when I got a job soon after we were married, doing casual waitressing at Carrie’s teashop in the village to pay for Rosie’s riding lessons and stuff like that, he didn’t like it in the least, though perhaps that was mostly because he considered it menial. And while he used to say I was scatty and dreamy as though they were lovable traits, now he says it accusingly.
Still, my Ms Alison Alphawoman is not quite invulnerable, because chocolate is her kryptonite, and when she comes into contact with it she turns into … Blobwoman! A scatty, plump and dreamy sloven just like me, who’s only good at cooking, painting and drawing cartoons (though actually I’m pretty brilliant at all those), but who manages to bail Alphawoman out of tricky situations anyway.
And come to think of it, I don’t think I did a bad job as a mother either, once I got over the surprise. Parenting just seemed to be Rosie and me having fun together, all the way from mud pies to marrying Mal, when things hit a slight blip. But in the end it was Mal who had to adjust to the idea that my life was still going to revolve around Rosie much more than him.
I wanted to linger and play with my intriguingly Jekyll-and-Hyde Alphawoman, despite my shack being cold as the Arctic – working in a wooden shed never stopped Dylan Thomas, after all – and I could always put my little heater on if I got desperately chilly. But today, birthday revels called, and so too did my miniature seventy-seven-year-old dynamo of a mother.
‘Fran! Fraaa-nie!’ she shrilled.
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
