Sowing Secrets (3 page)

Unfortunately there is always a little tension between him and Ma, and when Rosie is there too I’m sure he feels they are ganging up on him – which they often are. Ma finds his ever-increasing obsession with tidiness and hygiene, and his refusal to allow her dogs in the house, definitely alien if not downright perverted – as do I, really, if I’m honest.

It’s his one major flaw, and he hid it pretty well until we were married (being jaw-droppingly handsome is pretty good camouflage for anything); when he suddenly insisted that Rosie leave all her beloved pets behind with Ma, we were very nearly
un
married again pretty smartly until we reached a compromise whereby Rosie was allowed to bring Tigger. It was touch and go, especially once Mal realised that no matter how madly I loved him I would always love my daughter more.

It is tricky for a stepfather, but deep down Mal is very fond of Rosie, and though he
says
he never wanted children I know that is just because Alison insisted he got tested and he discovered he couldn’t father any himself. And while I would have loved another baby, at least I don’t have to worry about contraception!

We’ve all had to make tricky relationship adjustments, but generally we manage to get along in a civilised way, despite Mal’s slow ossification into a finicky, short-fused old fossil, trying to attach as many expensive consumer items to his shell as possible using the superglue of credit.

Fortunately, I’m not a romantic; I know a relationship has to be worked on and that this is as close to Paradise as any woman can expect. (Now I come to think about it, it even has twin snakes-in-the grass in the form of our ghastly next-door neighbours, though frankly I could do without them! They certainly rank at the top of the list of people I would be least likely to take an apple from.)

As if on cue, Ma said, ‘Those Weevils wished me a Happy New Year as I came in, Fran – they must have shot out the minute my engine stopped. What are they up to, twenty-four-hour surveillance?’

‘It feels like it. I can’t make a move outside without feeling watched,’ I said ruefully.

‘
Wevills
—and Owen is my friend!’ Mal snapped. ‘I’m more than happy to have good neighbours to keep an eye on things when I’m away.’

‘They seem to be keeping an eye on things even when you’re
not
away,’ Ma pointed out. ‘And maybe Fran doesn’t want to live like a
Big Brother
contestant.’

‘No I don’t, and they may be nice to me when you’re there, Mal, but it’s totally different when you’re not. They’re entirely two-faced.’

‘You’re imagining things, Fran, they’re lovely people and very popular in the village.’

‘A man can smile and smile yet still be a villain,’ Ma pointed out. ‘Weevil by name and weevil by nature – you can’t fool me. Did you like your
skean-dhu
?’

‘What?’ he said, thrown by this example of Ma’s laterally leaping conversational gambits.

‘The knife, for putting down your sock. Thought it would be handy for Swindon. You never know what they get up to down south.’

Even I wasn’t sure whether she was joking, but when Mal said he intended using it as a paperknife she looked entirely disgusted.

Later, Mal took himself off to the yacht club for a drink with Owen, the male Wevill, who inspired his boating passion and now frequently crews for him on
Cayman Blue
. He is small, bald-headed, wrinkled and unattractive, while his wife has a face like blobbed beige wax, a loose figure, and the hots for Mal.

Is it any wonder I don’t like them?

Rosie volunteered to walk back up the lane to Fairy Glen with Ma so she could play with the dogs, and I gave in to temptation and went to check my website to see if anyone else had visited.

I am getting terribly proficient now I know how to get rid of all the things I inadvertently press, so I was soon able to see that I’d had thirty-six visitors to my site … though come to think of it, at least half of those were probably me.

Then I checked my email and found four messages, only three of which wanted me to grow my penis longer, buy Viagra or look at Hot Moms.

The fourth was from someone called bigblondsurfdude@home and the subject line said, cheerily, ‘Hi, Fran, how U doing?’

I dithered over that one, since I didn’t think I knew any surfers or dudes, but then opened it, my finger ready on the delete button just in case it was a nasty.

And it
was
a nasty, as it happens: a nasty surprise.

Hi Fran,

Remember me?! Found your website – great photo! You don’t look a day older than when I last saw you. I’m glad you’re doing well up in North Wales. I’m teaching art and surfing down here in Cornwall, the best of both worlds, but I often come up to visit friends at a surfing school not too far from you, so I might drop in one of these days!

All the best,

Tom

Tom?

When old loves die they should stay decently interred, not try to come surfing back into your life.

I deleted him, but printed the message out first, and shoved it into the desk drawer, just in case. But if I didn’t answer, surely he would assume he’d got the wrong Fran March?

And if I hadn’t been so insistent on keeping my own name when I got married, it would have been the Fran Morgan Rose Art site and Tom would never have been able to launch this stealth attack on my memories.

Thank goodness Rosie hadn’t been around to see it – she’d probably have been emailing him right back by now, asking probing questions about blood groups and stuff.

Rosie went back to university, together with half the contents of my larder and selected items of my wardrobe, all packed into her red Volkswagen. She calls it Spawn of Beetle since it’s much newer than mine, due to both Granny and Mal’s mother being putty in her manipulative little hands.

I cried for ages after she’d gone, which, as you can imagine, pissed Mal off no end, but although she drives me crackers when she’s home I miss her dreadfully.

‘I cry when
you
go away too, Mal,’ I told him, although actually that was a lie because I don’t any more, I just feel sad for ten minutes or so. I expect I’ve got used to his frequent absences, but Rosie is (or once was) a part of me, and although my brain wants her to be off having a life and getting a career, my heart wants her right here with her mum.

So next day I tearlessly waved Mal off too, as he manoeuvred his big Jaguar with difficulty around my car, which I seemed to have parked at an angle, half in, half out of an azalea bush.

He was too preoccupied to notice Mona Wevill casually standing on her doorstep wearing only thin silk pyjamas in the same rather distressing pinky-beige as her face, so that she looked baggily nude. Her boobs were not just heading south, but had actually passed the Equator.

She is certainly not any competition, even though I’m nowhere near as pretty as when I was younger. You know you’re past it when you stop feeling indignant at workmen shouting after you and instead want to go and personally thank them for their interest.

Anyway, not only did I
not
cry as Mal’s car vanished, but I actually felt relieved he wasn’t going to be there to make me feel guilty about my weight, especially since I have grasped that he finds my measly few extra pounds such a big turn-off! At least now I have six weeks before he comes back to do something about it.

I went up the frosty garden to see to the hens in their neat little coop. They looked at me as if I was mad when I opened the door of their nesting box and asked them if they wanted to come out, moaning gently as they mutinously huddled down into their warm straw nests.

‘Please yourselves, girls, but you’ll be sorry when Mal’s back and you
have
to stay in your run all day,’ I told them, but they weren’t interested.

Later that morning I set off for Fairy Glen to help Ma pack up too, since everyone seemed determined to leave me at once; though at least Nia should actually be coming back from spending Christmas and New Year at her parents’ house any time now.

Ma, a small bohemian rhapsody layered in vaguely ethnic garments and with her head tied up in a fringed and flowered turban, was sitting in an easy chair in a haze of cigarette smoke doing the quick crossword in yesterday’s
Times
. The lacquer-red pen she held in her nicotine-gilded fingers was the exact shade of her lipstick and nail varnish, but I knew that was just a happy accident and not by intent.

Ma is a happy accident.

The two long-haired dachshunds threw themselves at me, yapping shrilly, and she waved away a cloud of smoke with a heavily beringed hand. ‘That Mal gone, then?’

‘Yes, first thing. And Rosie rang last night to say she’d had a good journey down,’ I said, sitting on the floor so I could let Holly and Ivy climb all over me. For the next six weeks I could safely reek of old dog, or hens, or rose manure, or anything else I wanted to.

‘Ma, have you ever been on a diet?’

‘Diet? No – but me and a couple of friends thought about getting fit once, years ago when we all used to play tennis. We went to this meeting of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty in the village hall, and there were about twenty of them there in black leotards and tights, all being trees reaching up to the sunshine. Then they had to be beautiful gazelles, bounding across the plains. You’d have thought a lion was after them.’

‘So did you join in?’ I asked, fascinated.

‘No, we decided not to bother. I didn’t think the floor was up to it, for one thing.’

Recrossing her feet, which were incongruously shod in her favourite mock-lizardskin stilettos, she said rather abruptly, ‘Fran, I’ve been sitting here thinking about selling Fairy Glen.’

I sat back on my heels and stared at her. ‘Sell the glen? Do you mean the cottage, or just the glen itself?’

‘The whole thing, of course – house and grounds. I couldn’t sell one without the other, could I? They go together. The thing is, I’m seventy-seven and all this driving’s getting a bit much for me. And now Rosie’s off at college and you’re settled and happy enough with Mal – though he wouldn’t be my cup of tea! – I think the time has come to sell up.’

This was a stunner! My parents bought the place long before I was born, so all my happy childhood memories were of roaming the narrow wooded glen, from the overgrown remnants of a tea garden to the ancient standing stones set in a mysterious, magical oak glade high above the little waterfall. Victorian daytrippers had gone in droves to visit fairy glens, and this one, its natural beauty enhanced by grottos, statues and convenient flights of steps, had enjoyed a brief vogue. Long neglected, it had formed the perfect secret garden for me, Nia and Rhodri (the Famous Three) to have adventures in.

The old stone cottage had been hideously remodelled into some kind of miniature Gothic castle, the only concessions to modernity being an electric cooker and a small bathroom. Ma’s chosen style of interior décor was Moroccan magpie nest crossed with dog kennel.

‘But, Ma,’ I croaked, finally regaining the power of speech, ‘won’t you miss it?’

‘Yes, of course. I’ve had so many happy times here, and it’s where I feel closest to your father – he loved it so much. But memories are portable things; I won’t lose them if I sell the Glen.’

‘You could sell Marchwood instead and move here permanently,’ I suggested – Marchwood being her big detached thirties house in Cheshire, near Wilmslow.

‘Well, my love, I thought of that, but it’s always been my main home and I’m settled there. There’s my water-colour class, the bridge club and the girls: never a dull moment.’

The girls are the friends she hangs out with, a sort of Hell’s Grannies chapter. Never agree to play any kind of card game with them; they’d have your last penny and the clothes off your back before you could say Old Maid.

‘And then Boot does the garden and any handyman stuff, and Glenda does the cleaning, so it all runs along smoothly,’ she added. ‘But Fairy Glen is falling apart. It needs love and money spent on it, and I feel it’s time someone else had a chance to live here and love it like I did.’

I could see the sense of what she was saying even if I hated the thought of it; and it wasn’t like I would never see Ma again. I knew she wouldn’t come and stay with me if Mal was home, but she would be less than two hours’ drive away, so I could even pop over for the day.

No, I think what dismayed me most was the sudden realisation that she was getting old. This was the first sign she’d ever given that she wasn’t going to go on for ever.

‘I’m tough as old boots,’ she said as if reading my mind. ‘I’m not about to turn my toes up, I’m just falling back and regrouping: “downsizing” – isn’t that what they call it these days? And if I do sell Fairy Glen, then I could go off on that round-the-world cruise with some of the girls, and have fun.’

God help any cruise ship with Ma and the girls on board! ‘Speaking of regrouping, Ma … ’ I said, and repeated much of what I had told Rosie about her transient father, while she looked at me pretty hard and blew a whole series of smoke rings.

I got the message: she didn’t really believe me either.

Much more of this and I will start to think I hallucinated Adam the gardener or have got false memory syndrome or something. But at least we all seem agreed that Tom exists … though I have forgotten where I put that email printout from him, so I might have imagined that. I could have
sworn
I put it in the desk drawer, but maybe it is somewhere out in the studio. Or in the pocket of the jeans currently going round and round in the washing machine. Who knows?

But since it
is
mislaid and I deleted the message, I can’t possibly answer it, can I?

Back home I spent a couple of hours in my studio trying to finish my calendar designs, but not only was I totally distracted by the thought of Fairy Glen being sold, my fingers were so cold that if I’d tapped them with a pencil they would have fallen off and shattered.

I could do with a more efficient heater, or better insulation, or both.

There was a phone message from Nia when I went back to the house to thaw, so I rang her once I could grasp the receiver.

‘Has he gone?’ she asked conspiratorially, as though poor Mal were an ogre or Bluebeard.

‘Yes, early this morning. He should be phoning me any minute to say he’s arrived.’

‘Oh, good – see you in the Druid’s Rest around seven, then?’ she suggested. ‘I’ve got some news.’

‘So have I, and I want your advice on diets – Mal thinks I’m too fat.’

‘You’re not fat!’

‘Well, I’m certainly not slim any more – even Rosie described me as cuddly!’

‘There’s nothing wrong with cuddly,’ Nia said decisively.

‘You haven’t seen me since I pigged out over Christmas,’ I said ruefully. ‘My spare tyre would fit a tractor.’

‘It’s not much more than a week since I last saw you, Fran. You can’t have put that much weight on!’

‘You wait and see,’ I told her, because it’s truly amazing the way all the calories have bypassed my digestive system and gone straight to my stomach and hips, laying up a fat store for a famine that was never going to happen … unless
diets
count as famine. But I wouldn’t need a diet if I hadn’t got fat, so if my body decides this is starvation, isn’t it going to be a sort of vicious circle? Or am I hopelessly confused?

Diets
must
work, or there wouldn’t be any point to people going on them, would there?

I rather gingerly checked for emails before I went out, but there were only impersonal rude ones, easily deleted from both computer and memory.