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 whole thing, of course – house and grounds. I couldn’t sell one without the other, could I? They go together. The thing is, I’m seventy-seven and all this driving’s getting a bit much for me. And now Rosie’s off at college and you’re settled and happy enough with Mal – though he wouldn’t be my cup of tea! – I think the time has come to sell up.’
This was a stunner! My parents bought the place long before I was born, so all my happy childhood memories were of roaming the narrow wooded glen, from the overgrown remnants of a tea garden to the ancient standing stones set in a mysterious, magical oak glade high above the little waterfall. Victorian daytrippers had gone in droves to visit fairy glens, and this one, its natural beauty enhanced by grottos, statues and convenient flights of steps, had enjoyed a brief vogue. Long neglected, it had formed the perfect secret garden for me, Nia and Rhodri (the Famous Three) to have adventures in.
The old stone cottage had been hideously remodelled into some kind of miniature Gothic castle, the only concessions to modernity being an electric cooker and a small bathroom. Ma’s chosen style of interior décor was Moroccan magpie nest crossed with dog kennel.
‘But, Ma,’ I croaked, finally regaining the power of speech, ‘won’t you miss it?’
‘Yes, of course. I’ve had so many happy times here, and it’s where I feel closest to your father – he loved it so much. But memories are portable things; I won’t lose them if I sell the Glen.’
‘You could sell Marchwood instead and move here permanently,’ I suggested – Marchwood being her big detached thirties house in Cheshire, near Wilmslow.
‘Well, my love, I thought of that, but it’s always been my main home and I’m settled there. There’s my water-colour class, the bridge club and the girls: never a dull moment.’
The girls are the friends she hangs out with, a sort of Hell’s Grannies chapter. Never agree to play any kind of card game with them; they’d have your last penny and the clothes off your back before you could say Old Maid.
‘And then Boot does the garden and any handyman stuff, and Glenda does the cleaning, so it all runs along smoothly,’ she added. ‘But Fairy Glen is falling apart. It needs love and money spent on it, and I feel it’s time someone else had a chance to live here and love it like I did.’
I could see the sense of what she was saying even if I hated the thought of it; and it wasn’t like I would never see Ma again. I knew she wouldn’t come and stay with me if Mal was home, but she would be less than two hours’ drive away, so I could even pop over for the day.
No, I think what dismayed me most was the sudden realisation that she was getting old. This was the first sign she’d ever given that she wasn’t going to go on for ever.
‘I’m tough as old boots,’ she said as if reading my mind. ‘I’m not about to turn my toes up, I’m just falling back and regrouping: “downsizing” – isn’t that what they call it these days? And if I do sell Fairy Glen, then I could go off on that round-the-world cruise with some of the girls, and have fun.’
God help any cruise ship with Ma and the girls on board! ‘Speaking of regrouping, Ma … ’ I said, and repeated much of what I had told Rosie about her transient father, while she looked at me pretty hard and blew a whole series of smoke rings.
I got the message: she didn’t really believe me either.
Much more of this and I will start to think I hallucinated Adam the gardener or have got false memory syndrome or something. But at least we all seem agreed that Tom exists … though I have forgotten where I put that email printout from him, so I might have imagined that. I could have sworn I put it in the desk drawer, but maybe it is somewhere out in the studio. Or in the pocket of the jeans currently going round and round in the washing machine. Who knows?
But since it is mislaid and I deleted the message, I can’t possibly answer it, can I?
Back home I spent a couple of hours in my studio trying to finish my calendar designs, but not only was I totally distracted by the thought of Fairy Glen being sold, my fingers were so cold that if I’d tapped them with a pencil they would have fallen off and shattered.
I could do with a more efficient heater, or better insulation, or both.
There was a phone message from Nia when I went back to the house to thaw, so I rang her once I could grasp the receiver.
‘Has he gone?’ she asked conspiratorially, as though poor Mal were an ogre or Bluebeard.
‘Yes, early this morning. He should be phoning me any minute to say he’s arrived.’
‘Oh, good – see you in the Druid’s Rest around seven, then?’ she suggested. ‘I’ve got some news.’
‘So have I, and I want your advice on diets – Mal thinks I’m too fat.’
‘You’re not fat!’