Trisha Ashley - Sowing Secrets

‘I went up there yesterday,’ Carrie said, ‘and planned how I wanted the tearoom set out, once we get permission.’

‘And reminded us that we hadn’t thought of toilets for the visitors,’ Nia sighed. ‘Another thing to fit in somewhere.’

‘You’ll get there,’ Carrie said encouragingly. ‘Anyway, aren’t you both just dying to see what I’ve got on Gabriel Weston?’ And she dumped a big carrier bag of stuff on the tabletop.

Not only had she scoured her contacts, the Internet and the magazine racks of the nearest town for further information on Gabriel Weston, she’d even gone to the length of buying his book!

Restoration Gardener looked just the sort of thing I would like if I weren’t horribly and unreasonably prejudiced against the author, who smiled enigmatically at me from his book jacket photo.

‘You know, the more I look at his face, the more I wonder if I’ve totally flipped and become one of those women who imagine they are having a relationship with someone famous,’ I confessed, picking it up to study it more closely. ‘Maybe it was just someone who looked a bit like him? I mean, he can’t be unique, can he?’

‘He looks pretty unique to me,’ Carrie said, scrutinising his picture with the eyes of a connoisseur. Then she riffled through the heap. ‘I got most of this off the Net. There’s lots about a paternity claim case, back when he’d just started making a name for himself on TV.’

‘What? A paternity case?’ I snatched up the first sheet that came to hand and started reading, and so did Nia. After a bit I looked up. ‘It wasn’t his baby after all!’

‘No,’ agreed Carrie, ‘but there must have been something in it, because his wife divorced him – see, read that one there.’

‘Reputation Restored! TV gardener cleared in paternity claim row … but too late to save marriage.’

‘Perhaps she simply wasn’t the “stand by your man” type?’

Nia was frowning over a magazine article. ‘Or maybe she wanted to divorce him anyway? It says here that she went to America and remarried.’

Carrie fished out a copy of Surprise! magazine: ‘Yes, and she’s just divorced and remarried again – for the third time, I think. This one’s a plastic surgeon.’

‘Once Gabe Weston started being a familiar face on the telly he’d probably have had lots of opportunities to play around,’ Nia said cynically. ‘I suspect all men would if they got the chance.’

‘Not all of them!’ Carrie protested defensively.

‘Ignore Nia, she’s jaundiced on the subject,’ I told her. ‘Your Huw would never dream of being unfaithful to you.’

‘He’d better not,’ Carrie said. ‘And actually, maybe we’re wrong about this guy, because once I’d waded through all the information I sort of got to like him. Listen to this one:

Gabe Weston lives quietly these days in his small London mews house near Marble Arch, a strange place to find a gardener, although he is said to be looking for a country property.

Part of his charm is his everyday unpretentious nature. He is a deeply private man despite his many TV appearances. You won’t find out from him about his tragic family history: the older brother killed in Northern Ireland, the widowed, alcoholic father who reduced the family to poverty. Strictly off limits too is the failure of his marriage: his ex-wife, the former Tamsyn Kane, recently remarried for the third time, lives in America with their only daughter, Stella.

‘So the poor man seems to have had a difficult childhood, but he still got to university and he’s made a name for himself with this archaeological gardening thing.’

‘He doesn’t seem to have ever been the wild party type,’ Nia admitted, though there are a couple of kiss-and-tell-type articles’.

‘Some people will do anything for money,’ Carrie commented. ‘He seems to be living pretty quietly these days, but there was some gossip that his wife was pregnant when they got married, which was more of a big deal back then, I suppose.’

‘When?’ I demanded suddenly.

‘When what?’ Nia said, puzzled.

‘When did they get married?’

Carrie pounced on a cutting. ‘I’m just working it out … the daughter must be nearly eighteen now.’

‘About a year younger than Rosie,’ I said, thinking that Gabe Weston seemed to have put it about a bit, making me just a member of a not-so-unique club.

‘She was the daughter of his first major client – some garden down in Cornwall or somewhere. They filmed a documentary about it, and that started his TV career off.’

I frowned. ‘You know, that may be where he said he was going when I met up with him – so he didn’t waste much time, did he?’

‘Me Mellors, you Lady Constance?’ Nia asked.

‘She must have liked a bit of rough,’ I said tartly, feeling full of a smouldering rage that was quite unreasonable in the circumstances.

‘Was he?’ Carrie asked interestedly.

I shrugged. ‘He looked like it – you know, grubby jeans and a T-shirt, five o’clock shadow.’

‘He certainly didn’t come across like a bit of rough in that DVD,’ Nia said. ‘Lady Whoosit could hardly take her eyes off him, and she must have been seventy if she was a day!’

‘I didn’t say he wasn’t attractive – he must have been, because he certainly didn’t make me go back to his van and have his wicked way with me. I really fancied him. I may have been practically legless, but I do remember that much.’

Nia and I sat and worked our way through the rest of the stuff, which mostly repeated hearsay and old news, and soon we could all have won Mastermind on the public domain knowledge about Gabe Weston’s life. I’d have failed on the general knowledge, though, unless it was about roses.

At some point Carrie must have put a half of bitter in front of me and I’d drunk most of it before I realised what I was doing, I was so involved in trying to find the man among the myths and extract the minotaur from the maze of misinformation. Actually, though, if he wasn’t exactly coming out smelling of roses, he certainly was far from a monster.

‘Well, what do you think?’ Carrie asked eventually.

‘I think your intelligence-gathering resources are impressive, and you are secretly a mole for the CIA,’ I said.

‘Did you see the second paternity claim?’ Nia said. ‘That must have knocked him for six, even though the poor woman was delusional and he’d never as much as met her.’

‘Yes, but it did sound like he’d been having an affair with that woman in the first paternity case, even if the baby turned out not to be his, so he doesn’t come out of this entirely white as the driven snow, does he?’ I shuddered. ‘Just imagine if I’d suddenly discovered who he was and popped out of the woodwork with a paternity claim too! But he doesn’t know about Rosie, and he never is going to know about Rosie – and nor is the press, so that’s that!’

‘Yes, but what if Plas Gwyn does get chosen for the programme?’ Nia asked. ‘Don’t you think he might recognise you?’

I pondered. ‘I don’t think so, do you? One night, one woman among many – probably one in every place he stopped! And I’ve altered a lot after all these years. I think women change much more than men do.’

They looked at me consideringly.

‘He can’t have met many girls with long hair the colour of faded candyfloss,’ Nia said.

‘But even my hair is much less strawberry and more just dark blonde now that I’m older, and it’s a whole lot shorter.’

‘I still don’t think you do look much different from how you used to,’ Nia said obstinately. ‘Your face is a bit plumper, but still heart-shaped—’