Sowing Secrets

‘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.

The Druid’s Rest

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.’

‘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.

Sex, Lies and Videotape

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.’