The First Time I Saw Your Face

by Hazel Osmond

  He turned to see Brenda. She was holding a tin of ratatouille in one hand and another tin was rolling among the spilt rice and packets of pasta. Her face was stern, immobile, her eyes gleaming under the strip lighting. ‘They do a family size,’ she said dropping the tin in her hand on to his foot. ‘Get away from my daughter.’ She gave him a hearty shove against the shelves. ‘Leave her alone. You’re a cruel liar. A manipulator of people’s feelings. She doesn’t want to see you. Nobody wants to see you. Go home.’

  Mack had expected to be terrified at his first meeting with Brenda, but he was too busy watching Jennifer. She was staring at the packet of mung beans in her hand. She put them neatly back on the shelf and looked disorientated. His heart was racing just looking at her, his breath coming as fast as hers had.

  ‘Sorry, Brenda,’ he said, ‘but I’m staying. I love Jen and I regret every single thing I did except loving her and getting her on that stage.’

  Brenda looked as if she’d like to club him with something heavier than tinned ratatouille. ‘You’re twisted. There’s not one part of you thinking about how much pain this is putting her through, is there? It’s all about what you want. When are you going to stop hurting her?’

  She walked past him, took hold of Jennifer’s hand and started leading her away.

  ‘I’m sorry for making a scene,’ he called after them, and then, ‘Did you get my letters, Jen?’ He saw hesitation in Jennifer’s progress before she disappeared round the end of the aisle to be replaced by a large man in a blazer bearing the supermarket’s logo.

  ‘Come with me, please,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to pay for all this and then I’m afraid I’ll have to escort you from the store.’

  ‘Fine,’ Mack said, high on the adrenalin of what had just happened, his heart still hammering, ‘but if I’m paying for all of it, I’m taking it home.’ He got down on his knees and started to gather up the individual grains of rice, thinking that even if he was here all night, he had made contact with Jen, and revelling in how beautiful she’d looked, her hair swinging back from her face as she lobbed things at him in anger.

  Jennifer got up in the early hours of the morning, put on her clothes and let herself out of the house. She wasn’t going to look at the moon, hadn’t really been too keen on looking at it since that night. She set off down to the river, sheep skittering away from her, a fox away in the woods, barking. Sitting by the water, she did up her jacket.

  Lying in bed or sitting out here she was still seeing Mack standing in the supermarket. Throwing those packets at him had been some substitute for what she really wanted to do: tear at his flesh and hurt him as much as he’d hurt her. He was such a liar, those brown eyes packed with all that sincerity again. Even his clothes had been a lie before. Now he looked …

  Sexy and beaten-up.

  She tried to let the river carry that thought away, but when it went, questions came in behind it. He’d been writing letters – Brenda admitted they had gone straight in the bin. Ten or eleven of them, she’d said. What kind of letters? And Doug, why was Doug giving him house room? Doug was no fool, well no bigger than everyone else had been. How had he managed to worm his way back in with Doug?

  Why was he doing this? He must be after something, but what? If he wasn’t Sebastian and he wasn’t Matt Harper, who was he? Who was this Mack Stone?

  She took the phone out of her pocket and rang Cress’s number. It went straight through to voicemail and she was glad. An easy first step back. ‘Hi, Cress … it’s me. Look, I’m sorry, I’ve been distant with you. I know you think that I’m uncomfortable about you being in love just at the time when I’ve been … or maybe that I blame you for that … that journalist hunting me out. Anyway, neither of those things is true … Damn.’ The voicemail cut her off. She rang back. ‘It’s more that I’ve felt so embarrassed and so stupid for being taken in and telling him everything that you were telling me. I betrayed you, in a way. And you haven’t wanted to talk about him, which has made me feel that you kind of agreed. It’s been like this big, horrible thing between us. All I wanted to say was, ring me. I need you, Cress. He’s back.’

  CHAPTER 45

  By the time Jennifer got into the library the next day she understood that it was biologically possible to have both PMT and menopausal mood swings. She had woken up expecting to want to turn over and stay in bed, but anger had got her up and downstairs. How dare he think he could come back, did he have no understanding of what he’d done to her? Did he expect that anything he ever said or did could wipe that out? She would show him he was severely mistaken about that.

  Her resolve had faltered a little over breakfast as Brenda had tried to persuade her to stay home. When Jen had reasoned that she would be safe in the library with Sheila and Lionel on guard, Ray had taken her side, his only stipulation being that she didn’t drive herself. She agreed, sensing that Bryony would enjoy a chance to escape from Danny for a while. Since she had blabbed that day in the kitchen, Danny had been uncharacteristically terse with her.

  When Jen returned from having a shower and getting dressed, she saw Alex pulling into the yard, and his opening words ‘Now, what’s all this about going back today?’ told her that someone had rung him. Her money was on Danny, although Brenda, currently looking evasive near the kettle, was her second bet.

  ‘It’s important to me to go in,’ she said. ‘I need to show him he doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You don’t need to show him anything.’ Alex smiled. ‘Now come on, let’s stop all this nonsense. How about we go for a drive, have a pub lunch and you think about going back tomorrow … or maybe next week?’

  All this nonsense? Is that what my determination means to you?

  ‘No, Alex. Bryony’s going to take me.’ She picked up her bag, walked from the kitchen and along the hall. She heard him behind her. She went out through the porch into the yard and looked around for Bryony.

  ‘OK, OK,’ Alex said, ‘you need to go in, I get it. But let me take you.’

  She might have got into the Land Rover if Danny had not appeared.

  ‘Good man,’ she heard him say, and she felt like some Victorian woman being passed from family to betrothed.

  Ten minutes later she was driving up the track in her own car, watching Danny and Alex get smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror. Her driving was erratic, but she felt as if she had offloaded some things she’d been meaning to offload for a while. Poor Danny, he had looked genuinely scared when she’d shouted at him. She couldn’t remember everything she’d said but it had gone along the lines of reminding him he was her brother, not Alex’s stooge and he’d better start being nice to his wife again. Alex she had told to back right off.

  She was still fizzing with outrage when she got to work, and rang Alex again from the upstairs office. Before he could start in on anything else, she asked him not to fight her battles for her, especially if that involved actual fighting. She was sick of it and, really, she needed to fight them for herself. Also, could he just have a think about how it made her feel to see people with any kind of injury, particularly ones about the head and face?

  Then she tried to hunker down in the simple cataloguing job Lionel had given her, but her mind merely flitted around it before heading back to that leather jacket and the guy inside it and the question of when he would try to see her again. She knew it was ‘when’, not ‘if’.

  ‘Heard Northumberland County Cricket have signed you up,’ Sheila said when she came in to the office, ‘spin bowler, especially effective with pasta and pulses.’

  ‘News travels fast.’

  ‘Like that pasta. Girl from the wine section told Sonia.’

  ‘Told Sonia … so you and Sonia?’

  Sheila did a kind of shrug that suggested yes, they were talking after ten years, and it was no big deal. ‘Anyway.’ Sheila lowered herself into a chair. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’

  ‘Neither,’ she said, knowing whom it would concern.

/>   ‘Sorry, that’s not a choice. The good news is he’s not in the library. The bad news is he’s sitting in the park. Lionel’s just taken him a cup of tea—’

  ‘Hang on, Lionel’s what?’

  Sheila rolled her eyes. ‘Long story. Heard the Peachmeister had ended up in A&E, so was eaten up with even more remorse, terrified he’d hurt him that badly. Was so overcome with relief when he found out it wasn’t his fault, took him over tea and came back with a message.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it, Sheila. Talk to me about anything else. Talk to me about Reece.’

  Sheila screwed up her face. ‘Reece is back. Last night. Unlikely he will be allowed entry to anything Spain owns ever again. There was an incident involving a Spanish taxi and some chickens.’ Sheila rubbed the back of her head slowly and looked at the floor, defeat evident in the set of her mouth. ‘Anyway, he’ll be in the park every morning, rain or shine.’ She paused. ‘Not Reece, obviously, the world spins off its axis if he’s ever out of bed before noon.’

  ‘I hope it does rain then,’ Jen said. ‘Or hails: stones the size of teacups.’

  Sheila nodded. ‘That’s the spirit.’

  Mack drove out of Tyneforth after lunch thinking it hadn’t been a totally wasted day. Just after eleven, Susan the woman who had been stage manager, had come and sworn at him and Sheila had detoured through the park to tell him to ‘bog off’. He guessed one of the sandwiches in her hands was for Jen. The highlight, though, had been Jocelyn, who suddenly appeared to have rewritten history so that she was Jennifer’s best friend. When he had told her his story she had said terrible things about his mother and suggested that he was the reason she was an alcoholic. That had touched a bit of a nerve.

  Up in the hills above the town, he walked till his muscles started to complain, and was able to laugh at his newfound affection for his walking boots. They were becoming two of his best friends, although given his current popularity, they didn’t have much competition.

  Having walked off the top layer of despair that had settled on him, he rang Tess and got Joe. Somewhere during the conversation, Mack let slip that his honesty had already resulted in a few fights. Joe’s cheery ‘Just keep telling the truth, it’ll come right’ sounded hollow. The flaw in Joe’s argument was that nobody believed he was capable of telling the truth now, even when he was.

  He told himself that he was only in the foothills of his campaign for forgiveness. How easy had he expected it to be? And really, this wasn’t about him, it was about healing Jen.

  Back at his car, he took off his walking boots and thought about the other positive thing he’d set his mind to achieving. Soon he was heading towards the MetroCentre with a shopping list that included industrial quantities of brown paper, large, not too heavy items and rolls and rolls of sellotape.

  CHAPTER 46

  Jennifer was determined not to look in the direction of the park, but when she did, she saw him, and he raised his hand and waved at her, but did not get up. She scuttled into the library, pulse all over the place, feeling outrage. This was where she lived, not him. He had done something wrong, not her.

  She fretted and stewed, the images of him kissing and holding her invading her head if she didn’t cram it with cataloguing and reading lists and stock transfers. If only Cress had rung back.

  Just before lunch she took a deep breath, assumed the mantle of Lady Macbeth and went over to the park. It felt strange to walk towards him when she should have been retreating. She clung on to her anger.

  He leaped to his feet, the magazine he’d been reading dropping to the ground.

  ‘Given up on newspapers?’ she said, not looking at him. ‘Well, give up on this farce too. You have a bloody nerve, and I don’t want you here. This is cruel of you, crueller even than last time.’

  ‘It’s not meant to be cruel, Jen. There’s no other way to convince you that I bitterly, bitterly regret what I did and that I love you. Please let me explain what happened.’

  ‘Don’t bother. I’ve heard the tale you’re spinning from everyone else. You deceived me all the way through.’

  ‘No, not near the end, all those things I said to you then, I meant. And even at the beginning, I was really trying to do what I had to do without hurting you … I couldn’t help trying to comfort you—’

  ‘Don’t patronise me.’ She looked at him when she said that, confident that her anger would protect her. ‘Everything you did was calculated to fool the poor sap. God, I bet your face was a picture when they showed you mine.’

  She saw his eyes widen, and he took a step forward before obviously realising he shouldn’t. ‘No, Jen, please don’t think that. Listen to me; I didn’t know you’d been in an accident, not until I saw you that first night. Please believe me.’

  She gave him marks for ‘doing’ distress really well; he was all over the place.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ he repeated sadly, ‘but it wouldn’t have made any difference if I did. There was no way I could get out of doing the job.’

  ‘Am I meant to be impressed by your brutal honesty when you tell me that? Because forgive me, it sounds like the same kind of brutal honesty you showed me last time. No, sorry, it’s not honesty, is it? It’s just brutal. Well take it and shove it and then get in your car and drive home – wherever you’ve decided to tell people that is this week.’

  ‘Jen, please, I never set out to get you into bed, I tried to keep it friendly; I made up a girlfriend—’

  ‘So sad little me wouldn’t get the wrong message?’

  ‘No … I mean, yes, but I didn’t think you were sad when I met you … oh shit.’

  ‘Lie after lie after lie, they just keep coming,’ she screamed at him. ‘Making people up, killing them off, leading Lisa on, pushing her away, getting my sympathy, reeling me in. Go on, tell me more, because that’s what you’ve come back for, isn’t it? To point out more humiliations I hadn’t even considered?’ Her anger took her over the road again, but once inside the library she couldn’t settle. She retreated to the toilets to try to clear the wad of emotion stuck in her throat; she went back into the library, but couldn’t think of anything that would distract her enough.

  She was walking over the road again, shakier this time, but more determined.

  He leaped up again, the magazine fell to the ground again.

  ‘I’m telling you to go. I don’t want you here, and if you loved me, you’d stop causing me pain and leave.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  His expression didn’t change; it was still intense, apologetic. She had an urge to slap him, but fought it, imagining the Courant headline: ‘Library Assistant Attacks Man in Park’.

  ‘Jen, I can only keep on repeating that I love you and ask you please to listen to how it happened from the start. How it unfolded. Please, I want to be completely honest with you. I know you want me to go, and yes, in the short term that would be easier for you and easier for me, but where does that leave us eventually? Living the wrong lives with the wrong people.’

  She laughed out loud at the cheek of that and walked back over the road before he could say anything else, her legs trembling.

  ‘I’ll be here again tomorrow,’ she heard him shout. She made a big show of putting her fingers in her ears.

  Sitting on the floor in the staff toilet Jennifer closed her eyes and tried to think herself somewhere calm. It wasn’t working: she kept finding herself back by that seat in the park. The gall, talking about living the wrong lives with the wrong people – if she did something mad like end up with Alex it would be all Mack Stone’s fault. He was the one who told her anything was possible and then revealed it wasn’t.

  Ending up with Alex. Accent on ‘End’ there. Better to be a mad old lady with a house smelling of cats. Or sheep.

  Her phone rang and she held it in the palm of her hand as if weighing up if she had the nerve to answer it.

  Cress only got out ‘Hi, Jen,’ before the pair of them were crying – huge gulps and sobs.
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br />   ‘We sound as if we’re underwater,’ Jennifer spluttered.

  ‘Underwater heavy-breathers,’ Cressida agreed, and then she was off, ‘Jen, I am so sorry; so, so sorry that you think I feel you betrayed me. I don’t think that at all. And I’m so sorry too that when you needed me, I’ve been side-stepping talking about … him.’ There was another bout of gulping and sniffing. ‘It’s not for any of the reasons you said on that message. It’s … it’s … oh … Auntie Bren’s going to kill me, but I have to tell you this: I didn’t talk about him because she asked me not to.’

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘When I came to see you after … on that terrible Saturday, I asked Auntie Bren if I should tell you that I’d paid Mack a call … and that he seemed upset, genuinely upset. You see, I thought it might give you some comfort that not everything he’d done had been a lie. Auntie Bren almost tore my head off, said the best way for you to get over it was to stop talking about him.’

  Genuinely upset?

  ‘I don’t want to hear it, Cress. Sorry, I can’t … I …’

  ‘OK, sweetie, OK … let’s leave it, let’s … how can I help you now? What can I say?’ There was a little hiccup from America. ‘Oh God, Jen, I’ve missed you so much.’

  The underwater heavy-breathers were back.

  ‘I’ll have to go in a minute,’ Jennifer said, reaching up and tearing off some toilet paper to wipe her eyes. ‘I’m sitting on the toilet floor, I’ve been missing for a while. If Sheila comes to find me and knows you’re on the phone she’ll prise it from my hands and want to know all the ins and outs of you and Anna Maria.’

  ‘Not the “Shake it all abouts”? People seem very interested in those.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The hokey cokey: you put your left leg in, your left leg … oh, come on, sweetie, you need to get that brain back firing on all cylinders. You’ve been spending too much time with Anaesthetic Alex.’