The First Time I Saw Your Face

by Hazel Osmond

Sheila was picking bits of fluff off her cardigan, her massive chest still wobbling with laughter. ‘Sorry, Jen. It was just too good to resist. Although, next time, could you get him to speak up a bit when he’s reading?’

  ‘Next time, I’ll be the one hiding behind the bookshelves laughing loudly while you have to listen to him read. And, Lionel, I’m surprised at you. Aren’t you meant to set an example?’

  ‘Completely unprofessional behaviour,’ he agreed sadly. ‘Would it make amends if I got the last cup of tea of the day?’ He gathered together their three mugs. ‘I’m sure we could all do with something warm inside us.’

  When Sheila told him not to be such a dirty devil, he looked appalled and scurried off in the direction of the kitchen.

  ‘Poor Lionel,’ Jennifer said, ‘he’ll be reporting himself for making an inappropriate comment.’

  ‘Speaking of inappropriate, ever think old Armstrong’s getting his thrills by reading you those bits that shock him?’

  ‘No. Wouldn’t occur to him, he just sees it as his duty. Thinks he’s all that stands between civilisation and the ravaging, sex-starved hordes.’

  ‘If I’d known they were coming I’d have worn a shorter skirt,’ Sheila said, looking excited.

  Jennifer didn’t want to think of Sheila’s large hips in anything shorter than she was wearing now and turned quickly to the shelf holding the reserved and requested books. She picked up one and wondered why anybody would read it, let alone reserve it. ‘Thought Mr Armstrong looked a bit tired today, though. I’ll mention it to Mum; get her to ask him if he’s getting enough rest when she’s on the lunch deliveries next time.’

  Sheila hefted a pile of sorted books into her arms and propped them against her chest. ‘Forget him; I see Cressida’s fallen for her pool boy.’

  There was a barely interested look on Sheila’s face, but Jennifer was not fooled. From time to time Sheila would embark on these little sessions, which Jennifer secretly called ‘fishing trips’.

  ‘Really?’ Jennifer matched Sheila’s innocent look. ‘Her pool boy? She never mentioned it.’

  ‘Not that you’d tell us if she had. It’s like trying to prise open a whelk.’

  ‘I thought you got whelks out with a pin?’

  ‘Don’t try and distract me. What’s the good of me having direct access to Hollywood when you won’t pass on anything juicy?’

  Jennifer picked up one of Mr Armstrong’s books and balanced it carefully on the pile Sheila was carrying. ‘Here you go, I’m passing this on. Mr Armstrong reckoned it was juicy and completely …’

  Sheila’s expression made her stop talking.

  The woman and the little girl in the children’s section were having an argument. Jennifer half-turned to watch.

  ‘No. You are not having a DVD, Araminta, no DVD,’ the woman was saying, pulling on one end of the DVD case that the little girl had shoved under her arm. ‘You can have as many books as you like. But no DVD.’

  ‘Want-it-want-it-want-it.’

  ‘No.’ One massive tug got it safely into the woman’s hands, and she strode over to the shelves holding the DVDs and put it back on the highest one, way beyond the girl’s reach. ‘And why they have these in a library, I don’t know. It’s like sweets at the checkout in a supermarket.’ This last statement was delivered loudly enough to ensure it reached the librarians and the tone was particularly admonishing.

  ‘New people,’ Sheila said out of the side of her mouth. ‘Moved into the barn conversion over at Johnson’s.’ She hefted the pile of books up higher against her chest and added, ‘Southerners.’

  ‘Ah,’ Jennifer grinned. Sheila was into pigeonholing people, so anybody a bit posh was a ‘Southerner’, difficult men were ‘sexually frustrated’ and almost everybody else was a ‘tosser’. Her tetchy performances at the county’s ‘Opening Books, Opening Minds’ staff-training courses were the stuff of librarian folklore.

  Lionel came back with the tea and they tidied up a bit more, pretending not to notice how the argument in the children’s section was escalating. The little girl was now trying to drag a chair towards the shelves, presumably to retrieve the coveted DVD, and the woman’s studiously reasonable tone was slipping to show the steel beneath.

  Jennifer took a sip of her tea and positioned herself where she could watch, but not be seen. The fight hitched up a notch as the woman sat down on the little chair before the girl could climb on it.

  Lionel rolled his eyes. ‘The poor mite’s picked loads of books. What harm is one DVD going to do? We always let our kids watch cartoons and films.’

  Sheila gave him a little push. ‘Go and tell her then, Lionel. Tell her your kids both got to Cambridge and a few DVDs didn’t hurt them.’

  Lionel shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t listen. Know the type.’ He hesitated. ‘Sorry. That was prejudicial stereotyping.’

  Lionel always emerged from ‘Opening Books, Opening Minds’ with a pat on the back.

  ‘Stop it, Araminta. Stop it now. I will tell Daddy when he gets home. He will be very cross. Very cross. Privileges will be withdrawn. Withdrawn, Araminta.’

  Lionel took off his glasses and started to clean them with his tie. ‘Storing up all kinds of problems with that autocratic parenting,’ he said bleakly.

  They all watched, pretending not to, as the little girl tried to push her mother from the chair. She would have succeeded if her mother had not been hanging on to the seat. It was one of those scenes that might have been comical had it not been so emotionally raw.

  ‘Oh, I’ve had enough of this,’ Sheila said and went and deposited her pile of books on the little reading table in the children’s section. Both mother and child stopped fighting.

  ‘There, Araminta,’ the woman said, ‘the lady has come to tell you off for being naughty.’

  ‘No, I came to ask you not to sit on that chair.’ Sheila crossed her arms; an exceptionally tricky manoeuvre given the size of her chest. ‘They’re meant for children and we tend to find that even the lightest adults –’ the pause might as well have had ‘of which you are definitely not one’ embroidered on it – ‘even the lightest adults, tend to buckle the legs.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Jennifer said. Lionel busied himself with the stapler.

  There seemed to be a stand-off, but the woman was only regrouping. She stood up, catching the girl by the arm just as she made another attempt to climb on the chair and said, ‘May I just observe, it is not particularly helpful of you to put DVDs out in a library. Not for those of us who believe in the beneficial effects of reading.’ There was a sniff at the end of the speech which served both as punctuation and a mark of cultural superiority.

  ‘I think you’ll find,’ Sheila retorted, ‘that a balanced intake of different forms of stimulation produces a wider vocabulary in pre-school children and prepares them for participating in a range of multi-media learning scenarios.’

  ‘Well, look at that,’ Lionel said, ‘she was listening in those training sessions. And she’s using verbal reasoning instead of barely sublimated aggression. That’s a good sign.’

  ‘Possibly. But how is she standing, Lionel? Is she doing that jutting-out-her-chin thing?’

  ‘Oh,’ Lionel said and went back to checking his stapler.

  Sheila reached for the offending DVD. ‘Ah, Bananas in Pyjamas,’ she said, smiling at the little girl. ‘My kids loved them when they were your age.’

  ‘Really,’ the mother retorted, snatching the DVD back and replacing it on the shelf, ‘and, don’t tell me, they’re all brain surgeons now.’

  For a moment, Jennifer thought Sheila was going to lie, but when she chanced a quick look, she saw Sheila’s shoulders sag. ‘Fair point,’ she said and, bending down to the little girl’s level, shouted, ‘Listen to your mother and do exactly what she says at all times!’ Then, picking up her pile of books again, she walked quickly towards the kitchen.

  Jennifer felt Lionel move behind her. ‘Has young Reece got a court date yet?’ he whispered.


  ‘Friday. Sheila’s convinced he’ll get a custodial sentence this time, even if she does the pleading-mother act.’

  Sheila did not reappear.

  There was no more noise from the children’s section after that – the little girl was now meekly holding her mother’s hand and casting nervous glances around as if she was afraid that scary woman was going to return and shout at her again.

  Lionel went upstairs to the gallery, climbing the spiral wrought-iron staircase and Jennifer heard him huffing at the mess the high-school kids had left in the quiet study area. She counted up the money they’d taken in fines and placed the returned CDs back in the secure cabinet until, just as the clock said half past six, she became aware that the posh woman was standing right by the counter in front of her. She had her head down and was looking in her bag.

  Worst possible scenario.

  When the woman looked up she would see Jennifer for the first time. Cold. Jennifer knew how the script would go: a couple of seconds of silence; the usual unguarded look of shock and then some determined, frantic attempts at direct eye contact and a cheerful, breezy tone.

  ‘Just these books …’ the woman said, lifting her head, and everything spun out as Jennifer thought it would.

  She was pretty good, though, the woman, only missing a beat before changing her shocked expression into a mask of forced brightness. She studiously stared Jennifer straight in the eye.

  Funny how the ‘Let’s pretend nothing’s out of the ordinary’ approach is worse than unashamed gawping.

  Jennifer did what she always did in these situations, smiled vaguely and pretended she was up in one of the top fields at home, looking down on the river. If she concentrated hard she could imagine a flash of iridescent blue kingfisher.

  Breathe in. Breathe out. It is the other person’s problem. It is not your problem. You have come a long way. They are only looking.

  ‘Good series, this,’ she said and reached out and picked up one of the books.

  ‘Yes. Yes. Very good. Oh, yes. We love them. Absolutely. Love them.’ The woman was almost hyperventilating with the effort of not letting her gaze fall from Jennifer’s eyes.

  Silence again.

  ‘I’ll need your card, then,’ Jennifer prompted.

  There was a flurry of activity, and more desperate bagsearching. The little girl wandered over.

  Oh dear.

  ‘It’s here somewhere, I had it just now. I can’t think what I’ve done with it.’

  There was nothing covert about the way the little girl was staring at Jennifer.

  Here it comes.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy, that lady’s got a horrible—’

  ‘Noooooo,’ the woman shrieked, rounding on her daughter. ‘No, no, no. No talking now, Araminta. No.’ She caught hold of the girl’s arm. ‘You will help Mummy look for the library card. Come on. Now.’

  She all but rammed the girl’s head into the bag.

  ‘But, Mummy …’

  ‘Araminta,’ snapped the woman. ‘I will not tell you again. You have been naughty today. So naughty.’

  ‘But what’s she got on her face?’

  ‘Right, that does it,’ bellowed the woman, her own face becoming redder and redder. ‘No books today. No books. Naughty girl. No books.’

  Jennifer was half-tempted to lean across the counter and just explain everything. Children were brilliant, asked sensible questions, sometimes wanted to touch and then moved on to the next thing. That moment had passed with Araminta, though; she started to cry loudly.

  ‘Not fair. You said if I didn’t understand something …’

  The rest of Araminta’s plea bargaining was lost as her mother began hauling her out of the library in a flurry of bag-rearranging and scolding. There was a final clumsy scene as they tussled with the door button, and it was then that Araminta’s voice drifted back over the library, tearful and high-pitched, ‘But she’s got a horrible scar, worse than Harry Potter. It’s yukky, all down her face.’

  The door closed and there was silence.

  Jennifer took a deep breath in and let it out slowly before picking up the books that the girl had chosen and taking them back to the children’s section. Finding their correct homes on the shelves, the Rowling after the Reeve, the Higson before the Ibbotson occupied her mind and slowed her pulse.

  When she returned to the counter, Sheila was back and she and Lionel were standing very close together. Sheila coughed.

  ‘You know, Lionel and I were thinking of going for a drink after work.’

  Jennifer looked at the united little front of support.

  ‘You’re awful at telling lies,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. Really.’

  ‘Yeah, like I’m Angelina Jolie. Really,’ Sheila said and, despite all the other emotions swilling about in her, Jennifer couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘Go on, keep us company,’ Lionel said. ‘Get your stuff and we’ll meet you out front. I’ll lock up.’

  ‘Besides,’ Sheila said, ‘if you don’t need a drink, I bloody do. I’ve got one son who’s buggered off to Ibiza and can’t even talk in a straight line when he rings … which is barely ever, and only when there’s a Z in the month. Then there’s Reece, can’t see a car without wanting to drive it. Even if it belongs to the police.’

  Jennifer gave in. A drink would take the edge off things. First Mr Armstrong and then Araminta; please God, it wasn’t the start of a whole alphabet of awkward incidents lined up for the rest of the week.

  She went off to the staff toilets (a rather grandiose name for the one cubicle space used by all the female employees of the library) and gave her hair a brush. When she had been growing up, she’d coveted her cousin’s hair with all that bounce and curl, the kind of hair that always looked winningly dishevelled, but now she was content with how hers fell straight to her shoulders: a thick blonde curtain she could withdraw behind simply by dipping her head.

  Ignoring the large mirror behind her, she got out a small one from her make-up bag and used it while she smeared on coloured lipgloss. Then she repositioned the bag on the windowsill, next to Sheila’s deodorant and celebrity magazine. On a whim she picked it up and flicked through it, shaking her head at the rubbish in it about Cressida. Nice photograph, though. She was putting the magazine back on the windowsill when the phone rang in her bag and she jumped. It was the ringtone she had picked out for Cressida’s latest number, and she felt as if somehow looking at her cousin’s photograph had prompted her to ring.

  ‘OK, what’s new?’ she said as she brought the phone to her ear. There was no reply and Jennifer stayed silent too, just listening to the breathing.

  ‘Would it help if we talked about the weather?’ she said after a little while. ‘It’s blummin’ cold here, and a frost on the car this morning. I suppose it’s warm there?’

  There was a rushed ‘Uh huh’ in reply.

  ‘Cress,’ Jennifer said softly, ‘what’s wrong? Homesick?’

  Another grabbed ‘Uh huh’.

  ‘And I’m guessing you’re a bit nervous about that tricky scene in the lagoon tomorrow?’

  When there was no reply at all this time, Jennifer leaned against the wall and said very distinctly, ‘OK, now listen to me. Look on this as some free therapy. You’re doing what you love. You’re brilliant at it and that’s a fact, not flannel. For goodness’ sake, they’ve given you those hideous bits of metal and Perspex to prove it. This is a doddle, just another aspect of the craft to conquer. No, no, don’t interrupt, Cress, I haven’t finished yet. You will repeat this after me until all that fear’s banished.’ Jennifer looked at the door, feeling faintly foolish, but then went on, ‘Here we go – I’m talented and clever and beautiful and I’m going to rock them back on their heels with what I can do. Go on, let’s hear it.’

  There was a pause and then she heard Cress say, ‘I can’t remember all that.’

  Jennifer snorted. ‘Who are you kidding? Of course you can remember one simple line. And, what’s more, I
bet you’ve got yourself in front of a mirror so you can watch yourself saying it.’

  There was a little squeal from the other end of the phone.

  ‘Yeah, thought so,’ Jennifer said, transferring the phone to her other ear. ‘Just like the time when you had that terrible thing to tell Mike Egan and you acted the whole thing out.’

  ‘There’s no fooling you.’

  ‘Nope, so let’s hear it from the top … I’m talented and …’

  Jennifer closed her eyes and listened to Cressida repeat word for word what she had told her. At first there was a slight waver in her cousin’s tone, but soon the old, assured Cressida was discernible.

  ‘OK, OK, that’s enough,’ Jennifer said finally, ‘otherwise that head of yours won’t fit in any of your hats.’

  Over the top of her own voice, Jennifer could hear the sound of Sheila’s footsteps, so she leaped to the door and opened it before Sheila could. Hiding the phone behind her back, she said, ‘Out in a minute. Sorry, didn’t realise I’d taken so long.’ Sheila grumbled something about Jennifer needing to eat more roughage and it being perishing outside and could she hurry up?

  When Sheila had gone, Jennifer said into the phone, ‘Got to go, Cress, are you feeling better now?’

  ‘Much. Thanks Jen; just needed you to get me back in off the window ledge.’

  ‘Any time. Now go … go on. And if it happens again, you know where I am. Bye, sweetheart.’ She was just about to switch off the phone when Cressida spoke again.

  ‘But are you OK, Jen? Everything all right?’

  ‘Of course,’ Jennifer said, brightly. ‘I’m fine, absolutely fine. I’m always fine; no need to ask. Scram.’

  When Jennifer had replaced the phone in her bag, she stayed propping up the wall for a while, her mind over the other side of the Atlantic, but then the need to meet Lionel and Sheila roused her and she stood upright. Moving her position seemed to whisk Cressida away from her completely and the memory of Araminta and her mother took her place.

  If Cress was homesick, she was just sick.

  She lifted her chin. ‘Come on, it’s their problem, not yours.’ But no matter how many times she said them, the words just sounded like shiny, happy counselling-speak to her. It was her problem.