The First Time I Saw Your Face

by Hazel Osmond

  Carefully she dipped her head so that her hair fell forward and then opened the door.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mack sat on the train heading north and fought the desire to fall asleep. If he did he’d probably shoot past Newcastle and end up in Scotland, and he hadn’t had the inoculations for that.

  Hardly surprising he was tired. Since O’Dowd had handed him this poisoned chalice, he’d lied to his sister and her family; had a disturbing showdown with his mother; buried his old identity and got himself a new name.

  He stared out of the window, not registering the view skimming by, but then the thought that he’d left Tess to cope once more with Phyllida on her own made him turn away, just in case he caught sight of his own reflection in the glass. Breaking the news to Tess that he was going away had been horrible, and thinking of a reason to explain his departure had taken all his story-telling skills. But telling her the truth, all that stuff about Phyllida and Sir Teddy Montgomery, had never been an option. Along with her optimistic nature, Tess had the kind of soft heart that would have turned itself inside out to find a way out of this mess that did not involve deceiving someone else. Whereas Mack knew that was pointless. Once O’Dowd’s teeth were clamped on, you either gave him what he wanted, or waited for the death roll.

  He had carefully chosen his moment to lie to Tess. They had taken themselves out into the garden, Tess sitting on one of the patio chairs and him on the low, stone wall with the lawn stretching away behind him. Even in the sun, sheltered from the wind, it was what Phyllida called ‘bracing’. Mack had his hands in his jacket pockets and Tess had poked hers up the sleeves of her coat. Cold as they both were, it was good to be outside while Phyllida slowly resurrected herself; a nice break from peering in bins and feeling under furniture.

  The chat at first had been about his old school friend Bob, the one he’d used as his excuse for going up to London. Telling Tess he was going to see O’Dowd would have been akin to saying he was off to see the Antichrist. Bob stumbled from one carcrash relationship to another and it was perfectly believable that, yet again, Mack had been called to help Bob sit up all night and vent about the female of the species.

  After that, he and Tess moved on to chatting about the garden: how the lawn was more moss than grass these days, which shrubs were looking a bit leggy and whether it was a healthy sign that Phyllida had been out and cleared the dead herbs from the oversized terracotta pots and filled them with compost ready for planting up when spring came round.

  At the first lull in the conversation, Mack said, ‘Remember you felt there was something good just around the corner? Well, didn’t want to get your hopes up before it happened, but I wasn’t only seeing Bob in London, I was seeing a publisher … about writing a travel book.’

  He had seen the enthusiastic questions lining up to come out of Tess’s mouth, and rushed on, telling her it was a small outfit called Sidecar Imprint round the back of Vauxhall, and that one of the guys there had once worked on a travel magazine (now folded) and been impressed by some articles on Cornwall Mack had submitted to it – that year he went just as the heatwave broke.

  Tess had nodded slowly. Sprinkling big lies with little bits of the truth was something he’d learned working for O’Dowd. Do it right and people would gobble up the lies quite happily. In reality there was no travel book, no Sidecar Imprint, no magazine that had folded. He had been to Cornwall, though.

  ‘A whole book,’ Tess had almost cooed before he dropped the big bomb.

  ‘They’re sending me north, to Northumberland, in fact. I’ll have to stay up there. Couple of months at most, and of course I can come home like a shot if there’s an emergency …’

  He had seen the happiness drain from her, could almost see it leave, muscle by muscle. He let her absorb the news, trying not to stare as she composed her face into one that didn’t look as if it was melting.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Tess, leaving you to mother Mum again, but you know how I need the money.’ He had watched her hands moving inside her sleeves.

  ‘I thought you hated the North,’ she’d said at last, and then, ‘it’s a bit of a bombshell,’ and finally, ‘I’m happy for you, ’course I am. It won’t make any difference here.’

  Mack had wondered how Tess was such a bad liar and he was such a good one. Probably because he got so much practice. He was about to get a lot more.

  The train was coming into Peterborough Station and Mack stopped thinking about Tess and watched the man opposite stand up, wrestle his way into his coat and weave down the train ready to get off. He waited to see whether anyone would get on and come and sit with him, but when the train pulled out again, there was just him and the three empty seats round the table. The carriage was barely half full. Why should that surprise him? Who in their right minds would be travelling north in February unless they had a gun at their head?

  He suddenly had an image of O’Dowd with a revolver. Well, it certainly wasn’t going to fire blanks; he knew that after his showdown with Phyllida, hot on the heels of his conversation with Tess.

  She had appeared inside the back door as he and Tess had been discussing how soon he had to head north, and Mack had known from the neatness of her navy skirt and gold blouse, to the way her hair was actually brushed, that she must have had a drink.

  She had levered herself over the doorstep and walked towards them with a slow, deliberate gait as if she had to concentrate on replicating what normal movement looked like. He remembered how, when he was little, she used to stride out and he’d had to look sharp to keep up with her.

  Ignoring Mack, Phyllida had wished Tess ‘Good morning’, and an embarrassed Tess had leaped up and offered Phyllida first her chair and then a cup of tea.

  Phyllida’s only words until Tess returned had been a pointed ‘Such a good child’, and Mack had seethed quietly. He’d seethed some more when Tess had passed the fine bone-china teacup and saucer to Phyllida – it was another fancy prop Phyllida used to convince herself she was still in control. They had all ignored the way Phyllida’s hand had shaken as she took it.

  He’d said nothing as Tess had told Phyllida in a shamingly proud way that he’d landed a job writing a travel book. Her reply, accompanied by a graceful ascent of her eyebrows, hit too many nerves.

  ‘Not your usual area of … expertise,’ she had said, ‘or will you be snooping on the locals too?’

  Even Tess’s pleading look couldn’t keep him sitting down.

  They had then had the same fight they’d been having since he had gone to work for O’Dowd, the one when he told her he knew he’d taken a wrong turning and she gave her view forcefully that he had wasted his training: O’Dowd was the worst kind of journalist overseeing the worst kind of journalism.

  ‘Sloppy, nasty, pandering to the basest instincts of the public.’ Her voice had grown harsher and harsher. ‘And you, you developed the morals of a hyena.’

  Tess had said ‘Mum’ sharply at that point, and Phyllida had stopped talking while Mack returned to his seat on the wall, outraged at the injustice. His morals! Wasn’t it her messy morals that had catapulted him back into O’Dowd’s world?

  That anger had still been there when Tess had gone off to see if she could find the article on Northumberland she’d seen in one of the magazines in Phyllida’s bathroom.

  Mack had moved towards Phyllida as soon as Tess was out of sight. There had been more coldness coming off her than the breeze. He saw the way she drew back from him, something she had always done, even before his spectacularly disastrous attempt to follow her into journalism. All of it stoked his anger further so that although he had little hope that he would get a straight answer, he decided to ask her about Sir Teddy, if only to see some of that haughtiness come crashing down.

  ‘You worked on the Arts pages at the Echo, didn’t you?’ he’d said conversationally. She nodded.

  ‘Must have been fascinating, being there right at the heart of London in the eighties.’

  Another
nod.

  ‘Hard to remember all the faces and the names, though?’

  ‘A little.’ There had been uncertainty in her voice.

  ‘Remember anyone called Teddy?’

  It was what he called a ‘softener’ question, preparation for hitting her with the name ‘Montgomery’ later, and he’d expected some kind of guarded look in response. Instead she had turned her beautiful, ruined face towards him and panic had slewed across it, widening her eyes and making her mouth dip.

  ‘Who told you about Teddy?’ she had said, her voice low and intense. ‘Who told you?’

  Mack had felt the shock roar through him. It was true … jeez, if he’d opened that brown envelope …

  When he’d managed to reply that O’Dowd had told him, her hand had gripped his. ‘The swine, why tell you? It was madness, a stupid passion. Nobody knew. Nobody.’ With horror he had seen tears in her eyes, and it was such an un-Phyllida type of thing to happen that he could still remember, sitting on this train miles away from her, how breathless it had left him.

  ‘What exactly did O’Dowd say?’ she had asked almost frantically, her hand now clutching at his sleeve and managing to catch some of his flesh.

  ‘That you’d had an affair.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  He’d wanted to shout ‘That’s all? That’s bloody well enough!’ but instead had got down on his knees and tried to soothe her, enclosing both of her hands in his.

  When she’d seemed calmer, he had suggested she went for a lie-down and, as he’d helped her from the chair, asked her to take it easy while he was away, pointing out that Tess couldn’t pop in all the time like he could, and if she did drink in the flat on her own and something happened …

  ‘There you go again,’ she had replied, but without her usual exasperation. ‘I don’t drink on my own any more. Just in the pub, in company. It’s not a sin.’

  He hadn’t argued, and just before she had stepped into the kitchen, she’d done a clumsy little turn and given a smile. It had missed him and landed somewhere among the flowerpots, but it had buoyed him up, made him hope she might be trying to pull herself around.

  Minutes later, when Tess returned with a pink hot-water bottle in one hand, that buoyant feeling had been punctured.

  ‘Take a sip,’ she had said tersely.

  In many other families, being asked to taste the contents of a hot-water bottle might have seemed bizarre, but Mack had upended it and felt the vodka with a hint of rubber burn its way down his throat.

  Fooled again … but not about Sir Teddy Montgomery, of that he was sure. That naked anguish had been Phyllida telling the truth.

  Tess had taken the hot-water bottle from him and, shaking it as if she wanted to break its neck, said, ‘So, that’s what she’s decanting the drink into, but where are the bottles?’

  Mack had thought back to Phyllida’s departing smile and walked over to the nearest plant pot. Digging his hand down into the cold compost, it had connected with something hard and smooth and he’d pulled out a full bottle of vodka. Presumably there would be others – some empty – in the rest of the pots.

  ‘Well done, Phyllida, you’re growing the stuff now,’ he’d said, but he’d been thinking: Is this how devious you were about Sir Teddy Montgomery? Fooling everyone, leading them in a dance?

  The train gave a jolt, and above him in the luggage rack, a dark red rucksack shifted. It lay on a fleece and he gave both items a sour look. Never in his life had he expected to own either. But then he’d never expected to become Matt Harper, travel writer and, he grimaced some more, keen walker.

  Finding his new name had taken best part of a morning in front of the computer. On page thirty of the search engine’s results for ‘travel writer’ he had spotted it and knew it was perfect. There were no photographs and only a tiny biography saying: ‘Twenty-nine, born in Weymouth, author of two books on walking in the West Country. Currently lives in Bristol.’

  He’d have no problem remembering to answer to that brilliant first name and good old Matt didn’t even appear on any social networking sites.

  Big, anonymous Bristol was perfect too. Mack knew it almost as well as he knew Bath, and unlike Bath, nobody in the frozen north would have visited it looking for bloody Jane Austen and want to talk to him about it.

  The only thing that would scupper everything was if low-profile, low achiever Matt Harper suddenly embarked on some publicity-grabbing behaviour such as running naked through a load of nuns. On a chatshow.

  The buffet trolley started its lumbering journey along the carriage and he got out some cash from his wallet. That was all that was in there since he’d emptied out anything with his real name on it. The one thing he’d hung on to was his passport, currently safely locked away in his suitcase. O’Dowd would have a fit if he knew, but Mack would need it if he had to fly home quickly.

  He flicked through some of his guides to Northumberland laid out on the table, but his brain couldn’t take any more forests and castles and miles of sodding coastline. He opened up one of Matt Harper’s West-Country walking books unearthed in a bookshop in Bath. Fortunately A Guide to Dorset Coastal Walks and A Walk Around North Somerset were slim little volumes he could easily read and more or less memorise, not some five-hundred-thousand-word tomes on kayaking in the melt water of the Himalayas. Also, not once did the words ‘Because I am six foot seven and have bright ginger hair’ appear. The writing was nicely anonymous too, but skull-crackingly dull – if Matt Harper had been walking the Hanging Gardens of Babylon he would have spent half an hour describing the soil.

  Putting down the walking books he opened O’Dowd’s file, skimming through the details on Cressida Chartwell yet again – a BAFTA and Olivier Award; what the bookies were giving as odds for her winning an Oscar within two years of arriving in Hollywood; past lovers. There wasn’t so much on this Jennifer, and what he did know depressed him – particularly that she was secretary of the Brindley and Yarfield Drama Club. Great, the north, the countryside and amateur dramatics; throw in a bit of morris dancing and he’d be reet ecstatic, pet.

  The only other facts were about her schooling (bright girl), her gap year (VSO in Botswana) and the drama degree at Manchester University (dropped out a couple of months shy of graduation). Silence for twelve months before she’d gone to work in the local library in a place called Tyneforth. Been there ever since.

  No significant boyfriends among the guys she’d dated at university and a complete drought since. After reading that, Mack had invented himself a girlfriend. If this Jennifer was desperate for a man, it was best to get it clear from the start that he wasn’t offering anything more than friendship.

  There was no photograph of Jennifer in O’Dowd’s file and somewhere in the back of Mack’s brain a question formed about that before he shrugged it off.

  Mack felt the train start to slow again as they came into some godforsaken place called Doncaster, and he looked up at the luggage rack again. The rucksack and fleece were just two of the things he’d bought during a depressing afternoon kitting himself out for a ‘holiday in Scotland’. Among his other purchases was a thing called a ‘wind-proof, waterproof outer shell’, but which looked suspiciously like a cagoule to him, two pairs of heavy-duty walking trousers and some thick socks. The fact that the things made him look like a twit and were either itchy or slippery wasn’t mentioned in any of the sales patter. By the time he was looking at walking boots he wanted to run out of the shop screaming.

  Thinking about Phyllida had brought him to his senses. Neither Tess nor he had told her that her potted-drink supply had dried up, but she had obviously discovered it herself, as she’d left the house in a door-slamming tantrum. Mack had felt the walls vibrate in his own flat.

  With the sound of that slamming door still in his head, Mack had settled on the pair of walking boots that hurt him the least. He was a keen walker, he had to remember that. My how he loved walking – preferably from a car to a house. In a small act of rebellio
n, he had added a bright bandana to his pile of purchases and, when he had got back to the flat, relished making all his outdoor gear look used. He had especially enjoyed going over the walking boots with sandpaper: giving them a taste of what they would be doing to his feet.

  The rest of the shopping trip had been occupied with buying the other props that would help him play the character of Matt Harper. Even though it pained him, he had bought a sludgy-brown cord jacket that he thought said ‘author’ better than his leather one; a selection of hearty jumpers to replace his normal slogan-bearing T-shirts and a couple of pairs of hideous jeans. Next stop had been a ‘gentlemen’s shoe shop’ for a pair of brogues that made him depressed just looking at them.

  He had also bought various pairs of spectacles off a stand because they made him look more studious and could be left on tables and in bars in a forgetful, vague way. Being absent-minded was a character trait he had observed made others drop their guard as they kept an eye out for you, rather than on you. For the same reason he bought a load of notebooks and put his name in all of them.

  He had only just got his coffee and a bar of chocolate from the trolley when his mobile rang and, seeing it was O’Dowd calling, he went and sat in the loo.

  ‘Listen,’ O’Dowd said, plunging right in without any pleasantries, ‘a Third Party’s going to meet you at Newcastle Station with a key to a rented house in Brindley – No. 3 Brindley Villas. It’s just up the hill from the Rosebys’ farm. He’s got cash for you, too, whenever you need more just call him; he’ll give you the number. Don’t worry, he can keep a secret or I’ll drop him in a bigger load of shit than the one that’s waiting for you. He’ll give you a mobile phone as well.’

  ‘I’ve already got one.’

  ‘Really? I thought we were talking via cocoa tins and string. Listen, turnip head, the new phone is the only one, from here on in, that you use. And no phoning my office and leaving a message. There are just three people who know what you’re up to: you, me and the big bastard upstairs, so keep it that way or everything will leak out like an incontinent nun’s knickers. Anything else?’