With a galvanic jerk Fran March opened her eyes to find herself practically nose to nose with a total stranger: a sleeping young Neptune, his lightly muscled body, carelessly disposed in sleep, green-washed by the early morning light filtering in through thin caravanette curtains.

Recoiling, she slipped from the bed, praying he wouldn’t wake up, panicking as she tried to find her clothes among the clutter of a camper van that both looked and smelled like a potting shed.

This Neptune’s trident was the homely gardening fork that fell over with a clatter as she struggled with the unfamiliar sliding door, almost weeping with silent frustration.

She froze as he stirred and half opened drowsy, green-flecked eyes, only to close them again and sleep on, long narrow nose pressed against the pillow, hair in improbable spirals and the darker stubble pricking out along the edge of his jaw.

The door finally opened enough to let her slip out into a world silent except for the non-judgemental birds, though, misjudging the drop, she didn’t so much hit the ground running as fall to her knees in the pub car park like a penitent Pope Joan.

Altered Conceptions

‘Mum, you know you’ve always told me that my father was a student prince who turned into a toad and hopped it when you kissed him?’ Rosie asked me ominously on Boxing Day while we were watching Who Do You Think You Are?. Mal was safely out of the way upstairs in his study poring over his stamp collection, yearning for a Cayman Blue.

‘Yes, ’ I agreed cautiously, the chunk of Christmas cake I had just eaten suddenly turning to stone in my stomach, though you’d think a survival instinct that sent a surge of energy to the leg muscles for a quick getaway would have been much more useful – except that Rosie had me cornered on the sofa.

She was wearing a familiarly stubborn expression, like a very serious elf maiden, all long, honey-blonde locks fronding around her slightly pointed ears and a frown above her straight brows. Her changeling green-grey eyes were fixed accusingly on mine.

‘Or that other story, where you said he was Neptune disguised in human form, and he dragged you down into his sea kingdom because he’d fallen in love with you? Only you escaped, helped by friendly dolphins, and were found wandering the beach covered in seaweed next morning?’

‘Mmm,’ I said vaguely, though actually I was quite proud of that one – some of the details were pretty inventive, especially all the little mussel shells clapping with glee when I got away, and a desolate Neptune blowing his conch shell to summon me back every evening for a month before giving up and swimming sadly away for ever, totally conched out.

Perhaps it was a fishy story, at that?

My favourite was the one where her father was a gypsy king with fast flamenco fingers, cursed by an evil witch never to stay more than one night in any place. If he did, she would appear, take his Music out and shoot it. (Music was a dog.)

That one always made Rosie cry, and I had to assure her that the king never stopped more than one night in any place, because he loved Music more than anything. And so the dog lived for ever, and they were very happy travelling about in their caravan, except when he thought about the beautiful princess he had had to leave behind.

But now, seemingly, the time for fairy stories was over.

‘Mum,’ Rosie said sternly, ‘you’ve never told me anything real about my father, and although I do know it’s because you don’t want to talk about it, now I’m eighteen and at university I think I have a right to know all about him, don’t you?’

‘Yes, darling, but there really isn’t much more to tell you,’ I said helplessly, because there hadn’t been that many facts to embroider. He came, he went – what more could I say? ‘Those stories were all variations on the truth, Rosie.’

‘I’ve been talking about it with Granny and she says it’s time you came clean, because you met my father at university in your first term and had been going out with him for two years before you got pregnant with me, so you must know all about him!’

Thank you, Ma.

‘Granny is wrong: that wasn’t your father,’ I said shortly. ‘I’ve never said he was.’

Mind you, I’ve never said he wasn’t either, so perhaps it’s not surprising that Ma, my husband and now even my daughter assumed it, and also that I never wanted to talk about it simply because he abandoned me.

And I don’t want to think about him, either; why rake up old hurts?

‘Well, Granny says he must have been, you hadn’t been going out with anyone else, but when she wanted you to write and tell him you were pregnant, you refused,’ she persisted.

‘Because it was nothing to do with him,’ I said patiently, though I suppose it was, in a way. If Tom hadn’t told me it was over between us on the night of the end-of-term pub crawl and party, maybe I wouldn’t have had too much to drink and ended up pregnant.

That put paid to the last year of my graphic design course, though Rosie, when she arrived was such a perfect creation that I felt I should have been allowed to submit her like a work in progress at the end of finals and get my degree anyway.

And once I set eyes on Rosie I never regretted having her, of course – except when she was giving me the third degree like now, and frowning at me as though she could extract the truth by telepathy: but only the one she wanted, a tidy truth with checkable details. A name, a face – a father.

I couldn’t give her any of those things, but clearly the time had come to give her what I had; to expose the bare bones of a buried past. I knew it had to come one day.

‘OK, Rosie, I’ll tell you everything I remember, which isn’t much – it was such a long time ago.’

I patted the sofa cushion and she plumped down, looking at me expectantly. ‘This had better not be another of your fairy stories.’

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Prologue: A Seed is Sown

Altered Conceptions

Sowing Secrets. Trisha Ashley
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