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his Liverpool digs, when he was doing his fine art degree.’
    ‘Yes, but the rest of the time you were living sensibly at home, working in a nursery garden and studying for your horticulture qualifications on day release,’ she pointed out. And I was
entirely
focused on my future and getting to where I wanted to be. Pia’squite different—she goes around with a group of complete wasters who seem to have no ambitions at all, other than to have a good time, though she keeps saying she’s going to go to college eventually.’
    ‘Well, you did and then you barely lasted a term before you got married.’
    ‘Becoming a student was just a means to an end, to get me to London, and then you have to strike while the iron’s hot,’ she said, then looked into her mug and reached for the blue and white striped teapot under its knitted hen cosy (one of Pansy Grace’s making, in black-speckled white yarn—it looked just like Aggie).
    ‘Phillip was such a sweetie, wasn’t he?’ I said. ‘Once I met him, I knew you were really in love with him. It wasn’t just his wealth!’
    ‘Of course not,’ Libby said indignantly and I grinned, remembering how I’d asked her when she first knew she was truly in love with Phillip and she’d quoted that bit in her favourite book,
Pride and Prejudice
(which has always been her blueprint for perfection), where Lizzy tells Jane she first knew she loved Darcy when she saw his beautiful grounds at Pemberley!
    ‘I loved Phillip, and I was devastated when he died within a year. And then Joe came along and I fell in love all over again.’ She sighed sadly. ‘You know,’ she confided, ‘the trouble with marrying wealthy elderly men is that they’ve always already signed over their business interests to the offspring of their first marriage, who are usually old enough to be your parents, if not grandparents, and have their own families. So although they’ve left themselves plenty to live on, there’s never an enormous legacy for the
second
wife. Neither Phillip nor Joe left me a huge inheritance, but Joe arranged Pia’s trust fund with the rest of the family when he formally adopted her—they always considered her one of the Cazzinis, even though she was no more related to them than I was. She’s dark like Phillip, though, so she looks like one.’
    ‘Oh, come off it with the poverty-stricken bit. You’re loaded!’
    ‘Comfortable, not mega-rich,’ she insisted, though she always seems to me to be fabulously wealthy and able to do anything she wants. ‘If I buy Blessings, I might have to sell the flat in Pisa.’
    ‘Or the London house?’
    ‘Tricky. Pia mainly uses that as her home base when she does deign to grace me with her presence. And that’s good, because when she’s in London, she gets taken over by the Cazzini uncles and aunts and cousins, especially Joe’s youngest sister, Maria, and they might manage to knock some sense into her head eventually. She’s more likely to listen to them than to me. The relations in Pisa are a bit too distant to have much clout. Anyway, I like having a base in London.’
    She got up. ‘I’ll just go and tidy up a bit and do my face, then I’m off.’
    ‘You aren’t letting the grass grow under your feet!’
    ‘I can’t afford to. The estate agent said there’d been lots of interest in Blessings already, almost all from the actors in that
Cotton Common
soap series that they shoot in Manchester.’
    ‘I suppose there might have been. They’ve been moving into the area, especially round the Mosses, in the last few years.’
    ‘Well, they’re not moving into Neatslake,’ she said firmly. ‘Oh, and is Ben home? I forgot to ask,’ she added as an afterthought.
    She and Ben had a fairly spiky relationship and I thought he was a little jealous of her. But it wasn’t like we didn’t both have other friends too, though come to think of it, they were mostly couples, like Mark and Stella who keep the goats, or Russell and Mary.