Sowing Secrets (5 page)

‘It will be lovely to have him back living in St Ceridwen’s, but I don’t think making money is his forte,’ I said doubtfully. Rhodri had been a handsome boy, but even then an air of sweet bewilderment had lurked behind his hopeful, trusting blue eyes, and the few times we’d met since I’d been married to Mal he hadn’t seemed much different.

‘No, it certainly isn’t. But I thought I might go up to Plas Gwyn and talk to him, now there’s no chance of running into that vile, stuck-up bitch he married, because there’s the whole stable wing doing nothing, and he could turn it into little craft workshops and studios as an extra tourist attraction – and rent one to
me
!’

‘Brilliant!’ I said, and brilliant it might prove to be for Rhodri too, for if Nia was one thing it was bossy, and if he looked pathetic enough she might just supply the backbone he needed to get Plas Gwyn off the ground as a paying proposition.

She needed some outlet for her powerful energy in addition to beating the hell out of lumps of clay, and possibly, if they pushed her too far, the neighbours. And it might even distract her from whatever strange rites I had twice caught her performing up at the ancient stones above the fairy glen, which I sincerely hoped were merely some form of Druidism or Wicca, and not something much more sinister. She can be
so
intense at times!

‘Do you want another glass of delicious water?’ she asked.

‘I’ve got a better idea – I’ve got pizza, home-made wine and some whisky at home, so why don’t we go and have a girls’ night in? Maybe watch a DVD?’

‘OK. Shall I give Carrie a ring and see if she wants to come round too?’

‘Is that greed talking?’ I said, because Carrie never comes visiting without bringing a selection of the home-made goodies she bakes for her café, Teapots.

Nia, already dialling, pulled a face at me over her mobile phone.

It felt wonderfully decadent with the three of us curled up on the big sofa in front of the TV, the coffee table groaning under the weight of pizza, leftover birthday cake and all the pastries Carrie had brought, scattering crumbs and drinking my home-made apple wine and Carrie’s mead.

Mal would have gone ballistic if he’d seen what we’d done to his immaculate living room.

We watched the news as an entrée, then Nia started going through my sparse collection of DVDs to find a film to watch as the main course.

‘
Ten Things I Hate About You
?’ I suggested, and the other two groaned.

‘We must have seen that a dozen times!’ Carrie complained.

‘Yes, but it’s my favourite film.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t let me get my favourite film,’ Nia objected. She may not have a DVD player but she usually carries
Fargo
round with her like a teenager with a new CD.

‘Too gory,’ I objected. I wanted something lighter.

‘What’s this?’ Nia asked, holding up an unfamiliar box.

Carrie reached over and took it. ‘
Restoration Gardener
?’

‘I’d forgotten I had that; Ma won it, but I haven’t watched it yet. It’s only a short one – the highlights of some TV series.’

‘I’ve heard of it – I think its sort of archaeology crossed with gardening. Let’s have a look at that first,’ Carrie suggested, ‘then decide on a film.’

‘OK, at least we haven’t already seen it a million times,’ Nia agreed, putting it in the machine.

We all replenished our plates and glasses, then started the DVD and sat back expectantly. Carrie’s a keen gardener, I’m passionate about roses and Nia loves flowers generally, so hopefully there should be something there to suit us all.

To the accompaniment of a gentle ripple of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the title
Restoration Gardener
wrote itself across the screen with a quill pen over some speeded-up computer-generated images of a Japanese crystal garden growing like iced mould out of bare paper.

Carrie settled back with a plate containing a custard tart, a cherry-topped coconut pyramid and two cream-filled brandy snaps (and that was just for starters). ‘I do love gardening programmes – it’s such a shame we can’t get more channels on the TV in St Ceridwen’s.’

‘It’s a shame we can’t always see the ones we
do
allegedly get,’ Nia said, scattering shards of meringue. ‘The reception’s so bad they should be ashamed of charging us for the TV licence, and only a masochist would bother looking in the newspaper at what’s on everywhere else.’

‘Do you think Gabriel Weston is his real name?’ I asked, as the quill pen reappeared and wrote it with a flourish. ‘It’s a bit olde worlde and earthy, isn’t it?’

‘You don’t get much more earthy and olde worlde than Bob Flowerdew,’ pointed out Nia, ‘and that’s
his
real name.’

‘Gabriel
is
his real name!’ Carrie exclaimed, striking herself on the forehead with the hand holding the remains of the coconut pyramid, so that it was suddenly like being inside a snowglobe (though the custard tart would have been much, much worse). ‘Am I stupid, or what? I read all about him in a magazine last time I went to the hairdresser’s in Llandudno. He’s usually called Gabe, though.’

‘It’s starting,’ Nia warned, and we stopped brushing bits of coconut off each other and turned to face the screen.

Helicopter-borne, the camera homed slowly in on a small Tudor manor house sitting inoffensively among a rolling, sheep-nibbled expanse of grass, with here and there a flight of stone steps or a section of herringbone-brick pathway.

There wasn’t much more garden left there than around Rhodri’s mini-mansion, Plas Gwyn, I thought, taking a bite of Bakewell tart and settling back. All Rhodri’s old gardener, Aled, had to do was drive round and round on his little sit-on mower and indulge his passion for clipping trees into strangely rude shapes.

‘Approaching Slimbourne Manor you might think that there never was a garden here at all, or if there ever was, that all trace had vanished,’ said a warm, deep voice with just the faintest, tantalising hint of a West Country burr.

A strange shiver ran down my back and I sat up and stared at the screen. I’d
definitely
heard that voice before somewhere, I was sure of it – maybe on some other gardening programme. It certainly wasn’t one you’d ever forget, with a mellow tone that made you think of dark, rich honey and folded tawny velvet … of a pint of best bitter with the sunlight shining through it, or the dappled gold-browns of a peaty stream bed, or … well, you get the idea. Even if the programme was no good I could see how the audience was hooked. I was half-mesmerised myself.

‘Yet, as we get closer,’ the velvety voice continued, ‘we start to notice clues: grand steps that once led somewhere and the remains of beautiful old brick pathways. The grass at the front of the house that looked so flat from high above, from an angle shows the bumps and hollows of a long-vanished knot garden. Slimbourne was once a jewel in a beautiful setting, and we are going to resurrect it!’

‘I don’t see how he can see anything there,’ I said sceptically, trying to shake off the near-hypnosis of that voice. ‘Perhaps he just makes it up.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Carrie, suddenly our instant resident expert, ‘apparently he has an absolute gift for garden design, a huge knowledge of the history of old gardens
and
a degree in archaeology! And, what’s more, he looked totally hunky in his photo.’

‘I don’t think people say “hunky” any more,’ observed Nia. ‘They say a man is “fit” or “well fit”.’

‘Then he looked well fit. More than well fit. Well fit with knobs on.’

‘I should hope so,’ I said, watching critically as Gabe Weston slowly approached us on the screen, escorting a tall and ancient lady dressed in mottled tweed trousers and an old cricket jumper, her long string of pearls trapped under one pendulous breast.

I jerked upright as though someone had run their finger down my spine, the half-eaten cake in one hand.

‘I’m lucky in having the assistance of Lady Eleanor Arkleforth, the owner of this lovely house, who has already researched the garden thoroughly in the family archives.’

‘Thank you,’ Lady Arkleforth said graciously. ‘I’m delighted to restore the grounds to some semblance of what they once were at last.’

‘I believe you’ve found a plan of how the garden looked originally?’ Gabe Weston prompted.

The camera finally fully focused on the gardener’s highly unusual face, but I could still see it clearly even when it moved on to the garden plan, because his image seemed to have been flash-burned into my retinas.

He had a strong chin, green-flecked hazel eyes rayed at the corners where he had screwed them up in laughter or against the sun, and the sort of Grecian nose you could open letters with. Rich, darkest-honey hair spiralled tightly round his face like a wet water spaniel’s.

‘Are you all right, Fran?’ Nia asked suddenly. ‘Only you look a bit startled. Your mouth’s open and you’ve gone awfully pale.’ She looked from me to the screen, where my nemesis had now reappeared in the flesh wearing one of those archaic winged smiles full of inner amusement. ‘Mind you, he
is
pretty stunning – he can dibble
my
beds any time!’

‘And mine!’ agreed Carrie enthusiastically.

‘Of course I’m all right,’ I croaked, though I was by no means certain I hadn’t suddenly flipped. ‘Would you really say he was good-looking? He’s not exactly handsome, is he?’

But distinctive; so
very
distinctive that a face whose features I had thought safely forgotten suddenly reclaimed its place in my memory, like the last piece of a puzzle locking into place.

‘Back track,’ I said urgently. ‘I think that’s Rosie’s father!’

Nia had replayed the DVD so Gabe Weston’s face was frozen in mid-smile like a mysterious male Mona Lisa, and just as informative.

‘It’s
got
to be him – there can’t be two men who look like that
and
have the same beautiful voice with a West Country accent,’ I said, feeling strangely breathless. ‘Unless I’m going crackers!’

‘You already are crackers,’ Nia said, ‘but I believe you. Only I thought his name was Adam?’

‘So did I.’

Carrie, who had been sitting looking totally bewildered, suddenly exclaimed, ‘Rosie’s father is Gabe Weston? But
I
thought it was Rhodri!’

‘Rhodri? Are you insane?’

‘But you were here all that summer working at Teapots, and thick as thieves with him!’ she said defensively.

‘We were old friends, and Nia was away most of that summer, so he was the first person I told when I realised I was pregnant – but not because he was the father!’

‘Well,’ Carrie said, ‘it wasn’t just me who got the wrong end of the stick, especially when he became Rosie’s godfather! I’m sure half the village still think it.’

‘They think wrong, then.’

She looked at me doubtfully. ‘But are you
sure
it was Gabe Weston? And if so, how come you never told him about Rosie?’

‘I’m sure – and it wasn’t an affair, it was a one-night stand.’

‘That doesn’t sound like you, Fran!’

‘I was drunk and I’d just split up with my boyfriend. All I knew about the man I slept with was that he was called Adam – which, as it turns out, was a lie – that he came from Devon and was a gardener. Even if I’d wanted to I couldn’t have found him from that information.’

‘And until now you had no idea who Gabe Weston was?’ Carrie said. ‘Well, isn’t that just amazing?’

‘Tragic, more like,’ Nia said. Then she set Gabe into motion and speech again and we all watched him silently, and in my case angrily, though I don’t know why. He hadn’t sneaked away without a word, it was me who’d done that. All he was guilty of was carelessness.

‘I don’t suppose he’s ever given me a thought since,’ I muttered bitterly.

‘But what about Rosie?’ Nia asked.

‘What
about
Rosie?’

‘You aren’t going to tell her who her father is, now you know?’

I shuddered. ‘Who her father
probably
is – and let’s not open that can of worms. You know what Mal’s like, and he’s always sort of assumed Rosie’s Tom’s baby. We’ve been through all that. And if I told Rosie who it was she might try and contact him and be rebuffed, which would be terribly hurtful. Things are better left as they are.’

‘And it sounds like there’s an outside chance she might not be his anyway,’ Carrie said helpfully. ‘So it would probably come down to DNA testing, and just imagine if the father really
was
your ex-boyfriend after all!’

‘Thanks for that thought, Carrie.’

‘It gets even better,’ Nia said. ‘Tom, Fran’s old boyfriend, has just emailed her and he wants to come and see her.’

‘Yes, but I didn’t answer, so he’s probably got the message,’ I said hopefully. ‘After all this time I don’t want either of them to pop back into my life and mess things up.’

I looked at the screen again. Gabe Weston was smiling, but then I expect he has a lot to smile about, being a successful TV personality. ‘He’s probably married with his own family by now,’ I mused aloud. ‘Even if Rosie
were
his he wouldn’t want to know.’

‘Divorced,’ said Carrie knowledgeably. ‘His only daughter lives with her mum in America, but his name’s been linked with quite a few other women since.’

‘I bet it has,’ Nia said drily.

Carrie regarded me admiringly: ‘Well, you’re a dark horse, Fran! It’s so romantic, just like
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
.’

‘I can’t see where
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
comes in,’ Nia said critically. ‘Gabe Weston looks more like Meryl Streep than Fran does.’

‘And I certainly haven’t been waiting for him to come back,’ I objected. ‘In fact, I’m going to try and forget I ever recognised him. Let’s just let sleeping gardeners lie – that’s seemed to work for me pretty well so far.’

‘Then perhaps you should stop humming “Look What You’ve Done to Me”?’ suggested Nia.

Mal phoned late that night after they’d gone home, and strangely enough I felt as guilty while I was talking to him as if I’d just spent the night with Adam the gardener all over again.

I would have liked to have blotted the memories out in Mal’s arms, but instead I simply had to obliterate them with leftover cake and a bar of chocolate.