads between Sticklepond and Merchester, passing the Hemlock Mill nature reserve on the way.

  ‘Did you get another email from Laurence Yatton this morning?’ I asked. ‘That makes three! Hebe seems to be throwing herself into organising the fundraising with a vengeance.’

  ‘I did. In fact I think all of Stella’s Hundred must have got the same one, though at the bottom of mine she’d put that I was already doing my bit with the gingerbread stars, but I might be called on to help with later fundraising activities, like the fête.’

  ‘And mine said I’d already done as much as I could, and should just help out generally, but I’d really like to think of ways to raise more money myself.’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll both be roped in to other things. You’ll be helping with the playgroup jumble sale in June, for a start, won’t you?’

  ‘That’s true. Celia said she emailed Hebe back with ideas for her Knitathon, which will also probably be in June, then her Crafty exhibition and garden party later on, when the weather’s warmer.

  ‘We don’t know when the fête will be yet, do we? That should be a big fundraiser.’

  ‘I suppose that will be summer, too. Hebe said she’d list more of the upcoming fundraising activities in the next newsletter, so we’ll have to wait and see what that one says.’

  I pointed out a sign to Pinker’s End and we turned off onto an even narrower road.

  ‘I’m getting nervous now,’ Jago confessed. ‘I’ve really fallen for Honey’s, and the more I think about it, the more ideal it seems.’

  ‘The village location is pretty perfect too, what with a church wedding every five minutes,’ I said. ‘There has to be a local demand for wedding cakes.’

  ‘And the house behind the shop could be made back into a really nice family-sized home, with maybe the cottage as a guest suite,’ he suggested. ‘It would be easy to glaze over that bit of paving between the kitchen and the annexe and turn it into a conservatory with a view of the garden and a sliding door through into the living room.’

  ‘I think garden is a bit of an optimistic term to use for that wasteland,’ I said. ‘Goodness knows what’s in there.’

  ‘True, and the estate agent might call that rotting heap of wood at the end a garage, but I think it’s only the ivy and weeds keeping it standing. It probably needs replacing.’

  ‘Don’t count your chickens,’ I warned him, amused by his enthusiasm. ‘And here we are, ready to beard the dragon in her den.’

  Pinker’s End Residential Apartments were reached via a long, well-kept gravelled drive through acres of wooded garden in which I glimpsed a red squirrel (there are lots of surviving enclaves of them dotted about West Lancashire) and a small lake. It ended at a large, square, Victorian mansion with a courtyard surrounded by mews-style cottages. I’d glimpsed other roofs set in the grounds as we drove up, so there were probably a lot of residents in differing kinds of accommodation, according to their needs, and it was all obviously hugely expensive.

  Miss Honey had a ground-floor apartment, furnished in a minimalist, easy-to-clean Scandinavian style. Or that had evidently been the intention, anyway, but Miss Honey had defeated any attempt to make her rooms low maintenance by cramming every surface with souvenir knick-knacks, most of them decorated with the unmistakable shape of Blackpool tower. There was a bit of a china donkey thing going on, too.

  The overalled assistant ushered us in and said cheerily, ‘Here are your visitors, dear.’

  ‘I’m not your dear,’ Miss Honey snapped acidly. She was a small woman with silver hair in a feathery urchin cut and a surprisingly sharp expression on her elfin, age-spotted features, and was regally seated in a high-backed wing chair with her feet on a tasselled hassock.

  ‘And I was only expecting the one visitor,’ she added, leaning forward slightly and screwing up her eyes, as if trying to bring us into focus.

  ‘I’ve brought a friend with me. I hope that’s all right, Miss Honey?’ Jago asked nervously.

  ‘I suppose so,’ the old lady conceded. ‘Joan, you can bring tea now: and I want the full works, mind – none of your one cup and a biscuit each.’

  ‘Cook’s got it all ready, I’ll fetch it in.’

  ‘Go on, then, and after that see if you can find my damned glasses. I must have put them down somewhere again.’

  The assistant scuttled off and we sat down, but Miss Honey had only just started to grill Jago on what she called his foreign-sounding name, when Joan returned, pushing a trolley with squeaky wheels, laden with chintz-patterned china, plates of small sandwiches and a sliced fruitcake.

  ‘That looks fine, thank you, love,’ Miss Honey said, mellowed slightly by the sight of refreshment. ‘I’ll ring if we need fresh tea – now, you go and find my glasses.’

  She fixed her faded grey eyes on me and said, ‘You can pour. I like a spoon of sugar and a dash of milk in mine. And pass me a sandwich – egg and cress.’

  I did that while she carried on interrogating Jago about where he came from, his family, age and education. Then she asked him how he came to have enough brass to buy her shop outright and when he told her, she exclaimed over his story of the lottery winnings.

  ‘So you decided to set yourself up in business?’ she said approvingly. ‘That shows good sense, lad, even though I don’t hold with gambling.’

  She contemplated us over the rim of her teacup as she took a couple of slurps. ‘I expect you’re wondering how I’m paying for a posh place like this, but my sister married a wealthy man and then she left it all to me: she’d no one else. I came here to convalesce after I broke my hip and somehow, I just never went back to the shop. I thought I would, but I didn’t …’

  She fell silent and I said gently, ‘It seems very comfortable here, and the grounds are beautiful.’

  I didn’t mention the fruitcake, which was a dreadful shop-bought thing, light on the fruit and sickly sweet: I was not impressed. Fruitcakes are so easy to make, and I’d expected the food to be good here.

  ‘Yes, it’s certainly that – and just as well, because the only way I’ll be leaving it now is in a box. I can see it’s time to pass Honey’s on to someone else and the only relative I’ve got left is my cousin’s girl, Natalie. She’s some kind of actress down in London, so she won’t be interested.’

  She took another sip of tea and ruminated. ‘I like the idea of a young couple taking the shop on and raising a family under the roof,’ she said finally.

  ‘Oh, we’re not married,’ Jago said quickly.

  ‘I don’t hold with people living together under my roof unless they are married,’ she said severely.

  ‘That’s all right, I can safely promise you we won’t do that,’ I assured her.

  ‘We’re just friends,’ explained Jago. ‘Not a couple at all.’

  ‘Best way to be before you wed: start as friends with shared interests,’ she said approvingly. ‘In my day you walked out together for years, went for bicycle rides or perhaps on the bus to Southport on a summer Sunday …’

  She lost herself to happy memories for a few moments before resuming her interrogation. ‘You seem to be doing it the right way round, but have the children after the wedding. I don’t know what the world’s coming to, with everything topsy-turvy.’

  I was about to try to explain the real situation again and mention Stella, when Jago got in first.

  ‘If you sell Honey’s to me, I’d be moving in on my own as soon as I had some of the house
habitable, then renovating the shop.’

  ‘As a haberdasher’s?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I’m afraid not. I make wedding cakes: a special kind of French one, called a croquembouche.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’ A shadow seemed to cross her face. ‘I don’t like anything French, neither. Never have, never will.’

  Jago described the elaborate choux bun edifices he created, but she seemed rather confused by the idea.

  ‘A wedding cake should be a good, solid fruitcake, a lot better than this stuff they give me, and covered in white icing,’ she said. ‘I prefer a nice sticky bun with my tea, an iced one, so next time you both come you can bring me one.’

  Jago looked slightly startled, but I said, ‘We’ll certainly do that.’

  ‘Pour some more tea,’ she told me, ‘and cut me a piece of that apology for a cake and a slice of crumbly Lancashire to go with it.’

  While I did that, she said to Jago thoughtfully, ‘So … you won’t need the stock in the shop? I thought someone could just take it all on and reopen.’

  ‘I’m afraid the stock is a little out of date …’ Jago said gently. ‘It would be hard to sell any of it.’

  ‘Is it? I suppose time does fly past … but Honey’s were always a haberdasher’s …’ she said sadly. Then she perked up a bit, reaching out for the piece of fruitcake I’d put on her plate, together with the slice of cheese. ‘Still, I like the idea of wedding cakes, even if they’re a funny foreign sort. I didn’t marry myself – but then, that was because I lost my young man in the war: so many did. But I love a good wedding.’

  ‘If you didn’t object – if you sell the place to me, that is – I’d like to carry on calling my new business Honey’s,’ Jago said, though I was pretty sure he’d only just thought of the inspired idea. ‘It’s such a nice name.’

  ‘That would be something, at least,’ she said. Since I’d leaned forward to hand her the cake and cheese she’d been trying to focus her faded grey eyes on me and now she suddenly said, ‘There’s something familiar about you, lass. I wish I could find my damned glasses.’

  ‘I can see the top of a pair sticking out of your cardigan pocket. I don’t suppose those are the right ones, are they?’ Jago suggested tentatively.

  ‘Oh, yes, there they are.’

  She jammed them onto her nose and scrutinised me. The glasses had huge blue frames and her eyes were enormously magnified. ‘Are you a local girl?’ she demanded.

  ‘No, though my mother was born in Sticklepond. She moved back about ten years ago, after my father died. She remembers your shop being open.’

  ‘What was her maiden name?’

  ‘Almond,’ I said, a little nervously, because she was certainly old enough to remember the ins and outs of whatever skeleton was in the Almond family cupboard. ‘Martha Almond.’

  She obviously remembered only too well, for a shutter seemed to slam down over her face and her small mouth shut like a trap. ‘I thought as much – you can’t mistake the Almond look! And to think, I’ve been sitting here taking tea with an Almond all this time and never knew it.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, seeing how upset she was, ‘but I’m not really an Almond, my name is Weston.’

  ‘I thought they’d all cleared off to Australia,’ she said accusingly.

  ‘They did, but Ma’s parents came back again within the year and worked for the man who’d bought the family farm.’

  ‘Ormerod,’ she said. ‘I think I remember young Martha and them coming back – her father’s Jacob Almond, one of the cousins, isn’t he?’

  ‘He was, but both my grandparents are now dead.’

  ‘They barely showed their faces in the village after they came back – and who can blame them?’ she said severely.

  Then she looked inimically at us both. ‘If I’d known, I’d have told you you were wasting your time. I won’t be selling up, if it means having an Almond living in Honey’s.’

  ‘But I won’t be – we’ve explained that we’re only friends, and that’s the truth,’ I protested. ‘I’ll never live there.’

  ‘I’m not having the wool pulled over my eyes,’ she declared, and though Jago tried to calm her down, she began to get so upset and agitated that we thought it better to leave.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Jago,’ I apologised as he drove me home. ‘I knew that an Almond relative blotted his copybook around the end of the war, though no one will tell me how, but I really didn’t think it was of any importance – I mean, not nowadays.’

  ‘Most families have some skeleton in their cupboards and you weren’t to know it would upset Miss Honey. Whatever the mystery is must involve her family too.’

  ‘I always wondered what made the entire Almond clan emigrate to Australia like that,’ I said. ‘I’ll have another go at Ma, though I’m not sure she knows the whole story. And even if I find out, it’s too late now, isn’t it? I’m so sorry I went with you, because it looks like I’ve lost you the opportunity of buying the place.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said optimistically, ‘she may cool down and think it over. All is not yet lost.’

  But I thought he was just being nice to me and must be every bit as disappointed as I was.

  Chapter 19: Gone, but Not Forgotten

  I went straight up to the studio as soon as I got back. Stella had decorated her moss and plant pot village with shells and was now standing at a small easel engrossed in a painting, with Toto curled in a fuzzy white ball underneath. He was the first to spot me and got up, lazily wagging his tail.

  ‘Don’t strain yourself with an effusive welcome,’ I told him, and Stella looked round.

  ‘Mummy!’

  Ma hadn’t appeared to notice I was there before, but now she stepped back from her painting and laid down the palette and brush with a sigh. ‘That dog’s moved again,’ she complained.

  ‘They will do that,’ I agreed, looking at the painting, where Toto had been transformed into a kind of sleeping hairy cherub-creature with a black nose and round dark eyes.

  ‘You’re back,’ she added belatedly. Then her eye fell on Stella. ‘Where’s Hal? Didn’t he go to make tea?’

  ‘That was ages ago, Grandma and we drank it. He had to go to Ormskirk and get his medicine from the chemist. He told you.’

  ‘Did he?’ she said vaguely. ‘Did you have a nice time?’ she added to me.

  ‘No,’ I said shortly. ‘I went with Jago to the nursing home to see Miss Honey, if you remember, so he could persuade her to let him buy the shop?’

  Ma’s blue eyes stopped looking vague and a wary expression came into them. ‘Oh, yes … didn’t it go too well?’

  ‘It was a disaster. It started out all right, with Miss Honey accepting that she wasn’t going to sell the shop as a going concern and seeming prepared to discuss Jago’s offer. But that was before she found her glasses and got a good look at me. Once she realised I was an Almond, the whole deal was off and she got so upset we had to leave.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ma. ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘And that’s an understatement,’ I snapped. ‘It’s cost Jago the property and he’s set his heart on it. Ma, don’t you think it’s time to tell me what this is all about? Did the Almonds and Honeys have some kind of giant fall-out in the dim and distant past?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘If you’d warned me Miss Honey might take against me, I’d never have gone with him in the first place.’

  ‘I didn’t think she’d realise. Your name’s different, after all, and anyone can be fair and blue-eyed.’

  ‘But there’s obviously a family look that’s very distinctive, since everyone comments on it.’

  ‘Still, I don’t really see why Miss Honey should get upset about it anyway, because it’s Jago who’d be buying the place, not you. Didn’t you explain that?’

  ‘We tried, but she’d got the idea in her head that Jago and I were an item, and no matter what we said we couldn’t convince her ot
herwise.’

  Ma sighed. ‘What happened was all such a long time ago, Cally. But then, to elderly people, the past is often clearer than the present, isn’t it?’

  ‘She’s a hundred and two and sharp as a tack: everything seems pretty clear to her,’ I said. ‘I only wish I could say the same, so I think it’s well and truly time for you to come clean and tell me what all the mystery is. What happened? What made the whole family emigrate to Australia? Is it something to do with that Esau Almond we’re not supposed to mention?’

  Ma began to carefully clean her brushes. ‘It all happened during the war, long before I was born, when they thought differently about things. Esau was the middle son from the three at Badger’s Bolt, and he jilted a Honey girl. I think it must have been your Miss Honey’s younger sister.’

  ‘There has to be a bit more to it than that,’ I said shrewdly. ‘I mean, no one ever wants to talk about Esau, that’s why I guessed it was to do with him, but I thought perhaps he’d been an army deserter, or something like that.’

  ‘Look, I’ll tell you everything I know later,’ she said. ‘It’s not a very nice story.’

  ‘OK,’ I agreed, seeing that Stella was now listening in. ‘Little pitchers have big ears.’

  ‘Pictures don’t have ears, do they, Granny?’ Stella said. ‘Mummy, you are silly!’

  ‘That’s me,’ I agreed. ‘Come on – and Toto, too – let’s go back to the house.’

  As soon as I had a minute, I wrote a letter to Miss Honey apologising for upsetting her and saying that I now realised there was some family history I hadn’t been aware of previously that would make the idea of my living in her former family home distasteful. Then I assured her that Jago and I were just friends, adding that in fact I’d only known him a couple of weeks and, in any case, my time was entirely occupied with my daughter, who had serious health problems. I ended by hoping she’d perhaps discuss the shop sale again with Jago on his own.

  It was the best I could do, so I hoped it was enough. Stella and I popped down to the village green with Toto to post it and then feed the ducks, though today they were reluctant to get off their little island, so everyone else had probably had the same idea.