Sowing Secrets (8 page)

Dear Mal,

I hadn’t realised the Wevills had such over-active imaginations – or that they were sending you bulletins on my movements. If they had really thought there was an intruder, surely they should have phoned the police?

Of course, what they actually saw was me going up the garden with the torch, as I thought I’d heard a fox trying to get at the hens. This was several hours after Carrie and Nia had been around for an absolute orgy of pizza eating and the riotously noisy watching of a gardening DVD. The Wevills must have ears like bats if that kept them awake.

If you want to know my day-to-day movements while you’re away, all you have to do is ask, they’re not secret.

Fran.

I didn’t deign to mention the Rhodri insinuations. I’m not protesting my innocence to my own husband like some damned Desdemona. He ought to know me better by now.

Mind you, by now he should also have realised that the Wevills are conducting an undercover hate campaign against me and jumped to my defence, but he takes them entirely at face value. So when Mona fawns and drools over him like a sex-mad boxer bitch she is just being ‘friendly’, and since Owen shares his passion for boats (indeed, was the one who infected him with the mania) he can do no wrong.

Before the Wevills arrived on the scene my only significant competition for Mal’s attention was his stamp collection, and at least that kept him in the house. But messing about in his boat and going down to the yacht club now occupies all the time we used to spend doing family things together, like walking and going to the zoo. (Rosie was addicted to the zoo – we had to go every Sunday for
years
.)

I was still seething about the email when Rosie rang. She’s been phoning me on a nightly basis since she went back, crying into the receiver about her assignment marks, which were not as brilliant as she thought they should be, although they sounded fine to me. This anguish is all mixed up with her dilemma over whether to dump her present nameless boyfriend
now
, in the hope that the boy she really fancies will ask her out, or whether that would be cruel while he is working hard for his finals.

When I could get a word in I said sternly, ‘Rosie, did you take an email from Tom Collinge when you were home, and reply to it in my name?’

There was a gasp. ‘Oh God, Mum – I’m sorry! I was just curious, and I didn’t think you’d reply to him yourself. I meant to keep checking so I could delete the answer before you saw it.’

‘Is that supposed to make it all right? And even though you know my password, don’t you think my mail is private?’

‘Yes, and I wouldn’t have opened any of the others, really I wouldn’t! And I only told Tom you had one daughter and were married, and asked him whether
he
was, that’s all!’

Then she started crying again, so I ended up assuring her I wasn’t really cross and she mustn’t worry about her marks, and suggested a way to finish with her boyfriend so they stayed friends – and I felt like a wrung-out dishcloth after I put the phone down.

While each call like this leaves me totally on edge and overwrought, it seems to have a totally different effect on Rosie; whenever I ring back worriedly an hour or two later to check that she hasn’t locked herself in her room with a bottle of pills and the breadknife, it’s always to be told by one of her flatmates that she has just left in high spirits for a party and isn’t expected back for hours.

And what’s with all these ball dresses she seems to need? When I was at college I could fit the entirety of my belongings in a rucksack and one holdall, and I’m not sure I even knew what a ball dress was. Even now, ninety per cent of my clothing consists of jeans, T-shirts and home-made patchwork tops – it’s economical and saves all that worry about what to wear every morning. I only need to get dressed up to go out with Mal. But Rosie seems to alternate between wearing a collection of paint-stained hankies held together in unexpected places by large plastic curtain rings, and off-the-peg but hideously expensive Princess Bride creations. I don’t think there’s a Schizophrenic Student Barbie yet, is there? There should be, there’s a gap in the market.

Still, maternal guilt combined with a love that is positively painful always makes me scrape together enough for the next dress, even though I suspect that Mal’s mother has already subbed up the wherewithal for several without telling me.

Mrs Morgan often phones me, asking how Rosie’s work is going, and whether she’s eating properly and only going out with nice boys – though how I am supposed to know any of this when she is a couple of hundred miles away and never gives me any details, I can’t imagine.

I asked Carrie to pop in later if she isn’t too tired, and help me put a new password on my email, since she did a Computing for Small Businesses nightclass last year, so is pretty good at that kind of thing.

I heard her exchanging jolly greetings with the Wevills when she arrived – she couldn’t have missed them, since they were on the drive filling my wheelie bin up with their rubbish.

Dragging her indoors, I told her what they were like to me when there was no one else around, but she was frankly incredulous.

‘But they’re so nice! Don’t you think perhaps they are just trying too hard to be friendly, Fran? I mean, they often come into Teapots, and they seem very genuine people.’

‘That’s just it, Carrie – they
are
nice to everyone, except to me when I’m alone,’ I said, but I’m sure she thinks I’m getting paranoid.

I might have started to think so myself if Ma hadn’t taken a dislike to them on first sight; and Nia can detect insincerity at a glance, so all their attempts to smarm all over her met with curt rebuffs even before she realised what poison they were trying to spread about me – in the nicest possible way, by telling people
they
didn’t believe such-and-such a rumour.

‘Well, if you say so, Fran,’ Carrie said doubtfully.

‘Ask Nia, if you don’t believe me.’

‘Of course I believe you,’ she said hastily. ‘Oh, and I’ve collected some more info about Gabe Weston, if you’d like to see it sometime.’

‘Oh, have you?’ I said with vague interest, but I don’t think she was really fooled.

After she’d gone I went out, removed the Wevills’ bags of stinking rubbish and lobbed them back over the fence into their front garden where their two cats instantly started to close in on them. Although no one ever sees the Wevills doing anything antisocial to
me
, I’ll bet my bottom dollar everyone in the village will know what I’ve done by tomorrow – and I used to be such a nice person.

The new password I put on my computer was ‘trust’.

This is the first day of the Shaker diet, though it would take a concrete mixer rather than a quick whisk to make that strange powder homogenise with any liquid except, possibly, rubbing alcohol.

It certainly didn’t satisfy my hunger, fill my stomach or titillate my taste buds, so what is the point of it unless it is simply meant as a kind of self-inflicted punishment for being gross?

Already craving real food I went up to the studio, where the only edible temptation was the sack of Happyhen mix (which I was pretty sure I could resist – for the first few days at least), and began roughing out some Alphawoman comic strips. Then I started a card design based on the hens, who are all big fluffy brown ones like in a children’s picture book. Photos of them in various exciting poses line my walls together with hundreds of snaps of roses.

When I checked my website later lots of people had been looking at it, so it’s not just me with the rose mania. Perhaps if I had good-quality prints done of some of my pictures I could sell them through the site. Limited editions, all numbered – and they’d be easy to post …

I’ll ask Carrie what she thinks about it – if I ask Mal, he will only blind me with technology and put me off the idea.

Oh, and I finally replied to Tom’s email, but more to occupy my hands than anything, since typing and eating simultaneously can seriously clog up your keys.

Dear Tom,

Nice to hear from you, and glad everything is going well for you. Yes, I’m happily married and love living here, but since I’m terribly busy, what with my family commitments and work, perhaps we could postpone having a reunion? I’ll let you know when I have a bit more free time.

All the best,

Fran

That should hold him … for ever?

I am doing loads of work to distract me from my gnawing hunger, though in between I pore over the soft porn of cookbooks, salivating. Oooh, crème caramel! Aaah,
tarte aux cerises
!

Which somehow reminds me of the afternoon I took the
Restoration Gardener
DVD out of the miscellaneous box and started guiltily watching it with the curtains in the sitting room shut tight, which must have made the Wevills frantic with curiosity.

They have started parking halfway across my drive like they did last time Mal was away, making it very difficult for me to get my car in and out; however, they prefer that to parking on their own narrow drive because it means they get to stare in the front of the house whenever they get in their car.

They only do this when Mal isn’t here, of course. And how do they know he’s away? Because he tells them – and gives them permission to do it, so they don’t have to keep moving one of their cars to get the other out!

After my sharp email to Mal he didn’t communicate with me at all for two days, which was probably just as well since I was seething, and then suddenly he rang me as if nothing had happened. I might have thought he hadn’t got my reply except that I could spot the Weevil-shaped hole in the dry biscuit of his conversation. I expect they have put a whole new spin on my daily round of giddy dissipation: walking in the fairy glen, going up to Plas Gwyn to help Nia whitewash her studio and see what new finds she and Rhodri have made in the attic, coffee (and sometimes a hand with the washing-up – old habits die hard) at Carrie’s, or down to the Druid’s Rest in the early evening for a wicked glass of diet tonic.

Now Mal phones me every couple of days, though there was a time when he would call me every night when he was away; and even though he is the other side of London he would still have driven back for the weekend at least once. And I’m sure he forgets who he’s talking to half the time, since he tends to address me in computer-speak monologues that slide effortlessly in through one ear and out the other.

I have barely touched on the fringes of understanding the Internet, though if the day ever dawns when I have to start submitting my artwork by computer I expect I will manage it: when I need to know something,
that’s
the time to learn it, otherwise I’d just be cluttering up my brain cells with a lot of useless information.

Since he doesn’t ask me anything about myself I haven’t mentioned that my hair has mysteriously got two inches shorter and shows a distressing tendency to go into ringlets, I’ve planted a rose in his part of the garden and half-covered the fireplace in pottery shards and mosaic tiles.

The only personal thing he let fall is that he has seen a bit of Alison, his first wife. What I want to know is,
which
bit?

This morning I let three lots of estate agents into Fairy Glen to value it for Ma, and they didn’t seem to know quite what to make of it.

The bright colours and sparkling, cluttered rooms stunned them speechless, as did the very basic amenities, even though it does have a bathroom and a kitchen of sorts. And none of them explored the garden further than the flattish area around the cottage, not having come equipped for hiking.

They scribbled in their notepads, scratched their heads, then valued it at about ten times what I thought it was worth, even though the glen is pretty useless for anything much except enjoying (and I must take lots more photos of it in case it is lost to me as inspiration – or at least in its present, magically neglected, form).

Of course, Nia might be right and no one will buy it, though then Ma couldn’t afford her cruise, which would be a shame. Dad left her quite comfortably off, but I don’t think she could get right round the world without augmenting her cash flow.

When I phoned her with the valuations she was absolutely amazed, but decided she would go with the highest one from sheer hopeful greed, though she
still
wouldn’t sell it, even at the asking price, if she didn’t like the person who made the offer!

Later I went to the Druid’s Rest, since Carrie wanted to show us the fruits of her research into the Life and Times of Gabe Weston before Rhodri got there, and secretly I am sure that Nia was as keen to see what she had turned up as I was.

Mona Wevill was sitting in her car in front of my house smoking when I went out, and she stared at me deadpan as I skirted round the bonnet and headed into the village. Creepy, or what?

Nia and Carrie were in the back parlour with the stuffed trout, two halves of Murphy’s and an open packet of dry-roasted peanuts between them.

‘Hi, Carrie. Hi, Nia – how’s it going up at Plas Gwyn?’

‘Fine, except I wish Dottie would stop trying to stable her horse in my workshop. I’ve left her a perfectly good loose box at the end of the wing, but she can’t seem to grasp the concept of change. She
does
realise Rhodri’s doing his best to maintain the place, though, in her own dim way, and she’s trying to help.’

‘I went up there yesterday,’ Carrie said, ‘and planned how I wanted the tearoom set out, once we get permission.’

‘And reminded us that we hadn’t thought of toilets for the visitors,’ Nia sighed. ‘Another thing to fit in somewhere.’

‘You’ll get there,’ Carrie said encouragingly. ‘Anyway, aren’t you both just
dying
to see what I’ve got on Gabriel Weston?’ And she dumped a big carrier bag of stuff on the tabletop.

Not only had she scoured her contacts, the Internet and the magazine racks of the nearest town for further information on Gabriel Weston, she’d even gone to the length of buying his book!

Restoration Gardener
looked just the sort of thing I would like if I weren’t horribly and unreasonably prejudiced against the author, who smiled enigmatically at me from his book jacket photo.

‘You know, the more I look at his face, the more I wonder if I’ve totally flipped and become one of those women who
imagine
they are having a relationship with someone famous,’ I confessed, picking it up to study it more closely. ‘Maybe it was just someone who looked a bit like him? I mean, he can’t be unique, can he?’

‘He looks pretty unique to me,’ Carrie said, scrutinising his picture with the eyes of a connoisseur. Then she riffled through the heap. ‘I got most of this off the Net. There’s lots about a paternity claim case, back when he’d just started making a name for himself on TV.’

‘What? A
paternity
case?’ I snatched up the first sheet that came to hand and started reading, and so did Nia. After a bit I looked up. ‘It wasn’t his baby after all!’

‘No,’ agreed Carrie, ‘but there must have been something in it, because his wife divorced him – see, read that one there.’

‘Reputation Restored! TV gardener cleared in paternity claim row … but too late to save marriage.’

‘Perhaps she simply wasn’t the “stand by your man” type?’

Nia was frowning over a magazine article. ‘Or maybe she wanted to divorce him anyway? It says here that she went to America and remarried.’

Carrie fished out a copy of
Surprise!
magazine: ‘Yes, and she’s just divorced and remarried again – for the third time, I think. This one’s a plastic surgeon.’

‘Once Gabe Weston started being a familiar face on the telly he’d probably have had lots of opportunities to play around,’ Nia said cynically. ‘I suspect all men would if they got the chance.’

‘Not
all
of them!’ Carrie protested defensively.

‘Ignore Nia, she’s jaundiced on the subject,’ I told her. ‘Your Huw would never dream of being unfaithful to you.’

‘He’d better not,’ Carrie said. ‘And actually, maybe we’re wrong about this guy, because once I’d waded through all the information I sort of got to like him. Listen to this one: