The First Time I Saw Your Face (18 page)

‘I don’t quite understand—’

‘Really?’ she said, with an unpleasant laugh. ‘I’ve just
seen you come out of the shop. Sonia must have filled you in on who my niece is?’

‘Well …’

‘Likes to chat, does Sonia.’ There was a hint of lemon there before she added, ‘Although to be fair to her, she’s pretty tight-lipped with journalists.’

Mack kept his face absolutely gormless-looking. ‘Yes, she did mention it, but to be honest, I don’t take much interest in these things.’

‘So you’re not that kind of writer, then?’ Those blue eyes gave him a sharp look to match the tone.

Yuk. Direct question. Calls for a direct lie.

‘No, wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘Actually, the problem is they don’t know where to stop.’

He could tell she wasn’t finished with him and watched her fold her arms.

‘So, you’re going to be in the play? Bit strange, isn’t it? Only here for a while and want to join in? You don’t know anyone.’

‘It’s because I don’t know anyone I like to join in.’ He was pleased how neatly he’d turned that around. ‘It’s a lonely business, writing.’

She studied him and then pointed towards Mr Armstrong’s door. ‘I deliver lunch here. Meals on Wheels, kind of thing.’ The blue eyes seemed harder. ‘I’m here twice a week. Every week.’

And you’ll be keeping an eye on me. Nice warning.

After a few more questions about where he was planning to walk next she said goodbye and went back down
the path to an old green Fiat parked at the kerb. When she opened the door, he could see that there was a baby strapped in the car seat and presumed it was her grandchild. Just then he couldn’t remember if Jennifer’s brother had a daughter or a son.

Back inside, he sat down on the arm of the chair, misjudging it and nearly ending up on his backside on the carpet. He had no idea if he’d passed the test, not a clue, but he understood perfectly well that she didn’t trust him and didn’t like him. Was that because of the journalists or some other, more personal reason? She was protective of Jennifer, no mistaking that.

He sat down properly in the chair and stared into the fire. He couldn’t imagine Phyllida ever looking after him like that. Whenever he’d been picked on she’d just told him to ‘toughen up’.

The bell rang again and his heart went into overdrive. He didn’t know if he could withstand another bout of questioning.

It was Mr Armstrong.

‘Cup of tea?’ he said in a gruff voice.

Mack was about to say that really he was a bit busy, thank you all the same, when Mr Armstrong took a step forward and he understood that the old man was inviting himself in. He stepped aside to let him pass.

‘See you’ve had that Jennifer’s mother here,’ Mr Armstrong said as he shuffled in. ‘Dreadful business with her niece going to America – Sodom and Gomorrah, it is there. And that Sonia over the shop,’ there was a sound
of air being drawn in rapidly, ‘she’s bought that latest husband of hers off the Internet, you know, some foreign boy. How her father stands it I don’t know, carrying on right under his nose.’

Mack followed Mr Armstrong into the house and shut the door. ‘Really, that’s fascinating, you must tell me more. Come and have a sit-down. Fancy a bit of toast with that cup of tea?’

CHAPTER 16

A week into rehearsals and Mack knew that, were Shakespeare still around, he would have jabbed him repeatedly with his quill. Instead of developing some kind of onstage chemistry with Jocelyn, who was meant to be playing the love of his life, he wanted to slap her soundly. The more he saw of her the less he liked her, particularly the way she stuck the knife into Jennifer. Which was pretty rich, seeing what he was planning to do to her, but it irritated the Hell out of him. Jennifer’s response was invariably to walk away, but from the set of her shoulders and that chin going down, he could see that each little snide remark hit home.

Shakespeare would also have been discomforted at the amount of on-stage chemistry that
was
present between brother and sister, Sebastian and Viola. Mack was pretty disturbed by it himself – not least because if he didn’t make it clear to Lisa that he wasn’t interested, she was going to keep on acting like a lovely pneumatic wall stopping Jennifer coming anywhere near him.

Those were just two of the things he hated about the play. Others included: the number of references to people not being what they seemed, the stupid costume he was going to have to wear, the fact he had to be in it at all and the almighty fiasco it looked like becoming. Doug kept crashing into him whenever he tried to read his lines and move at the same time, Neale was playing Malvolio as if he was some kind of international terrorist and Steve and Gerry had taken the message that they were the source of a lot of comedy in the play as an excuse to turn into Ant and Dec.

Right now he was watching Viola wooing Olivia on behalf of the Duke, and it was painful. Lisa was striding around and slapping her thigh like a principal boy in panto and Jocelyn was coming across as a woman on heat rather than a dignified lady. And if Pamela the leech, who was meant to be Olivia’s witty maid, didn’t stop screeching and flapping her arms around, the audience was going to think she was a hyperventilating seagull.

Little wonder Finlay was doing a lot of placing his hands on the top of his head and swaying. Did this club have to pay the audience to come and see them?

Mack looked across to the Blue Room, where Jennifer was kneeling on the floor cutting a pattern out of some material with a large pair of scissors. Her blonde hair had fallen forward and he was beginning to think of it as a shiny blonde shield. She was wearing a skirt today, which was now spread out around her like pale, powder-blue water, and he wondered idly whether she was in danger
of cutting through it when she cut out the pattern. She straightened up suddenly and her hair swung back and as always the sight of the scarring made him feel uneasy. He screwed his eyes up a little and tried to imagine what she had looked like without it.

Doug was giving him a quizzical look when he opened his eyes properly again. That was the trouble: while he was watching Jennifer, there was always someone watching him: her mother, the people in the library, Doug. All those people looking out for her and only him looking out for his entire family.

‘Right-ho,’ Finlay said, ‘Doug and Matt, let’s have another go at Act Three, scene three, where Antonio and Sebastian take leave of each other.’

Instead of my senses.

Doug lumbered to his feet and gave him a thumbs-up as the door to the hall opened, and a tall, tanned guy walked in. Doug did something funny with his face and Mack saw Jennifer stand up quickly and smooth down her skirt.

‘Hello, Alex,’ Neale said, ‘looking for Jennifer? She’s in the Blue Room.’

Ah, the famous Alex Lambton, the one who’s carrying a torch for Jennifer.

Alex said hello to various people as he passed through the hall and seemed to make a big show of talking to Finlay and apologising for disrupting the rehearsal. Mack could see Jennifer through the open door, stooping to pick up the bolt of material and the pieces she had cut from
it and then placing it all on the table. Then she moved the bolt of material off the table and leaned it against the wall. She fiddled about with the scissors, first placing them on the pieces of material and then directly on the table.

You’re feeling cornered in that little room.

Mack heard Finlay say, ‘Matt, if you would …’ and went and stood on his opening mark and saw the door of the Blue Room close behind Alex. Damn, he’d made spectacularly little progress with Jennifer since that car journey; he got the impression that she was avoiding him. If she did talk it was either with her chin firmly down or turned away, so that the perfect side of her face was all he saw. He could almost feel her embarrassment like a fence around her.

Now this Alex had put the kibosh on getting any further this evening.

Pressed up against the bar in the pub later, Mack’s original impression that Jennifer felt cornered hadn’t wavered. She was looking marooned at one end of the large table with this Alex, his back to the rest of the group, effectively blocking her off. Which confirmed Mack’s other impression: Alex didn’t really care much for the Drama Club, and all that bonhomie in the hall earlier had been false. And Mack knew false when he saw it.

All in all, this Alex was a bit of a stuffed shirt … although the guy deserved some points – from Sonia’s information it seemed as if the accident hadn’t changed Jennifer in his eyes.

Mack decided not to think about what he would have done in the same circumstances and worried instead about the more pressing problem of Lisa. Literally pressing – she had him right up against the bar, and although Doug seemed to be giving her his full repertoire of filthy looks, she wasn’t taking the hint. He was therefore relieved when he saw Alex get up and come towards him, causing Lisa to back off a little.

Within seconds, the guy’s superior attitude had got right up his nose. He was showing off in front of Jennifer, who had come to join him, and Mack understood pretty quickly that it was at his expense. He had to play this straight down the line – to be pleasant and naive. To be Matt Harper.

‘Jennifer and I go back a long way,’ Alex said when hands had been shaken and Mack saw Jennifer’s lips do a little twitch.

Next Alex assumed a cod West-Country accent to say, ‘Hear you’re from Bristol, down in Yokel Land.’

You prick.

Matt Harper nodded amicably.

‘Fancy yourself as a bit of an actor, do you, then?’

‘Well, I—’

‘Used to do some myself. Too busy now, of course. Leave it to those who’ve got more time.’

And talent.

‘Like to keep up with what’s going on, though. In fact, Jennifer and I have just decided to go to a play on the Quayside next week.’

Mack noticed the way Jennifer was holding her glass and wondered if it was Alex who had really decided about the play.

‘That’s nice for you both,’ he said.

There was a patronising smile. ‘Yes, it will be. So … the Derrick family, know them in Brizzel?’

Ooh, comedy rendition of Bristol, there’s no end to your talents.

‘I don’t think I do,’ he said, looking as though he was thinking, ‘but that’s not surprising, it’s quite a large city.’

‘But they’re a big name down there. Important family.’

Thanks for the put-down.

‘In farming, Alex,’ Jennifer said, pushing forward. ‘Remember, Matt Harper isn’t a farmer, he’s a writer.’

Alex had a supercilious look on his face, ‘Of course, a writer, not a farmer. Don’t like getting your hands dirty, I suppose?’

Matt Harper merely smiled in an apologetic way, but Mack Stone thought:
You have no bloody idea how dirty my hands are, mate. Even if you spent all day with yours halfway up a cow’s backside, they still wouldn’t be as dirty as mine
.

This time it was a rooster on the back seat that had almost made Jennifer drive off the road on the way back from the pub. She cursed Danny gently for messing with her ringtones again, before trying to ignore it. When the rooster would not shut up, she bumped back on to the grass verge by the side of the road and turned off the engine. Anyone watching her erratic progress was going to think she was doing some kind of Northumberland kerb-crawl, although
as she was on a country lane with fields both sides, the only thing she was likely to pick up was a sheep. Well, that wasn’t unheard of.

Soon she was giggling away at Cress’s saga about a photo opportunity the studio had set up with Rory Sylvester and his wife prior to the start of filming.

‘… we pitched up at this hip restaurant in Santa Fe, paps all outside, of course, because they’d been told we were coming, and we had to make it look as though we were completely surprised and really we always go out for pally meals.’

‘Food good?’

‘I had a yummy selection of salad greens with the tiniest sliver of tuna. Lucky there wasn’t a draught or the whole meal would have blown away. Rory had a steak and Anna Maria had something with a lot of chilli peppers in it. She very kindly gave me some to taste. Yup, she wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

Jennifer was building up a good picture of Rory Sylvester’s wife.

‘We all got on like a house on fire. Anna Maria has thoughtfully requested that some of the love scenes between Rory and I are rewritten before we start shooting next week – she feels they may be too “full on” for me.’

Jennifer burst out laughing.

‘Rory agreed, of course, in fact when Anna Maria went to the bathroom he said that films these days had become too explicit. His exact words were, “Why splash these things around for everyone to see, we all know what’s going to
happen when there’s chemistry between a man and woman.” Don’t you think that’s nice?’

‘Not the splashing bit. And … did you let him have a nibble of your pudding?’

‘No, but he really wanted some. I, however, kept thinking of that museum in Venice.’

Jennifer remembered the chastity belt she and Cress had gawped at in its glass case. However hot Rory was for her, Cress was not, it appeared, having any of it.

Jennifer looked out at the darkness and wondered when Cress would work around to asking her about Matt Harper and what she would say in reply. Matt Harper? Why couldn’t she just call him Matt? She said the name to herself and felt it was too intimate. Had she somehow become a virgin again in the accident?

‘Hmm, now, what rhymes with Cat, Hat and Bat?’ Cressida said innocently, and Jennifer could only laugh.

‘That’s dreadful, Cress. Blatant hinting. And really … there’s nothing to tell.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Well, I gave him a lift home one evening. He seemed to understand exactly how I felt seeing people acting when I’m not. Sympathetic without being patronising.’ She didn’t mention that she’d avoided giving him a lift since, had engineered it so she left rehearsals before he did.

‘Well that’s good, isn’t it? Jen? Come on, talk to me. Have you got to the stage where you’re imaging him naked yet?’