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 Blue. He is small, bald-headed, wrinkled and unattractive, while his wife has a face like blobbed beige wax, a loose figure, and the hots for Mal.
Is it any wonder I don’t like them?
Rosie volunteered to walk back up the lane to Fairy Glen with Ma so she could play with the dogs, and I gave in to temptation and went to check my website to see if anyone else had visited.
I am getting terribly proficient now I know how to get rid of all the things I inadvertently press, so I was soon able to see that I’d had thirty-six visitors to my site … though come to think of it, at least half of those were probably me.
Then I checked my email and found four messages, only three of which wanted me to grow my penis longer, buy Viagra or look at Hot Moms.
The fourth was from someone called bigblondsurfdude@home and the subject line said, cheerily, ‘Hi, Fran, how U doing?’
I dithered over that one, since I didn’t think I knew any surfers or dudes, but then opened it, my finger ready on the delete button just in case it was a nasty.
And it was a nasty, as it happens: a nasty surprise.
Hi Fran,
Remember me?! Found your website – great photo! You don’t look a day older than when I last saw you. I’m glad you’re doing well up in North Wales. I’m teaching art and surfing down here in Cornwall, the best of both worlds, but I often come up to visit friends at a surfing school not too far from you, so I might drop in one of these days!
All the best,
Tom
Tom?
When old loves die they should stay decently interred, not try to come surfing back into your life.
I deleted him, but printed the message out first, and shoved it into the desk drawer, just in case. But if I didn’t answer, surely he would assume he’d got the wrong Fran March?
And if I hadn’t been so insistent on keeping my own name when I got married, it would have been the Fran Morgan Rose Art site and Tom would never have been able to launch this stealth attack on my memories.
Thank goodness Rosie hadn’t been around to see it – she’d probably have been emailing him right back by now, asking probing questions about blood groups and stuff.
Rosie went back to university, together with half the contents of my larder and selected items of my wardrobe, all packed into her red Volkswagen. She calls it Spawn of Beetle since it’s much newer than mine, due to both Granny and Mal’s mother being putty in her manipulative little hands.
I cried for ages after she’d gone, which, as you can imagine, pissed Mal off no end, but although she drives me crackers when she’s home I miss her dreadfully.
‘I cry when you go away too, Mal,’ I told him, although actually that was a lie because I don’t any more, I just feel sad for ten minutes or so. I expect I’ve got used to his frequent absences, but Rosie is (or once was) a part of me, and although my brain wants her to be off having a life and getting a career, my heart wants her right here with her mum.
So next day I tearlessly waved Mal off too, as he manoeuvred his big Jaguar with difficulty around my car, which I seemed to have parked at an angle, half in, half out of an azalea bush.
He was too preoccupied to notice Mona Wevill casually standing on her doorstep wearing only thin silk pyjamas in the same rather distressing pinky-beige as her face, so that she looked baggily nude. Her boobs were not just heading south, but had actually passed the Equator.
She is certainly not any competition, even though I’m nowhere near as pretty as when I was younger. You know you’re past it when you stop feeling indignant at workmen shouting after you and instead want to go and personally thank them for their interest.
Anyway, not only did I not cry as Mal’s car vanished, but I actually felt relieved he wasn’t going to be there to make me feel guilty about my weight, especially since I have grasped that he finds my measly few extra pounds such a big turn-off! At least now I have six weeks before he comes back to do something about it.
I went up the frosty garden to see to the hens in their neat little coop. They looked at me as if I was mad when I opened the door of their nesting box and asked them if they wanted to come out, moaning gently as they mutinously huddled down into their warm straw nests.
‘Please yourselves, girls, but you’ll be sorry when Mal’s back and you have to stay in your run all day,’ I told them, but they weren’t interested.
Later that morning I set off for Fairy Glen to help Ma pack up too, since everyone seemed determined to leave me at once; though at least Nia should actually be coming back from spending Christmas and New Year at her parents’ house any time now.
Ma, a small bohemian rhapsody layered in vaguely ethnic garments and with her head tied up in a fringed and flowered turban, was sitting in an easy chair in a haze of cigarette smoke doing the quick crossword in yesterday’s Times. The lacquer-red pen she held in her nicotine-gilded fingers was the exact shade of her lipstick and nail varnish, but I knew that was just a happy accident and not by intent.
Ma is a happy accident.
The two long-haired dachshunds threw themselves at me, yapping shrilly, and she waved away a cloud of smoke with a heavily beringed hand. ‘That Mal gone, then?’
‘Yes, first thing. And Rosie rang last night to say she’d had a good journey down,’ I said, sitting on the floor so I could let Holly and Ivy climb all over me. For the next six weeks I could safely reek of old dog, or hens, or rose manure, or anything else I wanted to.
‘Ma, have you ever been on a diet?’
‘Diet? No – but me and a couple of friends thought about getting fit once, years ago when we all used to play tennis. We went to this meeting of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty in the village hall, and there were about twenty of them there in black leotards and tights, all being trees reaching up to the sunshine. Then they had to be beautiful gazelles, bounding across the plains. You’d have thought a lion was after them.’
‘So did you join in?’ I asked, fascinated.
‘No, we decided not to bother. I didn’t think the floor was up to it, for one thing.’
Recrossing her feet, which were incongruously shod in her favourite mock-lizardskin stilettos, she said rather abruptly, ‘Fran, I’ve been sitting here thinking about selling Fairy Glen.’
I sat back on my heels and stared at her. ‘Sell the glen? Do you mean the cottage, or just the glen itself?’
‘The
