The First Time I Saw Your Face (45 page)

‘I’m glad you’re on my side, Phyllida,’ he said and saw Ray hide what might have been a smile.

‘I have also told them that you’ve been like a poisoned cat in Bath, overcome with remorse and quite lovesick as far as I can remember what lovesick looked like. Oh, and perhaps they could cut you some slack because you have only recently discovered that the man who is actually your father is a complete and utter bastard.’

Ray was having trouble with that smile again.

‘How did Jen take it all?’ He almost couldn’t bear to hear the answer.

‘She didn’t say much, just listened and then went upstairs.’ Brenda looked uneasily towards Phyllida as she added, ‘Knowing why you did it is one thing. Forgiving how you went about it is another. We’ll … see how it goes. We can’t say more than that.’

‘Well, that seems like progress to me.’ Phyllida beamed around at everyone, quite the gracious dignitary. ‘We’ll leave you in peace and again, Mrs Roseby, I am so sorry for the pain and upset inflicted upon your daughter. She’s very lovely. So graceful.’ Phyllida came and linked her arm though Mack’s, and he would have been taken aback if
he had not been struggling to stay composed in the face of hearing her description of Jen.

The Rosebys could have retained their impression that Phyllida was a cultured, slightly eccentric soul, if she had not then stopped, turned back around and said, ‘Just one more thing – Douglas the blacksmith said Mack got a nasty head injury from somebody who calls himself Alex. Some gentleman farmer, evidently.’ Phyllida did a very elaborate bit of eyebrow-raising. ‘Perhaps if you see him, um, Daniel –’ her gaze homed in on Danny and he nodded like a man who had only a rudimentary understanding of how to move his own head – ‘perhaps, my dear, you could tell him that I know people in Bath who, for a very small amount of money, will twist his testicles off and ram them, one after the other, down his throat.’ She gave a jolly wave. ‘So lovely to have met you.’

Jennifer watched them talking in the yard and saw Mack help his mother into the car. Now that was an interesting woman. A glacier mint to Brenda’s lemon drop.

So here she was sitting in her bedroom again, pulling apart Mack’s behaviour and adding this new information and then trying to fit it all back together again. Blackmailed into taking on the job in the first place, terrified of his family being thrown to the baying public. What would she have done if she had been in his … brogues?

She lay down and allowed herself for the first time to really think about how he’d got her to be Viola. All those
things he’d said to her in bed. All those things he’d done to her in bed.

Could she accept he had been a man struggling with himself? That he had fallen for her somewhere along the line? Did that cancel everything else out?

But he’d been such a plausible fake. So good, it suggested that lying was second nature to him.

She looked around the bedroom. It was beginning to feel like a prison and so she took herself outside and sat on the fence as Ray fussed about selecting the sheep he intended to enter into the County Show. She knew he wouldn’t talk to her about Mack; it wasn’t his way to force any issue, and she was glad of that. She watched his gentle movements and the assurance with which he looked at hooves and peered into ears, and felt soothed. He had steadily gained a tan over the last week and she remembered how, as a little girl, she had been fascinated at the way it always stopped at the base of his neck and just above his elbows so that he looked as though he was wearing a short sleeved white T-shirt when he took her swimming.

Not a leather jacket.

‘All right?’ her dad asked as she jumped down from the fence.

‘Just going to find a quiet spot. Ring Cress,’ she called back.

It was some way into the conversation before Jen told Cress about Phyllida’s visit.

‘Teddy bloody Montgomery?’ Cress said, no longer
sounding sleepy, and Jennifer heard her repeat the words, but this time away from the phone. Jennifer imagined Anna Maria lying next to Cress and speculated on who was the dominant partner in that particular relationship. It seemed to be working though, this partnership. It was impossible to miss the happiness in Cress’s voice whenever she rang now. All that pretending to be tougher than she was, cooler than she felt, it all seemed to have been shelved with Anna Maria.

There was a huge gust of laughter and Cress was back. ‘Anna Maria asked me if this Montgomery was the one who fought in the desert. But, all joking aside, Jen … Montgomery, that’s huge. I thought it was some rubbish little secret he was protecting, like his mother had some kind of habit.’

‘She has.’

‘True, but, wow, that was a really big anvil to have over his head. So … how does this make you feel about what he did?’

‘It doesn’t change anything.’ Jennifer sat forward and then back against the tree trunk, trying to get more comfortable. ‘He still lied and cheated. He still wound me round his little finger. All that calculating just what to say, how to look—’

‘Ye-es. But sometimes people do bad things for good reasons, Jen.’

Jennifer looked up through the leaves and branches of the tree and frowned. ‘Are you trying to defend him, Cress?’

There was a pause.

‘Cress?’

‘I think … I think it does change a lot of things, Jen, and before you leap down my throat, just listen.’ Jennifer could hear Anna Maria talking in the background and Cress saying, ‘Yes, yes, I’m telling her. Shush.’

‘Recently, when we’ve been talking, you know, talking properly again, I’ve just enjoyed hearing that you were angry with him. It was better than all that sorrow you were lugging around. So I’ve held back from saying some things I wanted to say, and before I say them now, please understand that I am always completely, utterly on your side. If you decide not to forgive him and not to believe he has genuine feelings for you, then fine. But I think he does love you, Jen. I told you what he was like in Bath, but if anything I underplayed it – he was completely, utterly gutted.’

‘I’m surprised he managed to fool you too,’ she said, knowing Cress would have picked up on the snitty tone.

‘Don’t think he did, sweetie. He wasn’t acting.’

‘I don’t want to hear this.’

‘I’m sure you don’t, but please, just cut me some slack here. We’ve never discussed why I gave him the story of Anna Maria when I could have fobbed him off with the Rory one. Did you think it was part of some deal I cut to keep you out of the paper?’

‘Look, I don’t know how these things work …’

‘I gave him the story, even when he wouldn’t tell me what his mother’s secret was, because something about him made me believe what he felt for you was genuine.’

‘That’s enough, Cress.’

‘No it’s not. You’d better brace yourself, because there’s something else. You’re going to think I’m mad, but I set him a kind of test – told him something that I half-expected him to blab straightaway, but he hasn’t.’

Jen stood up and almost knocked herself out on the bottom branch of the tree. ‘Tell me you’re not talking about what I think you’re talking about,’ she said, suddenly frantic. ‘Tell me, Cress.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Oh God, oh God, what have you done? You can’t trust him. He’ll just be holding out for a higher price now you’re even hotter news.’ She put her hand out and felt the bark of the tree under her palm. ‘I’ll deny everything. It wasn’t your fault.’

‘Oh, come on Jen, time to grow up. Sorry to be so harsh, but we both know the truth. And if you can forgive me, haven’t you got it in you to forgive Mack? Look, tell him to get lost if you like, refuse to forgive him, but if there is the slightest smidgen of doubt in your mind about him being a bastard, swallow your hurt, give him a chance.’

‘I have to go,’ Jennifer said quickly and ended the call before throwing the phone as far away as she could.

CHAPTER 49

When Mack returned from Bath he found Pat’s post-office van parked near Doug’s car, which he took to be a good sign as it was ten o’clock at night. In the kitchen Mack saw the two ukuleles, one red, one blue, that had arrived during the time he had been away.

He listened. There was the dull thump of heavy metal from upstairs and so it wasn’t really necessary for him to tiptoe to his own room, but he did it anyway. At least he’d finally done something right. Unless in the morning he discovered Doug with teeth marks in his neck, drained of blood.

The Doug who appeared at his bedroom door in his underpants next morning was robustly full of life and kept striding around repeating ‘Bloody Hell!’ until Mack said, ‘Finally got it together then?’

‘Yesterday,’ Doug said, with a grin. ‘It was that ukulele that did it. She’s canny, Mack. She’ll be back after she’s done her rounds. Thinks the sun shines out of my arse, can you believe that?’

‘No. I’ve seen your arse, remember.’

Doug threw himself on the bed and lay beside Mack, his hands behind his head. ‘Me and her. Unbelievable. She’s first class and I’m just a rough old package with not enough postage.’

‘Are you going to talk in postal metaphors all the time now?’

Down in the kitchen, as a massive fry-up spat and sizzled in the pan, Doug asked Mack how much it had cost him to bring him and Pat together.

‘You knew all along?’ Mack asked.

Doug gave a huge, from-the-bottom-of-his-stomach laugh which Mack took to mean ‘Yes’.

‘I have to tell you something though, Doug, in the interests of honesty … I used some of O’Dowd’s money to pay for the things. Sorry … don’t know how you’re going to feel about that.’

There were a couple of seconds when it could have gone either way, but then Doug was laughing again. ‘You tight git,’ he said, ‘you’d think with so much money to dip into you could have got some better presents.’

It was only after they’d eaten, gravitating again to the sun and the pond to drink their cups of thick, brown tea, that Doug told him Jen had called round while he had been away. It had been an emotional meeting as the two of them had barely talked since the after-play party. She had stayed for a couple of hours and, from the look on Doug’s face, she had forgiven him for taking Mack in.

‘Did she mention me?’ Mack asked, trying not to hope.

‘She says she understands why you did it, but I couldn’t draw her oot any further. Sorry.’

‘That’s OK, it’s hard for you, I know that. But Alex, please tell me she’s not getting together with him again?’

Doug chuckled. ‘Sorry, should have told you this first off, but I wanted to savour the moment – Alex’s not welcome at the farm any more. Aye, you may well look like that. He turned up when Jen was there on her own. She was in the lambing sheds, clearing up some bits and pieces for Ray, and he starts trying to pressurise her into going back oot with him, ranting on about how grateful she should be to him, how she obviously couldn’t cope on her own, but she’s having none of it and he loses that temper of his. Starts backing her into a corner, literally, telling her she owes him—’

‘I’m going to bloody kill him,’ Mack said, standing up.

Doug reached up and yanked him back down. ‘Hang on, bonny lad. Turns out Jen wasn’t on her own. Bryony was in the house with Louise. She’d seen Alex arrive, thought she’d just turn the lamb-cam on, keep an eye on him. Result: end of Alex’s visiting rights.’

Mack watched the water boatmen skimming over the surface of the pond and thought of Jennifer being cornered in that barn and not being there to help her.

‘Something else on your mind?’ Doug asked after a while.

‘I was wondering if you’d make a gift for me to give to Jen. I mean, I don’t think it’ll make any difference, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’ve done a sketch; I’ll go and find it.’

Doug screwed up his eyes when Mack gave him the piece of paper. ‘Should be alreet,’ he said, turning the drawing round and looking at it from every angle. ‘Thin plate steel, use a gas torch, high-quality lacquer. Aye. Canny.’

Mack asked how much it would cost.

‘Nothing. I owe you after those ukuleles,’ Doug replied.

Jennifer did not appear in the park for a full week after that, although Mack saw her go in and out of the library. He ate his chocolate and drank his lattes and read his books. He worked his way through the menus of the sandwich shops. In the afternoons he walked around all those places he’d curled his lip at before and had often lied about visiting. He tramped over high moorland and down into the valleys. He got himself lost in the great, cathedral-like conifer forests and he walked along the coast. If he didn’t get his daily fix of that huge sky and those endless views he felt cramped and hemmed in, and often he would not get back till ten or eleven at night, enjoying the longer, light evenings this far north.

One place he did not go was Low Newton – too many ghosts on the beach.

During that week he veered between optimism and despair, but on the day she came to him he watched how she moved and knew she had made a decision.

‘I’ve been thinking around everything that happened,’ she said, perching on the arm of the seat, ‘I know the bind you were in – and I really appreciate that what Cress
told you about the accident has remained secret. But … no matter how I try, I can’t imagine how I could ever trust you again.’

‘You could, Jen,’ he said, desperately trying to get her to look him in the eye, ‘just give me time, I’ll prove to you that Matt Harper changed me. I’m not in a hurry. I’ll just keep coming back here every morning—’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I made that mistake with Alex, giving him hope, and in the end it’s just cowardice dressed up as charity. Go home, Mack, I hope your mum keeps on with the treatment, I hope you start writing that novel of yours again.’ She gave him something between a grimace and a smile. ‘I’ll always be grateful to you for making me believe, really believe, that I shouldn’t be crucifyingly self-conscious or apologetic or embarrassed about what has happened to my face. In some weird way, what you did has made me braver. Who knows, I might go out to see Cress soon, travel further afield, take some acting classes. And the next play, well, Finlay was talking about Portia. I just might do it.’