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
