my fingers. ‘Look – if that isn’t a spare tyre, I don’t know what is. And when I looked at myself in the mirror this morning I didn’t seem to have any cheekbones any more, but I’d gained two chins.’
‘I hope you aren’t going to get obsessive about your weight – you know what you’re like when you get a bee in your bonnet. I haven’t forgotten the time you were convinced your eyes were so far apart they were practically vanishing round the sides of your head, and everyone thought you were a freak.’
‘That was years ago,’ I protested … though maybe I do still look a little like Sophie Ellis Bextor.
‘Or when you thought your face was asymmetrical?’
‘It is asymmetrical.’
‘Yes, well, everyone’s face is asymmetrical to some extent, only most of us normal people don’t get a thing about it.’
‘You can’t talk. You’ve been on every diet known to woman and you never looked fat to me to start with!’
‘Not any more,’ she said firmly. ‘I reread Fat Is a Feminist Issue over Christmas and decided I will learn to love myself just the way I am.’
How she is is sort of rectangular, and she’s always looked much the same, as far as I recall, though maybe she used to go in at the waist a bit more. She’s always been very attractive in her own rather intense and brooding way, but the divorce seemed to have dented her self-confidence.
‘What does it matter anyway?’ she said now, shrugging philosophically. ‘I’m not going to get Paul back even if I turn into a stick insect, because he’s got a forty-year itch only a giggling twenty-something can scratch.’
She’d been running a pottery at a craft centre in mid-Wales with her husband when he suddenly fell for the young jeweller in the next workshop. He’s now buying her out of the house and business in instalments, so let’s hope the tourist industry stays strong in the valleys.
‘But would you want him back now?’ I asked curiously.
‘Not really. I’ve already wasted nearly twenty years of my life on someone who wasn’t worth it; why would I go back for a second helping?’
‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it,’ I agreed.
Nia and I go way back: we played together in St Ceridwen’s as children when I was staying at Fairy Glen with Ma; we rode Rhodri Gwyn-Whatmire’s roan pony – which he teased me was the same colour as my strawberry-blonde hair – in turns round the paddock of the big house; and both fell in and out of love with him in our early teens over the course of one long, hot summer holiday, without denting our friendship.
We even ended up at the same college together, she studying ceramics and me graphic art, the only difference being that she did her final year and graduated and I went back home and had a baby instead. And she was at the fatal party where I got off with Adam the gardener, only unfortunately she was smashed at the time and has nil recall of the night, except that she had a good time.
Presumably so did I.
I firmly banished the memory and got back down to the practicalities of the here and now. ‘Mal seems more inclined to love me as I was rather than as I am, so I’ll have to give dieting a go, and since he’s away for six weeks I should be able to lose a few pounds before he comes back. So, what sort of diet should I do? What about one of those meal-replacement things, then I wouldn’t have to cook anything tempting?’
‘Well, there’s the Shaker diet and the Bar diet, those are easy. But I’m warning you from bitter experience that even if you lose weight on one of those, you always put it straight back on again, plus an extra bit more.’
‘I wondered about that. But they must work for some people, mustn’t they? I’ll have to try it in the interests of my sex life, but it’s a pity I can’t just slide into comfortable middle age and be loved anyway. Thank God he hasn’t noticed my hair yet.’
What is it with men and long hair? I mean, Mal might love mine but I was beginning to feel like Cousin Itt from The Addams Family, so I’ve had to resort to getting Carrie to lop two inches off the end whenever he is away.
The shorter it gets the curlier it goes, so all that weight must have been pulling it down. It was certainly starting to pull me down.
‘There has to come a point when he will notice,’ Nia said. ‘What then?’
‘I’ll cross that hurdle when I come to it, preferably after I’ve lost my excess baggage. God, the things I do for love!’
‘Wouldn’t you like to borrow Fat Is a Feminist Issue, instead?’ she offered.
‘No, because I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for Mal. Well, I suppose I am doing it a bit for me, because Rosie says I look plump and cosy like Ma, and I don’t feel quite ready for that.’
‘You’re nowhere near as plump as your mam,’ Nia said. ‘And at least your boobs are still in the right place. Mine are heading south, and so is my bum.’
‘Now who’s exaggerating? You look fine to me! If you want to talk Major Slump you should see the Weevil woman next door in her pyjamas.’
‘Mona Wevill? I think I’d rather not; she looks bad enough clothed. What about this news you said you had? I’ve got some myself, but you start.’
‘I suppose mine’s a mixture of good and bad – and I’m not entirely sure which bit’s which. Christmas was a bit of a roller coaster, because first of all I finally had to tell Rosie all about her real father – or everything I know, which isn’t much, let’s face it – and she wasn’t terribly convinced. Ma’s been filling her head with the idea it was Tom Collinge … but I think she believed me in the end about the itinerant gardener.’
‘She’ll get over it. If she asks me I’ll tell her it’s true,’ Nia said. ‘Well, true that there was an itinerant gardener, anyway, because if you don’t know whether she’s Tom’s or not, I certainly don’t. Was that it, or is there more?’
‘More. Mal created a website for me as a surprise Christmas present,’ I said, ‘all about my artwork and … but that’s not important. I can show it to you next time you’re round. The thing is, I’ve now got an email address and Tom spotted the site and sent me an email!’
‘What? You don’t mean Tom Collinge, Rosie’s probably-not father?’
‘Yes! Just to say hi, and how was I, and that he’s got friends up here so perhaps he might drop in some time!’
She thought about it. ‘I suppose once you are on the Internet you are accessible to anyone who wants to look you up, and he sounds like he’s just being friendly and maybe a bit curious. You can discourage him gently.’
‘I can’t discourage him at all, because I deleted the email before Rosie or Mal saw it, and I’ve mislaid the printout.’
‘Then he’ll either contact you again and you can be politely chilly, or he’ll think you are a different Fran March and that will be that … and why are you humming “Surfin’ USA”?’
‘What?
