Free Sowing Secrets by Trisha Ashley Page B

noisy watching of a gardening DVD. The Wevills must have ears like bats if that kept them awake.
    If you want to know my day-to-day movements while you’re away, all you have to do is ask, they’re not secret.
    Fran.
    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