Читать книгу Sowing Secrets - Trisha Ashley - Страница 13

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.