Sowing Secrets

‘I think the glen is a burden the estate doesn’t need,’ Rhodri said stubbornly. ‘And there’s enough garden around the house to restore without it.’

‘There’s no garden around the house,’ I said. ‘It’s all grass and trees. How on earth can you restore that, Rhodri?’

‘Ah, but there was a garden once – and, what’s more, I’ve written to Gabriel Weston and he’s considering putting Plas Gwyn on the shortlist for his next TV restoration! What do you think of that?’

‘Oh my God!’ I said despairingly as my heart came into sudden collision with my ribcage before dropping into my boots, potted in one. ‘Are all my vultures coming home to roost?’

‘I thought you kept hens?’ he said, puzzled. ‘You’re not keeping birds of prey now, are you, Fran?’

‘You did say Gabriel Weston?’ demanded Nia.

‘Yes. Have you seen his series, Restoration Gardener?’

‘Well, would you Adam-and-Eve it!’ she said, turning to exchange an incredulous glance with me.

‘What?’ Rhodri said, puzzled.

I gathered my wits together. ‘It’s just that by a strange coincidence we watched a short DVD with clips of the series last night and saw him for the first time. Don’t forget, Rhodri, that the TV reception is impossible here unless you’ve got a satellite dish.’

‘You’re right, I had forgotten,’ he agreed. ‘And you haven’t got satellite?’

‘No, but we don’t watch much TV anyway.’

‘Just endless Buffy DVDs,’ pointed out Nia. ‘You’re addicted.’

‘Well, Carrie’s addicted to Sex and the City, and you don’t seem to mind watching either of them when we have one of our girls’ nights in.’

‘No, but I haven’t got a DVD player,’ Nia said. ‘I haven’t got time to sit about glued to the box – and neither have you,’ she added pointedly to Rhodri. ‘We’re both divorced and broke, and had better get on with making a living.’

‘What were you saying about this Gabriel Weston, Rhodri? We seem to have side-tracked,’ I said innocently, ‘and we don’t know much about him.’

‘Well, he’s appeared on various things over the last few years, but now he presents this really popular show called Restoration Gardener. He chooses a house that once had a special garden and surveys it, researches family documents and stuff, then draws plans to recreate what was there. Then his team spends a few weeks restoring part of it, at the programme’s expense. They often go back and see how the earlier ones are getting on too. It’s really interesting.’

‘And they might do Plas Gwyn?’ I asked, impressed despite my personal disinclination to have Adam delving anywhere in my Eden.

‘I don’t know – I sent in photos and details and told them there were lots of family documents, and I’ve just heard it’s being seriously considered. Though of course that’s only the first step, because even if it gets on the shortlist it still has to win the TV vote-off. But it would be wonderful if it did – and even more wonderful to have garden features again at Plas Gwyn other than a lot of grass and trees!’

‘There’s certainly nothing much there now,’ I agreed. ‘Apart from the turf maze, and even that’s getting hazy around the edges, because hardly anyone ever goes and walks around it these days, and Aled drives straight over it on the mower.’

‘I walk around it,’ Nia said, ‘especially at certain times of the year.’

‘Yes, and I still think it’s unfair that you came back and were allowed to be one of the Thirteen for the May Day maze-walking, but they will only let me watch from a distance,’ I said, distracted by the injustice of being excluded from participating in the local mysteries.

‘The Thirteen have to be from certain local families, especially the leader, the Cadi,’ Nia said firmly. ‘Even Rhodri could only watch, even if he wasn’t a man.’

‘I think I forgot to mention the maze in the details I sent,’ Rhodri said, knitting his brows like a Neanderthal sheep. ‘Not that it is a maze at all really, just a sort of winding pathway.’

‘It’s a unicursal maze,’ said Nia, who seems very knowledgeable about these things lately, ‘and it’s probably been there as long as the house, so you should look after it.’

‘Right,’ he said vaguely. ‘And you’d be surprised how the rest of the garden’s changed over the centuries. There used to be a big terrace, and there was a pond with a fountain, only Mother filled that in when I was small so I wouldn’t drown.’

Rhodri’s mother was mega protective, which is why he was taught at home until he finally went off to Eton or Rugby or whichever posh public school his name was down for and thenceforth only ever appeared in the school holidays.

‘It would give the place a bit of publicity if they chose Plas Gwyn for a TV makeover,’ Nia said. ‘Contacting them was a good idea, Rhodri!’

‘You needn’t sound so surprised!’ he objected. ‘But I don’t suppose they will choose us – we’re a bit out of the way.’

I said nothing, torn between realising how good for Rhodri it would be if Plas Gwyn was chosen, and being appalled at the thought of Rosie’s incarnated maybe-father practically on the doorstep.

‘They might, but even if they do I expect this Gabe Weston only spends a couple of days actually on site filming,’ she said, pointedly looking at me. ‘His minions probably do the hard work.’

‘Which would include me,’ Rhodri agreed. ‘I’ll have to do a lot of the donkey work myself. Aled’s not up to much – he should have retired years ago, but he just loves driving that mower around.’

‘And clipping things,’ Nia put in drily. ‘I’ve never seen a pleached walk quite so pleached, the stilt hedge looks half naked, and what that bit of topiary by the front gate is I’m not going to even try to guess, but it looks obscene.’

‘I asked,’ he said gloomily. ‘It’s suppose to be a rocket.’

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ I said. ‘I think you should put a little sign in front of it, telling visitors.’

‘If there are any visitors. I don’t really think we stand much chance of winning the garden restoration because I’m sure the other properties are a lot more deserving.’ Rhodri smiled his rather heartbreaking smile at me. ‘But I’m glad you’re happy and your illustrations and cartoons are so popular, Fran. Nia’s been telling me all about it and how well Rosie is doing with her veterinary science course.’

‘She was always mad about animals,’ Nia said. ‘It was a logical choice. And what about your Zoe, Rhodri, wasn’t she doing some modelling?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, though only in a part-time sort of way – and she’s getting married soon.’

‘She’s a very pretty girl,’ I said kindly, though she’s tall and skinny with big bug eyes in a triangular face and reminds me of nothing so much as a praying mantis, but with Rhodri’s sweet nature.

‘I’m glad I don’t have any children to complicate things,’ Nia said complacently. ‘My sister, Sian, is enough to cope with. She’s convinced I’m swindling her out of her birthright just because I’m buying the cottage from Mam and Dad! But I’m paying a fair price and they wanted it in instalments to live on in their retirement, so it’s suiting us all round – except Sian.’

‘She’s not married?’ asked Rhodri.

‘No, though she’s been through men like a dose of salts,’ Nia said. ‘Works for a newspaper down in Cardiff.’

While we had been talking we seemed to have demolished a plate of pastries between us, though I suddenly had a deep yearning for one of Carrie’s luscious gingerbread dragons, with scales in scalloped red icing … I think this is what comes of deciding to diet: all I can think about now is food.

‘I think we should all go up to Plas Gwyn and see what fresh ideas we can come up with on site,’ suggested Nia. ‘Maybe see what’s stored in the attic.’

‘That would take more than one afternoon,’ Rhodri said, ‘but we could have a quick look now.’

Rhodri wanted to pay for everything but we insisted on going thirds, and I took the money up to the till. I emerged from the teashop five minutes later rather sheepishly holding a paper bag.

Being the smallest one, I sat crammed into the back of Rhodri’s impractical old Spyder sports car. ‘Have to swap this for something more useful, Rhodri, like an old Land Rover,’ Nia said, and he winced. I don’t think she will divorce him from his car; that’s one bridge too far.

Halfway up the drive we met his cousin Dottie (whose name is quite apt) riding towards us on a large bay horse with three white socks.

She halted next to the car and looked down at us disapprovingly, especially me with a half-eaten gingerbread dragon in one hand. ‘Came to see you, Roddy – didn’t think you’d be out gallivantin’ with gels when the house is falling to rack and ruin around you. And you the last of the Gwyn-Whatmires!’

‘Did you want anything in particular, Dottie?’ he asked, wincing again.

‘Cup of tea,’ she said. ‘Made it myself. Come on, Rollover!’

Fortunately she seemed to be addressing the horse, for it moved off skittishly sideways, was gathered in and trotted briskly off.

I was glad the drive was short, because I was starting to feel a bit queasy, and tossed the dragon’s tail out into the bushes for the squirrels. Come to that, this last couple of weeks I’ve felt odder and odder. Am I coming down with something? It’s that sort of brink-of-illness feeling – or maybe brink-of-overdue-period feeling? I’m so erratic, and it always makes me feel bloated and strange.

Yes, come to think of it, I’m sure that’s what it is, because I’m Emotionally Weird, always a sign.

Grand Designs

Plas Gwyn is a collection of mossy, ancient grey stones that evolved haphazardly round three sides of a paved courtyard. The oldest part is the three-storeyed hall, with the solar tower poking up above the roof and Zéphirine Drouhin and the knotty trunks of old wisteria entwined around its nether regions; then there is the seventeenth-century wing where Rhodri would have his private apartments, and the stables and outbuildings of various kinds, ripe, as Nia pointed out, for conversion into studios, gift shop and refreshment room.

The cast-off furnishings of centuries were stored on the top floor of the hall, which opened right into the roof and was accessible by a twisty stair that made you wonder how they carried some of the larger pieces of redundant furniture up there – and how some of them were to be got down again.

‘The thing is,’ Nia said, as we finished our tour of the main house and passed through a low door and down two well-worn stone steps into what was once the kitchen, ‘you need to channel the visitors around so that they have to exit through here into a gift shop. Then they step out into the courtyard and there will be the tearoom and the workshops in the old stables – more lovely spending opportunities! And in the summer you could put little iron tables and chairs outside here.’

‘I’d need to employ people, though – there’d be wages to pay,’ Rhodri pointed out gloomily.

‘You already have Mrs Jones and her team of local ladies to come in and clean, and open it to the public on summer weekends,’ I pointed out. ‘They would probably be happy to work more hours.’

‘Yes, and Carrie will staff the tearoom,’ Nia agreed, ‘so you would just need to find someone to run the gift shop, and, if you made it the entrance to the house as well as the exit, they could sell the tickets too.’

‘He’d need signs along the drive to direct cars to a parking area,’ I said. ‘You could rope off that flat bit next to the paddock. And people could come to the workshops in winter even when the house wasn’t open, so that would work well.’

Rhodri was looking dubious about becoming the area’s major employer – in fact, apart from the hotel, pretty nearly the only employer – but as we went around and Nia enthused, he began to look more relaxed.

I thought it all sounded possible too, with hard work, and Rhodri would be able to keep his family home, scrape a living and still be comfortable in the new wing with the family ghost. (The Grey Lady is a quiet, benign female presence who closes the great oaken doors gently from time to time and tiptoes across the dark wooden floors so as not to disturb the living occupants.)

Rhodri is going to get some plans drawn up for the gift shop, tearoom and studios, and Nia volunteered to help him to sticker the furniture that is being consigned to the attic, the new wing or the old hall, so that strong removal men can come and change it all about.

She was having fun, I could tell by the bright colour in her cheeks and the sparkle in her eyes, so after a while I left them to it and walked off home to feed the hens and do a bit of work before driving into town.

The work didn’t get done, though; instead, I drew a cartoon of Rhodri as a sort of amiable heraldic lion with the caption ‘Come to Plas Gwyn for a roaring good time!’

When I checked for emails later there was one from Mal, which I’d expected, but also another blast from the past from Bigblondsurfdude, which I nearly deleted unread with the spam, except that it said ‘Thanks!’ and curiosity got the better of me. Just as well it did.

Hi Fran!

Thanks for your message. No, I’m not married. I was in a long-term relationship but we broke up before Christmas. Your daughter sounds great – almost made me wish I had kids! Yes, you’re right, we’ve got a lot of catching-up to do. Hope to call in and see you sometime soon.

All the best,

Tom.

My message? For a minute I thought I really had flipped and emailed him back … until the truth dawned and I realised where my missing email printout had gone. It comes to something when your children plot against you.

I opened Mal’s message expecting it to be a soothingly mundane list of instructions or fascinating details of how clever he was being, but it was far from that: more an accusation, really, though I’m not quite sure of what. Enjoying myself in his absence, maybe?

Apparently Owen Wevill emailed him after he and Mona spotted an intruder in our garden the other night, when they couldn’t sleep due to the sound of my late-night party. Of course they weren’t complaining about the noise – on the contrary, they were glad to know I could enjoy myself while my husband was away, and were sure that my old friend Rhodri would do his best to keep me entertained, now he was back living in the village!

I was livid and sent a reply off straight away.

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.