The First Time I Saw Your Face (13 page)

Jennifer had to work very hard not to laugh. Typical Lionel, eager to help and completely misguided. She was amazed Sheila had not decked him. Still, at least Sheila did not have to put up with him smiling wistfully at her when they worked together. For a while now she had suspected that Lionel’s feelings towards her were warmer than the usual ones that existed between a library supervisor
and a library assistant. It was like being cocooned in a soft, comfortable jumper.

Sheila’s bad mood and Lionel’s galumphing naivety were welcome distractions from those brown eyes of Matt Harper’s and the way they had looked at her. In bed last night, over breakfast this morning, on the drive into work, the sharp pain of that first awkward meeting had kept rising up like silt disturbed in a pond. No doubt the next time they met he would either avoid her like the plague, or overcompensate by being extra friendly and extra jolly.

Why couldn’t he have been fat with halitosis?

Jennifer turned her attention back to Sheila’s truculent book-sorting.

‘I could tell you a snippet about Cress to cheer you up, if you like,’ she said and was pleased to see some of the force go out of Sheila’s hurling technique. ‘She had a paparazzi in her pool.’

‘What, as in “had”?’ Sheila said, perking up even more.

‘No. He dropped in.’

‘To visit?’

‘No, literally dropped in. Fell out of a tree. They’re all buzzing round her, trying to dig up the dirt on her love life.’

Sheila immediately descended back into moroseness. ‘Must be nice to have some dirt in your love life for someone to dig up.’ She held out a book for Jennifer to see. ‘Scrap pile or sell pile?’

‘Scrap, I would think, look at the bite marks on it.’

‘Well, biography of Margaret Thatcher, what do you expect? Hey up, what’s wrong with Li-Li?’

Lionel was standing in the doorway. ‘There’s a young man downstairs for you,’ he said. The set of his mouth suggested he felt put out about that.

Jennifer saw who it was as soon as she started to come down the staircase: Matt Harper, a carrier bag in his hand and a dark-red rucksack over one shoulder. She concentrated on the metal steps. He was smiling cheerily at her; one of those fixed smiles she’d come to loathe.

She could do this, show him she didn’t care about yesterday and she really didn’t care about him. Only problem was, just at that moment she couldn’t raise her chin.

‘Hello,’ he said and she nodded at his brogues, two shoes that were perhaps among the most horrible ever made. Lionel was watching them under cover of checking out books and was being quite rough with the date stamp.

‘I’d like …’ Matt Harper said, and then stopped.

She waited, and when he didn’t start again, she did look up and registered the deep brown of his eyes and that unruliness in his hair which made him look as though he’d had a busy time in bed.

God, you’re good-looking.

His attention had obviously been taken by something behind her.

Jennifer saw that Sheila had come downstairs and was hanging around, not very subtly, pretending to tidy the newspaper rack.

‘Sorry,’ he said, looking confused, ‘that woman, I just thought she was somebody else for a second.’

‘Sonia at the village shop. In Brindley?’

He nodded, looking more perplexed.

‘It’s her sister. Sheila.’

‘Ah. Small world. Right.’ Out came his cheery, irritating smile again. ‘Look … sorry … I’m making a hash of this. Is there anywhere a bit quieter we could go?’

‘This is a library,’ she said, ‘everywhere’s quiet,’ and saw him look surprised that she had a sense of humour. That figured. Scarred face equalled not quite up to speed. It was a piece of arithmetic she’d met before.

‘More private, then,’ he said, gently.

Lionel came round the desk.

‘Everything all right, Jen?’

Jennifer looked at Lionel and saw the familiar layers of wool waiting to be wrapped around her. She looked at Matt Harper and didn’t know what she saw, but something was pushing her to find out.

She led Matt Harper to the modern literature section.

‘Bright chairs,’ he said in a distracted tone, putting his carrier bag down on one, and irritation that Sheila and the furniture were proving to be more interesting than she was began to outweigh her embarrassment. She concentrated on Matt Harper’s jumper, which was another horrible one and the same style as Lionel’s. He didn’t look like Lionel in it, though. That icky cord jacket was a mistake.

‘Sorry, this is a bit tricky, but I knew I had to come and
do this,’ he was saying. ‘You must be sick of it – people looking put out when they see you, and then pretending they weren’t and being over-the-top normal.’

She felt as if he’d shoved her. Or peered into her brain and seen her real feelings.

He was talking again, his hands moving as if smoothing over the words.

‘When I saw your face in the pub, I didn’t react very well. I fear I looked as if I found it disturbing.’

She had changed her mind: she did want to go and be wrapped in Lionel’s jumper. Matt Harper’s hand had come up in a kind of ‘Stop’ gesture as though he sensed that.

‘Please listen,’ he said, ‘my only excuse is that I was knocked back by the contrast with everything else about you.’

Oh God, her throat was going. She felt herself blinking too fast, but somehow her brain was processing that beneath the breath-taking, brutal honesty was something that he probably thought was a compliment.

‘Meeting new people must be hard enough for you without them standing there like a wounded goldfish.’

His eyes seemed to be searching her own for clues about how she was feeling. There was a little furrow in his forehead as though he was struggling with a headache.

‘I … don’t … you …’ She dried up.

His hand went to one side of his face and he rubbed it slowly as he spoke, as if he was at some deep level trying to process the subject of faces and skin and scars. ‘I’m very afraid I’m making this worse and humiliating
you even more.’ His hand stopped and he gave her a self-deprecating smile. ‘I spend too much time walking or staring at a blank sheet of paper; not enough time with people … or so my girlfriend says.’

This time her words came: ‘No, it’s all right. It’s just you’re very … direct.’

‘Tactless is what you mean, but you’re too kind to say, I suspect … but I’m glad you’re taking it like that, such a relief.’ Suddenly he had his hand out. ‘How about we start again and I promise not to be so in your face?’

All Jennifer could hear was the blip of the barcode reader followed by the thump of the date stamp. A quick look at him confirmed that the words had been a nervous blurt, not intended, but they had felt like little thorns nonetheless.

His hand was still extended towards her, although looking a little limp now. It was a nice hand, attached to a good-looking man, but it was beyond her.

‘I have to get back to the desk,’ she said and walked quickly past Stephen King and Hilary Mantel and George Orwell. She knew that it must have seemed abrupt and strange, but if she hadn’t moved then, she suspected she would have sat down on the floor.

He had followed her back to the desk and she got herself behind it and on to a chair. Sheila appeared like a shot. Lionel was still in a sulk.

‘Bye, then,’ Matt Harper said, with that cheery smile which looked rigid. He nodded at Sheila and Lionel and was gone.

Sheila didn’t even wait for the door to close. ‘Right, Jen, who is that, why is he talking to you and just how peachy is that backside?’

‘Sheila, not in the library,’ Lionel snapped, ‘there are children here.’

Jennifer told them who he was and why he was in Northumberland, but not why he had come to the library. Sheila gave her a sly look. ‘Well, you kept that quiet, missy. I’m seeing that play of yours in a whole new light now. Sulky Neale squeezed into a pair of big bloomers and tights wouldn’t get me away from
Coronation Street
, but he would. Tea break, I want all the gen on him, Jen.’ She laughed at her own joke.

‘Writing a book on Northumberland from a walker’s perspective?’ Lionel said, his mouth looking a bit funny again. ‘How utterly ground-breaking.’

Jennifer buried herself back up in the office, but she was still focused on Matt Harper. That hand extended in friendship, why hadn’t she taken it? Because of that last nervous blurt of his? All that blunt honesty?

Or because she knew that putting her skin against his was going to make her feel all kinds of things she hadn’t felt for a long time; things that were pointless for someone who looked like she did now to feel for someone who looked like him?

Mack wondered whether anyone would notice if he stood outside Tyneforth Library and repeatedly hit his head
against the wall. ‘In your face’. Brilliant. The one thing he shouldn’t draw attention to and he’d done it.

He found a coffee shop and mainlined a double espresso and chocolate muffin. Jeez, what a mess. Despite practising his apology on the bus it had been a lot more difficult faced with the flesh-and-blood reality of that face. The way she walked away at the end without shaking his hand, was that a sign that he should just hand Phyllida a shovel and tell her to get digging?

Still, out of the wreckage he’d picked up some things that might be useful. Like the fact the guy on the desk obviously had a thing for Jennifer; that Sonia had a scarier, bigger sister called Sheila and, Jennifer’s tone suggested, all was not right between them. Oh, and that he had the same taste in jumpers as the woolly Romeo. He’d almost laughed out loud when he’d seen that.

He looked around. Finding one of these coffee shops up here in the frozen north was a bit like finding a sushi bar in the desert.

That scarring was horrible, though. You couldn’t stop staring when you were talking to her. Took your mind right off those high cheekbones and blue eyes. She had a bit of an Eastern European look, or, with that blonde hair, perhaps it was more Scandinavian. The thought of Vikings made him remember Lisa’s comment about pillaging and he spent a few, satisfying minutes thinking about her breasts.

Still, Jennifer wasn’t the slightly out-of-it, sad soul he’d imagined from the way she’d acted yesterday in the pub.
Genuine sense of humour lurking in there, which he supposed shouldn’t surprise him: if she’d been set on being an actress she must have been outgoing, pretty confident.

He got another coffee and the code for the Wi-Fi, found a seat where he couldn’t be overlooked and retrieved his laptop from the rucksack. He’d missed being able to dig into the Internet or speak on his mobile whenever he felt like it and spent the first few minutes answering emails, giving the impression to friends he was still in Bath. Then he did a bit of research on the village Tess thought he was living in. Bloody typical, that one had a pub. Trawling through gossip sites he saw that Cressida had rescued a drowning member of the paparazzi. Nice bit of PR. She’d probably been tempted to push him right under.

Back out in Tyneforth, he bought some thick gloves and had a wander to get his bearings. Despite the number of charity shops, the place had a prosperous feel to it, modern supermarkets down by the river and then the older buildings stretching up the hill. The architecture was a jumble of ages and styles, but the overall impression was of old stone and old brick. He poked his head inside the ancient abbey that dominated the market square and made a note of any cafés or sandwich shops where Jennifer might get her lunch and where he could ‘accidentally’ bump into her.

He could have been in any market town in any shire in England, except for the soundtrack of that accent: ‘I had a one of them’, ‘He went off for to buy a paper’, ‘That lad needs fed’.

Feeling a long way from home, he walked back round to the library and, crossing the road, entered a park via an arch commemorating old wars, before passing a war memorial commemorating more recent ones. Down the path he went towards an ornate bandstand and huddled inside it to ring Tess. She sounded chirpy, and first Fran, and then Gabi were put on to talk. As he’d suspected Tess had looked up the village on the Internet and he told her the beer and food at the pub were great, the cottage was great, on Monday he was going up to Hadrian’s Wall.

‘So how are the natives?’ she asked with a laugh.

‘Incomprehensible, but not unfriendly.’

‘They don’t burn southerners for entertainment?’

‘Warmth maybe, but not for fun.’

He felt Tess thaw him out, although the news that Phyllida seemed to be behaving after her tantrum sent a slight chill through him again: he suspected more deviousness, but how was it helping Tess if he voiced that?

They talked for a while longer before Tess had to go.

‘The girls have sent you something,’ she said before she went.

He walked out of the park, not relishing having to ask the Third Party to go and retrieve whatever Tess had sent, but at least he could give Mack some more cash when they met up, because right now he was going to spend what he had left on a couple of fan heaters, an electric blanket and speakers for his iPod to get his music chasing away the deathly quiet of that cottage. In fact, he was going to hoover up as many bits of modern life as he could
carry back on the bus without it looking suspiciously like he was a softie with too much money.

The prospect of spending O’Dowd’s money geed him up a bit as he walked towards the shops, but then the realisation hit him that when he caught the last bus to Brindley he’d be back in the cottage by six, hemmed in by all that green.

Three days, he’d barely been here, three days. He could be here two months, perhaps more. How the Hell was he going to handle that?

CHAPTER 11

Mack opened his front door the next morning to find two pints of milk and an incredibly old man. Looking as though he’d been scrubbed and smelling faintly of soap and toothpaste, he was leaning on a stick, and his face, with its watery blue eyes, was dominated by a long, sharp nose.

‘Remove my top for me, would you?’ he said in that funny sing-song accent with the rolling ‘r’s.

‘Your top?’ Mack looked at the man’s jacket and jumper and wondered which one he meant.