Sowing Secrets

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.

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 unmarried 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.

Up the Fairy Glen

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.’