Sowing Secrets

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 (#ulink_01d20271-f13d-5952-91a1-674d09db31b2)

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.