Sowing Secrets (2 page)

And oh, the bliss of slumping into comfortable, guilt-free slovenliness! The effort of constantly maintaining the level of household standards Mal increasingly favours would be beyond me even if I tried, which I don’t, apart from token gestures, but I’d had a pre-Christmas blitz and everything still looked pretty clean. But then,
my
idea of a hygienic and tidy home is merely one where the health inspectors don’t slap skull-and-crossbones Hazard stickers on the bathroom and kitchen doors on a weekly basis, while
his
is the domestic equivalent of an operating theatre.

‘Do you want to go out for a walk before it gets dark?’ I asked hopefully. ‘We always used to go for a long hike on Boxing Day.’

‘No, I think I’ll watch that tall ships DVD you got me for Christmas again,’ he said, and, while I was glad that my present had found favour, it occurred to me that we were leading increasingly separate lives. I expect it makes a marriage healthy not being on top of each other all the time, but I do miss the long country walks we used to take together before he got boatitis. And while nothing would induce me to get on something that can go up and down, or side to side – or even both at once – without any warning, at least it gives him a bit of fresh air and exercise when he is at home between contracts, playing doll’s houses on his
petit bateau
,
Cayman Blue
, down at the marina.

Oh, well, not only have I got Mal and my beloved Rosie home and still speaking to each other, but Ma’s coming down to Fairy Glen (her cottage in the village) for a few days, so we can all be together for my birthday on the third: what more could I want?

I curled up next to him on the sofa, and after a couple of minutes he noticed I was there and put his arm around me. He smelled like a million dollars, which is about what I paid for that aftershave: worth every penny.

‘Fran, you’re singing “I Got You Babe”,’ he pointed out accusingly, as though I was doing something antisocial – which perhaps, considering my voice, I was. I never know I’m doing it unless I’m out somewhere and a space clears all around me as if by magic.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m just feeling happy.’

And let’s not forget mega relieved too: I’d managed to get through the tricky question-and-answer session with Rosie that I’d known had to come one day, and I thought it had gone quite well, considering.

Must remember to disillusion Ma too.

Although relations between them were a little strained by my birthday, Mal and Rosie still hadn’t seriously fallen out with each other, which must have been a record – though I think
I
might if she carries on shooting questions at me about her father at unexpected moments, as if trying to catch me out.

The mud at the bottom of the once limpid pool of my memory has been stirred with a big stick, so that when she suddenly shoots at me, ‘How tall was Adam?’ up to the surface bobs the reply, ‘Oh, well over six foot,’ without a second’s pause.

‘What colour was Adam’s hair?’

‘Like dark clover honey.’

‘What was Adam’s last name?’

‘No idea.’

‘What colour was the camper van?’

‘Blue and white.’

‘What on earth were you drinking?’

‘Rough scrumpy cider.’

However, I have now run out of answers so she has given up, thank goodness, and even Rosie can see that I can hardly put an ad in the press saying, ‘Did you have a one-night stand nearly twenty years ago with a slender woman of medium height, with grey eyes and long, wavy, strawberry-blonde hair? If so, please answer this ad for news that may interest you.’

Of course, had I known what the outcome would be, I would have noted Adam the gardener’s full name and address at the very least. Mind you, had I known the outcome I wouldn’t have done it in the first place – but then I wouldn’t have had my beloved and infuriating daughter, would I?

She was now packing for her return to university the next day, and I kept missing items of clothing, like my Gap T-shirt and good leather belt. Also several pots of home-made jam and two bottles of elderflower champagne.

Ma, fresh back from her seasonal visit to Aunt Beth up in Scotland, had arrived at her cottage with the dogs and was coming round later for birthday tea, bringing the cake, Tartan Shortbread and a litre of Glenmorangie.

I crooned ‘This Could Be Heaven’ along with my inner Walkwoman.

‘You sound amazingly cheerful for someone on her fortieth birthday,’ Mal observed, tidying up the wrapping paper from the present opening and disposing of it, neatly folded, in the wastepaper basket.

At any minute he would be pointedly positioning the vacuum cleaner somewhere I’d fall over it, I could see it coming, but I’m not cleaning anything today … or tomorrow, or the day after, come to that. Cleaning’s rightful place is as a displacement activity while you are psyching yourself up for something more interesting.

I smiled happily from under the brim of the unseasonal straw gardening hat, adorned with miniature hoes and rakes and even a tiny scarecrow, sent by my Uncle Joe in Florida. ‘Of course I am! I’ve got everything I could possibly need right here in St Ceridwen’s Well, haven’t I? A handsome husband, a lovely daughter, modest success with my work – especially now I’m selling more cartoons as well as my illustrations –
and
we live in North Wales, the most beautiful place in the world. What else could I want?’

He suggested mildly, ‘To lose a little weight?’

That deflated my happiness bubble a trifle, as you can imagine … though thinking of trifle fortunately reminded me that I must pop out and decorate mine with whipped cream, slivered almonds and hundreds and thousands.

Rosie came in, carefully carrying a tray with coffee and some of the yummy Continental biscuits covered in thick dark chocolate that had come in the hen-shaped ceramic biscuit barrel that was her present to me. This, together with microwave noodles, is about the extent of her catering skills, but still one up on Mal, who doesn’t even seem able to find the kettle unaided.

She cast him an unloving look, evidently having caught his comment. ‘You aren’t hounding poor Mum about her weight on her
birthday
, are you? And there’s nothing wrong with her – she’s perfect, just like Granny. Cosy.’

‘Thank you, darling,’ I said to her doubtfully, ‘but cosy isn’t quite the image I want to project.’ It sounded a bit mumsy, and though Ma isn’t fat, she’s pretty well rounded. Good legs, though, both of us.

‘Well,
I
certainly don’t want an anorexic mother, all bones and embarrassing miniskirts! You’re just right – plump and curvy. No one would think you were forty, honestly,’ she added anxiously.

Clearly forty was something to be dreaded, only it didn’t feel like that to me. Or it hadn’t until then. And of course I had noticed that I was a bit plumper, because I’d had to buy bigger jeans, though T-shirts stretch to infinity and all the tops I make myself for special occasions are quite loose caftan-style ones, so they’re still fine. (The one I had on today was made from the good fragments of two tattered old silk kimonos pieced together using strips of the crochet lace that Ma endlessly produces, dyed deep smoky blue.)

‘When I first met your mother at the standing stones up in the woods above the glen, she was so slender she could have been a fairy,’ Mal said, smiling reminiscently, and Rosie made a rude retching noise.

‘Well, nobody loves a fairy when she’s forty,’ I said briskly, hurt by all this sudden harping on about how I used to look.

‘
I
do,’ Mal said with one of his sudden and rather devastating smiles, and for him this was the equivalent of declaring his affections in skywriting, so I was deeply touched, even when he added, ‘Though you’d probably feel healthier for getting a few pounds off, Fran. Perhaps you need more exercise.’

‘She gets lots of exercise gardening,’ Rosie pointed out, which I do, because it is my passion, though only
selective
gardening; soon after I conceived Rosie, I also conceived a passion for all things rose. Very strange. But Rosie should just be grateful it wasn’t lupins or gladioli. Or dahlias. Dahlia March? I don’t think she’d ever have forgiven me for that one.

Most of my Christmas and birthday presents had a horticultural theme – or a hen one, for in the absence of any pets after Rosie’s old dog, Tigger, died we have had to love the hens instead.

This year I also got some garden tokens and I desperately want to use them to get a Constance Spry, even though everyone says they are terrible for mildew – but where could I put it? Would it do well in a tub on the patio? And would Mal notice my roses were impinging on his bit of the garden?

There were some non-rose related presents too. My friend Nia, a potter, gave me the delicate and strange porcelain earrings (and Mickey Mouse wristwatch) I am wearing now, and Carrie at the teashop had left a pot of her own honey on the doorstep, tied up in red and white checked gingham with pinked edges and a big raffia bow. Oh, and a mosaic kit from Ma’s elderly cousin Georgie, who has it fixed in her head that I am perpetually adolescent. (She could be right.)

Mal gave me a travel pack of expensive, rose-scented toiletries (although I hardly ever go anywhere), and a storage box covered in Cath Kidston floral fabric. I thought I would have that in my studio to store odds and ends in, of which I seem to have an awful lot, some already in boxes with helpful labels such as ‘Useless short pieces of string’, ‘Bent nails’ or ‘Broken pieces of crockery’. I once kept used stamps too, but Mal has rather cornered that market.

His boat being laid up safely for the winter, once Mal had tidied the room to his satisfaction he took his coffee and headed back to his study and colourful collection of perforated paper, and Rosie and I settled down to play with my presents and eat a whole packet of biscuits between us.

But at the back of my mind the weight issue niggled at me like a sore tooth. I just couldn’t leave it alone and resolved to ask Nia’s advice next time I saw her because she’s always on a diet, though I can never see any difference. Small, dark and solidly stocky is pretty well how she has always looked.

And although I am sorry she and Paul have just got divorced, I’m also selfishly happy to have her living back in the village (if you can call a handful of cottages with a teashop, Holy Well and pub a village).

The trouble with the idea of dieting is that food is such a pleasure to me, and so is cooking: my one successful domestic skill! It will be torment to create lovely meals for Mal, and Rosie when she’s home, if I can’t eat them too.

Still, you can’t start a diet on your birthday, can you? And Mal loved me anyway, he’d actually come out and said so.

I found I was singing the words to ‘(If Paradise Is) Half as Nice’, cheerful once again, because if getting fat was the only serpent in my Eden I was sure I had the power to resist.

Everything in the garden was coming up roses.

Inspiration later impelled me out through the darkening January afternoon, across Mal’s tailored lawn (which I’m not having anything to do with, since a carpet that grows is just outdoor housework), and under the pergola to my studio among the chaos of frosted rose stems.

Well, I say ‘studio’, but it’s more a glorified garden shed covered in a very rampant Mme Gregoire Staechelin (the hussy), where I do my artwork for greetings cards, calendars and anything else I can sell. I’ve rather cornered the rose market, in my own style, which is far removed from botanical illustration, but I find I’m doing more and more cartoons lately; they’re taking over my head and my life, tapping into a dark vein of cynicism I hadn’t realised I’d got until lately.

Recently I had an idea for a comic strip with a female superhero … Alphawoman! Most of the time she’s the perfect wife, the sort of woman Mal has suddenly started holding up to me as ideal: she works full time for a huge salary yet is always there for her husband, cooks, cleans, effortlessly entertains, keeps perfect house and also fundraises for charity, while staying fit, slim, young, chic and beautiful. Just about my opposite in every way, in fact, so comparing me with these Women Who Have It All is about as fair as comparing a Blush Rambler with a Musk Buff Beauty: you get what it says on the label, and it isn’t going to be a rose by any other name just to please you.

And really, this is
so
perverse of Mal, because that’s the way his first wife, Alison, was heading when they got divorced and, reading between the lines, he couldn’t handle it. The last straw seems to have been when she started earning more than he did and suggested she pop out a quick baby and he could be a house husband and look after it while she got on with her Brilliant Career in international banking.

But when
I
got a job soon after we were married, doing casual waitressing at Carrie’s teashop in the village to pay for Rosie’s riding lessons and stuff like that, he didn’t like it in the least, though perhaps that was mostly because he considered it menial. And while he used to say I was scatty and dreamy as though they were lovable traits,
now
he says it accusingly.

Still, my Ms Alison Alphawoman is not quite invulnerable, because chocolate is her kryptonite, and when she comes into contact with it she turns into … Blobwoman! A scatty, plump and dreamy sloven just like me, who’s only good at cooking, painting and drawing cartoons (though actually I’m pretty brilliant at all those), but who manages to bail Alphawoman out of tricky situations anyway.

And come to think of it, I don’t think I did a bad job as a mother either, once I got over the surprise. Parenting just seemed to be Rosie and me having fun together, all the way from mud pies to marrying Mal, when things hit a slight blip. But in the end it was Mal who had to adjust to the idea that my life was still going to revolve around Rosie much more than him.

I wanted to linger and play with my intriguingly Jekyll-and-Hyde Alphawoman, despite my shack being cold as the Arctic – working in a wooden shed never stopped Dylan Thomas, after all – and I could always put my little heater on if I got desperately chilly. But today, birthday revels called, and so too did my miniature seventy-seven-year-old dynamo of a mother.

‘Fran! Fraaa-nie!’ she shrilled.

I do wish she wouldn’t.

Ma had brought my birthday cake, which she had covered entirely – yes, you’ve guessed! – in huge Gallica roses cunningly modelled in icing sugar. It was beautiful.

With her came an inevitable touch of chaos, for when Ma walks into a room, pictures tilt, cushions fall over and the smooth deep pile of the carpet is rubbed up the wrong way and studded with the sharp indentations of stiletto heels.

Ma had dumped a rather Little Red Riding Hood wicker basket decorated with straw flowers on the coffee table and now began to unpack whisky, shortbread, a small haggis, a bundle of the grubby crochet lace she makes when she’s trying not to smoke and a DVD with a mistily atmospheric photograph of an overgrown bit of garden statuary on the cover.

‘The haggis and the shortbread are from Beth and Lachlan,’ she said. ‘I won the DVD, thought you might like it.’ Ma is forever entering competitions or firing off postcards to those ‘the first five names out of the hat will receive … ’ things.

‘What is it?’ Rosie said, pouncing. ‘
Restoration Gardener
? That doesn’t sound exciting!’

Ma shrugged. ‘That’s what I thought. I can’t abide gardening programmes; gardens are for walking round, or sitting in with a drink, the rest’s just muck and hard work.’

Reaching into a seriously pregnant handbag she began to pull out her cigarettes, then remembered she couldn’t smoke in our house in the interests of family harmony, and produced some half-finished crochet instead.

‘Well, are we having that cake? And what are we drinking the whisky out of, Mal?’

‘I don’t want whisky,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m going to make myself a cocktail with the kit Mum gave me for Christmas. Do you want one, Granny?’

‘No, thanks, my love, I prefer my poison unadulterated.’

‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ Rosie said, vanishing into the kitchen to brew her potion, which was not much different in appearance to the ones she used to concoct a few years ago when she was convinced she was a witch and could do spells. That was right after the phase when she thought she was a horse and wore holes in the carpet, pawing the ground.

Soon we were all mellow and full of alcohol and food … except Mal, who was looking a trifle constrained and narrow-lipped, and clearly fighting the urge to fetch a dustpan and brush to the crumbs on the carpet.