Sowing Secrets. Trisha Ashley

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      I didn’t deign to mention the Rhodri insinuations. I’m not protesting my innocence to my own husband like some damned Desdemona. He ought to know me better by now.

      Mind you, by now he should also have realised that the Wevills are conducting an undercover hate campaign against me and jumped to my defence, but he takes them entirely at face value. So when Mona fawns and drools over him like a sex-mad boxer bitch she is just being ‘friendly’, and since Owen shares his passion for boats (indeed, was the one who infected him with the mania) he can do no wrong.

      Before the Wevills arrived on the scene my only significant competition for Mal’s attention was his stamp collection, and at least that kept him in the house. But messing about in his boat and going down to the yacht club now occupies all the time we used to spend doing family things together, like walking and going to the zoo. (Rosie was addicted to the zoo – we had to go every Sunday for years.)

      I was still seething about the email when Rosie rang. She’s been phoning me on a nightly basis since she went back, crying into the receiver about her assignment marks, which were not as brilliant as she thought they should be, although they sounded fine to me. This anguish is all mixed up with her dilemma over whether to dump her present nameless boyfriend now, in the hope that the boy she really fancies will ask her out, or whether that would be cruel while he is working hard for his finals.

      When I could get a word in I said sternly, ‘Rosie, did you take an email from Tom Collinge when you were home, and reply to it in my name?’

      There was a gasp. ‘Oh God, Mum – I’m sorry! I was just curious, and I didn’t think you’d reply to him yourself. I meant to keep checking so I could delete the answer before you saw it.’

      ‘Is that supposed to make it all right? And even though you know my password, don’t you think my mail is private?’

      ‘Yes, and I wouldn’t have opened any of the others, really I wouldn’t! And I only told Tom you had one daughter and were married, and asked him whether he was, that’s all!’

      Then she started crying again, so I ended up assuring her I wasn’t really cross and she mustn’t worry about her marks, and suggested a way to finish with her boyfriend so they stayed friends – and I felt like a wrung-out dishcloth after I put the phone down.

      While each call like this leaves me totally on edge and overwrought, it seems to have a totally different effect on Rosie; whenever I ring back worriedly an hour or two later to check that she hasn’t locked herself in her room with a bottle of pills and the breadknife, it’s always to be told by one of her flatmates that she has just left in high spirits for a party and isn’t expected back for hours.

      And what’s with all these ball dresses she seems to need? When I was at college I could fit the entirety of my belongings in a rucksack and one holdall, and I’m not sure I even knew what a ball dress was. Even now, ninety per cent of my clothing consists of jeans, T-shirts and home-made patchwork tops – it’s economical and saves all that worry about what to wear every morning. I only need to get dressed up to go out with Mal. But Rosie seems to alternate between wearing a collection of paint-stained hankies held together in unexpected places by large plastic curtain rings, and off-the-peg but hideously expensive Princess Bride creations. I don’t think there’s a Schizophrenic Student Barbie yet, is there? There should be, there’s a gap in the market.

      Still, maternal guilt combined with a love that is positively painful always makes me scrape together enough for the next dress, even though I suspect that Mal’s mother has already subbed up the wherewithal for several without telling me.

      Mrs Morgan often phones me, asking how Rosie’s work is going, and whether she’s eating properly and only going out with nice boys – though how I am supposed to know any of this when she is a couple of hundred miles away and never gives me any details, I can’t imagine.

      I asked Carrie to pop in later if she isn’t too tired, and help me put a new password on my email, since she did a Computing for Small Businesses nightclass last year, so is pretty good at that kind of thing.

      I heard her exchanging jolly greetings with the Wevills when she arrived – she couldn’t have missed them, since they were on the drive filling my wheelie bin up with their rubbish.

      Dragging her indoors, I told her what they were like to me when there was no one else around, but she was frankly incredulous.

      ‘But they’re so nice! Don’t you think perhaps they are just trying too hard to be friendly, Fran? I mean, they often come into Teapots, and they seem very genuine people.’

      ‘That’s just it, Carrie – they are nice to everyone, except to me when I’m alone,’ I said, but I’m sure she thinks I’m getting paranoid.

      I might have started to think so myself if Ma hadn’t taken a dislike to them on first sight; and Nia can detect insincerity at a glance, so all their attempts to smarm all over her met with curt rebuffs even before she realised what poison they were trying to spread about me – in the nicest possible way, by telling people they didn’t believe such-and-such a rumour.

      ‘Well, if you say so, Fran,’ Carrie said doubtfully.

      ‘Ask Nia, if you don’t believe me.’

      ‘Of course I believe you,’ she said hastily. ‘Oh, and I’ve collected some more info about Gabe Weston, if you’d like to see it sometime.’

      ‘Oh, have you?’ I said with vague interest, but I don’t think she was really fooled.

      After she’d gone I went out, removed the Wevills’ bags of stinking rubbish and lobbed them back over the fence into their front garden where their two cats instantly started to close in on them. Although no one ever sees the Wevills doing anything antisocial to me, I’ll bet my bottom dollar everyone in the village will know what I’ve done by tomorrow – and I used to be such a nice person.

      The new password I put on my computer was ‘trust’.

      This is the first day of the Shaker diet, though it would take a concrete mixer rather than a quick whisk to make that strange powder homogenise with any liquid except, possibly, rubbing alcohol.

      It certainly didn’t satisfy my hunger, fill my stomach or titillate my taste buds, so what is the point of it unless it is simply meant as a kind of self-inflicted punishment for being gross?

      Already craving real food I went up to the studio, where the only edible temptation was the sack of Happyhen mix (which I was pretty sure I could resist – for the first few days at least), and began roughing out some Alphawoman comic strips. Then I started a card design based on the hens, who are all big fluffy brown ones like in a children’s picture book. Photos of them in various exciting poses line my walls together with hundreds of snaps of roses.

      When I checked my website later lots of people had been looking at it, so it’s not just me with the rose mania. Perhaps if I had good-quality prints done of some of my pictures I could sell them through the site. Limited editions, all numbered – and they’d be easy to post …

      I’ll ask Carrie what she thinks about it – if I ask Mal, he will only blind me with technology and put me off the idea.

      Oh, and I finally replied to Tom’s email, but more to occupy my hands than anything, since typing and eating simultaneously can seriously clog up your СКАЧАТЬ