Sowing Secrets

by Ashley, Trisha

  ‘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 go
ne 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.’

  ‘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.’r />
  ‘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.