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СКАЧАТЬ 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!’

      ‘Well, I’m certainly not slim any more – even Rosie described me as cuddly!’

      ‘There’s nothing wrong with cuddly,’ Nia said decisively.

      ‘You haven’t seen me since I pigged out over Christmas,’ I said ruefully. ‘My spare tyre would fit a tractor.’

      ‘It’s not much more than a week since I last saw you, Fran. You can’t have put that much weight on!’

      ‘You wait and see,’ I told her, because it’s truly amazing the way all the calories have bypassed my digestive system and gone straight to my stomach and hips, laying up a fat store for a famine that was never going to happen … unless diets count as famine. But I wouldn’t need a diet if I hadn’t got fat, so if my body decides this is starvation, isn’t it going to be a sort of vicious circle? Or am I hopelessly confused?

      Diets must work, or there wouldn’t be any point to people going on them, would there?

      I rather gingerly checked for emails before I went out, but there were only impersonal rude ones, easily deleted from both computer and memory.

The Druid’s Rest

      Five years ago a retired army officer and his wife bought the Druid’s Rest Hotel on the outskirts of the village and bedizened the interior with a tarty modern makeover, though they hadn’t been allowed to do much more to its venerable listed and listing old carcass than add a large conservatory-style restaurant round the back.

      Indoors, the only area left more or less untouched was once the back parlour of the inn, Major Forrester realising just in time that, no matter how unwelcome he made them feel, in the absence of any other pub the regulars were still going to adorn his bar. Now he tried to segregate them away in the back room where his hotel guests and the wine-and-dine set wouldn’t need to mingle with them.

      Mrs Forrester gave me a chilly smile as I walked through the lounge bar, since I was situated socially somewhere between stairs, like a governess. Sometimes I hung out with the lowlife in the back room, and sometimes Mal took me to dine in the restaurant like a lady.

      Nia was already in the back parlour, sitting in a raised wooden box with low panelled walls before a table made from an old beer keg, in the company of a faded, jaded stuffed trout and a moth-eaten one-eyed fox. She was nursing a half of Murphy’s and wearing the dazed expression of one who had spent her entire Christmas and New Year dutifully shut up in a small bungalow with two stone-deaf and TV-addicted parents.

      Nia must be the pocket version of the same dark Celtic stock Mal sprang from, for they both have lovely dark blue eyes and near-black, straight, shining hair, in Nia’s case hanging in a neat and rather arty bob. But whatever common ancestry they share has been well diluted over the centuries because they are totally dissimilar in every other way.

      She looked up as I put my virtuous glass on the table and said, ‘Call that a spare tyre? СКАЧАТЬ