Sowing Secrets (4 page)

Five years ago a retired army officer and his wife bought the Druid’s Rest Hotel on the outskirts of the village and bedizened the interior with a tarty modern makeover, though they hadn’t been allowed to do much more to its venerable listed and listing old carcass than add a large conservatory-style restaurant round the back.

Indoors, the only area left more or less untouched was once the back parlour of the inn, Major Forrester realising just in time that, no matter how unwelcome he made them feel, in the absence of any other pub the regulars were still going to adorn his bar. Now he tried to segregate them away in the back room where his hotel guests and the wine-and-dine set wouldn’t need to mingle with them.

Mrs Forrester gave me a chilly smile as I walked through the lounge bar, since I was situated socially somewhere between stairs, like a governess. Sometimes I hung out with the lowlife in the back room, and sometimes Mal took me to dine in the restaurant like a lady.

Nia was already in the back parlour, sitting in a raised wooden box with low panelled walls before a table made from an old beer keg, in the company of a faded, jaded stuffed trout and a moth-eaten one-eyed fox. She was nursing a half of Murphy’s and wearing the dazed expression of one who had spent her entire Christmas and New Year dutifully shut up in a small bungalow with two stone-deaf and TV-addicted parents.

Nia must be the pocket version of the same dark Celtic stock Mal sprang from, for they both have lovely dark blue eyes and near-black, straight, shining hair, in Nia’s case hanging in a neat and rather arty bob. But whatever common ancestry they share has been well diluted over the centuries because they are totally dissimilar in every other way.

She looked up as I put my virtuous glass on the table and said, ‘Call that a spare tyre? It’s not even the size of a bicycle inner tube! And what on earth are you drinking?’

‘Soda water – I thought I’d better start trying to cut down now, and beer is full of calories.’ I sat down and squidged my midriff into a thick welt between my fingers. ‘Look – if that isn’t a spare tyre, I don’t know what is. And when I looked at myself in the mirror this morning I didn’t seem to have any cheekbones any more, but I’d gained two chins.’

‘I hope you aren’t going to get obsessive about your weight – you know what you’re like when you get a bee in your bonnet. I haven’t forgotten the time you were convinced your eyes were so far apart they were practically vanishing round the sides of your head, and everyone thought you were a freak.’

‘That was years ago,’ I protested … though maybe I
do
still look a little like Sophie Ellis Bextor.

‘Or when you thought your face was asymmetrical?’

‘It
is
asymmetrical.’

‘Yes, well,
everyone’s
face is asymmetrical to some extent, only most of us normal people don’t get a thing about it.’

‘You can’t talk. You’ve been on every diet known to woman and you never looked fat to me to start with!’

‘Not any more,’ she said firmly. ‘I reread
Fat Is a Feminist Issue
over Christmas and decided I will learn to love myself just the way I am.’

How she
is
is sort of rectangular, and she’s always looked much the same, as far as I recall, though maybe she used to go in at the waist a bit more. She’s always been very attractive in her own rather intense and brooding way, but the divorce seemed to have dented her self-confidence.

‘What does it matter anyway?’ she said now, shrugging philosophically. ‘I’m not going to get Paul back even if I turn into a stick insect, because he’s got a forty-year itch only a giggling twenty-something can scratch.’

She’d been running a pottery at a craft centre in mid-Wales with her husband when he suddenly fell for the young jeweller in the next workshop. He’s now buying her out of the house and business in instalments, so let’s hope the tourist industry stays strong in the valleys.

‘But would you want him back now?’ I asked curiously.

‘Not really. I’ve already wasted nearly twenty years of my life on someone who wasn’t worth it; why would I go back for a second helping?’

‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it,’ I agreed.

Nia and I go
way
back: we played together in St Ceridwen’s as children when I was staying at Fairy Glen with Ma; we rode Rhodri Gwyn-Whatmire’s roan pony – which he teased me was the same colour as my strawberry-blonde hair – in turns round the paddock of the big house; and both fell in and out of love with him in our early teens over the course of one long, hot summer holiday, without denting our friendship.

We even ended up at the same college together, she studying ceramics and me graphic art, the only difference being that she did her final year and graduated and I went back home and had a baby instead.
And
she was at the fatal party where I got off with Adam the gardener, only unfortunately she was smashed at the time and has nil recall of the night, except that she had a good time.

Presumably so did I.

I firmly banished the memory and got back down to the practicalities of the here and now. ‘Mal seems more inclined to love me as I
was
rather than as I
am
, so I’ll have to give dieting a go, and since he’s away for six weeks I should be able to lose a few pounds before he comes back. So, what sort of diet should I do? What about one of those meal-replacement things, then I wouldn’t have to cook anything tempting?’

‘Well, there’s the Shaker diet and the Bar diet, those are easy. But I’m warning you from bitter experience that even if you lose weight on one of those, you always put it straight back on again, plus an extra bit more.’

‘I wondered about that. But they must work for some people, mustn’t they? I’ll have to try it in the interests of my sex life, but it’s a pity I can’t just slide into comfortable middle age and be loved anyway. Thank God he hasn’t noticed my hair yet.’

What is it with men and long hair? I mean, Mal might love mine but I was beginning to feel like Cousin Itt from
The Addams Family
, so I’ve had to resort to getting Carrie to lop two inches off the end whenever he is away.

The shorter it gets the curlier it goes, so all that weight must have been pulling it down. It was certainly starting to pull
me
down.

‘There has to come a point when he will notice,’ Nia said. ‘What then?’

‘I’ll cross that hurdle when I come to it, preferably after I’ve lost my excess baggage. God, the things I do for love!’

‘Wouldn’t you like to borrow
Fat Is a Feminist Issue
, instead?’ she offered.

‘No, because I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for Mal. Well, I suppose I
am
doing it a bit for me, because Rosie says I look plump and cosy like Ma, and I don’t feel quite ready for that.’

‘You’re nowhere near as plump as your mam,’ Nia said. ‘And at least your boobs are still in the right place. Mine are heading south, and so is my bum.’

‘Now who’s exaggerating? You look fine to me! If you want to talk Major Slump you should see the Weevil woman next door in her pyjamas.’

‘Mona Wevill? I think I’d rather not; she looks bad enough clothed. What about this news you said you had? I’ve got some myself, but you start.’

‘I suppose mine’s a mixture of good and bad – and I’m not entirely sure which bit’s which. Christmas was a bit of a roller coaster, because first of all I finally had to tell Rosie all about her real father – or everything I know, which isn’t much, let’s face it – and she wasn’t terribly convinced. Ma’s been filling her head with the idea it was Tom Collinge … but I
think
she believed me in the end about the itinerant gardener.’

‘She’ll get over it. If she asks me I’ll tell her it’s true,’ Nia said. ‘Well, true that there was an itinerant gardener, anyway, because if you don’t know whether she’s Tom’s or not,
I
certainly don’t. Was that it, or is there more?’

‘More. Mal created a website for me as a surprise Christmas present,’ I said, ‘all about my artwork and … but that’s not important. I can show it to you next time you’re round. The thing is, I’ve now got an email address and Tom spotted the site and sent me an email!’

‘What? You don’t mean
Tom Collinge
, Rosie’s probably-not father?’

‘Yes! Just to say hi, and how was I, and that he’s got friends up here so perhaps he might drop in some time!’

She thought about it. ‘I suppose once you are on the Internet you are accessible to anyone who wants to look you up, and he sounds like he’s just being friendly and maybe a bit curious. You can discourage him gently.’

‘I can’t discourage him at all, because I deleted the email before Rosie or Mal saw it, and I’ve mislaid the printout.’

‘Then he’ll either contact you again and you can be politely chilly, or he’ll think you are a different Fran March and that will be that … and why are you humming “Surfin’ USA”?’

‘What? Oh, probably because Tom said he taught surfing.’

‘Surfing?’

‘Yes, sorry, I thought I’d said. He teaches art and surfing in Cornwall.’

‘Are you sure? It sounds an odd mixture.’

‘Almost sure … ’ I frowned. ‘But it’s not important, like the other thing I was going to tell you, which is
truly
shattering: Ma’s decided she’s getting a bit past all the driving and so she’s decided to sell Fairy Glen.’

Nia froze with her glass suspended halfway to her lips, a fetching fuzz of froth adorning her upper lip.

‘Sell the glen? Do you mean just the cottage, or the whole thing?’

‘That’s what I said, but it’s the whole thing, of course.’

‘But she can’t! I mean, she’s had it since before you were born!’

‘She hasn’t actually done much to it, though,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s pretty basic, and she’s left the glen to run wild. And, if she’s going to sell one of her houses, she’s more comfortable in Cheshire with all her friends. She’s going to use some of the proceeds to go on a world cruise.’

‘She could give the Glen to you!’

‘But Mal and I have got a house already, a very nice house – and I’d like her to have fun with the money, go on a cruise or whatever she wants.’

‘Has she really thought about this? She does realise that she can’t come and stay with you and bring the dogs when Mal’s home? He’d vacuum them to death.’

‘I know, Rosie’s old dog had so many baths she used to hide at the sound of a tap running. But Ma could come when he was away, and I could go over to visit her. I mean, I don’t like the idea of this any more than you, Nia, but things have to change, I can see that.’

Nia’s frown cleared a little. ‘The cottage is so rundown, it’s not exactly weekender material, is it? Maybe it won’t sell.’

‘Perhaps not, or it may not be worth much, because although there’s lots of land it’s mostly vertical, and the cottage is tiny really – it’s the opposite of the Tardis, because the outside looks much bigger than the inside. I’m going to arrange to have it valued for her, anyway, so we will see.’

‘If it won’t fetch much money she might change her mind,’ she said hopefully.

‘You know Ma once she makes her mind up about anything … but I’m certainly going to miss walking in the fairy glen once it’s sold.’

‘Me too, and I need access to the standing stones,’ Nia agreed, looking darkly brooding (not unusual; she often does), but she didn’t say why.

‘What’s your news?’ I asked to distract her, and she scowled.

‘The bad news is, my planning application for the workshop’s been turned down.’

‘Oh, Nia, I’m sorry!’

Nia had taken over her old home now her parents had retired to Llandudno, and since her return had been making her exquisite porcelain jewellery in the old outhouse behind the cottage, while she waited for planning permission to rebuild it as a small studio. But now the new owners of the adjoining property had put in objections to the plans.

‘English weekenders!’ she snarled angrily, with the sort of expression that should have told her neighbours to head for the border, fast. ‘Here half a dozen times a year, contribute nothing to the village, think they own the place!’

Most fortunately, she has ceased to be – and now denies she ever was – one of the Daughters of Glendower, keeping the home fires burning in the weekenders’ cottages, or it might have been a case of ‘frying tonight’.

Sometimes I wonder if Fairy Glen only escaped because Ma is half Welsh and it would be terribly difficult just to burn half of a house (though it is a miracle that Ma herself has not set fire to the whole place with carelessly discarded fag ends by now).

‘Have you tried
talking
to your neighbours about your plans for the pottery,’ I suggested to Nia, ‘as opposed to just glowering over the wall at them?’

Nia does a good Frida Kahlo glower, due to having those thick straight eyebrows that meet in the middle when she frowns. ‘I mean, they might see your point of view if you explained.’

‘I did speak to them. They said they didn’t want to have drinks in the garden to a background thump of me wedging clay, and in any case I was a health hazard!’

‘You’ll have to find a workshop nearby if you can’t get planning permission. I’m sure there must be somewhere.’

‘Rhodri’s back again,’ she said, seemingly at random. ‘That’s the good news. And do you
know
you’re singing “There’s a Place for Us”?’

I hadn’t, but I stopped. ‘Rhodri? Have you seen him?’

‘No, Carrie told me – he’d been into Teapots to buy honey and a bag of doughnuts, and stayed for coffee and a chat. His divorce is going through and his ex-wife’s got the Surrey house, the London flat and seemingly most of the money.
And
she’s got a rich French count in tow too. I think poor old Rhodri’s number was up once he went from Lloyd’s Name to Lloyd’s loser.’

‘Oh, no, poor Rhodri! He always was weak as water when it came to the crunch. What’s he going to do? Hasn’t he already lost most of his money?’

‘Yes, and now he’s losing most of what he’s got left. But he says it’s a clean-break divorce so he won’t have to pay maintenance, and the daughter’s sort of a model-cum-socialite engaged to someone wealthy and nearly off his hands. So now he’s going to live permanently at Plas Gwyn, and Carrie says he’s thinking of opening it up all season to the public instead of just summer Sundays, to make some money. And he might hire the Great Hall out for weddings and stuff like that. She said he had lots of ideas.’