The First Time I Saw Your Face (2 page)

Peter’s face brightened as much as a face already painted silver could. ‘There’s plenty of work out there, especially if you’re prepared to do hen nights.’ He darted a look towards Gabi, who had partially re-emerged from behind Mack’s legs. ‘You’re a good-looking guy. The women would want to know where the silver paint ends, if you get my drift.’ The wink got another outing before Peter was all businesslike again. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me. Got a call earlier from Lord Nelson. Coachload of Scandinavians heading this way, stopover en route to Stonehenge.’ The helmet was hurriedly rammed back on. ‘Need to mop them up before they get to that Ancient Briton in woad round by the Parade Gardens.’ His paint puckered. ‘Not one of mine.’

Within seconds, the fierce centurion on the plinth was back, only unfreezing for one final wink and a mouthed, ‘Give me a call,’ before the sword was once more brandished aloft.

Mack imagined himself standing up there like a metallic, ersatz Johnny Depp and remembered the day he’d actually
interviewed the real one. He expected some form of intense emotion to sweep over him at that: regret possibly, or the urge to rip Peter Craster’s business card into pieces, knock him off his plinth and beat him with one of his replica sandals.

‘It’s a very kind offer,’ he heard himself say. ‘I’ll have a think about it.’

He was uncertain whether his response was due to a gradual mellowing over the last three years or the worry that he was up to his ears in debt and a job offer was a job offer.

He was stuffing Peter’s business card in the pocket of his jeans when someone said ‘Boo!’ behind him and, as he turned, he felt Gabi let go of his hand.

‘Mummy,’ she yelled, a whirl of arms and legs as she threw herself towards Mack’s sister, ‘we’ve been talking to this statue and he wants Uncle Mack to be a pirate and show hens where his silver bits end.’

He wished he could have got his phone out in time to capture his sister’s expression. His mother simply looked at the centurion, looked at Mack and said, laconically, ‘A pirate? How lovely, you could use some of those skills you picked up on that paper.’

He felt his mouth already forming the shape of some cutting reply when the pleading look on Tess’s face held him back. Instead, he turned to Fran. ‘So, Frangipan, how are the teeth?’ In reply he got a thumbs-up and a huge smile that suggested she still had a full set. There was a sticker saying ‘Star Patient’ on her coat.

‘Mum’s are OK too,’ Tess said, looking nervously at Phyllida. ‘Temporary crown. So … everyone set? Let’s go find the car.’

Slowly they cut across the Abbey churchyard, along the front of the registry office and the Market before reaching the underground car park. Later in the year, they would have heard all the world’s languages on their journey as the tourists descended on Bath to pick it clean of Roman and Austen memorabilia, but today it was mainly English, and much of it had a soft, Bathonian burr.

The girls walked ahead, and as he looked at them, Mack felt that he was seeing time-lapse photographs of the same person: blonde hair, wise blue eyes, a lower lip that was slightly fuller than the upper one. Whereas he and Tess looked nothing like each other, hadn’t even done so when they were younger. He glanced at her now as she walked, letting Phyllida lean on her arm. She had their mother’s blue eyes and fair skin tone; he had their father’s brown eyes and darker looks. He’d also got his father’s messy hair gene, whereas Tess’s blonde hair, a shade or two darker than both her daughters’, stayed exactly where it was put. In fact everything about Tess was neat – even the green scarf she was wearing today did not hang like some kind of forgotten piece of lettuce in the salad crisper, but was tied in a just-so, loose knot.

At the car park, the ever-practical Tess got Phyllida settled in the front seat of the car and the girls strapped in the back before even attempting to pay at the machine. Or perhaps she wanted to talk to Mack on his own. He followed her.

‘Did Phyllida get a “Star Patient” sticker too?’ he asked with a sardonic laugh.

He was pleased to feel Tess link her arm through his and give it a squeeze. ‘Not quite, and anyway, I’m thinking of awarding you one for not rising to her “pirate” comment.’

‘But she did behave herself?’

‘Uh huh. Told the dentist she’d broken her tooth on a piece of hard toffee.’

‘Not on a piece of hard pavement after five hours in the pub?’

‘Well, it’s one way to kerb her drinking.’

‘Yeah, at least falling on the pavement keeps her out of the gutter.’

They were employing the light and cheerful tone they habitually used when talking about their mother, but Mack knew that if he turned and looked at Tess closely right now, she would have the same expression on her face as he had. They called it their ‘standing by the gallows’ look and Mack was certain it got handed out to anyone with a heavy drinker in the family, along with buckets of patience and an endless supply of hope.

They had reached the head of the queue and Tess fed the ticket into the machine, followed rapidly by a stream of coins. Mack added one or two as his contribution. When Tess had the ticket back in her hand, they walked as slowly as possible back to the car and, because Tess looked uncharacteristically morose, he gave her a playful nudge with his hip.

‘Look, I know we’re in another one of her dips, but she’s always pulled herself round before; she’ll do it again. And at least this time I’m here, just upstairs. It’s not like before when you and Joe had to keep going round to check on her.’

‘I know, I know. But it’s hard on you.’

‘My turn, Tess.’

‘That’s what Joe thinks,’ she said with a grin, and Mack had no problem imagining just what the straight-down-the-line Joe would have said. The phrases ‘Now he’s stopped skulking around’ and ‘Pulling his weight’ would have featured largely. There was no dissembling with Joe, what you saw was what you got. Hard to remember that when Tess first took up with him, the all-knowing, arrogant Mack he was then figured she could do a lot better than a guy learning how to be a joiner. Now Joe had his own business and had proved to be a bit of a star on the husband-and-Dad front, while Mack had what? Granny and particles.

‘Sensible guy, Joe,’ he said.

‘That’s why I married him.’

‘I thought that was because you were pregnant.’

Tess cuffed him on the arm and looked covertly towards the car. ‘Shh. That’s why I married him
then
. Not why I married him at all.’

‘OK, OK, and mind the writing arm, will you? Anyway, what’s all this about it being hard on me? You still do too much. I’d have made her sort out her own dental appointment.’

‘Oh really, tough guy? Who was it got her glasses fixed when she sat on them, and remind me, how many times in the last week have you cooked for her, hmm?’

‘Yeah, well, it keeps me busy.’

Tess gave him a disbelieving look and he took the point that they were both as bad as each other. Phyllida had them on the rack again with her drinking, and all they could do was keep her on her feet as long as possible and ensure everything jogged on around her.

When they reached the car, Mack sensed Tess was back on an even keel, even though there was still a ring of hiked-up brightness about her voice as she opened the driver’s door and said, ‘Right ho, everyone. That’s sorted.’

On the way home, while playing ‘I Spy’ with the girls, Mack studied Phyllida’s profile. At first glance, she didn’t look bad for a woman in her sixties. Up closer, though, the texture of her skin was like sucked paper and the whites of her eyes had a jaundiced look to them. She was dropping too much weight as well. Phyllida turned her head as if she was aware he was studying her and he pretended to immerse himself in the game of ‘I Spy’ again, but he was still thinking about her.

When he was growing up, he thought all mothers smelt of alcohol, just as his father smelled of the little Turkish cigarettes he’d taken to smoking since his stint reporting in the Middle East. The pair of them joked that they were ‘work hard, play hard’ journalists, with Phyllida swearing that she wrote better with a drink inside her. Hard to pinpoint when her ability to drink heavily had tipped over
into something else. Five, six years after his father had died, he guessed.

After Phyllida, Tess and he had left London things had, despite the odd hiccup, got a little better, but since he’d been exiled back to live with her in Bath this time, the general trend had been mainly downwards. He wondered from time to time if that had something to do with him.

‘Phone box begins with an “F” doesn’t it?’ Gabi asked, pulling him out of his thoughts. He set her right before dipping back in.

Things might have been different if Phyllida had ever admitted that things were as bad as they were, gave what she was its proper name. Not a hope; too proud to say, ‘I spy something beginning with A.’

As they pulled up outside the house, Tess said, ‘I could just pop in and get Mum settled,’ and he answered, ‘No need,’ and was out of the car and round by Phyllida’s door before Tess could argue. Phyllida was getting some packs of chocolate buttons out of her bag and twisting round to give them to the girls. He heard her tell Fran how proud she was of her for being brave at the dentist; how grownup Gabi had been staying with Uncle Mack. He saw the little hands extended and his mother’s smiles and felt a rush of compassion. After Tess had hugged Phyllida goodbye, he helped his mother from the car, but she insisted on walking up the garden path unaided.

Tess wound down her window. ‘All that pirate stuff back there?’

‘A job offer. Nice of the guy really—’

‘It hasn’t come to that, surely? I mean, I know the freelance work’s been a bit slow recently.’

‘Slow as in none at all?’ He was trying to make light of it, but once he’d let that thought out, he couldn’t stop the other ones. ‘Never mind, still got my short stories … that’s if I could actually sell any of them. And then, hallelujah, there’s my ground-breaking novel. Any year now I’ll get off Chapter Five and move swiftly on to Chapter bloody Six.’ He heard the girls’ chocolatey giggle at the swearword and it made him pause. ‘Sorry, Tess, swearing and self-pity in one speech – you won’t let me have that “Star Patient” sticker now.’

He turned to see if Phyllida had reached the front door and immediately felt his arm being tugged.

‘Listen, you,’ Tess said, giving his arm a real seeing to, ‘you’re allowed the odd bit of self-pity, but things are going to get better, I can feel it. No, don’t laugh at me.’

Mack never would understand how Tess, despite the trials of Phyllida, had retained an optimistic outlook on the world.

‘And however bad it is now, it can’t be as terrible as when you were working for O’Dowd,’ Tess went on. ‘We got the “nice” you back when you lost that job. I’d rather have that one, even if he has to paint himself silver.’

‘Thanks, Pollyanna.’ He stepped back out of range of her hand and gurned at the girls to cover up the emotion he really felt.

When they had driven off, Tess shouting that she’d give him a ring tomorrow, he walked back up the path. Tess
was right: working for O’Dowd had been the worst experience of his life and in the end he hadn’t been up to it, but at least he’d felt alive. Now the ‘nice’ Mack was bored out of his mind and drifting God knew where.

He turned and looked at the row of Bath Villas opposite and the streetlights coming on. You could almost hear the sedate hum of Bath life and the solid assurance that tomorrow would be very much like today.

There was no sign of Phyllida when he reached the front door, nor inside, and he went along the hallway and rang her bell. Nothing. He put his ear to the door. No sound. Looking through the ribbed glass of the door was useless: it made whoever was on the other side look distorted and wavering. Mind you, with Phyllida, that was often what she looked like after you opened the door.

‘Can I get you anything, Phyllida?’ he shouted.

A faint, ‘No, thank you,’ drifted back and he wondered what she was up to. He suspected it would involve a bottle because getting up and out this morning, being charming to the dentist – it all told him that Phyllida had squirrelled some drink away in the flat again and had a good stiffener as soon as she’d woken up. She would be desperate for a top-up now. Tess would know that too, but that optimism of hers often allowed her heart to overrule her brain and she would be hoping that maybe, just maybe, Phyllida was showing iron self-will and keeping her promise to drink only in the pub. It was a promise they wrung out of her regularly, figuring that in the pub she’d get less alcohol for her money and at least they’d eventually turf her out.

But … perhaps he was wrong to be so cynical about what she was up to right now. Perhaps the half-bottle of vodka gaffer-taped to the underside of Phyllida’s bed that they’d found last week
was
her last attempt at smuggling and hiding. After all, both he and Tess had double-checked all the usual and unusual hiding places regularly since. Only this morning, while Tess was putting her in the car, he’d swept the place again. It was a mad game of hide-and-seek and he wanted to shake Phyllida and say, ‘Even when you win this, you’re losing.’

Suddenly weary of the whole thing, he walked back along the hall and upstairs to his flat. Without even bothering to remove his jacket he sat on the sofa and must have dozed off because he woke to hear his mobile ringing. By the time he had extracted it from his pocket, the call had gone through to voicemail. Perhaps it was someone wanting him to write a ‘particle’.

He laughed at that thought, but the laugh became a kind of strangled cough as he retrieved his message. It was short and brutal, very like the man who had left it.

‘O’Dowd here,’ it said. ‘Meet me at the Stairbrook Hotel, Paddington, two p.m., Friday. Room 751. As they say in all the best spy films, I’ve got a little job for you.’ There was that nasty, raspy laugh Mack hadn’t heard for three years. ‘’Course, you could stand me up, my son, it’s no odds to me. It won’t be my mum’s name splashed all over the papers. Won’t be my windows getting smashed by bricks.’

CHAPTER 2