Читать книгу Sowing Secrets - Trisha Ashley - Страница 7

‘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.