The Mysterious Miss Mayhew (3 page)

‘Anything in particular you wanted to know?’ He checked on Hattie, who was mooching about near the flower arrangements.

‘Fruit oven scones,’ she read from her programme. ‘But why did these get the first prize? All the entries look perfect to me.’

Her tone was earnest and he did a quick assessment of her straight back and came up with
Slightly odd, possibly humourless, but points for the hair
.

‘Well, the scones must have a good colour, and …’ He used his free hand to draw her attention to the finer details. ‘They should have a definite seam around the middle.’

Being so close to the baking was making him feel hungry. It was tempting to filch one of Mrs Egremont’s prize-winners, but that would mean spending the rest of his life in a safe house with a new identity.

‘Fascinating.’ The woman was nodding as if she meant it. She gave him, and the hand on his shirt, another look. ‘Ah,’ she said, smiling. ‘I know why you seem familiar. You’re the man who was wrestling those children earlier. Did you hurt your arm?’

He had to check to see if she was joking. Evidently not.

He ignored her question, but she didn’t appear to notice. ‘Well, thank you for the information on the scones. You’ve been most kind.’

Most kind?
He looked around to see if they were still in the twenty-first century.

She had moved along to the next table and was frowning again.

‘Problem?’ he said, joining her mainly to see how much odder she might become.

‘Well, sorry to repeat myself, but why has this sandwich cake, unfilled, been selected over the others?’

‘More even bake,’ he pointed out. ‘Better texture.’

He appeared to be channelling Mary Berry. Mind you, he had an excuse; he’d reached the age where he was beginning to think Radio 4’s
Money Box Live
might be worth listening to. But
she
couldn’t be more than twenty-three, twenty-four.

Another frown. ‘This Mrs Egremont seems to win a lot. I expect she’s some rosy-cheeked farmer’s wife.’

He tried to keep his face absolutely neutral, but she laughed and said, ‘Oh that look speaks volumes. The opposite of rosy-cheeked, then.’

‘Uh … I didn’t say that.’ He wished she’d keep her voice down.

She walked a little further, looking at the rosettes. ‘Yes, she’s won this and this and, oh, wait a minute. She hasn’t won
this
one.’ She peered at the offending pie. ‘Why is that?’

Mrs Egremont turned to look at him as if to say, ‘Yes, you bastard, why is that?’ Her elbows looked particularly sharp today, as if she had whittled them on purpose.

‘Is it,’ the young woman said helpfully, ‘because that bit of crust is slightly burnt?’

Mrs Egremont looked as if she’d been Tasered and Tom figured they had ten seconds at most before she snapped out of it and started biting people.

‘Hello,’ Hattie said, appearing next to the young woman. ‘Your hair’s nice, is it real?’

Before he could tell her off for that, the young woman said, ‘Well, that’s an interesting question. It’s real hair, but it’s not real in the sense that this is my natural colour. I dyed it.’

‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said when Hattie looked at him. ‘Not till you’re older.’

He checked on Mrs Egremont. She had recovered the power to blink.

‘Do you have a tattoo as well?’ Hattie was asking.

‘No.’ The tone was regretful. ‘I really don’t like needles.’

‘Me neither.’ Hattie looked at him as if he was always poking her with them. Then her face brightened. ‘Would you like to see my vegetable sculpture?’

‘I’m sorry … your?’ The woman was consulting her programme and he was going to say, ‘Hattie, enough,’ when it occurred to him that getting this completely tactless woman away from Mrs Egremont might not be a bad thing.

‘It’s just over there,’ Hattie said and they all set off, which gave him time to process that word
tactless
. He thought about it some more when Hattie covered up the card that explained what the sculpture was.

‘Can you guess the animals?’ Hattie asked and Tom wondered how badly this was going to go. Odd Woman seemed as if she had limited experience of dealing with children – possibly humans of any kind. So when she failed to guess what the courgette was doing to the potato, she might be brutally honest about Hattie’s artistic skills.

The woman gave the sculpture a good look over and said, ‘Well, it’s pretty obvious. That’s a shark attacking a whale.’

‘It is! It is!’ Hattie squealed, taking her hand off the card to prove it.

How the bloody hell
 …

That frown was back. ‘Great White or Tiger?’

‘Tiger,’ Hattie said and the woman nodded as if somebody had confirmed that the masterpiece in front of her was a Cézanne and not a Seurat.

She barely glanced at the winning entries. ‘And you did yours by yourself?’

‘Yes,’ Hattie said, proudly. ‘Dad didn’t give me any help at all.’

It made him sound like a lazy, uninterested git.

‘Only one suggestion, though.’ A finger was being held up.

Uh-oh, here we go
.

‘To really pep it up, you could roast a red pepper, take off the skin and then mash the insides to suggest blood and gore.’

The impressed ‘Cool!’ from Hattie was accompanied by a look that suggested she might like to ask the woman home for a sleepover.

‘Hattie, could you go and hurry Granny up a bit?’ he said, feeling sidelined.

Hattie went off reluctantly and the young woman suddenly announced, ‘Ah, stick dressing,’ and veered off towards the carved shepherd’s crooks. ‘Oh they’re lovely. Look at the detail on this.’ He reluctantly joined her to see
that she was pointing at a carved brown trout which formed the handle of one of the sticks.

‘Oh, and this,’ she said, singling out an otter. ‘How long do you think it takes to carve one?’

He looked around for one of the old boys who made them.

‘Not sure,’ he said. ‘And, to be honest, these are good, but you should have seen the ones Charlie did.’

‘Charlie?’

‘Charlie Coburg. He was a “real” artist, could turn his hand to all kinds of things; drawing, painting, carving. Used to win this every year. The others said he should be barred to give them a chance.’

‘Was he?’

‘No. Nobody would dare to ban Charlie from anything. Big character, plus his family, well, they’re one of
the
county families. Died before Christmas.’

‘A big character?’ She was studying one of the less successful handles, a sheepdog that looked as if its mother had been intimate with a pig. Over near the judging table he saw his own mother give her
I’m ready now
wave. Best wrap this up.

‘There are all kinds of stories out there about Charlie,’ he explained. ‘Armour-plated liver. Bit of a lady-killer in his younger days. A devil at parties.’ He remembered
Charlie at the office Christmas bash, baring his arse at the window.

‘You don’t make him sound very attractive,’ the woman said. Her back looked even stiffer.

That irked him. Even worse, he was irked by the way he was suddenly using the word
irked
.

‘That wasn’t my intention,’ he said. ‘Charlie was a real life-enhancer. People loved his illustrations and his pieces on wildlife. We’ve never really filled the gap he left.’

‘We?’

‘The magazine.
The Place, the People
. He was a contributor. I’m the editor.’

‘So you have a hole in your parties and your magazine?’ She turned a page in her programme as if making a point.

‘No, that’s not what I—’

‘Really?’ There were no more jolly hockey sticks in her tone.

‘Now, hang on …’ He realised that, in his agitation, he’d taken his hand off his shirt.

She wrinkled her nose when she saw the stain. ‘You haven’t hurt your arm wrestling at all.’

‘I never said I—’

‘In fact, you appear to have dropped some of your lunch down your shirt.’

‘I haven’t had my lunch yet.’

‘Somebody else’s lunch then, perhaps.’

‘It’s actually llama spit,’ he protested, wondering, even as he said it, why he thought that was preferable. Her expression told him it wasn’t.

Hattie reappeared. ‘Granny says she’s hungry. So am I. Do you want to come?’ This to the woman.

‘No thank you,’ she said primly. ‘But … Hattie, it is Hattie, isn’t it? You’re very kind to ask me. And I meant to say how much I enjoyed
your
wrestling.’

He was trying to think of a smart come-back to that, but she was unnerving him by the way she was looking at the stain again. ‘Were you antagonising it? The llama?’ she asked.

Subtext – like you’re antagonising me
.

‘No, I wasn’t antagonising it.’

‘Well something must have caused it to spit.’

She lifted her chin and regarded him gravely and again he searched for just the right phrase to convey that he thought she was weird and bloody ungrateful after he’d taken the time to explain baking and sticks to her. That he was a grown-up with a daughter, a man of the world, while she was obviously a tight-arse who couldn’t understand how you could think someone like Charlie was a pisshead, but still admire him. He almost had the perfect thing when he became aware that Hattie was studying him with a strange expression.

‘Dad,’ she asked, ‘can I have a look at your testicles?’

Tumbleweed blew through the tent, first one way and then the other, before he was trying to explain how Hattie had just been taught the word … not by him … and not about him … about mammals … bollocks, no, he didn’t mean bollocks, he meant bullocks …

The young woman gave Hattie a sympathetic look before walking purposefully to the entrance of the tent. She paused only to wipe off something that had adhered to her sandal.

He had no doubt she was thinking about him when she did it.

CHAPTER 4

Sunday 11 May

Well, I’ve made a start and dipped my toe in the water.

Actually, in those strappy sandals, I dipped my toe in quite a lot of other stuff too.

And the heat took me by surprise. The entire Internet led me to believe the essential item of clothing for summer in Northumberland was a polo-neck jumper, but I was boiling, even in that dress. It’s still warm now, sitting here in the last of the sun and slowly filling up the first page of this notebook.

And it has to be said, sitting outside my ‘cottage’ – cue hollow laughter – is better than sitting inside. My fond imagining of inglenooks and roses around the door was dashed on arrival. ‘Cottage’ obviously means a red-brick bungalow stripped of all original features and decorated by the dead hand of a gorilla. A gorilla who may have been incontinent, judging by the damp on the bedroom wall.

But I digress.

Back to the notebook.

I can’t help smiling when I see the title on the front of it:
Things I have learned today
. One of my mother’s bargains – three boxes of them bought from an educational materials supplier who was going out of business. I remember helping her carry them to the car and worrying if the suspension would take the weight.

They weren’t meant to be scribbled in, I had to make them last. ‘Just write your main impressions at the end of every day,’ she said, ‘ten points, maximum. That will ensure you focus on the important things.’

And the notebooks did last. Out-lasted my mother anyway. Probably because life got too busy for me to keep writing in them.

A very good discipline though, keeping it simple. Perhaps that’s why I slipped this notebook into my suitcase. I fear that life is about to get messy – and if I start writing about emotions, I’ll wallow. And wallowing isn’t a family trait.

Or is it?

Whether I’ll write in it every day, I doubt. But now is a good day to start. A day that was busy and quite, quite bizarre.

So … I have learned:

1) Northumberland doesn’t seem to be much of a melting pot, although today a lot of it did look as if it were melting. The faces I saw were mainly pink or red.

2) One should never wear strappy sandals to an agricultural show.

3) Getting animals ready to be judged involves a huge amount of shampooing and brushing and even the rubbing of talcum powder into hides. The last time I saw so much care with grooming was at a gay fashion show. Even I know that would not be a good thing to say out loud here.

4) People in the countryside seem very thirsty and as I was leaving, police were heading towards a beer tent. The whole thing is a bit Gay Pride meets the Wild West.

5) Mrs Mawson is formidable-looking. Her grand-daughter, who is obviously keen on show-jumping, resembles her horse. Called Mabel – the granddaughter, not the horse. (Oh, I’m not proud of that
resembles her horse
comment, but perhaps writing it will stop me blurting it out when I’m nervous.)

6) A good scone should have a seam around it.

7) Some women like to wear shorts that will not only give them a camel toe, but probably cystitis too.

8) Ferrets are not attractive, even when jumping through hoops.

9) Just because a man appears friendly and is handsome in a chunky, middle-aged way, it doesn’t give him the right to be extremely free with his objectionable views about people. It’s his poor daughter I really feel sorry for.

10) It’s hard to eat a lamb burger when there is a lamb looking at you.

CHAPTER 5

Tom wondered why that damn bird sitting on his windowsill sounded like a telephone. Until he realised that it
was
the telephone.

A flurry of eye rubbing, leaning over and picking it up; half-formed fears about his mother. Or Kath, gone into labour early. Brain prepared for Rob’s voice in either case, and so Steph’s ‘It’s me’ was like a bucket of cold water hurled at his chest.

A check on the clock before he said, ‘It’s quarter to five.’