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 he did and suggested she pop out a quick baby and he could be a house husband and look after it while she got on with her Brilliant Career in international banking.
But 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