TRISHA ASHLEY
Sowing Secrets

Copyright

Published by Avon

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain as The Generous Gardner by Severn House Publishers Ltd., Surrey, 2004

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2008

Copyright © Trisha Ashley 2008

Cover illustration © Debbie Clement 2016, Dominique Corbasson 2008

Trisha Ashley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9781847560117

Ebook Edition © February 2016 ISBN: 9780007329014

Version: 2018-06-13

Dedication

For Brian and Linda Long With love

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: A Seed is Sown

Chapter 1-Altered Conceptions

Chapter 2-An Unconsidered Trifle

Chapter 3-Up the Fairy Glen

Chapter 4-The Druid’s Rest

Chapter 5-Sex, Lies and Videotape

Chapter 6-Cool Runnings

Chapter 7-Grand Designs

Chapter 8-Up the Garden Path

Chapter 9-Thriller

Chapter 10-Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Chapter 11-Cayman Blue

Chapter 12-Misconceptions

Chapter 13-Grapes of Wrath

Chapter 14-Bigger Things

Chapter 15-All Cried Out

Chapter 16-Posted

Chapter 17-Over a Barrel

Chapter 18-Stemmed

Chapter 19-Mother Makes Three

Chapter 20-Bedding Out

Chapter 21-Go, Lovely Rose

Chapter 22-Something in the Water

Chapter 23-Great Expectations

Chapter 24-Paradise Falls

Chapter 25-Ting-Driven Thing

Chapter 26-Postcards From the Edge

Chapter 27-The Bartered Bride

Chapter 28-Lost in Space

Chapter 29-Homecoming Queen

Chapter 30-Might As Well Live

Chapter 31-Stamped Out

Chapter 32-Double Trouble

Epilogue: Heaven-Scent

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue: A Seed is Sown

Lost Angel of a ruin’d Paradise!

Shelley

With a galvanic jerk Fran March opened her eyes to find herself practically nose to nose with a total stranger: a sleeping young Neptune, his lightly muscled body, carelessly disposed in sleep, green-washed by the early morning light filtering in through thin caravanette curtains.

Recoiling, she slipped from the bed, praying he wouldn’t wake up, panicking as she tried to find her clothes among the clutter of a camper van that both looked and smelled like a potting shed.

This Neptune’s trident was the homely gardening fork that fell over with a clatter as she struggled with the unfamiliar sliding door, almost weeping with silent frustration.

She froze as he stirred and half opened drowsy, green-flecked eyes, only to close them again and sleep on, long narrow nose pressed against the pillow, hair in improbable spirals and the darker stubble pricking out along the edge of his jaw.

The door finally opened enough to let her slip out into a world silent except for the non-judgemental birds, though, misjudging the drop, she didn’t so much hit the ground running as fall to her knees in the pub car park like a penitent Pope Joan.

Altered Conceptions

‘Mum, you know you’ve always told me that my father was a student prince who turned into a toad and hopped it when you kissed him?’ Rosie asked me ominously on Boxing Day while we were watching Who Do You Think You Are?. Mal was safely out of the way upstairs in his study poring over his stamp collection, yearning for a Cayman Blue.

‘Yes, ’ I agreed cautiously, the chunk of Christmas cake I had just eaten suddenly turning to stone in my stomach, though you’d think a survival instinct that sent a surge of energy to the leg muscles for a quick getaway would have been much more useful – except that Rosie had me cornered on the sofa.

She was wearing a familiarly stubborn expression, like a very serious elf maiden, all long, honey-blonde locks fronding around her slightly pointed ears and a frown above her straight brows. Her changeling green-grey eyes were fixed accusingly on mine.

‘Or that other story, where you said he was Neptune disguised in human form, and he dragged you down into his sea kingdom because he’d fallen in love with you? Only you escaped, helped by friendly dolphins, and were found wandering the beach covered in seaweed next morning?’

‘Mmm,’ I said vaguely, though actually I was quite proud of that one – some of the details were pretty inventive, especially all the little mussel shells clapping with glee when I got away, and a desolate Neptune blowing his conch shell to summon me back every evening for a month before giving up and swimming sadly away for ever, totally conched out.

Perhaps it was a fishy story, at that?

My favourite was the one where her father was a gypsy king with fast flamenco fingers, cursed by an evil witch never to stay more than one night in any place. If he did, she would appear, take his Music out and shoot it. (Music was a dog.)

That one always made Rosie cry, and I had to assure her that the king never stopped more than one night in any place, because he loved Music more than anything. And so the dog lived for ever, and they were very happy travelling about in their caravan, except when he thought about the beautiful princess he had had to leave behind.

But now, seemingly, the time for fairy stories was over.

‘Mum,’ Rosie said sternly, ‘you’ve never told me anything real about my father, and although I do know it’s because you don’t want to talk about it, now I’m eighteen and at university I think I have a right to know all about him, don’t you?’

‘Yes, darling, but there really isn’t much more to tell you,’ I said helplessly, because there hadn’t been that many facts to embroider. He came, he went – what more could I say? ‘Those stories were all variations on the truth, Rosie.’

‘I’ve been talking about it with Granny and she says it’s time you came clean, because you met my father at university in your first term and had been going out with him for two years before you got pregnant with me, so you must know all about him!’

Thank you, Ma.

‘Granny is wrong: that wasn’t your father,’ I said shortly. ‘I’ve never said he was.’

Mind you, I’ve never said he wasn’t either, so perhaps it’s not surprising that Ma, my husband and now even my daughter assumed it, and also that I never wanted to talk about it simply because he abandoned me.

And I don’t want to think about him, either; why rake up old hurts?

‘Well, Granny says he must have been, you hadn’t been going out with anyone else, but when she wanted you to write and tell him you were pregnant, you refused,’ she persisted.

‘Because it was nothing to do with him,’ I said patiently, though I suppose it was, in a way. If Tom hadn’t told me it was over between us on the night of the end-of-term pub crawl and party, maybe I wouldn’t have had too much to drink and ended up pregnant.

That put paid to the last year of my graphic design course, though Rosie, when she arrived was such a perfect creation that I felt I should have been allowed to submit her like a work in progress at the end of finals and get my degree anyway.

And once I set eyes on Rosie I never regretted having her, of course – except when she was giving me the third degree like now, and frowning at me as though she could extract the truth by telepathy: but only the one she wanted, a tidy truth with checkable details. A name, a face – a father.

I couldn’t give her any of those things, but clearly the time had come to give her what I had; to expose the bare bones of a buried past. I knew it had to come one day.

‘OK, Rosie, I’ll tell you everything I remember, which isn’t much – it was such a long time ago.’

I patted the sofa cushion and she plumped down, looking at me expectantly. ‘This had better not be another of your fairy stories.’

‘It isn’t, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to like it any better. Granny was partly right about Tom – we did meet in my first term at university, though he was a year ahead of me. But he dumped me right at the end of my second year because he was off to Rome on an arts scholarship and didn’t see me as part of his new future. It was a bit of a shock.’

That was the understatement of the year – I was devastated. He’d even given me a ring a few weeks before with ‘Forever’ engraved inside it, though ‘For Now’ would have given me more warning of his intentions.

‘Poor Mum! And then you realised you were pregnant in the summer holidays?’ prompted Rosie sympathetically.

‘Yes, but not by Tom,’ I said, quickly scotching any ideas of a romantic tragedy. ‘Your father was someone I met on the rebound.’

Seeing she looked totally unconvinced I elaborated. ‘It was like Brief Encounter, but with sex. All I really remember about him now were his amazing eyes – sort of hazel with green rays round the pupils, and a lovely warm, deep, comforting voice.’

There had to have been something compelling about him at the time, or I wouldn’t have gone off with him like that, even on the rebound and far from sober, would I?

‘Come on, Mum, you can’t expect me to believe that! You? A one-night stand? Per-lease!’ she said scathingly. ‘And after everything you’ve told me about safe sex and loving relationships?’

‘Because I didn’t want you to make the same mistakes I did,’ I said, though I suppose if it hadn’t led to pregnancy I would have conveniently forgotten the whole Midsummer Night’s madness – or put a romantic gloss on it.

‘Why does even Mal think it was this Tom, then?’

‘He just assumed it, like Granny, since it’s not an episode I ever wanted to discuss, even if it did mean I had you, darling, which I’ve never regretted in the slightest. And please don’t bring the subject up when he’s about, will you? It’s all best forgotten.’

Mal is the jealous kind, so one previous lover seemed as much as he could take when we were at the true-confessions stage of our relationship. Mind you, although I didn’t tell him who Rosie’s father was – or wasn’t – my words circled in an endless holding pattern around this perfectly obvious gaping hole in my narrative, and he never once asked the question.

Rosie had got up and was wandering restlessly about, scowling. ‘But if you are telling the truth this time, Mum, then you can tell me something about my real father, can’t you? You did at least know who he was? Didn’t you want to tell him about me?’

She came back across the room, a paler, taller version of myself at her age, as though her father had been a ghost, which for all I could remember of him he might well have been. I mean, in eighteen years I’ve nearly convinced myself that there was no second party involved, so Rosie’s was practically a born-again virgin birth: she’s mine, all mine.

‘So what was he called? Where did you meet him? What did he look like?’

‘I … can’t remember,’ I said uncomfortably, but I could see I wasn’t going to be allowed off the hook until I’d given her more than that. ‘He was just passing through the town and we picked him up in a pub somewhere and took him on to the end-of-term party with us. We’d all had a lot to drink. He said his name was Adam, and he was a gardener, but that’s about all I know about him.’

‘And you expect me to believe that?’ she said angrily.

‘Well, I did. And he had an old camper van,’ I added, though that’s one of the details I have allowed to go fuzzy over the years … except that sometimes I wake up with a thumping heart in an absolute panic, thinking I’m back in the damned thing and trying to creep out before the stranger I’ve spent the night with wakes up.

(And it smelled like a potting shed, come to that, so perhaps he really was a gardener, generous with his seed. But let’s leave the analogy there before I start to feel like a Gro-bag.)

‘Mum, you could at least tell me the truth, and not fob me off with yet more fairy stories!’ she said vehemently. ‘A camper van!’

‘I have, Rosie,’ I said, getting up and giving her a hug, which she endured rather than returned. ‘I have told you the truth, and if I knew more details I’d tell you those too. But I love you, and Granny loves you – isn’t that enough?’

I didn’t include Mal, fond as he is of her in his way, for the relationship’s always been tinged with mutual jealousy, though things are better now that Rosie’s away during term-time studying veterinary science. But she’s always spent a lot of time with her granny anyway, since Mal is not a pet lover, and so most of her menagerie stayed with Ma after we married, something I’m not sure she’s ever quite forgiven him for.

Mal’s footsteps sounded upstairs and Rosie said quickly, ‘I wish I knew if you were telling me the truth this time!’

‘Rosie, I’m sorry if it’s not what you wanted to hear, but that’s what really happened,’ I assured her. (And how did I come to have such a bossy little cow for a daughter?) ‘And by the time I knew I was pregnant there was no way to find out more – no means of tracing him. I never even knew his second name.’

‘You must have talked to each other!’

‘Yes, but we had both drunk an awful lot, don’t forget,’ I said patiently. ‘I don’t remember what we talked about, but he must have been really nice or I wouldn’t have gone back with him. I was only horrified next morning when I was sober, because I thought I still loved Tom.’

‘But if Tom was your boyfriend, why are you so sure he’s not my father?’ she demanded.

On any list of twenty questions you didn’t want your daughter to ask, this would come fairly high up.

‘I just am … And although I wasn’t on the pill, we always took precautions.’

‘Accidents happen,’ she pointed out. I hope she doesn’t know this from experience, but am not about to ask her while she is interrogating me. Or even at all.

‘Well they didn’t,’ I said firmly, though I couldn’t put my hand on my heart and truthfully say that I was one hundred per cent sure that Rosie wasn’t Tom’s baby, because we might have got a little slapdash with the contraception towards the end of our affair … ‘And don’t think I didn’t try and convince myself that you were Tom’s, because I did – but I’m positive you’re not.’

She changed tack with disconcerting suddenness. ‘You could tell me something about this Tom Collins, though – like, why his parents called him after a drink?’

‘Collinge, not Collins!’ I said. ‘And why do you want to talk about him? It’s pointless – what’s past is past. We’re happy now, aren’t we? That’s the important thing.’

This was rhetorical: no teenager is ever going to admit to being happy, it’s not in the job description.

Mal came in, the tall, dark and handsome answer to any almost-maiden’s prayer, except for the thunderous frown, and snapped, ‘Rose, your phone’s been going off every five minutes in your bedroom – can’t you hear it? And why must it play such loud, irritating music?’

Rosie gave him her best ‘you’re speaking a dead language, you fossil’ glare. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ she demanded indignantly, and dashed off.

It was probably one of the boyfriends she prefers not to tell us about, though why they have to be a deep, dark secret I don’t know. Perhaps they vanish if exposed to the light of parental inspection.

I could feel the twitchings of an idea for a new cartoon coming on – or perhaps one of my Alphawoman comic strips. Something involving vampires and unsuitable boyfriends … But before I could pin it down Mal jerked me back into reality by demanding, ‘When did you say she was going back to university, Fran? And why does she have to be so untidy? The place is like a pigsty!’

The newborn inspiration turned its face to the wall and died; I do hate these sudden transitions from my out-of-body experiences. And ‘untidy’ was two abandoned magazines and a scatter of rose catalogues on the floor and an empty glass on the coffee table’s otherwise pristine surface. Pigs should be so lucky.

‘She takes after me and Ma: chaos comes naturally to us. And she’s going back to university on the fourth, after my birthday,’ I sighed. ‘I do miss her when she’s gone.’

‘Well, you’ve got me,’ he pointed out jealously.

‘Not for girlie chats, though, and you’re off on that six-week contract the day after Rosie leaves,’ I said.

Mal is something clever with computers, so he often works away troubleshooting. I might have added that even when he is home he is either up in his study messing about with his stamps, or down at the marina with his boat, but I didn’t want to seem to be complaining. It’s not like his hobbies are gambling, binge drinking and loose women, is it?

‘We’ll be able to keep in touch by email now too,’ I reminded him, for his surprise Christmas present to me had been the creation of the Fran March Rose Art website, which was very thoughtful of him. Rosie has promised to get me confidently surfing and emailing before she goes back to university, having much more patience with beginners than Mal, and I am to have a designated workspace under the stairs, with his old computer.

Truth to tell, I don’t mind Mal’s absences that much once he has actually gone, since not only do I actually like being alone, but I have lots of work to get on with out in my studio. Right now I need to finish off the illustrations for my third annual Fran March Rose Calendar, because the deadline is the end of January, and I still have December and the cover illustration to go.

And oh, the bliss of slumping into comfortable, guilt-free slovenliness! The effort of constantly maintaining the level of household standards Mal increasingly favours would be beyond me even if I tried, which I don’t, apart from token gestures, but I’d had a pre-Christmas blitz and everything still looked pretty clean. But then, my idea of a hygienic and tidy home is merely one where the health inspectors don’t slap skull-and-crossbones Hazard stickers on the bathroom and kitchen doors on a weekly basis, while his is the domestic equivalent of an operating theatre.

‘Do you want to go out for a walk before it gets dark?’ I asked hopefully. ‘We always used to go for a long hike on Boxing Day.’

‘No, I think I’ll watch that tall ships DVD you got me for Christmas again,’ he said, and, while I was glad that my present had found favour, it occurred to me that we were leading increasingly separate lives. I expect it makes a marriage healthy not being on top of each other all the time, but I do miss the long country walks we used to take together before he got boatitis. And while nothing would induce me to get on something that can go up and down, or side to side – or even both at once – without any warning, at least it gives him a bit of fresh air and exercise when he is at home between contracts, playing doll’s houses on his petit bateau, Cayman Blue, down at the marina.

Oh, well, not only have I got Mal and my beloved Rosie home and still speaking to each other, but Ma’s coming down to Fairy Glen (her cottage in the village) for a few days, so we can all be together for my birthday on the third: what more could I want?

I curled up next to him on the sofa, and after a couple of minutes he noticed I was there and put his arm around me. He smelled like a million dollars, which is about what I paid for that aftershave: worth every penny.

‘Fran, you’re singing “I Got You Babe”,’ he pointed out accusingly, as though I was doing something antisocial – which perhaps, considering my voice, I was. I never know I’m doing it unless I’m out somewhere and a space clears all around me as if by magic.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m just feeling happy.’

And let’s not forget mega relieved too: I’d managed to get through the tricky question-and-answer session with Rosie that I’d known had to come one day, and I thought it had gone quite well, considering.

Must remember to disillusion Ma too.

An Unconsidered Trifle

Although relations between them were a little strained by my birthday, Mal and Rosie still hadn’t seriously fallen out with each other, which must have been a record – though I think I might if she carries on shooting questions at me about her father at unexpected moments, as if trying to catch me out.

The mud at the bottom of the once limpid pool of my memory has been stirred with a big stick, so that when she suddenly shoots at me, ‘How tall was Adam?’ up to the surface bobs the reply, ‘Oh, well over six foot,’ without a second’s pause.

‘What colour was Adam’s hair?’

‘Like dark clover honey.’

‘What was Adam’s last name?’

‘No idea.’

‘What colour was the camper van?’

‘Blue and white.’

‘What on earth were you drinking?’

‘Rough scrumpy cider.’

However, I have now run out of answers so she has given up, thank goodness, and even Rosie can see that I can hardly put an ad in the press saying, ‘Did you have a one-night stand nearly twenty years ago with a slender woman of medium height, with grey eyes and long, wavy, strawberry-blonde hair? If so, please answer this ad for news that may interest you.’

Of course, had I known what the outcome would be, I would have noted Adam the gardener’s full name and address at the very least. Mind you, had I known the outcome I wouldn’t have done it in the first place – but then I wouldn’t have had my beloved and infuriating daughter, would I?

She was now packing for her return to university the next day, and I kept missing items of clothing, like my Gap T-shirt and good leather belt. Also several pots of home-made jam and two bottles of elderflower champagne.

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.’

‘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.’

‘It’s starting,’ Nia warned, and we stopped brushing bits of coconut off each other and turned to face the screen.

Helicopter-borne, the camera homed slowly in on a small Tudor manor house sitting inoffensively among a rolling, sheep-nibbled expanse of grass, with here and there a flight of stone steps or a section of herringbone-brick pathway.

There wasn’t much more garden left there than around Rhodri’s mini-mansion, Plas Gwyn, I thought, taking a bite of Bakewell tart and settling back. All Rhodri’s old gardener, Aled, had to do was drive round and round on his little sit-on mower and indulge his passion for clipping trees into strangely rude shapes.

‘Approaching Slimbourne Manor you might think that there never was a garden here at all, or if there ever was, that all trace had vanished,’ said a warm, deep voice with just the faintest, tantalising hint of a West Country burr.

A strange shiver ran down my back and I sat up and stared at the screen. I’d definitely heard that voice before somewhere, I was sure of it – maybe on some other gardening programme. It certainly wasn’t one you’d ever forget, with a mellow tone that made you think of dark, rich honey and folded tawny velvet … of a pint of best bitter with the sunlight shining through it, or the dappled gold-browns of a peaty stream bed, or … well, you get the idea. Even if the programme was no good I could see how the audience was hooked. I was half-mesmerised myself.

‘Yet, as we get closer,’ the velvety voice continued, ‘we start to notice clues: grand steps that once led somewhere and the remains of beautiful old brick pathways. The grass at the front of the house that looked so flat from high above, from an angle shows the bumps and hollows of a long-vanished knot garden. Slimbourne was once a jewel in a beautiful setting, and we are going to resurrect it!’

‘I don’t see how he can see anything there,’ I said sceptically, trying to shake off the near-hypnosis of that voice. ‘Perhaps he just makes it up.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Carrie, suddenly our instant resident expert, ‘apparently he has an absolute gift for garden design, a huge knowledge of the history of old gardens and a degree in archaeology! And, what’s more, he looked totally hunky in his photo.’

‘I don’t think people say “hunky” any more,’ observed Nia. ‘They say a man is “fit” or “well fit”.’

‘Then he looked well fit. More than well fit. Well fit with knobs on.’

‘I should hope so,’ I said, watching critically as Gabe Weston slowly approached us on the screen, escorting a tall and ancient lady dressed in mottled tweed trousers and an old cricket jumper, her long string of pearls trapped under one pendulous breast.

I jerked upright as though someone had run their finger down my spine, the half-eaten cake in one hand.

‘I’m lucky in having the assistance of Lady Eleanor Arkleforth, the owner of this lovely house, who has already researched the garden thoroughly in the family archives.’

‘Thank you,’ Lady Arkleforth said graciously. ‘I’m delighted to restore the grounds to some semblance of what they once were at last.’

‘I believe you’ve found a plan of how the garden looked originally?’ Gabe Weston prompted.

The camera finally fully focused on the gardener’s highly unusual face, but I could still see it clearly even when it moved on to the garden plan, because his image seemed to have been flash-burned into my retinas.

He had a strong chin, green-flecked hazel eyes rayed at the corners where he had screwed them up in laughter or against the sun, and the sort of Grecian nose you could open letters with. Rich, darkest-honey hair spiralled tightly round his face like a wet water spaniel’s.

‘Are you all right, Fran?’ Nia asked suddenly. ‘Only you look a bit startled. Your mouth’s open and you’ve gone awfully pale.’ She looked from me to the screen, where my nemesis had now reappeared in the flesh wearing one of those archaic winged smiles full of inner amusement. ‘Mind you, he is pretty stunning – he can dibble my beds any time!’

‘And mine!’ agreed Carrie enthusiastically.

‘Of course I’m all right,’ I croaked, though I was by no means certain I hadn’t suddenly flipped. ‘Would you really say he was good-looking? He’s not exactly handsome, is he?’

But distinctive; so very distinctive that a face whose features I had thought safely forgotten suddenly reclaimed its place in my memory, like the last piece of a puzzle locking into place.

‘Back track,’ I said urgently. ‘I think that’s Rosie’s father!’

Nia had replayed the DVD so Gabe Weston’s face was frozen in mid-smile like a mysterious male Mona Lisa, and just as informative.

‘It’s got to be him – there can’t be two men who look like that and have the same beautiful voice with a West Country accent,’ I said, feeling strangely breathless. ‘Unless I’m going crackers!’

‘You already are crackers,’ Nia said, ‘but I believe you. Only I thought his name was Adam?’

‘So did I.’

Carrie, who had been sitting looking totally bewildered, suddenly exclaimed, ‘Rosie’s father is Gabe Weston? But I thought it was Rhodri!’

‘Rhodri? Are you insane?’

‘But you were here all that summer working at Teapots, and thick as thieves with him!’ she said defensively.

‘We were old friends, and Nia was away most of that summer, so he was the first person I told when I realised I was pregnant – but not because he was the father!’

‘Well,’ Carrie said, ‘it wasn’t just me who got the wrong end of the stick, especially when he became Rosie’s godfather! I’m sure half the village still think it.’

‘They think wrong, then.’

She looked at me doubtfully. ‘But are you sure it was Gabe Weston? And if so, how come you never told him about Rosie?’

‘I’m sure – and it wasn’t an affair, it was a one-night stand.’

‘That doesn’t sound like you, Fran!’

‘I was drunk and I’d just split up with my boyfriend. All I knew about the man I slept with was that he was called Adam – which, as it turns out, was a lie – that he came from Devon and was a gardener. Even if I’d wanted to I couldn’t have found him from that information.’

‘And until now you had no idea who Gabe Weston was?’ Carrie said. ‘Well, isn’t that just amazing?’

‘Tragic, more like,’ Nia said. Then she set Gabe into motion and speech again and we all watched him silently, and in my case angrily, though I don’t know why. He hadn’t sneaked away without a word, it was me who’d done that. All he was guilty of was carelessness.

‘I don’t suppose he’s ever given me a thought since,’ I muttered bitterly.

‘But what about Rosie?’ Nia asked.

‘What about Rosie?’

‘You aren’t going to tell her who her father is, now you know?’

I shuddered. ‘Who her father probably is – and let’s not open that can of worms. You know what Mal’s like, and he’s always sort of assumed Rosie’s Tom’s baby. We’ve been through all that. And if I told Rosie who it was she might try and contact him and be rebuffed, which would be terribly hurtful. Things are better left as they are.’

‘And it sounds like there’s an outside chance she might not be his anyway,’ Carrie said helpfully. ‘So it would probably come down to DNA testing, and just imagine if the father really was your ex-boyfriend after all!’

‘Thanks for that thought, Carrie.’

‘It gets even better,’ Nia said. ‘Tom, Fran’s old boyfriend, has just emailed her and he wants to come and see her.’

‘Yes, but I didn’t answer, so he’s probably got the message,’ I said hopefully. ‘After all this time I don’t want either of them to pop back into my life and mess things up.’

I looked at the screen again. Gabe Weston was smiling, but then I expect he has a lot to smile about, being a successful TV personality. ‘He’s probably married with his own family by now,’ I mused aloud. ‘Even if Rosie were his he wouldn’t want to know.’

‘Divorced,’ said Carrie knowledgeably. ‘His only daughter lives with her mum in America, but his name’s been linked with quite a few other women since.’

‘I bet it has,’ Nia said drily.

Carrie regarded me admiringly: ‘Well, you’re a dark horse, Fran! It’s so romantic, just like The French Lieutenant’s Woman.’

‘I can’t see where The French Lieutenant’s Woman comes in,’ Nia said critically. ‘Gabe Weston looks more like Meryl Streep than Fran does.’

‘And I certainly haven’t been waiting for him to come back,’ I objected. ‘In fact, I’m going to try and forget I ever recognised him. Let’s just let sleeping gardeners lie – that’s seemed to work for me pretty well so far.’

‘Then perhaps you should stop humming “Look What You’ve Done to Me”?’ suggested Nia.

Mal phoned late that night after they’d gone home, and strangely enough I felt as guilty while I was talking to him as if I’d just spent the night with Adam the gardener all over again.

I would have liked to have blotted the memories out in Mal’s arms, but instead I simply had to obliterate them with leftover cake and a bar of chocolate.

Cool Runnings

In the early hours of this morning I got up, found a torch that worked and went to hide the Restoration Gardener DVD in my studio in the box marked ‘Miscellaneous’.

At that hour the oddest things seem strangely logical.

As I made my way back I saw the pallid glimmer of one of the Wevills watching me from their bedroom window, so I suppose this will go into their next report to Mal, along with my girlie night in transformed into some kind of orgy. I don’t know what made them look out at that time of night because I’m almost sure I wasn’t singing.

They must use mirrors on sticks to watch me some of the time – it’s the only way they can know so much about my movements – but fortunately my rose garden and studio are on the other side of the house, bordering the lane, so once I go through the pergola they’ve lost me unless they have radar.

After that I was wide awake, so I made some hot chocolate, got out the mosaic kit Ma’s cousin sent me for my birthday and started to transform the boring, dead-white-tiled fireplace in the sitting room. I could use some of that box of broken china in the studio too: I knew it would come in handy one day.

It was a chilly day even after the sun came up, so I took to running between the house and my studio with sandwiches and Thermos flasks, watched by the cold, bored hens.

My roses were all frozen in time like so many sleeping beauties, and glittered in the sunlight, although there were still deep-red flowers on my Danse du Feu until just before Christmas.

I felt a bit weak and trembly, as though I had received a severe shock … which, thinking about it, I suppose I had. But, in reality, nothing much has changed except I now know Adam’s real identity, so I firmly put it out of my head while I got on with my work.

I completed the final illustration for the calendar of a dog rose trailing over one of the half-ruined Fairy Glen grottoes, then began putting the finishing touches to the cover, which is taken from my studio in its thorny bower, rendered a bit more picturesque than it really is.

It was a good day’s work, and tomorrow I will be able to pack them up and send them off, together with some cartoons that I’ve got circulating; batches of them come and go in the post, some finding a home, some not. Two have just appeared in Private Eye, and three they didn’t want have been taken by the Oldie instead. I’ve got one or two other projects on the back burner, but the cartoons seem to be bringing in the most cash lately – perhaps because I’m constantly dashing them off between other things. Sheer volume.

This hit-and-miss aspect of my work drives Mal mad, since I never know how much money will be coming in, but I do religiously pay two-thirds of everything I make into our household account towards the bills. I know Mal earns a huge amount more than me – but then he spends a lot more than me too, on boats, cars, electrical gadgets, stamps, expensive wines and stupid stuff like that, while I pay my own car bills and support Rosie and the hens: the important things.

As the song (almost) says, the best things in life are free, though Mal certainly wouldn’t agree with that – and even our basic differences in the value we put on things inspires cartoons, so waste not, want not.

I’m going to start drawing an Alphawoman comic strip tomorrow now the calendar is finished, and I must buy enough meal replacement bars and shakes to get my diet off to a good start when I go into town to post my stuff.

Nia has summoned me to a Council of War at eleven in the morning at Teapots! Since Rhodri is coming too, I only hope it is a war on debt she means, and not something involving fire and her neighbours.

It will be good to see Rhodri again, though – and lucky that Mal is still away, since he is inclined to be jealous of any time I spend with my oldest friends. At first we tried to include him, but I think our shared history made him feel an uncomfortable outsider.

Just as well he spends so much time away or I wouldn’t even have the modest social life I enjoy now.

I decided not to tell him about the meeting when he called from sunny Swindon to remind me to take his suit to the cleaners, pick up his migraine prescription (he only gets migraine when he drinks red wine, so the answer to that one lies in his own hands) and purchase a birthday card and present for his mother.

Why me? She hates me! I still have to call her Mrs Morgan, and she never spends a night under the roof of the double-dyed Scarlet Woman – for not only did we marry in a registry office, which doesn’t count, but also I already had an illegitimate child! This makes it all the stranger that the only chink in her scales is her love for Rosie: she succumbed immediately, though don’t ask me why – you’d think only a mother could love such an obstreperous little creature. But love her she does, to the point where I’m sure she’s managed to forget that Rosie really isn’t her granddaughter at all.

She is also convinced that Mal and his first wife would have resumed their marriage by now if not for me, since they have remained in friendly contact over the years. In fact, they will probably meet up for lunch or dinner a couple of times while he is down there on this contract, but I am not in the least jealous … just illogically uneasy.

Seeing Alison again seems to make him dissatisfied with our life here together in St Ceridwen’s Well, although when he lived the high life in London he wanted to move to the country and chill out. But now he’s in the country he seems to be trying to live the consumer-driven high life again, so what’s that all about? He’s not going to turn into a middle-aged male weathercock, is he?

And another worrying thought: we’ve now been married about the same length of time as his first marriage lasted, so did I come with built-in obsolescence? Especially with the Wevills dripping their sly insinuations about me into his ear like a pair of Iagos.

I wish I wasn’t suddenly having all these worrying ideas.

And what do you buy a dragon for its birthday? Firelighters for damp mornings?

Inspiration! Spotted an advert in a magazine for a firm who will create a bouquet to reflect any message you want to send, together with a little booklet explaining the meanings of flowers and plants, so the recipient can have hours of harmless fun working it out.

I am trying to be subtle here, so no deadly nightshade or anything of that kind.

The dog rose, ‘pleasure mixed with pain’, perhaps? (Her son is the pleasure – to look at, at least – and she is the pain.)

After that, feeling rather put upon, I finally ordered a Constance Spry – ‘pink old rose form … luminous delicacy … myrrh scented’ – with my birthday garden tokens.

OK, I know that they’re prone to mildew and I haven’t got an inch of space left in my bit of the garden, but they are so very pretty that I’m sure Mal won’t mind if I put it near the patio somewhere. The scent would be heavenly when we are sitting out, and I could train it over the trellis round the door.

I won’t tell him, I’ll just dig a little tiny bed for it while he’s away and heel it in to see if he notices.

As I sealed the envelope with the order it occurred to me that I might be one of the last people in the country using cheques. Apart from one Switch card I don’t possess a single bit of plastic, although Mal more than makes up for it: when he opens his wallet it unfolds like a stiffly backed patchwork quilt.

Teapots is right next to the Holy Well and smack opposite the one smallish village car park. Inside it’s painted a brave, welcoming yellow, lined with shelves displaying Carrie’s collection of hundreds of teapots, and with red-checked tablecloths and fresh flowers on each table.

There are no menus: she bakes breads and pastries each morning as the fancy takes her, but doesn’t do hot food, because she isn’t interested in poaching eggs and deep-frying chips. I admire that – she only cooks what she enjoys, the way I only do gardening involving roses. Her Welshcakes are superb.

The room was already half full, even though it was too early in the season for the coach parties who come to visit the Holy Well and Rhodri’s house, Plas Gwyn. The café’s popular all the year round, not just for tourists but with the locals too.

Did I say that Carrie is originally American? I tend to forget, and you can hardly tell from her accent, which I suppose must have worn off over thirty years here in St Ceridwen’s. She arrived as a hippie with a rucksack, guitar and a notebook full of recipes and never left, except for closing up for a month every November and going back to visit friends and relatives in the States.

She’s very popular in the village, maybe because it’s seen as a sort of compliment that she has elected to live here, bringing in tourists and money. Even her attempts to speak Welsh are treated with benign tolerance, though her grasp of the language is excruciatingly formal and grammatically old-fashioned, like someone talking the most impeccable Elizabethan English. ‘Prithee, wouldst thou like thy Olde Welshe Cream tea with jam or, mayhap, honey from mine own hive?’ That sort of thing.

But we all love Carrie, she’s so unsquashably bouncy and cheerful. (And she knows everything about everyone, having been conducting a part-time affair with the village postman, Huw, for about a quarter of a century.)

She was presiding behind the counter when I arrived, and smiled and pointed to where Rhodri and Nia were sitting at a corner table, arguing.

Nothing new there – they’ve always argued, but it’s mostly Nia’s fault; she’s so prickly, and has this big chip on her shoulder about being a quarryman’s daughter, while he is the lord of the manor – as if Rhodri ever cared about stuff like that.

Although we’ve always kept in touch, I hadn’t seen Rhodri to talk to properly for absolutely ages, but as soon as I saw his pinkish face under the unruly thatch of burned-straw hair light up at the sight of me, it was as though we’d never been apart. It’s the same with Nia: whenever we meet we just pick up where we left off, and that’s the sign of true friendship, I think.

He sprang to his feet – he has such beautiful manners, and this lovely posh but friendly voice. ‘Fran!’ he said, giving me a hug and a kiss on both cheeks. ‘You look wonderful!’

It was more than I could say about him; he was looking not only older but sadder, like the poor lion in The Wizard of Oz. He has a wide blunt nose and straight, thick fair eyebrows over his pale blue eyes, which add to the resemblance.

‘Sit down, Fran,’ ordered Nia bossily. ‘Carrie’s bringing coffee and Danish pastries over, so you don’t have to order. We need to get on.’

‘With what?’ I asked, sitting down and thinking it was just as well I hadn’t actually started the diet yet.

‘Sorting out Rhodri’s far-fetched plans to turn Plas Gwyn into some kind of kiddies’ Camelot theme park.’

‘Oh, now,’ protested Rhodri, ‘that’s not fair! I never said anything like that! Just that I wanted to open the house up to the public all season – maybe even all year – and perhaps have a tearoom and gift shop to try and make a bit of money to live on. And I only mentioned the possibility of having a Camelot-inspired children’s playground.’

‘Forget it,’ advised Nia. ‘That’s not the way you should be going. Plas Gwyn isn’t a holiday camp, it’s a historic gem in the middle of nowhere, and you need to attract the type of visitor who already comes to St Ceridwen’s to see the Holy Well, only more of them.’

‘I think Nia’s probably right about that,’ I agreed. ‘I’m sure lots of people would come to Plas Gwyn if it was on the historic houses list, because it’s so beautiful, but at the moment they can only see it at weekends in July and August, which restricts your visitor numbers a bit. But if you open it to the public all year where are you going to live?’

‘In the new wing,’ Rhodri said. ‘It’s where I spend most of my time anyway, since it’s the only part with modern plumbing or anything remotely civilised.’

The new wing is mainly seventeenth century, which gives you some idea of how old the old part is.

‘I can close the doors off on all the floors between the two wings of the house to make it private. And I thought I could take any modern furniture out of the old house and put it in the attic, where there’s loads of stuff that I can use to furnish it back into period style … or maybe each room in a different period. I’m not sure yet.’

‘Eclectic can look good too,’ suggested Nia. ‘It gives some idea of a family living in the house over centuries. And it’s a good idea to rent out the Great Hall as a wedding venue eventually, but you need more – and turning some of the stable buildings round the courtyard into craft workshops, a gift shop and a tearoom would not only bring more people to visit, but give you some income all the year round.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Carrie, who had arrived with the coffee and was unashamedly listening in. ‘And I can supply your tearoom with cakes and pastries and my Welsh honey – in fact, it can be an off-shoot of Teapots and then it’s not competition, just extra profit!’ She wandered off again, notebook in hand, to take an order.

Rhodri was looking slightly dazed. In the past the Gwyn-Whatmires had never been averse to making money, but poor Rhodri doesn’t seem to have inherited the knack. ‘That all sounds great – but I can’t afford to do much more than any basic building work and garden clearance that’s needed to start with.’

‘We were just talking about the garden when you arrived, Fran,’ Nia said with a sudden glower at poor Rhodri. ‘I’ve told him about your mam wanting to sell Fairy Glen, and since it was once part of the Plas Gwyn estate I think he should buy it back and make it into an extra attraction.’

‘I think fairy glens went out with the Victorian day-trippers,’ I said dubiously. ‘I mean, I know it was terribly popular in its day, and all credit to the Gwyn-Whatmire of the time for walling it off from the estate and flogging it, and to whoever put in the paths and grottoes and made the tea garden, but it’s all gone back to wilderness now.’

‘Well, I think you’re wrong,’ Nia said firmly. ‘But you could at least make an offer for the oak woods and the standing stones up at the top of the glen, Rhodri – they’re part of your heritage.’

‘Yes, but Fran’s right. It was all walled off with the glen and it’s part of it now,’ he objected. ‘And it would cost a fortune to restore. I’m more concerned with hanging on to Plas Gwyn itself.’

‘But we don’t want more weekenders buying it and stopping us walking in the glen,’ Nia said firmly, which is something that I hate the thought of too: it’s such a special place to both of us, and seemingly vital to whatever Nia does up there. (This involves a robe, a strange little knapsack and a long staff and, just once, some kind of interment – but I’ve decided not to speculate on that one … too much. Now I just turn and creep away if she’s there.)

‘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.

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:

Gabe Weston lives quietly these days in his small London mews house near Marble Arch, a strange place to find a gardener, although he is said to be looking for a country property.

Part of his charm is his everyday unpretentious nature. He is a deeply private man despite his many TV appearances. You won’t find out from him about his tragic family history: the older brother killed in Northern Ireland, the widowed, alcoholic father who reduced the family to poverty. Strictly off limits too is the failure of his marriage: his ex-wife, the former Tamsyn Kane, recently remarried for the third time, lives in America with their only daughter, Stella.

‘So the poor man seems to have had a difficult childhood, but he still got to university and he’s made a name for himself with this archaeological gardening thing.’

‘He doesn’t seem to have ever been the wild party type,’ Nia admitted, though there are a couple of kiss-and-tell-type articles’.

‘Some people will do anything for money,’ Carrie commented. ‘He seems to be living pretty quietly these days, but there was some gossip that his wife was pregnant when they got married, which was more of a big deal back then, I suppose.’

‘When?’ I demanded suddenly.

‘When what?’ Nia said, puzzled.

‘When did they get married?’

Carrie pounced on a cutting. ‘I’m just working it out … the daughter must be nearly eighteen now.’

‘About a year younger than Rosie,’ I said, thinking that Gabe Weston seemed to have put it about a bit, making me just a member of a not-so-unique club.

‘She was the daughter of his first major client – some garden down in Cornwall or somewhere. They filmed a documentary about it, and that started his TV career off.’

I frowned. ‘You know, that may be where he said he was going when I met up with him – so he didn’t waste much time, did he?’

‘Me Mellors, you Lady Constance?’ Nia asked.

‘She must have liked a bit of rough,’ I said tartly, feeling full of a smouldering rage that was quite unreasonable in the circumstances.

‘Was he?’ Carrie asked interestedly.

I shrugged. ‘He looked like it – you know, grubby jeans and a T-shirt, five o’clock shadow.’

‘He certainly didn’t come across like a bit of rough in that DVD,’ Nia said. ‘Lady Whoosit could hardly take her eyes off him, and she must have been seventy if she was a day!’

‘I didn’t say he wasn’t attractive – he must have been, because he certainly didn’t make me go back to his van and have his wicked way with me. I really fancied him. I may have been practically legless, but I do remember that much.’

Nia and I sat and worked our way through the rest of the stuff, which mostly repeated hearsay and old news, and soon we could all have won Mastermind on the public domain knowledge about Gabe Weston’s life. I’d have failed on the general knowledge, though, unless it was about roses.

At some point Carrie must have put a half of bitter in front of me and I’d drunk most of it before I realised what I was doing, I was so involved in trying to find the man among the myths and extract the minotaur from the maze of misinformation. Actually, though, if he wasn’t exactly coming out smelling of roses, he certainly was far from a monster.

‘Well, what do you think?’ Carrie asked eventually.

‘I think your intelligence-gathering resources are impressive, and you are secretly a mole for the CIA,’ I said.

‘Did you see the second paternity claim?’ Nia said. ‘That must have knocked him for six, even though the poor woman was delusional and he’d never as much as met her.’

‘Yes, but it did sound like he’d been having an affair with that woman in the first paternity case, even if the baby turned out not to be his, so he doesn’t come out of this entirely white as the driven snow, does he?’ I shuddered. ‘Just imagine if I’d suddenly discovered who he was and popped out of the woodwork with a paternity claim too! But he doesn’t know about Rosie, and he never is going to know about Rosie – and nor is the press, so that’s that!’

‘Yes, but what if Plas Gwyn does get chosen for the programme?’ Nia asked. ‘Don’t you think he might recognise you?’

I pondered. ‘I don’t think so, do you? One night, one woman among many – probably one in every place he stopped! And I’ve altered a lot after all these years. I think women change much more than men do.’

They looked at me consideringly.

‘He can’t have met many girls with long hair the colour of faded candyfloss,’ Nia said.

‘But even my hair is much less strawberry and more just dark blonde now that I’m older, and it’s a whole lot shorter.’

‘I still don’t think you do look much different from how you used to,’ Nia said obstinately. ‘Your face is a bit plumper, but still heart-shaped—’

‘A fatty little heart.’

She gave me a repressive look. ‘And now you regularly have your eyelashes dyed you don’t have that startled-rabbit look you used to have when you forgot to put your mascara on, but that’s about all that’s changed.’

The eyelash tint is my one beauty extravagance, but very effective. I have smallish, neat features otherwise, nothing remarkable.

‘You have very lovely big grey eyes,’ Carrie said kindly.

‘With lovely big crow’s feet. No, I can’t believe I’m so memorable he will recognise me, but if Plas Gwyn wins the makeover, I’ll make sure I’ve got my head covered at all times and wear dark glasses, OK?

‘The whole village will think Mal’s been beating you up,’ Nia objected.

‘They certainly will. Well, this is really fascinating,’ Carrie said, ‘but I’ll have to go. Shall I leave all the stuff for you to have another look through?’

‘No, thanks,’ I said, bundling it back into its bag, ‘I think I’ve got it all by heart.’ Then I hesitated. ‘Perhaps I could borrow the book for a couple of days, though?’

‘OK,’ she agreed, ‘if I can have the DVD in exchange?’

She went off home – she gets up early most mornings to bake – and later Rhodri came in. Even though he was wearing cord trousers and a battered lumberjack shirt, the landlord fawned over him like he was royalty; he simply can’t understand why the local gentry should want to hang out in the back parlour with us peasants.

His old jacket smelled foul; I don’t know what they do to them, but on rainy days the entire waxed Barbour jacket brigade stink like wet tents whole flocks have lambed in.

Up the Garden Path

I have been dipping into Carrie’s book, and Gabe Weston sounds more like a psychic gardener than a restoration one to me. Cop a load of this:

Old gardens, no matter how big or small, from the overgrown parterres of the great estates to the seemingly aimless dips and hollows of long-vanished cottage gardens, all have a history. The ghost of what once was still lingers on the air like the faint fragrance of old potpourri.

He seems to be able to dowse for long-buried garden features like other people can find water with a bit of twig, although he seems happy to use modern technology like geophysical surveying too.

Walking over what was once a garden I can feel the resonances of time as though I were a human echo-finder tuned to every nuance of the old pathways, walls, trees and even the more transient plantings of the past.

Can this be true? Or is it just how they sell the series? Not, of course, that he wouldn’t be a big success without an angle like that, because any even halfway decent man who can talk gardening is terribly seductive, and he is much more than that.

Ma came down for the weekend and we did a bit of sorting out and cleaning ready for any viewings, while the dogs contributed a fresh silting of hair, and Ivy sicked up half a rubber ball on the Chinese rug.

I frantically felt her little fat furry stomach for signs of the other half blocking something vital, while she wriggled ecstatically and tried to lick my face, but then Ma found Holly chewing it behind the sofa.

After that excitement I flicked a feather duster over the magpie litter of Ma’s sitting room, where every surface is encrusted with shells, pebbles, sea-washed glass, bits of mirror and those plastic things they used to put in cereal packets. Ma sat in her favourite chair in the window, smoking and crocheting simultaneously.

‘You look a bit peaky, my love,’ she commented when I started to flag.

‘I do feel a bit off lately – but I’ve been dieting, so that probably isn’t helping.’ In fact, pottering about the studio playing with my ideas and wandering the garden looking for something to prune followed by a trio of hopeful hens is about all I’ve got the energy for lately.

‘Dieting’s unhealthy, Fran. I hope you’re eating a balanced diet.’

‘I’ve tried those meal-replacement things – they’re supposed to have all the vitamins and minerals you need. But I only survived a week on the Shaker diet before going totally off the rails.’

‘Shaker?’

‘Yes, though I don’t know if it’s called that because it’s all milkshakes, or for the way it makes you shaky after the second day – or even because it’s dead simple. But after a week I found myself in the kitchen at two in the morning eating a big slab of that disgusting chocolate cake topping, and I realised my mouth had got totally out of control.’

‘I’m not surprised!’

‘So then I tried diet bars, but that was just as bad … all I could think about was food! Bacon and eggs, fish and chips eaten from newspaper on the harbour front at Conwy, those fresh shrimps we used to get at Parkgate when I was a little girl … ’ I sighed. ‘Oh, yum! I’m starting to feel ravenous all over again.’

‘I’ll take you to the Druid’s Rest for a bar meal, Frannie. You need feeding up.’

‘I don’t know about feeding up, but it’s clear that a starve-binge cycle isn’t going to make me thinner,’ I said, and she certainly didn’t have to twist my arm to get me to eat real food at the pub.

I’m going to have to think about this dieting business a bit more unless Mal can just learn to love me the way I am, as I love him, fossicky little ways, undiscriminating friendships and expensive habits included. Do I have to keep young and beautiful? Why can’t I be plump, middle-aged and beautiful?

Come to that, why aren’t the women’s magazines full of articles on ‘The Beauty of the Wrinkle and How to Enhance Them’? Or ‘How to Successfully Put on Weight in Middle Age’, instead of featuring those Petra Pans of the celebrity circuit who are holding time at bay with applications of ground-up sea slugs at a hundred pounds a dab?

Nia says she hasn’t put on any weight since she read Fat Is a Feminist Issue and stopped worrying about it; in fact, she has lost a bit, but I think that is partly because of all the work she is doing with Rhodri transforming Plas Gwyn. She seems to have more or less taken charge of the renovations and innovations (and of Rhodri), so it’s just as well it’s a very bijou stately home and not a Chatsworth.

They have now furnished each of the rooms in a particular period, with furniture and hangings that had languished unseen for years – out with the new and in with the old! Workmen are busily putting new electric wiring into the craft studios and plastering the soon-to-be gift shop and tearoom.

I took Ma up there to see how they were getting on before she went home again, and Rhodri gave us tea and chunks of Caerphilly cheese on limp crackers and told her all about Gabe Weston (which I hadn’t mentioned since I wasn’t sure my face wouldn’t give something away) and the trunkful of family documents he had found in the attic.

‘I haven’t had time to go through them yet, but there might even be a plan of the garden, or at least some lists of plants or something,’ he said hopefully. ‘That’s the sort of thing they like on Restoration Gardener.’ He picked up his own well-thumbed copy of the accompanying book and read out: ‘“All kinds of family documents can offer clues to vanished gardens, from detailed plans and planting lists to chatty family letters. Even a passing mention might be the one missing piece that will make the picture clear.”’

‘Most of the top ones appear to be old household accounts and linen lists,’ Nia said, ‘but goodness knows what’s at the bottom. They seem to have been tipping paperwork into it for centuries.’

‘There’s bound to be something interesting in there,’ Rhodri agreed optimistically.

While Rhodri is much better at using his hands than his head, he’s pretty knowledgeable about antiques and the history of his house, so when he has time he will be compiling a guide that he can sell to visitors.

I gave him that cartoon I drew of him and he loved it so much he is going to have it on lots of items in his gift shop, from postcards to mugs and tea towels: the Lion of Plas Gwyn! And he is not quite such a sad lion any more, for he has cheered up no end now Nia has taken him in hand. Some men just love to be bossed around.

Once I became aware of Gabe Weston’s existence I seemed to see or hear mentions of him everywhere, as though my ears and eyes had tuned into his frequency. And I even bought another copy of the book so I could give Carrie’s back, because I found the workings of his mind strangely fascinating, especially combined with what I’ve already learned of his history. As he says on page 56, ‘It is amazing what can be grafted on to tough native rootstock.’

And the more I stared at his author photo, the more doubtful I was that he could be Rosie’s father: I couldn’t see the least resemblance. Could I have got it wrong, and it was really Tom after all? But she doesn’t look in the least like him, either!

I still didn’t want Gabe Weston anywhere near St Ceridwen’s Well, but as time passed I started to think nothing would come of it – until the day Rhodri heard that Gabe was about to tour the six properties on the long list in order to decide which three would go forward for the TV vote-off.

Rhodri was terribly excited about it – think of the publicity if Plas Gwyn were featured! – but unfortunately he will be in London doing his Father of the Bride stuff when the Great Gardener turns up, and so has had to delegate the honour of showing him the estate to his cousin Dottie as Token Family Member. Nia will be around too, in case Dottie totally blows it, since she has not only got a screw loose but a whole bolt, a gasket and several vital rivets.

And I know I ought to lie low that day, but I am terribly tempted to go up and spy on him! I have this burning curiosity to see him in the flesh, and this could be the only opportunity I ever get. I could watch him in perfect safety from Nia’s workshop, because he’s bound to park out front in the paved courtyard.

Dare I?

Fairy Glen is about to go into the property papers and this morning I heard hammering from up the lane, which turned out to be the estate agents putting up a ‘For Sale’ sign. This seemed pointless since the lane peters out into a farm track beyond the glen and no one uses the old rear drive to Plas Gwyn, so there is virtually no passing traffic except Ma and tractors.

I went up there to give it a quick vacuum through, but was so exhausted I gave up halfway. I can’t imagine what’s the matter with me lately; my legs feel as if someone sneaked in and filled them with lead. Wonder if I’ve got that ME thingummy? I hope not, I haven’t got time to do an Elizabeth Barrett Browning on a chaise longue – especially without a large and devoted family to run about after me.

I’m juggling cartoons, card designs and the first illustration for next year’s rose calendar as it is, not to mention Alphawoman – and

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