Sowing Secrets. Trisha Ashley

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